Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity. Patrick Curry

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СКАЧАТЬ of Middle-earth’s peoples are closely tied to a particular geography and ecology, and manage to live there without exploiting it to the point of destruction, isn’t this what is nowadays called bioregionalism? But no kind of apartheid is involved: one of the subplots of The Lord of the Rings concerns an enduring friendship between members of races traditionally estranged (Gimli and Legolas), and the most important union in the book, between Aragorn and Arwen, is an ‘interracial’ marriage. As usual, the picture is a great deal more complex than the critics, although not necessarily the public, seem to see.

A Pastoral Fantasy?

      A major stream of hostile Tolkien criticism can be traced back to Raymond Williams, who fathered British cultural studies, and called his method ‘cultural materialism.’ In The Country and the City, Williams noted the ‘extraordinary development of country-based fantasy, from Barrie and Kenneth Grahame through J. C. Powys and T. H. White and now to Tolkien …’ and concluded, ‘It is then not only that the real land and its people were falsified; a traditional and surviving rural England was scribbled over and almost hidden from sight by what is really a suburban and half-educated scrawl.’

      Williams has been massively influential. One could produce many other commentators since who have lambasted pastoralism in the same way. One writes of ‘the ultimate, deeply conservative, ambition of pastoral’ that it ‘falsifies the actual relations of non-city communities just as much and for the same reason that it falsifies city communities.’ For another, ‘The Pastoral allows for a direct opposition to social change, a reactionary clinging to a static present, and an often desperate belief in future improvement.’ And it fades away with ‘the possibility of social mobility and of economic progress.’ (How dated this now sounds, as we face increasingly insurmountable problems as a direct result of ‘economic progress’!)

      Let us put cultural materialism to the test by seeing how well it applies to Tolkien. According to Williams, ‘In Britain, identifiably, there is a precarious but persistent rural-intellectual radicalism: genuinely and actively hostile to industrialism and capitalism; opposed to commercialism and the exploitation of the environment; attached to country ways and feelings, the literature and the lore.’ This sounds generous, until you get to the punch-line: ‘in every kind of radicalism the moment comes when any critique must choose its bearings, between past and future … We must begin differently: not in the idealizations of one order or another, but in the history to which they are only partial and misleading responses.’ By the same token, according to Williams, in our current crises myth and revolution are opposites rather than complementary: we must have ‘real history’ oriented to a revolutionary future, not ‘myth’ dreaming of the past.

      But this emperor now has no clothes, if indeed he ever had. The mythical ‘vs.’ the actual, the ideal ‘vs.’ the real – this is a set of choices which postmodern sensibilities have exposed as cruelly misleading. The ‘material’ is meaningless except as structured by ideas; conversely, ideas have highly material effects. Revolutions – before, during and after – are saturated with myth. Nor is the political character of traditions and positions inherent and fixed for all time; look how Marxism-Leninism, supposedly ‘left-wing,’ became crudely authoritarian; or how ‘conservative’ parties today have become vehicles of sweeping radical change. Williams doesn’t even seem to realize that people do not live by factual and physical bread alone, but also by ideas, values and visions of alternatives.

      It is not surprising, then, that his treatment of pastoralism terminates in mere abuse of Tolkien’s work as, absurdly, ‘half-educated’ and ‘suburban.’ Oxford professors may be many things, but they are not yet half-educated; and Tolkien actually complained to his son in 1943 that ‘the bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb.’ Nor has Williams noticed that the hobbits’ pastoralism is dominated and subverted by other themes. As Gildor said to Frodo, ‘it is not your own Shire … Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.’ As Merry too admitted, ‘It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not.’ The Lord of the Rings could thus better be seen as an extended argument that pastoralism alone is not enough – doomed, even: ‘The Shire is not a haven, and the burden of the tale is that there are no havens in a world where evil is a reality. If you think you live in one, you are probably naïve like the early Frodo, and certainly vulnerable.’

      Perhaps the political problem is the richness and centrality of the natural world in Middle-earth (and not just pastoral nature). But if so, it only serves to confirm that the Left of Williams and his followers remains stuck in a modernist and economistic world-view. Had Marxist socialism accepted William Morris’s generous offer to meet halfway (as E. P. Thompson put it), this tragedy never would have happened.

      Thompson himself is a good counter-example: Morris’s biographer, a passionate critic of economism and class reductionism, defender of William Blake’s mythos, and, perhaps not so coincidentally, a passionate gardener. Here, in a catalogue that would have impressed even Samwise, is Thompson’s account of his garden on his fiftieth birthday: ‘there is: rasps, strawbs, red, white and black currants, worcester berries, wineberries, gooseberries, loganberries, lettuces, radishes, asparagus, tomatoes, globe artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, marrow, cucumber, broad beans, peas, runner beans, french beans, rhubarb, cabbage, broccoli, carrots, leeks, spring onions, celery, CORN, apples, peaches, nectarines and weeds.’

      Thompson is one powerful reminder that in order to be progressive it is not helpful, let alone necessary, to adopt the po-faced dogma of materialist and rationalist modernism. George Orwell (also a gardener), is another. In ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ (1946), he asked:

      Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring? … is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle?

Fascist?

      Williams says that nostalgic ‘celebrations of a feudal or aristocratic order’ embody values that ‘spring to the defence of certain kinds of order, certain social hierarchies and moral stabilities, which have a feudal ring but a more relevant and more dangerous contemporary application … in the defence of traditional property settlements, or in the offensive against democracy in the name of blood and soil.’

      Williams’ disciple and biographer СКАЧАТЬ