What breaks the enchantment?

[Saurreg]

Originally Posted by davem

I've said I don't have any problem with 'applying' whatever the reader finds applicable. But we enter into a difficult area - what about the 'application' of racist theories, or the 'application' of the atomic bomb to the Ring, or the 'application' of WW2 generally to LotR?

I suspect most of us would have some dispute with any of these 'applications' - particularly the first.

The danger with 'application' is that it can merge subtly into allegory, so that the Ring becomes seen as 'nothing but' the bomb - Shelob 'nothing but' Lilith, or Saruman 'nothing but' Newton, etc. If we are careful to keep the 'applications' seperate from the meaning there won't be a problem - we may even gain some insight into ourselves & what the text means to us. But as I say, there is a danger that we give too much weight to our applications to the point that they become 'necessary' to our understanding & the story we're reading is placed 'in the service' of another story.

If the Secondary World is well enough constructed then it will not require such input from the Primary World - if it does, then it has not been well enough put together & the author has failed to enchant us. Also, the more aware we are in our reading of theses applications, the more we will be distracted, pulled out of the Secondary World into the Primary world, because the necessary dividing line will be lost.



Well, will it 'reveal' things - ie, give us insight into Shelob as Shelob, a character in Middle earth, or will it simply be a conflation of the two, so that in the end we end up with no clear sense of either. Apart from general similarities, how much alike are they? Of course, these 'applications' are useful as a kind of 'shorthand' in discussing the text with others (like the fractals image) but we have to use them carefully when it comes to applying them to our own reading as we read.

A very good post davem. Got me thinking again, as you had in the other thread.

I heed your urgent call not to infer and deduce wild allegories that are not in the works at all. I personally think that people who make such wild accusations have chips on their shoulders and their own demons to exorcise.

However may I build on your point that different people of different background and cultures hold different points of view and thus "apply" differently. Those real-world applications that you mentioned have never crossed the minds of my mates and myself for that matter of fact when we read LoTR. On the whole we enjoyed the book as a good fantasy read and the notions of racism, industrialism and allegories wide-scale war and weapons of mass destruction never crossed our minds.

A good non-Tolkien related example of what I am trying to relate here is my experience is English Literature for the GCE "Ordinary" Levels. Our literature text was Macbeth and our teacher was an English woman. She tried her best to make us read into the play in her point of view and understand the commonly interpreted themes in it, but us Asian students were unable to do so no matter how hard we tried. To us, all her analysis and explanations were unconvincing at at times irrelevant to what we thought. It was an exasperating period for both sides and we were finally reduced to the state of her simply reciting her notes and points of each scene and us scribbling them down and memorizing for the exams.

Those of us who memorized and regurgitated the contents of our brains score pretty well for the paper. The braver lot who tried their very best to appreciate the play and then write down their own thoughts on the discussion questions fared poorly - even though we all latter agreed that those poor souls' answers made more sense than the Cambridge model answers.