NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/fan/tolkien/1959

Text File | 1993-01-21 | 5.9 KB | 106 lines

Newsgroups: alt.fan.tolkien
Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!nntp.Stanford.EDU!jchokey
From: [e-mail] (James Alexander Chokey)
Subject: Re: Subcreation (was Re: Hobbits)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (Mr News)
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
References: <samw.727253780@bucket> <[e-mail]> <samw.727556042@bucket>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 93 08:32:53 GMT
Lines: 94

In article <samw.727556042@bucket> [e-mail] (Sam Warden) writes:
>
>[e-mail] (James Alexander Chokey) writes:
>
>>    [my disagreement with the approach of trying to fit the Hobbit into
>>    the framework of the Silmarillion is that]
>> ... it seems to imply
>>that Tolkien's ideas about the Hobbit's relationship to the Silmarillion
>>shortly before his death are somehow "more valid" and should take precedence
>>over the ideas he had of it when he was actually writing The Hobbit.
>
>Well, I do think that the finished sculpture is "more valid" in
>many ways than the roughed-out block, or the painting more valid
>than the pentimento.  Though both can be extremely interesting
>and both are certainly `real'.

    Fair enough, but there are a couple of things about that analogy
that make me uncomfortable.  First of all, I don't think it's fair to call
_The Hobbit_ a mere "roughed-out block."   I think it can quite easily stand
on its own as an independent work of literature and is not in any way an
"incomplete" work of art.  (This is, of course, an aesthetic, rather than
a scholarly judgement.)  Part of my dislike of the let's-fit-everything-into-
the-Silmarillion approach is that it effectively "denigrates" the status of
_The Hobbit_, turning it into a incomplete story that does not find its
fulfillment until much later. Is thinking of the Hobbit as an incomplete
work that is subordinate to others really more valid of an approach than
thinking of it as a complete and independent work of literature?

    My second disagreement is that I don't think it's fair to consider
the whole body of fictional works that Tolkien had created as a "finished
sculpture."  Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that we can think of
the whole of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings as one singular work of art,
rather than a related set of different works of art.  By the time of
Tolkien's death, this "sculpture" was still incomplete.  Tolkien still had
not yet completed the Silmarillion and the related tales.  It was his son
Christopher who had to put the finishing form on it--  and I think it is
certainly debatable as to just how "finished" that version of the
Silmarillion, or indeed the whole of Tolkien's oeuvre, really is.  I think
it is quite possible to see it as a still-incomplete work, as the presence
of a book entitled _Unfinished Tales_ suggests.



>
>It's silly to lose sleep over where the stone giants fit into
>the Silmarillion.  :-)  To the extent that that is your point
>I think we're in perfect agreement.  But I think there _are_
>connections of a different kind which I don't like to sweep
>aside: the Silmarillion was on Tolkien's mind, asserting an
>influence in the background if you will, as later became
>apparent.  More directly, The Hobbit was the direct forerunner
>to TLOTR of course.  And Tolkien himself expended efforts to
>revise and reconcile his stories, which I also regard as valid.
>I have often been struck by how meticulous he was of details
>like this.  Over and over I've found that names and references
>which I assumed were idle inventions had whole stories of their
>own to back them up.  My point is to argue respect for that,
>for his integrity as a subcreator.

    We are basically in agreement here.  There _are_ numerous
intertextualities-- quite obvious, deliberate, and undeniable connections--
between what might be called the Big Four fictional works of Tolkien (The
Hobbit, LOTR, The Silmarillion, and the Adventures of Tom Bombadil).  I'm
not trying to deny that.  It's just that, on the whole, Tolkien fans and
scholars seem to focus _only_ on the connections between the works, and look
at his fiction _only_ as it were a singular work of art, rather than a
multiplicity of different works of art that.  Many fans seem to expect from
T's fiction a uniformity and fictional homogeneity that, IMHO, is unreasonable
to expect from a set of writings that were developed over the course of fifty
years (or even up to seventy years, if we want to include the writings that
Christopher Tolkien has edited) and that appeared in several different works,
many of which were initially conceived of as independent and unrelated works
of literature.
    There is, by far, no shortage of people arguing that there are
connections between Tolkien's works.  On the contrary, a large number of
Tolkien fans seem to presume that Tolkien's works have to be seen _only_ as an
indivisible and completely coherent unity and ignore the very real differences
and discontinuities that pervade his work.  My basic point was that there
are differences and "anomalies" between T's various works, primarily because
they were, in fact, created as seperate works, even if they were later brought
together into one big meta-narrative. IMHO, it's quite amazing that there are
as few "anomalies" and "discontinuities" in the epic of Middle-earth that
there are, considering the circumstances under which the various stories that
became part of it were created.  The desire to have all of Tolkien's works
fit easily into one grand meta-narrative, IMHO, obscures for many readers
the fact that real differences that do exist between his works.  I'm not
trying to deny that Tolkien's works in many ways connected.  I'm just trying
to historicize the nature of that connection, to show why there are differences
between these works and why it is silly to try and seek to "resolve" these
differences.

    --  Jim C. <[e-mail]>