What's "real," anyway?

[davem]

Originally Posted by Lalwende

And davem, that article you posted the link for...be afraid, be very afraid...

Oh, come on, somebody must agree with Carole!

Saddam Hussain: 'No living man may hinder me!'
Condolesa Rice: 'I am no man!'

George Bush: 'Do not misunderestimate me, Sauron!''

(Well, that's helped Fordim in the reputation stakes, 'cos no Republican on these boards will ever vote for me again!)

[drigel]

I agree with you Lalwendë. For me its the pulling off the feeling that what I am reading is something passed down across time. Aelfwine, et al.

Yea, so I read the website, and ya its to the right - but no more disconcerting than what i see /hear /read from the left. I vote for content not opinions Davem. Engage me and ye shall benefit I know - I know I shouldnt but :

"Elves and Dragons! I says to him. Cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you. Don't go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you'll land in trouble too big for you, I says to him." hmmmm who could that be./.?

[Mithalwen]

All I can say is that if Tony Bliar is Theoden ...can I be the Witch King .... or even his steed... .... I draw the line at Snowmane

[tar-ancalime]

That’s the neat thing about truth and reality: we can all have different truths, but we all share the same reality.

And that’s where I come back to Tolkien: do his works share the same reality? Or are they ‘merely’ very pleasing tales, divorced from reality? Or do they create a new or different reality, that in some way is connected to our own?

I'm not so sure I agree with you, Fordim. Do we all share the same reality?

I suppose in a broad sense we do, in that we're all on the same planet orbiting the sun at the same speed, but each of us inhabits a very small slice of that reality. Many, many things that are very important in my life would seem unfathomable to someone else, to the extent that things I spend hours on each day would not ever enter the consciousness of many other people. My life is just as real as everyone else's, but no one else can ever experience it. Even within the same society, there can be completely different realities. One need look no further than the old stereotypical upstairs, downstairs class divide. Does the master of the house really know what the servants are doing all day? Would he even understand if they told him? (The converse is also true, of course.) Two intersecting yet largely dissimilar realities exist within the same house. This is a weak example, I know. Unfortunately the really good and pertinent examples would be impossible to make, because the one side necessarily wouldn't understand enough about the other side's reality even to describe it. (Which, I'm well aware, is a very cheap rhetorical trick and I apologize for it.)

And now to Tolkien--

I don't think that "very pleasing tales" are ever "divorced from reality." Tales, pleasing and otherwise, are attempts to explain (whether overtly, as in myths, or obliquely, as in other types of stories), describe, reject, or have another relationship to reality. One can continue to put more and more verbs into my previous sentence without changing its meaning at all; the point is that every work of art is necessarily reacting to the artist's reality. The artist's reality is all that s/he knows and is therefore the only basis for art. (Of course I'm including imagination and inner life within the umbrella of reality.)

Going back to your original post, then, Hamlet and LoTR are exactly the same in their relationship to reality. Once the work of art exists it stands alone as another commentary on the "actual" world, and that function is the same whether the work is set in Denmark or Dunharrow, England or Eregion.

[davem]

Going completely off topic here, can I just say, in case I somehow get the reputation of being a Godless commie pinko liberal bedwetter (& leave the whole discussion of it right here) that the older I get the more wisdom I see in Tolkien's 'political' position of 'anarchism, philosophically understood'. In short, I'm not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side.

(Oh, & I don't have any WMD's, either )

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by tar-ancalime

Once the work of art exists it stands alone as another commentary on the "actual" world, and that function is the same whether the work is set in Denmark or Dunharrow, England or Eregion.

Insofar as we are talking about the physical settings of the tales I would agree with this. I can no more visit the Elsinore of Hamlet than I can visit the Shire. I can see the places that inspired these imagined worlds, but that’s about it.

Things are quite a bit different when we turn to the “moral landscape” of the tales, however. The universe that Hamlet addresses is one in which I actually live. Sure, in the play there are ghosts and (probably) a God, and there are kings, and women are regarded in not-exactly the same way they are these days, but all of these things are open to re-interpretation and reconfiguration. The reality of the play refers to the reality of the moral landscape that I live in, so I have a certain authority to tweak the former with reference to the latter.

The reality of LotR, however, refers to the reality of the moral landscape that Tolkien invented. I am free to question the existence of God, or the depiction of women in Hamlet, because it’s a mirror that’s been held up to a nature that I share with Shakespeare (in which he and I get to decide for ourselves if there’s a God and what he – or she – is like). I don’t have that option with Tolkien – in his world, the moral landscape includes Eru, whose actions and nature are a certain way. The reality of Middle-Earth is fixed and beyond my control in a way that the reality of Shakespeare’s Elsinore is not. That reality thus exists in a more difficult relation to the reality I live in.

