China Mieville on Tolkien and Epic/High Fantasy

Umbran said:
I dunno about infinite. Infinite is a lot. I'm not sure that the human mind is capable of coming up with an infinite number of concepts. In addition, despite some schools of thought, there are some limits of reasonability on what meanings are in a text.
Oh, yes, infinite. And by infinite I mean not that any given person can sit down and think up an infinite number of reasonable interpretations, but that we will never come to an end of reasonable interpretations. People are still finding new things to say about Genesis, which surely has to rank as one of the oldest tales of all time. I'm reasonably confident we will not run out of things to say about Hamlet.

Human creativity is a funny thing. It always defeats expectations and always finds a new point of view, just when you think it's exhausted every avenue.
I choose to ask about meaning because I find your method of asking "what does it say to you" tends to neglect the cases where the author had specific messages in mind, and tends to neglect the historical framework in which the piece was written. Your way seems to focus on the you and the now. While that's something that ought to be looked at, it is far from complete.
We are in complete agreement on everything except terminology. And I'm willing to let that slide.

Bigger fish to fry in this here pot...

:D
 

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Celtavian said:
He discusses those subjects because people were interested in them. He received countless letters from fans wanting more information on Middle Earth and the underlying mythology. The real telling factor here is his other book The Hobbit. An entirely different story from Lord of the Rings which people quite ignore when they attach such significance to Lord of the Rings.

Any messages or meanings are implied by the reader. He is not saying anything about the "importance of blood (ancestry)" or "friendship". He used those particular elements because they seemed to fit the genre.
Actually, the more I read of Tolkien's notes and Tolkien's life, the more I believe Tolkien included them because they meant something to him, and he believed strongly in the concepts the story uses. They are not just "part of the genre, or something used because it was interesting and it fit. The more I read of Tolkien, the more I understand that Tolkien wrote about what he believed in very strongly. Tolkien didn't write to be popular, he didn't write for critical or commercial acclaim, he wrote his books because those books were a window into who he was, and he deeply resented the way modern literature had grown. He deeply resented the change in values in society. His story was meant to be an escape to the kind of world he wished that ours was.

Granted, he didn't make those messages the focus of his story, so he can get away with saying that the stories have no intended meaning. But I think you are premature and, indeed, flat out wrong, to dismiss elements such as the ones I used as examples as mere tools to tell the genre story Tolkien wanted to tell.
 

barsoomcore said:
It's VERY interesting to re-read Zelazny in the wake of where Brust has taken that style (because there is no doubt that Brust draws heavily upon Zelazny, you're quite correct). Now Brust is far too humble to say so himself, but he has far outdone his predecessor. Zelazny simply isn't as skilled a technician as Brust.

I don't know... stylistically, maybe you're right. I love Brust's work, but I don't think he's better than Zelazny was on every score. Brust hasn't written anything that compares on a world-building level, in my opinion, with (say) Lord of Light. I read something online recently that explains the Jenoine a bit more to me, but I found them extremely intrusive and off-putting in the Vlad book in which they appeared heavily.

And I don't know if I've read anything in Brust as beautiful/evocative as some things I've read in Zelazny. I guess I'm a sentimentalist, but the passage that comes to mind is the one in which Corwin inscribes his Pattern, remembering Paris at the turn of the 20th century.
 
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I find Dragaera more thorough and compelling a world than Amber, frankly, though perhaps less ambitious philosophically.

However, I'm not saying that Brust is better than Zelazny in every single possible way. I'm just saying that, overall, Brust is the better writer. Obviously that's a very subjective thing to say, but I will say that he's demonstrably more competent a wordsmith than Zelazny ever was.

Beautiful and evocative? Agyar, Brokedown Palace and The Sun, the Moon and the Stars. Brust is a very terse writer and never wallows in his own sentences -- which subjectively is a style I prefer, so I find a great deal of beauty in his writing. Milage. Vary.
 

Fast Learner said:
Here we very fundamentally disagree. I and others here have described what meaning and message we see Tolkien as imbuing, and you have clearly stated that it doesn't matter what anyone says, you simply won't believe it, LALALALALA. That's fine, as you're fully entitled to your opinion. That doesn't make us rude for seeing something different.

Everything you stated concerning an author sending an unintended message is understood and true, but the onus is on the reader for any message that they receive when the author does not intend one.

Tolkien could just has easily have used completely different characters, ideas, plot elements, etc, etc. What would you be saying now had Sam turned evil and coveted the ring and Gollum been redeemed? What if Boromir had been seduced by the ring and fought Aragorn? What message would there have been then?

The only objective way to decide whether or not a work has a message is to determine the author's intent. Tolkien personally professed that he had no underlying message included within Lord of the Rings.

