The Death of the Author as a Young Man (fiction)
While the work clearly stands on its own as a masterpiece of prose fiction, William Bright’s & Testament takes on greater meaning, and is perhaps only fully explicable, in the context and reality of its creation. As anyone who watched the included DVD of the funeral might remark, the story is only the merest part of the total performance art experience called Life. But, to quote one of the author’s favorite poets, whose sensibility underpins Will’s writing: “we had the experience but missed the meaning, and approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form, beyond all happiness.” Challenging the commonly held critique of the intentional fallacy, it seems we can only approach this experience through meaningful moments in the author’s own life, restored through the memories of those who witnessed the events first hand. Hence William Bright’s final request that a series of interviews with his family and friends be appended to the text once, “the body lay rotting in the world, where all is said and done.” If ever it can be, for as long as the memory of a person lives on, there remains ever more to say about their life and work. – Ed.
Nim Bright: He couldn’t wait to get there, could he? Since we were born he was first, twelve minutes before me, and that kept going the rest of our lives. Will’d always be the one to try something, to make mistakes, figure out the instructions, while I sat back and watched and made my mental models of the problem. And then performed it right. Hell, I figured on at least another fifty, seventy years before we’d have to figure this one out, though he seems to have nailed it in his book. He always had to be different. I don’t blame him for it. We used to fight a lot, after we grew apart and he moved away. I’d tell him, Will, you’re wasting your energy, you have to be like me, patient, like water, he never did understand Taoism. But he didn’t want to be like me, that’s what drove him, his whole short life trying to escape the fact that on the genetic level we are, were, the same person. He wrote me a long letter last year, apologizing for his perspective on all of it. I… kept meaning to reply.
Yeah, we got along till about middle school. No, forget that telepathy nonsense, having a twin’s like having a best friend, another you, to play with, but not in your head. Who needs anyone else? Right? We shared everything; we’d go on these walks on the beach and dream up this elaborate mansion, imagining room after fun house room, the heart of this whole internal reality that we could always come back to. It’s what got me into computer programming, and Will into story writing I guess. Our whole childhood was like that, made up games, invisible adventures. We told each other everything, except for our fears, maybe if we had been able to say them out loud… God, I remember we must have been six or seven, I don’t know why but we were both having a lot of nightmares, skeletons, dark wizards; the usual fancies. Will wasn’t sleeping at all though. Dad told me later Will was lying awake trying to imagine what death was like. Not some vision of heaven or hell, though we were raised Catholic we never believed in any of that afterlife nonsense, but death itself I think, the existential experience of not-being. He said the closest he could imagine was like lying, immobile, in some vast empty space, and being condemned to think for eternity. It’s terrifying when you’re a kid, isn’t it? But that’s where we’re headed. See I’m working on this program to upload consciousness into a digital medium. We can live forever in the neural network. Will knew. It was in his story, the only part of his testament we couldn’t follow. But once I get through this layer we can take his brain off ice, and he can live, er, think out his dream of being the eternal storyteller. How exciting! And then I, I guess I could apologize, for not having it done in time, or for not replying to his letter, when it might, um, have made a difference.
Mary Sinclair: Oh Will! Why did he do it? I don’t know if anyone can understand, certainly not a simple-minded Pooh Bear like me. He was always so different, so unique, more than anyone else we went to school with. I remember, when we met, in middle school, he came into orchestra class in this long black trench coat, so tall and intimidating. Oh! It wasn’t what he wore though, though he did dress pretty strange with the years. It was how he thought, always so complex, these circles, I never knew what he was talking about, these… No, it was that he smiled, at a silly fat girl like me. And kept smiling. Because he understood, we were on the same side, the outside. I don’t know why no one liked him, or Nim either, but Will, he was brilliant, beautiful, he always cared, always listened through the years when I’d gotten my heart broken again, he’d be there and listen, and never ever judge me. And after he moved away he’d tell me stories about his life, his dreams and adventures, whenever I wasn’t telling him who died that year, which someone always did and he always wanted to know about it, and I never got anything he said but I just sat their and smiled too, because we were friends, because he was William Bright.
No, he wasn’t outside, though we hung out with the other misfits out back of T.C. during lunch. He, he had this way of, everywhere he was, it was like, that was the center of life. I don’t know how to explain it. He made the world around him? Like he made his death too, his bones. Oh, why were they just bones? I… don’t know what I expected… gold. I was glad of the parade though, I didn’t know Will had touched so many people’s lives, like he touched mine. He was so caring… Before our senior year, our friend Red killed himself, took acid and hung himself right in front of his sister. It was horrible! But Will, maybe he was out of town that summer, but no one told him about the funeral. He got upset, he wanted to pay his respects, so he made us, well, he suggested we all go down to the tunnels, the sewers under the school we sometimes hung out in. I hated the place, crawling through those dark, wet rooms. But it had been Red’s place, and Will knew that so he took us there, and lit a red candle, and we sat on the rocks and smoked a long joint in memory of Red, what he would have done for any of us, you know? But the joint started running and the cherry fell off, and before I could relight it Will said no, this joint is like our friend, burnt out before his time. Then he blew out the candle. I… guess it sounds silly now, but then it was the smartest most caring thing anyone could have thought of to say. We all cried there in the dripping darkness, we were not alone.
Phoebe Zeitgeber: I always knew something was eating at Will, like he was a top spinning around the edge of a sunlit abyss, and he couldn’t ever leave that cliff alone. Like when we were doing those writer’s groups back in the day – I gave him his first journal you know – he’d always bring in this one line, one theme: “I walk the twisted streets alone again, between shadows and the lamplit avenues.” Maybe used it in five poems? I always thought it was abstractions, hollow symbols, but thinking back that’s what he always did, walk the night time streets again and again, searching for some answer, some goddess, anything that could tell him why he was the way he was, why nothing ever made sense. God, the number of times I had to talk him down from a tempting ledge or a new girlfriend. It’s not that he wanted to be different, he just was, and that scared him down to the core. Do you ever feel what it’s like never knowing who you are or what you are supposed to do, but being possessed with this unaccountable energy, this prodigious imagination, and still not knowing what you were supposed to do with it? Will did. He was always asking me for advice. That or just channeling these strange desires, being a medium for the Universe, he put it. A medium for worms now, and one day, a tree. We’d always talked of that, being planted with a seed in the gut to renew the cycles of the Earth. And the eating, I came up with that too.
