Tolkien understood the sort of literature he wrote to be beyond the realm of mere drama, which, as he opined earlier, was “anthropocentric,”¹ something we can take to mean as concerned only with the affairs of the characters. Narrative art perhaps includes drama but is in no way solely defined by it; Tolkien, to reiterate, considered the full work of narrative art to be the creation of a coherent ‘secondary world’ as a sub-creation of the artist. This is, in other words, a fictional world which offers a brief reprieve from the drudgery of modern life. An escape.

Before continuing, a brief promised aside is worth consideration: that of Peter Jackson’s efforts in attempting the impossible: to bring The Lord of the Rings to the silver screen. In the last section, Jackson’s films were strongly criticized for deviating so far from the substance and content of their namesakes as to be presenting a different story altogether. This is certainly true, but it seems unlikely to have unfolded that way out of a particularly malicious intent.

It can charitably be said that Jackson was more interested in writing a blockbuster action film rather than telling the story of The Lord of the Rings. Here we take into consideration the method by which he set the parameters for the script writing for both himself and his team, his intentions at the onset of production and upon its completion, and his overall approach at bringing what he believed to be Tolkien’s story to life. The films mobilized a cast and crew numbering in the thousands and were financed by hundreds of millions of dollars in money that belonged to New Line Cinema. If the films bombed, he’d have been drawn and quartered and, in all likelihood, found difficulty finding work in the film industry for a decade or two.

With this in mind, the accomplishments of Jackson’s film trilogy speak for themselves. He swept the Academy Awards in 2003 with the last installment, propelled WETA Workshop into the status of nearly a household name, and sent the whole cast—who didn’t already have well-established careers, such as Ian McKellen or Christopher Lee—propelled into the center stage of public stardom. It cannot be said that Jackson’s method of adaptation, his approach to ensuring a return on New Line Cinema’s investment, didn’t pay off. It in fact reaped quite the dividends, as by the end of Return of the King’s theatrical release, it alone was one of the highest grossing films of all time, to say nothing of the cumulative financial success of its counterparts.

It must therefore be acknowledged that Jackson must have done something right, to speak somewhat glibly. He tapped into a public consciousness of what people wanted out of a film portrayal of The Lord of the Rings: a swashbuckling, action packed adventure story with fairly by-the-book developments for its characters, even when these developments were invented out of thin air and flew in the faces of the characters Tolkien portrayed. But in the twenty-five years since their release, Jackson only seems to be more and more vindicated; spend any time online, around forums or on social media sites, and one needs only to scroll long enough to find the most facile criticisms of Tolkien’s work imaginable coming from self-professed fans. When they read the book, what they want is the movie.

This last section is to address this phenomenon specifically: in some sense, to attempt to answer the question of where it all went wrong. Can a book be interpreted the wrong way—the answer here seems obvious—and if so, has some wrong been committed that, in the process, attacks the book itself? To answer this fully, we look at fandom, interpretive modes, and, briefly, art, while keeping in mind Tolkien’s views on the subjects.

Role Play and Fandom Community

If the creation of a secondary world was all Tolkien was truly interested in, then one might assume that, had he lived long enough, he would have appreciated the eventual development of video games and virtual reality, even if in his own curmudgeonly fashion he critiqued or ridiculed the technology required to power them. Tolkien did live at a time of tabletop strategy or war games, though by present standards, they would seem remarkably archaic and largely irrelevant to what tabletop “role-playing” gaming would eventually turn into. It wouldn’t be until the year after Tolkien’s death that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson would publish the original Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop RPG that probably needs no introduction. It should be made clear, however, that the D&D of Gygax and Arneson owed its mechanics to the tactical war-gaming tabletop experiences of the times, and although it did include and embrace the elements of ‘role-playing’, it would take another two decades before the role-play aspect of the game became an end unto itself. This distinction is important to remember.

Fewer titles have done more to shape the public consciousness of high fantasy than Dungeons & Dragons, except perhaps Lord of the Rings itself. They are radically different things, however; one is a game with rules and, perhaps, lore for those interested enough in it. The other, as attested to so far, is a story. Still, given the proximity these two titles occupy in the social landscape, one wonders whether a similar interpretive mode can be applied to both in order to engage with them.

