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Originally Posted by davem
we should attempt in the first instance, & as far as we are able, to experience the art objectively.
Or, if I take your post for example, would you want me to make an effort - in so far as I can, to try & understand your points, the things you are trying to communicate to me, as objectively as I can, or would you be happy with me simply reading into them whatever I choose?
In other words, is it possible for me to understand what you're saying - if I pay attention & read your words carefully - or must I inevitably interpret what you write in my own, unique, idiosyncratic way?
And if I must do that, how can you object if I misunderstand or misinterpret what you write, or impose my own meaning on it? Shouldn't I have enough respect for you as a person, & for what you have made the effort to write & post here that I try, in so far as I am able, to understand what you intend?
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Is there one, right, unvarying, unchanging way to interpret a text? Has the enchantment of Tolkien always been the same? Were the hippie American university students who adorned their rooms with "Frodo lives!" wrong? Were the first readers who looked aghast at them right? What about the tree huggers? Or are later readers now, who have the benefit of The Silm and HoME, the true standard bearers? Is there one author who, over time, has invariably been understood in the same way? Not the Bible, not Dante, not Cervantes, not Dickens, not Dostoyevski, not Kante, not Kafka, not Joyce, not Woolf. Etc.
I don't disagree with you that we must do our best to try to listen to the "voice" that speaks to us, to respect the "Other." But has this truly been your method here with our posts? As you yourself noted in the current Chapter by Chapter thread, that thread generated far more discussion than the previous one, where people did not have disagreements or differences. In fact, you yourself said you were posting not so much to disagree as to keep the discussion going.
Was this disrespectful? Or was it an effort to stimulate the discussion, to engage in the free intellectual play of words? Frankly, I don't think you *do* respond to what you think I mean. I think you respond in order deliberately to misinterpret, in order to generate futher discussion. It is a playful move, not at all disrespectful, but it represents in fact how humans make meaning. "Misprision." If all we ever posted was, "eh, wow, me too!", well, I don't think there would be a Barrow Downs discussion board.
Some forms of disagreement are far more serious, particularly when there is a deliberate attempt to silence the "other" who thinks differently, responds differently, sees things in a slightly different perspective. To characterise those who don't 'achieve the reading success you do' as people who are blind to other ideas, blind to the ideas of the author and who don't like to be challenged and who impose their will upon a text, moves too closely I think to this negative consequence of disagreement.
As I see your posts here in this thread, your theory of reading has no place for historical change of meaning, has no place for the generation of new awareness, has no place for the future, no explanation for imagination. (Forgive me if I see definite elvish traits here.) It is you, I fear, who would impose on readers, as a text themselves, your own reading, because you think you know how to interpret Tolkien, since the enchantment is always and ever with you. 'I am completely happy and in thrall to the text, therefore I think as Tolkien wants me to think.' There's something solipcistic there that worries me.
Of course, we could just be dancing on the head of a pin.
EDIT: cross posting with Fordim, davem, and Lalwendë. don't have time now to respond to their latest.