[CLUE-Talk] Tolkien and allegory

[Dennis J Perkins]

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:

>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. 
>

I'm not a believer in literary analysis and avoided literature classes 
in high school and college whenever possible.  The purpose of most 
stories is simple... tell an entertaining story.  Good stories have real 
plots to hold our attention.  They do not require analysis to understand 
them, altho some people might enjoy analyzing them.  And trying to apply 
analysis to stories from another era or culture is bound to produce 
ludicrous results.

I remember Asimov's autobiography saying that someone once told Asimov 
what he meant in one of his stories..  The guy justified it by saying, 
how would Asimov know what he meant?