Sartre and Tolkien - Writing, Interpretation, and Meaning

“The reader must invent them all in a continual exceeding of the written thing. To be sure, the author guides him, but all he does is guide him. The landmarks he sets up are separated by the void. The reader must unite them; he must go beyond them. In short, reading is directed creation.” (Emphasis added.) So writes Jean-Paul Sartre in his work on aesthetics, What Is Literature? This offers an pretty intriguing addition to our considerations of myth and narrative. Tolkien, among others we’ve read for this course, strongly tied the composition of myth with the idea of creation. Others such as historian and phenomenologist Gerardus van der Leeuw have also written on poetry (poesis) as an act of creation, i.e. bringing into being that which was not there, actually bringing about meaningful alterations to reality. But what Sartre suggests is that the reader has as much of a part to play in the creative power of writing as does the author. The writer does not merely create a world which the reader may encounter through the literature. The reader actually participates in making the meaning of the work; he is, in a sense, co-author. Sartre is not necessarily saying that the meaning of a literary work is totally up to the reader, as later postmodern thinkers would claim. “Words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us,” says he. But without the reader embracing the work, reflecting on it, lending his imagination to the written pages, it lies inert. Furthermore, the reader’s interpretation vies for reality along with the author’s intentions. Neither necessarily dominates the other. Like opposing currents shaping a seaside cliff, their combined subjectivities shape the meaning of the work.

What are the implications for myth as we’ve considered it? Might one come along with a secular interpretation of the Chronicles of Narnia? Doubtless our attempts at interpretation already reach areas which Lewis never cognitively intended, but according to Sartre these add to the meaning of the works. If, as Lewis says, what flows from myth is reality, then Sartre adds that it is not only the author who has a hand in shaping that reality, but the reader also.