‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Welcome to the discussion Child, nice to have you around it.

But there's one thing: the question you quote above and respond to (so eloquently and touchingly) was not posed by me, but by Saucepan Man.

I don't have time to respond at length but I would like to raise one point: you write

It was clear that some interpretations were right and some were wrong.

I couldn't disagree more with the absoluteness of this statement -- at least, not in the context you give it. Sure there are wrong interpretations (LotR is not a fascist text in support of genocidal murder, for example), but that does not mean that there are a set of absolutely "right" interpretations to be gleaned from the Legendarium. For all the reasons I've already ranted about above, I don't think we can start to think this way ("Tolkien is a privileged source for the 'truth' or 'meaning' of the book") without both making Tolkien into a Sauron-like figure (the 'eye/I' is the only source of vision into the text) and, ironically, forsaking the ethical obligations that Tolkien has put on us to interpret for ourselves.

The different interpretations that are possible, the different 'ways' of taking the text are there, to allow us as readers the freedom to develop our own responses and generate our own meaning(s). It just gets tricky because that freedom is not unrestrained -- we can't just overlay whatever interpretation we want, because there are things we can get wrong (another popular wrong example: LotR is a pro-war novel).

[Bêthberry]

Man, you guys make it hard for us Shepherds of the trees, er, pourers over paper books. I will have a very long reply here ready later this morning.

In other words, my first SAVE in Books. Oh to what bad habits do RPGs lead me.

[The Saucepan Man]

There is a wonderfully subtle shift in your language here that proves my point (ha!).

The shift is a logical one and does not, I think, imply that I view the relartionship between the reader and the author as akin to prisoner and jailor or Ringbearer and Ring. My primary position (one which it seems that you would agree with, Fordim) is that everyone is free to interpret Tolkien's works in any way that seems appropriate to them. In that sense, no one is bound to accept Tolkien's own views and opinions on what he wrote, whether they are casual readers or serious Tolkienologists. It is up to them whether they do or not.

But those who take a deeper interest in the Professor's works will surely be more likely to accept his intended meaning than will the casual reader. I am not saying that they are obliged to do so. I am simply acknowledging that they will naturally be more inclined to do so (and possibly adjust any inconsistent preconceptions) because of their more serious interest.

And to take it one stage further, I do think that anyone participating in any serious discussion of Tolkien's works is obliged at least to acknowledge the author's views (assuming that they are aware of them). Again, there is no one forcing them to agree with those views, but they will have to acknowledge that their own views are at odds with those of the author and that they will therefore be of limited value in any serious discussion of Middle-earth.

Child, I was in much the same boat as you when I first started reading Tolkien's works (and btw, yes it was my paragraph you were commenting on ). LotR and the Hobbit were the only published texts at the time. Although the Silm was published shortly after, as I said, I gave up on it. But I do not think that the position is that much different for the modern first-time reader. After all, only a proportion of those who read LotR will be aware of the wealth of background material, and even those who are aware of it will inevitably read the book itself first before going on to review it. And, as Angmar suggests, it is in that first reading that the longest-lasting and most vivid impressions are, I think, formed.

I do agree with you, however, that there is scope for the serious Tolkien enthusiast to retain initial impressions even when they are at odds with the meaning intended by the author. You put it as follows:

When I discuss topics on a public board, I will honestly try to stick to canon as closely as I can. What I see in my own head when I read the books may be a little different, but that's my private prerogative as a reader!

But I think that I would put it slightly differently. I see nothing wrong with any of us setting out on a site such as this our own private impressions of the book in the full knowledge that they are inconsistent with the author's intentions, provided that we acknowledge that inconsistency. Indeed, it may be necessary to do so for illustrative purposes on a thread such as this one. Or it may simply be that we feel that they may be of interest to others. But, as I indicated above, we must also recognise that they will be of limited value in any serious discussion of the legendarium.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

My primary position (one which it seems that you would agree with, Fordim) is that everyone is free to interpret Tolkien's works in any way that seems appropriate to them. In that sense, no one is bound to accept Tolkien's own views and opinions on what he wrote, whether they are casual readers or serious Tolkienologists. It is up to them whether they do or not.

But those who take a deeper interest in the Professor's works will surely be more likely to accept his intended meaning than will the casual reader. I am not saying that they are obliged to do so. I am simply acknowledging that they will naturally be more inclined to do so (and possibly adjust any inconsistent preconceptions) because of their more serious interest.

