For what should have been our second meeting in July, and at the risk of being drummed out of the Reading Group I have a come up with a few comments on my most recent reading because unlikely as it seems, I felt the reading shed light on some aspects of Tolkien and his work.
The first topic is just some thinking based on the non-Tolkien reading I have been doing but relates to Tolkien as the ‘serial reviser’. My latest reading is Slavoj Zizek’s 1991 Looking Awry. Not exactly cutting edge, but very enlightening. Zizek argues what we experience when we desire is not some the pleasure of obtaining of a final object but desire itself, which constantly promises a final enjoyment and satisfaction. That is the pleasure – the ongoing contemplation of enjoyment and satisfaction. The process is the pleasure.
It seems now banal to propose that this was what encouraged Tolkien to keep returning to his Beren and Lúthien story, and indeed that urge of obsession may be accounted for by his conviction of the ‘duty’ of sub-creation. It was the God-given opportunity and responsibility to continually explore the variations that his imagination could devise that spurred him on, not just an artist’s dissatisfaction and desire to achieve some final perfect result.
Which is where this circles back to Zizek. What drew Tolkien back again and again was the desire to continually move towards a final form for his story, but that could never be achieved, because of the infinite variety implicit in the Divine gift of sub-creation, but also because to find completion of the task would be to relinquish the prospect of creative satisfaction, which was the desire and the drive. As Niggle found only death resolves that paradox of desire, and his experience showed that perfection was deferred into the Divine.
I know this intersects with Flieger’s Splintered Light but I haven’t yet worked out quite how. I think the ‘fragmentation’ trope is convincing, it’s Tolkien’s own after all, but it also seems to legitimate the idea that constant revising of the same or similar ideas is a deferral of satisfaction which is driven by an implicit understanding or even anxiety that it is the desire for completion that creates pleasure, not completion itself. In this context ‘fragmentation’ also carries various levels of potential significance including broken, shattered, and dangerously so.
This is as far as I can get with this train of thought at present. Please feel free to tell me I’m talking nonsense. There’s worse to come!
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The second thing I have been reading intermittently is the first book of A Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire. I hasten to declare it’s not my choice! I am only doing it to be prepared to read someone else’s comparative work on it and The Lord of the Rings. If you have read GoT and enjoyed it, please ‘turn the page and read something else’ as Chaucer said of his ‘Miller’s Tale’.
Nevertheless, I can justify my venture into GoT again via Zizek who proposes the value of using popular culture as a comparator for more esoteric and literary things.
Ice and Fire reads to me as ‘base, common and popular’ (to quote Pistol in Henry V). Its superficiality is only matched by it vulgarity and crudeness of expression. The wintry aspect of some of it, which could be more interesting, is overborne by the author’s preoccupation with describing clothes and heraldic devices. It says something about either the book or me that this is what comes to mind first! A better handling of these topics would make for interesting and evocative detail, as it is, it tends to get boring – not more heavy velvet; not more gold; not another family device. And someone has a ‘shiny’ breastplate! Certainly heraldry should be meaningful and can lend richness to scenes as it does in the Gondolin story, the difference is that Tolkien understood heraldry both as a medievalist and an artist. George Martin puts it in for descriptive, not literary, effect.
Apart from its attempts at Middle English vocabulary (thankfully limited) the range of lexis is neither characteristic in the way that Tolkien’s certainly is, nor is it particularly rich, except in its lurid depictions of physical relationships and the equally lurid descriptions of violence. The text separates itself from any reasonable comparison with Tolkien’s work by its determined emphasis on physicality, down to the problems of saddle sores. Martin describes everything with sharp focus on the body. If this had been done with more wit and humour the work might have tended towards the carnivalesque, as it is, references to the ‘lower bodily stratum’ are still subversive, and in this case what they subvert is Tolkien’s handling of ‘medieval’ epic. But if Martin set out to challenge Tolkien’s cult-status medievalism by obscuring it in grossness, that grossness only serves as a comment on those who prefer it, and as the shadow to Tolkien’s brilliance.
If Martin has any grounding in medievalism at all it can, I think, only be in the filtered form of historical novels like The White Queen and Wolf Hall. His grasp of fantasy and violence is that of Hollywood, computer games, and in my very limited experience, graphic novels and comic books. These elements he overlays onto what is essentially a soap opera involving a lot of families intermarrying and fighting one another.
There are of course a number of direct pinches from Tolkien. There are horselords, in this case configured like Mongols, black haired, well-muscled and owing something, I felt, to the Black Lace genre of women’s fiction. There are wights – blue-eyed and black-handed for reasons so far unexplained – but killers nevertheless. As a stand-in for hobbit smallness there is the dwarf Tyrion, although to be fair, anyone less like a hobbit would be hard to imagine! The question of borrowing and influence in GoT is immaterial, however, in such a trivial postmodern pastiche. The creation or adaptation of names reflects this lazy approach.
Multiplying complaints is fun but not productive. As far as I have gone, GoT is strangely mesmerising – I turn each page waiting for some further assault from the trivial, crude, but easily read surface. It is truly pulp fiction, hard to find anything about which to comment except to complain. So to the comparative aspect: Tolkien’s work, as we have observed, requires Reading, it offers so much after the initial allure of Middle-earth. It has spiritual and moral depth, which is often complex and theologically grounded. It resonates with the primary world to an extent that maybe can only be compared with Shakespeare. In these respects GoT has sharpened my appreciation of the delicate brilliance of The Lord of the Rings especially: it is porcelain compared to earthenware, sprigged muslin compared to rough bast woven from nettles. It leads the reader through a world that is violent for more important reasons than dynastic power games.
One final thing, the wall of ice in GoT is an interesting concept.
Southfarthing Mathom 2012 