I think this is a fascinating discussion and am glad it's being indulged.
Ideas provoked by Jacob's questions:
On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 09:31:10 -0800 Jacob Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
writes:
> 1) Can we look to the historical period in
> which Tolkien was writing and say honestly that his works were
addressing
> real and relevant issues surrounding England?
Probably so. He was a country boy who fought in the trenches in the Great
War; LoTR seems to make some agrarianish and populistic critiques of
modernity, mass society, industrialism, technology and the ways in which
power is generated, wielded and exploited. Tolkien has a clearly catholic
personalist anthropology which is threatened by all these forces and
phenomena.
> What does his blatant depiction
> of a good race or races and a bad race or races say about the
> political
> ideology of the time, etc.?
That seems to be a problem, but in fairness to the text, all the races
are shown for their weaknesses and propensity to become corrupted by
power or the lust for it.
> Also I heard something about Tolkien saying that he did not intend
> to write what many have now labeled an allegory - specifically an
> allegory of Christianity, but simply a compelling story. Do we believe
him?
> Why or why not? And how does that affect the way in which we should
> approach his works? Also, on the allegory front, why not explore more
deeply
> his relationship with someone whom we hold fairly esteemed in Spenser
> studies - C.S. Lewis?
Tolkien did say that, and he disliked Lewis's stuff--mainly the Narnian
chronicles--for being transparent theological allegories as well as
impure hybrids of different mythological systems. However, there are
undeniable Christological aspects of LoTR whose presence I believe he
admitted. But overall, Tolkien seems to create a thoroughly pagan (though
religious, transcendent-affirming) world that comports with an openness
to natural theology that dissipated in protestant thought. This seems to
be overlooked by the protestant right that admires Tolkien, perhaps
because his re-enchanted world is so compelling and perhaps because there
is a legacy of natural theology in the right's regard for "natural law,"
which is a critical underpinning of conservative and/or religious legal
hermeneutics and national identity. That's the sort of thing that
fascinates me--what contemporaries like or don't like about Tolkien (or
Spenser?) says something about their relative taste for the way such
writers mobilize the fragments of the past to comment on the present--a
fundamentally political act.
One might also find interesting things to explore in the fact that
Tolkien had a lot to do with Lewis's rejection of atheism and
re/conversion? to Christianity, but Lewis also remained an ulster
protestant whose friendship with Tolkien was troubled. Politically they
divided over the Spanish civil war, when Tolkien sided with the fascists
since the communists were killing nuns and priests. Tolkien says Lewis
and his brother occasionally said things that made him feel like the
"shabby little catholic," and Lewis's friendship with Charles Williams
(associations with Yeats, the Golden Dawn, etc), whom Tolkien regarded as
a "witch," is supposed to have (almost?) severed their friendship. These
were highly unusual people who complicate and perhaps illuminate the
usual cultural and political categories that academic analysts tend to
employ. They are also too complex in their respective faiths for the
various Christian groups today that tend to lionize them as one of their
own.
I think these historical observations start to get at the causes of
resistance, hostility and discomfort with "fantasy as a compelling and
communicative literary discourse." Fantasy is tantamount to religion; it
is perhaps the modern afterlife of what was once a habitual religious
orientation in the culture toward the cosmos. Tolkien, LeGuin (maybe),
Lewis, Orson Scott Card, and Steven Lawhead all seem to appreciate
"fantasy" and "medievalism" because of their own affinity for and/or
investment in conservative religious particularist traditions in which
the transcendent and personal immortality are realities that make
ultimate claims on us. (Has anyone read Card's Enchantment?) This, of
course, is rather troublesome within the dominant and especially the
intellectual discourse of a society that has been defined by the effort
to contain these very sentiments since the religious wars of the
reformation era. Tolkien has been revived post-9/11 just as western and
middle-eastern religious particularists seem poised to re-engage their
old battles, and kill-joy provocateurs like Stanley Fish are happily
telling "liberals" that their pluralist consensus is dead on arrival in
the present crisis. "Faux-medievalism" must register as a threat in this
context not because it is aesthetically gauche--it is gauche only because
it smacks of a truly dangerous political heresy. The millions of American
readers of the Left Behind novels who want to censor Harry Potter were
one thing; now you have the bi-coastal newspaper elites paying a lot of
nuanced attention to "the religious right" in the political and cultural
scene. You have the current evangelical protestant clamor over Gibson's
The Passion (it's a "conversion tool"), which has either a real or
fictitious imprimatur from the present pope. ("It is as it was"--no
aesthetic distancing there!) And then there is the fact that Gibson and
his father are not simply "traditionalists" but sedevacantists with an
unusual, radical Marian theology that supposedly comes out in a film
whose potential anti-semitism has been worried over for a year. -Dan
Knauss
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