‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[davem]

Aiwendil makes the point that we have been going over old ground, but that's inevitable, because the author's intent & purpose is either central to our understanding & interpretation or it isn't. If an artist paints a picture of a tree (Eru alone knows where I got that idea from ) then it is either a picture of a 'real' tree or its a picture of an imaginary tree. Of course, we could agree to discuss the picture as a work of art, & ignore the real tree of which its a picture (if it is one), but if the author's intention in painting the picture was to refer us to the tree (the tree is in danger of being felled & he wants our help to prevent that happening, or the area in which it stands is in danger of being developed, or perhaps we've lived in a city for so long we've forgotten that there's a real tree there & he wants to tell us about it so we can go there & experience it, whatever), then by treating the painting simply as a beautiful work of art, we ignore the artists purpose.

My own feeling is that we cannot ignore the artists intention, & that until we take into account the painter's purpose in painting the tree we will never get a true understanding of the meaning, the reason the painting exists at all. So inevitably we go round & round on the question of whether it has an objective referent (is that the right term?), because until we have agreed on that we can't go any further in our discussion of the painting. Why did the artist paint that tree, & is it a real tree or not? We could split off into two groups, & discuss our respective understandings, but if we are to come together & discuss it as a single group then we have to agree on our understanding of the meaning for the artist of what he painted, & why there's a painting at all.

[Aiwendil]

Note: I started writing this response before Fordim's and Davem's last posts but had to rush off to class; so the first part doesn't take them into account.

Davem: All right, I think I understand your view, though I continue to find it strange and of course I still disagree with it. Can you say the same of my view? I only ask because I wonder whether I have not been sufficiently explicit or whether we are simply at a dead end.

It seems improbable in the extreme that either of us will convince the other. But it still might be interesting to discuss one view or the other without agreeing on it.

In your view, as you say, there is an objective fact about whether Turin returns at the end of the First Age or at the end of the World, but that fact is not knowable by us. Would you then say that the "canon" is unknowable? And if it's unknowable and yet people read the books and enjoy them and have intelligent discussions about them, then can it really be that important anyway?

In a way I keep feeling that our views are not actually in contradiction, but rather that we're simply talking about different things. I cannot deny that Tolkien had intentions, and that given enough time and suitable pressure for publication he would have arrived at a final version; nor can you deny that the texts do form a body of statements and that we can extract coherent sets of them and thus envision our own imaginary Middle-earths. But then you say that Tolkien's intention defines the "truth" about Middle-earth and I say there is no single truth about Middle-earth. Yet both of these are simply definitions, which are arbitrary anyway. It's as though you insist "Apples are sweet" and I say "Wrong! Lemons are sour!"

So what I wonder is what specific consequences you draw from your view and whether these differ substantively from mine.

Fordim wrote:

These two stances are not entirely compatible, nor are they -- I think -- entirely contradictory.

Yes, this is something like what I was just getting at with respect to my view vs. Davem's. What does it really mean to say that "Tolkien's version is final and authoritative"? Does authoritative merely mean that it's the view of the author, the authority? Well, no one denies that! Or are we really dealing with a moral directive here, something like "One ought not to hold a view of the texts that differs from that of the author"? Besides being a bit presumptive, that's problematic since it's impossible to divine the exact thoughts of Tolkien, and in many cases his own thoughts were very different at different times.