‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Bêthberry]

This is a reply to davem, post #98, wherein he states the argument, if I may paraphrase it, 'You are what you write.'

They [Tolkien's stories] come out of his mind, & in effect are him, speaking to us, mind to mind. To risk falling into the trap of 'Zen & the Art of interpreting Tolkien , we can almost say that while he was in the process of telling the stories - in the various periods of his life - he 'was' the story - his mind was focussed on them, his total attention was on the tale. So, when we read the stories, we encounter Tolkien 'mind to mind'. We are reading his thoughts - even if we know nothing about him or his day to day life or his beliefs, it is still Tolkien's mind that is communing with our mind. We cannot say that Tolkien is not there, because in effect we would be saying our minds are communing with nothing, or that our minds are communing with themselves.

Well now, let's see. What is the nature of this living life form's reproductive capabilites? Clone or new life form? If you ask a question of this textual mind, can it answer back, creating new expressions of communication itself, or are we limited to receiving repetition in the original language/mind only? I would tend to think it can only clone or echo and so your organic model of Tolkien as text strikes me, if I may be allowed such an outrageous analogy, as a kind of resurrection fallacy.

Furthermore, if you state that his textual mind continues in our new creations, then you are, in effect, denying both our presence in our own thoughts and subjugating them (oh, that Nazgû allegory again!) to Tolkien's mind, or crowning this thorny issue with questions of virginal gestation: where did his mind/text originate-- in previous mind/texts? Who indeed is the Word with. Or where.

This organic/ textual mind model also assumes that language is a transparent window between minds. Yet, if I may use an analogy from St. Paul, "we see through a glass darkly" (Corinthians 13). (Some have even called it a mire or swamp rather than glass. Nods to Sam Coleridge and Jonathan Culler.) Language is opaque; it follows its own predetermined code of paradigmatic and syntactic structures, already in place before our minds form the expressions. Tolkien may have created many languages, and he may have invented Middle-earth to give expression to them, but he wrote The Hobbit and LotR in English, using the fiction of translation between the 'original' and his text.

and if you can only offer that 'illusion' of serial time as an argument against that theory then I will be disappointed.

I hope, then, I have not only not disappointed you, but entertained you as well.