As I did not know the man personally, and as all the accounts that I can find of him are effusive and almost certainly reveal him as more pretentious and of less worth than he really was, I will turn to his works for the study, especially to that very long and very well-known work named The Lord of the Rings.
I've been puzzled by the strong emotional impact that Tolkien has had on persons of various sorts, by the question of how this elderly British fantasy writer has become the object of so passionate a cult. I thought I might find an answer to this in rereading Tolkien. I haven't been able to. I don't know the answer.
I was puzzled for a much shorter period as to why many persons, not cultish, not pretentious, not affected, find genuine pleasure in reading the Tolkien works. I believe that the answer is simply that he has a fine narrative flow. This is a thing that was once common and is now rare. The places where it may still be found can almost be counted on the thumbs of one hand. People are hungry for this sort of excellence and will fasten on it when they find it.
But back to the subject of Tolkien and Christ. In the light of the Redemption as the central act of history which illuminates everything both before and after itself in time and which makes itself the only valid environment, is it possible to leave Christ out of any work on any subject?
And the answer is that it is possible, but only with very great effort.
Then the critical question is; is Christ left out of the Tolkien work?
And the answer has to be yes.
Then comes the question; by what great effort was this omission brought about? And how was the resultant screaming emptiness disguised?
The Omission was brought about by a toilsome effort extending over many years. And the method of disguising is one of the things that we will try to solve here.
There's an old saying that a Catholic can't even climb a tree without showing that he's a Catholic. Tolkien climbs a tree (it may be intended for Yggdrasil or the World-Tree of the Norse), and how does he avoid showing what he is when he climbs it? Oh, by pretending to be part Dwarf, or Elf, or Ent, or Hobbit, by being something in the anteroom of humanity. And the pretension rings with a valid sound and strikes concords in everyone who comes on to it. There is something here in consonance with our memory.
“The collective unconscious… is not individual but common to all men, and perhaps even to all animals,” Jung writes. Is it also common to all Elves, Gnomes, Trolls, Dwarfs, Kobolds? Apparently it is, even though we do not know who they really were or are. We dip with them into the common unconscious, and we find pieces of them inside ourselves. There is authenticity in this. The mind-set of these creatures or uncreatures is to be found in the unconscious, whether or not they are to be found in the world itself. Their contribution to the group unconscious is a proof that they do have existence, whether or not it is a bodily existence, whether or not it is a human bodily existence. The subject of this isn't supposed to be Tolkien and Jungian Psychology, but the strands don't separate easily.
Someone should do a piece on the connection between the Collective Unconscious and Purgatory, and discover whether the name of the connecting land is not Middle-Earth. But Christ suffuses Purgatory, and Christ is the Lord of the Archetypes in the unconscious. And Christ is carefully and laboriously excised from this version of Middle-Earth.
I have, in another and earlier place, called Tolkien's fantasy elephantine, and so it is. But the fantasy is more than ponderous and slow-moving, and its style is other than contemporary elephant. There is something of the Wooly Mammoth in it, something of the Mastodon, something of the Behemoth himself, of which latter one is tempted to ask ‘Are you sure he who made the lamb made thee?’
The largest church in my city is that of a Christian sect that will not show the cross. It is built in imitation of a style that requires the cross, and the simple elimination of it would leave an emptiness and discordance. What is done to disguise this gaping omission? There is not permitted to be seen one right angle in the entire building, not one natural congruence of horizontal and vertical line. There are asymmetrical spires all over the place, there are twenty-nine degree angles, there are optical convolutions, there are mock corbels, and clashing metal-stone interplay. But every line is broken up for the eye. If one straight line were allowed, then a second one might come in by stealth; they might get together, and they might look like a cross. Great care is taken in avoiding even a hint of the cruciform. But Tolkien takes even greater care that no shadow of Christ should fall on his Middle-Earth, nor even anything that might remind of that golden shadow.