Perhaps this is why so many people forsake the question of the reality of the tale and leap onto truth – it may not be real (there is no Eru; the world is not governed by a providential hand) but it seems/feels true (we want there to be an Eru; we wish we could believe that the world is governed by a providential hand). But I shudder at the implications of this, since the way I am now describing LotR makes it sound like the kind of deception/sorcery practiced by Sauron!

[davem]

Ok, let me start with my post from the Chapter by Chapter thread on A Knife in the Dark (I know its totally OTT, but I mean every word):

And that's when I fell in love.

It was that moment, looking out across the great desolate expanses of Middle earth that the fairy story spell of the Hobbit was broken for me. I had seen a new world stretched out before me for the first time, & I suddenly loved it absolutely, (& I've never fallen out of love with it). Looking back on my first reading of LotR, 28 years ago, I remember I had drifted through the earlier chapters, enjoying the pleasant escape into a fantasy world, but at this point, like Frodo in Lorien, I seemed to have stepped through a window into another world, a 'real' world.

This scene is, & always will be for me, Middle earth. If for Frodo its the case that:

then when davem, wanderer from this world, has passed back into the outer world, he will still stand on the summit of Weathertop & watch the Old Road winding out of the West towards the Misty Mountains.

& your own comment:

I second davem on the power of this moment: I still catch my breath at the description of the lands about the hill – it really is the first moment at which Middle-Earth fully comes alive in the book).

Why is that scene 'real'? Well, for me it was so 'real' I felt it - it was like someone had grabbed me by the solar plexus & wrenched me into Middle earth. My head spun, & I felt the sudden vertiginous lurch that anyone afraid of heights (as I am) would feel at suddenly finding themselves looking down on a real landscape from a height of a thousand feet. I could feel the cold, the wind in my face. It was REAL.

In other words, I'm not sure the moral dimension is relevant, & the question of whether I agreed or disagreed with Tolkien's own moral & ethical belief system never entered my head. The reality of that moment in that place was also totally divorced from the context of the story. Black Riders & Magic Rings played no part in it. I was in a suddenly intensely REAL place, & I couldn't understand how or why. Yet I was also at home, sitting with a book in my lap. Two places at once (torn in two!), yet both were, in their own way, equally real.

I can't explain that, but I can't explain it away, either. Its not about 'logic' - some things are real, even if you can't explain them.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by davem

I can't explain that, but I can't explain it away, either. Its not about 'logic' - some things are real, even if you can't explain them.

Aha! I knew it!! All this time you've been masquerading as a moral rationalist when is just knew that you were an existential subjectivist!!

*Fordim begins a taunting chant of. . .* Exis-tential Sub-ject-i-viiiiiist, Exis-tential Sub-ject-i-viiiiiist, Exis-tential Sub-ject-i-viiiiiist, Exis-tential Sub-ject-i-viiiiiist, etc

Hey! I think we may finally have found a title for you!

[tar-ancalime]

I am free to question the existence of God, or the depiction of women in Hamlet, because it’s a mirror that’s been held up to a nature that I share with Shakespeare (in which he and I get to decide for ourselves if there’s a God and what he – or she – is like). I don’t have that option with Tolkien – in his world, the moral landscape includes Eru, whose actions and nature are a certain way. The reality of Middle-Earth is fixed and beyond my control in a way that the reality of Shakespeare’s Elsinore is not.

Again, sorry, but I don't agree.

Shakespeare's Elsinore is just as fixed as Middle-Earth is: you can question God, women, and hosiery fashions till you're blue in the face, but you won't change Elsinore. As I said in my last post (rather obtusely, I fear), once the work of art exists it's fixed. We can interpret, question, and otherwise layer on ideas, but we don't change the art or the world it inhabits. No literary world is entirely the same as the one we inhabit--that's what makes literature different from journalism. And it seems to me that the difference between Shakespeare and Tolkien (not the only difference, of course, but the relevant one) is one of degree. Each author has invented a moral landscape and both moral landscapes are mirrors held up to the world we inhabit. You and Shakespeare are free to believe in God or not, and the inhabitants of Middle-Earth would be free to believe in Eru or not (is there any evidence that most hobbits even know of Eru?). You the reader have to accept Eru as a given, but only insofar as any reader must suspend disbelief in order to get through a work of literature. In other words, when reading Shakespeare you can't question the existence of Hamlet. The two worlds are very similar in that you must accept certain aspects of them at face value--the only difference is which aspects they are.

Thank you for starting this thread, by the way--this is much more fun than working on my dissertation!