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Après lecture d’un ancien fuseau et quelques recherches…
1. Le jardinier architecte
Georges R.R. Martin, interrogé sur sa manière d’écrire, répond très (très) souvent par une double métaphore :
There are many different kinds of writers. I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners. There are some writers who are architects, and they plan everything, they blueprint everything, and they know (before the drive the first nail into the first board) exactly what the house is gonna to look like, where all the closets are gonna be, where the plumbing is gonna run, every day is figured out in the blueprints before there actually begin any work whatsoever.
And then there are gardeners who dig a little hole and drop a seed in and water it with their blood and see what comes up, and sort of shape it. They sort of know what seed they planted. They know whether it’s an oak or an helm, a horror story or an science fiction story, but they don’t know quite the shape it’s gonna take, how big it’s gonna be etc.
I am much more a gardener than an architect.
04/08/2006, geekson.com
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners […]. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.
14/04/2011, The Guardian
I’ve always said there are – to oversimplify it – two kinds of writers. There are architects and gardeners. The architects do blueprints before they drive the first nail, they design the entire house, where the pipes are running, and how many rooms there are going to be, how high the roof will be. But the gardeners just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up. I think all writers are partly architects and partly gardeners, but they tend to one side or another, and I am definitely more of a gardener.
01/08/2011, The Sydney Morning Herald
I have names for those types of writers: I call them architects and gardeners. The architect, before he drives a nail into a plank, has all the blueprints and knows what the house is going to be like and where the pipes are going to run. Then there are the gardeners, who dig a hole in the ground and plant a seed and water it – with their blood sometimes – and something comes up. They know what they planted, but there’s still lots of surprises. Now, you seldom get a writer who is purely an architect or purely a gardener, but I am much closer to a gardener.
24/05/2012, Rolling Stone
Un article en ligne de 2011 suggère que Martin classait alors Tolkien du côté des architectes :
He thinks of himself as a “gardener” — he has a rough idea where he’s going but improvises along the way. He sometimes fleshes out only as much of his imaginary world as he needs to make a workable setting for the story. Tolkien was what Martin calls an “architect.” Tolkien created entire languages, mythologies, and histories for Middle-earth long before he wrote the novels set there. Martin told me that many of his fans assume that he is as meticulous a world-builder as Tolkien was. “They write to say, ‘I’m fascinated by the languages. I would like to do a study of High Valyrian’ “— an ancient tongue. “ ‘Could you send me a glossary and a dictionary and the syntax?’ I have to write back and say, ‘I’ve invented seven words of High Valyrian.’”
11/04/2011, The New Yorker
Une telle interprétation est sous-entendue dans un entretien de la même année :
There was a point early on, relatively early in the writing of the series, where I stopped writing and did a spate of world building. I didn’t do it before I started, like Tolkien, but I was writing the book and I was getting in and starting to refer to history. So I stopped and started to formalize it, drawing the maps, working out the genealogies, the list of the Targaryen rulers and the dates of their reigns, and so on. […] I was starting to think about all of these things as I did it, and I had little hints about their stories through the nicknames I gave the kings. So Maegor the Cruel, Jaehaerys the Conciliator, and the Young Dragon, and so on. So the seeds of a lot of the history were planted when I drew up that list.
Et on peut remonter ainsi l’opposition entre la conception de l’architecte (qui serait celle de Tolkien) et celle du jardinier (celle de Martin) plus haut encore, puisqu’en 2007, Georges Martin disait :
And some point, when I was about 3-4 chapters in, I stopped and drew a map, which is probably the first step of imagining the seven kingdoms and Westeros. So the world grew up together with the story, the two of them growing side by side. It was not a case as Tolkien did where he completely imagined the world first, for decades, before he finally started to write Lord of the Rings.
Et déjà, en 2003:
J.R.R. Tolkien when he wrote Lord of the Rings of course was I think really the first one to do this. He worked out his world in such amazing detail. He had been working on it for decades before he even started Lord of the Rings with The Silmarillion. I think that really set the template from that time forward. Fantasy readers want a world created with a lot of detail. The setting becomes almost a character in these kinds of books. You'll hear readers talking about wanting to go to Middle Earth or the Land or some of the other great fantasy places that have been created. You can't get away with just setting a fantasy in a generic kingdom. Readers want a sense of history, they want a sense of reality. The whole setting and background have to be fully fleshed out.
Cependant, en 2011, Martin disait également et explicitement le contraire :
there are different kinds of writers. I’ve given this lecture in many of my talks. I like to say that there are two kinds of writers, there are the architects and the gardeners. And the architects plan everything ahead of time before they write the first word of a novel. They do all the world building, they know how many rooms the house is going to have and they know how they will flow to each other and how high each floor is going to be and where the electricity and the plumbing is going to go and everything. Before they even nail up the first board.
And then there are the gardeners who just sort of dig a hole and they put a seed in it and they water it with their blood and then something starts to grow. Now, they usually know that they plant a peach tree or did they plant a cactus. But the precise shape its going to take they don’t know. I think all most writers are somewhere in the middle, you know. I’m much more of a gardener than an architect and so was Tolkien.
19/04/2011, Time
En 2013, il confirme classer Tolkien parmi les jardiniers en 2013 :
I do know where I’m going. I know where the story ends, I know the fate of the principal characters […]. But there’s a considerable matter you discover in the process of writing. That’s the fun of writing actually. I’ve talked in many other interviews about two kinds of writers – the Gardener and the Architect.
The Architect is like an architect planning a building when he plans a novel: he knows how many stories there’s gonna be, and how many windows there’s gonna have and how is gonna be heated and what the roof is made off, were the plugs are gonna be in each wall, etc., etc. And he works all of that out, and blueprints all of that or outlines it in a case or novel before he drives the first nail or writes the first sentence.
The Gardener digs a hole and throws in the seed and sort of what is blood and hope that something interesting comes out. Now, the gardener knows certain things. The gardener knows whether he planted a potato or a geranium. He would be surprised when he planted a potato and germanium comes up but a lot is discovered in the process.
I think all writers are some combination of these two but they tend to put on their personality on one side or another. And I am much more on the gardener side. I am, I think, like ninety percent Gardener. As was somebody like J.R.R. Tolkien (one of my literary idols) who started out writing The Lord of the Rings as a sequel to the Hobbit and it grew considerably – “the tale grew in the telling” as he said – as mine as.
G.RR. Martin fait alors référence à la première phrase de l’avant-propos à la seconde édition du Seigneur des Anneaux :
Cette histoire a grandi a fil de sa narration (This tale grew in the telling), pour devenir une chronique de la Grande Guerre de l’Anneau comprenant de nombreuses allusions à l’Histoire encore plus ancienne qui l’a précédée.
La Fraternité de l’Anneau, Bourgois, 2014, p. 9
Une transition de l’étiquette écrivain architecte en écrivain jardinier pour décrire Tolkien semble avoir lieu en 2011-2012, alors que Martin, s’appropriant la métaphore végétale de l’avant-propos du Seigneur des Anneaux, choisit de considérer Tolkien comme un jardinier qui aurait certes travaillé toute sa vie à développer des talents d’architecte – mais un jardinier avant tout :
I often said that writers are of two types. There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in each room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.
And then there’s the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He’s not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.
No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I’m very much more a gardener.
As indeed was Tolkien. For all this architecture he did on the Silmarillion which he began before WWI, he started The Lord of the Rings thinking he was writing a sequel of the Hobbit. There would be another children’s book about the adventures about a couple of hobbits dealing something. And it obviously grew into something much larger than he ever expected. And he later said “The tale grew in the telling” – that’s a line I would [have liked] to quote myself because my tale grew in the telling many many times.
13/03/2012, entretien avec G. Stroumboulopoulos
Un indice avec un entretien de 2011 dans lequel Martin hésite sur la paternité de la métaphore végétale (oubli simulé ou temporaire car il y avait fait référence auparavant) tout en reconnaissant une similitude entre son approche et celle de Tolkien :
I think it was Tolkien who said when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, "The tale grew in the telling." […]
With the general construction of the books, in some ways I took The Lord of the Rings as my model. Tolkien begins very small, in the Shire with Bilbo’s birthday party, and from there, the characters all accumulate. First there’s Frodo and Sam, and they pick up Merry and Pippin, and then they pick up Aragorn in Bree, and they pick up the rest of the fellowship in Rivendell, but they’re still altogether. But then at a certain point, they begin to go separate ways—Frodo and Sam cross the river, Merry and Pippin are captured by orcs, and Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas are chasing them, and they continue to separate. You get this sense of everyone being together, and then the world gets bigger and bigger.
My scheme is very similar to that. We begin in Winterfell, and everyone except Daenerys is in Winterfell, even characters that don’t belong there, like Tyrion. And they set off together and then they begin to split. In that sense my books are bigger than The Lord of the Rings because there are more characters and they split further apart. It has always been my intent, as with The Lord of the Rings, that eventually it would curve around and they would start moving back together. I think I’m reaching the turning point, that’s starting to happen now.
