‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[davem]

SpM

I can see where you're going with the sheet of glass analogy, but the problem with it is summed up by Tolkien's statement:

'In such stories when the sudden 'turn' comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, & heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, & lets a gleam come through.'

Its the 'rending the web of story' thing - or breaking the glass - the light comes through. We can't then argue any longer about the cause of the patterns. The light from behind is seen to be the cause.

Its fine just discussing the patterns on the surface, but if they are only the 'effect' of the light behind them, then by limiting ourselves only to what appears on the surface, & in effect denying the existence of the Light that causes them, we will fail to ever truly understand what is happening. This is what I meant by having to 'compress' my conceptions & understandings in order to make them fit into some 'common ground' - we'll never get beyond that common ground. Effectively, we're boxing ourselves in. If we limit everything to what can be explained by brain function, then we'll end up only with an 'explanation' that tells us how our own brains work. We're 'assuming that which is to be proved'.

The patterns on your glass may be beautiful, but the real question is what they mean - is there a reason for them being there, or are they just 'there'. Tolkien is saying that there is a definite reason for them being there, & that that reason is more important, more 'True', more real, & most importantly, more beautiful, than the patterns on the glass, because it is the light behind it, shining through it, that makes it beautiful & meaningful.

[The Saucepan Man]

You seem to be saying that you cannot discuss the themes and values within Tolkien's works in any way that is meaningful to you with anyone who does not accept the existence of Truth (or at least accept its existence for the purposes of the conversation). If so, then that's fine. That's your choice. But it does seem to me to be unduly restrictive.

[davem]

I didn't mean to imply that. I'm simply taking Tolkien's statements at face value, because they strike me as expressing what I feel about things.

The problem I have is with restricting what we can discuss to the 'lowest common denominator' - ie, what we can all agree on, & excluding everything which challenges our own belief system. If we exclude anything which will not fit with your & Aiwendil's worldview, then that would exclude a large part of what I consider to be important, & the discussion would become too restrictive for me - I would have to censor everything I wanted to say to fit it in.

Believe it or not ( & while it may have made some embarrassed or uncomfortable) my recounting of my 'encounter' with my Guradian Angel was to make a point. Was it 'True'? Well, I could explain it in terms of psychology & chemical reactions in the brain, & thereby find 'common ground' with you & Aiwendil. But if I did I would be denying the essential part of the experience - the emotional, the Numinous. Also, by reducing the experience to something that could be encompassed by psychology, I enable you to respond - 'There, I told you it was 'nothing but' psychology'. Any attempt to fully understand what I experienced, to my satisfaction at least, requires that any 'common ground' is wide enough to include the fact of Guardian Angels - though I have no 'logical' explanation of where they come from, other than to srart talking about 'Truth' again, or assign any logical 'meaning' to the experience beyond the simple fact of its intense 'reality' to myself.

The question, as far as discussing Tolkien goes, is: is our 'common ground wide enough to include 'Truth', Joy, Light from beyond the story, which can break through it, or not? If not, isnt it a bit like trying to discull Middle Earth, but refusing to mention the Elves?

That's not to say we can't discuss specific events or characters within the Legendarium, but this thread, intentionally or not, has come to be about 'meaning' - what Tolkien meant, what his intentions were, what, exactly, his philosophical position was.

[The Saucepan Man]

You seem to be saying that you cannot discuss the themes and values within Tolkien's works in any way that is meaningful to you with anyone who does not accept the existence of Truth (or at least accept its existence for the purposes of the conversation).

I didn't mean to imply that … If we exclude anything which will not fit with your & Aiwendil's worldview, then that would exclude a large part of what I consider to be important, & the discussion would become too restrictive for me - I would have to censor everything I wanted to say to fit it in.

But isn’t that really just saying the same thing?

If not, isn’t it a bit like trying to discuss Middle Earth, but refusing to mention the Elves?

Well, I can happily discuss my views on Elves and how their nature and experience within Middle-earth might be applicable to my life, my beliefs and values and my understanding of my world, without actually believing that they exist in my world.