Nicely put, Saucepan Man, and your point is well-taken (and you are right, I do agree with this). But once more, I have a question about your response. I couldn’t agree more that “anyone participating in any serious discussion of Tolkien's works is obliged at least to acknowledge the author's views” – but where I pull away from your point somewhat is at the odd claim that if my views “are at odds with those of the author…they will be of limited value in any serious discussion of Middle-earth.”

Why? What do you mean by “value” that my interpretation will have less of it than Tolkien’s interpretation? Are you suggesting that his interpretation is more true or right or useful? If so, by what basis can we make this claim?

To go back to my Gollum example: Tolkien’s interpretation of Gollum’s fall is an explicitly Catholic one (he explains in the Letters, in fact, that his ‘take’ on LotR is entirely and “consciously” Catholic throughout); my own interpretation of that moment (which I shan’t get into here) is not. If his interpretation is of greater “value” (and please do address what you mean by that loaded word) than mine – where does that leave me? It would seem to be cutting me off from the text (that is, I’m not “really getting it” because I'm not giving it a Catholic interpretation), even as I am most directly engaged with it (that is, I am developing a meaning that has resonance for me -- and probably for many others -- in my non-Catholic interpretation).

[Findegil]

Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle:

Of course, there are huge differences between the Ring and Tolkien’s texts that I need not go into here (first and foremost being that the Ring’s creator wants to supplant Eru; the maker of Middle-Earth wants only to supplement the Primary Creator) – but the similarity of the relation (individual to Ring; reader to Middle-Earth) is quite striking.

Have you reflected what you did write here? "Supplement the Primary Creator" is really the last think of all Tolkien would have intended. The "only" before this phrase makes it nearly a blasphemous statement for people deeply believing in a Primary Creator (as Tolkien had clearly done), even without considering the action it self.
Without a question the analogy is good, since the action of Sauron was clearly blasphemous in the same way. But it fails entirely if once the background of Author of Middle-Earth is taken into account.
And thus we come nicely bake to the subject under discussion: Your interpretation of Tolkiens writing was as freely made, as you wanted it all over this thread. But it can be proved as clearly wrong by considering the additional information available as can be the interpretation of The Lord of the Ring as pre-war-novel or as supporting fascistic ideas. If you demand freedom in one direction, you can't deny it in the other one. The book as a stand-alone allows a lot of interpretations, and since a book is meant as a stand-alone publication, we are free to read and interpret it as a single item.
What makes the book so attractive is in my view the glimpses of underlying stories, which are at once recognised as the holes left by the author to be filled with our own imagination. Thus the book does at once fire up our own imagination and waking our interest for more information on the subjects of our imagination.
By providing the information the imaginations is more and more restricted. What is the art of Tolkien, which even the extensive editing of his son could not destroy, is that with each new information given or found new holes for your imagination will be discovered. And Tolkien was really aware of this, as is shown in his story Tree and Leaf. And being less sure in his craftsmanship in writing than his son is, JRR Tolkien would have restricted the publication much more than Chritopher Tolkien did.
What is now the bearing of this to the topic? Well, even Fordim Hedgethistle in his first post had admitted that the approach of scholarly research is "entertaining and extremely informative". None of us would discuss here if it were not for this entertaining. And I think many have come here in the first place for exactly that informativeness of such approaches.
Thus it isn't suppressing at all that the scholarly approach get the majority of posts in this thread. Asking the same question in a forum, which would discuss literature and not just the story given in it, would probably turn the table.

Respectfully
Findegil

[The Saucepan Man]

Why? What do you mean by “value” that my interpretation will have less of it than Tolkien’s interpretation? Are you suggesting that his interpretation is more true or right or useful?

No, not at all. Your interpretation is certainly of value to you (assuming that you do not prefer the author's interpretation when you hear of it). And it may well be of value to others in discussions of the book as a "stand-alone" publication (as Findegil put it). But it will be of little value in discussions of the "truth" of Middle-earth, as handed to us by the author (ie what the author intended). And I would concur with Findegil that most serious discussions here fall into the latter category.

You may argue that the discussions here should allow people more scope for arguing in favour of their personal interpretation, even though it may be inconsistent with that of the author. But it seems to me that the primary purpose of the serious discussion threads is to determine (where we can) what the author's intentions were. As I said, many here will be inclined to accept these and adjust their own interpretation accordingly (as I have done on a number of issues). But, having established the author's intentions, people are free to reject them and retain (on a personal level) their own interpretation, which will remain of greater value to them.

