Discussion - 'Leaf by Niggle' and 'On Fairy-Stories' by JRR Tolkien

[Arakawa]

So, these two things by JRR Tolkien for some reason have been spinning around in my mind for quite a while now.

'On Fairy-Stories' http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf

An essay by Tolkien where he tries to define what a 'fairy-story' is, as compared to an ordinary story; to explain why these stories are interesting, and not just for children; and to discuss the distinctions between the Primary Reality of the real world, and the Secondary Reality that a fairy-story attempts to construct as an 'enchantment'.

Since this is one of the foremost fantasy writers of all time thinking about what the point of writing fantasy is supposed to be, the essay is interesting just from that alone.

'Leaf by Niggle' http://heroicjourneys.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/niggle.pdf

A short allegorical story that covers much of the same ground.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Basically, a failed painter dies and goes through a thinly-disguised version of Catholic Purgatory; then he discovers that the scene he's been trying to paint for most of his life is an actual place in the other world.

Tolkien insists in some sense that Secondary Reality is only interesting insofar as it is 'real' or 'true' (and that it becomes less interesting if we are given reason to believe that a fairy-story is not true, and forced to apply 'suspension of disbelief'); and there are any number of variant theories as to how we should understand a fictional story being 'real' or not.

Theory (a) The Secondary reality is logically consistent, but can't be said to be 'real' in any meaningful sense.

Theory (b) The Secondary Reality is 'real' in a fanciful metaphorical sense that it illustrates certain very true things about the laws of the Primary Reality. (For instance, the Ring of Power (a fictional plot device) is a striking way to explore the corrupting temptation of power (which is very real but not at all obvious in real life), and one that is not available to a writer of 'realistic' fiction.) However, it doesn't exist in any sense beyond that.

Theory (c). Parallel Worlds. The author is somehow able to obtain a (partial, distorted view) of a parallel (or past) reality, which of course has its own internally consistent laws and history. This reality exists whether or not the author describes it, and independently of whether the author's description of it is accurate. This is a notion that Tolkien sometimes plays with while devising the universe of Arda, under the conceit that this is a body of mythology that is meant to act as an account of the far past of Earth, or a world that eventually becomes very similar to Earth. (From what I've heard, Tolkien's unfinished Notion Club Papers were intended to expand on this idea, though I haven't actually read them.)

This is also related to the Ancient Greek notion of story-telling, which is that the storyteller is inspired by a Muse to recount a poetic description of actual events (that he might otherwise have no knowledge of).

Theory (d). Future Creation. The theory is that humanity is a race of fallen 'sub-creators' with some . In that sense, fantasy is 'real' in the sense that it comes about through the exercise of a faculty that the writer might, in some future life, use to create actually existing consistent reality. Thus a well-written fantasy is real in the sense that it's a distorted blueprint for a reality that might be created at some point in the future.

Theories (c) and (d) are notion that (from what I understand) can be very badly shoehorned into a Catholic worldview such as Tolkien had, and does not fit into most other worldviews at all, but Tolkien seems to want to believe in some variant of them, and perhaps it's a part of his motivation for deciding that writing isn't a waste of time; the end result is that he vaguely hints at these theories, but doesn't really explore them in any detail.

(That results in the weirdest aspect of 'Leaf by Niggle', if I'm reading it correctly:

Spoiler: ShowHide

Niggle encounters the real tree partly as if it's something that's been there all along, but the story also insists that it was created as a collaboration between Niggle and his neighbour Parish (and indeed the administration in Heaven winds up crediting the tree to both of them). So the story ends up being partly about theory (c) and partly about theory (d).

.)



So, part of the thing that's been bothering me about this, isn't so much the believing / not believing in alternate fictional realities, as the fact that the odd beliefs have an actual effect on how someone writes fantasy.

If you believe (a) or (b), then the fantasy is explicitly something you are constructing. Thus, all conflicting accounts of the 'same' event that are internally consistent and illustrate some kind of truth about human nature, are equally valid; if an author comes up with several ideas on how to do something, choosing between the ideas is just a matter of the author's aesthetic preference.

On the other hand, if you believe (c) or (d), or at least assume it as a conceit for the duration of your writing process, then you are forced to treat your drafts as a flawed and distorted description of actually existing events. Therefore, your objective when looking at your own drafts, is just like the task of a historian with an unreliable source -- you need to look at the small details of evidence to figure out what actually happened. Therefore it is possible to imagine that you've written an internally consistent story that is real according to (a) and (b), but you might still be dissatisfied with aspects of the work due to a feeling or intuition that they're not what really happened, and your arguments for changing something might end up being different, and result in a different story.

Thus I've heard it alleged by commentators that Tolkien's writing process involved a 'making things up' or 'shamanistic' process where he wrote down stories and story details as they occurred to him, and then a 'forensic' process where he'd treat his earlier notes as unreliable historical sources that described an actually occurring event, and attempted explain odd or obviously-mistaken portions of them, in order to reconstruct 'what actually happened' for the final version of the story.

