anxiety, blood, & fantasy.

So.  I actually wrote my first two posts in this sweet-I-think-I-may-love-this-whole-blogging-thing furor.  Now we’re up to the third post, and I’m trying to figure out what I should write about.  *racks brain for ideas* I’ll ramble a bit and ideally it’ll dance somewhere fun.

At the same time, I’m also dealing with the minor annoyance of a cut on my left thumb, inconveniently found pretty exactly where my poor little thumbkin hits the keys.  I kind of sliced my finger a bit at work (yup, I has job! Is office work) with a retractable knife– the kind you use to break down cardboard boxes.  Which is what I was doing.  Oops.

It was going so well, until the second to last box.  Then, blood gushing everywhere.  The carpet is still soaked.

Aragorn.  See the blood on his left hand?  It's got nothing on my thumb wound.

 Eh, ok, that’s pretty untrue.  A teeny bit of blood welling, coupled with a quick handwash and bandaid rendered things pretty alright, aside from this annoying little sting when I use my left thumb to type.  Whine whine.

But, all of that gave me an idea for something cool to write about!  Let all the nations rejoice and be merry.  It’s a bit of a weird idea, but I think it might go somewhere.  Warning: this is going to be long, and probably rambly…

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Who’s read The Lord of the Rings?  For some odd reason, homeschoolers were obsessed with Tolkien a few years ago.  I mean, everyone was pretty keyed up on LotR early on last decade.  The movies led to the popular resurgence of the books and generated a lot of interest in fantasy in general.  But homeschoolers, man, we were obsessed with his stuff.  A bunch of us even read The Silmarillion.  I took it several hundred steps further and read dozens upon dozens of fantasy novels.

I still read fantasy.  Not as much as I used to– the reason why will probably emerge in this post– but enough that I probably go through somewhere between seven and a baker’s dozen a year.

Brief aside.  The Silmarillion is a whole new level of brilliant.  It’s not a novel– the thing is like its own literary form, without any true precedent or antecedent, which is in and of itself a striking achievement.  Plus, there’s an enormous, evil dragon:

Look carefully, friends.  See the expanse of landscape.  Look where his head starts and his tail ends.   Then realize that Glaurung is also extremely intelligent and can speak. 

I love enormous, evil dragons.  Enormous things in general, the kind that make you go insane after seeing them.  Hence the Cthulhu thing.

So.  Tolkien rocked our world, and continues to do so.  I joined in congregation with a roomful of graduated and current home educated folk and did a marathon of the movies (extended editions, because those are the only real versions) less than six months ago, a week after we all watched The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in theaters.

So, Middle-Earth continues to enthrall us and make us buy swords and daydream about finding Gandalf on our doorstep, which are all wonderful things.  I know we’re not exclusive as far as mega-fans go, there are plenty of others, but still.  There’s a level of devotion going on.

And that’s part of the problem.

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Talk about a letdown.  ‘Yeah, we homeschoolers love Tolkien and he’s awesome and Gandalf and swords and elves and can you believe they left out Tom Bombadil?’ Then I cap it off with, ‘Meh, part of some problem I haven’t yet revealed, man.’  It was a little Scumbag Steve of me.

I’m not criticizing our devotion.  Maybe saying ‘part of the problem’ is too strong.  But it bothers me that Tolkien’s creation has legions of devotees, yet so few of them live in the academic world.  The fans, hey, they’re awesome.  But the literary world hasn’t really always proven so cool with Middle-Earth.  At this point, few people are going to come out and say they don’t think much of Tolkien, but his absence, and the overall absence of fantasy in English Departments everywhere is a little bit of a silence that speaks.

There are a lot of reasons for that absence.  Going into all of them would be long and boring.  But one of them is actually kind of compelling, because it’s both a fairly credible reason for why fantasy as a whole has been left out and a major reason Tolkien, at least, should be included less hesitantly among the ranks of literature.

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More obscure enquiry: Who’s read The Anxiety of Influence?  It’s by Harold Bloom, a literary critic who specializes in being both brilliant and a curmudgeon.  Granted, he’s in his eighties, but I have a sneaking suspicion he might be one of those guys who’s always been a little curmudgeonly.  Not a bad thing.  The world needs its curmudgeons.

I think I might just like saying curmudgeon…

Hobbes understands what I'm going through here.

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t read it.  I have mixed feelings about The Anxiety of Influence myself, and it’s sort of on mixed ground as far as popularity goes.  Currently, a lot of the critical theories that Bloom abhors are ‘in,’ if a literary theory is ever really in.  They’re the cool kids.  But his ideas are still striking, and respected.

