January 24, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:THE NEW REPUBLIC has an
THE NEW REPUBLIC has an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying discussion of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (the books, that is). A partial list of the topics covered:
The question of whether they are books for adolescents or adults. I would argue that the question is a little anachronistic -- Tolkien, the medievalist, strikes me as thoroughly Victorian, and the Victorians did not delineate adolescent and adult literature the way we do. That Benjamin Soskis doesn't seem to grasp this is particularly apparent in the reason he chooses to illustrate why he doesn't consider them adult books: sex.
Tolkien invented his own mythological world, but it lacks the dignity and the sinew of a real mythology, for it is without religion and essentially without sex. Hobbits may have fur at the bottom of their legs, but they have seem to have no balls at the top; and that pretty much goes for the rest of Middle-earth, too. The women in The Lord of the Rings are few and pallid. . . what disturbs is not so much the absence of women, perhaps explicable in an adventure story of this kind, as the absence of desire. In this work that presents itself as the representation of a whole world, there is hardly any awareness that we are sexual beings.
In the post-Freudian world, it is impossible for us to imagine that one could write a book for adults without layer upon layer of sexual tension, but in fact before those licentious Edwardians got in, there was a booming school in exactly that. The women are few and pallid? One could say the same of Mark Twain. There is a total absence of desire? No awareness that we are sexual beings? That describes 90% of novels written before 1900, and a good many written after. . . the fact that contemporary English departments enjoy savoring the fraught sexual atmosphere of a Henry James or Kate Chopin (who, in my humble opinion, has been elevated to canonical status on the basis of this rather than, say, writing talent) does not mean that one cannot write a novel for adults without sexual themes; it is merely that no one does any more, because we are all Freudians now -- and because most "literary" writers imagine themselves to be writing for posterity, and so consider their market to be the English departments of America. There is no sex in Lord of the Rings because it is a family novel, and because it isn't important to the plot. Not that I'm against sex, but I think it would be nice if we saw more of this diversity in the literary world.
When he says the books are religionless I suppose he means that a struggle for good isn't religious -- only religious rituals count. Don't tell the Unitarians.
Actually, I agree that few of Tolkien's characters have any deep emotional life -- they're rather like characters in a medieval epic, with a few grand passions rather than complex emotional lives. But if we are to argue that you need characters to have complex emotional lives in order to have an adult novel, you'll have to knock out a great deal of contemporary literature from Waiting for Godot on. Contrast this with the indubitably for children Anne of Green Gables series, where the characters often have extremely complex emotional lives -- just read this passage about the death of a childhood friend (no, men, it won't cause you to lose your facial hair and take up needlepoint) if you don't believe me. But then I suppose there isn't any sex, so it doesn't count. Emotions are only complex if they involve sex somehow.
The symbolism is flawed. Having told us that the emotions in the book are insufficiently complex, he immediately turns around and complains that another problem with the series is that
the moral economy of the work is radically flawed--that there is a confusion between whether the corrupting ring symbolizes sinful desire (the lust for power, or whatever) or should be seen as a magical object that acts upon the wearer as an external force
That's what I would call intricate, nuanced symbolism, but once again it doesn't involve sex, so I'm probably confused. Soskis might prefer it if Tolkien just told us in an appendix exactly what the symbolism was so we wouldn't have to wonder.
I shouldn't make fun of Soskis. His criticism is interesting and well written. But I am struck, while reading this, by how entirely modern criticism has come to view everything through the prism of sex. We expect to find subtle and nuanced evocations of sexual themes, yet everything else is supposed to be right out there, unambiguous and unexplored in any but the most superficial way. It strikes me also that this may be why so much modern "literature" has degenerated into increasingly violent and bizarre sexual themes coupled with increasingly dull political ones, laminated together with a thin veneer of verbal scrimshaw.
The prose isn't particularly artistic. Soskis's criticisms of Tolkien's style, on the other hand, are right on target; his dialogue is wooden, his prose redolent of the Victorian schoolboy's history compositions. Yet I doubt that those who love Tolkien would disagree, much, with this verdict; his prose is hard going, and does not later reward you, as does James or Austen, with an appreciation of its subtle artistry. It is not to Tolkien's prose that we respond; it is to his fecund, delighted, heroic imagination, his unerring moral compass, his hold to the idea of the timeless struggle between good and evil which gave birth to an entire genre. But these are not the stuff of modern literature; for all their flirtation with magical realism, vivid imagination is not what the modern literary establishment truly values, and they are certainly not interested in absolutes of good and evil. They delight in exploring all the varations in shading in the grey areas, and while I find Tolkien's moral universe quite complex, it doesn't have a lot of grey in it.