… this thread, intentionally or not, has come to be about 'meaning' - what Tolkien meant, what his intentions were, what, exactly, his philosophical position was.

Has it? It started out as an exploration of whether we necessarily have to accept Tolkien’s meaning if we accept his text, or whether we are free to impose our own meaning on it. Although it has clearly moved on and covered a wide variety of related issues, I still see that issue as being central to the discussion.

[davem]

Well, If we're to debate whether or not the reader must accept Tolkien's meaning, or is frre to interpret the text in their own way, we have to have a clear understanding of what Tolkien did mean, before we can debate anything.

The next question, for me, is 'was Tolkien right'?. To the extent that he was 'right'/correct in his statements, including his statements about Truth & Joy, then that would not be an area for argument - we can only validly argue about interpretations, not about facts. We can't argue about 2+2=4, & say its all down to interpretation whether the answer is 3, 4,5,6 or 78,9374.

So, we have to seperate the 'facts' from the interpretations - ours, Tolkiens or anyone else's. If we can't agree what constitutes facts & what constitutes opinions, its difficult to debate what role/responsibility the reader has in relation to the text.

[The Saucepan Man]

Well, If we're to debate whether or not the reader must accept Tolkien's meaning, or is free to interpret the text in their own way, we have to have a clear understanding of what Tolkien did mean, before we can debate anything.

For me, that does not logically follow.

As I stated earlier, I am not at all sure that any of us can ever gain a complete understanding of what meaning Tolkien' attributed to his works, regardless of our beliefs. But, even though we can gain an approximate understanding, I see such authorial meaning as irrelevant to the reader's appreciation of the text unless the reader wants it to be relevant.

[Bêthberry]

davem,

I'm a bit confused about a statement you made earlier today.

I'm simply taking Tolkien's statements at face value, because they strike me as expressing what I feel about things.

I don't wish to appear to be pouncing on something you said, but this confuses me as it appears to suggest my--perhaps Sauce's and Fordim's-- position as well (although I don't wish to speak for them and I could be wrong).

I read this as saying you give credence to Tolkien's statements because they accord with something you have felt or experienced prior to reading Tolkien: you grant his words authority because they agree with your experience. Thus, the 'test' (if I may use that word) of the validity or authenticity of Tolkien's words is your own experience.

This seems to me to describe quite well the position that it is the reader who ultimately ascribes value or meaning to Tolkien.

I wonder if we could look at the word 'magic' for a moment. My recollection (and I don't have "On Fairy Stories" at hand) is that Tolkien offerred a particular definition of his use of the word.

He rejected magic as the magician's sleight of hand in favour of something which satisfied 'primordial human desires' (relying on memory here), of 'imagined wonder'. Elsewhere, I think in the Letters (and they are not at hand now either) I recall he regretted using this word magic as it is easily misunderstood. He then elaborated upon his idea that he meant a perfect correlation between will and deed, an ideal sense of art where intention is satisfied by the --I would use execution but that word seems to me to express too cruel a summation. A vision of aesthetic perfection or ideal.


Perhaps this encompasses both your sense of mystical experience and Aiwendil's aesthetic satisfaction?

EDIT: cross-posting with SpM. I would simply like to say that I agree with Sauce that we can never finally ascertain what Tolkien meant. And, that, for me, to make any effort to determine that apart from a text like LOTR is to engage in an activity which predetermines the text. We can discuss the text in terms of our own experience.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

319 posts and 5 175+ views on this thread, and today marks exactly one month since I opened Pandora’s Box with it. As has been noted by many in the last few days we have covered a lot of territory in that time and moved around, through, over, away-and-back, past and perhaps even under my initial question (quite a humbling experience, actually).