11/07/2011, The Atlantic
Dans ce même entretien, Martin revient sur les choix narratifs de Tolkien en ce qui concerne la clôture du Seigneur des Anneaux, choix qu’il approuve et prend pour modèle :
I was very satisfied with the end of The Lord of the Rings, let us say. Talking about predictability here—I had a sense, even as a kid, that the ring was going to go in the volcano. They weren't going to let Sauron take over the world. But he surprised me in that Frodo couldn't do it. Bringing in Gollum the way he did was an amazing part of the ending, and then came the scouring of the Shire. And when I was 13 years old, reading this, I didn't understand the scouring of the Shire. They won—why are there all these other pages? But I reread these books every few years, and every time my appreciation for what Tolkien did there grows. It was this kind of sad elegy on the price of victory. I think the scouring of the Shire is one of the essential parts of Tolkien's narrative now, and gives it depth and resonance, and I hope that I will be able to provide an ending that's similar to all of that.
11/07/2011, The Atlantic
S.
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2. Le Seigneur du Crépuscule
Peu de temps après l'entretien précédent, Martin commente la « sensibilité crépusculaire » qui caractérise son œuvre à l’image de celle qui donne « profondeurs et écho » à l’œuvre de Tolkien :
I have always been a dark writer. If you look at the stuff I was writing before. I prefer the term realistic. I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white. I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings. The best fantasy does have a thread of darkness that runs through it. If you go back and look at Tolkien, the master of them all, there’s definite darkness in The Lord of the Rings. There’s a sadness to it, the passing of an age, the elves are leaving, magic is dying, these kingdoms of men are fading. There’s a sort of twilight sensibility. He had the scouring of the Shire, even after the great victory over Sauron. It’s not all happiness and dancing in the moonlight. Things have been lost, and Frodo is never quite the same. I responded to those elements in it, even when I read it at 13. I think there’s a lot of similar elements not only in Ice and Fire, but in all of my work.
01/08/2011, The Sydney Morning Herald
Martin n’a jamais caché qu’il partage avec Tolkien une inclination pour le Crépuscule. Ainsi en 2009, lorsqu’on lui fait remarquer certaines similarités à ce sujet entre A Song of Ice and Fire et le Seigneur des Anneaux :
I have a certain attraction towards twilights. You can see that in my work, if you read my first novel Dying of the Light. There is something about it that it is very evocative to me, the twilight world, and the world between the edges.
27/07/2009, freemagazine.fi
Deux ans plus tard, lorsque Martin lui-même questionne cette force suggestive qu’est pour lui le sentiment de la perte ou celui d’un Âge d’or qui précède le nôtre, il associe explicitement son histoire personnelle à la fin du Troisième Âge d’Arda :
This big house my mother had been born in and her family had grown up in, but had lost. And other people lived in what had been our house. And I think it always gave me this, this sense of a lost golden age of, you know, now we were poor and we lived in the projects and we lived in an apartment. We didn’t even have a car, but God we were… once we were royalty! It gave me a certain attraction to those kinds of stories of I don’t know, fallen civilizations and lost empires and all of that.
And that may be one reason why Tolkien’s world appealed to me so much. Middle Earth is in decline as well. I mean, the elves are going away, magic was leaving the world. Many of the great places we visited in Middle Earth, like the Mines of Moria—I mean, Moria was once this great city and now it’s this hideous ruin and crumbling, this dark place under the earth inhabited by these monstrous creatures.
20/04/2011, Time
Trois ans plus tard, Martin détaille la découverte du Seigneur des Anneaux, évoque les sentiments qui furent les siens à la première lecture – un enthousiasme mêlé d’incompréhension et suivi d’un grand vide que beaucoup de lecteurs ont éprouvé – et livre son interprétation du caractère si particulier du Seigneur des Anneaux, livre qui trouve encore de nouveaux lecteurs aujourd’hui et que les lecteurs relisent plusieurs fois, lui le premier :
Quartana, one of the fanzines I hoped to write for, was covering mostly sword and sorcery and fantasy. They had a story about this English guy, Tolkien, and his story about hobbits and rings. It sounded cool to me, so when the first pirated Ace edition of Tolkien came out in paperback I snapped it up. I had a very mixed reaction when I started it. I was a high school sophomore by then. I thought this was like Conan? What the hell is all this stuff, Hey nonny nonny, and little guys with hairy feet smoking pipe weed. Conan would always begin with a half naked woman and a giant snake [laughs], and I was looking for the giant snake. But by the time I got to the Black Riders and Bree, I was hooked, and by the time I finished Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien had become like my favorite writer, finally knocking Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton off their pinnacle.
As I read Return of the King, I didn’t want it to be over. That last book blew my mind, particularly the scouring of the Shire. I didn’t like that when I was in high school. The story’s over, and they destroyed the ring — but he didn’t write "and now they lived happily ever after." Instead, they went home and home was all fucked up. The evil guys had burned down some of the woods; a fascist-like tyranny had taken over. That seemed anticlimactic to me. Frodo didn’t live happily ever after or marry a nice girl hobbit. He was permanently wounded; he was damaged. As a 13 year old, I couldn’t grasp that. Now, every time I re-read The Lord of the Rings — which I do, every few years — I appreciate the brilliance of the scouring of the Shire. That’s part of what lifts the book from all its imitators. There was a real cost to Tolkien’s world. There’s a tremendous sadness at the end of Lord of the Rings, and it has a power. I think that’s partly why people are still reading and re-reading these books.
By the time I finished Lord of the Rings it actually somewhat depressed me, because I didn’t think I could ever do anything of that stature. Fortunately, I got over that.
28/04/2014, Rolling Stone
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3. Honorer le père sans l’imiter
Si Martin fait partie des fidèles relecteurs du Seigneur des Anneaux, c’est certes avant tout pour revivre cette découverte extraordinaire, alors enfant, de la Terre du Milieu :
J.R.R. Tolkien, I think is the giant who looms above the entire realm of fantasy. I read Lord of the Rings when I was back in Junior High School still writing those stories for fanzines and it had a profound effect on me. I re-read it every few years.
I am a huge fan of Tolkien. I read Lord of the Rings when I was in high school. It had a tremendous impact on me and really solidified my love of fantasy. I still reread it every few years. I think all modern fantasy derives from Tolkien.
01/04/2012, Smarter Travel
I read Tolkien when I was twelve or so and he impressed me a lot so I don’t get tired of rereading it. In fact, I planned to send a letter to Mr. Tolkien when I was a child, but I finally didn’t, thing for which I am a little bit annoyed, more after getting noticed that Tolkien use to read almost every letter he received.
07/10/2012, entretien, Adria’s News
I revere Lord of the Rings, I reread it every few years, it had an enormous effect on me as a kid.
11/08/2014, The Guardian
Mais il y a plus. Lorsque Martin estime que « toute fantasy moderne dérive de Tolkien » (2012), il veut dire que le lecteur adulte comme l’écrivain professionnel a tout à gagner à revenir au Seigneur des Anneaux pour y découvrir aussi bien la joie et l’amertume premières que de « nouvelles choses », comme autant de « niveaux et signification » que « le père de toute fantasy moderne » aurait placées dans les « profondeurs » de « son chef-d’œuvre » :
Tolkien […] is the father of all modern fantasy, the greatest fantasist of modern time certainly. His Lord of the Rings is his masterpiece, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, it’s gonna be read for hundreds of years to come […]. The best books should have levels, should have depths, should have possible layers and meaning you discover on repeated rereadings […]. And for me Lord of the Rings of Tolkien is one of them, it’s the book I reread every three or four years, and every time I reread it I discover a new thing.
13/08/2014, Tages Anzeiger
Ces découvertes qui se succèdent d’années en années sont celles de l’explorateur. Car Tolkien a conçu un monde et a été capable de donner au monde qu’il avait imaginé la consistance de la réalité :
As a kid, I read mostly SF and comics... there was no fantasy being published back then. I discovered JRR Tolkien in high school, when Ace published the unauthorized Lord of the Rings. Blew me away. […] Middle earth was magical and wondrous.
The “place” was as important as the plot or characters, I believe. It's that way in all great fantasy. I'm trying to make my world, my Seven Kingdoms, as vividly real as JRR did his.
Tokien a conçu la Terre du Milieu certes par son travail d’architecte, mais il lui a donné vie par son talent de conteur, en choisissant à plusieurs reprises de surprendre le lecteur plutôt que de le satisfaire systématiquement. Martin est d’autant plus sensible à ce choix lorsque le conteur travaille le sentiment de la perte et introduit la réalité de la mort :
I’ve talked about Gandalf [in The Lord of the Rings], and how the impact of his death was enormous. When I was a 12-year-old kid reading The Fellowship of the Ring and “Fly, you fools!” and he goes into the chasm… it was “Holy shit! [J.R.R. Tolkien] killed the wizard! That’s the guy who knew everything. How are they going to destroy the ring without him?” And now the “kids” have to grow up because their “daddy” is dead. If Gandalf could die, anybody could die. And then just a few chapters later Boromir goes down. Those two deaths created in me the “anyone could die” thing. At that point I was expecting [Tolkien] to pick off the whole Fellowship one by one. And then we also think in The Two Towers that Frodo is dead, since Shelob stung him and wrapped him up. I really bought it because he set me up with those other deaths. But then, of course, he brings Gandalf back. He’s a little strange at first, but then he’s basically the same old Gandalf. I liked the impact we got from him being gone.
