Canon-Fire: Our Mysterious Obsession with the Authoritative Account
Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and ecumenical councils
This Edition of Ecstatic is by Raed Gilliam
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s been a few months, but let’s open that can o’ worms for just a sec. Amazon Prime carefully laid its trail of teaser snippets, but the overwhelming pre-release feeling in the Tolkien fandom was at best a kind of apprehensive curiosity. When it finally came, many shunned it outright; a handful of headlines were enough to earn it a boycott. I confess I did watch it, and actually enjoyed much of it (though the less said about the Harfoots, the better). I kept my own expectations in check by treating the whole thing like a big-budget fan-fiction series: “This is an interpretive spin on Middle Earth. These characters are clearly not Elrond, or Durin, or Isildur, just people pretending to be them, putting on a decently entertaining show. I’ll just enjoy it for what it is, a non-canonical take on Tolkien’s sacred masterpiece.”
I remember when I first encountered the word “canonical.” Scrolling deep into the keyboard battlefields of tireless Reddit geeks, I was surprised to find it had nothing to do with ten-tonne cast-iron artillery. Instead, a canonical literary text is the “official” one. The real, legitimate, internally-consistent reality of… the ultimately still fictional, made-up world. Star Wars is a great example of this. You have George Lucas’ films and screenplays, which are automatically canonical, being straight-from-the-creator’s-mind originals. Then you have a trillion novels and comics, strewn across the libraries of folks who just can’t get enough of this “long time ago” and “far, far away” galaxy. To be clear, these are the Star Wars Legends stories, not canonical. Then Disney buys the property, starts making more movies and books, and we’re back to being canonical, again. Official. Backed up by a gatekeeping authority.
But what if you don’t like the canon? What if you disagree with it? You need to take it to the powers that be, like the 104,000 disgruntled signatories who petitioned Disney to “Strike Star Wars Episode VIII from the Official Canon.” In his “Who Gets to Decide What Belongs in the ‘Canon’?” piece for The New York Times, Walter Morris traces the way canon has changed from being an object of irreproachable consecration set by cultural elites “who embraced a work of art and sent it aloft to some deifying realm” to become an “adjective, giving the word thunder and muscle and curatorial certitude.” And this newer sense illuminates the religious impulse at work here. “In this sense,” Morris writes, “‘Canon’ wants to keep something like Star Wars heresy-free and internally consistent.”
“The term canon, from a Greek-Hebrew word meaning ‘cane’ or ‘measuring rod,’ passed into Christian usage to mean ‘norm’ or ‘rule of faith’”, the Encyclopedia Britannica helpfully explains. “The Church Fathers of the 4th century CE” first used it “in reference to the definitive, authoritative nature of the body of sacred Scripture.” In the first few hundred years of church history, the books that now constitute the Biblical canon were swimming in a sea of apocryphal texts, written much later by the different splintering sects of this fast-spreading faith tradition. Just like the Star Wars Legends stories, these texts had little concern for the cohesion of the overall story; they typically served more as vessels for a sect’s unique theological takes. Eventually, various councils established the widely-accepted canon of today (differences remain between some denominations).
Whether it’s a council of Church Fathers, or Disney executives, or the self-selecting literati elite, cultural canons tend to be set by a powerful or influential few who find themselves in a position, and so grant themselves the right, to decide what goes in and what stays out. But this isn’t an impulse reserved for the gatekeepers; canon conversations have exploded in the democratized internet world of online pop culture fandoms, because we all share this instinct to love something to bits, to be so swept up in it, that we want others to see it the same way, to enter this same world with us; we want to be part of that grander, more real story, the one beyond us, the one we can’t invent and are content to simply accept. It’s a kind of worship, really, a religious devotion. The world might have lost its reverence for the Scriptures, but it can’t shake its need to revere something, and that something had better be official, true, consistent, and lovely. It’s one thing for a canon to be forced on us from above, but when we still find in ourselves a need to identify and fight for and treasure a canon, even in something so utterly inconsequential as a fictional series, we can’t blame the “elites” anymore. We have to admit that we are canon-craving creatures. We long for a canonical story to hold on to, we deeply desire to be grounded in a story that has a definitive account, a coherent reality.
Many of us today might no longer see reality in this way. We have our truths, so let’s hold to them if they make us happy. Our truths are all valid, if they work for us and don’t harm anyone else. But let us for a moment be honest with ourselves: at an inside, gut-level, we know this is not enough. So we run to stories, to get lost in the escapism of an immersive imagined world designed to be wondrously explored. We look to enter in and enjoy the cohesive reality, the inner-consistency of the world-building, and to engage with the god-like presence of the author on every page and behind every word. Here, we know there’s a creator; the name’s right there on the cover, and it meets, if only for a few minutes, a primal intuitive need to see the Intent behind everything, to see the events we experience and the conversations we have and the characters we meet day in and day out as meaningful things that somehow, in some way, happen for a reason.
This is something in us. No one can deny it; it’s an essential part of our design. It’s either an accidental byproduct of our brief blip of an existence on the pale blue dot; a measly wish-fulfilment; a compensatory comfort-myth to help us cope with the terrible meaninglessness of the whole sum of human history. Or maybe, these shared intrinsic longings that find partial satisfaction in the little canons civilization creates are the fingerprints of an author who has created a meaning-filled world waiting to be discovered, ready to be made sense of, totally consistent, with patterns of physical, moral, mathematical, musical rules and principles that aren’t invented, but reveal themselves to those who look, who seek, who search, who listen. This author is, like any other, waiting to be found behind every word and every letter, every note and every tune, every high and every low.
Turn another page, and keep reading.
Raed Gilliam
Writer & Filmmaker
Beirut-born, and Brooklyn-based, Raed is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker (Common Grounds?). He currently works as a documentary filmmaker for a global missions organization.
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This was a wonderful read! I viscerally resonate with that instinct to protect the internal consistency and perfect complexity of the worlds that I love, be those in books or movies or anime. So often I think it comes along with that longing that Lewis talked about, for a world that is here but not yet here. Thanks again!
Really well done! And a fantastic overall thesis. Love it!