Parting Shot -- Off The Net For Awhile -- Biking -- March 15, 2018

Link here:

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Tolkien

Only one book today.

Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, editors Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, c. 2004.

Essays by:

• CS Lewis
• WH Auden
• Tom Shippey
• many others

WH Auden: "The Quest Hero"

The editors:

At the very moment that such champions of modernism as Philip Toynbee and Edmund Wilson were mocking and maligning The Lord of the Rings as "dull, ill written, whimsical, and childish," coarse fodder for those readers who have "a life-long appetite for juvenile trash," Auden, among the great modernist poets, wrote this admiring and penetrating analysis of Tolkien's great epic.

Auden considered The Lord of the Rings to be the kind of work that shapes an enduring, universal mythic and psychological pattern in human culture and consciousness. It is, he says, a "literary mimesis of the subjective experience of becoming." Dismissing the left-wing paper warriors who  attached Tolkien as a fascist and a racist, Auden calls attention to the political and social ideals the novel upholds: a "benevolent monarchy," within which the Shire exists as "a kind of small-town democracy." It is Sauron's kingdom, which all the free peoples of Middle-earth abhor, that is "a totalitarian and slave-owning dictatorship."

The Quest.

Some variants:

The Detective Story: the goal is not an object or a person but the answer to a question -- who committed the murder?

The Adventure Story: here the journey and the goal are identical.

Moby Dick: here the Precious Object and the Malevolent Guardian are combined and the object of the Quest is not possession but destruction. Another example of a Quest which should not have been undertaken, but it is tragic rather than evil. Captain Ahab belongs in the company of Othello, not of Iago.

The Kafka Novels: in these the hero fails to achieve his goal, in The Trial either to prove himself innocent or learn of what he is guilt, in The Castle to obtain official recognition as a land surveyor; and he fails, not because he is unworthy, but because success is humanly impossible. The Guardians are too strong and, though Kafka avoids saying so I think one can add, too malevolent. What makes K a hero is that, despite the evidence that Evil is more powerful than Good in the world, he never gives up the struggle to worship the Prince of this world. By all rules he ought to despair; yet he does not.

My first thought after reading that paragraph by WH Auden on the Kafka novels? Trump.

More from WH Auden (don't you wish you could have taken Brit Lit from WH Auden?):

To indicate the magnitude of the task Tolkien set himself, let me give a few figures. The area of his world measures some thirteen hundred miles from east (the Gulf of Lune) to the west (the Iron Hills) and twelve hundred miles from north (the Bay of Forochel) to south (the mouth of the River Anduin).

In our world there is only one species, man, who is capable of speech and has a real history; in Tolkien's there are at least seven.

The actual events of the story cover the last twenty years of the Third Historical Epoch of this world. The First Age is treated as legendary so that its duration is unknown, and its history is only vaguely recalled, but for the 3,441 years of the Second Age and the 3,021 years of the Third he has to provide a continuous and credible history.

My first thought after reading those paragraphs: George Lucas and Star Wars.

Tom Shippey: Tolkien's official biography, reviews Peter Jackson's movie trilogy. And says Jackson did an incredible job. One of Shippey's most interesting observations:

One has to say that there is, probably inevitably a certain degree of bowing to popular taste in Jackson. Tolkien's perceived lack of strong female characters leads to the insertion of Arwen as Frodo's rescuer in the first movie, but the heroic role she is given rings a little hollow ... But it perhaps offers a moment for female viewers to place themselves in the story.

If you've seen the movies (and who hasn't?), Tom Shippey's essay is a must-read.

I did not care for CS Lewis' essay -- CS Lewis was Tolkien's closest friend -- but the essay appeared to have been dashed off in one afternoon.

If one has time to read just two selections from this anthology, I recommend WH Auden's and Tom Shippey's.

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Word For The Day: Mimesis

I've seen this word three times today in two sources.

Mimesis: imitation, in particular --

• representation or imitation of the real world in art and literature
• the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change