La stupeur qui était celle de Georges R.R. Martin lors de sa première lecture dans les années soixante alimente encore son écriture, avec toujours Tolkien pour référence :
I always remain impress with stories where you don’t know what was going to happen. […] And Tolkien, in some ways, laid the way for that. I mean the Fellowship of the Ring set out. The death of Boromir had an enormous impact on me. And the seeming death of Gandalf. That incredible moment in the Fellowhip of the Ring where the Balrog drags Gandalf down into the abyss and you think he’s dead, you think he’s dead for the good part of the rest of that book and the first part of the next book. If it had been me I probably would have him stayed dead. Because the impact of losing Gandalf. Gandalf was the leader, he was the one who knew what was gonna happen, he was the father figure, the wise guy. He always knew what to do and what was the meaning of this. So now it was “The children are in charge” […] “Father’s dead, what are you gonna do now? Now you have to save the world!” Oh God, what a feeling that was! That set me up perfectly for the end of the second book, the Two Towers, when it seems also Frodo is dead. Frodo has been stabbed by Shelob and Sam takes the Ring and he leaves Frodo and I was reading ad saying: “My God, they’ve killed – I thought Frodo was the hero – they’ve killed Fodo! How could they do this?” And I really didn’t know what was going to happen at the end of this book. And that’s the feelings that I’ve had reading those things that I try to replicate for my readers.
08/11/2013, entretien avec Richard Fidler
Mais l’admiration de Martin à l’égard de Tolkien ne se reporte pas sur ses successeurs, appelés « imitateurs » et accusés d’avoir simplifié la pensée du Maître en réduisant la fantasy, ternissant ce qui en faisait l’attrait :
[…] like any really successful book, Tolkien has been imitated and imitated and imitated, and I think many of those imitators get it wrong. They take elements from Tolkien and they remove some of the things that make those elements interesting and produce works that to my mind are much inferior. I did not want to do that.
01/04/2012, Smarter Travel
Pour Martin, les imitateurs se sont égarés dès le départ en sélectionnant certains éléments seulement du chaudron des contes tolkieniens sans comprendre l’usage que Tolkien en faisait :
I’m a huge fan of Tolkien. […] The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.
But most of publishing regarded Tolkien as a freak: okay, this is one of those weird little books that comes along once in a while and it’s a bestseller for reasons nobody can comprehend, but no one will ever do another book like this. And it was [Lester and Judy-Lynn] del Rey at Ballantine Books, which later became Del Rey Books, who really finally challenged that assumption in the late-‘70’s, when they published the Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara, which were the first real attempts to follow in Tolkien’s footsteps… both with success. And that led to a lot more Tolkien imitators.
And as a Tolkien fan, I sampled a lot of it. And hated a lot of it. It just seemed to me that they were imitating Tolkien without understanding Tolkien and they were imitating the worst things of Tolkien.
18/04/2011, Time
L’image du chaudron n’est pas si gratuite qu’elle en a l’air puisque suggérée par une autre image culinaire dans un ancien commentaire de Martin lui-même :
Many fantasies after Tolkien have been terrible, of course. There are terrific writers, don't get me wrong. Tad Williams, Robin Hobb, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Vance, Guy Gavriel Kay, and others have done wonderful work in the fantasy field. But a lot of it does read like they boiled all the good stuff out of The Lord of the Rings and kept what was left.
Parmi les éléments qui ont été conservés de l’héritage tolkienien : la magie et la magie à haute dose, sans qu’aient pu être saisis la nature et le rôle qu’elle avait dans le Seigneur des Anneaux :
Magic is a particular — I mean, my fantasy is quite low magic compared to the majority of it out there. And in that sense, I was following Tolkien’s footsteps because if you actually look at Lord of the Rings as I did when I was writing this, [Middle Earth is] a very magical world in a sense, it’s a world of wonders and marvels and so forth, but there’s very little onstage magic. […] You never see Gandalf doing a spell or, or creating throwing fireballs. You know, if there’s a fight, he draws a sword. You know? He does fireworks… his staff will glow. Minor stuff. Even the magic rings, I mean, the big powerful one ring, all we ever see it do is make people invisible.
[…] it’s supposed to have these great powers for domination, but it’s not like Frodo can put it on and tell the Nazgul what to do. […]. It’s unknowable, it’s mysterious. And that kind of magic I think is good. One mistake I see over time in bad fantasy is they go for the high magic world. They have really powerful wizards and witches and warlocks who can destroy entire armies – and they still have entire armies! […]. If you’ve got one guy who can go, booga-booga, and your 10,000 men army is all dead, you’re not going to get together 10,000 men!
But people don’t think through the consequences. They have these very powerful wizards but yet they still have kings and lords […] – why wouldn’t the wizards rule the world? I mean, power gravitates to it, you know.
18/04/2011, Time
Pour Martin, le « moule » du Seigneur des Anneaux aurait dû imposer d’user de l’artifice de la magie avec circonspection, trop de magie tuant la magie :
I was irritated myself by as lot of fantasy that I’ve read that seems to take place in a sort of Disney version of the middle ages, rather than anything really approaching a real life medieval period.
I wanted something that was grittier and more realistic in that sense.
But in another respect I was also going back to the mold in a sense, because the mold of most modern fantasy is Tolkien’s mold. If you look at The Lord of the Rings although it’s a very magical tale, Tolkien makes magic very rare and mystical and something that only a few people practice and understand how it works.
That seemed to me like a much better way to do it. If you’re going to have rules to magic and have magic schools that people go to and everything is cut and dried, you kind of take the magic out of magic.
08/12/2003, brokenfrontier.com
Mais en réponse au traitement de la magie par les imitateurs, Martin a ressenti le besoin de « revenir » à Tolkien lui-même :
As it is, I have carefully rationed magic. I went back to The Lord of the Rings and looked at how Tolkien does it. The Lord of the Rings is set in a magical world but there is not that much magic actually on stage. For Tolkien, wizardry is knowledge, not constant spells and incantations. I wanted to keep the magic in my book subtle and keep our sense of it growing, and it stops being magical if you see too much of it. In Tolkien, Aragorn's sword is magical because it just is; not because we regularly see it helping him win fights. In these books, magic is always dangerous and difficult, and has a price and risks
07/2000 pour amazon.co.uk
Martin accepte sur ce point l'usage parcimonieux et discret du merveilleux chez Tolkien. Ainsi, il conserve à la magie sa puissance d'effroi ou d'émerveillement (wonder) qui dépend de son caractère extraordinaire (wondrous) :
It's a fantasy novel, so I did think I should put some magic into it. But I wanted to handle the magic very carefully. This is one of the aspects where Tolkien had a good influence. We have this sense of Lord of the Rings being a very magical kind of novel, and it is. It's imbued with a sense of magic and mystery and wonder. But there's very little onstage magic. Gandalf is a wizard, but what does he actually do that's magical? He makes fireworks that may or may not be magical, his staff glows, but you don't see him, as in some of the bad fantasies, with magic treated almost as a superpower from a comic book, where the characters are going around throwing fireballs and they have a lot of spells.
Tolkien was much more mysterious. Sauron never comes on stage, you never know what his actual powers are except that they're vast and malignant. The whole handling of magic is very subtle. When I realized what Tolkien had done there, it seemed to me that he had made a great choice. The whole point about magic is that it has to be magical. If it's commonplace, if you go to the magic shop like you go to the butcher shop and the wizard lives on the corner of the street and anybody can go see them when they have a toothache, it loses a lot of its wonder.
I deliberately designed the series where magic would be very subtle at first and then would come up book through book. But I'm always going to keep it unusual and wondrous.
02/1999, amazon.com
I think the handling of magic in fantasy is one of the genre’s trickiest aspects, one where we have to make a very important decision going in. I wrestled with this for a long time when I was first starting the books. I looked at Tolkien, of course, who’s regarded as the very master of modern fantasy. Virtually everything that all of us are doing today is pretty much patterned to Lord of the Rings, which created the genre as it now exists.
Middle Earth is a very magical place. You read the books and you certainly get the view that magic suffuses the world and the culture, but there’s actually very little onstage magic. Gandalf is a wizard, but he fights with a sword; he doesn’t perform incantations or pull down lightning from the sky. Most of the magic, when it does occur, is of great import, but he never really gives wiring diagrams as to how it works.
To my mind, that worked, and it worked better than most of the other alternatives I’ve seen. If you make magic too explicit, it ceases to become magical. Magic should be wondrous and terrifying. It should be outside our realm of knowledge—supernatural, not natural. That’s the way I tried to handle it.
I am trying to handle magic in some of the ways Tolkien did. LOTR has a great deal of magic, but seldom on stage, and seldom explained.
I find myself […] in sympathy with the way Tolkien handled magic. I think if you’re going to do magic, it loses its magical qualities if it becomes nothing more than an alternate kind of science. It is more effective if it is something profoundly unknowable and wondrous, and something that can take your breath away.
24/05/2007, Weird Tales
S.
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4. Guerre des camps, guerre au-dedans
Le titre original du Trône de Fer (A Song of Ice and Fire) a reçu de nombreuses interprétations. Melisandre, personnage du roman, en donne un aperçu à sa manière toute manichéenne de prêtresse du dieu du feu et de la lumière :
There is ice and there is fire. Hate and love. Bitter and sweet... Winter and summer. Evil and good. Death and life. Everywhere, opposites. Everywhere, the war.
