What breaks the enchantment?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

However, I still think that the more one knows about writing and reading, the greater the difficulty in co-creating. This is also true given a greater difference between Tolkien's cultural context and the reader's; no fault of either writer or reader, but a consequence nonetheless.

Just some musings about this. Do you mean that, with subsequent readings and more conscious awareness of literary affects, that the sense of the true meaning of ordinary life, which is revealed through the enchantment with the subcreated world, is lost? Or do you mean that the link between the two becomes harder to maintain? Would this mean that writers themselves no longer experience this joy, either in their own writing or when they read other fantasy?

I would have thought that, since Tolkien's view of the imagination is tied in so closely with language, the creation of meaning, that the more one understands how words mean, the more one is able to join in that subcreative activity. (By the way, I don't deny the importance of the reader working with the text. I would use text rather than author.)

It seems to me that any sense of fantasy which is so heavily based on the virginal or naive first reading has to be doomed to a kind of linguistic fall unless one can account for new meanings which come to the imagination upon subsequent readings. Or if there is some other kind of relationship between primary and secondary world. If the only value of fantasy is this defamiliarising quality which makes us see our world newly, then once that act has been achieved, ...

The other point which can be made is to ask whether these breaks you feel in the enchantment are sufficient to destroy the final overall affect of consolation, recovery, joy. I mean, how long must an epiphany be?

By the way, I've just read some stuff about George MacDonald, who of course greatly prefigured Tolkien and Lewis in attributing the value of the imagination to fantasy. I thought it might be useful here to consider.

One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought; it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he himself had not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

This rather fits the Tolkien letter you referred to earlier, that he had not initially seen things in Galadriel that he later saw (or had pointed out to him). So, if Tolkien had a sense of coming closer towards discovering the story rather than inventing it, why cannot the reader also have this experience, as the two are joined in the act of subcreating?

I'm not sure any of this is very coherent or lucid.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Bb

It seems to me that any sense of fantasy which is so heavily based on the virginal or naive first reading has to be doomed to a kind of linguistic fall unless one can account for new meanings which come to the imagination upon subsequent readings.

I don't think its about basing our sense of fantasy on 'on the virginal or naive first reading'. Its about (for me) finding new depth & meaning within the secondary world rather than attempting to supply that depth & meaning from an external source - ie the Primary world.

This rather fits the Tolkien letter you referred to earlier, that he had not initially seen things in Galadriel that he later saw (or had pointed out to him). So, if Tolkien had a sense of coming closer towards discovering the story rather than inventing it, why cannot the reader also have this experience, as the two are joined in the act of subcreating?

This should be our goal on re reading any text, but we should look to the text itself (& the supplimentary work by the author) & our own speculations & surmises about it rather than attempting to find 'relevant' connections outside it - if we want the enchantment to deepen. If we bring in too much of the primary world we may find that the secondary world isn't strong enough to hold it & it will start to unravel - this is our part in the co-creation of the secondary world. We have to assist in the building of it, rather than simply standing around, looking at things & saying 'You know, this is really such & such - I think I'm being had!.'

In his continuing 'meditations on Galadriel Tolkien 'realised' that she was a kind of Virgin Mary figure in the sense that they shared certain symbolic attributes, but she never became merely an allegory of Mary. She could always stand alone as a figure within Middle earth.

Now, I'm not saying its not interesting to make connections between Middle earth & the primary world - I've indulged in that kind of play myself, but while it can be entertaining what I've found is that it takes me away from the actual experience, the 'enchantment'. Its fine to say 'This reminds me of so & so' - in fact, we can't help but be reminded in some cases, but to go beyond that & say 'This must equal that, they're the same thing' is asking for the spell to be broken.