And you can always start up a new thread to discuss personal interpretations of the events and characters portrayed and how these might differ from the those of the author.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

But it seems to me that the primary purpose of the serious discussion threads is to determine (where we can) what the author's intentions were.

Thank you so much for clearing this up so succinctly Saucepan Man. This is the core issue upon which we disagree, for I believe that the practice of critical interpretation is emphatically not to seek the “author’s intention” but, rather, to develop our own interpretations and to subject those interpretations to the corrective of reasoned dialogue with other people who may or may not share our interpretations (and Findegil’s corrective post about the “blasphemous” practice that I inaccurately attributed to Tolkien is an object lesson in this – indeed, “supplement” is entirely the wrong word there).

The reasons I reject this search for the author’s intent are many. First, we need look no further than the fact he wrote the book for his primary intention – he intended for the book to be read and enjoyed. Beyond that, we can read in the Letters that his intention was that the book be Catholic (but Tolkien only arrived at this intention after the first draft had been written) – are non-Catholic interpretations wrong then? Of course not. Or, at least, not necessarily. Finally, seeking the “intention” of anyone for anything is doomed to failure – if nothing else, sociology, psychology, history, molecular biology, theology all tell us (in their own ways) that human action (like writing a book) is governed by a lot of things other than the “intention” of our conscious minds/wills/selves. In other words, there is always going to be lots of stuff in a book that the author never “intended” to put there.

This next bit may sound like I’m slagging you Sauce (if I can call you Sauce), but I truly and honestly am not. To be entirely honest, I can’t think of a more boring way to approach a text than the one you’ve put forward. Tolkien’s intentions are useful to know, maybe even required, but if to know them is to know the book – well, that way lies the death of all discussion and debate. The answer to every question becomes precisely the same, “What does Tolkien say?” and if we can find the answer, then conversation is resolved with one person being right, and the other being wrong. If we can’t find the answer, then the conversation simply dies.

[The Saucepan Man]

Hmm. Perhaps "primary purpose" was the wrong word to use in describing the nature of serious discussion threads here. Determining the author's intention is rather, I think, the natural inclination of the majority of those who post in such threads (myself included). The natural response of many to most of the questions raised in the Books forum is to quote from the text itself, or from associated materials such as the Letters.

To be entirely honest, I can’t think of a more boring way to approach a text than the one you’ve put forward.

Yes, I see your point. But, then again, I see the author's intention as just the starting point in any discussion. Having determined this as best we can, from both the primary source (the book itself) and the secondary source (biographical materials, unpublished and draft writings etc), I believe that there is still considerable scope for interpretation and discussion. The source material will not cover every single aspect raised on a particular issue and there will often be scope for interpretation of the author's intentions themselves, and therein lies fertile material for discussion and debate. It seems to me that there are, and always have been, in this forum fascinating discussion threads involving quite considerable differences of opinion, even though each of the participants may be approaching the issue from the perspective that the author's intentions represent the underlying "truth".

But I also agree that this is not the only way of approaching Tolkien's published material. While it happens to be (as I see it) the most prevalent approach to discussions on this forum, there is nothing to prevent you or anyone else tackling themes within Tolkien's works on the basis that you have outlined. Of course, you might get told that your thoughts are "wrong" where they conflict with those of the author, although I would have thought that this could easily be addressed by acknowledging the conflict at the outset and making clear the purpose of the discussion.

[Bêthberry]

I think SaucepanMan was right that this question of canonicity and intentionality lurks unexamined in many Books threads. If I may, let me backtrack from the many fine posts here a bit to present what the topic of canonicity suggests to me. And, since I am a literary scholar by training, I should warn you that I am going to bring some of my professional life's dealing into the mix here. So, put your feet up and set a spell. Or skip on to the next post.

It's probably fairly safe to say that for many if not most readers, the assumption is that an author owns a story because she created it. Kind of like an owner of the property which readers use or rent. However, this concept of the writer as the owner of meaning, controlling interpretation behind a text, is a recent one--recent meaning one derived from the last couple of centuries. It was not, of course, a concept that Tolkien worked with. As Fordim points outs, Tolkien

. . . believed that the truth of any tale lies in its historical origins -- more specifically, the historical origins of the words that have given rise to the tale.

Tolkien, of course, worked with literary texts for which authorship was unknown. It has been a conceit of scholarship to go back as Sharkey says, to attempt to retrieve an authoritative text:

Older mediaevalist science, for example, tried to construct an 'author's text' from the extant material, looking for sensible compromises and judging by their own ideas of taste and style. The result was of course a stab in the dark in regard to authencity

I think, however, it is very important to acknowledge that this is not what Tolkien did. He placed his significance necessarily in the tale itself. This is one reason why I am so tremendously impressed by his scholarly essays on Beowulf and On Fairy-Stories. They are remarkable evidences of his incredible feel for story.