A Storm of Swords, Chapter 25, Davos III.
Si Martin avait à choisir un unique couple, ce serait la mort et la vie, qui sont au cœur de chaque bonne histoire de fantasy comme elles le sont aussi dans notre monde et notre vie :
Truth is sometimes hard to hear. Two of the central phrases [of Ice and Fire] are true, but they are not truths that most human beings like to contemplate. Winter is coming and Valar morghulis – “all men must die”. Mortality is the inescapable truth of all life . . . and of all stories, too.
23/04/2014, Rolling Stone
Et en ce cœur, non pas l’harmonie, mais la guerre :
I do think war is one of the central issues of our time and perhaps one of the central issues of the all time. And it’s a very complicated subject that I try to explore in my books [since it’s] a central issue of all fantasy. Look at the all tradition of fantasy since Tolkien: it’s all about war, there’s war in every book.
22/05/2012, BBC Radio 4
Si « tout n’est que guerre » en fantasy, c’est à Tolkien qu’on le doit.
Or, tous les éléments que les imitateurs de Tolkien ont annexés en abandonnant d’autres alors que ceux-ci, unis aux premiers, donnaient au récit une force imaginative exceptionnelle, peuvent être rassemblés sous l’expression manichéenne du
fight between good and evil — which has been a hallmark of so much fantasy over the years, ever since Tolkien, and Tolkien did it brilliantly! But in the hands of his imitators, it’s become kind of a cliché where you have the dark lord, and he has his evil minions. And his evil minions are very evil — you know they’re evil: they dress in black, they’re very ugly, they have no redeeming qualities.
Si le Seigneur des Anneaux voit se dérouler une guerre où se joue le destin de la Terre du Milieu, Tolkien y décrivait (« brillamment ! ») non la guerre ni toutes les guerres mais une guerre possible. Pour Martin, Les auteurs de fantasy qui lui ont emboîté le pas, en se réduisant à l’imiter, ont réduit le combat à la guerre et la guerre à la guerre totale :
The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that’s become the template. I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that.
23/04/2013, Rolling Stone
Martin jette moins la pierre sur Tolkien, l’homme du XIXe siècle (qui a connu les tranchées de la Première Guerre Mondiale, les angoisses de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, est mort au début des années soixante-dix) que sur ses successeurs. Ceux-ci, tout comme Martin, étaient de la génération des enrôlés ou des opposants à la guerre du Vietnam – c’est-à-dire une guerre qui avait peu de rapport avec une civilisation à défendre et semblait reposer, comme la majorité des guerres depuis des millénaires, sur un prétexte aussi mince et fallacieux que l’enlèvement d’Hélène :
The big question they would always ask you was “Would you would have fought in World War 2 against the Nazis?” Yes, I would have fought in WW2 against the Nazis... But the Vietcong where not the Nazis and I didn’t think America had any business and so forth – so I was objecting that particular war. […] I still think the Vietnam war is a terrible mistake for America – but I still would have fought against the Nazis.
Si, tout comme Tolkien, Martin rejette toute interprétation allégorique de ses romans, il reconnaît l’influence dans son œuvre de la guerre du Vietnam :
I think the attitude toward war is definitely shaped by my experiences with the controversies of the Vietnam War. War is central to a lot of fantasy, going back to Tolkien and beyond, but in most modern fantasy, it's very much the good guys fighting the bad guys. The Dark Lord is about to take over the Earth unless the guys in white cloaks stop him. I don't tend to think things are that simple—I think my generation was disabused of that notion by Vietnam—and the wars in my books are much more morally complex.
08/2005, Sci-Fi.com
Une telle guerre fut vécue par Martin comme une catastrophe morale nationale, dont les conséquences néfastes perdurent de générations en générations :
I was, like many kids of my generation, a hawk. I accepted that America was the good guys, we had to be there. When I got into college, the more I learned about our involvement in Vietnam, the more it seemed wrong to me. Of course, the draft was happening, and I decided to ask for the conscientious-objector status. I wasn't a complete pacifist; I couldn't claim to be that. I was what they called an objector to a particular war. I would have been glad to fight in World War II. But Vietnam was the only war on the menu. So I applied for conscientious-objector status in full belief that I would be rejected, and that I would have a further decision to make: Army, jail or Canada. […] To my surprise, they gave me the status. […]
I don't think America has ever quite recovered from Vietnam. The divisions in our society still linger to this day. For my generation it was a deeply disillusioning experience, and it had a definite effect on me. The idealistic kid who graduated high school, a big believer in truth, justice and the American way, all these great values of superheroes of his youth, was certainly less idealistic by the time I got out of college.
23/04/2014, Rolling Stone
Précisons que Martin n’avait pas attendu la guerre du Vietnam pour être sensible aux situations tragiques et moralement inextricables. Ses lectures des comics (Avengers n°9, paru en 1964, qui voit l’apparition de Wonder Man revient souvent comme référence) ou de l’Iliade avait alimenté aussi bien son goût pour les personnages ambigus que pour les affrontements entre héros aux motivations opposées :
I prefer gray characters. I prefer the philosophy that, you know, the hero is the villain of the other side. You know, […] the fight between Gandalf and the witch king of Angmar is a great moment, but the fight between Achilles and Hector also […] resonates for me and is something that I wanted to draw upon where you have two heroes fighting.
En évoquant l’affrontement entre Achille et Hector, Martin rappelle que la fantasy a commencé avant Tolkien et que, puisant dans notre histoire et notre humanité, ses sources sont en réalité millénaires. Dès lors, tel un peintre qui doit connaître la palettes des couleurs à sa dispositions, l’auteur de fantasy moderne doit aussi bien se souvenir de Tolkien et du Seigneur des Anneaux que d’Homère et de l’Iliade :
But Tolkien wasn’t a direct influence to me when I decided to write A Song of Ice and Fire although my books are in the fantasy canon that Tolkien improved. I mean, fantasy is very ancient. We can find it in the Iliad or in the Gilgamesh Poem, but Tolkien turned it into a modern genre, and A Song of Ice and Fire shares some of these patterns but not all of them. For example, I pretend to offer a dirty fantasy, more raw than Tolkien’s.
Il faut donc distinguer, avec A Song of Ice and Fire, la réponse de Martin aux imitateurs de Tolkien (qui ne l’ont pas compris comme Martin l’a compris) et celle de Martin à Tolkien lui-même :
I mean, I loved Tolkien but I don’t think he was perfect. So I did want to do something that replied not only to Tolkien, but to all of the Tolkien successors who had followed that.
18/04/2011, Time
In some sense, when I started this saga I was replying to Tolkien, but even more to his modern imitators.
11/08/2014, The Guardian
La réponse de Martin à Tolkien est avant tout celle du disciple qui cherche à s’émanciper de la tutelle du « maître de tous [les auteurs de fantasy] » (2011), voire celle du fils qui ressent le besoin de s’éloigner du « père de toute la fantasy moderne » (2014) :
I read Tolkien in high school, and it had an enormous effect on me. Certainly it was a book that I loved, I just fell into the world. So I wanted to do something of my own that might effect a new generation of readers in the same way. At the same time I wanted to make it different from Tolkien.
Cette réponse est double, d’une part attentive et sensible à l’esprit du Seigneur des Anneaux, d’autre part critique et qui se veut émancipée de ses limites possibles ou supposées. Premièrement, pour Martin, venir après Tolkien nécessite de prendre comme référence non le merveilleux mais l’intime :
I love Tolkien. I’m the biggest fan on the world of The Lord of the Rings. But [in] Tolkien’s view of good and evil – evil is externalized: it comes from Sauron, or Morgoth before it, there are orcs who are absolutely irredeemable, the good people get together and stop the orcs. Most of the good people are good. I’ve always been more attracted to grey characters as I’ve said in many interviews. I do think that battle of good and evil is a great subject for a fiction but in my view the battle for good and evil is weighed forth through the individual, in human heart.
06/2016, entretien avec Stephen King
Ce que les « imitateurs » de Tolkien n’ont pas compris :
[…] to some extent, I was writing in reaction to other fantasies. It's always the question of the good vs. evil. Tolkien started it and did it quite masterfully, but others who followed didn't do as well. I think the battle between good and evil is certainly a valid one, but I think that the battle is much more interesting in real life than in fantasy. I am particularly irritated by fantasy where you can always tell the bad guys because they are ugly and wear black.
I have no qualms with the way that Tolkien handled Sauron, but in some ways The Lord of the Rings set an unfortunate example for the writers who were to follow. I did not want to write another version of the War Between Good and Evil, where the antagonist is called the Foul King or the Demon Lord or Prince Rotten, and his minions are slavering subhumans dressed all in black (I dressed my Night's Watch, who are basically good guys, all in black in part to undermine that annoying convention). Before you can fight the war between good and evil, you need to determine which is which, and that's not always as easy as some Fantasists would have you believe.
