I'm just a reader in a fantasy land, which I think is what accounts for the particular differences in the experience of reading Tolkien when compared to those authors
Aelfwine has named.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Aelfwine
Why not Faulkner, or O'Brian, or Vonnegut, or Homer, or Tolstoy or... you get the picture.
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Unlike
Aelfwine, though, I would not include Homer in this list of contrasting authors, and I note that
Morth did not include Homer in his list of Those Who Tolkien Resembles Not.
There are books which we read for "the facts"--just the facts, ma'am--even literary fiction, as well as histories and expository prose. This is especially true of novels in the realistic tradition and, possibly, those in the ironic tradition. But not all books are best read as proof-texts for literalness--witness the desperate measures of those who read the Bible literally (which it never was until the last two centuries). Some books invite a different kind of reading experience.
Homer's two epics are such books, which originally were oral, and which often were sung. They are performative, possibly even interactive. Witness the oft-told complaint that Tolkien's style is archaic--it often assumes the rhythmic beat of Old English rather than contemporary English. Homer's and Tolkien's creations are activities to be experienced rather than texts to be decoded. Perhaps this is the nature of mythologies. Both Homer and Tolkien wrote, after all, mythologies. And both authors have inspired re-tellers of their tales. There is something about mythologies that inspires readers and listeners to invest the writings with more than simple decoding, something akin to
ekstasis or a 'stepping outside' of normal experience. Not every kid had Athena for a Mentor but holey-molely look what happened to one who did!
This might be what
Morth is getting at when he claims that Tolkien was using allegory even when he claimed he wasn't. There are, after all, various kinds of
allegoria, not all of which "point back" to events in a one to one correlation with contemporary history.
Anyhow, I think it was Mircea Eliade who used the term
coincidentia oppositorum, a special sense unlike the ordinary, daily, mundane experience, to describe the experience of myth, which possibly can also be ascribed to fantasy. I think many readers invest Tolkien's works with this sense.
(As an aside, let me suggest that
davem would not be such a reader, given his recent thread where he insisted that historical veracity had to be the ultimate means of assessing Tolkien.)