If we pause, not merely to note that such old elements have been preserved, but to think [i]how]/i] they have been preserved, we must conclude, I think, that it has happened, often if not always, precisely because of this literary effect....The ancient elements can be knocked out, or forgotten and dropped out, or replaced by other ingredients with the greatest ease: as any comparison of a story with closely related variants will show. The things that are there must often have been retained (or inserted) because the oral narrators, instinctively or consciously, felt their literary 'significance'. Even where a prohibition in a fairy-story is guessed to be derived from some taboo once practiced long ago, it has probably been preserved in the later stages of tahe tale's history because of [b]the great mythical significance of prohibition. Source: On Fairy-Stories

I will return to this point that the story's the thing wherein we catch the conscience of the creation--sorry Hamlet--but for now let me ramble on about the significance of authorial intention. Here's where I get to bore you with a bit of scholarly stuff, my own little thread in the great tapestry of literary understanding, not any complete history of literary theory,and I tell it here merely to explain how I view authorial authority more circumspectly than many.

My scholarly research dealt with how, in the nineteenth century, the questions about the authority of the Bible led to questions about the authority of any kind of exegesis. Big word--it means critical explanation or interpretation. I won't name-check any people in the controversies here; my point is simply that as the errors and inaccuracies in the transcriptions of the Bible became known and as the understanding of plenary inspiration itself came to be questioned, this scepticism spread to underlining fundamental assumptions about the traditional response to language. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet, is particularly important here in assigning an active participation to the reader; his thought is consistent with St. Augustine's defense of figurative language (a particular bone of contention in the rising empirical tradition) as a test of intelligence. What does this all mean? It means that, for a variety of reasons, the role of the reader was being brought to the forefront of thought about interpretation. More and more, attention was being given to something like a fiduciary approach to language, where language was seen as "a living organism whose function is to reconcile the past and present experience of a community" (John Coulson, Newman and The Common Tradition).

Still with me? Never fear; this will come back 'round to Tolkien.

Authors themselves have long played with notions about where the authority of a book lies: with the author, the book, the reader, with sources. That naughty cleric Laurence Sterne justified his scurrility by recourse to his reader's imagination on more than one occasion: "No one who knows what he is about in good company would venture to talk all ... so no author... would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself." (That's from the notorious novel, Tristram Shandy.)

Sterne is having a bit of sport here because he was specifically talking about the naughty bits. But my point is that there is a tradition of interpretation which grants to readers active participation in the generation of meaning. Charlotte Bronte's "Reader, I married him" is the last in a significant number of addresses to the Reader that in fact, when attended to closely, produce a warning to readers not to take the romance of Jane Eyre at 'face' value.

Okay, let me move on. Sharkey points out that, unlike medieval scholars, we have an author identified and an author who was quite willing thank you very much to tell us what his books meant. Well, yes and no. Literary criticism is full of examples where authors proved to be unreliable narrators of their own creative lives. They never got their own stories about how they wrote and what they meant 'right.' Or they were writing their explications years after writing the story and in the process were creating intentions and meanings that had not been 'there' in the stories at the time of creation. Or they were working backwards to discover motives and ideas which were consciously part of the initial plan. Sometimes, too, authors wrote certain explanations to certain recipients, explanations which were couched for the benefit of the letter's recipient rather than as a formal bit of literary explication. Entire professional careers have been launched by demonstrating spectacularly that Author so and so was wrong in his Letters. (I exaggerate for effect, but not much.) At the very best, an author's literary remains need to be examined sceptically and evaluated for their applicability rather than being automatically accepted as authoritative evidence in a body of work. This is not to disparage Tolkien as unreliable or dishonest in any way, but to suggest a cautionary way of proceeding with any and all authors, to suggest that an author's thoughts should not automatically by fiat supercede other innterpretations.

Yet what I have to say next will most likely surprise many of you--or appall you. These currents of thought, the nature of readerly participation and the need for cautionary acceptance of authorial claims (coupled with several other currents of thought which I overlook here), took a jump to light speed in the late twentieth century. But bear with me because this, too, will lead to Tolkien. Structuralist critics such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault claimed not simply that authors could be wrong, and not merely that they were dead wrong. But that they were dead. Period.

