[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Mister Underhill

Should have replied to this a while ago, but better late than never. I wanted to get a comment in before the thread gallops off down the usual well-trodden road.

Look: Now, I submit to you, Bb, that when I read these words of yours, the final act of creation is a collaboration between you and me. You haven't described either woman in any great detail, but I have a clear picture in my mind of both of them; likewise the place where they're at. Together we've created something that neither of us alone could have made. You don't have to be here with me, or even alive for that matter, for us to collaborate. Your words on my screen are as fresh as they were the day you typed them on your keyboard for the first time, just as Tolkien's are as fresh when I crack LotR today as they were the day they flowed from his pen. We're having a meeting of the minds, and both of us are bringing something to the party. Later, you may refine or even drastically alter the images in my mind and the way I think about the characters. The collaboration continues as I read. The creative act is ongoing.

Now these few paragraphs have established little or no meaning and not much emotion either. But together over the course of a whole story an author and a reader may collaborate to build whole worlds of image, thought, meaning, and emotion. And it is indeed a collaboration in the truest sense of the word: "to labor together".

Fordim's "analysis of the text" option which he has offered to cover this collaboration is far too dry for me. It implies an intellectual distance and doesn't compass, for me, the creativity and emotion of reading.

As SPM has implied, a book itself is only a sort of potential energy; unread, gathering dust on a shelf, it is meaningless to anyone except the one who wrote it. When another mind engages it, the possibilities that the two may create together are boundless. But it takes both author and reader together to make it happen.

I shall begin, blushing, with Mr. Underhill's comments here using an example of my writing from The White Horse Inn. I wish he had not found a passage with a typo though!

With all due respect to your mind and the courtesy you have shown me, Mr. Underhill I would point out that Fordim's first wording was the intention of the author. If I understand you correctly, when you say that as you read this passage from TWH, you find a collaboration between my mind and yours, that is to change the terms slightly. It is as impossible for any of you to know the full extent of my intention when I wrote this passage, as it was for me when I read passages from another gamer whose work stimulated and prodded my response. And certainly at the time, I was not aware of his full intentions, any more than he was aware of mine. I do know that he sought certain effects, as did I. What readers create now is in part the culmination of those intentions. The better the writer, the better that culmination fits the writer's intentions. But this is not to say that my mind or my purpose is present there. My artistic effort is, and it is this, manifested in the passage, which readers pick up. If you were to see my other kinds of writing you might more readily accept this point, but I will not show that here.

If I may, let me take from the many other posts here some general ideas. Lalwendë , you have mentioned that here at the Barrow Downs our community values abhorr the White Supremacists' interpretations of LotR. Yet let me say that, rather than reacting with shock at the idea Tolkien could be taken to support such claims, let's step back a bit and ask some important questions. It is in such asking that we learn more about how people read, what they bring together to form their interpretations, and indeed maybe even about the text.

What is it in LotR that prompts White Supremacists to make their claims? If we are honest, we will look closely at their arguments. We will see some interesting patterns. First, we will see that they give priority to certain passages in the text over other passages. Some passages they will ignore. They will tend to use the text to reinforce or buttress the ideology which they hold before they read the text. In rebuttal, we can point out everything they have ignored or downplayed. Yet at the same time, perhaps we might also recognise certain tendencies in Tolkien's vision of the past that uncomforatably allows them to exaggerate their claims. It is somewhat similar to reading T.S. Eliot's book of Practical Cats and being horrified by how many times Eliot alludes to a yellow peril. Tolkien never goes that far, but he does demonstrate a tendency of his time to prioritise his culture and his values over those of other countries and geographies. If we ignore this habit, as a habit mind and not as a despicable ideology, then we too are forming an interpretation from the book that suits our sense of who and what Tolkien was and what Middle earth is. The question is always, how much do readers read selectively. If we are not willing to see or grant that Tolkien was as much a man of his time and generation and station as he was of something beyond that, we are ourselves creating the persona "Tolkien."

As an example, let me point to Lalwendë 's very good discussion of how to try to understand Denethor apart from the overwhelming pressure of the story. In one context, I suspect both she and I would say that this misrepresents how the story wants readers to interpret him. Yet such an approach also opens up the story to us, so that we can become more aware of how Tolkien plays his cards, when he holds, when he folds, when he discards. For littlemanpoet, this puts him into a quandry as he becomes less prone to the spell of the text. Both approaches lead to greater appreciation of the text.

I always laugh when I see posters trying to discount the reader by taking the most absurd examples of readerly solipcism. Yet again, the absurdity can always tell us something either about the reader or about the text which we had not noticed, and we are free then to either discard the idea or incorporate it. Intrepretation is an always on going process rather than a final arrival at an objective or absolute fixed meaning. And to those who discount the reader as the source of meaning, I would ask: How do you account for the historical changes that have come about in how people have read various texts? How do you account for history in authorial intention or The Text?

But this point about the spell of the text brings me to my main point here--and just in case anyone is still with me, this is a point I have not raised before, either on the dreaded "C" thread or the "Enchantment" thread or any others. It is to step back and ask something similar to what Lalwendë did when she posited a difference between reading for information and reading for pleasure. What is it we mean by the word literature? How do we understand these artistic artefacts and their purpose?

For davem, literature brings us into a vision of a perilous realm beyond our own temporal existence. For Mr. Underhill, reading brings us into contact with other minds. For Saucepan, reading is an experiential activity. For Aiwendil, oblo, Sono, literature provides a touchstone for rational explication. I'm leary of ascribing others to any particular approach, so please do not mind that I mention no other names.

What all of these various ways of understanding literature demonstrate, however, is that the creative realms speaks to our heart's desire however we understand that desire.

I would posit that authors do not write to express their own mind, although this is part of the complex activity of writing. They write to tell a story, create beauty with words which enchant us. Authors who know their stuff write to appeal to our heart's desire. They translate desire into words and then back again into desire, the reader's desire. And desire is a large and vast emotion, a house with many rooms. Every author worth his or her salt writes with this understanding of how to appeal to the reader. Readers with large, magnanimous hearts (and this will include cynics and wits) will take widely to the book while readers with limited imaginations and personal agendas will limit their understanding of the book.

Yet in discussing our various desires, we can come to expand our own understanding of our own desire. That is, I would suggest, the way to approach meaning in literature. Again, a journey, not a destination.