‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Lyta_Underhill]

But Lyta, isn't there a difference between accepting the metaphysical elements contained expressly or impliedly within the Tolkien's stories (such as LotR) and accepting the metaphysical implications of his theories (such as that expressed in OFT)?

Certainly there is a difference; I was referring to the reading experience of Lord of the Rings in particular, really, as a self-contained work; the supplemental and subsequent work by Tolkien explicates his position on the meaning of the story and of his own philosophy of sub-creation, but I don't think it negates the reader's freedom to interpret it in his or her own way as well. The theories put forth by Tolkien in other writings, and the more mythological bent of the Silmarillion and supplemental post-mortem offerings do not need to enter into the reader's experience with Lord of the Rings, but, of course it is all the more explicit in the First Age writings. (I think a reader is still granted the option to dismiss the Ainulindale in its literality if he or she so chooses, and to do so puts the reader as perhaps a revisionist historian inside Middle Earth, if you will but doesn't invalidate the experience.) What the reader believes Tolkien's Eru to be representative of in his or her own life is another matter and is subjective, although the reader can choose to be affected and perhaps enlightened by Tolkien's other writings, accept them or reject them, or accept some of them conditionally; it is all optional for the reader. There are many other ways to read a work, even one so well-documented as the History of Arda.

We can, therefore, accept Faramir's words at their value (which is nebulous and provocative of thought even inside Middle Earth), and we can take these words into the primary world and interpret them there as well. "Faramir believes in God; Faramir believes there is some realm beyond; Faramir values that realm and it informs him in his daily life; Faramir is a crackpot who performs a silly ritual; Faramir's rituals help him deal with the reality of constant war by taking his mind off it...etc. etc..." Insert Joe Smith next door for Faramir (not that I think there are any Faramirs where I live!) But one can accept Faramir as a noble character or crackpot, or what have you and see Faramir reflected in the primary world, just as one can see other concepts or characters reflected. The reader's perception of the concept or character does not necessitate that he or she accept Tolkien's definitions in secondary writings as you said, SpM, nor that the reader accept the expressed motivations behind the works as his or her own motivations.

Cheers,
Lyta

[HerenIstarion]

SpM

But the evolution of physical attributes is not random

That's what I tried to point out

[davem]

Not really an attempt to resurrect this thread, but I've just come across this article, which seems to sum up a lot of what has been said here:

http://www.touchstonemag.com/docs/is.../16-8pg42.html

(of course, if this sparks off the debate again, that would be cool).

[HerenIstarion]

I have strong suspicion people are just having a time-out, getting their breaths back for another nine page dive

Thanks for the link, read first, comment later

*heads off in the direction of Touchstone...

edit:

Thank you again, there was a good read on it. Should we stress on:

And does so effectively. I know a number of teenagers, contemporaries of my oldest daughter, who have no religious background at all, and yet who are completely caught up in the mythos of Middle-earth. Through this mythos, symbolically embedded in the story, young people are unconsciously absorbing any number of spiritual nutrients which may serve them well in later life. They will have learned to see the world in a certain way, as it is seen by Christianity.

?

[davem]

Originally Posted by HerenIstarion

Should we stress on:

...They will have learned to see the world in a certain way, as it is seen by Christianity.

?

Clearly Tolkien's wish & intention. And I suppose Caldecott is correct also in her analysis of Pullman's intentions, & of his desired intentions. What strikes me most strongly is the way Pullman, even in a 'fantasy' story, cannot let go of his athiesm. He's basically undermining fairy story, by deliberately denying any possibility of eucatastrophe. He eventually cuts this world off from magic, & from any possibility of 'liberation'. So, he strands us, here, in this one world, this one life. And all we have to look forward to is cessation.

Tolkien seems to be offering the exact opposite.

So, can we class both writer's works as 'fantasy' - HDM is not 'fantasy' in the sense in which Tolkien uses the term, because Eucatastrophe is completely absent. Indeed, Pullman seems to have created a story in which eucatastrophe is impossible. He seems almost to see enchantment & eucatastrophe as part of the 'childish' innocence which has to be outgrown & left behind. Yet the world he offers to the 'wise' adult is simply bleak & ultimately hopeless. Pullman seems incapable of accepting the possibility of enchantment even in a story. His 'fantasy' worlds have to be as bleak as the 'real' world, as far as he is concerned.

Tolkien's secondary world, as well as his vision of this world, are equally 'enchanted'. So, a fanfic set in Middle Earth, if it is to be 'canonical' must contain & express that hope, & eucatastrophic possibility, while a 'Pullmanic' fanfic must be free of all enchantment, & even of the possibility of it.