No, we hadn’t talked much recently; I’ve been real busy since I moved to Prague, when he met Glory. I can’t imagine what she did to him, to drive him to this… No, he always drove himself. Even when we were together he drove himself. I recall, back in high school, our punk rock salad days. There was a show, Grimple was playing, we were all into them that year. Anyway, before they even got on stage a kid who was tabling in the back suddenly collapses. A heart attack. Everyone rushed over, except Will, standing off to the side with a look of horror on his face. See, he had been a lifeguard that year, still certified for CPR, but he told me that in that moment, when someone’s life might depend on it, he panicked and forgot what to do. I told him it was okay, could happen to anybody. Seven other punks couldn’t resuscitate the body, the kid was DOA when the medics showed up, but Will, I don’t think he ever forgot that moment, or stopped blaming himself maybe for not being able to be the hero. It ate him up, knowing that even when you know what to do, and how to do it, sometimes you can’t.
Dr. Randolph Carter: I didn’t know William Bright all that well. In fact, I only had him for one class at the University of Maryland, back in 2000. But it’s like any teacher who’s been teaching long enough will tell you, there are those students who even decades later you can not forget. It’s something about their eyes, that voracious gaze, as if they can stare straight through time and space. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I’m sure William left teachers wondering his whole life just what he would get into when he left their classrooms. I guess we all know now.
The class was called Thanatos: the Many Meanings of Death. I was quite proud of that title. I wanted my students to learn to question the cultural taboos on dying in order to more fully appreciate the lives they were living. I mean, it was rather dull actually, all textual based: Ivan lllych, Kubler-Ross, Ariés. If I ever taught that class again I’d take them to a morgue. But you’d be surprised at how hard some of these kids took it, as if they’d never been told that they would die before. So I had them keep journals of their emotional reactions to the texts, so that I could make sure no one wanted to look at death too closely, if you know what I mean. Well, William’s journal, I don’t think he understood what I meant by emotions, he had never journaled before. But the rest of it, it was this collage of ideas, research, mythologies real and imagined, some of it rather impressive if not a little overblown. I chalked that up to youth. He had even written a couple stories there, one actually that was mainly a collection of funerary rituals. I guess he never let that idea go. I recall how fascinated he was with the concept of aerial burials, and I guess I was a little pleased though admittedly sickened, watching those ravens tear at his organs. Actually it was beautiful, that moment when one raven picked out his eye. I’m glad that part made it onto the DVD, even if I can never bring myself to watch it again.
I think he always knew it, even back in 2000. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, like he knew that he had to experience the fullness of life and the fullness of death, but he was only waiting for someone to tell him to go ahead. This one day I did. It was early spring, none of my students wanted to be in class, all sitting there with their heads in their hands, bored even with this, the greatest of mysteries. I grew furious, I wanted to get a rise out of them, so I said, if you are ever doing something that you don’t want to be doing, even sitting in this classroom right now, and you know what you’d rather be doing instead, then go do it! And William, rest his soul, stood up, fixed me with his penetrating blue gaze, and then he walked out. Just like that! How could I ever forget it? None of the rest of the kids even moved. When I read his book, those passages about meeting God, that’s all I could think, what it would have been like to see the world through those eyes. Maybe this is the closest we get, maybe…
Flip Rogers: I didn’t have to be there to know it; I had a gig that night anyway. They incinerated his heart, right? So what? Will’s heart was always on fire. That was his anthem, he wore it on his patchy sleeve: live passionately, love fully, with his big dreams and outrageous songs, as if he was the hero of his own story. We used to argue about it constantly, living your life as material for your writing. An’ that’s what we were doing, with the Moment, the whole Bumrush poetry thing, living our dreams. Least till it ‘came obvious those dreams weren’t attainable. We’d argue an’ I’d say, yo God, Kerouac tried it, the whole Beat thing, this personal mythology. It’s been done, no one cares, you can’t do it anymore. The first person narrator is dead. But he’d just shrug an’ go out wandering, get involved with a circus or some fool shit, you know? Will’s dreams were bigger than any of us realized, just he never told no one what they were.
It’s like back when we were first starting the band, he wrote this one song called Momento Mori, “pain reminds me I am alive” and all. Yeah he was always thinking on that level. Deep, too deep, way out in left field where none of us could catch him. Like, Phoebe tried to keep Will straight, an’ I tried to keep him bent. I got him drinking beer back in the day, even gave him blow-caine once when he asked for it. All our wild, meaningless adventures, like I had to keep him entertained, him and everyone else for that matter. But then, just when no one expected it, Will’d go off and sell fairie wings for a living, or join up with some shamanic ritual cult or something. For what? The experience? Who the fuck knows! Will never shared what was in his heart, but it was burning, burning, his desires were unquenchable. Like after Terra dumped him, an’ he spent a year drunk an’ courting the Horror. He threw himself just as passionately into dying.
That one night, we were all fucked up, an’ Will starts getting the shakes, like someone’s walking over his grave for hours an’ hours. His temperature had dropped a bunch an’ so Lady’d put him in a hot bath to warm up and knock it off. He said he was dying. None of us listened really, I mean, people’ve got sick before an’ got over it. But then, I remember we were listening to Mirah sing Wile’s “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” an’ then Will starts yelling from upstairs, he’s praying, like in some foreign language, saying that if he lived through the night he’d get his shit together an’ do everything he was put on Earth to do, real spiritual like. Sent chills up my spine, an’ fuck, I though I’d heard everything! I don’t know if he did get it together, if he did what he had to do whatever that was. We stopped talking after that, when he met Glory. I jus’ know he fell into her with as much passion too, an’ maybe when that went belly up an’ he finally realized he couldn’t be a hero in life like he wanted to, well, he decided to be one in death, like Peter Pan puts it, “to die will be a terribly great adventure.” An’ you know what I say to that? Ain’t get to enjoy no adventures when yer dead.
Albion Mazara: The thing you have to understand is that reality is not just this. There are other layers, larger patterns of which we are only the smallest part. Will understood this, he called them symbols, metasymbols; you may as well call them godforms, or the Council of Ancient Intelligences like I do in my art. That’s what we were after, the greater reality, the hidden reality. Except he saw it, Will went there, Saint Peter opened the gates for him on Earth. We were all tripping, not Matthew of course, and John was puking his up, but then I saw that fish Mark had caught and Luke had hung on the tree. It was still breathing, dying slowly out of its element. We had betrayed life. It threw me into a hell world, years of fighting my own shadows. But Will, he saw that fish and saw a key to life! He tried to explain it later, while I was warped up in the darkness, the Akashic Records, the connection through the back of the skull, like we are each cells, atomic structures in the larger organs of society, time, and space, all building up into larger living structures of intelligence until it, we, are all Existence. What is one cell? The skin on your finger dies all the time. It was like when Frank died, when those kids shot him in the head. It was just a death, but we finished his walk for him, year after year, building up a pattern, a ritual, that keeps him alive, a part of us. That’s how Will put it.