Bloom doesn’t really like fantasy, based on the few comments he’s leveled against it over the years.  Lewis Carroll is about as far as he’ll go with the genre.  Oh well.

It’s a bit ironic, then, that his book is spurring me on to make an argument about Tolkien.

So.  I should state some of the ideas Bloom presents in The Anxiety of Influence.  Honestly, I don’t entirely grasp everything he gets at– it’s a dense book.  Murky.  That word comes to mind with Bloom’s writing.  He’s fascinating, but I think I’m going to need to re-read this one before it entirely settles into my brain.

Ok.  Super streamlined version of his idea:

Poets in the Post-Enlightenment era– essentially Milton and afterward.  Think Romantic poets, like William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron.  He focuses a lot on that era (technically, the whole book is a study of Romantic poetry) to explain his idea of influence.

Not really pertinent, but those guys are sort of becoming my heroes.  Don’t know for sure yet.  Crazy talented people.  Anyways.

[I’ll be using the male pronoun throughout.  Yes, I agree a gender neutral term would be a worthwhile addition to English.  But for the purposes of describing weird literary theories, the plural ‘they’ will just make slightly obscure points seem even more obscure.]

Bloom sees poetry and writing as subliminally competitive.  In a Freudian way.  So, Poet A writes The Rise of The Elder Gods.  It’s published.  Poet B, the younger poet, reads his predecessor’s work.  In it, he recognizes himself, but he inevitably sees something with which he differs, because he is himself, not his predecessor.

In fact, Poet B’s recognition of himself is likely not Poet A’s intent at all– here we hit on a central Bloom concept, creative misreading, or misprision.  The latecomer poet reads his own ideas into The Rise of the Elder Gods.  He creatively misreads the work that influences him.

With a title like The Rise of the Elder Gods, Poet A probably read a bit too much of this....

Poet B’s writing, like that of all Post-Enlightenment poets, is an effort to represent himself in his art, but Poet A’s enormous impact has already set in.  Poet B, by virtue of coming later and having The Rise of the Elder Gods coming before, experiences a subliminal anxiety.  He is in the imaginative shadow of his artistic father.  Genius has already come and gone, and it has expressed itself so perfectly as to permanently affect the later writer.  What is left to the new poet?

Essentially, rewriting the work that went before him– in his own writing, he must subtly shift our attention to his views, his self, rather than those of his precursor, so that even when we read the precursor’s work, we are to some extent reading his literary heir.  Poet B’s writing must match and exceed Poet A’s, so that The Rise of the Elder Gods feels to us as though it could have in fact been written, not by Poet A, it’s actual creator, but by Poet B.

Hmmm.

That might be overstating it.  Bloom’s a little unclear about this, but I think a more accurate interpretation would be to say that we read The Rise of the Elder Gods in light of Poet B’s great work, which we’ll go ahead and name The Harpy’s Tear.  If Poet B is successful, then we read The Rise of the Elder Gods in relation to The Harpy’s Tear, not the other way around.  The latecomer becomes his own father.  His work, metaphorically, makes itself the ancestor of the previous great work.

Also, to Bloom, influence is essentially inescapable.  Willful departure from The Rise of the Elder Gods is all part of the process for Poet B to write The Harpy’s Tear.  He can be deliberately different, but that’s still reactionary to Poet A’s work.  His difference (at least in part) is because of the great poem that’s influenced him.

Yes, it’s weird and not really at all what we think of when the word poet gets tossed about.  I’m honestly unsure if the whole literary theory (antithetical, if you’re into technical terms…) actually applies to modern poetry.  I think it might, though in an altered form.

Where I think the entire theory is splendidly useful is in describing fantasy literature and Tolkien.

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Oh.  One more thing I should mention.  Very rarely, a writer consumes his influences so completely that we cannot find a trace, or at the very least only tremendously miniscule traces, of his predecessors in his work.

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Bloom, I suspect, would not be entirely thrilled with me appropriating his theory of Romantic poetry and applying it towards Fantasy literature.  But at the same time, I hope he’d be open to the idea.  The whole thing ties in so perfectly that it’d be remiss not to bring it up.  My love for literature compels me…

Harold Bloom, metaphorically giving me a skeptical look about my application of his ideas.

… though I can certainly sympathize with him if he were to look at my uber streamlined version of his theory of antithetical literary criticism and be annoyed that I didn’t represent it better.

Calling Tolkien the Father of Fantasy or something similar is a bit misleading.  Fantasy definitely existed before The Lord of the Rings.  It’s really the work’s effect on fantasy that renders it so important.  Thus, I disagree entirely with Moorcock and Pullman, who both tend towards being dismissive of Tolkien.  Sorry guys.  As long as we’re discussing this antithetical business, he’s got you both beat.