Dès lors, Martin développe dans son œuvre ce qu’il estime le plus digne d’être repris dans l’écriture tolkienienne :
I try to create these fully fleshed, gray characters that have ambiguities and conflicts within themselves, so they’re not heroes and they’re not villains. One of my favorite characters – and I love Lord of the Rings; don’t make it sound like I’m bashing Tolkien here, ‘cause it’s like my favorite book of all time – but my favorite Tolkien character in Lord of the Rings is Boromir, because he’s the grayest of the characters, and he’s the one who really struggles with the ring and ultimately succumbs to it, but then dies heroically. You see, he has both good and evil in him.
14/03/2014, Vanity Fair
Ce faisant, Martin lit correctement les intentions de Tolkien mais doit sans cesse lutter contre l’image à laquelle a été réduit (et à laquelle lui-même réduit) le Seigneur des Anneaux :
The battle between good and evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between good and evil is thought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and … they’re really ugly and they’ve got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody’s ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien’s heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this become cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators.
You know what I’m saying, I love Tolkien. I want to stress that here because I don’t want to come across like I’m slamming him. But I am responding to him. One of my favorite characters in Lord of the Rings is Boromir. Boromir is a traditional hero in many ways. He’s the Prince, he’s the heir to the great kingdom he’s very brave, he’s a great warrior and all of that, but ultimately he succumbs to the temptation of the ring. But then he dies heroically, protecting innocents. He has that wonderful sense of greatness about him.
Saruman is another interesting character the White Wizard whose been on the side of good literally hundreds, if not thousands of years, as the wizards are not men, they’re Maiar, they’re very long-lived. And yet he too, at the end you know succumbs. These are two characters where the human heart is in conflict.
18/04/2011, Time
Quant à l’aspect critique de la réponse de Martin à Tolkien, il concerne le traitement des figures féminines et des rapports amoureux :
I admire J.R.R. Tolkien vastly, I think all modern fantasy derives from Tolkien, and Lord of the Rings is one of the great works of this century. Nonetheless, it does have flaws, and I think its almost complete absence of women, and of anything even approaching sex and/or romantic love – it reflects its time and its place, but it's certainly not something I wanted to do.
Mais aussi le traitement du pouvoir :
But I also want to respond — I’ve read a lot of history about feudal history and Roman history and so forth, about politics in those days. I follow contemporary politics. And you know, what strikes me is that these issues are horrid. And a lot of fantasy makes it seem simply: a good man will be a good king. Well, a good man is not always a good king. And a bad man is not always a bad king. You know, it’s much more complicated than that.
18/04/2011, Time
Cette critique revient avec des arguments connus et sérieux (qui ont été abordés en ces lieux, autrefois ou récemment) :
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I’ve tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.
23/04/2014, Rolling Stone
Cependant, le second aspect de la réponse de Martin à Tolkien, quoique sévère, ne masque jamais l’admiration accordée au « maître de tous [les auteurs de fantasy] » :
Tolkien was a 19th-century guy, a world war one veteran, and the fact that his books still speak to the modern reader, and are enjoyed by millions of people today, is a sign of his brilliance. I think he will continue to be read for centuries to come.
02/06/2012, entretien avec Isabel Berwick, Food & Drink
Car, pour un auteur de fantasy venu après Tolkien, la réduction (évitable) de la nature de la fantasy à un affrontement entre le parti de la lumière et celui des ténèbres s’accompagne d’une une réduction (inévitable) de la consistance du légendaire associé.
Si Martin est plus que protégé de la première (aussi bien par son goût pour l’histoire et des violents effets de surprise comme par son penchant pour la complexité des situations et des psychologies), il avoue sans honte ne rien pouvoir faire contre la seconde. Aucun écrivain désireux de vivre de sa plume ne peut consacrer sa vie à construire un monde comme Tolkien a pu le faire, façonnant un royaume et une histoire qui conviennent aux langues qu’il aurait inventées pour son unique plaisir. Pour Martin, la fantasy tolkienienne est à la fois une source inévitable de toute fantasy moderne mais aussi une référence indépassable dans son genre, une croix à porter pour qui voudrait en imiter la substance :
Sometimes I have sometimes so much fun creating world that I have to smack myself around and stop from putting all the stuff in the stories where it doesn’t necessarily belong. But it’s nice to know it’s there. It keeps the world the more grounding and there are occasions where it would come up in dialogue or in storytelling and if you know what it is you can handle it more elegantly.
People ask me about world-building sometimes. One of the crosses that all modern fantasy writers have to bear is that they all laboring in the tremendous shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. And Tolkien was a brilliant man and a very unique sort of writer. He was not a professional writer in the same sense that I am: he was a linguist, he was an Oxford don, he was an expert on Old Norse and languages – he made up imaginary languages for fun! And he made up genealogies and histories of his kingdom for fun.
I remember the first time I read Lord of the Rings back up when I was in junior high school. I’m reading the books, now I’m on the Return of the King’s last book – and I was loving this book so much that I didn’t want it to end. And I’m saying: “I don’t have to worry, I don’t have to worry, I still have a lot of pages, a big hunk of pages here…” And then suddenly it’s over! “Hey! Wait a minute! Oh… it’s all appendices!” And pages and pages and pages of appendices! And it wasn’t till later that I read all the appendices, that I got to really appreciate all off its contents.
But Tolkien, with the Silmarillion which he started to working on in the WWI and the tranches, and were still working on when he died in the early seventies without ever completing it, and the all background of Númenor and Valinor and all the different kings and gods and kingdoms that have risen and fallen, he developed that all in an enormous detail.
So he sort of set a very difficult part for all of us fantasists who would follow to live up to this.
Plus I think a lot of fantasy writers think all fantasies are like Tolkien’s: it’s like the iceberg when they said nine tenth of the iceberg is below the surface. That’s true in Tolkien : nine tenth of the iceberg is below the surface; he has the all Silmarillion thing that lies underneath the stories of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and all the histories and so forth. For people like me (and I think the vast majority of our contemporaries) what we have is a little ice on a raft! And we’re trying to make you think that there is an enormous iceberg under the surface here – but there isn’t! We haven’t invented entirely imaginary languages! We don’t have thousands of pages of world-building […] There, maybe a few people do – but they do it wrong in that case ; they’re not Tolkien…
S.
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5. Le maître mais non le favori
On ne s’étonnera pas, à lire ce qui précède, de trouver le Seigneur des Anneaux au sommet de la liste des conseils de lecture de G.R.R. Martin :
Martin recommends Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Robert E. Howard's Conan and Kull stories, the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn and A Fine and Private Place, Fritz Leiber's stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories, and Jack Vance's Lyonesse, The Dying Earth, and Cugel's Saga. He also recommends historical writers such as Sharon Kay Penman, Nigel Tranter, Cecilia Holland, Thomas B. Costain, and Maurice Druon.
Mais lorsqu’on l’interroge sur son écrivain préféré, Martin répond immédiatement, non pas Tolkien, mais
Jack Vance. Definitely. He's incredible. He just goes on and on. So many writers of his duration hit a wall at some point in their career. They stop writing, or they continue writing, but their books turn to crap. But Vance is just as good now; Nightlamp was just as good as Big Planet. He keeps hitting these home runs as far as I'm concerned, and I can't stop reading him. I pick up a new book by him and I read one sentence and I'm hooked; he's got me in. He's terrific. I like a lot of other writers, too but Vance is definitely my single favorite.
Car Vance non seulement est un « maître de la fantasy » mais également (pouvait-il dire en 2000) « le plus grand écrivain vivant de science-fiction » :
Jack Vance is the greatest living SF writer, in my opinion, and one of the few who is also a master of Fantasy. His The Dying Earth (1950) was one of the seminal books in the history of modern Fantasy, and I would rank him right up there with Tolkien, Dunsany, Leiber, and T.H. White as one of the fathers of the genre.
À la mort de Vance en mai 2013, G.R.R. Martin lui rend hommage sur son blog, en faisant de lui le troisième membre d’une trinité des créateurs de mondes avec Howard et Tolkien :
It is a sad day for fans of science fiction and fantasy.
Word has just gotten out that Jack Vance, one of the grandmasters of our genres, and IMNSHO one of the greatest writers of our times, passed away on Sunday. He was 96.
I had the honor of meeting Jack a few times, but I cannot claim to have known him well. But he had a huge influence on me and my work, and for the past fifty-some years has ranked among my very favorite writers. Every time a new Jack Vance book came out, I would drop whatever else I was doing and read it. Sometimes I did not mean to, but once you cracked the covers of a Vance book, you were lost.
It pleases me no end that Gardner Dozois and I were able to do our tribute anthology, Songs of the Dying Earth, when Jack was still alive, so he could hear how many of today's fantasists he had inspired. Vance's Dying Earth ranks with Howard's Hyborian Age and Tolkien's Middle Earth as one of the all-time great fantasy settings, and Cugel the Clever is the genre's greatest rogue, a character as memorable as Conan or Frodo (either of whom Cugel would likely swindle out of their smallclothes, had they ever met).
Vance was equally adept at writing SF and mystery, and will be remembered as one of the very few writers ever to win an Edgar Award along with Hugos and Nebulas. The output was prodigious, and there is scarcely a bad book among them. If you haven't read Jack Vance... well, I pity you, but I envy you as well. You have some amazing adventures ahead of you. The Dying Earth, Lyonesse, the Demon Princes, Bad Ronald, Liane the Wayfarer and Chun the Unavoidable, Emphyrio, Showboat World, Big Planet, the Dirdir and the Pnume and the Chasch and (yes) the Wankh, the Last Castle, the Dragon Masters, the Moon Moth... the list goes on and on and on and on.