Some quick thread facts:

25 posters have posted to the thread

SaucepanMan and Mark 12_30 are tied for the most posts at 49 each

By my rough calculation, we’ve put up somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 000 words (or about 800 typed, double-spaced pages)

But at any event, that’s not why I’m posting. I thought that now might be a good moment to bring forward my initial post and address how I think it might be regarded given the thread’s evolution:

I’ve been noticing that most of the questions and debates that take place in this forum tend to turn on the idea of what Tolkien ‘intended’ when he wrote the books. That is, when it comes to something like the origin of orcs, or whether a particular character is a Maia or not, everyone goes scrambling to the various reference works to piece together the ‘truth’. More often than not, what happens is we find that Tolkien’s own writings are far from definitive and, even worse for those who desire absolute clarity, they sometimes are even contradictory (the origin of orcs being a good example; or, my personal fave and a perennial topic for heated discussion in these parts: do/can balrogs fly?).

It seems to me that this kind of an approach, while entertaining and extremely informative, tends to miss the point somewhat. Tolkien himself wrote in the Introduction to LotR that he “much prefers history, real or imagined.” Throughout his career as a creative writer, Tolkien saw himself as a historian who was ‘recovering’ these tales from a distant past. The historian can shape the narrative of history, but he or she cannot make that history. This only makes sense, I suppose, given that Tolkien was by training and temperament a philologist. He 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.

Given this idea (which, again, was Tolkien’s own) of the writer-as-historian, then does this not mean that we – the readers – are not only able, but compelled, to seek always to reinterpret the tales from our own standpoint rather than continually try to figure out what the ‘first’ historian made of them? Tolkien can give us important clues and hints into the history and – more significantly – the moral fabric of Middle-Earth, as he was the world’s greatest expert on the material. But in the end, it’s up to the reader to really figure it out for him or herself. That’s, I think, the real strength of Middle-Earth over other imagined worlds: it’s open-ended and incomplete; it’s contradictory; it doesn’t make sense – it’s just like our own (primary) world.

The question that comes up out of all this (and if you’re still reading: thanks) is – how far can we go with our own re-interpretations of the works before we’re working ‘against’ them rather than ‘within’ them. I think it’s pretty fair to say that everyone here would agree that it’s at acceptable (even desirable) to interpret the women characters from a point of view that is more contemporary than Tolkien’s own. I think it’s also safe to say that we would all want to adopt an interpretation of the Dwarves that is radically different from Tolkien’s own (in a BBC broadcast recorded in 1971 he said that the Dwarves are “clearly the Jews”). But can we do something like criticize Gondor for maintaining an autocratic form of government (the King)? Are we allowed to re-interpret the Scouring of the Shire as the re-establishment of upper-class power (Frodo) after a successful revolution by the underclasses (albeit it supported by foreign insurgents)?

In a book that doesn’t really conclude, where does its truth end and our own begin?

From my perspective, I think that at the moment we have become a bit stuck on the horns of this sticky dilemma. davem has become the voice par excellence in celebration of the intensely personal nature of the reading experience – perhaps, the uniquely personal reading experience when encountering Middle-Earth (insofar as the story exists within the ‘frames’ both of fiction itself – the ‘not true but meaningful’ – and of its status as a subcreated world – ‘not true but meaningful within itself and according to its own internal rules and laws’.

I think that we all agree that this is an entirely valid and useful response, but it is a response that is itself too internalised to the reader to be shared in any kind of critically useful way with other readers. We might each have our own visionary/intuitive/religious/psychological/etc encounters with the work, but unless we can find another person who has precisely the same kind of reaction (which will never happen, insofar as we are all different people) then that encounter will forever remain personal and unique. This is good, and right and proper and, I daresay, the final and ultimate function of fantasy.

But this still does not get us anywhere down the difficult road toward the matter of reinterpretation of the text. I am not saying that personal encounters with the text – personal interpretations, say – aren’t valid (quite the opposite, see paragraph above), but that interpretation of a text as a critical act takes place only within a community. Sharing our personal experiences of the text (how it made us ‘feel’, the rightness of it all, the truth/Truth we gather from it) is an important part of a reading community, but not – I hope – the sum total of such a community. Or, at least, there are other kinds of communities possible.

I do think that we have gone just about as far as we can go with the debate that is currently going back and forth between davem and SpM (I feel kind of like a spectator at a tennis match as I read through their posts above – uh oh: I mean, a non-competitive tennis match!). Where I think we can refocus our efforts here is to ask, how can we begin to move beyond our personal and individual encounters with Middle-Earth and work toward some new reinterpretations of the text? The point of this is not, I think, to reach consensus or agreement, but to work through our own interpretations in response to other peoples’.

