Cleaning up with Joseph Pearce, in Verse and Prose
| Ok, so I am at my place of residence in good ol' Weirton WV and have been cleaning up a bunch because I have accumulated way too much crap over the past however many years and I want to get things way stripped down in plenty of time for the (hopeful) move when I head to work on a Ph.D. So, I came across a number of unmarked audio cassettes and decided to pop them into a handheld tape recorder I have to see what they were and the first one was a recording I had taped of a "debate" (at which I was in the audience) between Joseph Pearce (whom Pauli and I have mentioned before, and his biography of Tolkien, as well as others, can be found on Amazon ... good stuff) and Henry Russel (a literature professor from Ave Maria College in MI). The debate was after only the first Lord of the Rings movie had come out and was over whether Jackson had "desecrated" Tolkien's epic. The Main Point The point at which the tape was when I popped it in (after I turned down the variable speed so that Pearce no longer sounded like a woman talking in a hurry) he was making a great point. In defending the exclusion of Tom Bombadil from the movie, Pearce noted that, as sort of "unfallen nature," Tolkien always has Bombadil speaking in verse. So my small project for the next while will be to go back through all 6 books of Potter and carefully read the songs of the Sorting Hat. I think that Pearce is right that "verse is pre-lapsarian and prose is after the fall" and that some of the most interesting parts are delivered in verse. That is why the word "prosaic" has a negative connotation such as "dull" (*Merlin said, notably in a prose format* LOL) |
Comments on "Cleaning up with Joseph Pearce, in Verse and Prose"
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Anonymous said ... (January 05, 2006 2:13 AM)
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Merlin said ... (January 05, 2006 6:34 AM)
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Anonymous said ... (January 05, 2006 6:36 AM)
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Pauli said ... (January 06, 2006 1:25 PM)
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Merlin said ... (January 06, 2006 3:40 PM)
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Anonymous said ... (January 07, 2006 5:45 AM)
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Pauli said ... (January 07, 2006 10:29 AM)
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Merlin said ... (January 07, 2006 12:11 PM)
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post a commenti have NO idea what you were talking about then....
pre-lapsarian?
sorting hat was in the movie wasn't it? or is it cut for the same reasons??
confused.
would you mind explaining a little for me?
:)
jkr (in australia)
JKR,
sorry, slipped into "academic mode" there.
"Pre-Lapsarian" simply means before the "fall" (lapsarian being like "lapsing" or "falling back" into a bad habit like smoking
[*"who? me? smoking?" he asked, giving a pathetic attempt to hide a slight cough*])
So for Tolkien Bombadil's purity (as unfallen nature) is shown in the fact that he speaks in verse all the time, since it is more naturally pleasing and interesting than prose.
Which is why I want to go read the sorting hat's FULL songs in the books - they are the only places she really uses verse, the only real "verse-character" - and I'm betting there are a lot of hidden clues there (she has a new one for every year)
thanks
jkr
I think there are a few sorting hat songs missing - Ron and Harry miss the 2nd year sorting because of the car wreck. Plus - isn't the latest one missing...I don't remember it.
um ... ok ... yeah, well ... then I'm gonna read the ones there are even more extra-careful LOL
hey merlin,
have you seen this? don't know if it fits the bill really, but you never know!
found it on jkr's site under stuff edited out 'extras - characters'
http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/extrastuff_view.cfm?id=11
it's a ditty by nearly headless nick.
(i'll just leave the link, as i don't know if it's bad form to cut and paste that without permission)
jkr2
Thanks for the link, JKR2D2. I remember reading that. Although a verse about getting your head nearly chopped off with a blunt axe doesn't strike me as pre-lapsarian, but pretty darn funny nonetheless.
JKR2,
Thanks. I think I had seen it once upon a time but forgotten it. But I like it.
One of my fave verses from the Hobbit is the goblin song from the "over hill under hill" chapter. I like it when an author has the ability to use different styles as a sort of characterization element in different types of characters (IE, not all verse indicates some sort of "pre-lapsarian" state ... but I do think that verse is more properly "mysterious" or "mystical" and used to convey things that cannot be conveyed as well in prose description wihtout being burdensome - in the case of Bombadil the generally more mystical character of verse might represent a more wholistic nature in him, such as nature was before the fall in the Garden of Eden, not at war with itself).
In the case of the goblins in the Tolkien passage you have the harsh, gutteral sounds(and punctuated or stopped labials and dentals, rather than aspirative labials, ie the "p" in "whip" vs a "ph" sounds or the "t" in "Beat" vs a "th" sound)in a very shortly punctuated verse, "Swish, Smack! Whip Crack! Batter and Beat! Yammer and Bleat!" (although you notice there is the use of apsirative dentals in words such as "Swish" and vocalic dentals such as "yammer" mainly, I think, to speed up the flow of the verse so that the stops are that much more harsh and jarring . kind of like an actual whip cracking - the harsher sounds are always at the end). All of which is very like the swift harshness of the goblins themselves. (I love the descirptions of how fast they run bent over low and the sound of their hard bare feet slapping on the stone floor as they run)
In the case of Rowling (and here I am sort of out of my depth a little, I am not as good of an analyst of these "creative writing" stylistic elements as I am of content - so this is more of my rough impression - I have studied some of it in an introductory level poetry class in college but I am not great with it - and I absolutely suck at trying to write it, lol) - the song of Nick is, as you say, kind of a ditty. It has a kind of nursery rhyme quality to it with the middle and end of each first line rhyming and the second line (of each couplete) being kind of a spacer or "wind-down" line.
(meaning "nursery rhyme quality" as indicative of the mindset of Nick, the same mindset that has landed him as a ghost with his head neither full whole nor fully severed ... not the quality of Rowling's writing as an author)
Whereas the Sorting Hat's song in Book 5 has a more complex rhyme scheme to it:
A
B
A1
B
I put "A1" there not as "the second occurrence of A" but as "A-prime" is used in math. It's rhyming with A is always at least much looser than the rhyming between the B elements (and I have not checked very thoroughly but I think the whole song sticks pretty much to the 4-line Stanza, or "quatrain," structure) and sometimes that third line (A1) does not rhyme with the first line (A) at all. I think this thing of the third line is sort of an element of the "mysterious" in reality or in experience. You can make sense and order of your experience of reality and reality itself, but you always have to leave the opening there for the things that will not fit so tightly into the scheme it suggests to you without doing violence to the things themselves - to try to force it is kind of like the "Procrustian Bed" (the bed made by the proverbial Procrustes, who thought that all guests MUST fit the bed exactly, so if they were too tall for it he cut off their feet, or if they were too short for it he stretched them on the Rack until they were not, even if they were not alive either)