13-08-2016, 18:37
Après lecture d’un ancien fuseau et quelques recherches…
[espacement]
[emphase]1. Le jardinier architecte[/emphase]
Georges R.R. Martin, interrogé sur sa manière d’écrire, répond très (très) souvent par une double métaphore :
[citation=04/08/2006, geekson.com]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.[/citation]
[citation=14/04/2011, The Guardian]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.[/citation]
[citation=01/08/2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]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.[/citation]
[citation=24/05/2012, Rolling Stone]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.[/citation]
Un article en ligne de 2011 suggère que Martin classait alors Tolkien du côté des architectes :
[citation=11/04/2011, The New Yorker]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.’”[/citation]
Une telle interprétation est sous-entendue dans un entretien de la même année :
[citation=11/07/2011]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.[/citation]
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 :
[citation=30/05/2007]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.[/citation]
Et déjà, en 2003:
[citation=12(?)/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.[/citation]
Cependant, en 2011, Martin disait également et explicitement le contraire :
[citation=19/04/2011, Time]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.[/citation]
En 2013, il confirme classer Tolkien parmi les jardiniers en 2013 :
[citation=13/11/2013]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.[/citation]
G.RR. Martin fait alors référence à la première phrase de l’avant-propos à la seconde édition du Seigneur des Anneaux :
[citation=La Fraternité de l’Anneau, Bourgois, 2014, p. 9]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.[/citation]
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 :
[citation=13/03/2012, entretien avec G. Stroumboulopoulos]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.[/citation]
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 :
[citation=11/07/2011, The Atlantic]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.[/citation]
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 :
[citation=11/07/2011, The Atlantic]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.[/citation]
[espacement]
S.
[espacement]
[emphase]1. Le jardinier architecte[/emphase]
Georges R.R. Martin, interrogé sur sa manière d’écrire, répond très (très) souvent par une double métaphore :
[citation=04/08/2006, geekson.com]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.[/citation]
[citation=14/04/2011, The Guardian]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.[/citation]
[citation=01/08/2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]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.[/citation]
[citation=24/05/2012, Rolling Stone]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.[/citation]
Un article en ligne de 2011 suggère que Martin classait alors Tolkien du côté des architectes :
[citation=11/04/2011, The New Yorker]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.’”[/citation]
Une telle interprétation est sous-entendue dans un entretien de la même année :
[citation=11/07/2011]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.[/citation]
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 :
[citation=30/05/2007]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.[/citation]
Et déjà, en 2003:
[citation=12(?)/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.[/citation]
Cependant, en 2011, Martin disait également et explicitement le contraire :
[citation=19/04/2011, Time]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.[/citation]
En 2013, il confirme classer Tolkien parmi les jardiniers en 2013 :
[citation=13/11/2013]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.[/citation]
G.RR. Martin fait alors référence à la première phrase de l’avant-propos à la seconde édition du Seigneur des Anneaux :
[citation=La Fraternité de l’Anneau, Bourgois, 2014, p. 9]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.[/citation]
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 :
[citation=13/03/2012, entretien avec G. Stroumboulopoulos]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.[/citation]
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 :
[citation=11/07/2011, The Atlantic]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.[/citation]
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 :
[citation=11/07/2011, The Atlantic]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.[/citation]
[espacement]
S.