That does not preclude a work from having a meaning or message, a term I use loosely since I feel a message must be intended, to an individual reader. I personally find the Lord of the Rings very meaningful. I love the characters, the story, the traditional idealistic morality, the strange creatures, Sam and Frodo's friendship, and so many other elements included in the story. Yet I also understand that Tolkien could just as easily have changed any of those elements at any point in time because he was writing a tale and testing different ideas to see which ones he liked best.

I have already stated examples of authors such as Orwell who intended to send a message and made it quite clear. An author can create a meaningful work without intending to do so. An author can also send a clear message with the full intent to do so. There is a subtle difference between the two.

If there was not, then every author would be sending a message with every work. That is not the case, at least not from many author's standpoint and not from mine either.
 

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Joshua Dyal said:
Actually, the more I read of Tolkien's notes and Tolkien's life, the more I believe Tolkien included them because they meant something to him, and he believed strongly in the concepts the story uses. They are not just "part of the genre, or something used because it was interesting and it fit. The more I read of Tolkien, the more I understand that Tolkien wrote about what he believed in very strongly.

Granted, he didn't make those messages the focus of his story, so he can get away with saying that the stories have no intended meaning. But I think you are premature and, indeed, flat out wrong, to dismiss elements such as the ones I used as examples as mere tools to tell the genre story Tolkien wanted to tell.

They did mean something to him. I don't doubt that. Tolkien is my favorite author as I have already professed. I have read quite a deal on him and watched a few biographies on his life.

The one constant in his life is that he loved storytelling. He built Middle Earth over a number of years based on a variety of influences including the Bible, Beowulf and other forms of Norse mythology. He started a few storytelling groups and was an outspoken advocate of what is now termed speculative fiction.

Elements of his story that you mentioned could just as easily have been changed were the story's needs different. As I stated, there are alternative scenes he constructed for many of the characters which would have completely changed the story. Tolkien was a storyteller first. It brought him joy.

Tolkien didn't write to be popular, he didn't write for critical or commercial acclaim, he wrote his books because those books were a window into who he was, and he deeply resented the way modern literature had grown. He deeply resented the change in values in society. His story was meant to be an escape to the kind of world he wished that ours was.

This statement is very true. He knew he could not stop the changes, they were inevitable. So he created a place to escape from the bothers of daily life, and he did such an extraordinary job that others grew to love the work when it was published.

The above statement is exactly the reason why I don't think he intended to send a message. He was escaping, much like we do when we game. That doesn't mean that you can't gain insight into the man and his beliefs through his work, I just don't think he was sending a message to the masses in the same way that Orwell or Twain did in some of their works.
 

Celtavian said:
The only objective way to decide whether or not a work has a message is to determine the author's intent.
Objective? That presupposes that people have an objective point of view on their own thought processes. And then that they have an error-free means of transmitting that point of view. And that we possess a perfect way to translate that transmission into our own terms.

None of which are true, so I guess there is no objective way to decide whether or not a work has a "message".

I'm not saying (Umbran) that investigating authorial intent is valueless. I am saying that expecting to derive objective statements on a work of art from ANY source is a sure route to disappointment.

Here's a couple of interesting quotes from the good Professor for you to chew on:
Letter 142 to Robert Murray, S. J. (2 December 1953)

"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."
Letter 181 to Michael Straight (early 1956)

I hope that you have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings? ... It is a 'fairy-story', but one written for adults. Because I think that fairy story has its own mode of reflecting 'truth', different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or 'realism', and in some ways more powerful. ... But, of course, if one sets out to address 'adults' (mentally adult people anyway), they will not be pleased, excited, or moved unless the whole, or the incidents, seem to be about something worth considering, more e.g. than mere danger and escape: there must be some relevance to the 'human situation' (of all periods).
Clearly while Professor Tolkien did not intend for one single "message" to be read into his book, he DID hope that people would draw what I've been bludgeoned into calling "meaning" from it. Clearly he expected it to do more than provide an escape from the world.
Celtavian said:
An author can create a meaningful work without intending to do so. An author can also send a clear message with the full intent to do so. There is a subtle difference between the two. If there was not, then every author would be sending a message with every work.
An artist does send a message with every work. Just as you send a message with every gesture you make, every word you say, every post you write (does anyone else hear the Police?). We send messages, will or no, with every action. Our acts are interpreted by others to mean things. Very often things we did not intend. Indeed, very often the most important messages we send are the ones we do not intend to send.

Art (action) gives rise to interpretation. I have said before that a work of art does not have "a meaning" or "a message". What I meant is that no work of art admits to only one interpretation -- it is the nature of art that every reader, every audience, produces their own interpretation. It can be useful, powerful, to compare interpretations -- but nobody can ever claim that a single interpretation is the correct or final or ultimate one.

