‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Bêthberry]

I think SaucepanMan was right that this question of canonicity and intentionality lurks unexamined in many Books threads. If I may, let me backtrack from the many fine posts here a bit to present what the topic of canonicity suggests to me. And, since I am a literary scholar by training, I should warn you that I am going to bring some of my professional life's dealing into the mix here. So, put your feet up and set a spell. Or skip on to the next post.

It's probably fairly safe to say that for many if not most readers, the assumption is that an author owns a story because she created it. Kind of like an owner of the property which readers use or rent. However, this concept of the writer as the owner of meaning, controlling interpretation behind a text, is a recent one--recent meaning one derived from the last couple of centuries. It was not, of course, a concept that Tolkien worked with. As Fordim points outs, Tolkien

. . . believed that the truth of any tale lies in its historical origins -- more specifically, the historical origins of the words that have given rise to the tale.

Tolkien, of course, worked with literary texts for which authorship was unknown. It has been a conceit of scholarship to go back as Sharkey says, to attempt to retrieve an authoritative text:

Older mediaevalist science, for example, tried to construct an 'author's text' from the extant material, looking for sensible compromises and judging by their own ideas of taste and style. The result was of course a stab in the dark in regard to authencity

I think, however, it is very important to acknowledge that this is not what Tolkien did. He placed his significance necessarily in the tale itself. This is one reason why I am so tremendously impressed by his scholarly essays on Beowulf and On Fairy-Stories. They are remarkable evidences of his incredible feel for story.

If we pause, not merely to note that such old elements have been preserved, but to think [i]how]/i] they have been preserved, we must conclude, I think, that it has happened, often if not always, precisely because of this literary effect....The ancient elements can be knocked out, or forgotten and dropped out, or replaced by other ingredients with the greatest ease: as any comparison of a story with closely related variants will show. The things that are there must often have been retained (or inserted) because the oral narrators, instinctively or consciously, felt their literary 'significance'. Even where a prohibition in a fairy-story is guessed to be derived from some taboo once practiced long ago, it has probably been preserved in the later stages of tahe tale's history because of [b]the great mythical significance of prohibition. Source: On Fairy-Stories

I will return to this point that the story's the thing wherein we catch the conscience of the creation--sorry Hamlet--but for now let me ramble on about the significance of authorial intention. Here's where I get to bore you with a bit of scholarly stuff, my own little thread in the great tapestry of literary understanding, not any complete history of literary theory,and I tell it here merely to explain how I view authorial authority more circumspectly than many.

My scholarly research dealt with how, in the nineteenth century, the questions about the authority of the Bible led to questions about the authority of any kind of exegesis. Big word--it means critical explanation or interpretation. I won't name-check any people in the controversies here; my point is simply that as the errors and inaccuracies in the transcriptions of the Bible became known and as the understanding of plenary inspiration itself came to be questioned, this scepticism spread to underlining fundamental assumptions about the traditional response to language. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet, is particularly important here in assigning an active participation to the reader; his thought is consistent with St. Augustine's defense of figurative language (a particular bone of contention in the rising empirical tradition) as a test of intelligence. What does this all mean? It means that, for a variety of reasons, the role of the reader was being brought to the forefront of thought about interpretation. More and more, attention was being given to something like a fiduciary approach to language, where language was seen as "a living organism whose function is to reconcile the past and present experience of a community" (John Coulson, Newman and The Common Tradition).

Still with me? Never fear; this will come back 'round to Tolkien.

Authors themselves have long played with notions about where the authority of a book lies: with the author, the book, the reader, with sources. That naughty cleric Laurence Sterne justified his scurrility by recourse to his reader's imagination on more than one occasion: "No one who knows what he is about in good company would venture to talk all ... so no author... would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself." (That's from the notorious novel, Tristram Shandy.)

Sterne is having a bit of sport here because he was specifically talking about the naughty bits. But my point is that there is a tradition of interpretation which grants to readers active participation in the generation of meaning. Charlotte Bronte's "Reader, I married him" is the last in a significant number of addresses to the Reader that in fact, when attended to closely, produce a warning to readers not to take the romance of Jane Eyre at 'face' value.

Okay, let me move on. Sharkey points out that, unlike medieval scholars, we have an author identified and an author who was quite willing thank you very much to tell us what his books meant. Well, yes and no. Literary criticism is full of examples where authors proved to be unreliable narrators of their own creative lives. They never got their own stories about how they wrote and what they meant 'right.' Or they were writing their explications years after writing the story and in the process were creating intentions and meanings that had not been 'there' in the stories at the time of creation. Or they were working backwards to discover motives and ideas which were consciously part of the initial plan. Sometimes, too, authors wrote certain explanations to certain recipients, explanations which were couched for the benefit of the letter's recipient rather than as a formal bit of literary explication. Entire professional careers have been launched by demonstrating spectacularly that Author so and so was wrong in his Letters. (I exaggerate for effect, but not much.) At the very best, an author's literary remains need to be examined sceptically and evaluated for their applicability rather than being automatically accepted as authoritative evidence in a body of work. This is not to disparage Tolkien as unreliable or dishonest in any way, but to suggest a cautionary way of proceeding with any and all authors, to suggest that an author's thoughts should not automatically by fiat supercede other innterpretations.