The answer is no, and in fact, Gary Gygax illustrates this himself:

Though I thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit, I found the “Ring Trilogy”… well, tedious. The action dragged, and it smacked of an allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler’s Nazi evil. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Professor’s dedicated readers, I must say that I was so bored with his tomes that I took nearly three weeks to finish them.²

That Gygax misreads The Lord of the Rings is hopefully self-evident, given how he characterized it as some class-war parable against Nazi Germany. This particular reading was not uncommon (and surprisingly, remains so today) despite the various forces of the Enemy bearing no resemblance whatsoever to either the mid-century German war machine or its government.

His misreading is deeper than a superficial confusion of context or allegory, however, as his misreading characterizes exactly how the popular culture today attempts to read much of Tolkien’s work, and why so little of The Lord of the Rings in popular discourse seems to reflect what the narrative actually is. Gygax continues, making explicit note of the things of Tolkien’s work that did not influence the development of D&D:

Considered in the light of fantasy action adventure, Tolkien is not dynamic. Gandalf is quite ineffectual, plying a sword at times and casting spells which are quite low-powered (in terms of the D&D® game). Obviously, neither he nor his magic had any influence on the games. The Professor drops Tom Bombadil, my personal favorite, like the proverbial hot potato; had he been allowed to enter the action of the books, no fuzzy-footed manling would have been needed to undergo the trials and tribulations of the quest to destroy the Ring. Unfortunately, no character of Bombadil’s power can enter the games, either—for the selfsame reasons! The wicked Sauron is poorly developed, virtually depersonalized, and at the end blows away in a cloud of evil smoke… poof! Nothing usable there. The mighty ring is nothing more than a standard ring of invisibility, found in the myths and legends of most cultures (albeit with a nasty curse upon it). No influence here, either….³

Gygax writes that he had nourished his sense of fantasy on the works of Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, A. Merritt, and H.P. Lovecraft, with additional inspirations coming from the likes of Zealzany, E.R. Burroughs, Moorcock, and Phillip Jose Farmer.⁴ These authors are much closer to the definers of ‘genre fantasy’ than Tolkien’s comparatively academic efforts are, though several of them obviously draw from a similar, overlapping, or related wellsprings of folklore and cultural knowledge.

He does not nourish it from any literary background, however, particularly in his interpretive mode. For Gygax, the Ring is little more than a cursed trinket that grants invisibility, Sauron (or Saruman; it’s hard to tell, considering that it was the latter who dissolved into a cloud of smoke) should have been destroyed in some great apocalyptic battle, and Gandalf should have stepped up his magic game instead of wave a sword around. This indicates that Gygax was not interested enough in The Lord of the Rings to engage with it on its own terms; he wanted a sword and sorcery high fantasy pulp, and when he didn’t get it, he dismissed the entire work out of hand as “tedious.” Consider now any popular ‘critiques’ of the book one might hear from random passersby, either online or in real life. The method should sound familiar.

As a brief but related aside, Gygax’ legacy would itself undergo a similar transformation. As noted earlier, D&D did not start off as an exercise or game devoted primarily to role-play, but rather as a tactical tabletop game with obvious and direct inspiration from the tabletop war gaming that had come before. The role play element was intended to be an element of immersion into the fantasy world that made D&D distinct from some of its competitors at the time.

The release of each new edition of D&D resulted in rule sets so different as to be incompatible with one another; the first few offering greater development and elaboration on the existent ethos of a tactical war game, up until the 90s release of 3.0, wherein the role-play element and character creation moved toward becoming an end in and of itself. Others in the BrOSR community have written and talk about this with greater qualifications, details, and interest than myself, however, so search them out for more detailed analyses of the change or contortion of D&D.

This aside is included for the simple reason that what happened to D&D was part of the same social phenomenon that happened to the popular interpretation and general consensus of Tolkien’s work. In both cases, the common conception of the work in question has deviated so far from what the works are as to be unrecognizable, and this in turn has influenced newcomers to attempt changing it into something it was never supposed to be. In D&D’s case, that means the game is now a completely different game. In Tolkien’s case, it means that ‘fans’ of the work feel free to abuse whatever was sold as “intellectual property” so that otherwise unrelated studios can make video games, television shows, and branded Denny’s breakfast meals.