I do want to defend Tolkien's dialogue a little bit, not because I like it, but because Soskis is so savage: "This is writing that aspires to be noble and philosophical, but its nobility seems to me gimcrack" Its nobility sounds to me a lot like medieval epics, and their later Victorian interpretations, to me. Given that Tolkien was a medievalist, I think he just wrote that way because he actually enjoyed it. Medievalists are very strange people. I dated one who used to wake me at three in the morning shouting things like "Hwaet we garde na in geardagum þeodcyninga!"
Nor can Soskis hang on me the charge he makes that those who really love the books read them as adolescents; I just read them last week. As I say, I found his prose uneven, but his imagination. . . that soars. . .
Soskis complains that Middle Earth is basically just Europe. It is. He doesn't say what is wrong with this. Presumably, the thing stands on its own, and I'm just too dim to see it.
Tolkien's popularity doesn't mean he's a great writer. Horsefeathers. I would argue, on the contrary, that any book that doesn't get decent circulation in the literate (not literary) community of its time is doomed to obscurity unless hauled out by some ethnic studies group of the year 2200. As exhibit one, I offer you William Dean Howells. William who? I hear you cry. Why, the most famous and successful literary author of post civil war America, that's who. Mark Twain, on the other hand, was considered a vulgar popular figure, the Dave Barry of his time. Making predictions this early about which works will stand the test of time is a sucker's game -- but I'll go ahead anyway and say that anything made deliberately difficult, like James Joyce, will go away because as the language changes in a hundred years it will be just too damn difficult to read.
I suspect Soskis' verdict about the book is much influenced by the fact that apparently any old person can read and enjoy it -- which he backs up by rejoindering the claim that readership equals greatness with the example of Danielle Steele. I would argue that the cases aren't the same, because Steele's readers are prolific readers who will consume anything as long as the plot is sufficiently romantic and the prose sufficiently simple; they rarely re-read her books, and easily substitute other books for hers. Tolkien fans pore over his books repeatedly. I am willing to state that any book that a lot of people buy as a "lifetime" book -- one that goes on the shelf instead of getting thrown away, so that you can read it again 5, 10 and 20 years from now; a book that people look forward to passing onto their children -- any book that meets those criterion is a candidate for being a classic.
Soskis says that the literati don't dislike Lord of the Rings because it is popular: "think of the cartloads of highbrow praise justly heaped upon jazz or Elvis or The Simpsons". Disagree. The literati like jazz because it is black, don't particularly like Elvis but tolerate him because he is poor, and like the Simpsons because it makes fun of the middle class, and many of them have a lingering horror of their roots in the bedroom communities of New York and Los Angeles. They aren't rebelling against popular culture; they're rebelling against pole lamps and Mom's book club. They do not like things that the vast middle class, middlebrow population likes. LOTR falls into this category.
Soskis undercuts his argument thoroughly in the final paragraphs, where he tells us why he is so hard on Tolkien: because he doesn't deserve to top the list of best book of all times. My question: why on earth should Soskis care? And what hill was he standing on when God handed him the list of the best books of all times?
This attitude is the reason that so many people hate reading, including people who teach and study it. They've been told that there's a list of books that they should like, and if they don't, then they don't like reading. I recall vividly an English class at Penn where I managed to shock into silence 40 sensitive suburban types merely by saying that I didn't like Wordsworth, and I thought his poetry was bad. (I've revised this opinion somewhat since then. But only somewhat.) The idea that one could challenge the canon for any but political reasons was entirely alien to them. Little wonder that so few of them evinced any genuine love of books or words -- they were far too busy trying to figure out what books they should like, to ever discover which ones they did. Saying that you're not allowed to like Tolkien, or like Tolkien better than other authors, because he doesn't add up well on the hierarchy of literary traits that Soskis has assigned is no better than declaring that you like a writer merely because he does.
Posted by Jane Galt at January 24, 2002 06:48 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links