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Some members of BD want to proscribe a clearly delineated operation whereby they understand their work as continuing in some definition the intentions of Tolkien. This is one interpretative community.
Other members here are more suspect of that endeavour and in fact might represent an-other interpretative community. I think it is safe to say that davem, myself, Mr. SaucepanMan and Mr. Hedgethistle, among others (and I don't wish to ignore others, I am merely writing in haste from memory) could belong to this group, if group it is... There will be as many interpretive communities as there are one or two gathered together in Tolkien's name.
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Once again,
Bęthberry, thanks for putting this so concisely. This little schema you offer of different interpretative communities (I hereby forswear all “” in this post!) hearkens back to the question with which I began: “In a book that doesn’t really conclude, where does its truth end and our own begin?”
I am about to float something that will at first appear outrageous and will raise many hackles – please bear with the post however, as I hope that the hackles will droop as you proceed:
In LotR there are two rival groups set against one another. First, the Fellowship, brought together by Eru (as Elrond points out at the beginning of the Council: “Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world” ). Second, the Nazgűl, under the domination of Saruon. I would suggest that the interpretative community you identify as trying to “understand their work as continuing in some definition the intentions of Tolkien” is reflected by the Nazgűl, while the interpretative community you say “suspect[s]…that endeavour” is reflected by the Fellowship.
Please, remember, keep all hackles down! I am NOT NOT NOT claiming that one group is one the side of good and the other one the side of evil; nor am I suggesting that one group has free will while the other are slaves. I am merely trying to work through how Tolkien himself provides us with a way of thinking about this in his own novel. The comparison/relation between the Fellowship and the Nazgűl – among other things – works through the relationship between those who seek truth by submitting themselves to an-other’s particular version of that truth (the Nazgűl look to the Eye/I of Sauron), and those who cling to their own particular versions of truth (hobbits, Men, Elves, Dwarves) while hoping against all hope that somehow these truths are part of an overarching Truth that they can never really know. Now, obviously, Tolkien is dramatising this relationship in a fiction – in our primary world, we are all (as readers) a mixture of Fellowship (seeking to maintain our own versions of truth, and hoping for Truth unknowable) and Nazgűl (seeking the truth from an authoritative, authorial other).
Any hackles? If so, please read the above paragraph again.
I think that we are all in agreement that our reading experience is some mixture of this – more importantly, that our sense of the truths and/or Truth of Middle-Earth is an (unhappy?) mixture or composite of these positions. I have seen some extraordinarily eloquent and intelligent attempts to work through this dilemma, but a dilemma it remains (for me at least). The questions that I have from this are:
1) Is it possible to turn to the author for the truth of the text and not become as the Nazűl? That is, can we place our faith in the authorial interpretation and not lose some of our own free will?
2) If we are to adopt the contrary position, is it possible for us in the Primary World to maintain the same faith and hope that Elrond expresses in the Secondary World of M-E that our truths are part of one Truth, without having to make recourse to number one?
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In any of these circumstances, their experience cannot be said to be less valid than those who are aware of and/or who hold as important the "Eruism" theme (or any of the other ideas contained within the secondary materials). For them, the heroism will suffice. (That last sentence is in there simply to make my title pun more relevant.)
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I think
Saucepan Man and
Child that you are both selling yourselves short. You both seem to be saying that in your first readings of LotR you had no conscious or overt sense of the Eruism that informs the text. Well, OK, but it’s quite a logical leap to go from that to the claim that you did not notice the effect of Eruism. If we had to be consciously aware of gravity for it to effect us, then everyone before Newton would have been in a lot of trouble! Perhaps a more appropriate analogy can come from music: one need not know a thing about scales and chords to feel their effect in a symphony by Mozart.
Allow me to return to my favourite example for this thread: Gollum’s little ‘tumble’ at the Cracks of Doom. You say that when you read the text, you did not consciously formulate any thought that there was a Force or Guide, beyond the characters, giving Gollum a little push there: you were unaware of the Eruism. OK, but I’m welling to bet dollars to donuts that you also did not through the book across the room in disgust and cry out. “What a cheat! Frodo totally caves in and the Gollum just trips and falls? It’s all a bloody accident, man! What a rip-off!” It should be amazing that this moment works at all – after all that has gone on, a lucky slip is what saves the day?!?!? In just about any other work, such an ending would be a cheat (imagine, for example, if at the end of
Return of the Jedi the Emperor tripped on his robe and fell off the catwalk without any help from Darth Vader? Or if at the end of
Moby Dick the whale happened to beach himself and the
Pequod sprung a leak?)
But it
does work, and not just dramatically, but thematically and meaning-fully – it feels and is precisely the right way for that moment to come off. It is, I would argue, the only way that it could come off. And we’re made to feel that way, to accept that moment not as a cheat but as the logical and satisfying conclusion (the
eucatastrophe) because throughout the novel the Eruism that is immanent in the action has been there, quietly working away on our unconscious minds, prodding us, and insinuating itself into our reading experience, until we accept it like a second skin (or an interpretative layer). We’ve already said in this thread that the text is as much a product of the author’s unconscious mind as it is of his conscious will – why should our reading experience be any different?
You did not see the Eruism in LotR, or hear the progressive minor chord shifts in Mozart’s
Requiem? Fine – good – who cares? They were there all the same, and your reaction to both works of art was effected by them without your conscious mind ever really being aware of it. This is one of the hallmarks of great art.
(And, incidentally, of effective propaganda… )