I saw hell because my life had been a heaven before. Will saw heaven because his life had been a hell. Since we met, it always seemed that something was going wrong for him, usually of his own making. Except he knew a way out, he knew how to dream. Will had this theory, how ancient cultures and shamans would leave tools with their dead to aid them in the afterlife, the otherworld. But that place, Will said, was no different from the drug state, the dream state, the imagination. Will died every night and wandered through his soul, unraveling the darkness before he was reborn each morning. He even took tools with him once he told me, under his pillow, which allowed him to get to the other side of his own personal hell. He had me make one of my little mummies, a tiny clay Will Bright. We buried it with his tools: the coins, the mirror, the length of string, a miniature blank journal. This wasn’t in his story, or the funeral. If they were he wouldn’t have been able to come back for them. I believe he did, you know, when I opened the tiny tomb, his simulacrum had already set out for the bridge between worlds.
Murphy Bright: Marta isn’t able to say anything. William asked her to participate too, but she hasn’t been able to stop crying yet. Even the best of the Scotch hasn’t helped her calm down. It’s the first time she hasn’t had the first word since the twins were born, which would almost be funny if it weren’t the death of our son. I should be drunk too, surprised I’m not, except I’ve had no desire to drink, like I feel this more pressing responsibility to finish William’s story. Over all the years, ever since I told the boys those animal tales when they were little, I think he was trying to get me to talk. When I started working on the genealogy William challenged me not to just record the names and dates, the tangibles, but to tell the stories, the lives and strange connections that make people real, that make our family tick. But really I think he was pushing me to tell him about my own life, but I never could, though he did get me painting again.
One story I did find though, was that for generations our blood would dig into one location, one way of life, that stubborn Southern mentality. But then one member would suddenly drop it all and run off to be a lighthouse keeper, or an artist. William loved that one; I think he felt it explained why he always had to push boundaries, like there was some genetic urging that could never be stilled, never be satisfied, that was always curious and revolutionary and so, so caring (which, if you look at even our recent family history is certainly a change from the norm). Take my mother’s funeral for example. I was having a really hard time of it myself, but William came down to Virginia immediately, dressed nice, helped out as much as possible. And he encouraged Marta to read the little poem she’d written and would have been too distraught to read otherwise. It wasn’t much, but it made the otherwise typical funeral a little more personal. Will wrote his own poem afterwards, it was so moving it made us both cry, because it addressed everything else that was going on around that day that did indeed make her passing special.
I think that’s one of the reasons William did this. His funeral was one that nobody will ever forget, though I couldn’t bring myself to eat his flesh. I wouldn’t be surprised if ages hence it became a national holiday, or a religious celebration. He had that power in his writing, in his art, even when it was weird, the power of truth, of what he called Total Reality. Even in the face of death, William wanted to see through to the other side. I think we can all learn from that, I certainly have. If there’s one thing I could tell my son, it’s that I started working on that story of my childhood again, the one he always wanted me to tell him.
Glory Bev Khora: We argued about it when he first read that Barthe’s essay. Will was outraged, adamant that an author’s life does have meaning, any life for that matter. That’s when he came up with the story idea, I just thought it was a clever intellectual exercise, I just never expected him to really follow through with it, not just the writing but the actual dying… If only we hadn’t broken up, that’s when everything turned. I was the only person Will had talked to in years; he’d abandoned everyone else. I kept telling him to make friends, to see a therapist, but he wouldn’t, he insisted that he could work through all his problems in his writing. But other people, they’re what gives life meaning, even if sometimes it feels like hell. Will was so lonely, so outraged, like his father, who Will said clung so hard to his beliefs that he eventually lost all his friends over it. Will didn’t want to end up like that, but he did. I think he was scared of losing people, or saddened that he’d driven away so many already. He said that he’d seen most of them die, not literally, but in his dreams. He said that meant you were killing off an old projection of that person that no longer worked anymore, so you could see them for who they really are, even with all the flaws.
But the image he could never get beyond was his own. When things were really bad between us I asked him, how he could manage to change the world if he couldn’t change his own perspectives? Maybe he couldn’t, maybe he just gave up after I told him I wasn’t ready to have children, when I broke off our engagement. That’s one of the ways he wanted to find meaning too, a lasting, to leave something behind that would endure. But can anything? You know, in the winter, right before he vanished, Will was furious again, about what? About that the stars were all going to disappear from the sky, something about the rate of expansion of the Universe speeding up. He wanted to fight the death of the Universe! And that so many billions of years away it’s pointless to even think about it. Talk about tilting at windmills. Talk about looking for meaning. But he must have thought, how can anything I do endure if billions of years from now there won’t be stars, planets, life to enjoy it? Clearly that’s not the right way of looking at it. Sure the author’s important, so’s our work, but we can’t be so important that it stops us from doing God’s will, here and now, whatever that is for each of us, getting along maybe, dying gratefully after the life we’ve had.
Gah, but this is all academic, isn’t it? Will’s not dead. I guess I’ll ruin his surprise. At least I don’t believe it. For starters, how did he die? No one knows, no one’s talked about it either. There was just the manuscript and the body. It could have been any body, a cadaver already anonymized, portioned out for the specific rituals. We couldn’t even see his tattoos, since the skin had already, supposedly been preserved somewhere. No, actually, dying would be entirely inconsistent with everything I know about him; even in his worst moments he was full of life. No, he’d rather play the joke, or just disappear completely, vanish to some hermitage somewhere and years down the road we’ll get a package in the mail that’ll be the manuscript of his next book. Author returns from the dead, will be the headlines. Of course, maybe that’s just what I want, what we all want. If Will’s not actually dead we’re all gonna kill him for it.
2.22.2009
The Anthropological Perspective in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness
The Anthropological Perspective in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness
In his essay on The Left Hand of Darkness, Martin Bickman discusses the ways in which Ursula K. Le Guin plays with different formal elements to more clearly express the content and themes of her novel. While Bickman points to the use of structural arguments and descriptive passages, he neglects to mention one of the main stylistic techniques through which Le Guin illuminates her theme of finding unity through diversity, that of the narrative voice or point of view through which the story is told. The narrator, Genly Ai, claims that he will make his report on the planet Gethen as if it were a story (Le Guin, 7), but through the majority of the novel this record is rather told as if it were field notes on an unknown culture, that is, as an anthropological survey. As we are given little of Genly’s emotional responses or personal history, it is primarily through, and against, this anthropological perspective that we see the narrator struggling to understand the otherness of the alien culture in which he is placed.
Le Guin herself was the daughter of the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber, and this fascination with the studying of other cultures influences a number of her works. From the sociological study of the short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, to the all-encompassing cultural portrait of a world in Always Coming Home, Le Guin presents other peoples and places with the attention to details of custom that make individual cultures unique. It is perhaps a testament to her abilities as an author that she is able to create a narrator who also sees the strange world he comes to from this anthropological perspective. For instance, Genly goes to great page lengths to accurately describe the New Years celebration of Karhide, from its socio-political stratification to specifics of costume, entertainment, and ritual (Le Guin, 8-12). Elsewhere Genly analyzes the Karhidian diet, the floor plan of the royal Palace, and the planet’s political and technological history as if these were the necessary or obvious perspectives to the telling of his story. Though he is afraid the Gethenians think he will, “judge as an alien” (Le Guin, 11), the only judgments Genly makes at first are objective and observational ones.
