January 23, 2003
WE, RESPECTFULLY, BEG TO DIFFER:
Much as I enjoy tweaking Charles Murtaugh about the deleterious effects being at Harvard has had on his political sense, I usually agree with his literary judgments. So it comes as a great surprise to see him agree with this portion of an essay about The Lord of the Rings (Eric Olsen, Blogcritics):
I finally finished rereading The Return of the King, about 25 years after the first time I read it. I find it preposterous that the series has been voted the greatest work of literature of the 20th century, or even the millennium by one poll: this is a great story with an amazing depth of mythic detail behind it, not a work of great literature. "Literature" at its greatest shines an uncanny light upon human relationships and exposes something so surprisingly true about ourselves that we stare into space in wonder and even fright. Depth of character and the complexity of relationships is what Tolkien does least well.
As a threshold point, one fails to see how it can be argued that a great read that creates its own mythology of "amazing depth" can fail to be considered great literature. By comparison, I'm currently reading Philip Pullman's Dark Materials Trilogy, which has won awards and much critical acclaim, but as you read it there is no sense that the characters have any life or history beyond what appears on the page and serves the plot at that moment. Part of the unique genius of Tolkien is that he created Middle Earth, its languages, religions, literature, songs, peoples, history, etc. and only then wrote the novels. It may be fair to say that characters don't have the "psychological depth" we require in the age of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Oprah, but they have an entirely different kind of depth: to the extent such a thing is possible, they exist outside the books.
However, even this underestimates the series. For it is precisely by exposing humanity to the truth about itself, in a very frightening way, that the series achieves true greatness. If it is fair to say that characters are in some sense too heroic, that their basic goodness makes them unrealistic, it is also the case that not a single one of them--from the wisest to the mightiest to the most innocent--is capable of resisting the ring and its siren call to wield power over others. At he heart of the series lies this core truth--and it is here that we most clearly see Tolkien's Christian message--that evil exists and that it is is irresistible but must be resisted.
This, of course, is a message that is denied by the modern (since Rousseau) Left (and by the libertarian Right), which insists that bad behavior is a
mere product of bad circumstances, rather than a function of the eternal capacity for evil that is at war with the aspiration towards good that is ongoing
in Man's soul. Perhaps the best example of what has happened comes from Andrew Delbanco, who TIME named America's best intellectual. In
1995, he wrote a very fine, but ultimately tragically wrong, book called href=http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1129>The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil:
[T]he work of the devil is everywhere, but no one knows where to find him. We live in the most brutal century in human history, but instead of stepping forward to take the credit, he has rendered himself invisible. Although the names by which he was once designated (in the Christian lexicon he was assigned the name Satan; Marxism substituted phrases like 'exploitative classes'; psychoanalysis preferred terms like 'repression' and 'neurosis') have been discredited to one degree or another, nothing has come to take their place. The work of this book is therefore to think historically about the shrinking range of phenomena to which accusatory words like 'evil' and 'sin' may still be applied in contemplatory life, and to think about what it means to do without them.I have written it out of the belief that despite the shriveling of the old words and concepts, we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that used to go under the name of evil. Few people still believe in what the British writer Ian McEwan has recently called the 'malign principle, a force in human affairs that periodically advances to dominate and destroy the lives of individuals or nations, then retreats to await the next occasion.' We certainly no longer have a conception of evil as a distributed entity with an ontological essence of its own, as what some philosophers call 'presences.' Yet something that feels like this force still invades our experience, and we still discover in ourselves the capacity to inflict it on others. Since this is true, we have an inescapable problem: we feel something that our culture no longer gives us the vocabulary to express.
Yet, even having recognized the problem inherent in abandoning a world that recognizes the existence of evil, Mr. Delbanco shows himself unable to confront its implications:
Although there would be a certain satisfaction in living imaginatively in such a world, on balance it is probably a good thing that we have lost it forever. Whether we welcome or mourn this loss, it is the central and irreversible fact of modern history that we no longer inhabit a world of transcendence. The idea that man is a receptor of truth from God has been relinquished, and replaced with the idea that reality is an unstable zone between phenomena (unknowable in themselves) and innumerable fields of mental activity (which we call persons) by which they are apprehended. These apprehensions are expressed through language, which is always evolving, and which constitutes the only reality we recognize. Our world exists
in the ceaseless movement of human consciousness, a process in which the reception of new impressions is indistinguishable from the production of new meanings: 'mind's willful transference of nature, man, and society--and eventually of God, and finally of mind itself-- into itself.'
Where Mr. Delbanco had begun by telling us "we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that used to go under the name of evil," now he tells us that instead :
[T]he story I have tried to tell is the story of the advance of secular rationality in the United States, which has been relentless in the face of all resistance. It is the story of a culture that has gradually withdrawn its support from the old conception of a universe seething with divine intelligence and has left its members with only one recourse: to acknowledge that no story about the intrinsic meaning of the world has universal validity.