Narrative Art and Literature

It is by Tolkien’s own admission that he had “not been nourished by English literature.”⁵ Rather, his education and interest had lay in the classics, particularly in Homer. The tradition of the English novel, rather recent by his considerations, never particularly interested him; this explains the total absence of any comments, engagements, or interactions with the works of the English Modernists whose works remained relevant in literati spheres well into the periods in which Tolkien was most at work on his writing. As he mentions in a letter more than a decade after his book’s publication, The Lord of the Rings “is not a novel, but an ‘heroic romance,’ a much older and quite different variety of literature.”⁶

When placed in context with the themes of Tolkien’s work, both in The Lord of the Rings and the broader mythic Arda cycle he strained with throughout his entire career, one can’t help but consider his endeavor as something yearning to have belonged to a lost age: a Don Quixote for the war-torn England. Tolkien’s own strains of anti-modernism and anti-industrialism pitted him against the land of his birth as the times, so to speak, sought to catch up to themselves; and this, he viewed, came at the expense of whatever remained of a Merrie Olde England. This is why, despite being a novel written in English, there’s some merit to be found in protesting its classification as an English Novel per se; it lacks all exterior trappings of a timely work concerned with contemporaneous events and attitudes.

This only somewhat superficial, however; as was explored in the previous section, The Lord of the Rings does not escape its author so much as is something of a textual embodiment of him. And a man lives in his times the way a fish lives in water. What is different between Tolkien’s work and that of the ‘novelists’ or the other literary figures of his day is that Tolkien sought explicitly not to reflect the times in his work.

Tolkien expressed his thoughts on the literary tradition very strongly in the same letter that he dismissed the categorization of his work as an English novel. In particular, he stressed his general disdain for efforts of literary criticism or analysis, biographic ‘investigation,’ or other such tools used in the process of thorough interpretation:

One of my strongest opinions is that investigation of an author’s biography (or such other glimpses of his ‘personality’ as can be gleaned by the curious) is an entirely vain and false approach to his works—and especially to a work of narrative art, of which the object aimed at by the author was to be enjoyed as such: to be read with literary pleasure. So that any reader whom the author has (to his great satisfaction succeeded in ‘pleasing’ (exciting, engrossing, moving etc.), should, if he wishes others to be similarly pleased, endeavor in his own words, with only the book itself as his source, to induce them to read it for literary pleasure. When they have read it, some readers will wish to ‘criticize’ it, and even to analyze it, and if that is their mentality they are, of course, at liberty to do these things—so long as they have first read it with attention throughout. Not that this attitude of mind has my sympathy: as should be clearly perceived in Vol. 1 p. 272: Gandalf: ‘He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.’⁷

One might suggest that this is exactly what this entire piece has been: a use of the author’s life in the effort to understand his work. Not quite. The use of his letters and drafts to illuminate the text of The Lord of the Rings has been limited to Tolkien’s thoughts on the text itself or otherwise related to it. Only in the use of proving that an author can never be truly independent of a work he’s written have a few instances of using his life experiences to buttress the use of particular devices in his work. Secondly, while it remains this author’s opinion that a text can and should speak for itself—that whatever a writer has to say about his particular work should be included within that work and, for the most part, nowhere outside of it—Tolkien himself did not share quite as puristic a view on this as other writers have.⁸ This being said, as evidenced by the letters that have been cited, and indeed by the hundreds of others that weren’t, Tolkien’s ‘extra-textual’ commentary on The Lord of the Rings never contradicts nor even adds to the story he wrote. He does not make up rules about the world in letters to bystanders, nor does he explain aspects of the plot that aren’t at least implicitly grasped by the attentive reader. All of his commentary is done only to verify what’s he already included in the work.