The clearest we learn of Genly’s subjective past is that he comes from Earth, but more directly he arrives as an Envoy from the Ekumen, an interplanetary federation socially and technologically more advanced than the cultures on Gethen. This cultural difference is so vast and incomprehensible to the Gethenians that the king of Karhide asks why they should have, “anything to do with all these nations of monsters living out in the Void” (Le Guin, 38). This response may have been similar to what Western, imperialist cultures on our planet encountered when ‘discovering’ other indigenous peoples during the age of colonization. While Genly has been sent to communicate with, and not colonize, the Gethenians, he faces the same problem faced by real world anthropologists: that of having to understand the native people with whom he would talk. Genly is aware that he has to, “see the people of the planet through their own eyes” (Le Guin, 17); to which end he collects local myths and stories throughout the text. Despite the inclusion of these narratives of the other, Genley still sees his task as difficult due to differences in Gethenian sexuality or the socio-political intricacies of shifgrethor, but it may actually be because of the way his anthropological perspective treats the other.
In his essay, Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters, Carl D. Malmgren sets up a three-tiered model for the perspectives through which aliens, the other, are generally encountered in science fiction: “other as enemy, other as self, other as other” (Malmgren, 18). The narrator of The Left Hand of Darkness clearly wants to reach the point of viewing the Gethenian other as self, but until he achieves that perspective he does not see them as either enemies or wholly other. From his broader cultural background in the Ekumen, which has abolished war ages ago, Genly has no desire to see Gethenians as enemies. Even when he is sent to the prison farm in Orgoreyn he discusses events with no sense of animosity, and at worst only feels further away from understanding the cultures around him. On the other hand, Genly’s perspective does not treat the other as wholly other, that is, as impossible to understand from our human vantage point. They may be other now, but through observation they might become known, even if that requires long, inhospitable journeys such as Genly goes on to see the Foretellers. But until these journeys are made, the anthropological perspective treats the other as an object, as something to be studied, classified, and perhaps even used. While Genly wants to understand Gethenian culture, his objective attention to cultural details keeps him from participating in the kinds of individual relationships necessary to apprehending the other as self, the relationships that are at the core of Le Guin’s novel.
Objectivity, it seems, is the greatest fallacy of the anthropological perspective. Is it possible to encounter the other without affecting and being affected by the other’s culture? Genly’s arrival on Gethen and his attempts to educate the Gethenians of the Ekumen drastically reshape the political machinations of both the Karhidians and the Orgoreyns. Each side wants to use Genley to leverage their own socio-political position on the planet, despite his warning that, “we’re all sons of the same Hearth” (Le Guin, 39). Genly’s own objective perspective similarly suffers from or is changed by this commingling of cultural ideas and values. While he participates in a number of feasts and civic ceremonies as an outsider, Genly chooses to participate directly in the Foretelling at the Otherhord Fastness. The answer he receives not only changes Gethenian culture by determining that the Ekumen will arrive within five years, but also introduces Genly to the religious Handdarata concept of, “the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question” (Le Guin, 71). This clearly non-objective state of mind haunts Genly through the rest of the book, making it increasingly difficult for him to interpret what he observes when he arrives in Orgoreyn. Estraven points out that Genly demands an “inordinate trustfulness,” and can not see that the machine of Orgoreyn conceals its machinations (Le Guin, 144 and 146), which lands the Envoy in the prison farm of Pulefen.
Genly and Estraven’s escape onto the Ice marks the place in the story where the novel’s theme of unity through diversity may become possible. It is also when Genly’s anthropological perspective begins to break down. The narration at this point goes back and forth each chapter between the two characters, signifying that one perspective alone is not enough to convey unity. Similarly, it is Estraven’s narratives that here take a scientific and objective turn, describing the quality of the Ice and its effect on the cultures of Gethen with the details that only someone from within that culture could know. Genly meanwhile has little culture to observe, and his narratives tend toward the minutia of physiological survival rather than the objective studying of the other. The other here is now nature itself, but the act of survival disallows the separation from the world that is necessary to the anthropological perspective.
Though the narrator’s perspective weakens as The Left Hand of Darkness draws to a close, it is still uncertain whether the cultural differences between the Ekumen and Gethen are surmountable enough for Genly to understand the other as self. Each of these cultures has their own method for directly connecting to others; for Gethenians it is the sexual state of Kemmer, while for members of the Ekumen it is Mindspeech, a form of telepathy. When they are alone on the ice, Estraven says that he and Genly are, “equals at last, equal, alien, alone” (Le Guin, 221). Yet when he goes into Kemmer, Genly is not able or refuses to participate, denying the form of connection from Gethenian culture. Instead Genly convinces Estraven to participate in Mindspeech, which he claims is “the only important thing” his culture has to give to Gethen (Le Guin, 233), equating this act as an instance of cultural dominance. Even then Estraven can only hear Genly through the voice of one of his own people, and consequently rejects the cultural gift of connection and communication between equals.
Throughout the story then it seems that it is not Genly’s objective anthropological perspective, or even his culture’s “superior” values, that enables him to achieve his mission of bringing the Ekumen to Gethen. All these things do is succeed to alienate the narrator from his own people when they finally arrive, leaving Genly more culturally adrift than when he arrived. He becomes other from himself. Instead it is Estraven who allows the Ekumen culture into his own, for he alone was broadminded enough from the beginning to not only understand his own culture, but also the necessity of welcoming an alien other into their midst. While he has been the Envoy’s strongest ally, Genly was unable to see this, let alone trust Estraven, precisely because of his dehumanizing perspective of the other as an object of study.
In his essay on The Left Hand of Darkness, Martin Bickman discusses the ways in which Ursula K. Le Guin plays with different formal elements to more clearly express the content and themes of her novel. While Bickman points to the use of structural arguments and descriptive passages, he neglects to mention one of the main stylistic techniques through which Le Guin illuminates her theme of finding unity through diversity, that of the narrative voice or point of view through which the story is told. The narrator, Genly Ai, claims that he will make his report on the planet Gethen as if it were a story (Le Guin, 7), but through the majority of the novel this record is rather told as if it were field notes on an unknown culture, that is, as an anthropological survey. As we are given little of Genly’s emotional responses or personal history, it is primarily through, and against, this anthropological perspective that we see the narrator struggling to understand the otherness of the alien culture in which he is placed.