In the fundamentally unserious kind of culture that America had become by the mid-90s, this kind of nonsense could be argued with a straight face. However, here's a bit of an interview that Mr. Delbanco did with Bill Moyers right after 9-11:
BM: Do you believe in evil?AD: I don't see how anyone can have experienced even indirectly as you and I sitting here have the events of the last day and not take seriously the existence of evil. One of the things that a number of writers have said about the devil-- some people believe in him as a literal being, some people believe in him as a metaphor or an image or a representation of these dark, human capacities-- one thing that a number of writers have said is that the cleverest trick of the devil is to convince people that he does not exist. We saw evil yesterday. We have to confront it. We have to face it.
BM: Evil is defined as?
AD: Well, for me I think the best I've been able to do with that question is to try to recognize and come to terms with the reality of the fact that there are human beings who are able, by convincing themselves that there's some higher good, some higher ideal to which their lives should be dedicated, that the pain and suffering of other individuals doesn't matter, it doesn't have to do with them or that it's... That they're expendable, that it's a cost that's worth making in the pursuit of these objectives. So evil for me is the absence of the imaginative sympathy for other human beings.
BM: The absence of a moral imagination, the ability to see what the consequences of your actions are to someone else?
AD: Yes, the inability to see your victims as human beings. To think of them as instruments or cogs or elements or statistics but not as human beings.
BM: You have written about your concern that Americans have lost the sense of evil. Is what happened in the last 36 hours going to bring us back or is it too deep for that, our absence, our loss of memory.
AD: I think it simmers. It's dormant in all of us. We don't want to acknowledge it. We want to explain it away. We want to find [an explanation] for it. In a modern world we mostly live in a place where the terrible suffering of the world seems far away-abstract and unreal and we can somehow imagine that it hasn't anything to do with us. It came home yesterday. I think a lot of people in this city and in this country are searching their souls.
Suddenly, Mr. Delbanco has ditched his secular rationality and is speaking of the soul and there's no more blather about how there are no universals. The relativistic Left asked in the wake of the attacks: why do they hate us? Because they can no longer comprehend evil, there had to be something we did that caused such a horror. But Mr. Delbanco seemed entirely able to state a universal truth, that the attacks of 9-11 were evil.
If the cleverest trick of the devil truly is to convince us that he doesn't exist, then one of his greatest modern opponents is J.R.R. Tolkien--whose writings have reached millions, by now perhaps hundreds of millions. The Lord of the Rings teaches us that evil is real and that it is compelling, that even the best of us will be attracted to it. This is one of the oldest truths of Western Civilization, yet somehow it still surprises people, as Mr. Olsen demands that great literature must. And because it does and because this truth is so vital to a proper understanding of what it means to be human, it seems to me at least that it must be considered one of the greatest works of literature our civilization has produced.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 23, 2003 12:03 PMThanks for taking the time to comment upon my post, I am honored.
I don't see any major disagreement here between our main points: namely, that (quoting myself) "In conjunction with this tale told of a parallel, pre-firearm, cusp-of-the-Industrial-Revolution earth, the unself-conscious values of honor, courage, commitment, and attachment to kith, kin and the land are presented so naturally and powerfully that by the end of the series we are ready to take up arms and stride purposefully out the door seeking to eviscerate evil, in between draughts of good ale, of course"
We agree that the trilogy is a great story that unflinchingly names evil "evil" and asserts that it cannot be "appeased" (again quoting myself).
The only place we seem to disagree is in the meaning of the word "literature." The reason I don't call Tolkien "literature" is that all of this truth is told through the action of the story, not through any penetrating glimpse into the individual characters or their relationships - it is all revelaed externally, and I believe "great literature" must get inside the characters and their relationships.
This doesn't mean it isn't a great story, or that it isn't great writing, or that I don't love it and revere it - I tried to make all these things clear in my review.
What you concede about "psychological depth" is for me the essence of the definition. Yes, I agree that the characters exist outside the books, but they do so very thinly. Yes, all of the characters go through their own struggle with the ring, but the struggle is seen from the outside: I don't really know what that struggle feels like to the characters.
I don't think this necessarily diminishes the trilogy as a story, but it does take it out of the realm of literature, by my definition.
Thanks again, EO
Thanks.
I'm afraid I just find that definition of "literature" bizarre. That a book can move you to wish to confront evil and not be "great" makes little sense to
me. It also seems to rule out any book that isn't told in the first person, or at least laden with navel-gazing soliloquies. Even then, what does Marcel
Proust, the exemplar of this format, teach us about ourselves? I think nothing, though he does plumb his own depths to some degree.