In addition, Tolkien’s criticism of the use of literary analysis and critique, as well as his accusation that the act of analysis somehow breaks or damages the work, seem more than a little misplaced. This letter was written in 1971, however, near the end of his life and almost two decades after the initial publication of The Lord of the Rings. In considering his relation between analysis, literary criticism, and the incursion of damage, one can only assume that the harsh words from figures in the literary establishment left him bereft of any interest in further dialogue along such grounds. Worse, being an artist who took such seriousness in the accumulation of details and the formulation of his ‘Secondary World’, with keen attention to narrative, the common superfluous attempts to draw superficial analogies between his work and the World Wars no doubt exacted a great and tedious toll.

One could interpret his words here in their plainest sense, but this would only lead to either outright contradiction or, worse, a pessimistic nullification of his own work, as if a form of artistic suicide. The Lord of the Rings should be read for ‘literary pleasure,’ he insists, yet he would find it ridiculous should anyone subject the novel to scrutiny or analysis. Such a stance is strikingly at odds with the details he went to great lengths to include in the narrative, not just in terms of ‘world-building’ but in highlighting specific thematic notions of power, consequences, authority, et cetera, some of which were given attention in the previous section of this piece. Moreover, the notion that an artist would spend fifteen years of his life on a manuscript number six-hundred-thousand words and then, after it had been published, insist that no one should pay attention to it is absurd. He seems to admit this much, at least, yet draw some mysterious distinction between “reading it with attention” and “even analyzing it.”

In this same letter, Tolkien expresses disdain for “affixing ‘labels’ to writers,” at least in the sense that such practice “overemphasizes what is common […] and distracts attention from what is individual (and not classifiable).”⁹ While there’s some truth to the notion that genrefication can lead to truly inspired works getting miscategorized or neglected fair treatment by proper audiences, the sad truth is that most works in the modern publishing industry self-genrefy. Particularly in the case of fantasy and science-fiction, writers are too eager to have their work considered according to particular genres, as these genres offer conventions, shared narrative rule sets, and a common interpretive mode that makes it easier for fans to ‘engage’ with their works. As literacy proves to be another domain of diminishing returns, it’s hard to fault authors with the desire to be storytellers seek to game a system necessary to reap some sales. In 1971, when Tolkien expressed this sentiment, the building of the genrefied publishing industry was already well underway, but very much to Tolkien’s credit, his work cannot easily be categorized into the high fantasy genre. Despite sounding like a bitter curmudgeon in this late piece of commentary, his words on this issue, with regard to The Lord of the Rings, remains true.

This has been one of the main thrusts of this entire piece. Although Tolkien requests to avoid interpretation according to literary critique or analysis, his words on the subject seem to indicate a misunderstanding of what proper literary analysis actually does. Moreover, his understandable interest in denying the flattening language of genre categorization, ironically, speaks to a desire to be read according to means that aren’t beholden to genre per se. In absence of ‘genre’, when it comes to the written word, one has only ‘literature’ left. Tolkien’s conception of literature, the “English novel,” in all likelihood fell into a particular genre at the time, but that category now does not exist. Although experimental fiction and ‘timely’ works fill the niche, the similarities across works now considered High Literature are too disparate to adequately ascribe a coherent category to. Much like the category of the ‘art film’ encompasses the experimental, the serious, the abstract and the realistic alike, so too does ‘literary fiction’ fulfill the role of artistic narrative in a way that no other genre suffices.

This is precisely why literary fiction is written for the purpose of critical or analytical engagement. Any serious writer will tend toward imbuing his works with details and themes that require this sort of engagement in order for the work to be best understood. This act is not even necessarily intentional so much as a result of a master keenly attuned to the practice of his craft and the desire to reflect meaning back into the world. This is not to mean, as Tolkien might have suggested above, that he does so with the intention of specifically attracting the attention of literary critics or to have his work critically analyzed in literary journals. Such an end is just as superfluous as throwing together a manuscript for the pulps in order to cash out on a few dollars now and then; the former’s payout is measured in personal satisfaction and bragging rights rather than a few more numbers on a balance sheet.

Interpretive Mode and Consumer Media

This talk of genre in the arts returns the topic of this piece to consumer media and interpretive modes. Literature, in whatever loose categorical definitions one might make for it, demands of its audiences an attention to the work itself. It presents, in each work its own way, its own interpretive modes or conventions according to which it should be understood. The reader either consents to this tacit agreement, and therefore engages with the work, or he rejects the agreement and attempts to make of the work something that it isn’t. Usually, this results in a negative assessment of the work in question, but even in cases where it doesn’t, it does result in the work being radically misconstrued. If it gets popular enough, this results in the popular mass mis-reading of the work, which could be resultant from a sort of fandom’s digression.

