[CLUE-Talk] Tolkien and allegory

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 01-10 10:27, 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...

Yep, posted this one wayyyyy back. The 28th sounds right. My clock is
correct, in any case. 
 
> > 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...) 

That's pretty funny.  I never had any courses in deconstruction, thank God.
I really have to laugh when I read that some deconstructionists take on
science. I'd love to be a fly on the wall for those "discussions" - it has
to be a hoot. I have a feeling they have no idea what they are toying with.
Chomsky won some points in my book when he attacked a lot of folks who
aren't working in a real science, and yet try to come up with theories that
are too complicated for anyone else to understand.
 
> > 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. 

Hmm. I didn't exactly *hate* Old Man & the Sea, per se, but the evaluation
did start to get old for me. We studied it in high school, and IIRC, we
spent a few weeks on it. It took about a half hour or so to read, and we
then belabored it for weeks. The annoying thing I found about it was that,
from our teacher's perspective, there was One Right Interpretation, and that
was final. That's a recurring problem I had with the liberal arts type stuff
throughout my education - whatever is en vogue at the time (or for the
teacher/prof in particular) that's the lens that all art will be examined
with. 

<diversion> It was in uni where I found that the lens often used could only
be called radical feminism. I had a lit class which was headed up by a woman
who I'm sure was a card-carrying NOW member. Anyway, she specifically
selected stories (many written in the 50's and 60's) that could be twisted
to her ends. Those ends were, boiled down, MEN BAD, WOMEN GOOD. It wasn't
helped much by the fact that one of the students was a woman who was screwed
over by a guy and she was apparently a single mother as the result. Those
two would sound off most of the class in what could only be called a
monologue done by more than one voice. All the guys in the room never said
boo unless they had to. It was a real struggle for me to keep my mouth shut
at some of these classes, but I did it. Oddly enough, the prof chose to talk
to me after class, because she said I wrote really well. I told her it was
probably because it was beaten into me by a certain English teacher in high
school (the same one that covered Old Man & the Sea). I remember I could
barely get this out since I was in such an internal rage over the day's
"discussion" - I mumbled this and nodded at whatever she said, and got out
as fast as I could. I wouldn't have minded the class so much if I had a fast
forward button for when those two (and a few other women) were on a rant
about how evil men are. It seemed less about achieving parity, and more
about getting even.  

But then there was a certain kind of justice. We had to attend a play given
about Inuits. The play prominently featured a very attractive female
topless. Needless to say, there was much bluster the next session about how
that was unnecessary, patriarchy, objectification, blah, blah. I had to
cover my smile in the back of the room.
</diversion>

There are other stories I could tell about lit classes regarding other lens,
like what is commonly called historical revisionism, but really isn't
"revisionism" so much as correcting common myths. Maybe they weren't so much
lens as hammers. And everything looked like a nail to some of these profs.
:) Luckily, none of my profs got out the Marxist lens, but I was a comp
science major - which is lumped in with engineers for most of those classes
(not the feminist one above, though). Maybe they figured there was only so
much we'd tolerate.

Maybe I'm twisted, but I actually ended up liking Hemingway's stuff despite
nearly beating the heck out of Old Man & the Sea. After Kerouac dropped so
many references to him in his books, I went back and read a lot of
Hemingway's stuff. 

I was vindicated years later when I read some interviews with Hemingway, and
I think it was one for Life where he said something derogatory about English
profs and teachers. I forget the exact quote, but the jist was that they
sought and found too much meaning.

I do think there is something to people subconsciously putting things in
their stories - I think that's what Tolkien might have been talking about
when he said he sought truth. If I understand what the article is saying, he
didn't SET OUT to make a "moral to the story" with certain symbols, but
instead, if certain patterns (such as Jung's archetypes?) came to the
foreground, that'd be the truth. 

-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at americanisp.net  
http://users.americanisp.net/~seanleblanc/
Get MLAC at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlac/
A man always needs to remember one thing about a beautiful woman. Somewhere, 
somebody's tired of her.