And, well, after all, why should that be any great shock? Nietzche had claimed that God was dead, so why should authors escape a similar fate? (And, yes, I know that joke about the washroom graffiti: Nietzche: 'God is dead.' God: 'Nietzche is dead.') Okay, I'll get back to the topic.

No, honestly, this is not another Barrow Downs joke. The death of the author became a ringing challenge of discussion and debate. Both Barthes and Foucault sought to overcome the stranglehold of appropriation which the concept of authorship held over meaning and understanding in the empirical tradition (that same tradition which was shaking up the biblical criticism I mentioned earlier).

What Barthes sought to recover was a sense of the performative excitement of reading when the reader engages with the text. He wanted, in The Pleasure of the Text, to do away with this notion that there was somehow an active writer behind the text and a passive reader in front of the text. The text can only be reached by itself, by its own words rather than by talk about it. Foucault went farther in considering how we have created a concept of 'author-function' which allows us to assign significance.

At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was acceptable only if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text depended upon this information. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly, these remarks are far too categorical. Criticism has been concerned for some time now with aspects of a text not fully dependent upon the notion of an individual creator; studies of genre or the analysis of recurring textual motifs and their variations from a norm ther than author. From "The Author Function" 1970.

And, again,

The third point concerning this "author-function" is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a "realistic" dimension as we speak of an individual's "profundity" or "creative" power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned. A "philosopher" and a "poet" are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist.

Even if critics hate Barthes and Foucault, their work still must be acknowledged. What I find particularly fascinating about all of this is that Barthes and Foucault came from Catholic cultures. In fact, Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text is even structured after a Catholic prayer formula. And we all know that Tolkien's Catholic faith was profound (unlike that of Barthes and Foucault, but that does not concern me here.)

You see, I think, in obviously very different ways and means, these three men were responding to that old traditional assumption about language as fiduciary, a creation of meaning which pertains not in the words themselves on the page but in that special space which exists between the story and the reader's imagination, a meaning which comes about through inference and assent, "a living organism whose function is to reconcile the past and present experience of a community" (Coulson, again). Well, maybe Barthes was more into orgasm than organism, but ...

The 'truth' about understanding lies in the tale and its life beyond the author. A tale, once published, is like a child who has grown up and moved away from Mum and Dad. It is responsible for itself.

It seems to me that literary theory of the last several decades represents a serious effort to get back to that situation which Tolkien faced: how to understand how a text speaks to us without the parental voice always telling us what to think. Here I take us back to the lecture "On Fairy-Stories?"

But when we have done all that research?collection and comparison of the tales of many lands?can do? when we have explained many of the elements commonly found embedded in fairy-stories (such as step-mothers, enchanted bears and bulls, cannibal witches, taboos on names, and the like) as relics of ancient customs once practiced in daily life, or of beliefs once held as beliefs and not as 'fancies'[b] there remains still a point too often forgotten: that is the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are. . . . Such stories have now a mythical or total (unanalysable) effect, an effect quite independent of the findings of Comparative Folk-lore; they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.

.

I am making many jumps here. But let me provide one final quotation, from a critic who is closer in many ways to my own way of thinking than Foucault et al. George Steiner is no trendy post-modernist, but he, too, is working in this way I have of thinking about Tolkien and canonicity.

'Interpretation' as that whick give language life beyond the moment and place of immediate utterance or transcription is what I am concerned with. The French word interprète concentrates all the relevant values. An actor is interprète of Racine; a pianist gives une interpretation of a Beethoven sonata. Through engagement of his own identity, a critic becomes un interprète--a life-giving performer--of Montaigne or Mallarmé. As it does not include the world of the actor, and includes that of the musician only by analogy, the English term interpreter is less strong. But it is congruent withthe French when reaching out in another crucial direction. Interprète/ interpreter are commonly used to mean translator... When we read or hear any language-statement from the past, be it Leviticus or last year's best seller, we translate. Reader, actor, editor are translators of language out of time.

.

No, I did not include this last quotation simply so that Mallarmé reference might please a certain English interprète of French Radicalism who sometimes haunts our threads.

I included it as a final statement of what I believe was important to Tolkien and what I think is vital in discussing Middle-earth, that we respect the extraordinary experience of reading his texts and engaging with his stories rather than demanding that there is any one particular way of reading him. This is my way of understanding sub-creation and it is one which will respect any fair and honest readingof Tolkien as the experience of the reader. Like Tolkien, I believe that meaning is not imposed by fiat but created by the web of words. In our acts of discussing Tolkien lie the essence of sub-creation, not in a reductive archeology.