[Formendacil]

So, I finished rereading the "What Breaks the Enchantment?" thread and this is my third attempt to write a response out of that. First I tried replying, but the topic of self-identification with the text kept pushing me here, then I tried a new thread, but that post was about to be a tangle of nonsense (didn't help that I was playing WW, having a Real Life™ conversation, AND trying to do that). So I'm here. I think it might work best here.

The long and the short of the giant argument that drove that thread to four pages in the halcyon days of 2005 was whether the enchantment being broken was the fault of the author for not writing a perfect text or the fault of the reader for bringing in outside thoughts or failing to "read up to" the text. My drowned attempt to start a new thread would have been an attempt to re-ask the question: "without passing judgment on who is responsible--Tolkien or yourself--what breaks the enchantment?"

"Breaking the enchantment," by the bye, is how LMP, as the progenitor of that thread, termed the moment when the reader's "suspension of disbelief" fails--the moment when you stop being IN the fiction and are mentally knocked out of it.

The reason that I couldn't successfully reply there, and why simply re-asking that question as a new thread, failed is that my answer is much too simple: I really don't find that the enchantment breaks for me anymore. Mind you, it never REALLY did, but in some of those earlier years, when I was no longer a child but was still being opened up to critical thinking and analytical reading (so... my early years here, really), I did FEAR that it might.

But, somehow, I've passed through two degrees and writing a published paper (to say nothing of 16 years here) and a mellowing of my firebrand-edged youth into an almost agnostic complexity... and the enchantment still hasn't broken. Part of this is definitely because there is still that fence about heart: I'll happily talk your ear off about geopolitics of first millennium of the Third Age for hours, but I avoid talking or discussing what Tolkien means.

It's easy to divert this into "allegory vs. applicability" (not least because that is Tolkien's own feint), or to start self-analyzing myself ("does this discomfort stem from a recognition that Tolkien, whom you have idolised, is actually deeply problematic?"), and I kind of AM doing that: I'm saying that Middle-earth and everything around it is so much a part of the story of me that I don't want to break it apart lest I break myself apart.

But the reason I couch all this in the "what breaks the enchantment" question is that I've realised I have something of a middle ground on the question--it's not a cut-and-dried "nothing breaks it" answer suggesting complete imperviousness, as the answer might have been in 2005. But as I've spent more and more time with the critical side of being a Tolkienist (and have become more of a "nonfiction" person in my life generally--I read 20 nonfiction books a year, preferably 600-page tomes with copious footnotes, and shy away from any new fiction), I've returned to reading Tolkien to discover that I'm simultaneously both inside and outside the enchantment.

In this respect, the ability to be more "in and out" strikes me as a kind of self-understanding: as I get older I understand myself better (I think--also realising just how much I dissemble and am a construct even to myself), and this sort of dualism: being inside myself and being able to analyze myself is where I'm at with "the enchantment" too.

So... I don't know where this post should have landed in the end, but I figured this is the newer thread and the shorter thread and, what's most important, I actually FINISHED the post here.