‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Bêthberry]

Hmm. I 've been out of this for some time but would like to raise just a couple of points in terms of how to advance the discussion, as Barrow Wight would say.

Helen and SpM,

Sauce suggested that most or many readers in England do not find the spiritual element which Helen and davem claim exists in the books. In response, Helen said that, on the contrary, she finds many young girls who are indeed given to think along traditional lines of moral behaviour after reading the book.

So, what happens next in this kind or form of argument?

Helen, did you mean to imply that your experience disproves or invalidates Sauce's? Does Sauce's invalidate yours? (I don't think he would say it does.) What I mean by this is, if we have two contradictory experiences, how do we validate one over the other? Or do we have to? How do we advance the discussion? Surely both responses exist as legitimate responses. The point then is not to discount either one but to recognise that both exist. What is then the next step?

davem,

In your long post, you made this statement,

So, before we can ask 'the Book or the Reader' we must understand what Tolkien was attempting to do with the book, whether he had any message that he wanted to communicate.

I'm not sure if you are suggesting something about how to go about reading here. I would question this idea of "before we can ask". Just where do we understand or apply what Tolkien was attempting to do with the book? The book surely must be self-explanatory at some level if it is to be successful as a story. If we have to go to biography, letters, etc, before we read the books themselves, that is validating non-fiction over fiction, discursive prose over story, as much as if we 'apply' it retroactively after the fact of reading. And surely the point also becomes one of whether the book in fact does what the collateral prose says it was 'intended' to do. I mean, do we have to start, as readers, saying, "I must find a message here", before we start to read? Do we really have to read with a priori notions? Or do we have to 'interpret' with a priori notions to lay back on top of our reading experience? In short, you have not convinced me we 'must understand' what Tolkien intended; you have rather demonstrated that in discussion with his school chums he thought certain things. It does not mean that the stories were consciously written with those thoughts in mind. And, especially because Tolkien clearly revised and revised--"consciously so in the revision"--we are still left with what inspired him in the first draft. What is in the texts themselves? (have we been over this before?)

The Book or the Reader does seem to require that we at least state where we as individual readers are coming from, & in what way the book affects us, in order that we can say why we come down on one side or the other in the question.

I am going to go back to my second post here to suggest that there was a tradition regarding literature which Tolkien could have been aware of, a tradition where the writer consciously aimed to make his work one where meaning is held in the eye of the beholder--and this tradition was one which developed within the context of Christian exegesis. Tolkien, after all, did not write political tracts in his zeal to reform society morally. He did not join political organisations and marches. He wrote stories, believing in the value and worth of story telling and story reading. And stories are never definitive. Middle earth does not end. Tolkien says this in On Fairy Stories. The stories never end, but lead out. This is why I object to those who say, this spiritual truth is in the book and this is what the book is about. If he had wanted to make this truth explicit, he would have. He choose not to, but to use veiled allusions. Why did he do this?

This takes me back to Child's post, written before the May 1 party, where she argues that what we do is go beyond this magical first reading to consider its validity and in doing so reject such interpretations as that of the White Supremacists or Germaine Greer. I am going, for the sake of discussion, to go out on a limb here and say that both of those positions actually help enlarge an appreciation of Tolkien.

Clearly, Greer writes as she has always written, to be flamboyant. But what she responds to so strongly is the idea of an 'other' who is solely evil It is very easy to attack 'enemies' when, particularly under the duress of war and attack, we ascribe to them an incarnate evil. Stormfront equally wants to read within its own validating priorities. What the existence of these two positions does, I would suggest, is help us discuss--reaffirm--the moral vision in LOTR. I read a review recently of Wagner (Atom Egoyen's production here in Toronto) which suggested that Tolkien wanted to recover the glorious tradition of heroic, northern narrative from the stains of the Nazi tradition. (I am well aware of how Tolkien denied any conscious, deliberate debt to Wagner.) I would suggest that the very existence of interpretations which we feel are 'wrong' in fact work to help us clarify points about the texts which we might not really react to, given the very different perspectives which we bring to the table. This is why, I would argue, the terms 'right' and 'wrong' are beside the point. Even out of error, greater understanding can arise. It is like Frodo learning from Gandalf not to kill Gollem. Something good still might come out of all this.

I am writing in a hurry, for which many apologies, but I did want to add one final point. davem, you seem to suggest--and I have seen it stated elsewhere here in discussion on the Barrow Downs--that materialists have no moral or ethical basis, cannot differentiate good and evil, cannot ascribe to the belief in beauty and spirituality. I don't want to answer here for either SaucepanMan or Aiwendil, but I do want to suggest, humbly, that this is an unproven assumption. Speaking as someone who has lived lo these many years with an athiest, let me say that he makes manhood an honourable estate, as honourable as anything Aragorn is said to represent. There! I think I 've just made the same kind of argument which I was questioning Helen for making. My point, davem, is that materialism does not, by its very nature, automatically mean people cannot appreciate the concepts of heroic ideal or endeavour, sacrifice, self-discipline, pity, beauty, or fail to recognise good and evil.