To bring this back to the subject of this thread, I think we have to say that 'enchantment' & 'eucatastrophe' are central to Tolkien's canon, & have to be seen as present in everything he wrote, rather than as things which can be ignored, or seen as peripheral. Its really in a comparison with Pullman's work that we can see this clearly. The total absence of enchantment & eucatastrophe in Pullman's world(s) shows their presence in sharp relief in Tolkien's world. It also shows them as being at the emotional core of Tolkien's creative work.

I think it also explains why HDM left me cold. Tolkien is attempting to get us to see the world in a certain way, from a certain perspective - a'Christian' one, as Caldecott will have it, & that seems to go to the core of his purpose - as if that was the 'canonical tradition' that he was working within, & attempting to conform his writings to. Pullman is working within a different canonical tradition - equally biased - though no doubt he would claim more objectively 'true'.


Both writer's visionsare quite 'dark', but what seems to anger Pullman as regards Tolkien's vision, is that Tolkien holds out the possibility of Light breaking through.

I don't know if I've strayed away from the subject of this thread here, but I think maybe its easier to explore the relationship of reader to book if we compare different writers work.

[Bêthberry]

This is an interesting approach here,davem, to develop the discussion by comparison with other fantasy writers. However, I think the comparison with Pullman, as represented by the Touchstone article, is perhaps not the only way for a Christian to interpret the Dark Materials trilogy.

I am copying something which Rimbaud sent to some of us, a review of the stage production in London, England of Pullman's trilogy. I think Rimbaud got this from the Guardian but I am not sure. It is written by the current Archbishop of Cantebury, the spiritual head of the Anglican Church and strikes me as being far more astute or perceptive about literature and faith than the Touchstone article, but this is simply my opinion.

'A near-miraculous triumph'

Archbishop Rowan Williams reveals how it felt to see religion savaged and God killed in His Dark Materials

Wednesday March 10, 2004

In the interval of the second part of His Dark Materials, I found myself surrounded by a lively school party from Essex wanting to know what I thought of it so far. Was I shocked? No. But wasn't it about killing God? Yes - but which God is it who gets killed? Is this what a believer would recognise as the real God? This set some animated discussion going: some of the group had noticed the scattered hints that "the Authority" in Philip Pullman's story had arrogated power to himself, or that he was not the actual creator.

And that is the kind of discussion that I think the drama ought to provoke. Nicholas Wright's version of Pullman's story in fact brings into sharper focus some of these issues. It is clear very early on that there is a plan to overthrow the Authority and that the Church is aware of this and determined to prevent it. What takes Pullman a long stretch of very subtle development to uncover is here foregrounded almost at once. But what kind of a church is it that lives in perpetual and murderous anxiety about the fate of its God?

What the story makes you see is that if you believe in a mortal God, who can win and lose his power, your religion will be saturated with anxiety - and so with violence. In a sense, you could say that a mortal God needs to be killed, from the point of view of faith (as the Buddhists say: "If you meet the Buddha, kill him"). And if you see religious societies in which anxiety and violence predominate, you could do worse than ask what God it is that they believe in. The chances are that they secretly or unconsciously believe in a God who is just another inhabitant of the universe, only more powerful than anyone else. And if he is another inhabitant of the universe, then at the end of the day he just might be subject to change and chance like everything else. He needs protecting: churches are there to keep him safe.

I read the books and the plays as a sort of thought experiment: this is, after all, an alternative world, or set of worlds. What would the Church look like, what would it inevitably be, if it believed only in a God who could be rendered powerless and killed, and needed unceasing protection? It would be a desperate, repressive tyranny. For Pullman, the Church evidently looks like this most of the time; it isn't surprising that the only God in view is the Authority.

Like some of the Gnostic writers of the second century, Pullman turns the story upside down - the rebels are the heroes. Unlike them, though, this is all done to reaffirm the glory of the flesh, the actuality of here and now. The Harpies guarding the land of the dead find peace and nourishment only in stories of the actual, the everyday, in the wonder of the utterly ordinary. The scene where Lyra pacifies these monsters (far more frightening in the book than the play, because the book can show how they activate the inner devils of self-doubt or self-loathing) by talking of children's games in Oxford is intensely moving.

The dramatised version also highlights and simplifies the most ambitious metaphor in the books: Dust. Dust is precisely the glory and vitality of the ordinary; if you try to live in more than one world, Dust drains away, from the individual and from the world as a whole. So the knife that cuts doors between the worlds has to be broken. The whole story is about the triumph of Dust, of the glory of the everyday. Dust is threatened from one side by the Authority and the Church, who fear the everyday and its contingency, who fear even more the risk of error and tragedy that are part of the everyday, part of adult experience. They want to prevent real decision-making, with its potential for loss and betrayal. But Dust is also threatened by those who want to obliterate the consequences of once-and-for-all decisions, and once-and-for-all death, by making possible an endless retreat into alternative worlds. Dust is somewhere between repression and empty or uncommitted liberty, a danger to both - between premodern absolutism and the postmodern aversion to history and personal psychology.

