[CLUE-Talk] Tolkien and allegory

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Sun, 11 Jan 2004 10:43:49 -0700
Sean LeBlanc <seanleblanc at americanisp.net> wrote:

> 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. 

Yeah, that is a problem you'll run into with some lit instructors. 

I don't know that there's One True Reading of any particular text,
though there are certainly plenty of wrong ones... 

> <diversion> 
*snip*
> </diversion>

Yeah... I had a similar experience with one of my instructors. She was
definitely not fond of men, at least not heterosexual men. She would
disregard or disagree with just about anything I said in class, then
violently agree with someone else who said virtually the same thing if
they were female or if it was Marshall, the class "queer theory"
proponent who saw homosexual themes in virtually everything we read.
(He insisted that "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was full 
of rampant homosexual themes because there were no strong female 
characters... the fact that the novel was set in a Russian Gulag 
was apparently just a trifling detail...)  

Oddly, though she graded very fairly. 

> 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. 

To each their own... I didn't care for Hemingway's writing, at least not
when I was subjected to it in college. I definitely didn't see any
reason why Hemingway was somehow more relevant than other authors that
weren't included in many of the courses. 

> 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. 

Sounds about right. 

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