Consider Gygax’s misreading of Tolkien once more; his desire to sublimate The Lord of the Rings to the conventions of sword and sorcery—to subject it to the latter’s conventions in order to interpret it—is exactly how fandom digression occurs. Gygax did not engage with Tolkien’s work any more than a modern D&D player engages with the game whenever they insist on prioritizing roleplay over game mechanics. Instead, he interiorly classified The Lord of the Rings according to a particular genre and category before writing it off as failing to adhere to the customs of that genre.

‘High fantasy’, like ‘sword and sorcery’, have established genres. Writers will write according to these genres the way one checks off boxes on a list of requirements for the fulfillment of contracts, though (hopefully) not in quite as sterile a fashion. In like manner, a reader (or fan) of such genre reads a piece of high fantasy or sword and sorcery according to particular modes of interpretation. Generally speaking, this mode is not a totally conscious object of rules; it’s a set of expectations which are conscious, but there are elements of narrative that do not immediately interface with clearly defined categories and tropes. This is what allows genres to have enough variation to remain lively without breaking their conventions.

It is certainly possible that a writer can begin with particular conventions in mind and write with skill enough to transcend the genre, but in cases where this occurs, it must be noted that the conventions then become very poor rubrics by which such work can be judged. A genre’s conventions exist specifically in the aid of interpretation; once a work ceases to function according to them, they become inhibitors to interpretation. Maestros of any craft transform an audience’s understanding of the conventions through their total mastery of them; rather than writing to satisfy the convention, they turn the convention such to service their story, or otherwise dispense with it when it no longer suffices. So long as the audience is willing to extend to the artist the courtesy of engaging with the work in question, the interpretive act remains sincere. The tacit agreement to ‘take the work according to its own terms’ remains fulfilled, and there remains some limited sense of charitable communication occurring between artist and audience.

As writing has matured—and audiences degenerated—‘literary fiction’ has shed what few conventions it had when first coined. Some may attempt to paint the genre as the domain exclusively dominated by racial or sexual grievances that have become the vogue of self-satisfied liberal circles. Although the mainstays of the literary publishing industry do comprise such groups, and in legacy publishing, often to the detriment of truly innovative new talent, there remains still a wide range of literature that spans the serious to the ironic, the experimental to the romantic. Not all of it is good, but in terms of defining the category, quality really isn’t the point. Literature is not simply what is left over when all other categories are ruled out; one might almost define it as what is left when the limits of all other categories are exhausted.

It can be said, then, that literature avoids easy categorization, and as such, avoids the danger of collapsing into the cheap bill of goods known as consumer media. The first section of this piece touched on consumer media and its relationship to The Lord of the Rings, but a more thorough treatment is necessary here.

Consumer media requires a definition no stricter per se than its obvious meaning: media that exists to be consumed. Consumption, however, and specifically how consumption differs from engagement, is a nuanced but imperative distinction. Consumption isn’t simple thoughtlessness or mindless indulgence; it can manifest as such, but this is downstream from the consuming impulse. A man can consume alcohol and consider himself amused without ever really trying to discern its taste. The consumption element of consumer media is that: not just a lack of attention in its interpretation, but media made with an implicit purpose to dissuade direct attention being directed toward it.

Modern Millennial media made with an ironic facade of being ‘so bad it’s good’ fills this example perfectly, as does the social attitude that allows it to exist. When subjected to even the slightest scrutiny, a work ‘so bad it’s good’ collapses entirely; one is meant to enjoy it by ‘just turning your brain off’ and allowing it to subject its madness, ultimately, as a form of entertainment. In music, one can draw a parallel example of Dionysian dance music—the kind made and blasted out of speakers under the pretenses that a majority of its listeners are on stimulants and psychedelics. This is media made specifically for its audience to flee from the soul’s living experience, not to deepen it.