The latter process, at least, would be something he'd be very familiar with from his day job, which involved working with actual historical documents (in the capacity of a philologist).

These are just my incomplete thoughts on the matter, however. It would probably be more interesting to discuss the usefulness (or not) of this 'forensic' approach to building stories, and only secondarily what this implies for the 'reality' of a given story-world.

[sarsaparilla]

Interesting thoughts, something that I didn't know about Tolkien in particular.

I am quite familiar with the 'forensic' approach to storytelling; though, I wouldn't pretend to be relaying glimpses of a world that is real in any meaningful sense, as much as I am mapping out a story that already exists somewhere in the unconscious part of my mind -- even if I have only seen some fragmentary pieces of the whole, I feel reasonably confident that the pieces, when assembled in the proper order, will indeed spell out an intelligible story.

The strength of the approach is, as I see it, that the unconscious mind has superior lateral thinking capabilities, and thus stories that originate in that part of the mind are inherently more interesting in the way they can illustrate underlying relations or unexpected points of view. Compared to that, the stories that I construct purely on the conscious level feel more shallow, and require more effort to polish to an acceptable level.

[Brian]

I don't actually see a lot of difference between the structure that Tolkien evidently used and refining a concept into an outline, and then expanding on that to a more complete draft.

So I suppose that's roughly similar to my own process, at least at inception.  Editing is an entirely different story.

That being said, while Tolkien was a very impressive world builder, his storytelling was -- to me -- very, very dry.

[Arakawa]

Interesting thoughts, something that I didn't know about Tolkien in particular.

Part of my uncertainty is whether I've got an accurate impression of what Tolkien is saying about the creative process. (Thus I've avoided linking to commentators in my original post, just referring to things Tolkien himself had written.)

I am quite familiar with the 'forensic' approach to storytelling; though, I wouldn't pretend to be relaying glimpses of a world that is real in any meaningful sense, as much as I am mapping out a story that already exists somewhere in the unconscious part of my mind -- even if I have only seen some fragmentary pieces of the whole, I feel reasonably confident that the pieces, when assembled in the proper order, will indeed spell out an intelligible story.

That being said, while Tolkien was a very impressive world builder, his storytelling was -- to me -- very, very dry.

All this brings us back to the question of whether it's worth conceptualizing the writing process in this way, or whether it even matters. My only thought on this so far was the one I mentioned earlier, that this might lead to a more stringent testing of story elements against the unconscious intuition that judges if something is real or not.

Well, and the other thing is that it may lead the author to take a slightly different approach to ideas that 'just came up'. Something that is an unconscious mistake, or contradiction between two drafts, or an element that keeps occurring to mind in spite of the fact that it doesn't fit, might be seen more as a puzzle in need of explanation / to be reframed, than just an aberrant or accidental feature of the story.

i.e. an obvious mistake might be a feature of the story-world that is being interpreted incorrectly by the author, rather than just a mistake.

This can sometimes lead to story elements that wouldn't otherwise have occurred to the author, although this can sometimes also backfire horribly:

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.ca/2013/02/tolkien-nods-saga-of-trotters-feet.html

[Muphrid]

It strikes me that Tolkien stumbled upon a way to engage different parts of the brain in the writing process.  The initial burst of creation (throwing ideas at the wall, seeing how they end up falling together and sticking) is a process that only entails documenting a series of ideas, perhaps with some notions of how those ideas should connect, but that's all.  The forensic process looks for ways to reconcile those ideas into a coherent narrative, and it has the freedom to reject some of that information as unreliable if it doesn't fit the narrative.  It is, as Brian said, a process of outlining, sorting through ideas, grouping some together into a story and rejecting the others.

In this light, I think the explicit idea that the story is some imperfect account of something with actual reality is merely a heuristic at best, in that we associate with "reality" an idea of internal consistency.

Tolkien's process does connote the idea that the consistent history of disparate ideas need not have a unifying theme.  One hardly expects history to be full of such narratives, after all.  Perhaps, in this view, it is in the author's discretion to choose what stories he tells and which sequences of events should be related to help discuss a particular theme or concept.

This is a dimension of storytelling that I've thought about on and off for some time--I'm not sure what to call it other than the thematic "tightness" of a story.  A tight story has almost every detail (every bend of every blade of grass, if you will) connect with some message or theme.  A loose story allows for more of these elements to merely exist or be present merely as part of trying to convince the reader that the story is "real".  A story that is too tight may seem contrived and full of coincidences.  A story that is too loose may struggle to say anything at all.

I think Tolkien's alleged process lends itself to a slightly looser conception of a story, or at least one that admits worldbuilding and such for the sake of worldbuilding alone, rather than in fitting the narrative needs of a particular story.