Pullman is very much a celebrant of a kind of modernity, in that sense. What he does for the religious reader/spectator is to prompt the question of how this sort of modernity (a word that theologians these days often don't like) may converge with some accounts of what a settled religious life entails: acceptance (not passivity); the monitoring of fantasy for the sake of adult responsibility; but also the sense of hidden glory pervading the environment, the beauty that is open to Christian theoria and Buddhist mindfulness. The life-sustaining energy of being itself becomes invisible, even blocked off and ineffectual, if there is always an escape from the unwelcome here and now, an escape that the human will can manipulate. If anything, Wright's drama, by pushing the characters of Asriel and Mrs Coulter just a bit more towards conventional romanticism, weakens Pullman's unsparing portraits of the moral ambivalence of these liberators. Timothy Dalton and Patricia Hodge turn in what the director calls "high-definition" performances, which I felt made them less interesting, less mysterious.

Repressors and would-be liberators are equally merciless to the individual; that is why Lyra's life is at risk from both sides. As Lyra, Anna Maxwell Martin manages flawlessly the shifting perspective of a child "on the cusp" of adolescence, and the fusion of profound strength with emotional openness that is Pullman's greatest achievement in creating this unforgettable character. Dominic Cooper as Will lacks the stolid, taciturn integrity of Will in the books, but their relationship works on stage.

Overall, the stage version is a near-miraculous triumph. It may well end up with Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream or Nicholas Nickleby as one of those theatrical experiences that justifies the whole enterprise of live theatre in our day. Of course, there are failures. The angels were disappointingly unmysterious, left only with a rather querulous dignity, which didn't allow much room for the seriousness of their mutual love. The death of the Authority lost all its pathos; Pullman manages the remarkable feat of making it both a matter of chance and a moment of disturbing poignancy, all the more poignant for not being fully grasped by the children at first. On stage it was flat to the point of being almost comical. But so much was so well-imagined, not least the realisation of the daemons and the evocation of different universes.

I said earlier that it rather underlined some of the themes in Pullman that should prevent us just concluding that this is an anti-Christian polemic. Pullman's views are clear; but he is a good enough writer to leave some spaces. This is a church without creation or redemption, certainly without Christ; it was interesting that on stage the ritual gesture of the clergy was not the sign of the cross but a sort of indeterminate marking of the brow, as if to acknowledge that this is not simply the historical Church. Pullman's most overt attempt to connect the Church of Lyra's world with ours is in the character of Mary Malone, the ex-nun, whose adventures form one of the main strands (beautifully imagined) in the third volume. Wright removes her entirely - understandably in terms of narrative economies, sadly in terms of the human depth and warmth of the story, and provocatively in allowing that bit more distance between the historical Church and the alternative.

But this should not be read as a way of wriggling out of Pullman's challenges to institutional religion. I end where I started. If the Authority is not God, why has the historic Church so often behaved as if it did indeed exist to protect a mortal and finite God? What would a church life look like that actually expressed the reality of a divine freedom enabling human freedom?

A modern French Christian writer spoke about "purification by atheism" - meaning faith needed to be reminded regularly of the gods in which it should not believe. I think Pullman and Wright do this very effectively for the believer. I hope too that for the non-believing spectator, the question may somehow be raised of what exactly the God is in whom they don't believe.

[Child of the 7th Age]

While a high school student from Arkansas is a long way from the Archbishop of Canterbury, this brief article also suggests what Bethberry was saying: that a person may account themselves a Christian yet view Pullman in a different light than that put forward in Touchstone. This young Christian woman feels that a reading of HDM "allowed her to grow as a person and closer to God." This student feels that reading Pullman has made her better able to understand the complexities of life, and less likely to automatically condemn someone whose faith is diferent than her own. On this, click here.

My personal views on HDM are a bit more complicated than that. I find some parts of the series challenging, even questionable, and others spell-binding and positive. I will never feel the easy affinity I do when reading Tolkien. Yet I hesitate to say Pullman's work presents a totally "bleak" world that lacks any enchantment. This is not at all the feeling I had when I closed the pages on the final volume. I will try to organize my thoughts later as I am running out the door, but for now will offer several links for anyone who's interested.

For the upcoming movie and the enormous difficulties in transferring Pullman's themes to film given the very real religious sensibilities that exist, see this.

For a general fansite, and an article discussing the relation of Pullman's works to myth in general and the Creation story in particular, check here.