‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Bêthberry]

First, an apology to anyone reading this. I attempted early this morning (before I had my coffee) to revise my post from yesterday ('sleeping on the post' did wonders for my thinking--not that I fell asleep here at the keyboard ) and in the process somehow lost much of what I rewritten. And so in a fit of typerly pique, I nuked the whole thing. Let me reconstruct again.

SaucepanMan, your story about the spider brought a gleam to my eye as I remembered Jung's own dream where scarabs and flying beetles led him to develope his idea of synchroncity. However, the question you post to me and others is this:

Does the presence of these archetypes from our shared experience (collective consciousness?) mean that there will be a level upon which we will all react to these materials in the same way, just as spiders evoke in all of us at some level a feeling of revulsion, if not fear? Does this mean that there may in fact be a "right" approach towards interpreting Tolkien at some level?

I don't think the collective unconscious--which is what I think you meant here--even if there is one, would operate this way. Let me turn to some thoughts about interpretation in contemporary critical theory. I will be taking a different tact from that suggested by davem, so for now I won't comment on his observations about archetypes.

To the best of my knowledge (which is faulty on Jung I must acknowledge) there is no current critical theory on literature which uses Jungian archetypes as a metalanguage (paradigm or model) which will produce an interpretation of the material, "the text.' This was what critics such as Joseph Campbell did with Jungian archetypes in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. (That book remains, to me, fascinating to read in context with Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories.") What I mean here is interpreting a text by equating Tolkien's characters with Jung's archetypes, such as Galadriel with the all-powerful Mother archetype, or even seeing how Jung's own dream of the wise old man accompanied by a young girl (who represents Jung's female aspects, we are told authoritatively) or the rough dwarf who helped him slay the beautiful young Siegfried relate to Tolkien's narrative.

For those who might not know Campbell, I have a rather reductive explanation of his work on narrative plots, the monomyth, but the link is not working now. Perhaps I will return to insert it.

However, there is another way to regard the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature and this is currently an interest in critical theory, to examine how the process of interaction between the therapist/analyst and the patient can stand for what happens when we read texts. This act is called in psychoanalysis transference and it is most commonly used in conjunction with Freudian analysis. I'm no authority on it but I can provide a small explanation of it and then consider whether Jung's idea of the psyche would lead to a monolithic interpretation of "one right way", as SpM has wondered.

In transference, the truth of the events or the unconscious is not revealed by the therapist telling the patient what the patient's dreams mean. The truth is more properly understood to arise from the performative act, from how the therapist becomes involved in the relationships which the dreams present, from how the patient displaces feelings from past events onto the therapist. That is, we can ask ourselves how a particular reading of a text or dream--our search for meaning and origins--in fact re-enacts a primordial quest, like the Oedipal drama or the myth of Narcissus. Seen in this light, our own interpretations repeat archetypal narratives and relationships. As Jonathan Culler explains it:

Awareness of the centrality of transference, recognition that the truth of a text may lie not in what an authoritative interpreter says about it but in the interpreter's unexpected relationship to it, makes possible a subtle and fruitful investigation of the problems of interpretation. The Pursuit of Signs

Using this idea of transference, we could ask what particular archetype comes most into play in our own, individual interpretations. (There are critics who say that Freud, in attempting to interpret the Oedipal story, himself repeats that myth, or acts it out, in The Interpretation of Dreams.)

However, I don't think that Jung's ideas about the psyche would result in one interpretation valorised over others. After all, he himself posited a psyche comprised of persona, shadow, anima (the female aspects of the male) or animus (the male aspects of the female) These interact in different ways, which for Jung became Psychological Types based on dichotomies of intuition, introversion, etc. So it would seem to me that we would have not one way to interpret the text (again, the master interpreter telling us what the text means) but a variety of ways in which our own psychological makeup infact has us repeat the archtypes in our own interpetations.

I'm sure that Fordim would have more to say about this.