‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Mister Underhill]

Not at all, Aiwendil – it’s a typically lucid and reasoned post.

To clarify my own feeling slightly, I’m not really “concerned” about analyzing “enchantment”. If I were, I probably would have quit the Downs years ago. I merely observed that the analysis, for me, doesn’t get me any closer to understanding why or how it works.

I’m somewhere between the two poles you mentioned at the end of your post – author’s intentions at one end, anything goes at the other. I see where you’re headed with the “reasonable person” idea and it might make a good practical solution in many cases, but something tells me that there are many blind alleys and pitfalls down that road. For instance, we can hardly read Mein Kampf while giving Hitler the benefit of the doubt of being a reasonable person. Maybe that’s slightly off point since it’s not a work of fiction. Think of someone like the Marquis de Sade, then.

The book I mentioned earlier is called Story, by a fellow named Robert McKee. It’s nominally about screenwriting, but I think his theories on story can be discussed with regard to any medium intended to transmit story, including prose. He articulates a view which I have long held:

Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing – they dramatize. Audiences are rarely interested, and certainly never convinced, when forced to listen to the discussion of ideas. [...] A great story authenticates its ideas solely within the dynamics of its events; failure to express a view of life through the pure, honest consequences of human choice and action is a creative defeat no amount of clever language can salvage. [...] A story cannot be reduced to a rubric. Far more is captured within the web of a story than can ever be stated in words – subtleties, subtexts, conceits, double meanings, richness of all kinds. A story becomes a kind of living philosophy.

I think we can derive a certain amount of right meaning from a story without outside reference to the author’s intent or a hypothetical reasonable person. I think this might be the sort of idea that I, SPM, and Child were all nibbling around the edges of up above. If not, I’m sure they’ll let me know.

I doubt the two opposing views will come to agreement on that topic any time soon.

A most reliable prophecy, I think.