There was a man in a Chesterton story who fell heir to all the gold of a household. He took it all, all the gold coin and gold plate and gold leaf, even the gilding of the ornate capital letters in old books. He cuts out the thin gold in pictures and books, and leaves puzzling holes. Tolkien does the same thing, but then he goes back and disguises the holes that he left. There may not be a vestige, not a shape, not an imprint of the Christ influence. This function is very mysterious.
But is isn't imagination that the Christ gold is of universal, though uneven, distribution. It is found forwards and backwards in time, it is found in macro and in micro space. It's on every level of geography and cognition, and in every medium. Homer is gold-speckled with the coming of Christ. Virgil knows everything except the name. The Africans and the American Indians had all the symbolism and expectation. The Birth itself marked a change and hiatus in every mythology, however far removed in culture and geography from the site of the birth. The question of the quest became ‘Where?’ and no longer ‘When?’; in the Year of the Lord it is always present time. The quest for the pearl beyond price, for the ring, for the grail was now a quest in the context of actual geography; the treasure was in some bright place on Earth, now. Augurs need no longer be cast to learn the time of the happening; the happening was continuous and present. The Lord of the only world we know was manifest in that world. There was a change in the retelling of the story of the golden fleece, for instance. There was alteration and burgeoning of all the cycles and sagas and mythologies and Eddas. The Treasure became central to every one of them. The Redemption is inextricably in all myth fabric since its happening and in most before.
And it was also central to Middle-Earth till it was gathered out of there and destroyed. I do not at all understand the reason for this compulsive removal, for this pulling out (heresis) and discarding of the essential element, for this heresy literally.
The Ring was always the Fisherman's Ring, in Jewry or legend or anywhere. The same ring story in its Irish versions is full of trout taken with the Ring itself in their mouths. And Arabian Nights stories have strange foreign fish (probably the same species of Irish trout) taken likewise; or the ring is found sparkling in the midst of a netful of fish. For the Arabian fisherman (like the Jewish) was a fisherman in a boat. The Fisherman motif is archetypical in this, as is the Ocean (the Ring that goes around the World) motif.
But in The Lord of the Rings there is a reversal, as though the good and evil had changed places. Thus, the questors seek the ring to destroy it and not to enthrone it. The questors (made to appear as likeable as possible) are playing devil roles in this. And words and things are turned into their opposites.
Someone has succumbed to the Devil's dic ut lapides isti panes fiant temptation. ‘Order that these stones become bread’, and it is ordered. But is this Devil-devised transubstantiation of stones into bread real, or is it illusion? Are things so easily turned into their opposites?
There are various scattered references to Christian elements in The Lord of the Rings. But the writers of these references are mistaken; there is no such element to be found there. By accident there would always be some such element. By probability and by comparison to similar works the element would be fairly strong. But accident and probability have been prevented here. The element is not to be found in this work because it has been taken out. And that's the mystery.
We do not doubt the per
sonal worth and commitment and honesty of Tolkien (we even say that about Teilhard, and here is one greater than Teilhard), but Tolkien has done a puzzling and opposite thing in his major work. Perhaps he was merely trying to destroy the grosser barnacles and incrustations that had attached themselves to the Redemption Ship. Or perhaps he himself understood nothing about the Transcendent Ship beyond these barnacles and incrustations. Both these cases are unlikely.
“Is there a man among you who would hand his son a stone when he asked for bread? Or would hand him a snake when he asked for a fish?” Christ asked in Matthew.
But the people of the Tolkien cult have total faith in Tolkien, and some of them insist that this faith is an illustrative miniature of the True Faith.
(But they shouldn't have sought to destroy the Ring. They've reversed good and evil.)
And among them are persons of exceptional intelligence and insight. One of them tried to explain to me just how important and illuminating Tolkien really was. His face shone with sincerity (he is a big man with a shiny face). But then there loomed another face and person of him, equally sincere, even while we were talking. And this second and more immediate presentation of him gave a different version of it all, while denying the difference.