Le Guin herself was the daughter of the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber, and this fascination with the studying of other cultures influences a number of her works. From the sociological study of the short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, to the all-encompassing cultural portrait of a world in Always Coming Home, Le Guin presents other peoples and places with the attention to details of custom that make individual cultures unique. It is perhaps a testament to her abilities as an author that she is able to create a narrator who also sees the strange world he comes to from this anthropological perspective. For instance, Genly goes to great page lengths to accurately describe the New Years celebration of Karhide, from its socio-political stratification to specifics of costume, entertainment, and ritual (Le Guin, 8-12). Elsewhere Genly analyzes the Karhidian diet, the floor plan of the royal Palace, and the planet’s political and technological history as if these were the necessary or obvious perspectives to the telling of his story. Though he is afraid the Gethenians think he will, “judge as an alien” (Le Guin, 11), the only judgments Genly makes at first are objective and observational ones.
The clearest we learn of Genly’s subjective past is that he comes from Earth, but more directly he arrives as an Envoy from the Ekumen, an interplanetary federation socially and technologically more advanced than the cultures on Gethen. This cultural difference is so vast and incomprehensible to the Gethenians that the king of Karhide asks why they should have, “anything to do with all these nations of monsters living out in the Void” (Le Guin, 38). This response may have been similar to what Western, imperialist cultures on our planet encountered when ‘discovering’ other indigenous peoples during the age of colonization. While Genly has been sent to communicate with, and not colonize, the Gethenians, he faces the same problem faced by real world anthropologists: that of having to understand the native people with whom he would talk. Genly is aware that he has to, “see the people of the planet through their own eyes” (Le Guin, 17); to which end he collects local myths and stories throughout the text. Despite the inclusion of these narratives of the other, Genley still sees his task as difficult due to differences in Gethenian sexuality or the socio-political intricacies of shifgrethor, but it may actually be because of the way his anthropological perspective treats the other.
In his essay, Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters, Carl D. Malmgren sets up a three-tiered model for the perspectives through which aliens, the other, are generally encountered in science fiction: “other as enemy, other as self, other as other” (Malmgren, 18). The narrator of The Left Hand of Darkness clearly wants to reach the point of viewing the Gethenian other as self, but until he achieves that perspective he does not see them as either enemies or wholly other. From his broader cultural background in the Ekumen, which has abolished war ages ago, Genly has no desire to see Gethenians as enemies. Even when he is sent to the prison farm in Orgoreyn he discusses events with no sense of animosity, and at worst only feels further away from understanding the cultures around him. On the other hand, Genly’s perspective does not treat the other as wholly other, that is, as impossible to understand from our human vantage point. They may be other now, but through observation they might become known, even if that requires long, inhospitable journeys such as Genly goes on to see the Foretellers. But until these journeys are made, the anthropological perspective treats the other as an object, as something to be studied, classified, and perhaps even used. While Genly wants to understand Gethenian culture, his objective attention to cultural details keeps him from participating in the kinds of individual relationships necessary to apprehending the other as self, the relationships that are at the core of Le Guin’s novel.
Objectivity, it seems, is the greatest fallacy of the anthropological perspective. Is it possible to encounter the other without affecting and being affected by the other’s culture? Genly’s arrival on Gethen and his attempts to educate the Gethenians of the Ekumen drastically reshape the political machinations of both the Karhidians and the Orgoreyns. Each side wants to use Genley to leverage their own socio-political position on the planet, despite his warning that, “we’re all sons of the same Hearth” (Le Guin, 39). Genly’s own objective perspective similarly suffers from or is changed by this commingling of cultural ideas and values. While he participates in a number of feasts and civic ceremonies as an outsider, Genly chooses to participate directly in the Foretelling at the Otherhord Fastness. The answer he receives not only changes Gethenian culture by determining that the Ekumen will arrive within five years, but also introduces Genly to the religious Handdarata concept of, “the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question” (Le Guin, 71). This clearly non-objective state of mind haunts Genly through the rest of the book, making it increasingly difficult for him to interpret what he observes when he arrives in Orgoreyn. Estraven points out that Genly demands an “inordinate trustfulness,” and can not see that the machine of Orgoreyn conceals its machinations (Le Guin, 144 and 146), which lands the Envoy in the prison farm of Pulefen.
Genly and Estraven’s escape onto the Ice marks the place in the story where the novel’s theme of unity through diversity may become possible. It is also when Genly’s anthropological perspective begins to break down. The narration at this point goes back and forth each chapter between the two characters, signifying that one perspective alone is not enough to convey unity. Similarly, it is Estraven’s narratives that here take a scientific and objective turn, describing the quality of the Ice and its effect on the cultures of Gethen with the details that only someone from within that culture could know. Genly meanwhile has little culture to observe, and his narratives tend toward the minutia of physiological survival rather than the objective studying of the other. The other here is now nature itself, but the act of survival disallows the separation from the world that is necessary to the anthropological perspective.
Though the narrator’s perspective weakens as The Left Hand of Darkness draws to a close, it is still uncertain whether the cultural differences between the Ekumen and Gethen are surmountable enough for Genly to understand the other as self. Each of these cultures has their own method for directly connecting to others; for Gethenians it is the sexual state of Kemmer, while for members of the Ekumen it is Mindspeech, a form of telepathy. When they are alone on the ice, Estraven says that he and Genly are, “equals at last, equal, alien, alone” (Le Guin, 221). Yet when he goes into Kemmer, Genly is not able or refuses to participate, denying the form of connection from Gethenian culture. Instead Genly convinces Estraven to participate in Mindspeech, which he claims is “the only important thing” his culture has to give to Gethen (Le Guin, 233), equating this act as an instance of cultural dominance. Even then Estraven can only hear Genly through the voice of one of his own people, and consequently rejects the cultural gift of connection and communication between equals.
Throughout the story then it seems that it is not Genly’s objective anthropological perspective, or even his culture’s “superior” values, that enables him to achieve his mission of bringing the Ekumen to Gethen. All these things do is succeed to alienate the narrator from his own people when they finally arrive, leaving Genly more culturally adrift than when he arrived. He becomes other from himself. Instead it is Estraven who allows the Ekumen culture into his own, for he alone was broadminded enough from the beginning to not only understand his own culture, but also the necessity of welcoming an alien other into their midst. While he has been the Envoy’s strongest ally, Genly was unable to see this, let alone trust Estraven, precisely because of his dehumanizing perspective of the other as an object of study.
2.20.2009
Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
Every quest has a goal, but sometimes these goals contain subtler, more far-reaching effects than their stated purpose. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the explicit goal is to save the world of Middle-Earth from the evil of Sauron by destroying the One Ring. While this act certainly rids the world of evil, it also serves another purpose for its inhabitants, cultures, and environment: that of allowing this reality to continue into the future. In this sense, ‘saving the world’ preserves or records what has come before for those who are yet to come. And though we do not find ourselves slaying evil warlocks in our daily lives, we too can participate in this quest through the symbolic applicability of the ideals in The Lord of the Rings to our modern life. This paper will examine the ways in which this preservationist sense of ‘saving the world’ is illustrated in the history of Middle-Earth, in the early stages of the ring quest, and in the writing and reception of Tolkien’s masterpiece in our own reality.