I suppose the tweaking I would like to give my initial post is this. I began by asking what claim or authority does the author have on the interpretative act of the reader in our encounters with Middle-Earth. Now, I think I would like to find out what claim or authority does the reading community have on the interpretative act of the reader in this encounter? Or/and: what claim or authority does the interpretative act of the reader have on the reading community?

(Special Note to Mister Underhill: note my total lack of reference to Nazgûl or Fellowship-readers! )

(Second Special Note to Mister Underhill: there’s no room left for any other kind of reader insofar as I see these two ‘types’ as existing at either end of a very long spectrum upon which every reader moves as we encounter the text.)

[davem]

Bethberry Quote:

'I would simply like to say that I agree with Sauce that we can never finally ascertain what Tolkien meant. And, that, for me, to make any effort to determine that apart from a text like LOTR is to engage in an activity which predetermines the text. We can discuss the text in terms of our own experience.'

Well, to that extent we can never finally ascertain what anyone ever means about anything.

We can take the letters, essays, the morality & worldview that comes through in the books, etc. We can take some statements at face value & accept that they express Tolkien's own values. Of course, we're then still having to assume things, but we won't be inventing our 'own' Tolkien from scratch. I don't see that involving 'predetermining the text' - if I understand you're meaning. I don't see this 'discussing the text in terms of our own experience' thing either - we can be changed by the text & emerge a different person. The text may change our 'meaning', rather than us imposing a meaning on it.

So actually, its not true to say :

Quote:I read this as saying you give credence to Tolkien's statements because they accord with something you have felt or experienced prior to reading Tolkien: you grant his words authority because they agree with your experience. Thus, the 'test' (if I may use that word) of the validity or authenticity of Tolkien's words is your own experience.

Reading LotR changed me. I'd never paid any attention to the natural world before reading it, I never had much interest in 'spirituality' - up to discovering LotR at 16 my reading matter of choice had been comicbooks. I was changed by Tolkien's works, they gave me my first 'glimpse' into something beyond materialism. But everytime I go back to them I find more in them, I find confirmation for my experiences. Everything I read in Tolkien's writings - fiction & non fiction. I don't feel myself to be so 'important' in this context - Tolkien has taught me something - & from everything I've read of his, he's taught me exactly what he intended to teach me. I don't believe I've imposed my own meaning on his stories, & that my own meaninbg has just happened to coincide with what he intended by pure fluke.

If I misinterpret something you or another poster here writes you, rightly, take me to task - I'm not free to decide that what you post only means whatever I take it to mean - & I don't distinguish between 'fact' & 'fiction' when it comes to meaning. I think Tolkien's meaning is pretty obvious to everyone who reads his works - until they start 'analysing' it, & trying to work out what it means. I suspect only really 'clever' people struggle over what it all means, & what Truth is, & Joy.

Quote:Perhaps this encompasses both your sense of mystical experience and Aiwendil's aesthetic satisfaction?

Er, no - it doesn't really, does it? Mystical experience is 'spiritual' & aesthetic satisfaction is 'sensory' (unless you believe they have their origin in the same 'state' - 'Truth' perhaps? 'Truth is beauty & beauty, Truth'etc. But I don't think Aiwendil would accept the reality of Mystical experience, unless he was allowed to translate it as meaning the same thing as 'aesthetic satisfaction', & so could say 'There, its all simply 'aesthetic sastisfaction'. I have to seperate the two & keep them seperate, otherwise the 'common ground' is false, & we're simply agreeing for the sake of not arguing, & I don't see where that gets us. Mystical experience is experience 'of' something. At least Tolkien believed that to be the case, & I think its a central question as to whether thats a 'fact' that we're dealing with, as Tolkien believed, or an interpretation. The two are simply of a different order to each other. Don't we need to know whether we are interpreting a 'fact' or interpreting an interpretation. Aren't Facts 'canon' ? If so, then Truth & Joy are canonical, aren't they?