It is true that the reader is free to interpret and enjoy a given work however he chooses, and indeed, that Tolkien himself wrote explicitly of reading “for literary pleasure.” It should also be considered, however, that the abandonment of reason in engaging with media, even for pleasure, fits more closely to what Tolkien criticized in his words on escapism. Narrative art should offer relief the way a man unjustly imprisoned has a responsibility to seek escape. This escapism is not synonymous with a soldier called to battle who deserts his post. In the former case, the soul is granted faculties as a result of engaging with narrative art, it is uplifted, freed, revitalized, perhaps, while in the latter, faculties are removed from it as the will refuses to engage with what is before itself.

To determine the difference between consumer media and narrative art, one must first understand how this difference in interpretive mode affects the reader’s relation with the work in question. With this understood, consumer media becomes much easier to identify: works that are made with the express intention to be consumed in this manner of desertion—namely desertion of the intellect. When subjected to scrutiny, consumer media disintegrates. It is not meant to be analyzed or considered, reflected on or thought about any more than cheap swill is intended to be savored. The difference between bottom-shelf whiskey and an Islay single malt is just such a difference: one exists only to remind its drinker of better things while accomplishing the same material end (drunkenness), while the other is exactly the reference of the former’s imitation. Art, although it neither imbibes physical drunkenness nor offers caloric nourishment, instead fulfills an aesthetic need in the soul that manages temperament and reason.

What we find in the opinions of people who so thoroughly misread Tolkien, such Gary Gygax or Morton Zimmerman, is an interpretive mode that has been trained to consume rather than to engage. They read a work, take what they like from it, and dispense with the rest. If they bother to form an opinion, they pause only to reflect on how the work failed to produce what they wanted from it, not unlike how a reviewer might leave a two star review for a truck stop because the gas station’s coffee had burned. This is not the work of a serious critic or someone who engaged with the narrative at hand; it’s the passing comments of one uninterested in absorbing the work and would prefer that it stay known only enough to remain as a memory and nothing more.

One can think of consumer media as the commodification of facsimiles, not necessarily fraudulent, but in themselves only veneers that give off impressions of reality or meaning. Its purpose is not to supply meaning, but rather to be a purchasable (and therefore salable) trinket: an amusement, an intellectual piece of candy, a stimulant or knickknack that never invites greater scrutiny or demands of its being the engagement of its buyer. For physical trinkets, that means sitting on a shelf. For consumer media, that shelf is in the mind and one’s gaze passes over it in the act of remembering something else. It is a point of reference for some other meaning. It will be seen by the interior eye when making a reference, using a joke, or mentioning something to stay relevant—but only in the act of imitating these social all themselves facsimiles of things real people do naturally. But the space that occupies reality, engagement—art, effectively—is taken up by this other consumable that has nothing behind it. Consider it a Potemkin consciousness.

For those who are familiar with large language models, this sort of ‘thinking’ should sound familiar. Artificial intelligence operates in much the same fashion, using extraordinarily complex probability networks that are ‘trained’ according to yes/no inputs and calibrated according to accumulated ‘crawled’ data. They supply conclusions that seem to fit the questions that researchers ask them, but there is no act of understanding occurring; they are running data through a framework of impressions.

There is an argument that this is indeed all intelligence actually is, but this consideration strays into the territory regarding theories of mind and knowledge that this piece is not particularly concerned with. Neither, really, is AI and the development of LLMs, but those at least remain relevant when considering the future of art and consumer media. As briefly touched on in the first section of this piece, AI is already capable of producing ‘content’ online, and soon enough, with only negligible amounts of tweaking or editing, it will confidently be able to write whole books and novel length works within the next few years. These will not be original pieces per se—and, given how the various models of image generation have worked so far, it’s not hard to predict that the first AI-generated novels will be rank with plagiarism—but originality isn’t the point. If one is not outfitted with an appropriate interpretive mode, he will be totally helpless to meaningfully distinguish between the superfluously proliferated LLM products and genuine articles. Worse, failing to develop a sufficient interpretive mode, he may frighteningly decide that there’s no point in distinguishing between the two, that content is content, and it does not matter whether a particular work has any intent behind it whatsoever.

