Seems Like Someone's Rooting for the Wrong Side

[Bêthberry]

It is fascinating to read all this sound and fury in defense of the position that literature, as a sub-created world, cannot be applied to the primary world, but is simply, merely and only a spot of puff, just entertainment, without any other relation to ourselves as human beings and our culture than a smacking good time-eater.

For this is not, for example, how post-colonial writers in Africa regard stories. Take Ngugi wa Thiong'o, for example. He writes movingly of the power of language to define our selves, particularly of his experience as a child in the oral culture of the African language Kikuyu and then in the written culture of his colonial school, where English was imposed and the oralture (oral literature) of Kenya denigrated.

What, according to Thiong'o, was the effect of the nightly stories told in Kikuyu?

Originally Posted by Decolonizing the Mind

We therefore learned to value words for their meanings and nuances. Language was not a mere string of words. It had a suggestive power well beyond the immediate and lexical meaning. Our appreciation of the suggestive magical power of language was reinforced by the games we played with words through riddles, proverbs, transpositions of syllables, or through nonsensical but musically arranged words. So we learned the music of our language on top of the content. The language, through images and symbols, gave us a view of the world, but it had a beauty of its own.

Language is not a non-reactive agent. Again:

Originally Posted by Decolonizing the Mind

Lanuage has a relationship to human experience, human culture, and human perception of reality.

For Thiong'o, the language of Imperialism, English, colonised the minds of the children of Africa, so that it not only devalued their own language and culture, but made language a cerebral activity, rather than "an emotionally felt experience", one divorced from the life which Kenyan children knew.

So, how does this relate to our reading of Tolkien? What do we do when we read him? Is reading him merely a cerebral activity, divorced from our experience in our daily language/s? Or does his language reverberate in our being, so that it mediates our relationships, it provides "image forming agents" in our mind which are part of the community and culture which English informs?

It doesn't follow from this that readers who enjoy orcs and trolls and dragons are immoral. But what does follow is that language does relate powerfully to the Primary world, even language in stories. Heck, even popular culture. How much of our reading of Tolkien influences the world we perceive? How much of Tolkien causes us to see the world in a particular way? Maybe that's what Tolkien does--provides us with a variety of mediations, so that some of us can become elves, some hobbits, some Men, some dragons, trolls, orcs even, or, at the very least, perceive the world as a place of struggle between good and bad agencies.

And it's funny, in a way, that Western culture (aka, some of its proponents here) seems intent to deny this purpose and value of language while writers in other cultures staunchly proclaim the kind of magical power for language which Tolkien himself espoused. Maybe that's what Tolkien does: allows us to perceive the world as elves, as hobbits, as Men, as orcs, trolls, dragons, or, at the very least, to perceive the world as a vast canvas of struggle between good and evil.