Stories & Soliloquies

Tag: tolkien

• Abandoning Originality

  Posted at 10:00 am by michellejoelle, on December 6, 2013

  Originality is a tough thing to achieve. When someone is retying really hard to be original, you can tell. The product of this effort usually draws attention to the places its bucking tradition, and almost always, its an idea that’s been done before. At least, this is what happens when I try it – read anything I’ve written in the name of originality, and you can feel the desperation as it seeps through the awkward seams I’ve left behind my clumsy attempt to pull things together in a new and unique way.

  When someone is actually original, it feels effortless, even if it took effort to execute, and even if its provocative. Finding the line between “challenging your audience with something new” and “just plain weird” is a little like magic.

  A few weeks ago, I came across two Freshly Pressed posts on the topic of identity and originality. The first is from the blog Cats and Chocolate, called simply “Identity”, and the second is from Lark & Bloom, called “7,000 Reasons Your Uniqueness is Plagiarism”. Both articles explore the difficulty of being original. To truly be an individual is an incredible feat, and one that might not be worth chasing.

  In what seems to be a contrast to these articles, Tolkien says that no two stories are the same, no matter how similar they seem. No matter what, every retelling changes a story, making it a variant at best. Word choice matters. Order matters. The outcome matters.  Any little change to a story alters the general context and makes it something unique. Our identities come out whether we mean them to or not.

  But I think that what this means is that best way to be original, sometimes, is to not try to be original. If you’re honest about what inspires you, what you want to copy, and what you want to be, then the unique element you bring, whether its something you can quantify or not, will shine out against that well defined background.

  I think JK Rowling does this amazingly – she is very clear about the things and ideas she wants to play with from myth, religion, and fantasy. She follows the organic heroic storyline we know so well, and makes no apologies for it. She goes so far as to throw clear and obvious shout-outs to Tolkien (the kid named Longbottom is good with plants?) and the Greeks.

  What this does is let her be honestly derivative in a way that lets her unique magic quality stand out – because it’s not mushed in and mired in the context of things which come from others, it’s just that much clearer, even if it stays unquantifiable.

  I think that when we try so hard to create ourselves as special, and different, we invariably end up stamping out that part of us which is actually unique. It may not be something we can see and control. Maybe our best shot at being original is to abandon the attempt – drop the pretense, be unabashedly sincere in what we love, even if what we love is something that’s been done before, and hope that our context will allow us to combine things in a way that, ironically, allows our unique identities to shine through.

  Posted in The Waste Book | 0 Comments | Tagged identity, JK Rowling, originality, tolkien

• On Allegory and the Death of the Author

  Posted at 10:00 am by michellejoelle, on November 26, 2013

  After thinking about my post the other day, “It All Comes Back to Stories“, I wanted to come back to the ideas I started at the end. Basically, when it comes to dealing with clearly stated messages, we have a tendency to recoil and retreat back into examples, images, and stories. A dense philosophical text makes more sense to us if we can turn it into a story in our minds. I’m all for this.

  However, I mentioned in the second part of my essay “Sacramental Imagining” that I agreed with Tolkien’s assessment of allegory – that it exacts a kind of tyranny on its readers that was a little unsavory, and eminently harmful for the story. I’d like to qualify that sentiment. While I still think that stories work better as applicable metaphors than as rigid allegories, I do love the cave in Plato’s Republic, Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Orwell’s Animal Farm, and even Tolkien’s own Leaf, by Niggle. All of these are allegories.

  The thing about these allegories is that with the exception of The Cave, they are great stories as much as they are devices, and as such they can be reapplied to different situations or messages, or taken just as stories in themselves. Leaf, by Niggle can tell us as much about art as it can the afterlife, and Animal Farm is as much a lesson in the perils of power as it is a lesson in Russian history. And they’re eminently entertaining as mere stories.

  On the other hand, Plato’s Cave may not have much of a story by itself, but it is employed not subversively, but openly – it makes no pretense to trickery, but instead serves as explanatory example of principles argued for conceptually in previous books. It seems less tyrannical for its honesty. Beyond this, you can easily find ways of seeing lessons in the allegory of the cave that go beyond merely illustrating Socrates’ point in context. People take it out of context all the time, to great effect.

  But allegory is hard to get right. You want the message to work without dominating the reader. You want to be able to see the message, but still have the story work if you don’t. But in the latter scenario, is it still the same story? In Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, he develops an idea of historiography as a dialectical disruption, an academic move which tears a moment in time from its both its place in the temporal flow, losing sits places in chains of cause and effect, as its lateral context. It becomes something new and different when ripped free and concretized by the outside observer who is mired in her own flowing context. You want to disrupt the one-to-one comparison just enough to allow for some imagination in interpretation, but if you’re trying to say something specific, something you think is important, it can be tough to let it be so ripped from you and its intended context. It cannot be easy for an author to send their story out into the world, where it might – or will – be torn from them and created anew by readers. Overt allegory is one way of planting firm contextual ground in your work, one way of keeping an auteurial hold on a story so it cannot rip free and be cast off alone into the wind.
  Posted in Essays | 0 Comments | Tagged Allegory, Animal Farm, Chronicles of Narnia, Plato, reading, tolkien, writing

• Thoughts on Science and Belief

  Posted at 10:00 am by michellejoelle, on November 6, 2013

  I wanted to share a couple of interesting articles about children, science, and belief.  Both are from NPR.

  The first is from Halloween, called “How Real is the Candy Witch?”, by Tania Lombrozo. It explores the gullibility of children, concluding in the end that they’re not really so easily fooled as we might think, and that a readiness to believe in what seems unlikely doesn’t conflict with an appreciation of evidence. The second is called “Every Child is Born a Scientist”, by Marcelo Gleiser. This one is a brief look at the radical openness of a child’s mind, where science can become “a magical portal to them, a place of wonderment and discovery.”

  My response to these articles is that these attitudes are related – our ability to enjoy stories and myths is tied to our scientific openness. Children in particular have a really strong ability to occupy that space between fact and fiction where “truth” can be something else, something wondrous and indeterminate.   If you find these articles interesting, I’d also suggest taking a look at Tolkien’s essay “On Fairie-Stories”, Martin Donougho’s work on what he calls the “double semantic register” of myth, and several of Richard Feynman’s essays in the collection, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

  For me now, these are just going to have to remain random thoughts.

  Posted in The Waste Book | 9 Comments | Tagged children, Donougho, feynman, Fiction, myth, NPR, science, tolkien

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