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Old 06-09-2005, 03:45 PM   #152
davem
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
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davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
I have to admit to feeling a little out of my depth in this kind of discussion. If I am misunderstanding your position its probably because I don't have your accademic background. I'm someone who left school at 16 - without having paid too much attention to what I was being taught if I'm honest. Since then I've read a lot of books, but haven't followed any particular course of study, just reading what appealed to me. This is simply to try & explain why I may sometimes misunderstand or misinterpret what other's post - NOT that I'm accusing anyone of being deliberately obtuse, so please don't take what I'm saying the wrong way. My position in this debate has been put together as I've gone along, & I've tried to formunlate an argument in response to the things others haved posted. So, in short, I can't bring in a lot of literary or linguistic theory to support my position. Its based on a 'gut feeling', that it should be possible to experience a work of art as a thing in itself, something objective, unknown. That seems to me what we 'owe' to the art. The art is the 'not me', it is 'other', it exists in its own space, which I may enter to commune with it, but that 'communion' will not be so much an interaction as an opening up on my part to that 'other'.

It seems to me that there is perhaps a difference between the 'literary novel' & the story. At the extreme of the literary novel we have, say, Finnegan's Wake, a novel as much about language itself as it is about anything else. Perhaps we could put the folktale - especially the folktale as heard rather than read - at the other extreme. What I mean is that in the literary novel the focus is on the language - the text - while in the folktale the focus is on images. Folktales are often (like folksongs), a series of images, vignettes, episodes, with interconnecting narrative. I think a work like Tolkien's Legendarium is very close to folktale in this sense. The reason I say this is that, unlike its 'polar opposite', FW, which has very few 'images' - apart from ones conjured by 'connection' or analogy in the mind of the reader - a work like LotR is full of such scenes & images - they are what strike us & stick in our minds. The most powerful of which for me is the sight from the summit of Weathertop across the wide lands of Middle earth.

These images are incredibly powerful, they kind of 'burn' themselves into our psyches, & create the sense of 'enchantment' I'm talking about here, the sudden
intense glimpse of the 'Other', the 'not me'. The reason that sight of wild lands from the summit of Weathertop affected me so profoundly was not because it made me thinkof something else, some other place I had known, nor was it because of the language, the specific words Tolkien had used. Neither was it because of the events that lead to the Hobbits & Strider standing there, or any 'projection' into the future events of the story & what might happen. What it was, I think, was that specific image - not the words themselves but the image they evoked - looking down from a high place onto an unknown land. It was a 'primal', archetypal experience, & its 'power' came from its 'otherness', its absolute unfamiliarity. Something 'other', something I hadn't brought to that particular party, had overwhelmed me.

So, perhaps 'language', literary theory & linguistics have as little place in this discussion as 'psychology'. I think its the 'images' that 'enchant' us - not by their familiarity but by their 'unfamiliarity'. Words, paint, music are the medium.

Whether any of that makes sense I have no idea....
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