So we return to the distinction between consumer media and narrative art. Mounting a defense against LLMs-as-artists is indeed an important enterprise going forward, but it is not in itself the reason to seek, establish, and ultimately defend the difference in sub-creative works. It is to fight against the tendency to reduce all of human creative action—all of human action, in fact, down to the must superficial of veneers. Flattening art in such fashion similarly flattens personality, flattens the communicative act, flattens the interpretive act, and reduces efforts of understanding between men down to the simplistic satisfaction of the domineering—or gluttonous, more likely—impulse.

On the Question of Interpretive Violence

One may critique this piece as an attempt to separate ‘works I like’ from ‘works I don’t like’ using highfalutin, sophistic arguments about style, intent, and escapism. Whether that’s a fair assessment or not is up to the reader, but even in writing this, my Devil’s Advocate made a compelling case. Nonetheless, experience should tell any student of literature that one does indeed engage with different kinds of texts in different ways. When one seeks to build an unorthodox bench, he seeks out a manual or an illustrated guide. When one considers questions on theology, one seeks out the Inspired words of Scripture itself, as well as the texts of holy men whose insights better illuminate it. When one seeks to unwind for the evening, a pulp-inspired adventure into the Hyborian Age does the trick just as well (or these days, better) than a television serial.

In much the same way, literature services a particular end distinct from that of escapism—or, by Tolkien’s use of the term, desertion. So far, we have equated desertion with the consumptive or domineering impulse exhibited by modern audiences and preyed upon by consumer media. It has been this piece’s argument that The Lord of the Rings is better suited to categorization as high literature for this reason, despite (or, due to differences in definition, perhaps because of) Tolkien’s words to the contrary. Tolkien’s expression of his fictional world, his sub-creation, is so infused with his personality, thoughts, and memories as to render the work an artistic gem of the same literary merit and experimentation as the cutting edge writers of literature from the last century.

One may argue that it already is, as it has been possible for decades now to encounter it on college campuses in the form of assigned reading. In light of this, the massive media apparatus that festers atop of the work itself can be surgically removed without much, or any, harm to the literary patient; whatever Peter Jackson or Ralph Bakshi or Netflix or even the Tolkien Estate decides to do with the work bears no impact on the work itself, nor does it block access to the proper interpretation of it. What goes on behind the closed doors of a private study is of no business to media moguls.

Unfortunately, however, the times paint the interpretive modes of the art almost as much as the art creates the times, and the art that has created these times, as depicted in the second section of this piece, is not the art that Tolkien laid down on the page. The proliferation of the media around The Lord of the Rings forms an osmotic social fluid that only the most insulated observers are immune to.

This brings about the question asked at the start: can one commit violence against a work of art by his interpretation of it? The answer to this seems likely to be ‘no.’ A work remains a work regardless of the opinions—as that’s all an interpretation is, in the end—of it. But a work of art is also a form of communication from its artist to the person interpreting it, so the question must be rephrased: can one commit violence against the words that someone is speaking to him? Or, better stated still, is it possible for one to inflict damage upon an idea that isn’t his?

The answer to this, however, is both yes and no. If the idea truly isn’t his, then no. A work of art is brought into existence as a tangible thing separated from the artist’s mind and soul. Words spoken in conversation remain only in the fragmentary and fallible recesses of memory, to be recalled in their perfection only by the recollection of the Divine Mind. But written words—or those recorded, too—endure for so long as their medium remains and those still live to perceive their language.

He is in the work insofar as it reflects who and what he is; it cannot escape his presence insofar as the artist is found in every stroke of brush or every phrase of word. Where artistic creation—sub-creation—uses aesthetics to bridge into the unconscious mind of the artist, whereby his identity is imprinted into his work, it also functions according to organizing principles, such as the form, medium, materials, outline, design, and order (among others), such that it constitutes a communicative act of relation from one person to another. This communication may not be totally literal or totally logical, as it is not a conversation where in one party can speak and the other respond. The artist’s work stands without possibility of response. Any response to it is silently reflected back to the person making the response.

