[CLUE-Talk] Tolkien and allegory

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 11:22:27 -0700
Sean LeBlanc <seanleblanc at americanisp.net> wrote:

Is your computer's clock off, or is something weird happening with mail
to clue-talk? (I thought it had been quiet...) I just got this e-mail
this morning, but it's dated the 28th of December...

> Last week at the pre-study group dinner, someone mentioned that Tolkien
> didn't like allegory. I just remember being stunned to hear that. In
> retrospect, I shouldn't have been - I do remember that he denied some of the
> symbolism that people have since attributed to his work. 

There's nothing unusual in that -- a lot of so-called literary criticism
is nothing more than someone trying to advance a particular school of
thought by reading something and then picking out a few bits so they can
use it as a vehicle for what they want to say. 

Of course, there's also the reverse -- it's entirely possible that an
author places symbolism into their work that they're not conscious of.  

(On another topic, there was an excellent article linked off of Slashdot
the last day or so about an engineer looking at the language used by
literary types. http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/decon.html --
excellent stuff, and if you've suffered through articles written by
literary professors, this piece will give you a great deal of
satisfaction...) 

> Even Hemingway has
> done similar stuff, though, IIRC: saying his stuff had no symbolism in it.
> If Hemingway's stuff was "just" about, for example, an old man fishing, it
> wouldn't be revered all that much. (I'm sure old Ernie isn't revered all
> that much anymore as it is due to his macho persona...I could see some of
> the feminists sharpening the knives when I was in uni back in 1991 - but
> that's another story). But I think I'm garbling up the terms "symbolism" and
> "allegory".

Ugh, Hemingway. Had to deal with "The Old Man and the Sea" when I was
taking Modern Literature (a misnomer, "modern" does not indicate
"modern" as in "now" it means a particular time period in the middle of
the 20th century. I don't recall the exact dates at the moment, but
we're not talking about anything in the last thirty years... what an
arrogant term...) and hated it with a passion.   

I think that many of the forms of literary criticism are fairly bogus.
You can't take a novel written in one time period and judge it by the
standards of another -- judging Hemingway by feminist standards, for
example, is patently unfair to Hemingway since he was writing from a
mindset created by his timeperiod. I got in all kinds of heated debates
with other lit majors about this because they'd rip an author to pieces
for being a misogynist or whatever, when the author was simply
reflecting the standards of their period. 

The worst of the lot is "reader response" though -- where everyone gets
to interpret the literature from their own point of view, and how it
makes them feel. That's for Oprah's book club, not for serious literary
criticism. 

> Huh? Doesn't Christianity itself have some conspicuously placed holidays and
> traditions that derive from "paganism"? Anyway.... 

Yes, but most practicing Christians don't seem to realize that. In fact,
I'd wager a guess that most of the people who are Christians have done
very little study into the religion or the historical practices of the
churches they belong to. This is something that bothers me greatly --
I'll speak to someone who very seriously believes that you'll burn in
Hell for eternity if you don't worship the right invisible being, but
they've done very little homework into the history of their own
religion, nor any exploration of other religions.  

Best,
Zonker
--
"Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off 
their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more." - Mark Twain