We can assess interpretations, of course. There are two criteria, neither of which have anything to do with authorial intent. The criteria for assessing interpretations are firstly, is the interpretation supported by the work itself, and secondly, is the interpretation itself interesting? For example, an interpretation of Hamlet that is well-supported by the text is that Hamlet is about a Danish prince whose father is dead. Well-supported, but not very interesting. Useful interpretations are those that are both well-supported AND interesting, but no interpretation, no matter how well-supported or interesting, will ever be the final interpretation.

Authorial intent -- you seem to keep coming back to this. There's a lot of problems with your position, some of which I've tried to outline already. It's hard to determine -- claims of objectivity are patently false. It changes -- you're applying your own interpretation (whoops! there we are again!) to Tolkien's other writing as a means of claiming primacy for another interpretation of a different work? Shaky logic, my friend. Finally, it doesn't supply much to the debate.

Critical discussion should never be about closing off possibilities -- except as the evidence and the interest of the possibilities themselves dictates. If somebody wants to suggest that LotR is an allegory for gasoline prices in the 70's, let 'em try. I submit that my two criteria above will demolish such an interpretation without any need for recourse to authorial intent (let alone date of publication!). But introducing authorial intent as a means of shutting down possibilities is just foolish. Use it to offer new possibilities -- not until I learned that Tolkien had been a devout Catholic did it ever occur to me to look for the Catholic ideas contained within the book. Now I see them clearly and they're among the book's most powerful ideas. So knowing about the author can be helpful -- but it does not provide any authority to any interpretation.

So when somebody posits that LotR reveals Tolkien's class snobbery, the supposed fact that Tolkien intended no messages in his work is of no value in assessing that idea. We have to turn to the work itself and see what IT says, not what the Professor says it says.
 

barsoomcore said:
So when somebody posits that LotR reveals Tolkien's class snobbery, the supposed fact that Tolkien intended no messages in his work is of no value in assessing that idea. We have to turn to the work itself and see what IT says, not what the Professor says it says.


I don't really think that this statement is fully applicable to Tolkien purely because his writing methods were quite radical compared to other authors (remember that the whole work of Middle earth is primarily linguistic in inspiration as he said many times). To start with Tolkien used to name his characters and places and then derive from that standpoint alone how the name defined the character. His writing therefore never followed the standard path of fleshing a character out for example, he actually tried to work out how something came to be or what is was like in a much more logical fashion. He after all regarded himself as more of a historian reporting what happened in Middle earth so when he wrote something it was not the case that he wrote it because thats how he wanted it to be, more that from his standpoint that was the only possible way it could be. Tolkien always regarded Middle Earth as something he had discovered not created himself.

Whilst its pretty much impossible for an author to not have a message in any work he writes, because after all that work is based on his on life experiences and will always therefore reflect his persective on the world the problem it seems with people like Melville is that they don't really understand just how fastidious Tolkien was with the above method. This is the same man after all who when asked by a by a farmer if she could name some of her bulls after the elves in Rivendell flatly told her that it was inappropriate and suggested a name like Mundo instead. Following that though he then had to sit down and work out why Mundo was a word related to bulls. Therefore while trying to say that Tolkien had no message is as such probably wrong however trying to draw extreme conclusions from the work is also equally inaccurate (which is what Melville has done). Indeed the fact that people seem to disagree so much about what Tolikens book means and what it supposedly says is probably an indication of some sort as to just how much freedom the reader is allowed to draw conclusions of his own rather than being forced in a particular direction by the author.

Anyway the whole idea that Tolkien was some sort of class snob is ridiculous. He even explicitly states in his letters that Sam Gamgee was based on the privates he met in the trenches, people who he says he regarded as being much superior to himself even though he was an officer. He must have been a very strange class snob if he regarded the supposed "lower class" as being superior to the "higher class". Personally I think that this view is illustrated by how Tolkien writes about Sam throughout the book. If Melville is trying to suggest that Tolkien is a class snob I'd think it more likely that his observation seems more one drawn by an agenda than by common sense , even though I'm sure that many people would be shocked that such a thing happens in the world of literary criticism ;)
 
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barsoomcore said:
Objective? That presupposes that people have an objective point of view on their own thought processes.

Not really. It presupposes that they have a subjective view of their own thought processes as in Tolkien knew that he did not intend to send a message. He voiced that subjective opinion of his own work.


Clearly while Professor Tolkien did not intend for one single "message" to be read into his book, he DID hope that people would draw what I've been bludgeoned into calling "meaning" from it. Clearly he expected it to do more than provide an escape from the world.