So then the question must be considered again: can one commit violence against an idea? In the case of related ideas, an idea from one person comes into the consciousness of another by some vehicle of relation. Here, the vehicle is the artwork. And true, a man’s interpretation of a particular piece may not injure the work itself, but it can injure his own idea of that work. A man can very easily injure the part of himself capable of interpreting this or that particular work of art. How he engages with art matters; what he takes with him in the act of interpretation matters, and the field on which this interpretation takes place matters, too. Does he seek to connect to the artist, to engage with the artwork as it is, to let himself disappear in the interpretive process, or does he seek instead to exert domination of the work and sublimate it to some selfish end?

The purpose to this piece has been first to address and then warn against exactly this impulse. What is often disguised as critique against a work of art too frequently reveals itself as a complaint that the work did not satisfy the consuming impulse. This impulse is incapable of engaging with a work of art because it has only teeth that are directed outward, rather than hands or eyes; it is a purely self-interested mode of interpretation that seeks, at root, domination over the artist rather than a charitable union.

It certainly sounds extreme to label this mischaracterization as ‘violence,’ given that no one is coming to blows and there lacks any blood on the ground in the process. But the self-imposed isolation of the will in refusing the act of engagement should come across as a sort of intellectual version of self-harm. This is admittedly to some extent hyperbole; if one surrounds himself only with the exceptional, he often loses the ability to truly engage with it, as the exceptional is itself a mark of novelty that encourages engagement in the first place. But those aesthetical zombies whose only mode of interpretation they understand is that of consumption have not had their senses dulled by overexposure to greatness. On the contrary, they’ve conditioned themselves not to see greatness except in some dim and distant fashion, and only then when it’s presented in a way that’s easy to consume.

Conclusion

The Lord of the Rings, and indeed, Tolkien’s entire Arda corpus is the perfect means by which to make these points, and his own thoughts on fantasy, narrative, literature, and interpretation, particularly when pitted against popular conception of his work and its cultural reception, hopefully make it clear why. This piece is not intended to ‘reorient discourse’ around Tolkien’s works so much as to critique and offer an alternative to engagement with the arts. This is especially necessary for anyone interested in seeing a change in the arts presently available in the developed world.

The masters are dead or dying and few seem poised to take over their mantles. The literary world in particular has partaken in a generation-spanning effort to reorient itself away from literary excellence and experimentation. These are due in large part to the consequences of art being subjected to (and thus subjugated by) industries ran by boardrooms; hiring practices, ideology and profit motive all took their tolls on the selection of candidates for publication. The results speak for themselves.

It is not enough, however, to simply point this out. Establishing alternative platforms to promote the arts is also not enough. And although gutting some of these industries and weeding out the bad actors at work in them is a nice thought, few men are in positions of power capable of doing such a thing. Moreover, it would make little difference for so long as the popular interpretive mode and treatment of artwork remains as a form of intellectual or aesthetical consumption.

It is unreasonable to expect the broad social culture to change their method of interpretation to anything resembling the sort of engagement outlined in this piece. That requires a level of literacy, intelligence and attentiveness that is beyond most of the American public. What can be expected, however, an in fact striven for is the return of this sort of engagement among those with eyes to see. Those who do try to engage with works of art should be held to high standards every bit as much as those who try to make works of art should be. Mediocrity of opinion, be it a result of thoughtlessness or contrarianism, should be called out as the social bile that it is.

As LLMs infiltrate the market to greater degrees, and as the influence of AI on writing increases, the distinguishing marks between generated content and the artistically created are going to come down to matters of taste and engagement. The consumer has already been trained to interact with media the way the machines do, now. Hopefully, the need for understanding and engaging with more thorough interpretive modes is clear. Man was made for more than consumption, more than to reason like a machine.

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1See section 1 of this piece, note 3.

2Gary Gygax, “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games: Why Middle Earth is Not Part of the Game World,” Dragon Magazine, March 1985, 14, see: Internet Archive

3Ibid, 14-15.

4Ibid, 14.

5John Tolkien to Robert Murray, S.J., 2 December 1953, 142 in The Letters, 258.

6John Tolkien to Peter Szabo Szentmihalyi (draft), October 1971, 329 in The Letters, 580.

7Ibid.

8Cormac McCarthy and Robert Frost both famously said next to nothing about their own writing, for instance, and as literature goes that tends to be—though isn’t in itself—a mark of a master.

9Ibid.

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