This prophetic or intuitive version of the man held a stone in one hand and a snake in the other, but he believed that the one was bread and that the other was a fish. The ground was strewn with his broken teeth from munching on the stone, but he insisted that it was the sweet bread of life. There was blood and serum and venom on his face and he was really badly snake-bitten. But he said that those were only the marks one gets from eating good fish.
Then the two images of the man coalesced, but the duality of impression remained.
“And that is the real moment and import of Tolkien,” he was saying. “Do you understand?”
“No,” I said. I didn't and I don't. The stone had a hard look about it, like that first stone thrown by some terrible and sinless man. And the snake had a qualmy glare in his eye.
I have to be wrong, of course. They're using softer stones now. They are vitamin-enriched stones, and they are as good as bread. And the snakes, ah, they're a little rubbery, yes, but no worse than the fish that you get in the markets. Remember that this is the age of surrogates.
But I worry unaccountably over the rumor that they're using real venom in their rubber snakes now.
Review: Again, Dangerous Visions
Edited by Harlan Ellison
Doubleday
This is a very entertaining book. Many of the parts are unintentionally or unconsciously entertaining, but they are entertaining nevertheless. But is it $12.95 entertaining? Sure it is. You are rich; this is unofficially be-kind-to-Science-Fiction week; besides, you have never read a book like this unless you have read the original DANGEROUS VISIONS. It is true that the book perverts the noble concept of Science Fiction at almost every turning. That does not matter. Science Fiction, like all nearly perfect things, is always made up of imperfections badly stitched together.
On the surface, this book consists of 46 original stories by 43 authors (there is some collaboration, and there are several stories by each of several authors), along with introductions and afterwords for each story (about 60,000 words of introductions and afterwords, about average novel length in themselves).
But this is only the surface appearance. This is actually a large and rambling non-fiction novel (the second of a trilogy; the first was DANGEROUS VISIONS, the third will be named THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS) put together by the editor Harlan Ellison. It is a little bit like that welded type of sculpture made from garbage can lids and old automobile shocks and broken iron gates. The stories lose their original function and become pieces of this collage. Harlan blends and tacks the pieces together into something that is entirely his own. Regrettably, the whole comes out to something less than the total of the parts. A little about Harlan then:
The world's oldest teenager (He's about forty, give or take a hundred years.) is himself an indifferent writer. That's a little like saying your favorite rock singer is an indifferent podiatrist, for Harlan is intra-media. He is, nevertheless, the prize-winningest writer ever in Science Fiction. He is an excellent entertainer on stage or platform or anywhere where three or more are gathered together. His personality is on several different levels and some of the levels are certainly laughing at others. He hasn't any personal magnetism, moxie, or charisma, for those are all twentieth century concepts and Harlan is nineteenth century, where he isn't eighteenth century. What he is full of is the old mesmer fluid. Scientists of its day said there wasn't any such thing. But there is.
In fitting the different pieces, Harlan makes many good contributors seem worse than they are (it isn't always clear whether it is Harlan or the individual author speaking in the introductions). Several practicing Catholics are made to sneer at the Church, or to seem to. Some very intelligent persons are made to speak like fools in selections of their own words. Many sincere persons become mawkishly sentimental. There is a dwarfing process going on in all of this assembling.
Now how does he manipulate such a crowd of writers, some of them better and some of them worse than himself, into becoming mere characters or chapters in his turgid novel?
WITH THE BENTFIN BOOMER BOYS ON LITTLE OLD NEW ALABAMA by Richard A. Lupoff is a good story that would be better if told at a fifth of its length. It is mostly stuffing, but the stuffing isn't too bad.
GETTING ALONG by James Blish is a patchwork of parodies supposedly in styles ranging from Conan Doyle and Lord Dunsany to H.G. Wells, but it is actually all of one sort and all an unintended parody of Blish himself. It isn't much fun, though Blish in his afterword says that it is intended to be. He also warns of reading any Deep Meaning into it. There was no danger of that.
