Fantasy Stream

8 November 2025

This old post begins to focus on the studies that informed how I write, recounting some of the bases for critical theory and how that affected my writing.

13 August 2012

One of the areas I studied as an undergraduate and a Master’s student was critical theory, which might be described simply as the ‘tools in one’s critical toolbox’–these are approaches to the interpretation of literature, or maybe ‘handles’ allowing one to grapple with any text. An example of this is found in the structuralist approach to the film Casablanca. The structuralist looks for repeated images or action that can then be used to interpret the text. In this Humphrey Bogart film, we find a structuralist symbol in ‘the overturned glass’: throughout the film, we see a glass filled with liquid overturned; this happens the first time in the beginning of the film, indicating a state of chaos, or disorder, will follow. Toward the end of the film, we see the glass ‘righted’ indicating a return to order. Why is such a simple thing significant? To classical thinking the ‘structure’ of a comedy (not what we currently think of as a string of jokes or comical moments) begins in a kind of stasis, or order, followed by disorder and chaos, with a return to order in the end–think of the structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream–the play begins with disorder in the ‘fairy world’ which bleeds over into the ‘real world,’ the play concluding with a reconciliation between the king and queen of fairyland, and the ‘lovers’ falling for the right people and getting married. This view of literature was pervasive throughout the 20th-century until the Paris students’ revolt in the summer of 1967–an arbitrary date chosen to mark the ‘change’–it really began before this, but this is the point chosen by most critics as the ‘turning point.’

The change was fueled by several French language philosophers who challenged the structuralists’ notions of language. Simply stated, they (the structuralists) believed there was a one to one correspondence between a word and its meaning. Thus, the collection of sounds that form the word, for example, ‘tree,’ lead us directly to the concept the ideal ‘tree,’ or the form of the perfect ‘tree’–all of this flowing out of Platonic ideals. What this means, for the structuralist, is that there is no confusion in language, and there is a single, authoritative interpretation–a single meaning, if you like–for any and every text. The French language philosophers, Jacques Derrida in particular, challenged this notion. Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ showed how there was ‘slippage among signs’ (words), meaning that there could be more than one meaning (pun intended) derived from any utterance of language; he brought forward the ‘playfulness of language’: using our ‘tree’ example, what is the ideal form of a tree? If I open the dictionary to find the meaning of ‘tree,’ what do I find? More signs (words) leading to more meanings, any one of them a possible interpretation of ‘tree.’ To make it simpler, what actually is the essence of ‘treeness?’ Is it the huge, deciduous forests of Europe? The conifer forests of western North America? Or the palm trees of any desert? Which of these ‘trees’ is the essence of ‘treeness?’ And if this is the case with simple words, like ‘tree,’ what happens with more abstract words like ‘justice’ or ‘freedom?’ The possible interpretations multiply, undermining the notion of a single, authoritative interpretation of any text, which dislodged the ‘high priests of literature,’ who dispensed ‘meaning’ from their lecterns.

Now, what does this have to do with the story of ‘how I got this way?’ These ideas informed my study of literature, which in turn influenced my writing; also, Tolkien pre-figured these ideas of language interpretation, or the understanding of a story: each one of us, when approaching a story, any story (or any text, for that matter), brings with us fundamental ideas for interpreting (understanding) the text. As an illustration, when Tolkien says in one of his stories that the characters climbed a forested hill and descended into a green valley with a river flowing through it, he had in mind the forests of his youth, the deciduous forests of the English midlands where he grew up, what was for him, the essences of these different words. For me, on the other hand, growing up in the northwestern United States, I see conifer forests and wide, fast flowing rivers, much different from Tolkien’s thinking, but acceptable within the framework of the story. This is the fundamental reason why Tolkien, although approached several times during his life, never allowed filmic representations of his works. Why? Because in a film, choices for how characters and places look are made by one person, the director, which limits interpretive possibilities. Tolkien relished the idea that every reader would bring something unique to his reading of the story, seeing in his mind’s eye the places and characters that for him represent those ideas, most often flowing out of his first experiences with the ideas behind the characters and places described in the story. To push it further, someone who grew up in the desert might imagine a desert oasis as the place described above–the climbed hill leading into a green valley with a river. This idea was brought home to me by the illustrations inspired by the Lord of the Rings, especially those by his Russian fans–so different from what I envision that I could only tell the images were about Tolkien’s work by their captions!

As a poet, this ‘play’ in language has led me to break lines to multiply meanings possible in a line, lines, or a few words; as a novelist, this study lead me to examine the roots of words, their origins, and how the meanings have changed over time. Its most direct result in my epic was the creation/formation of a language I call ‘ancient’ which is based on Indo-European roots, so that some of it seems familiar although old and alien at the same time, as if the ‘ancient’ of my epic were a precursor to Indo-European, or of a different language family, related to modern English but different; this ‘language’ became the basis for spells, which in turn creates a ‘history’ for the secondary world I have created.

To be continued. . . .