Jack Vance left the world a richer place than he found it. No more can be asked of any writer.
S.
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Merci beaucoup pour cette impressionnante compilation, Sosryko.
Je n'ai pas encore eu le temps de tout lire, mais c'est déjà très intéressant.
I.
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Merci pour le partage, Sosryko. La cinquième partie rejoint certains éléments de mes propres investigations.
D'autres citations sur le sujet, que j'ai récolté durant mes recherches, pourraient être rajoutées à ta compilation, mais si vous le permettez, la primeur en sera donné aux lecteurs de certains travaux d'écriture destinés à la publication (sinon, je n'en aurai jamais fini, et le Dragon hausserait les épaules... ce qui ne manquerait pas de m'agacer !)... :-)
Amicalement,
Hyarion.
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Une très belle surprise que je découvre ce matin, superbe fuseau Sosyrko, un grand merci ! ;-)
Sur la première partie. Le parallèle Architecte / Jardinier est intéresssant mais j'ai quelque part du mal à croire que l'architecte existe dans ce contexte. Quels seraient les auteurs qui pourraient se revendiquer architectes ? Le processus créatif laisse obligatoirement à mon sens une place à la surprise, l'improvisation, l'inattendu, c'est d'ailleurs probablement l'une de ses caractéristiques. Qui plus est, cette approche "architecturale" revêt un côté froid, analytique qui remplace l'émotion. Ou si émotion il y a, elle serait calculée, non sincère.
Mais je suis un jardinier moi-même alors peut-être ai-je du mal à comprendre les architectes ;-)
En réalité, les deux approches sont a priori indissociables. Il y a toujours un canevas qui procède du côté architecte, un squelette que l'on viendra animer pas des muscles, du sang, des terminaisons nerveuses, etc. On donne vie au squelette, cette graîne qui finira par fleurir, ou dépérir. Comme le titre du premier message l'indique, le jardinier est architecte, et vice-versa.
Etes-vous jardinier, ou architecte ?
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Eh bien, que de sujets abordés dans cette évocation de Tolkien chez Martin ! Merci, Sosryko. Il va falloir un peu de temps pour tout digérer.
En parlant de digestion, j'ai relu au printemps le cycle de Lyonesse de Jack Vance. J'avais oublié combien il donne l'eau à la bouche à nous décrire ce que mangent ses personnages — une lecture que je déconseille à tout Hobbit qui fait une cure de lembas. ;p
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Heureux que ce fuseau vous intéresse, camarades
@ Cédric : je ne suis pas auteur de fantasy, mais tel que je me connais, je serais certainement un jardinier architecte (et même un jardinier mauvais architecte...) et non un architecte jardinier!
S.
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Sur la première partie. Le parallèle Architecte / Jardinier est intéresssant mais j'ai quelque part du mal à croire que l'architecte existe dans ce contexte. Quels seraient les auteurs qui pourraient se revendiquer architectes ? Le processus créatif laisse obligatoirement à mon sens une place à la surprise, l'improvisation, l'inattendu, c'est d'ailleurs probablement l'un de ses caractéristiques. Qui plus est, cette approche "architecturale" revêt un côté froid, analytique qui remplace l'émotion. Ou si émotion il y a, elle serait calculée, non sincère.
Pas encore tout lu, je ne répondrai donc qu'à cette interrogation : c'est nécessairement le cas des auteurs de polar (et assimilé), puisqu'il faut avoir une vision claire du crime et de l'investigation afin de pouvoir maintenir la crédibilité et le suspens jusqu'au bout. J'envisage que ce soit souvent la même chose pour les auteurs de roman psychologique, puisqu'il faut alors envisager en détail le caractère de chacun des personnages afin de pouvoir mettre en scène leurs interactions. Enfin, je soupçonne que pas mal d'auteurs « réalistes » fonctionnent de cette façon : sans être aucunement spécialiste de son œuvre, c'est le genre d'impression que j'ai à la lecture de Zola.
In fine, je dois bien admettre que je préfère la lecture d'œuvres de jardiniers à celle d'architectes. Inversement, si jamais je devais écrire de la fiction, je soupçonne que j'aurais tendance à me montrer architecte, mais si possible un architecte qui travaillerait avec des matériaux vivants, afin de pouvoir se laisser surprendre à l'occasion.
Elendil
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Une citation à méditer sur le processus créatif :
While I don’t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present or even the future work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen or rather, off my typewriter almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of storywriting. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it. I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the facts remain. I still write of Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters. But the time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. That has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character.
Robert E. Howard — Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, December 14th, 1933
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Merci Anthony.
A mon tour, cet extrait de la lettre 163 à W.H. Auden (ce dernier demandait à Tolkien "s’il voulait bien ajouter un peu de « touche personnelle » sous la forme d’anecdotes sur la manière dont le livre en était venu à être écrit") montre le côté architecte mais surtout le jardinier qu'était Tolkien.
De par ma maigre expérience, ce que j'ai pu inventer d'imprévu m'est surtout venu en... écrivant. Comme celui dans son jardin qui commence une tâche et finalement en fait bien plus et arrache une mauvaise herbe ici, retourne la terre là, cueille et plante. Il est bien connu qu'une idée en amène souvent d'autres, pour notre plus grande satisfaction.
Tolkien dit lui-même que certaines idées étaient en "germe", cela ne fait-il pas de lui un jardinier ?
Je suis resté bloqué pendant une éternité à la fin du Livre Trois. J’ai écrit le Livre Quatre sous forme de feuilleton et l’ai envoyé à mon fils, soldat en Afrique en 1944. Les deux derniers ont été écrits entre 1944 et 1948. Cela ne signifie pas, bien sûr, que l’idée centrale de cette histoire est un produit de la guerre. On y était déjà arrivé depuis l’un des plus anciens chapitres qui aient été conservés (Livre l, 2). Elle était vraiment là, présente en germe, depuis le début, même si je n’avais pas d’idée consciente de ce que le Nécromancien représentait (hormis le Mal, toujours récurrent) dans Bilbo le Hobbit, ni de son rapport avec l’Anneau. Mais si l’on voulait repartir de la fin de Bilbo le Hobbit, je crois que l’anneau était un choix inévitable pour faire le lien. Si l’on voulait, ensuite, un grand récit, l’Anneau devait tout de suite prendre une majuscule ; et le Seigneur Ténébreux apparaîtrait immédiatement. C’est ce qu’il a fait, de son propre chef, dans l’âtre de Cul-de-Sac, dès que j’en suis arrivé à ce point du récit. La Quête centrale a donc commencé tout de suite. Mais j’ai rencontré en chemin de nombreuses choses qui m’ont étonné. Tom Bombadil, je le connaissais déjà ; mais je n’étais jamais allé à Bree. Voir Grands-Pas assis dans son coin à l’auberge à été un choc, et je n’avais pas plus d’idée que Frodo sur son identité. Les Mines de la Moria n’avaient été jusqu’alors qu’un nom, et au sujet de la Lothlórien rien n’était parvenu à mes oreilles de mortel jusqu’à ce que je m’y rende. Au loin, je savais que vivaient les Seigneurs des chevaux, aux confins d’un ancien Royaume des Hommes, mais la Forêt de Fangorn a été une aventure imprévue. Je n’avais jamais entendu parler de la Maison d’Eorl, ni des Intendants du Gondor. Plus troublant encore, Saruman ne m’avait jamais été révélé, et j’ai été tout aussi perplexe que Frodo lorsque Gandalf a manqué son rendez-vous du 22 septembre. Les Palantiri m’étaient inconnus, même si au moment où la Pierre d’Orthanc a été jetée de la fenêtre, je l’ai reconnue et j’ai compris le sens de la « chanson de la Tradition » qui trottait dans mon esprit : Sept étoiles et sept pierres et un arbre blanc. Ces vers et ces noms ont tendance à surgir, mais ils ne s’expliquent pas toujours. Il me reste encore tout à découvrir sur les chats de la Reine Berúthiel. En revanche, je connaissais plus ou moins tout du rôle de Gollum, et de Sam, et je savais que le chemin était gardé par une Araignée. Et si cela a un quelconque rapport avec la tarentule qui m’a piqué lorsque j’étais un tout jeune enfant, les gens sont libres de le penser (en supposant, ce qui est improbable, que cela intéresse quelqu’un). Je puis seulement dire que je ne m’en souviens absolument pas, que je ne serais pas au courant si on ne me l’avait pas raconté ; que je ne déteste pas particulièrement les araignées, et que je n’ai aucun besoin de les tuer. D’ordinaire, je sauve celles que je trouve dans la baignoire !
Tolkien, lettre 163 à W.H. Auden, 7 juin 1955
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Une lettre riche d'enseignements, Cédric ! Poursuivons donc sur l'idée de graine qui germe avec une citation d'un autre auteur :
When I'm starting a book, I compose in bed before I go to sleep. I will lie there in the dark and think. I'll try to write a paragraph. An opening paragraph. And over a period of weeks and months and even years, I'll word and reword it until I'm happy with what I've got. If I can get that first paragraph right, I'll know I can do the book.
