Subject: meaning in literature
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 29 2001 - 03:48:03 GMT
(I think this is a bit late and I might have already missed the discussion,
but school and work have kept me from the bowl for over a year now and I
fear I'm already being forgotten. So better late than never, I suppose.)
J.R.R. Tolkien flatly denied that he wrote allegorical fiction, saying in
fact that he had hated allegory since he was old enough to recognize when it
was being used. He said that fiction need not be allegorical to be
applicable and that these two -- allegory and applicability -- are too often
confused. Maybe this is only vaguely relevant, or even not relevant at all;
but I've been thinking about it just hard enough that I'm now struck by some
sort of relevance and I probably won't know until tomorrow whether I'm
imagining it. So I'll talk about it now, self-deluded or not.
As it often does, my gut wants to agree with Scottie. Zealous symbol
seekers do tend to strike me unfavorably, although I am sometimes uncertain
how much of the bitter taste comes from their claims and how much comes from
their presentation. I am unsure how much of the fault lies within myself,
but I frequently have trouble discerning symbol-heavy literary expositions
from overtly pretentious displays. I am, however, sympathetic to claims
that we can reasonably read between the lines at least to some extent,
inferring that which is not strictly literal. Somebody said that God
created poems to be smarter than poets, and while that's initially hard for
me to swallow, something about it does seem to me to get at truth.
Maybe Tolkien's distinction between allegory and applicability is the
important one. Perhaps the poet has the last word about allegory but about
applicability the poem speaks for itself and might have surprises even for
the poet.
-robbie
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