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From: psal@othervax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: Re: clever idea (sort of)
Message-ID: <389@othervax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Feb-85 10:06:41 EST
Article-I.D.: othervax.389
Posted: Thu Feb  7 10:06:41 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 12-Feb-85 04:39:26 EST
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==== < FOR THE LINE EATER > ====

	Yes, Jeff. I don't think Hardy was exactly a twit, but I find him
vastly overrated and awfully heavyhanded. For example, in Tess of the d'U's.
the good guy appears in a nimbus of light and the bad guy amid flames with
his hair twisted into horns, actually carrying a pitchfork. Being this obvious
is a great help when trying to explain symbolism to vocational-school types
who grew up without a book in their houses, but to most people seem to find it 
a little unsubtle. I vaguely recall a short story by Ellery Queen in which the 
names of the suspects were anagrams of their roles. The killer was named Kit 
Heller, etc.

	There is an individualaesthetic value judgement called for here, and
I think that I could make a good case for subtle pleasures being superior to 
or at least more satisfying than gross ones. Puritan values aside, a work of 
art at which one has to work does more than one in which everything is laid
out for the reader because it involves him in the creative act. This is why 
reading is so much more satisfying than watching T.V. while your brains liquify
and run out your nostrils. A haunted house in a book will always be more 
terrifying than one on screen because it contains the horrors supplied by
YOUR OWN IMAGINATION, which no director can know. the cartoon version of 
'Lord of the Rings' flopped partly because the characters didn't match, and
coldn't match, the ones dreamt of by the mind's eye of every reader, and
so the readers were disappointed. It's the part hat the reader brings to the 
book that adds the most pleasure; the author is at best a guide for the
reader's imaginative faculties. In music, a C&W song is completely understood 
by a brain-damaged drunkin a bar, mind and soul numbed or dead, but it takes 
effort to understand a Bach fugue, to follow the theme and countertheme, 
transposed, reversed, inverted... 

	The more often one listens, the more one hears. But it's THERE, to be
heard, whether it's there in the work itself, or in the soul of the listener
and masterfully evoked BY the work. There is, I submit, more pleasure, more
fufillment, perhaps even more value in the one that doesn't come easily. Hardy 
plops everything down in front of you: its all done in advance. It's like a 
mystery novel where you are shown the killer during the comission of the crime:
it becomes just a cop story, a police procedural. The subtlety, the demand for 
the readers involvement isn't there.


			-C.Thomas Weinbaum von Waldenthal