To
what extent do The Lord of
the Rings and The
Hobbit invite audience participation?
This was one of the questions
we addressed in our first Thinklings meeting of 2014. In a recent article Nils Ivar
Agøy argues that ‘The Lord of the Rings is a
book to make ones own’,[1]
whilst Verlyn Flieger has called the novel ‘something of a chameleon’, a novel
that will ‘take on whatever literary hue best blends with its readers
assumptions’.[2] We
discussed to what extent we believed these notions to be true and what the implications were for how we read Tolkien, as individuals, in the furture. The following
quote from Agøy’s article, which we
considered in some detail,
received a mixed response:
The Lord of the Rings...invites participation, in many
subtle ways. Then, too, we simply have to contribute something of our own if we
are to visualize what happens in it. Tolkien’s descriptions are rarely very
detailed. People, buildings and objects are usually described more or less as
the scenery or weather is described, quite vaguely, that is; as seen from a
distance...The book encourages,
almost forces the reader to make her own, more detailed
pictures of people and settings—which many do so thoroughly as to become quite
annoyed when they discover, in illustrations or films, for instance, that
others see things differently.[3]
The
group was very much interested in the idea that The Lord of the Rings could be in some way ‘personalised’ and
generally agreed that it did require readers to participate in the creation of
the story. Some members, however, did question the extent to which Tolkien’s writing
is ‘rarely very detailed’. After all, there are many examples of Tolkien
entering into in depth descriptions of places and characters. The
wasteland-esque description of Mordor is one example and Treebeard another
(although this character has been visually depicted in various ways in
artwork). There were clearly some aspects of Middle Earth and its inhabitants
that Tolkien did not want to relinquish authorial control over.
Tolkien’s
reluctance to give his readers imaginative freedom in all areas of his created
world led us on to consider Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ theory, which
suggests that ‘to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text’.[4]
We compared this theory with the following quote from Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy
Stories’:
However good in themselves, illustrations do
little good to fairy-stories. The radical distinction between all art
(including drama) that offers a visible presentation and true literature is
that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind
and is thus
more progenitive. It is at once
more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or
stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet
each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination.[5]
Most members
were unaware that Tolkien held such an opinion of art and drama. Was Tolkien,
like Bartes, against the imposing nature of an author on a text? Did he want to
give some of the sub-creation process over to his readers? We considered the
work of Benjamin Saxton which considers the extent to which Tolkien allowed his
characters agency and to which he, himself, relinquished authorial control.
Says Saxton, ‘Tolkien spoke explicitly against the notion of an author
controlling a text’.[6]
This part of his article particularly interested us:
As his Letters
demonstrate most forcibly,
Tolkien often defended his
writing against [...] perceived misreadings of
his work. For example,
in response to
Morton Zimmermann’s screenplay
of The Lord of the
Rings, Tolkien complained that he frequently found his work treated
‘carelessly in general, in places recklessly...’ (Letters
270). On the
one hand Tolkien’s
displeasure is
understandable especially for
any of us
who feels that
his creative work
has been misinterpreted or
overlooked. But how do
these comments square
with Tolkien’s insistence on
the ‘freedom of
the reader’ instead
of ‘the purposed domination of the author?’[7]
The
group contemplated whether or not Tolkien was being hypocritical, whether he
was actually reluctant to give up ‘control’ of his work. Did Tolkien want the
best of both worlds? Some members considered this might be the case, and
wondered how Tolkien would have reacted to the cartoon depiction of Thranduil
as an ugly toad-like creature in a loin cloth. Yet one member took this example
of artistic interpretation to argue that Tolkien was right to criticise
interpretations of his work if they were, as he said, ‘reckless’. Perhaps he
would simply have had to suffer the depiction of Thranduil thus, if he does not
describe elves in much detail in his work? After all, people have many ideas of
what elves look like based on various examples they have come across in
childhood stories and fairytales. Flieger seems right to say the novel is a
‘chameleon’ based on the readers’ assumptions – was the cartoon version of
Thranduil ‘reckless’ or inaccurate or simply a product of what the director
thought he knew of elves from other cultural sources?
[1]Nils
Ivar Agøy, ‘Vague or Vivid?: Descriptions in The Lord of the Rings’, Tolkien Studies, 10 (2013), 49-67 (p.
49).
[2] Verlyn
Flieger, 'A Postmodern Medievalist?', in Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages,
ed. by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), pp. 17-28 (pp.17-18).
[4] Roland
Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ in Image,
Music, Text (New York: Hill, 1977), pp 142-148 (p. 147).
[6] Benjamin Saxton, ‘J. R. R. Tolkien,
Sub-creation, and Theories of Authorship’, Mythlore, 31 (2013),
47-59 (pp. 56-7).
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