2. Literary Theory

2. Literary Theory

Concerning the study of his literary materials, Tolkien may have embraced the methods from New Criticism, and to a certain extent, some aspects from Deconstructivism. New Criticism emerged during the 1920s and 1930s as a theory developed by I.A. Richards, William Empson and T.S. Eliot. The first text concerning this new theory was Practical Criticism, by I.A. Richards, appeared in 1929. Not much later, in 1930, William Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity. And finally, in 1933, T.S. Eliot published The Function of Criticism. However, all three authors just settled the foundations for the approach, as it was actually extended by poets and critics from the United States, namely Beardsley, Brooks, Ransom, Tate, Warren and Wimsatt. Their studies gave birth, amongst others, to the literary analysis method of Close Reading.

T. S. Eliot, in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism defined the text as an autotelic artifact, something complete with in itself, written for its own sake, unified in its form and not dependent on its relation to the author's life or intent, history, or anything else, and valued the formal and technical properties of Literary creations as a work of art (Eliot, 69). Tolkien made his own particular declaration about his idea of external influences to a text in one of his letters:

I do not like giving ‘facts’ about myself other than ‘dry’ ones (which anyway are quite as relevant to my books as any other more juicy details). Not simply for personal reasons; but also because I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists. They only distract attention from an author’s works (if the works are in fact worthy of attention), and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest.

Tolkien & Carpenter, The Letters of Tolkien, 288

The above fact, that is, Tolkien rejecting his biography as a source for the characters and events in his works, links his viewpoint with the Theory of Affective Fallacy (biography never has a use in the creation and the meaning of a text), established by New Criticism theoricists W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, and which can be defined as follows according to the on-line Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms by Jack Lynch:

For Wimsatt and Beardsley, meaning was to be determined solely from close reading of a text. Any one reader's private reactions to a text are likely to be biased and uncritical: a reader with certain personal associations will make connections that have nothing to do with the poem.

Also, his refusal for the Lord of the Rings to be an accusation/denouncement to the Fascist regime of Hitler or to post-war British Socialism approximated his thoughts to the Theory of Intentional Fallacy (text means only what the author intends it to mean), provided also by the New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley, and defined as follows again in Lynch's on-line Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms:

They suggested that even when we have statements about the author's intention (such as diary entries, critical essays, or new works from living authors), the text means only what it says. Even if Keats were to rise up out of his grave and tell us "That's not what I meant," the New Critic would be able to respond, "But that's what you said, so that's what it means.".

In contrast, Deconstructivism, in a general way, should be applied to the way Tolkien saw his text as a source for multiple interpretations. Theoretician Jacques Derrida defended the possibility for deconstructive criticism to show that any text inevitably undermines its own claim to have a determinate meaning, and licenses the reader to produce his own meanings out of it by an activity of semantic ‘freeplay’ [as quoted from Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences (1966) in David Lodge’s Modern Criticism and Theory (1988)]

Reader-response criticism helps unveiling the fact that Tolkien was in favour of emotional, evocative, intimate readings, but just for the personal, individual, non-generalising 'use' of them. The pioneer of reader-response criticism approaches (first appeared in the book Literature as Exploration in 1938), Louise Rosenblatt, affirmed, concerning poetry: A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text (Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading (essay), 1969) Frontally against the scope of affective fallacy there is Stanley Fish, also from contemporary reader-response criticism. He was against the vision of the literary work as an object, trying to describe it according to its nature, but considering neither its function nor its effect, put down the essence of literature and reading. He defended the affective force of reading in Literature (Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics, 1970).

The declared effect of 'escapism' a fantastic narrative should produce according to Tolkien (On Fairy-Stories, 147-156), is the proof for the allowance of subjective readings by an author himself. In his essay on Beowulf, within The Monsters and the Critics (1983), Tolkien spoke about poets as artists; able to evoke the essence of emotions through a poem and wake them up inside all those who read it whether they were the same ones he had originally talked about or not. He criticised the dismembration-and-reconstruction method to approach literature (tM&tC, Beowulf, 7-9), as the scientific discovery of what only the poet felt when writing the poem and how he displayed that emotions through it, would really impoverish its artistic/evoking function.