The internal conflicts of the characters in The Ring though, precisely because they are the universal struggles of mankind, echo within each of us.
Which of us doesn't think, on some level, that if we had absolute power we'd use it wisely? Yet which of us, on the more profound level, does not
recognize that, in reality, we'd use it to benefit ourselves? And since this is the primary truth from which our relationships with one another
proceed--especially here in America, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary" (James Madison)--what more can we ask.
A series that excluded this great theme but that let us in on Sam Gamgee's forbidden longing for Frodo would certainly be more in keeping with the
modern style of literary psychobabble, but at that point it would have devolved from universal truths to particular and highly individualistic truths.
We might learn more about Sam but we'd learn nothing of ourselves. In that direction lies the mess we find ourselves in now, where the most popular
literary form is the memoir, a bit of voyeuristic sensationalism that tells us more than we ever wanted to know about seemingly anyone who can write
two hundred pages about themselves and tells us nothing about the wider world. More importantly, we've no way of knowing whether anything in
such inner-oriented books is "true" because we do not partake of the thoughts and feelings of the authors. Only a Marcel Proust or a Frank McCourt
knows what his own feelings are. We, as readers, have to take their word for it, unlike the feelings and desires that Tolkien is writing about, which
are the shared heritage of humankind.
Regards,
O
Eric - I also find your definition of literature bizarre - and so too would Isaac Bashevis Singer, who said the following:
"The truth is that we know what a person thinks, not by what he tells us, but by his actions. This reminds me – once a boy came to the cheder where I studied, and he said, “Do you know that my father wanted to box my ear?” So the teacher said, “How do you know that he wanted to box your ear?” And the boy said, “He did.”
A man may sit for hours and talk about what he thinks, but what he really is, you can judge best by what he does. . . . When you read the Bible, it never tells you what a man thought. It’s always what he did. . . . When you read Tolstoy and Flaubert and Chekhov, it’s always what the hero or heroine said or did. . . . When you read a newspaper, you never find in the news what someone was thinking, but always his deeds. This is the reason why people read newspapers with so much more appetite than they read books. The paper tells you that a man has murdered his wife, not that he pondered about it. In many cases the reader already knows the psychology behind the deed. If you read that a man came home to his wife, he found her lover in her bed, and he shot both of them, you understand more or less how angry he was, and what he was thinking when he was arrested. Real literature concentrates on events and situations." (Richard Burgin, Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, pp 53-4.)
I think the Aubrey/Maturin books are one of the great novels of the 20th century, so I have little license to quibble about any else's definition of "Literature." However, I can do no better than Posner in Law and Literature
(a decent book, by the way, if better on literature than law) in saying that whether something is classic literature can only be judged historically -- is it still read 100 years later. Much of Dickens, for example, would fail Eric's test.
But the questions raised by Eric's definition are similar to a question in historiography between narrative and analysis. To oversimplify, should the historian tells us what happened or tell us why it happened. It has always seemed to me that the height of the historian's art is to tell me what happened in such a way that "why" is implicitly clear. However, this takes great skill and great integrity. The same is true, it seems to me, with literature.
When dealing with other people, I can never know their motives, or their thoughts, or how their childhood has warped them. I can only know what I see of them. To take that same limitation, and apply it to characters in a book, while at the same time leaving me convinced that I understand them implicitly (and thus better understand other people), seems to me the height of the novelist's art.
Isn't the best we can hope for to begin to understand why characters (or real people for that matter) behave as they do?
Oh, and Aubrey/Maturin are certainly great literature.
I think Eric is right and you guys are arguing over semantics, Orrin. He didn't say LOTR wasn't great--just that it wasn't great literature, which he defined as a genre which illuminates the human condition using psychological techniques, "penetrating glimpse[s] into the individual characters or their relationships." Hey wow, you can define away the vast gap between high-minded literature types and the great genre-loving unwashed masses just by assuming literature is a genre with its own set of conventions. Neat.
Posted by: Justin Slotman at January 23, 2003 4:02 PMLooking forward to the review on Dark Materials.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at January 23, 2003 4:06 PMAUTHOR: Alastair
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DATE: 01/23/2003 05:41:00 PM
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Here's the best thing you'll read on Pullman, though I'm less impressed by the books than is Mr. Moloney:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0105/reviews/moloney.html
I thought Maloney's review was pretty much right on. My only objections are, first, that the great sacrifice made in the end, which Maloney admires, is in no way required by the rules Kaufman has set-up in the previous thousand pages and, second, there is no recovery from the injury done to the trilogy as a whole by the incoherence of the third book. Finally, as an attack on Lewis and Narnia the trilogy fails completely. The third book descends into a heavy-handed, overly-concrete diatribe of which Lewis, with his light touch, was incapable.
Posted by: David Cohen at January 23, 2003 7:18 PM