I
very much like your (sub)creation analogy
Saucepan Man: I
think it makes sense to me…
You say, however, that my Nazgűl-Fellowship analogy doesn’t resonate with you. Fair enough. But allow me to take one more run at it, using a paragraph from your own post as demonstration:
Quote:
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So where does this analogy get us? Well it says to me that the reader has free will at every stage to interpret the text in whatever manner seems most appropriate. Although that interpretation will be affected by the secondary materials and external influences, the reader is still free to accept or reject such influences if they do not resonate with him. But at all times, the reader is bound by what is said in the text itself unless he chooses (exercising free will) to act like Melkor and reject it.
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Right here I think I can see the very relation that you and
Child (I don’t know why I resist proper names so much) refer to as a “sliding scale” and that I call a “composite” – your own formulation of the reader’s response enacts both a Nazgűl and a Fellowship approach:
“Well it says to me that the reader has free will at every stage to interpret the text in whatever manner seems most appropriate” – the freedom of the Fellowship to be take up the Quest or lay it aside at will (“On those who go, no oath or bond is laid”).
“Although that interpretation will be affected by the secondary materials and external influences, the reader is still free to accept or reject such influences if they do not resonate with him.” – Still, the freedom of the Fellowship, but now a somewhat constrained freedom, or a mitigated one. The choice to continue on the Quest is couched by the advice of Elrond, the Counsel of Gandalf, the injunctions/testing of Galadriel, the role and effect of Eruism (“And then, as though some other will were using his voice, Frodo spoke. ‘I will go to Mordor. Although I do not know the way’.”)
“But at all times, the reader is bound by what is said in the text itself unless he chooses (exercising free will) to act like Melkor and reject it” – An extremely ironic sentence insofar as you seem to be linking the exercise of free will to
Melkor; I understand perfectly what you are suggesting (Melkor chose to rebel against Eru), but it does re-emphasize my point: that in the same manner, the Nazgűl willingly gave themselves over to Sauron. They chose to accept the Rings of Power and to keep them. Insofar as you talk about the reader being “bound by what is said in the text unless he himself chooses” to exercise his or her free will – you are describing not just Melkor in response to Eru, but the Nazgűl to Sauron and, I would suggest, that instinct in us as readers to say “my individual truths are not equal to the intended Truth of the Creator of Middle-Earth, so He must tell me what the Truth is.”
Again I must say that I am not suggesting that any one group of readers, or even that any individual reader is either a Nazgűl-reader or a Fellowship-reader. Both stances are impossible in any kind of total form: we never can become wholly ensorcelled by the text to the point where we lose the ability to think for ourselves, nor can we willy-nilly generate whatever we want in response to the text without doing violence to it. We are all of us both Nazgűl and Fellowship at one and the same time. All I am trying to suggest through this analogy is that in our encounters with the subcreated world of M-E we are being put into a very difficult and fascination position as readers – we are being presented with a text that pits the Fellowship against the Nazgűl as bitter and opposed enemies, even as we are having a reading-experience in which we are at one and the same time both Nazgűl and Fellowship.
In effect, the text presents us with a vision of Nazgűl
versus Fellowship, and then puts us into the position where we can see that we are both!
Again, great art does this…(but not effective propaganda)