Stephen King — The Atlantic, July 23th, 2013
P.S. : Et pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas, je vous conseille son essai sur la création littéraire (Écriture : Mémoires d'un métier).
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Une citation à méditer sur le processus créatif :
While I don’t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present or even the future work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen or rather, off my typewriter almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of storywriting. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it. I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the facts remain. I still write of Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters. But the time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. That has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character.
Robert E. Howard — Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, December 14th, 1933
Je me permets, à ce propos, de rappeler ici les remarques de Patrice Louinet s'agissant des explications sur la création de Conan le Cimmérien que Robert E. Howard a donné à son collègue Clark Ashton Smith, dans ce passage de la lettre que tu cites (cf. Conan le Cimmérien, premier volume, 1932-1933 [référencé dans le fuseau dédié à Howard], "Une Genèse Hyborienne", p. 541-571) :
Expliquer que ses personnages et ses histoires lui venaient naturellement était chose courante chez Howard, qui ne mentionne qu'en de très rares occasions ses récits inachevés ou invendus dans sa correspondance. Cette particularité devait d'ailleurs grandement desservir le Texan dans les années qui allaient suivre, nombre de critiques prenant ces propos au pied de la lettre. Ainsi, si l'on prend l'exemple des nouvelles de Kull, seules trois histoires mettant en scène le personnage furent publiées du vivant d'Howard tandis qu'une douzaine de récits devaient demeurer inédits, incomplets ou rejetés par les éditeurs de l'époque. Et pourtant, Howard écrivit à Lovecraft: « Merci pour vos compliments sur les histoires de Kull, mais je doute pouvoir être capable d'en écrire une autre. Les trois nouvelles que j'ai écrites sur ce personnage ont presque semblé s'écrire toutes seules, sans intervention de ma part ; elles ont tout simplement surgi dans mon esprit, toutes prêtes, et je les ai couchées sur le papier sans plus d'efforts. »
Or, des brouillons nous sont parvenus pour la quasi-totalité des histoires de Kull ; nous savons, par exemple, qu'Howard travailla pendant des mois sur « The Shadow Kingdom » (« le Royaume des Chimères »), retravaillant longuement son tapuscrit. Comment, dans ces conditions, pourrions-nous croire Howard quand il nous déclare que l'écriture des nouvelles de Conan relevait presque de l'écriture automatique ? Les choses ne furent pas aussi simples et aisées qu'Howard voulait bien le laisser entendre à Clark Ashton Smith... et à nous par la même occasion.
Patrice Louinet, Une Genèse Hyborienne
Patrice évoque plus loin, dans son essai, la création de Conan dans l'esprit de Howard, plus spontanée et inconsciente a priori que le processus d'écriture lui-même :
« Conan a tout simplement surgi dans mon esprit il y a quelques années de cela tandis que je faisais halte dans une petite ville frontalière sur la partie basse du Rio Grande. Sa création ne fut pas le résultat d'un processus conscient. Il a simplement surgi d'un coup du néant, et m'a immédiatement chargé de rédiger la saga de ses aventures. » (Cité dans Alvin Earl Perry, « A biographical Sketh of Robert E. Howard », 1935.) [...]
Lorsque Howard expliquait que Conan avait surgi dans son esprit sans guère d'efforts de sa part, il disait probablement la vérité. Ce qu'il ne réalisait pas en écrivant ces mots, c'est que cet acte de création obéissait à des forces inconscientes particulièrement puissantes. Les « gigantesques mélancolies » de Conan font écho aux « humeurs noires » d'Howard (pour reprendre son expression), tout comme la Cimmérie fait écho à Dark Valley [région natale de l'écrivain, dans le comté de Palo Pinto, Texas]. Et tout comme cette Dark Valley est un souvenir pénible pour Howard, il n'existe pas de pays plus sinistre pour Conan que la Cimmérie. [...]
Patrice Louinet, Une Genèse Hyborienne
Amicalement,
Hyarion.
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Hyarion, merci pour cet éclairage qui a le mérite de rappeler qu'il ne faut pas toujours prendre pour argent comptant les déclarations des auteurs.
Toutefois, la démonstration de Patrice Louinet ne me convainc pas entièrement. Il explique qu'il a trouvé des brouillons montrant un travail important de réécriture pour Kull alors que Howard avait affirmé le contraire dans une lettre. De cela, il déduit que, comme Howard a dit la même chose pour les histoires de Conan, il a forcément dû beaucoup les retravailler aussi. J'aurais préféré qu'il explique d'abord pourquoi il n'a pas pu se baser sur des brouillons de Conan pour arriver à cette conclusion.
Par ailleurs, dans la citation que j'ai donnée de la lettre à Clark Ashton Smith, Howard explique bien que le personnage de Conan tient une place à part dans sa création, que les histoires lui viennent bien plus facilement que pour d'autres personnages. Se baser sur Kull pour extrapoler sur Conan me parait donc biaisé.
Pour poursuivre sur la genèse de Conan, j'ai trouvé une autre lettre, un peu plus tardive que la précédente :
It may sound fantastic to link the term “realism” with Conan; but as a matter of fact — his supernatural adventures aside — he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that’s why he seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prizefighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.
Robert E. Howard — Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, July 23, 1935
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"Se baser sur Kull pour extrapoler sur Conan" serait hasardeux, notamment compte tenu des différences entre les deux personnages et les récits qui les mettent en scène, mais Patrice Louinet est, je pense, suffisamment familier avec l'oeuvre de Howard dans son ensemble pour aider précisément le lecteur à ne pas se focaliser uniquement sur ce que Howard a pu écrire sur sa façon de travailler et sur l'aura particulière qu'a Conan le Cimmérien, sa plus célèbre création. :-) En ce qui concerne la première nouvelle de Howard mettant en scène Conan, Le Phénix sur l'Épée (The Phoenix on the Sword), il se trouve qu'il s'agit d'une réécriture d'une histoire de Kull, Par cette hache je règne ! (By This Axe I Rule !, 1929), effectuée en 1932. Voila déjà un élément qui peut aider à faire la part des choses en matière de spontanéité vis à vis de la création d'un personnage d'une part et du processus d'écriture d'autre part, sachant bien que cet élément ne résume pas tout, naturellement.
Mais en tous les cas, les quelques extraits que j'ai cité ne dispense évidemment pas de lire l'essai "Une Genèse Hyborienne" dans son intégralité, loin s'en faut. :-) Cet essai comprend plusieurs dizaines de pages et il est divisé en trois parties, chacune concluant l'un des volumes de l'intégrale des histoires de Conan parue chez Bragelonne. Patrice y analyse chaque texte de Howard, un par un, par ordre d'écriture. Si tu lis cet essai, tu pourras constater qu'il commence par un extrait de la lettre de Robert Howard à Clark Ashton Smith de décembre 1933, juste avant d'évoquer son exemple des histoires de Kull. Cette évocation doit donc être prise pour ce qu'elle est : un élément introductif, avant d'aller substantiellement plus loin et en détail. Si tu poursuis ta lecture, tu retrouveras l'autre passage que j'ai cité, ou encore celui-ci :
Il semble bien qu'Howard disait la vérité lorsqu'il expliquait à Clark Ashton Smith que les épisodes se bousculaient dans sa tête et qu'il ne fit qu'écrire des histoires de Conan pendant des semaines. Howard envoya « Le Phénix sur l'Épée » et « La Fille du Géant de Gel » au début du mois de mars 1932, et n'attendit même pas la réponse de Wright [rédacteur en chef de la revue Weird Tales] pour entamer sa troisième nouvelle, « Le Dieu dans le Sarcophage ».
Patrice Louinet, Une Genèse Hyborienne
Bref, ce que je veux simplement dire, c'est que Patrice s'efforce donc de faire la part des choses, en tenant compte des discours comme des faits. Mais je ne fais là que picorer dans le texte, si j'ose dire : pour avoir une vue d'ensemble, il vaut mieux lire tout l'essai (dans les trois volumes), à mon avis. :-)
Si la correspondance de Robert E. Howard t'intéresse, elle a fait l'objet d'une édition en quatre volumes (dont le premier est hélas épuisé) par la Robert E. Howard Foundation sous le titre The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard : les lettres à Clark Ashton Smith que tu as citées figurent dans le troisième volume (1933-1936), où elles portent les numéros 249 et 298. La correspondance entre Howard et Lovecraft a fait, elle, comme je l'ai signalé dans le fuseau dédié à Howard, l'objet d'une édition en deux volumes chez Hippocampus Press sous le titre A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (un projet d'édition en français est à l'étude).
Amicalement,
Hyarion.
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Merci pour ces « quelques recherches », Sosryko !
L’analyse de Martin est plus fine que les jugements sommaires de certains de ses admirateurs (dans le genre « Martin, c’est mieux que Tolkien parce que c’est pas manichéen »).
