Tolkien the Metafictionist

[NogrodtheGreat]

Hey, first time poster here!

As my first post I thought I'd start a pretentious thread about Tolkien and the notion of 'meta-fiction'. If anyone follows the journal 'Tolkien Studies' you may have noticed that over the last few years they've been running quite a few papers on the question of Tolkien's meta-fictional conceits. Brljak's article (2011) for instance argued that the overall conceit of the Lord of the Rings - that it is ultimately a translation of an unknown number of 'manuscripts' (only the initial manuscripts in the tradition having been actually written by Bilbo, Frodo and Sam) - is actually its defining characteristics and should be granted far more attention.

For example Brljak argues that we cannot 'view' the story contained within the pages of LoTR without some degree of readerly skepticism, given that Tolkien alerts us to the manuscript conceit in the Prologue (indeed explains it in considerable depth). He therefore argues for a new approach to Tolkien that "problematizes", to use that hideous piece of Po-Mo jargon, the novel's claim to authenticity. Furthermore, he argues that the prevalence of novelistic technique argues against the status of the work as a straightforward translation of 'Frodo's memoir' - instead we should see it as a 'history' that has been 'novelised' by successive generations of scholars.

But if we view the work in this way, what are we to make of its claims to verisimilitude? We treat the LoTR as though it were an unproblematic window into this 'Secondary World' - but what if (just bear with me!) it is nothing of the sort, and instead is an artistic compilation from out of that secondary world, but which represents it only fictionally.

This is perhaps all very ridiculous, but Brljak and Gergely Nagy have been arguing for some years that some kind of meta-fictional approach to Tolkien's work is essential. It both creates, and possibly distorts and undercuts, that familiar sense of 'depth' that Shippey and others have commented on.

Your thoughts about this?

[avar]

Originally Posted by NogrodtheGreat

We treat the LoTR as though it were an unproblematic window into this 'Secondary World' - but what if (just bear with me!) it is nothing of the sort, and instead is an artistic compilation from out of that secondary world, but with represents it only fictionally.

Welcome Nogrod - although I am new here too and this is my first post

I think there are statements of Tolkien that should be interpreted exactly like this - that the Lord of the Rings is a translation/adaptaion of (parts of) the Red Book, a fictional work mentioned in the text. The difference in tone between the Hobbit and LotR, for instance, is due to Bilbo being responsible for the former.

[NogrodtheGreat]

Originally Posted by avar

I think there are statements of Tolkien that should be interpreted exactly like this - that the Lord of the Rings is a translation/adaptaion of (parts of) the Red Book, a fictional work mentioned in the text. The difference in tone between the Hobbit and LotR, for instance, is due to Bilbo being responsible for the former.

Yes, this is correct. The Red Book of Westmarch, is, as I understand it, that copy of the memoirs of Bilbo, Frodo and Sam that is kept by Sam's family for generations at Undertowers in the Fourth Age. - but it is only one copy of several that were made.

In order to flesh out Brljak's thesis a little more I'll quote a couple of passages. Here he makes the point that 'depth' is created by Tolkien's style, and thereby a sense of "reality" is created.

The vistas remained in background, unexplained and unattainable, but depicted against such a background, the foreground could jump off the page, immersing its reader in a fantastic world realized with an unprecedented "reality" or "depth".

He then sums up what he calls the "dominant view":

...according to...[Shippey, Flieger et al.] the metafictional element...is important, but primarily as a frame, validating and authenticating the frame by producing the quality one may refer to as verisimilitude, depth, credibility and so forth.

Brljak then goes on to challenge this view, and reading about his ideas here prompted me to create this thread, because they genuinely challenge a 'consensus' that has developed in Tolkien studies in a very fascinating way:

In the midst of great adventure the reader, especially a careless one, is prone to submit to the illusion: after all, a good tale is supposed to "take us there". But the pseudophilological metafictional interface fulfills a task which is equally, if not more important - the task of dragging us back again, back to the "here", into the poignant awareness of the distance, of the chain of mediations stretching across an immense span of time and through the hands of various intermediaries. Tolkien's mature fiction is centrally concerned precisely with this inability of the text to ever take us to that vanished, irretrievable "there", from which even living memory was but the first remove.

[avar]

I see, you wished to discuss the implications of this. (I read the first post to cursively )

I agree that strictly, one may not be bound to take stuff recorded even in the LoTR - for instance, concerning the wings of the Balrog - as necessarily "canonical". As implied by the Red Book fiction, they are supposed to be ultimately based on the observations of the participants.

Then again, are there not statements by the author who suggest that he himself regarded the stories as recorded as basically "accurate"? (If you are right about the "pomo" inclination of the mentioned scholars, they may not regard this authorial intention as relevant, though.)

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by NogrodtheGreat

. . .

Brljak then goes on to challenge this view, and reading about his ideas here prompted me to create this thread, because they genuinely challenge a 'consensus' that has developed in Tolkien studies in a very fascinating way

I don't think one needs to go to po-mo theory to discuss the sense of layers of story--if that is what is meant by depth and not degree of realistic detail.

Tolkien himself had a theory of the the transmission of story and it's effect in story. See his essay on Gawain and the Green Knight. His comments are tantalizingly brief but I do believe he was there first.

And welcome to the Downs, NogrodtheGreat and avar. We already have a Nogrod so my money's on folks coming up with a different short nick for you than 'Nogrod'.

[NogrodtheGreat]

hmmm, "nog"?

[NogrodtheGreat]

hmmm, "nog"?

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by NogrodtheGreat

hmmm, "nog"?

Even that is sometimes used, and still might produce confusion. The nickname should make it perfectly clear which person we are referring to, so it should be completely different: therefore, I'm afraid you'd have to settle with "Great".

In any case, welcome both to the 'downs...