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09-08-2013, 04:41 AM | #1 |
Pile O'Bones
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Tolkien the Metafictionist
Hey, first time poster here!
As my first post I thought I'd start a pretentious thread about Tolkien and the notion of 'meta-fiction'. If anyone follows the journal 'Tolkien Studies' you may have noticed that over the last few years they've been running quite a few papers on the question of Tolkien's meta-fictional conceits. Brljak's article (2011) for instance argued that the overall conceit of the Lord of the Rings - that it is ultimately a translation of an unknown number of 'manuscripts' (only the initial manuscripts in the tradition having been actually written by Bilbo, Frodo and Sam) - is actually its defining characteristics and should be granted far more attention. For example Brljak argues that we cannot 'view' the story contained within the pages of LoTR without some degree of readerly skepticism, given that Tolkien alerts us to the manuscript conceit in the Prologue (indeed explains it in considerable depth). He therefore argues for a new approach to Tolkien that "problematizes", to use that hideous piece of Po-Mo jargon, the novel's claim to authenticity. Furthermore, he argues that the prevalence of novelistic technique argues against the status of the work as a straightforward translation of 'Frodo's memoir' - instead we should see it as a 'history' that has been 'novelised' by successive generations of scholars. But if we view the work in this way, what are we to make of its claims to verisimilitude? We treat the LoTR as though it were an unproblematic window into this 'Secondary World' - but what if (just bear with me!) it is nothing of the sort, and instead is an artistic compilation from out of that secondary world, but which represents it only fictionally. This is perhaps all very ridiculous, but Brljak and Gergely Nagy have been arguing for some years that some kind of meta-fictional approach to Tolkien's work is essential. It both creates, and possibly distorts and undercuts, that familiar sense of 'depth' that Shippey and others have commented on. Your thoughts about this? Last edited by NogrodtheGreat; 09-08-2013 at 04:55 AM. |
09-08-2013, 04:49 AM | #2 | |
Newly Deceased
Join Date: Aug 2013
Posts: 5
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Quote:
I think there are statements of Tolkien that should be interpreted exactly like this - that the Lord of the Rings is a translation/adaptaion of (parts of) the Red Book, a fictional work mentioned in the text. The difference in tone between the Hobbit and LotR, for instance, is due to Bilbo being responsible for the former. |
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09-08-2013, 05:21 AM | #3 | ||||
Pile O'Bones
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Thanks, and also welcome!!
Quote:
In order to flesh out Brljak's thesis a little more I'll quote a couple of passages. Here he makes the point that 'depth' is created by Tolkien's style, and thereby a sense of "reality" is created. Quote:
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09-08-2013, 06:15 AM | #4 |
Newly Deceased
Join Date: Aug 2013
Posts: 5
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I see, you wished to discuss the implications of this. (I read the first post to cursively )
I agree that strictly, one may not be bound to take stuff recorded even in the LoTR - for instance, concerning the wings of the Balrog - as necessarily "canonical". As implied by the Red Book fiction, they are supposed to be ultimately based on the observations of the participants. Then again, are there not statements by the author who suggest that he himself regarded the stories as recorded as basically "accurate"? (If you are right about the "pomo" inclination of the mentioned scholars, they may not regard this authorial intention as relevant, though.) |
09-08-2013, 08:35 PM | #5 | ||
Cryptic Aura
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 5,989
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Quote:
Tolkien himself had a theory of the the transmission of story and it's effect in story. See his essay on Gawain and the Green Knight. His comments are tantalizingly brief but I do believe he was there first. And welcome to the Downs, NogrodtheGreat and avar. We already have a Nogrod so my money's on folks coming up with a different short nick for you than 'Nogrod'.
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I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away. |
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09-08-2013, 08:50 PM | #6 |
Pile O'Bones
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hmmm, "nog"?
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09-08-2013, 09:00 PM | #7 |
Pile O'Bones
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hmmm, "nog"?
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09-09-2013, 02:59 AM | #8 |
A Voice That Gainsayeth
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: In that far land beyond the Sea
Posts: 7,431
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Even that is sometimes used, and still might produce confusion. The nickname should make it perfectly clear which person we are referring to, so it should be completely different: therefore, I'm afraid you'd have to settle with "Great".
In any case, welcome both to the 'downs...
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"Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own." -On Fairy-Stories |
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