It’s odd to apply ‘beat’ to discussions of literature.  As a writer, I’m not in love with the idea that we’re in competition with our forbearers.  At the same time, I think Bloom makes brilliant points in The Anxiety of Influence, even if the phrasing is aggressive.  I’ve been reading a lot of Romantic poetry lately, and I can definitely see what he means, with their relation to Milton and each other.  You can almost feel these guys, brilliant young poets, struggling with the immensity of Milton’s genius and Paradise Lost.

So.  The Lord of the Rings.  Yes, fantasy as a genre was around before it was published, and had been kicking around since the late nineteenth century.  It was young, but potent– some really excellent stuff was being written in the early twentieth century.  The Worm Ouroboros, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, and Robert E. Howard’s many stories about Conan of Cimmeria are all pre-Tolkien fantasies, all of them strong works.  Nary a dud amongst them.  There are others we could throw out.  The Well at the World’s End, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and in fact Tolkien’s own The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again all serve as examples of excellent fantasy that existed before The Lord of the Rings.

Then, between nineteen fifty-four and nineteen fifty-five, Tolkien published The Lord of the Ring.  Very quickly, the face of the young genre shifts.  The most obvious change was that Tolkien was actually popular and reviewed.  Not all the reviews were positive.  Edmund Wilson (a professional critic) called it ‘balderdash’ and ‘juvenile trash’ (Oo, Those Awful Orcs!).  On the other hand, W.H. Auden (a poet) wrote, ‘The demands made on the writer's powers in an epic as long as "The Lord of the Rings" are enormous… but I can only say that Mr. Tolkien has proved equal to them” (At the End of the Quest, Victory).

Ahhhhhhh darn.  I promised myself when I started writing this that I wouldn’t put in quotes, in an effort to keep from getting all scholarly.  I even held off when I was summarizing Bloom.  Meh.  Dear Blog, ENG 220 this Fall is where I have to substantiate my opinions.  Stop making me do work.  Oh well.  At least there doesn’t need to be an annotated bibliography at the end.

The sad part is, I was actually tremendously satisfied when I found those quotes.  It’s quite possible I’ll some day be that professor who always tells his classes, ‘I never thought I’d be doing this, but…’

I will be the coolest professor, though.  My advisor is a hipster, so I feel comfortable saying that a precedent has definitely been set for me.

Anyways, the whole thing with Tolkien was fairly polarizing.  As long as we’re talking about them, both Wilson and Auden noticed it.  In their reviews– arguably the most famous articles to have addressed Tolkien while he was alive and publishing– both recognize the extreme opinions about The Lord of the Rings.  Basically, it was a love or hate situation.

In and of itself, the critical attention paid to The Lord of the Rings was a big deal.  Fantasy hadn’t really been substantially noticed before it.

The floodgates were open, but it took a few years for much to trickle through.  Some masterpieces, like A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels, were published.  Lloyd Alexander wrote The Prydain Chronicles.  Those were both in the sixties, and both bore Tolkien’s mark.

Influence, as I’ve hinted at, doesn’t exactly imply that the new book closely resembles the old.  It’s subtler than that.  In lesser works, certainly, there’s bound to be fairly derivative elements.  But in writings produced by true brilliance, the influence manifests itself less clearly.  Earthsea and Prydain are both brilliant series.  Yet both stand in Tolkien’s creative shadow, because, in a way, The Lord of the Rings just ramped up everything that was already there in fantasy.  Central to Tolkien’s creative thought process is the idea of secondary creation– building a world.  That’s exactly what earlier fantasists did.  The difference lies in quality, not in kind.  The world Tolkien created and fleshed out in The Lord of the Rings is extraordinarily complete.  It gets thrown out a lot, but seriously, the guy made up languages for his fictional races that actually work as real systems of speech and thought.

And that secondary creation, that world building (which is the more current phrase), is a central tenant of fantasy.  It’s part of what defines the genre.  At the end of the day, the themes in fantasy, while told in an overblown, swords and thunder and God reaching out of the heavens and grasping the earth to tether it against the falling tears of Sak-Dalanya the Overdemon fashion, are not really different from the rest of literature.  But the aesthetics of fantasy are so striking, the world building, the ability to formulate a convincing and consistent world (which includes geography, topography, politics, etcetera ad nauseam), this skill becomes central.

(There are other differences.  Getting into all of that is a separate post.)

Tolkien permanently altered the world building game.  Middle-Earth is so complete, so internally consistent, that everything before it is redefined.  Tolkien sort of gobbled up his predecessors.  They’re still good, some of them great, but all of them are under a shadow that his legacy casts both backward and forward.