Yet what I have to say next will most likely surprise many of you--or appall you. These currents of thought, the nature of readerly participation and the need for cautionary acceptance of authorial claims (coupled with several other currents of thought which I overlook here), took a jump to light speed in the late twentieth century. But bear with me because this, too, will lead to Tolkien. Structuralist critics such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault claimed not simply that authors could be wrong, and not merely that they were dead wrong. But that they were dead. Period.

And, well, after all, why should that be any great shock? Nietzche had claimed that God was dead, so why should authors escape a similar fate? (And, yes, I know that joke about the washroom graffiti: Nietzche: 'God is dead.' God: 'Nietzche is dead.') Okay, I'll get back to the topic.

No, honestly, this is not another Barrow Downs joke. The death of the author became a ringing challenge of discussion and debate. Both Barthes and Foucault sought to overcome the stranglehold of appropriation which the concept of authorship held over meaning and understanding in the empirical tradition (that same tradition which was shaking up the biblical criticism I mentioned earlier).

What Barthes sought to recover was a sense of the performative excitement of reading when the reader engages with the text. He wanted, in The Pleasure of the Text, to do away with this notion that there was somehow an active writer behind the text and a passive reader in front of the text. The text can only be reached by itself, by its own words rather than by talk about it. Foucault went farther in considering how we have created a concept of 'author-function' which allows us to assign significance.

At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was acceptable only if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text depended upon this information. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly, these remarks are far too categorical. Criticism has been concerned for some time now with aspects of a text not fully dependent upon the notion of an individual creator; studies of genre or the analysis of recurring textual motifs and their variations from a norm ther than author. From "The Author Function" 1970.

And, again,

The third point concerning this "author-function" is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a "realistic" dimension as we speak of an individual's "profundity" or "creative" power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned. A "philosopher" and a "poet" are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist.

Even if critics hate Barthes and Foucault, their work still must be acknowledged. What I find particularly fascinating about all of this is that Barthes and Foucault came from Catholic cultures. In fact, Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text is even structured after a Catholic prayer formula. And we all know that Tolkien's Catholic faith was profound (unlike that of Barthes and Foucault, but that does not concern me here.)

You see, I think, in obviously very different ways and means, these three men were responding to that old traditional assumption about language as fiduciary, a creation of meaning which pertains not in the words themselves on the page but in that special space which exists between the story and the reader's imagination, a meaning which comes about through inference and assent, "a living organism whose function is to reconcile the past and present experience of a community" (Coulson, again). Well, maybe Barthes was more into orgasm than organism, but ...

The 'truth' about understanding lies in the tale and its life beyond the author. A tale, once published, is like a child who has grown up and moved away from Mum and Dad. It is responsible for itself.

It seems to me that literary theory of the last several decades represents a serious effort to get back to that situation which Tolkien faced: how to understand how a text speaks to us without the parental voice always telling us what to think. Here I take us back to the lecture "On Fairy-Stories?"

But when we have done all that research?collection and comparison of the tales of many lands?can do? when we have explained many of the elements commonly found embedded in fairy-stories (such as step-mothers, enchanted bears and bulls, cannibal witches, taboos on names, and the like) as relics of ancient customs once practiced in daily life, or of beliefs once held as beliefs and not as 'fancies'[b] there remains still a point too often forgotten: that is the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are. . . . Such stories have now a mythical or total (unanalysable) effect, an effect quite independent of the findings of Comparative Folk-lore; they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.

.

I am making many jumps here. But let me provide one final quotation, from a critic who is closer in many ways to my own way of thinking than Foucault et al. George Steiner is no trendy post-modernist, but he, too, is working in this way I have of thinking about Tolkien and canonicity.

'Interpretation' as that whick give language life beyond the moment and place of immediate utterance or transcription is what I am concerned with. The French word interprète concentrates all the relevant values. An actor is interprète of Racine; a pianist gives une interpretation of a Beethoven sonata. Through engagement of his own identity, a critic becomes un interprète--a life-giving performer--of Montaigne or Mallarmé. As it does not include the world of the actor, and includes that of the musician only by analogy, the English term interpreter is less strong. But it is congruent withthe French when reaching out in another crucial direction. Interprète/ interpreter are commonly used to mean translator... When we read or hear any language-statement from the past, be it Leviticus or last year's best seller, we translate. Reader, actor, editor are translators of language out of time.

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No, I did not include this last quotation simply so that Mallarmé reference might please a certain English interprète of French Radicalism who sometimes haunts our threads.

I included it as a final statement of what I believe was important to Tolkien and what I think is vital in discussing Middle-earth, that we respect the extraordinary experience of reading his texts and engaging with his stories rather than demanding that there is any one particular way of reading him. This is my way of understanding sub-creation and it is one which will respect any fair and honest readingof Tolkien as the experience of the reader. Like Tolkien, I believe that meaning is not imposed by fiat but created by the web of words. In our acts of discussing Tolkien lie the essence of sub-creation, not in a reductive archeology.