If the whole world is at stake in the quest, we must first understand what that world is before it can be saved. The epic story told in The Lord of the Rings is only the tip of the iceberg, or the dénouement, of a long and winding history stretching back thousands of years before men, much less hobbits, were even conceived. In many places in the text, references are made to historical persons and events that, while not bearing directly on the tale, are still an integral part of that reality. In a letter to his publisher, Milton Waldman, Tolkien discusses this history, suggesting that Middle-Earth grew out of or was invented to house his imaginary languages of the Elves (143). Already we can see this world as a kind of record, moving from creation myths to the histories of the Elven people, respectively recorded by Tolkien in the Music of the Ainur and the Silmarillion (146). Middle-Earth is a world created by the gods (who imagined it as a story), but it is incomplete. In order for the world to be fully made it has to be made for someone: the Children of the Gods, who are the Elves, and later Men (147). The world is made in order to pass it on, like a grand inheritance, including all the cultures and ideals that world contains.
As the history of Middle-Earth deals primarily with the Elves, it is necessary to look at how Elven culture helped shape the Middle-Earthian ideals of preserving the world. Elves are immortal, and thus concerned with, “the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change” (146). Elven magic is a sub-creative art rather than a dominating power, and they desire to use magic to “benefit the world and others,” including the environment, through the “adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts” (146, 151). Tolkien similarly points out that Elrond’s house represents Lore; the art of the Elves includes, “the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful” (153). If the elves have a flaw however, it is in wanting to preserve this beautiful world around them as it is, despite the passage of time. But as the world inevitably changes, their art eventually becomes ineffectual, “a kind of embalming” (151). The main purpose of the Rings of Power stems from (and perverts) this Elven desire: “the prevention and slowing of decay” (152). This brings out another facet of ‘saving the world,’ that we can only safeguard reality for those who come after us, and not for ourselves.
While the Elves are First-born, it is their duty in turn to fade like the gods, and to pass Middle-Earth on to the Followers, Men. Having no magic of their own, Men are not as concerned with the preservation of goodness and beauty in their world, and they more readily fall prey to the dark forces at work in Middle-Earth. The elves however passed on to Men a “strand of ‘blood’ and inheritance” on which the art and poetry of man depends (149), that is, the ability and desire to pass on their own ideals through the art of cultural transmission. This is highly significant, because unlike Elves, Men are mortal. In his article, The Quest Hero, W.H. Auden suggests that quests serve as “symbolic descriptions of our personal experience of existence as historical” (33). The telos, the goal or end point, of any life is in death, and as such the quest is always in some way an attempt to defy death, which is attempted in two drastically different ways. The Men in the Second Age of Middle-Earth are denied immortality, but still act out of the received Elven ideals of preserving themselves, by desiring either more time in life or to escape death altogether (Tolkien Letters, 154-5). This desire for eternal life unfortunately results in the aligning of the kingdoms of Men with Sauron against the gods in a terrible and world-twisting battle (ibid, 156). On the other hand, Men can face death by saving the world: by both defeating the evil forces that encourage destruction and by leaving behind cultural records for the benefit of the world that follows. At stake in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, in which The Lord of the Rings takes place, are not only the world itself, but also the ability to continue to save the world through the preserved legacies of mankind.
Sauron is not defeated until the end of the third book of The Lord of the Rings, but the ways in which the story’s heroes can save the world through cultural legacy are already suggested early on in the quest, in The Fellowship of the Ring. The history of the One Ring itself highlights some of the personal challenges reflected in this theme of inheritance. As Elrond recalls the story during the Council of Elrond, the Ring was taken from the hand of Sauron and then lost by the human Isildur (320), who wanted to keep its power for himself. Isildur’s heir, Aragorn, inherits the Sword of Elendil, the broken blade of which symbolizes Aragorn’s duty to mend the damage caused by his ancestor’s greed. Aragorn does this by first protecting the peoples of the North, and then joining the quest that will restore him to his inherited place on the throne at Minas Tirith. While the One Ring passes from Isildur to Golem, these characters loose the ring because they want to preserve themselves and not their world. The next inheritor though, Bilbo Baggins, chooses to give up the ring to his nephew Frodo on his own accord (79). Frodo is Biblo’s heir, for his property, wealth, and stories. But it is the act of being given the Ring freely that allows Frodo the ability and desire to want to, “save the Shire” (96), and by extension, the rest of the world of Middle-Earth, which he does by going on the quest to destroy the Ring. The Ring is passed on for the sake of the future.
The quest to resolve the inheritance of the Ring is not the only way that the inhabitants of Middle-Earth in the Third Age are attempting to save their world. One might even say from the amount of stories, songs, and knowledge recorded in the text that the chief pastime of the Middle-Earthian races is the preservation and transmission of their cultural realities. Beyond the large-scale histories preserved through their retelling by Gandalf and Elrond, other historical events are recorded in the Elf-songs to Elbereth, Gil-galad, and Eärendil (117, 250, and 308), sung not just by Elves, but also by Samwise and Bilbo. Though the Elves are fading into legend their history is preserved in song, and more importantly their language is also being preserved, as Bilbo teaches Frodo the Ancient Tongue of the Elves (119). And it is not just the high culture of the Elves that is preserved; Glóin reounts the Dwarven attempt to reclaim their own cultural heritage by excavating Moria (316), and even Hobbit history is recorded, as in the legend of Gorhendad Oldbuck and the school song about trolls (141 and 276). Beyond these cultural inheritances, knowledge of the land itself is preserved in the stories of Tom Bombadil. The ancient Tom not only knows the secret stories of the trees and environment of Middle-Earth, but also willingly shares these with the Hobbits, so that they too can pass on the full history of their world (181). As we see from the Notes on the Shire Records that opens the text, Frodo’s three Hobbit companions go on after the quest is finished to record information on the legends, names, languages, calendars, and herblore of Middle-Earth (37), effectively preserving everything that has come before for the future ages of their world.