(There are also other reasons that The Lord of the Rings antithetically completes its predecessors.  Again, separate post.  Or doctoral thesis.  Maybe both.)

Consider E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, published in 1922.  It’s a bold, robust book.  Wars and magic, all set in an independently created world.  Touches on some dark philosophical places Tolkien doesn’t.  But it pales somewhat when set next to The Lord of the Rings.  Eddison’s world lacks the internal resonance of Middle-Earth.  It’s not a flaw, per se, just a lack, an absence of the fully fleshed out secondary creation.  Tolkien read and admired The Worm Ouroboros, and was in fact inspired by many of the same legends that Eddison, like Tolkien a scholar of Germanic mythology, immersed his imagination in.  Chronologically, Tolkien should have been experiencing the anxiety of influence from Eddison.

Yet there is not trace of The Worm Ouroboros in Tolkien.  Reverse the process, though, and Eddison seems like a less mature version of Tolkien.

Now, jump forward, from the nineteen twenties to the nineteen sixties.  OH MY GOSH THE BEATLES.

Sorry!  Forgot myself for a moment there.  Can’t wait to see them on Ed Sullivan.

60s.  Ursula K. LeGuin.  Lloyd Alexander.  I mentioned them a little while ago– both fantasists who published in the sixties, both brilliant writers.  The influence is, because they’re both excellent writers, understated.  But it’s there.  Both, in attempting secondary creation, must relate to Tolkien.  There are marked differences in both Earthsea and Prydain with Middle-Earth, little ways that LeGuin and Alexander swerve away from Tolkien.  That’s a Bloom idea– Poet B follows Poet A to a certain point, then swerves the idea to where he believes it should have gone.  Metaphorically.  As a writer, you can only be so aware of the whole influence-as-anxiety thing.

For example, Earthsea is exactly what it sounds like– a huge archipelago.  Prydain is a little kingdom place, world building on a miniature scale.  Both are genius.  Both remain in Tolkien’s shadow.  Their greatness is not tarnished, to my mind, by this association.  It’s merely a recognition of the strength of The Lord of the Rings.  On their own merits, if we ignored influence, perhaps Earthsea and Pydain are better.  They’re not, but that’s besides the point.  It’s just that influence is so essential to understanding literature, poetry (honestly, all art by extension), we must take it into account.  We read The Earthsea Cycle and The Prydain Chronicles in light of The Lord of the Rings, not the other way around.

The literary relationship here isn’t absolute.  There are certainly bits of both LeGuin and Alexander that are stronger than Tolkien, and it is there that we see the triumphs of later writers over their parent.  Parts are stronger, and force us to see Middle-Earth in relation to Earthsea, or Middle-Earth in relation to Prydain.  But, as a whole, The Lord of the Rings is still the most powerful work of fantasy, from that ever important world-building perspective.

Alright, cool.  But what does that have to do with the Tolkien-deserves-more-academic-recognition-not-just-street-cred?

J.R.R. Tolkien.  Observe the pipe & meditative pose.

I postulate (love that word, postulate) that it is in fact the tremendous strength of The Lord of the Rings preventing fantasy from being welcomed into English Departments everywhere.  Conversely, it’s not Tolkien’s fault.

(I think I just introduced my thesis statement almost at the end.  I think like that.  Oops.)

So, for a while, there’s a trickle of writers influenced by Tolkien.  Most of them are strong, with a genius of their own that, while not overshadowing their poetic father, establishes a vision, genius works that live up to and illuminate the heritage of The Lord of the Rings.

Cue the seventies.  Fantasy explodes.  Previously, you’d had a few handfuls of novels and a lot of short stories, occasionally put together in an omnibus.  Roughly starting with The Sword of Shannara, bookstores added extra shelves to accommodate the sudden growth.

Sometimes, creative eruptions are good things.  The first generation of Pokemon was awesome, and begat about two more amazing batches.  Let’s think about fantasy like that, as much as the analogy flies in the face of legitimizing the genre.  Pokemon, for the first few generations, were basically the most awesome things ever.  I am without shame in proclaiming this.  Behold:

My favorite t-shirt and my little Pikachu buddy!!  And a random pair of shorts, too.

Notice those are the original starters and Pikachu.  Not the one who’s based off an ice cream cone.  To be sure, there are some cool ones among the more recent Pokemon.  Some of them even live up to the early ones.  Think of fantasy that way.  Early on, less, but at the same time, more.  Later on, the lesser hordes of adorable little monsters makes the whole affair seem a little less legit.  Still a few amazing ones.  Same with fantasy.

