Lewis, Tolkien, Rowling and Drama

I was just on the phone with my friend Coleen about going to (my) second viewing of the Narnia movie tonight (with her and her son and daughter and brother and sister-in-law.) But his criticism concerns something I thought it good to write a post on. He criticized Lewis on his character dialogue. The thing he likely doesn't realize is that Lewis, like Tolkien, was not concerned with writing "dramatic" dialogue. In fact, Tolkien had a specific beef with "drama." Now, I do not necessarily share Tolkien's view as far as he might have taken it (and I must admit I do not know to exactly what extent he took it) it but I do think he has a very valid point. I think psychological drama, in the way we mean it now-a-days, can be done well and be validly great art - but I also think it is good to know what Tolkien was talking about (especially because these days a lot of junk gets excused because it is delivered through good drama acting, without the question ever being asked of whether that should be an end in itself.) Shakespeare: A guy I know is studying violin performance at Yale but he also did an MA in Philosophy at the university where I got my MA in Theology last year. He was back over a weekend and some of us went out to Applebees and we were talking about somewhat famous professor from Yale with who John Michael (the guy I know) does some studying in Greek. This professor (Harold Bloom) credits Shakespeare with "the invention of the human person" in drama. What this means is that Shakespeare was the first to really do "in depth psychological character development." Now, what Tolkien would say, I think, is that Shakespeare, in being the father of "drama" as we speak of it, did not invent the psychological drama (ie character development) but rather that Shakespeare simply made the drama consciously visible by misplacing it. Tolkien's concerns probably revolve very much around that emphasis on conscious visibility, for that is the meaning of the word "Idolatry." Latria is the veneration due only to divinity, and in Idolatry it is ascribed to an "Eidos," an image (the Greek "e" at the beginning is from an augmentation at the beginning of the original verbal form - the same verbal root yields the imperative "Ide" meaning "behold") What I mean by "misplacing" the drama is that psychological drama has always been there in classical and medieval literature, but it was located in the audience and their interior, subjective, reactions to what happens on stage. The psychological phenomena happened between the audience and the stage. Note: The literary term for this is one of the main points in Aristotle's literary theory, Katharsis. The audience progresses to a sought goal of the place/temperment of their souls through a certain purging they undergo from being caught up in the drama. What Shakespeare did was to take the psychological drama and place it objectively on the stage. Rowling: Like I said, I think that "drama" in the way we mean it these day can be a legitimate art form and be done well. I think that this one of the things distinctive to Rowling versus Tolkien and Lewis. Tolkien and Lewis were steeped in Medieval literature with a distinct mind to it being pre-Shakespearian (even if Lewis did not actively feel this way, he was friends with Tolkien and would have been very conscious of the distinction). Rowling may have come across the subject of Tolkien's feeling on the matter (in her academic career in Classics) but she is probably not as concerned with it and much more in the mode of seeking psychological breadth to her dialogue ... and, quite honestly, I think she does a superb job of finding it and integrating it with the symbolist structure of her work.