While these introductory Notes on the Shire Records bodes well for the result of the quest, they are only possible by the quest being both completed and recorded. And these are achieved through two instances of the intersection of individual inheritance and cultural legacy that highlight the theme of saving the world in The Fellowship of the Ring. The first of these instances is Gandalf’s search through the libraries of Minas Tirath for proof of the One Ring: a scroll written by Isildur that accounts for the inscription on the Ring. Despite Isildur’s desire to keep the ring for his own inheritance, he leaves this account, “lest a time come when the memory of these great matters shall grow dim” (331). Even the caretakers of the library had forgotten this scroll, and if Gandalf had not had the knowledge to find these memories of the past, the inhabitants of Middle-Earth would have been condemned to repeat their forefathers’ desire to hide or use the One Ring. It is the finding of the record of the inscription that ends Gandalf’s quest and begins Frodo’s journey. But once the journey is finished, how are the future inhabitants of the world supposed to remember the quest, much less we the readers, unless better records are left behind? To this end, Bilbo wants to record Frodo’s story as a book, and even asks him to bring back any old songs and tales he comes across on the way (327 and 364). Bilbo is already recording Middle-Earthian cultures and legends; a selection of his Red book of Westmarch has been published (in our own world) as The Hobbit (20). As such, Bilbo’s act of recording Frodo’s journey ultimately saves their world, as it becomes for us the books of The Lord of the Rings.
While the world of Middle-Earth began as a linguistic exercise, Tolkien suggests in his letters that he wrote The Lord of the Rings as an attempt to conclude and encapsulate all the histories and themes of his imagined world (159). There was however another goal at stake in Tolkien’s invention of Middle-Earth: the creation of a mythology which would fill a lack of that kind of story in his own country (144), if not in our whole modern world. Though there is no agreed upon definition of mythology, contemporary myth-theorists like University of Pittsburgh’s own Fred Clothey might argue that myths are symbolic narratives that order a people’s experience of reality and serve as paradigms for how that reality is to be lived. The reality in which Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings was a chaotic and rapidly changing one. The world was involved in a second global war, new technologies were destroying the environment, and cultural transmission was being devalued by the new medium of movies into mere entertainment. Tolkien stresses in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring that while his story is not allegorical for the real world it is certainly applicable. The war over the Ring serves as a symbol for the dangers of global warfare; the concern of the Elves for the environment of Middle-Earth, and the living desires of that landscape itself, serve as symbols for the need to preserve our own respect of nature. The focus on acts of remembering and recording the past serve as a strikingly paradigmatic symbol for us to not forget our own histories and cultural traditions.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings thus fulfills its author’s intention of being written as a myth, but it cannot fully become one until it too is passed on, and is accepted as myth by the people whose reality it records and symbolizes. While it was relatively unread during the first decade of its publication, Tolkien’s story eventually became the second most read book after the Bible. During the ‘60s, “Frodo lives!” was graffitied in New York subways, a suitably mythic response to that decade’s need for new cultural explanations. What really attests to the books’ power as myth is that they continue to hold such fascination and relevance for our contemporary century. These stories were recently made into a series of critically acclaimed and high-grossing films that seem likely to continue to pass on Tolkien’s vision and ordering of reality for generations to come. As such, the stories of Middle-Earth, in their history, text, and modern relevance, serve as Tolkien’s own inheritance to us. The Lord of the Rings literally saves his world and its cultural values so that we in turn will remember to keep saving our own world.
Bibliography
Auden, W.H. “The Quest Hero.” Understanding the Lord of the Rings. Eds. Rose
Zimbardo and Neil Isaacs. Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston: 2004
Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Fellowship of the Ring.” Ballantine Books. New York: 1965
Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton
Mifflin Co. Boston
Every quest has a goal, but sometimes these goals contain subtler, more far-reaching effects than their stated purpose. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the explicit goal is to save the world of Middle-Earth from the evil of Sauron by destroying the One Ring. While this act certainly rids the world of evil, it also serves another purpose for its inhabitants, cultures, and environment: that of allowing this reality to continue into the future. In this sense, ‘saving the world’ preserves or records what has come before for those who are yet to come. And though we do not find ourselves slaying evil warlocks in our daily lives, we too can participate in this quest through the symbolic applicability of the ideals in The Lord of the Rings to our modern life. This paper will examine the ways in which this preservationist sense of ‘saving the world’ is illustrated in the history of Middle-Earth, in the early stages of the ring quest, and in the writing and reception of Tolkien’s masterpiece in our own reality.
If the whole world is at stake in the quest, we must first understand what that world is before it can be saved. The epic story told in The Lord of the Rings is only the tip of the iceberg, or the dénouement, of a long and winding history stretching back thousands of years before men, much less hobbits, were even conceived. In many places in the text, references are made to historical persons and events that, while not bearing directly on the tale, are still an integral part of that reality. In a letter to his publisher, Milton Waldman, Tolkien discusses this history, suggesting that Middle-Earth grew out of or was invented to house his imaginary languages of the Elves (143). Already we can see this world as a kind of record, moving from creation myths to the histories of the Elven people, respectively recorded by Tolkien in the Music of the Ainur and the Silmarillion (146). Middle-Earth is a world created by the gods (who imagined it as a story), but it is incomplete. In order for the world to be fully made it has to be made for someone: the Children of the Gods, who are the Elves, and later Men (147). The world is made in order to pass it on, like a grand inheritance, including all the cultures and ideals that world contains.
As the history of Middle-Earth deals primarily with the Elves, it is necessary to look at how Elven culture helped shape the Middle-Earthian ideals of preserving the world. Elves are immortal, and thus concerned with, “the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change” (146). Elven magic is a sub-creative art rather than a dominating power, and they desire to use magic to “benefit the world and others,” including the environment, through the “adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts” (146, 151). Tolkien similarly points out that Elrond’s house represents Lore; the art of the Elves includes, “the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful” (153). If the elves have a flaw however, it is in wanting to preserve this beautiful world around them as it is, despite the passage of time. But as the world inevitably changes, their art eventually becomes ineffectual, “a kind of embalming” (151). The main purpose of the Rings of Power stems from (and perverts) this Elven desire: “the prevention and slowing of decay” (152). This brings out another facet of ‘saving the world,’ that we can only safeguard reality for those who come after us, and not for ourselves.
While the Elves are First-born, it is their duty in turn to fade like the gods, and to pass Middle-Earth on to the Followers, Men. Having no magic of their own, Men are not as concerned with the preservation of goodness and beauty in their world, and they more readily fall prey to the dark forces at work in Middle-Earth. The elves however passed on to Men a “strand of ‘blood’ and inheritance” on which the art and poetry of man depends (149), that is, the ability and desire to pass on their own ideals through the art of cultural transmission. This is highly significant, because unlike Elves, Men are mortal. In his article, The Quest Hero, W.H. Auden suggests that quests serve as “symbolic descriptions of our personal experience of existence as historical” (33). The telos, the goal or end point, of any life is in death, and as such the quest is always in some way an attempt to defy death, which is attempted in two drastically different ways. The Men in the Second Age of Middle-Earth are denied immortality, but still act out of the received Elven ideals of preserving themselves, by desiring either more time in life or to escape death altogether (Tolkien Letters, 154-5). This desire for eternal life unfortunately results in the aligning of the kingdoms of Men with Sauron against the gods in a terrible and world-twisting battle (ibid, 156). On the other hand, Men can face death by saving the world: by both defeating the evil forces that encourage destruction and by leaving behind cultural records for the benefit of the world that follows. At stake in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, in which The Lord of the Rings takes place, are not only the world itself, but also the ability to continue to save the world through the preserved legacies of mankind.