Now, think back to those homeschoolers I mentioned.  Remember how I said we were obsessed with Tolkien?  Complete with reading The Silmarillion?  Well, a full generation of writers rocked said obsession for about two generations before we discovered The Lord of the Rings.  This is the generation that comes after the small and brilliant group writing immediately after Tolkien, now also inheriting works like The Earthsea Cycle, and The Prydain Chronicles, and, so I don’t sound like those were the only fantasists writing in the sixties, Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels.  In and of itself, the manner in which Tolkien influenced these writers and the quality of the writing his own work inspired should have assured him a place pretty quickly in the academic world.  But it has not, even as artists roughly contemporary with Tolkien not writing in the fantasy genre have become widely recognized.  Why?

I’m pretty sure it has to do with the fans, and by fans, I mean several generations of writers that followed the first(ish) wave after The Lord of the Rings’ publication.  The vast majority of works put out from the seventies until about now do not represent a compelling effort at channeling the anxiety of influence– rather, they are works so deep under the shadow of Tolkien that we see them purely in light of his work.  Incidental innovations occur in many such novels, and series, which are often fun.  But the essence of their work is so purely The Lord of the Rings– plus the additional weight of other great works– that they, and their authors, fail in realizing themselves.  They react to genius, but the sheer strength of The Lord of the Rings became so great as to prevent them from even trying to create their own vision.

That’s not actually a criticism.  I’ve read, and enjoyed, many books in that tradition.  But literarily, it represents a kind of clogged intersection.  There’s been a lot of books, written in a very short period of time– about fifty-seven years– and a large amount have not represented genius reacting to genius.  Storytellers, with often wonderful takes on the essential story, yes.  Definitely.  Most aren’t even pretentious about it.  They’re really chill, and write what they write because they love Tolkien– or, in some very recent instances, love the books transcribed from Tolkien– and are so enchanted by the tale that they feel compelled to create stories based upon it.  Dennis L. McKiernan is a great example.  His trilogy, The Iron Tower, is one of the most charming things I’ve ever read.  It’s epic, in a homely way, and has an adorably exaggerated version of the whimsy we find in Tolkien.

Obviously, I don’t find them offensive.  What does bother me, though, is the fact that they’ve (they not being the authors as much as the publishing industry) been defining fantasy for decades, and derivative works, well or poorly written, written out of awe or written because they’ll sell, don’t do much for a genre’s reputation.

Correction.  They do a lot to negatively publicize the genre as mere entertainment (and no art is mere entertainment, even if much of it is entertaining), thus damaging its reputation, and by necessity of the genre’s reputation being harmed, Tolkien’s.

That’s not fair.  If anything, we should be slapping Tolkien congenially on the back and congratulating him for being such a strong writer, for so powerfully wrapping influence to himself that, of oceans of writers, only a handful have swum down to Atlantis to join him.

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Not to be all Chicken Little or anything.  Tolkien’s reputation, and that of fantasists, the great ones, has been shifting lately.  It’s inevitable.  Because some of the work that’s been done is too brilliant to ignore, some of the attempts at channeling Tolkien’s influence too masterful to discount.

Yes, like Harry Potter.  J.K. Rowling is a genius.  (See,  I’m not a Tolkien snob.  I even own a replica of Lord Voldemort’s wand.) I’m not really a big fan of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (better known as Game of Thrones), but there is a lot of brilliance going on in those books.  I know of academic attention being paid to both, which is very heartening.

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Doooooooood.  My word count rests somewhere around 4k right now, and if you’ve made it this far, cheers!  For a guy who protests that he’s not really an academic, that he’s at heart a poet, I just wrote what feels suspiciously like an outline for a thesis paper.  Uh-oh. 

At the same time, though, Bloom’s pretty poetic himself.  There are passages in The Anxiety of Influence that are beautifully written.  One of my professors, Dr. Robert Vivian (wonderful man, and one of the most gifted writers I know) sees writing, reading, discussing literature, and even writing scholarly papers as all a part of the same flex of whatever muscle it is in the human soul we use for this art.  My phrasing, not his.  He’d’ve been far more eloquent.  But I think he’s right, so I guess I shouldn’t worry about diluting the artist for the academic, though it can be an awesome way to put off working on research when you’d rather write a poem.

Anyways.

As you can tell, I’m passionate about fantasy.  I love the genre, and I want it recognized for its great works.  I’ll write about this again in the future, and hopefully continue to explore the connection between antithetical criticism and fantasy, but for now, I hope you enjoyed my ramble.

In the spirit of taking a long time making your point, have a picture of Treebeard.