[Bêthberry]

Playing catch-up here! I would like to look back to Child's post # 268 and davem's post # 271. I think that ultimately my comments will point back to the idea Fordim has just made about the value and worth of discussion (which I think harkens back to my idea of 'interpretive community').

Child I thank you for the eloquence with which you have pointed out that there are many ways to seek this light. I would, however, like to comment on this well-taken point you made:

Yes, you are right. Something may be gained from a discussion of views like Greer and the neo-Nazis. (Poor Germain Greer! I've never liked her, but it seems cruel to put her in the same boat as those other folk.)

Yet, I am likely to learn considerably more by reading someone like Flieger or Shippey, whose perception and views on Middle-earth are far more acute.

I have no doubt that you (and I) will gain more from reading someone like Flieger or Shippey than reading the neo-Nazis. Who is to say, though, whether our experiece is greater or lesser than that of others. I can think of many readers, some beginning readers, some not so beginning, whose understanding of story and narrative might well be expanded greatly by considering how both Wagner and Tolkien were or can be appropriated by the neo-Nazis. For them, the enlightenment could well be far greater than that which you and I experience. For this reason, that there are many different kinds of reading experiences and many different ways to examine a subject, I hesitate to say that my experience reading Flieger is more successful or valuable than someone else's experience addressing the white supremacists. This, I think, relates to Sauce's point about the value of individual reading experiences.


davem,

When we read his reasons & his explanations for what he wrote, we are as likely to respond by thinking 'Of course! that explains what I felt!' as we are to respond 'Why, that's not it at all! I never felt that!' I would say that the former response is more common.

Even granted that this is so (which I do no think has been proven here), does that negate the experience of those who say "that's not it!" ? At most it proves that the position is uncommon or unusual, but it does not make it wrong. Many ideas in human history began with one or two voices having different experience and wanting to make that experience known and understood. The next step is, as Fordim suggests, to talk, to engage in a comparative process of understanding.

The Legendarium was Tolkien's manifesto, & it means what he intended it to mean, & while we may take from it what we will, or reject it all entirely, we can't claim it means nothing at all, & was not intended to do what the writer has stated clearly it was meant to do. I just can't see how anyone can seperate the story from its meaning, or claim it means whatever they choose it to mean. Tolkien is the only one who can claim the Humpty Dumpty role here -'when I use a word it means precisely what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less'

I find it strange that there is this tendency to equate the position of multiple interpretations with a Humpty Dumpty role or total chaos. The reader is in fact under the same kind of injunction which Tolkien made of the writer in "On Fairy Stories", that his understanding must be consistent. It must be consistent with the reader's own experience (and where this can be shown to be inconsistent, new understanding arises) and it must be consistent with the text. In Tolkien's case, that text is, as I said before, implicit rather than explict. As Child astutely observed, Tolkien was not Lewis. It seems to me, davem, that you draw conclusions from the text and then want to say this is explicit. This is, I humbly suggest, a "misreading" of the text based upon your insistence that there must be an authorising intention found in the text. Your argument, to me, does not recognise the indeterminant nature of much of Tolkien's narrative. You pull the strands together to create an overarching metatheory of meaning, but Tolkien's stories hold that only in potential and in part. He gave us the glass darkly. He didn't want it any other way. So, you see, my position does not in fact ignore what the writer meant.

EDIT: Perhaps another point is that we react to the way you phrase your points, davem. Look at this sentence:

So when we leave Middle Earth we feel a lack

That "we" certainly sounds all-encompassing and authoritative, but I am going to ask you to reconsider it. I don't think I have this experience you claim for all of us. What I feel when I finish reading Tolkien is little different than feelings of departures from other extremely well imagined worlds of fiction. It is narrative cessation--a post-reading desire comedown--not a sense that this world somehow fails. While you might well think that you are not enforcing your "Truth" on us, your style does not seem to suggest there are other possibilities out there.

And now I leave, taking my prism with me outside and dangling it in the sunshine, to watch the play of lights that dances around it.