The New York Tolkien Conference has put out a “call for programming“. Never heard that term before, but I think I get what they mean.  They’re interested in talks about the intersections between the Inklings and science.  Deadline for submission is May Day.

Time to start thinking….

Back to that guidance for topic selection that I find so helpful. I’ve decided that patterns are best used as supporting evidence, not topics.  Now, let’s look at what we can do with problems.  The Writing Center says you’ve got a problem if,

A character might act in some way that’s unaccountable, a narrator may leave out what we think is important information (or may focus on something that seems trivial), or a narrator or character may offer an explanation that doesn’t seem to make sense to us.

Problems are potentially much more fruitful for scientists. Noticing a problem and solving it is our default modus operandi.  As the old saying goes, “Engineers like to solve problems.  If no problems are available, they will create some to solve.” This is our comfort zone.

Good problems come from looking “along the story”, not looking “at the story”. I’m not interested in questions like, “where are Elrond’s farms?”  JRRT didn’t need them in the story, so they’re not in it.  Here are some problems I can see in LotR:

1. Gandalf gives a very persuasive speech against the death penalty to Frodo, but then encourages everyone to go to a war that will bring death to thousands. What’s the difference? I think of choices in terms of costs and benefits. What is JRRT encouraging me to put on the two sides of the ledger?
2. Technology seems to go the wrong way. The Shire seems to be mid 18th-century; Rohan early medieval; Gondor high medieval. The more populous the cities, the fewer signs of invention. That’s exactly backwards from the whole history of the real world. (Irrelevant tangent:  Did Merry make his fortune after the war selling horse-collars to the Rohirrim?) Is this the standard failure of Romanticism, of the kind that makes me prefer the Baroque? Or did JRRT have some larger purpose in mind?
3. Gandalf is usually really smart, but he tells Saruman that breaking light with a prism is somehow destructive. Worse, JRRT has him imply that writing words on white paper means you’ve “left the path of wisdom.” Which is, to say the least, an odd opinion for a writer to promulgate. What’s wrong with Gandalf here? Isn’t he supposed to be the wisest of the Maiar?

I think I really like that last one.

Looking for material about “digital humanities”, which may be where I’m going from here, I’m finding a whole world of research I never knew about. Research of stunning triviality. I have seen horrors like a professor of rhetoric who uses the word “discursivity”.  According to Webster’s dictionary,

discursive. 1 a : moving from topic to topic without order : rambling b : proceeding coherently from topic to topic. 2 : marked by analytical reasoning. 3 : of or relating to discourse <discursive practices>

Using a word whose first two definitions directly contradict each other is a failure of rhetoric, in my estimation. Especially since the meaning couldn’t be deduced from context, which is why I looked it up.

One gleam of hope:  did you know there is a method of data analysis called “grounded theory“? It’s so impressive that it gets an acronym when people write about it. What I like about it is the tacit admission that most theory in the humanities is ungrounded.  A certain segment of humanities scholarship sees itself as airy spirits dancing swiftly above us Calibans in the physical sciences. We, in return, see them as frivolous and insubstantial.  Grounded theory might be a valuable middle ground among us, since it includes “whether the theory worked or not” as a criterion for judging the effectiveness of a hypothetical structure.  Also, everything I can find about the methodology of grounded theory says that I’ve been doing it for years.  If you expand the size of the data sets from dozens of records to thousands, it’s how I analyze the performance of transportation systems.

Anyway, now that I’m done grumbling, this is the book I was reading.

When I find a pattern in a work of fiction, I’m pulling on a thread that the author has woven into the text. How far does such a thread extend? Does it have meaning apart from the instances I’ve spotted?

In the sciences, we rarely have to check that, because we’re trying to extract a law of nature. Natural laws are true all the time, so when I’ve found a pattern, I’ve accomplished something. I can extrapolate from it without fear, as long as I remember the domain of validity of my Ansatz.

With a work of fiction, by contrast, there is no reason to suppose that I’m working within an inductive set, from which I can infer future things. Once the text ends, what reason is there to suppose that the pattern I found goes any further? This is where so many literary analyses fall down. A pattern I see in one place may not be a fundamental symmetry that applies anywhere else.

Now, searching for patterns to go across multiple texts has merit. In fact, that’s how genres get defined. But that’s the domain of the real literati, not “trespassers”. (To borrow JRRT’s characterization in “On Fairy-Stories”.)

The most interesting part (to me) of the UNC class instructions that I mentioned recently was the suggestion of two ways to create a good paper topic:  Patterns and Problems.  I like them both, but I think patterns are better suited to natures born litterati, not me.  I’ll talk about patterns, “the recurrence of certain kinds of imagery or events,” here.  Problem-topics come next.

Some patterns are easy to find: they’re the things that jump out at me. They were noticeable because the author painted them red so I’d see them. Example:  In J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction, a character’s height is strongly related to his or her authority.

Aragorn was the tallest of the Company, but Boromir, little less in height…” LotR, II,iii.

or

Very tall they were, and the Lady no less tall than the Lord…” LotR, II,vii

I’m not even going to look it up — I know someone smarter than me has already written a paper on that.  Re-plowing that ground would be OK for under-grad work. The objective here is to do something original.  Finding and explicating these patterns is mostly a matter of careful reading to make sure I got all the references. This would be useful for a reading group, so everybody’s up to speed, but it is not useful for adding new understanding.

Prof. Olsen frequently talks about patterns as topics that are good for a potential paper. However, like any good teacher, he always leaves the critical element for the student to find.  In this case, that is the answer to the “So what?” problem.  A pattern by itself can’t give you that.

I’m not trying to avoid patterns entirely, of course.  They’re ideal as supporting evidence within a larger topic.  Here’s a great example:  Tom Hillman, in an essay about Gollum’s near brush with repentance, observes that that there was only one time in LotR that the narrator says “Sméagol” instead of “Gollum”, which reinforces the idea that Gollum really was close to redemption in that instant. JRRT constructed a subtle pattern, and then broke it to draw attention. This kind of subtlety is the mark of a real master.  I never even noticed that, until Tom pointed it out.  (Bravo!)