‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man

In which case 'reader-perceived' allegory and applicability are not the same thing, and the reader should be free to take the story as an allegory if that is how he or she genuinely perceives it.


He tells us that it is not his intended meaning. But can it not still be the readers perceived meaning?

I repeat myself once again. Tolkien wrote his denial of allegory after the fact. Perceiving any kind of analogy with WWII is an act of retroactive reading, taking an historical context and reading it back into a text which was at least begun before the war, even if it was completed under the war's terrible cloud.

There are books which become more 'meaningful'--that is, more significant to our understanding of our world-- when events occur after they are written and published which somehow seem to resonate with events in the book, as if the book were prophetic in some way. The historical events make readers more aware of certain aspects in the book, things which might have been missed before the historical events, highlighting those events in particular ways which point to an interpretation.

This is entirely in keeping with how we read. We bring to every book we read our own personal experience and every other book we read. If we are attentive readers, we are careful to see how readerly desire informs our reading.

To me, the fascinating point about Tolkien's statement is how he attributes to the Allies tendancies more often attributed to Mordor--a point which the Hitler-allegorists were missing. Was Tolkien fighting against the developing mythology of WWII which created very much an evil/good split, particularly as the West came to know more and more about the Holocaust? Was he fighting against the victors' tendancy always to portray history from their point of view?

If so, he was suggesting that the act of reading and interpreting is a very subtle, complex act, rather than telling us an either/or way to read LotR.