I've been reading this whole thread and I don't know where exactly to insert this comment, so I'll just stick it here.
Oh, this is as good a place as any, I imagine. Welcome to the fracas.
Tolkien himself one wrote a commentary somewhere - I can't recall at the moment - which sheds a little bit of light on a mystery of literature which has puzzled me since high school. That mystery is, why is it that all "great literature" is judged solely on it's metaphorical, allegorical, or other such misinterpretable details? (A similar question is, why is the "best" artwork the most unusual abstract stuff that nobody can make any sense of?)
These are good and valid questions, however difficult to answer. Ultimately I think that any metaphorical or allegorical meaning that is to be drawn from a work of literature has less to do with the intent of the author than it does with what someone might read-into the book. Generally an author's first job is to tell a story. Based on their own thoughts and experience a reader will then take that story and from its context draw out the metaphors and allegories that he or she is looking for; that provide the answers they hope to find. However, that's not to say that a good author can't influence the leaps of logic the readers will make, or the conclusions they will reach.
I personally don't believe that a book should be judged solely on it's metaphorical or allegorical content, but I do think that finding such content is significant for a book to be considered great. The interpretation of a book’s subtext is a good means of determining how much effort the author put into guiding his or her readers into coming to conclusions that reflect those of the author on their own. A poor author tells the readers what he thinks. A good author lets his readers think for themselves.
As for your similar question, I can't rightly say why some people feel that art that is abstract and unusual is better than other art based solely on those virtues. But I don't doubt that many people do. I, however, am not one of those people. I really think that a work's abstractness or straight-forwardness; how unusual or conventional it may be has little bearing on how good a work it is. I also think that a work's abstractness and the level of metaphorical subtext that it may allude to are independent of each other. The works of Dali may be quite abstract, and I like them quite a bit, but I don't think they're any better than the works of an artist like Rembrandt. Similarly, I don't think there's any less meaning to be found in something as straightforward as the works of Rembrandt. David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" was a beautiful but highly unusual and abstract piece. By contrast Lynch's "The Straight Story" was as simple and conventional as a film can be, but I felt that film was just as open to interpretation about its deeper metaphorical meaning as the other.
The commentary which Tolkien wrote, I recall was taken from his memoirs or some such - I was just skimming through some book in a bookstore and saw this and remembered it ever since. At the time Tolkien was writing this, he was terrified that his favorite type of writing was going extinct, being exterminated by the prevelance of what hits most best-seller lists nowadays - melodrama, tales of ordinary people in their ordinary lives in real cities at real times doing things that may as well just be historical accounts of things tha tnever really happened.
The writing that Tolkien loved was what we now call fantasy stories, including most scifi - tales of fictional worlds meant more as an act of sheer creation, a separate universe for the reader to visit and explore, and not necessarily intended to be any sort of commentary on the real world at all.
I feel that any genre of literature, or art in general, has just as much potential for greatness as any other. Drama, melodrama, science fiction, and fantasy exist as little more than categories of generalized elements of plot, time, place, and theme. The quality of a book has little to do with its genre, and there are many wonderful books in every genre. However, that being said, I will say that the likely reason that books of the sort you defined as melodrama are lauded as great more often than those of science-fiction or fantasy, is that it is much easier for an author to personalize his message and theme when he uses settings and characters that the readers can easily relate to. It is more difficult for a reader to relate on a personal level to the fantastic creatures and locations that populate many works of science fiction and fantasy.
Similarly, it is an obvious pitfall of that natural difficulty fantasy authors have in relating their characters and settings to their readers that they may become so bogged down in the details of these elements in an attempt to humanize them that the point is lost in the shuffle.
A good author lets his readers draw their own conclusions, and a great author makes the reader adopt the author's conclusions as his own, and the author does this by giving reason for everything he does. By offering an explanation and good motive for his implied allegories, message and theme, by telling his reader not what he thinks but why he believes what he believes, he offers insight into a different point of view and influences the reader. It is this, the justification of the message that can get lost easily in shuffle of details in much science fiction and fantasy. This is what I think happened with Tolkien's work. This is why I feel Tolkien may have been a good author, but was not a great author. He forgot to explain the "why." However, this is also why I think that truly great works of science fiction and fantasy deserve even greater praise they often receive for maintaining clear focus on motive and message while including characters and settings detailed enough for all readers to relate to.
An analogy I can think of is architecture. When someone builds a house, do they build it to make people think over it's symbolism, how it's shape can be interpreted to shed light on the story of human existance, and how people can learn from the arrangement of hallways and rooms? No. A house it built, besides it's simple functional needs, to be - for lack of a better word - COOL. It's an enjoyable place to simply BE. A retreat, an escape, a little world of it's own, built and designed solely to invoke an enjoyable or at least interesting mood and please the occupant. Likewise with a lot of fantasy.
This is an interesting analogy, and for the most part I concur. I think that for any building to be great it must be "cool." And I think the same is true for literature as well. It is important to be interesting, if for no other reason than to hold a readers attention long enough to get the point across. However, just as a book, even a fantasy book, can mask its greater importance under a more superficial layer of "cool," so can a building. A building may not need to say much about the story of human existence with its shape or arrangement of its rooms, but its purpose for being, its very existence can speak volumes. What does someone constructing the Taj Mahal for a dead spouse say about love and dedication? What does the Empire State Building tell us about our ability to overcome nature? What do the pyramids tell us about our desire for immortality? Who's to say? We can all draw our own conclusions about our nature from them.
Now this is not to undervalue character development and all the good stuff that lit professors preach about; merely to value the skill required and the enjoyment gained from creating virtual realites solely through text.
Fair enough. And enjoy, I do.
For the same reason that some might criticize much of fantasy for lacking depth in it's characters or theme, I criticise much of the rest of literature for it's utter lack of creativity in the worlds in which they place their stories.
Again, I'd say this is a fair assessment.
TRUELY good literature requires both...
My thoughts exactly.
...which is why I'd have to say Orson Scott Card is my favorite author of all time. Not only do many of his stories - such as Ender's universe take place inside a vast fictional spacescape which is entirely self-consistent and full of many original concepts, but reading some parts of them honestly made me cry.
I've always liked Orson Scott Card, and he may indeed be an example of a great sciencie fiction author. I imagine time will tell better than I. If it moved you, that's good enough for me.
-Phil.