[davem]

Difficult to follow Bethberry!

Obviously, we all enter ME in ignorance, are either enchanted or appalled. Germaine Greer has had an animus against all things Tolkien related since the sixties - but has admitted that she has only read the first chapter of LotR.

Those of us who do become 'enchanted' are not enchanted by the Legendarium as a whole. We may, if the enchantment is sufficiently powerful, go on to look into it - at which point the enchantment may become stronger or weaker. I think it was Shippey who mentioned meeting a woman on a train who claimed she loved everything Tolkien had written. On being asked what she thought of the Silmarillion she said she had no interest in it - she considered 'everything' he had written to comprise the Hobbit & LotR.

For people like that, Hobbit & LotR are sufficient to enchant, & anything more breaks the spell.

In other words, the 'spell' is cast for most of us without the background history. If we choose to move beyond the 'unexplained vistas' we have to risk the loss of enchantment. The more we discover, the more 'fixed' Middle Earth becomes, the less room for manouvre imaginatively - would Tolkien have approved? Which did he place the greater value on?

Moving into ME, is at once fascinating & restricting. One often has to suspend not only disbelief, but also disapproval, & accept what Tolkien has given, in order to understand his vision. When one comes out of ME one can then make a decision on what one likes & what one dislikes. But we then risk disenchantment - breaking a thing to find out what it is made of.

Increasingly, as anyone who has read any of my recent posts on the 'Nebulous it' thread will have come to realise, I take ideas from the books as starting points in my attempts to explore & understand my own feelings on 'life, the universe & everything'. So, in the same way as a writer of fanfiction, I am taking Tolkien's creation as raw material for my own exploration of his world - specifically the moral/philosophical dimension. The results are as 'mad' & extreme & 'uncanonical' as anything a writer of fanfic could produce. Would Tolkien approve of my use of his intellectual property? I have no idea. But as someone who didn't attend college, has never haunted the Halls of Academe, but was inspired by my discover of him to study Myth, Jungian psychology, ancient literature & then to branch out into the study of religion, I hope he would be pleased to have instilled a desire for learning in an ignorant oik such as I was.

In short, I feel that what we find in Tolkien's works, the inspiration we bring out from Middle Earth, is Tolkien's gift to us, the real enchantment that he works. I also wonder whether he would have approved of the obsessive desire to know every detail of his invented world. I doubt he would have approved of his near 'deification' by some 'fans'.

We shouldn't confuse our values with his - If he has stated a 'fact' about ME, it should be accepted as a 'fact' - but we can put that fact on one side & concentrate on other facts which appeal more. Or on enjoying being enchanted - even if a large part of that enchantment is contary to the author's own intention. If the 'facts' destroy the enchantment lets ignore them, & do it proudly. Why should the facts get in the way of a good story? And as the reporter in the movie The Man who Shot Liberty Valence said: 'When the Legend becomes a fact, print the Legend'.

If we must choose between the 'facts' of an author's creation & the 'enchantment' it provides, the facts must come a poor second. Is 'understanding' Tolkien's invented world, or 'understanding' the man himself, really of such great value?

As I stated in my earlier post here - I reject the 'Dome of Varda' & related ideas & prefer the earlier 'primitive' (in Tolkien's word) version of the story. I said it was 'silly' - what I meant was it was not 'enchanting' - not to me - & is like choosing to print the fact. It neither enchants nor inspires, so I choose the earlier account. I mean no offence to the author, but we have to choose, & judge. If one version enchants me & the other doesn't, I think I know which choice Tolkien would approve.

[mark12_30]

The discussion has moved from :

Canon -- The Original Works Themselves (does it include Author's supporting documentation? Open to debate. (EDIT: then again, see bottom of post.))

Through

Interpretation -- Reader's perspective

also through

Application -- Reader's actions/response based on interpretation

...and now to

Enchantment -- ...wild stab at definition Encounter with Faerie which brings sense of wonder, mystery, longing, possibly including Eucatastrophe.

~*~*~

....And just because I was wondering: from dictionary.com.... 5b, no?

canon: NOUN:
1. An ecclesiastical law or code of laws established by a church council.
2. A secular law, rule, or code of law.
3a. An established principle: the canons of polite society. b. A basis for judgment; a standard or criterion.
4. The books of the Bible officially accepted as Holy Scripture.
5a. A group of literary works that are generally accepted as representing a field: “the durable canon of American short fiction” (William Styron).
b. The works of a writer that have been accepted as authentic: the entire Shakespeare canon.
6. Canon The part of the Mass beginning after the Preface and Sanctus and ending just before the Lord's Prayer.
7. The calendar of saints accepted by the Roman Catholic Church.
8. Music A composition or passage in which a melody is imitated by one or more voices at fixed intervals of pitch and time.
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English canoun, from Old English canon and from Old French, both from Latin can n, rule, from Greek kan n, measuring rod, rule.