Sauron is not defeated until the end of the third book of The Lord of the Rings, but the ways in which the story’s heroes can save the world through cultural legacy are already suggested early on in the quest, in The Fellowship of the Ring. The history of the One Ring itself highlights some of the personal challenges reflected in this theme of inheritance. As Elrond recalls the story during the Council of Elrond, the Ring was taken from the hand of Sauron and then lost by the human Isildur (320), who wanted to keep its power for himself. Isildur’s heir, Aragorn, inherits the Sword of Elendil, the broken blade of which symbolizes Aragorn’s duty to mend the damage caused by his ancestor’s greed. Aragorn does this by first protecting the peoples of the North, and then joining the quest that will restore him to his inherited place on the throne at Minas Tirith. While the One Ring passes from Isildur to Golem, these characters loose the ring because they want to preserve themselves and not their world. The next inheritor though, Bilbo Baggins, chooses to give up the ring to his nephew Frodo on his own accord (79). Frodo is Biblo’s heir, for his property, wealth, and stories. But it is the act of being given the Ring freely that allows Frodo the ability and desire to want to, “save the Shire” (96), and by extension, the rest of the world of Middle-Earth, which he does by going on the quest to destroy the Ring. The Ring is passed on for the sake of the future.
The quest to resolve the inheritance of the Ring is not the only way that the inhabitants of Middle-Earth in the Third Age are attempting to save their world. One might even say from the amount of stories, songs, and knowledge recorded in the text that the chief pastime of the Middle-Earthian races is the preservation and transmission of their cultural realities. Beyond the large-scale histories preserved through their retelling by Gandalf and Elrond, other historical events are recorded in the Elf-songs to Elbereth, Gil-galad, and Eärendil (117, 250, and 308), sung not just by Elves, but also by Samwise and Bilbo. Though the Elves are fading into legend their history is preserved in song, and more importantly their language is also being preserved, as Bilbo teaches Frodo the Ancient Tongue of the Elves (119). And it is not just the high culture of the Elves that is preserved; Glóin reounts the Dwarven attempt to reclaim their own cultural heritage by excavating Moria (316), and even Hobbit history is recorded, as in the legend of Gorhendad Oldbuck and the school song about trolls (141 and 276). Beyond these cultural inheritances, knowledge of the land itself is preserved in the stories of Tom Bombadil. The ancient Tom not only knows the secret stories of the trees and environment of Middle-Earth, but also willingly shares these with the Hobbits, so that they too can pass on the full history of their world (181). As we see from the Notes on the Shire Records that opens the text, Frodo’s three Hobbit companions go on after the quest is finished to record information on the legends, names, languages, calendars, and herblore of Middle-Earth (37), effectively preserving everything that has come before for the future ages of their world.
While these introductory Notes on the Shire Records bodes well for the result of the quest, they are only possible by the quest being both completed and recorded. And these are achieved through two instances of the intersection of individual inheritance and cultural legacy that highlight the theme of saving the world in The Fellowship of the Ring. The first of these instances is Gandalf’s search through the libraries of Minas Tirath for proof of the One Ring: a scroll written by Isildur that accounts for the inscription on the Ring. Despite Isildur’s desire to keep the ring for his own inheritance, he leaves this account, “lest a time come when the memory of these great matters shall grow dim” (331). Even the caretakers of the library had forgotten this scroll, and if Gandalf had not had the knowledge to find these memories of the past, the inhabitants of Middle-Earth would have been condemned to repeat their forefathers’ desire to hide or use the One Ring. It is the finding of the record of the inscription that ends Gandalf’s quest and begins Frodo’s journey. But once the journey is finished, how are the future inhabitants of the world supposed to remember the quest, much less we the readers, unless better records are left behind? To this end, Bilbo wants to record Frodo’s story as a book, and even asks him to bring back any old songs and tales he comes across on the way (327 and 364). Bilbo is already recording Middle-Earthian cultures and legends; a selection of his Red book of Westmarch has been published (in our own world) as The Hobbit (20). As such, Bilbo’s act of recording Frodo’s journey ultimately saves their world, as it becomes for us the books of The Lord of the Rings.
While the world of Middle-Earth began as a linguistic exercise, Tolkien suggests in his letters that he wrote The Lord of the Rings as an attempt to conclude and encapsulate all the histories and themes of his imagined world (159). There was however another goal at stake in Tolkien’s invention of Middle-Earth: the creation of a mythology which would fill a lack of that kind of story in his own country (144), if not in our whole modern world. Though there is no agreed upon definition of mythology, contemporary myth-theorists like University of Pittsburgh’s own Fred Clothey might argue that myths are symbolic narratives that order a people’s experience of reality and serve as paradigms for how that reality is to be lived. The reality in which Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings was a chaotic and rapidly changing one. The world was involved in a second global war, new technologies were destroying the environment, and cultural transmission was being devalued by the new medium of movies into mere entertainment. Tolkien stresses in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring that while his story is not allegorical for the real world it is certainly applicable. The war over the Ring serves as a symbol for the dangers of global warfare; the concern of the Elves for the environment of Middle-Earth, and the living desires of that landscape itself, serve as symbols for the need to preserve our own respect of nature. The focus on acts of remembering and recording the past serve as a strikingly paradigmatic symbol for us to not forget our own histories and cultural traditions.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings thus fulfills its author’s intention of being written as a myth, but it cannot fully become one until it too is passed on, and is accepted as myth by the people whose reality it records and symbolizes. While it was relatively unread during the first decade of its publication, Tolkien’s story eventually became the second most read book after the Bible. During the ‘60s, “Frodo lives!” was graffitied in New York subways, a suitably mythic response to that decade’s need for new cultural explanations. What really attests to the books’ power as myth is that they continue to hold such fascination and relevance for our contemporary century. These stories were recently made into a series of critically acclaimed and high-grossing films that seem likely to continue to pass on Tolkien’s vision and ordering of reality for generations to come. As such, the stories of Middle-Earth, in their history, text, and modern relevance, serve as Tolkien’s own inheritance to us. The Lord of the Rings literally saves his world and its cultural values so that we in turn will remember to keep saving our own world.
Bibliography
Auden, W.H. “The Quest Hero.” Understanding the Lord of the Rings. Eds. Rose
Zimbardo and Neil Isaacs. Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston: 2004
Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Fellowship of the Ring.” Ballantine Books. New York: 1965
Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton
Mifflin Co. Boston
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