http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/
John Rateliff on a recent documentary about Tolkien by Joseph Pearce.
Quote:
It's not the facts but the interpretation where this piece falls down for me. The argument is not just that Tolkien is a Catholic writer -- a self-evident truth -- but that a Cathl0centric point of view is the only valid one through which to interpret his work. To try to build his case, Pearce resorts to heavy allegorization of the evidence. Thus he asserts that "Tolkien's Melkor is merely another name for Satan" and "merely different words for the same thing: Melkor IS Satan". The Lord of the Ring himself is "Sauron, the greatest of Satan's servants"..... one long scene (some fifteen minutes, out of a total running time over only about an hour) dramatizes the famous walk in which Tolkien and Lewis debated whether myths cd convey truth, which ended in Tolkien's assertion that Xianity was the one true myth. While v. well done, it contains two fairly major distortions. It presents Tolkien as doing almost all the talking while Lewis listens attentively, offering up a few respectful questions from time to time. This bears no resemblance to any account of Lewis as a conversationalist I've ever seen. It also portrays this as a dialogue, completely omitting Hugo Dyson, the third participant in that debate -- and assuming Dyson (a devout Xian but deeply bigoted against the Catholic church) held his tongue and had no influence on Lewis's decision to rejoin the Anglican church rather than become Catholic upon his return to Xianity is an iffy proposition.
Those changes can be defended on the grounds of dramatic license (after all, we only have Tolkien's account of this meeting, which doesn't include any indication of what Dyson said). But the second is far more problematic. Pearce has the actor playing Tolkien** repeat a passage from a 1958 letter to Deborah Webster Rogers: "I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic." But this is deeply deceptive, for the very next sentence goes on add "The latter 'fact' perhaps cannot be deduced". That is, Tolkien felt that his Xianity was obvious to an attentive reader but his Catholicism was not, and Pearce seems to be manipulating the evidence to hide this fact.
|
This is a 'documentary' & Pearce (a Catholic Priest) would certainly, hand on heart, tell you that he was only stating the 'facts' about Tolkien in this documentary. Rateliff disputes that - & he certainly demolishes Pearce's interpretation. In this scene referred to above it seems Pearce has taken words wrote in one context & has him saying them in another, he changes a three-way conversation to one in which Tolkien pontificates
& single-handedly brings Lewis back to the faith.
Is this acceptable? Anyone watching this 'documentary' could well take the events & interpretation contained as being 'factual', when clearly Pearce's intention is to strip Tolkien down to a CATHOLIC writer, who wrote Catholic stories which can only be appreciated when read as Catholic allegories (& probably only fully understood if the reader is a Catholic too - you certainly get that sense from reading Pearce's books on Tolkien).
So, is the 'documentary' any more acceptable than Hillard's novel? Both have Tolkien doing/saying things he never did (or distort things he did do & spin their meaning in Pearce's case). Yet Hillard (even before the Estate got involved) had included a clear statement that Mirkwood was a fantasy novel & that he was using Tolkien as a character, doing things he never did in real life. Pearce didn't make any such statement - because Hillard wants the reader to be under no illusion that the story they are reading is just that - a made up thing. Pearce, on the other hand is attempting to convince the viewer that his made up thing is not made up at all.