A propos de la problématique de l’écrivain architecte/ l’écrivain jardinier, il y a au moins une auteur de polars qui appartient à la catégorie des jardiniers, c’est Fred Vargas. Dans une interview sur le site de l’Humanité, on trouve ainsi :
« J’ai trois semaines où je suis avec mon bateau dans la brume, avec juste un point de départ et un point d’arrivée, et après je passe six mois, un an, à resserrer tous les fils, faire en sorte que tout concorde, que la logique soit respectée, que rien ne soit laissé sans explication. »
« Une fois, j’ai essayé de construire la moitié d’une histoire, bien calée, un plan sur papier. C’était pour Sous les vents de Neptune. Au deuxième chapitre, des personnages sont arrivés, les dialogues sont partis ailleurs et c’est sorti de la route tout seul. »
« Tous ces détails qui sont parfois considérés comme faisant partie d’un récit diaboliquement conçu, je les ai «appris» en écrivant. »
On retrouve aussi dans une autre interview l’idée de la graine :
« Et me voilà à nouveau coincée par "quelque chose" qui revient... obsessionnellement. Dans le précédent, Un lieu incertain, j'avais démarré avec une histoire de vampires. Avec celui d'avant, Dans les bois éternels, j'étais partie de l'os qui existe dans le coeur du cerf. Tout le temps, c'est un bidule comme ça. Et je sais que fatalement je vais y aller. "
Beruthiel
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Si la correspondance de Robert E. Howard t'intéresse, elle a fait l'objet d'une édition en quatre volumes (dont le premier est hélas épuisé) par la Robert E. Howard Foundation sous le titre The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard.
Je crois que je vais préparer ma liste de Noël très en avance cette année ! Merci pour la référence. ;]
J'ai repéré aussi l'intégrale consacrée à Bran Mak Morn chez Bragelonne. J'avais emprunté il y a bien longtemps le recueil édité chez NéO et j'avais bien aimé ce personnage.
If Gandalf could die, anybody could die. And then just a few chapters later Boromir goes down. Those two deaths created in me the “anyone could die” thing. At that point I was expecting [Tolkien] to pick off the whole Fellowship one by one. And then we also think in The Two Towers that Frodo is dead, since Shelob stung him and wrapped him up. I really bought it because he set me up with those other deaths.
— May 31th, 2015
Je reprends cette citation donnée par Sosryko. Je n'aurais pas imaginé que la marque de fabrique de Martin — ne pas hésiter à faire mourir régulièrement des personnages importants — prenait sa source chez Tolkien.
Il explique davantage les raisons qui l'amènent à la faire dans une interview pour Galaxy’s Edge, reprise dans Time.
I think a writer, even a fantasy writer, has an obligation to tell the truth and the truth is, as we say in Game of Thrones, all men must die. You can’t write about war and violence without having death. If you want to be honest it should affect your main characters. We’ve all read this story a million times when a bunch of heroes set out on adventure and it’s the hero and his best friend and his girlfriend and they go through amazing hair-raising adventures and none of them die. The only ones who die are extras. That’s such a cheat. It doesn’t happen that way.
Once you’ve accepted that you have to include death then you should be honest about death and indicate it can strike down anybody at any time. You don’t get to live forever just because you are a cute kid or the hero’s best friend or the hero. Sometimes the hero dies, at least in my books.
I love all my characters so it’s always hard to kill them but I know it has to be done. I tend to think I don’t kill them. The other characters kill ‘em. I shift off all blame from myself.
— « George R.R. Martin Explains Why He Kills Off Your Favorite Game of Thrones Characters », Time, May 17th, 2016
Concernant la difficulté pour un auteur de tuer un personnage auquel il est attaché, j'avais été ému par la déclaration de Maurice Druon après la mort de Robert d'Artois, protagoniste haut en couleur des Rois maudits (une autre œuvre qui a influencé Martin, comme en témoigne le texte intitulé « My hero: Maurice Druon » dans The Guardian en 2013).
… Et ici l’auteur, contraint par l’Histoire à tuer son personnage préféré, avec lequel il a vécu six années, éprouve une tristesse égale à celle du roi Édouard d’Angleterre ; la plume, comme disent les vieux conteurs de chroniques, lui échappe hors des doigts, et il n’a plus le désir de poursuivre, au moins immédiatement, sinon pour faire connaître au lecteur la fin de quelques-uns des principaux héros de ce récit.
— Le Lis et le Lion, quatrième partie, chapitre 6
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Et si cela a un quelconque rapport avec la tarentule qui m’a piqué lorsque j’étais un tout jeune enfant
Tolkien, lettre 136 à W.H. Auden, 7 juin 1955
Bonjour
Je déterre ce sujet car je viens de me rendre compte d'une confusion qui semble être récurrente même parmi les éminences tolkienniennes :
Les anglosaxons appellent "tarantulas" ce que nous appelons "mygales". Tolkien se serait fait mordre par une "baboon spider" (Harpactirinae) qui est de l'infra-Ordre des Mygalomorphae. Ce qu'on appelle en français "tarentules" n'en font pas parties.
A noter qu'une araignée de "pique" pas, elle mord. Mais pour le coup, Tolkien qui ne devait pas bien connaitre l'anatomie arachnéenne puisqu'il utilise le terme "stung"
Et pour info, il y a une faute de frappe, la citation est indiquée comme étant de la Lettre 136 alors que, comme dit plus haut dans le message de Cédric, c'est bien la Lettre 163.
Il y a également trace de ce faux ami dans ce sujet : https://www.jrrvf.com/fluxbb/viewtopic.php?id=5898
- Erendis qui ne faisait que passer -
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J'aime ce site où les Ents prennent plusieurs années (2016-2023) avant de réagir sur un sujet. Sans aucune moquerie (promis), c'est un temps plaisant très bien et doux en ces lieux.
S.
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Excellent Erendis, merci pour ces précisions "chirurgicales" ! Bien vu
J'en ferai l'écho sur la notice "Araignée" : https://www.jrrvf.com/fervent-hommage/t … n-1-image/
C.
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S'agissant de Shelob, on peut évidemment considérer qu'elle a une forme d'araignée, mais que sa morphologie est monstrueuse. De fait, elle semble aussi bien avoir des crochets à venin, ou plus exactement un « bec », si l'on se fie à la v.o. (« Un crachat de venin dégoulinait de ses crochets » / « her beak drabbling a spittle of venom ») qu'un aiguillon venimeux (« hors de portée de sa piqûre » / « out of the reach of her sting » ; « dard empoisonné » / « venomous sting »).
E.
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A noter qu'une araignée de "pique" pas, elle mord. Mais pour le coup, Tolkien qui ne devait pas bien connaitre l'anatomie arachnéenne puisqu'il utilise le terme "stung"
Effectivement, une araignée mord mais ne "pique" pas. En ce qui concerne Shelob, Tolkien a peut-être voulu décrire davantage une créature "arachnomorphe" qu'une araignée conforme aux constatations scientifiques que nous pouvons tous connaître (lorsque nous nous renseignons), mais il est vrai que ce ne serait pas la première fois que l'on confirmerait ainsi le fait que J. R. R. Tolkien n'était assurément pas un expert en toutes choses, y compris dans le cadre de sa subcréation.
Les anglosaxons appellent "tarantulas" ce que nous appelons "mygales". Tolkien se serait fait mordre par une "baboon spider" (Harpactirinae) qui est de l'infra-Ordre des Mygalomorphae. Ce qu'on appelle en français "tarentules" n'en font pas parties.
Pour compléter, Harpactirinae désigne une sous-famille (de mygales d'Afrique) de la famille des Theraphosidae, mais je ne suis pas sûr que le terme usuel anglophone "baboon spider" ("araignée babouin") puisse seulement désigner les araignées de cette sous-famille, comme semble a priori en témoigner l'existence d'une "king baboon spider" (Pelinobius muticus), seule araignée représentante du genre Pelinobius (africaine elle aussi), également de la famille des Theraphosidae mais n'étant pas rattaché à la sous-famille des Harpactirinae.
J'ai lu, par ailleurs, une mention dans la Wikipedia francophone parlant du genre d'araignées mygalomorphes nommé Pterinochilus, de la sous-famille des Harpactirinae, comme étant le genre des "baboon spiders"/"araignées babouins"... comme si le terme était propre à ce seul genre de la sous-famille...
Bref, c'est compliqué... ^^'
Mais disons que dans la mesure où les "tarantulas" des anglophones, soit les araignées de la famille des Theraphosidae, appartiennent effectivement au sous-ordre des Mygalomorphae (araignées mygalomorphes), si je devais choisir une formulation pour désigner l'animal dont parle Tolkien s'agissant d'un traumatisme de l'enfance qu'il minimise (mais qui a cependant pu avoir son importance), je parlerais d'une mygale d'Afrique ou d'une araignée mygalomorphe africaine.
Amicalement,
B.
P.S.: tant que j'y suis, puisque ce fuseau a été remonté à la surface, j'en profite pour compléter la fin de mon précédent message en 2016 :
La correspondance entre Howard et Lovecraft a fait, elle, comme je l'ai signalé dans le fuseau dédié à Howard, l'objet d'une édition en deux volumes chez Hippocampus Press sous le titre A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (un projet d'édition en français est à l'étude).
De fait, le projet d'édition en français en question a fini par être lancé dernièrement, via une souscription qui a rencontré un énorme succès (le tirage, lui, sera par contre très limité) : https://www.jrrvf.com/fluxbb/viewtopic. … 883#p91883
Hors ligne