Why is it when I read those quotes I understand them as saying he wanted to stay true to his religious beliefs. If you search further, you will find that there was actually alot of pressure from his Catholic and Christian friends to not stray from his faith. He would actually allow a certain Catholic friend to peruse the unpublished story to see if there was anything within it that could be deemed heresy.

An artist does send a message with every work. Just as you send a message with every gesture you make, every word you say, every post you write (does anyone else hear the Police?). We send messages, will or no, with every action. Our acts are interpreted by others to mean things. Very often things we did not intend. Indeed, very often the most important messages we send are the ones we do not intend to send.

Yeah, ok. I didn't say anything about a unintended meaning.

Art (action) gives rise to interpretation. I have said before that a work of art does not have "a meaning" or "a message". What I meant is that no work of art admits to only one interpretation -- it is the nature of art that every reader, every audience, produces their own interpretation. It can be useful, powerful, to compare interpretations -- but nobody can ever claim that a single interpretation is the correct or final or ultimate one.

Ok. I never said otherwise.

We can assess interpretations, of course. There are two criteria, neither of which have anything to do with authorial intent.

I respect an author's intent enough not to use my interpretation to deride their work or to assume that they take a certain moral stance on a given issue.

The criteria for assessing interpretations are firstly, is the interpretation supported by the work itself, and secondly, is the interpretation itself interesting? For example, an interpretation of Hamlet that is well-supported by the text is that Hamlet is about a Danish prince whose father is dead. Well-supported, but not very interesting. Useful interpretations are those that are both well-supported AND interesting, but no interpretation, no matter how well-supported or interesting, will ever be the final interpretation.

Your point?

Authorial intent -- you seem to keep coming back to this. There's a lot of problems with your position, some of which I've tried to outline already. It's hard to determine -- claims of objectivity are patently false.

No, they are not. There is nothing else to go on but what the author himself says about a work. If he tells me he did not write it with any message in mind, then I believe him.

Certainly doesn't mean I can't take what I want from the story that seems to have meaning and interpret as I will. It just means that I can't go cajoling the author into some corner attributing a variety of opinions to him because I interpret his work a certain way. Tactless and rude. The main reason I don't care for Mieville's assessment of Tolkien's work.

It changes -- you're applying your own interpretation (whoops! there we are again!) to Tolkien's other writing as a means of claiming primacy for another interpretation of a different work? Shaky logic, my friend. Finally, it doesn't supply much to the debate.

I am respecting the author and showing that he can indeed claim he intended no message. He has written other stories with completely different elements and themes such as Sir Gawaine and Green Knight and I believe a science fiction tale of which I cannot remember the name.

When an author uses certain plot elements or themes to create a story, that doesn't mean he is the definitive source on them or they are necessarily his own absolute opinions.

Critical discussion should never be about closing off possibilities -- except as the evidence and the interest of the possibilities themselves dictates. If somebody wants to suggest that LotR is an allegory for gasoline prices in the 70's, let 'em try. I submit that my two criteria above will demolish such an interpretation without any need for recourse to authorial intent (let alone date of publication!). But introducing authorial intent as a means of shutting down possibilities is just foolish. Use it to offer new possibilities -- not until I learned that Tolkien had been a devout Catholic did it ever occur to me to look for the Catholic ideas contained within the book. Now I see them clearly and they're among the book's most powerful ideas. So knowing about the author can be helpful -- but it does not provide any authority to any interpretation.

Authorial intent allows an author to explore themes they may agree or disagree with while not condoning or taking an opinion on the matter. It is important to consider the intent of the author prior to labeling his work or attempting to analyze it using your own subjective morality.

For example, if someone writes a tale with a serial as the main "protagonist", does that somehow mean that he or she thinks serial killing is an acceptable form of behavior? I think not.

Authors can and do use plot elements and themes to create stories. A competent story teller does such things and I believe Tolkien was a competent storyteller capable of telling a tale without sending me a message about how I or anyone else should live or whether or not class systems are right or how every friendship should be.

So when somebody posits that LotR reveals Tolkien's class snobbery, the supposed fact that Tolkien intended no messages in his work is of no value in assessing that idea. We have to turn to the work itself and see what IT says, not what the Professor says it says.

Only if you wish to consider a work such as Tolkien's capable of promoting the idea of class snobbery. Do you consider Lord of the Rings capable of morally persuading others to embrace the idea of class snobbery?

I don't. I think Tolkien can include a class system in his work for no other reason than historical precedence to lend believability to a tale set in a long ago time. Whereas he himself may have had vastly different ideas about the class system.

To force a message on an author because of something he created from his imagination primarily to entertain himself and other willing readers is ludicrous and rude. I'll have no part of it.
 
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