In THE FUNERAL by Kate Wilhelm and in MONITORED DREAMS AND STRATEGIC CREMATIONS by Bernard Wolfe, the straw universes of Harlan Ellison seem to be accepted as reality. The results are pretty sticky.
The remainder of the stories are mostly written by protégés of Harlan (some of them promising, some not), or are disappointing pieces by established writers, or are somehow quite forgettable. Still, there are at least ten good stories in this book. What other collection has so many, even out of forty-six chances?
The general tone, while fulfilling the duty of required obscenity, is not worse than that of the Main-Stream or Rotten-River literature now current. As to the tetragrammata, even the several writers here who have dabbled in the history of witchcraft and demonology do not seem to connect it to the present practice.
The tetragrammata, the four-letter acrostics, charms, designs, or words (whether already in the vernaculars or translated from the Chaldee or whatever) have few requirements for their success: they must be vulgar; they must be written or spoken ritually; and they must have the evocative intent. These conditions being fulfilled, devils might be called up by the use of the four-letter devices; not major devils, of course, but grubby little devils. There are quite a few of these grubby little ones around these days, appearing from nowhere, looking confused, but ready to serve. But those who call them up do not recognize them: they seem not to know that their ritual use of the four letter words is the cause of this effect.
One other thing: I never saw the virtue in using words to mean their opposites. There is nothing dangerous in any of the Dangerous Visions. There is the total safety under the protection of the smooth working anti-establishment.
There is dangerous and necessary work to be performed even in the writing field: but, with no more than three exceptions, the writers here draw away from it, close their eyes and avert their faces, and huddle together in the safety and conformity of their ramparted assumptions. Really, what can get to you in a straw world?
This book isn't a kilometer stone in Science Fiction, as it pretends to be. It's clear and away from the unbeaten trail that must be created. But there are some very good stories here if you can see them past
the imposed outline. And the outline itself, the Harlan Novel Conglomeration, is at least something different.
Buy and read.
I'm sorry, Harlan. But it was you who turned yourself from a person to a phenomenon, and you must be reviewed as such.
Review: The White House Transcripts
no author given
Bantam Books
THE WHITE HOUSE TRANSCRIPTS might be described as a non-fiction novel, a multi-media novel, a folk novel, or a morality novel. In matter and treatment it is a Heroic Comedy. Those who hold the idea that Tragedy is somehow more significant, more important, and more serious than comedy may boggle at this. Those who hold that Tragedy is the primary and Comedy is a secondary will not be capable of enjoying this in any case. But the fact is that Comedy is the main and central form of the human drama, and Tragedy is a derivation of a weaker sort. THE WHITE HOUSE TRANSCRIPTS is a serious and important and significant Heroic Comedy.
Humor comedy? Certainly humor comedy: good-humor comedy. Should a person or a relationship lose its good humor just because it is subjected to extreme physical or mental torture? No, it shouldn't. But it sure should come close. That's part of Heroic Comedy.
As a novel, this is innovative, seminal, spookily universal, and technically sound. And it's unusual. There are the characters, intelligent, compromised, and of the fallen species, characters seeking contingent solutions. There is a murderously comic circumstance, treacherous, human-diabolical, infested, but kinetic and interacting; one name for this circumstance is ‘the world’. And there is the comedy itself played out sometimes with hints of great depth, sometimes with shoaly shallowness.
It's well done. Not even O'Hara showed as good an ear for American sounds as is found here. With no author evident, the characters themselves take on sometimes a volitional and sometimes an autonomic quality. The character P has a Dostoyevskian depth and an O'Faoláian complexity. The only progenitors in the different media that this work has are distant and doubtful: certain Doré drawings, old vaudeville skits of the ‘Hogan's Alley’ pattern, Irish novels by Samuel Lover and Charles Lever, rowdy ballad songs, Belloc verses. All these things were more significant and more comic than is usually believed of them, but they still are doubtful and distant progenitors.
Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction Page 9
