Quote:
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The way Middle-earth appears to us is like a myriad of ‘facts’ trickling down from a vast vessel which is Fantasy (or rather ‘Fairie’?). The only nexus point from which it enters our world was, however, its author. All Middle-earth-relevant facts derive from Tolkien.
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This is an excruciatingly important point
Sharkű, as it puts
Bęthberry’s comments about Foucault and Barthes into a context that I doubt either of them ever really considered. For Barthes the author ‘dies’ (to the reader, at the moment the text is ‘completed’ ) and for Foucault the author ‘disappears’ (into the discursive structures that penetrate the moment of textual ‘creation’ ). In each case, the author recedes and the text is ‘absorbed’ into the world of power-relations that encompass the text’s new locus: the reader. But what of a work of fantasy like Tolkien’s? The point that has been made again and again in this thread is that for this work to survive as an interpretable object (that is, for it to survive as a text at all) we must include in the web of relations that come to replace the author the mythic/philosophical/moral world that the author has created – and thus the author, at the very moment of his death, is magically brought back to life (is this the “enchantment” of the text about which
Davem writes so movingly?).
There is, so far as I can tell, a huge difference between the process of authorial death as described by Barthes and what we experience with Tolkien. The author dies for Barthes, because the text’s ‘real’ existence is in the world that the author and the reader ‘share’; they may have totally different interpretations of that world, and hence of the text (this is why the author dies), but the world they share is the same one (our Primary world). But with Tolkien, the text’s ‘real’ existence is in the world that the author has
subcreated – the only way the reader can thus ‘share’ the same world as the text is to revive the author in some fashion by becoming “inclined to accept” (quoting
Saucepan Man now) the author’s interpretation of that world (without necessarily becoming bound to or by it).
Barthes and Foucault I am sure would argue that the author is still dead and/or absent, and that the reader is merely projecting onto the text his or her own subjectivity in order to create a ghost-impression of the author to fill the void left by the subcreator’s absence – thus making the author even more dead or more absent by erasing the death with a golem of one’s own.
But I don’t think I buy that line of thought…the enchantment of the text is too real.