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theseventhl's review
5.0
An excellent volume of essays examining Tolkien and his work. I especially enjoyed Diana Wynne Jones' piece on narrative and Nigel Walmsley's piece on Tolkien's place in the sixties. Note to devoted Tolkienites: not every essay is kind to the maker of Middle-earth's legacy, although some of the criticism is well-founded.
lizshayne's review
challenging
informative
slow-paced
2.0
Both of the above stars are for Diana Wynne Jones' essay on "The Shape of the Narrative in the Lord of the Rings".
There are two other clever things that this book does. The first is the final essay on sex and desire, which is an irritating but--at least when it's textually grounded--reasonable read of both gender and desire in Lord of the Rings.
The other clever thing the book does is attempt to undercut critique of its premises by painting those who object to their criticism as themselves implicated in the problematic morals of the text.
Everything else was teethgrinding.
There are reasons for this. One is the state of critical fields interested in being part of this anthology in 1984. Barthes had killed the author, but that approach had apparently not made its way to the critics writing this work and it's returning me to my era of reading bad undergraduate essays where I'm trying to painstakingly point out that the purpose of reading the politics of the text is to talk about the politics of the text, not make arguments for the morality of the author. (Robert Browning is great for this.) And because it's not careful about the argument, it ends up doing the modernist "this is what the text means" (because 1984) thing. It's jarring to see both how different this is from how I was taught to reflect on my own interpretive lens and, equally, how different the fields I read from this era are from these essays. The ones that looked at Tolkien and the zeitgeist were interesting. The ones that complained about the kinds of people who would like this stuff were...less so.
(This is also the era before academia got interested in popular anything - not that it is doing that much better these days.)
Another thing, and this made the book a brutal slog, is the number of essays in this book that offer editorial advice on a book that had been published for more than 20 years, advice that they think would have made the text better. Which, again, what? (My personal favorite was the person who thought that the problem was the lack of Campbellian hero with a moral struggle to hold the book together because that was what they imagined for themselves as a teenager and, my darling, my sweet summer child, my poor benighted writer who just needed a zine. Have you considered that maybe the problem is not the book?) Almost all of them boil down to "I don't see what the fuss is about and it would have been better if it had these things that are more to my tastes." Look, I too can excoriate popular books that I don't particularly enjoy because the things they do are not the things I care about. I can also go on a tear about why any number of widely acclaimed early 20th century writers suck because I don't appreciate their work (see everything Henry James wrote after Portrait of a Lady). But it's not interesting. These are texts that have almost nothing to say about Lord of the Rings, but invite--if the authors were not Dead in the critical sense--a fascinating investigation into the kind of person who writes it. Many of them reveal little about Lord of the Rings and much about how the narrative critical voice imagines meaning is made and literature works to morally improve. There is a thread of dulce et utile that underpins many of these texts - that by arguing against one or both of these features of LOTR, they can make it go away. Unfortunately for them, Peter Jackson exists.
Jackson is not the only reason LOTR survived and thrived; the entire rest of the field of fantasy is pretty relevant as well. This book came out a little less than 30 years after LOTR and it's been 40 since it was published so some of the fault I am finding in these essays is that of not being able to predict the future. Having said that, "how future-proof is this essay?" is a question more critics should be asking themselves. And, in this book in particular, "how much of my critique is based on a High Modernist presumption that any backwards longing is inherently suspect?" Whereas there is a prominent strain in our current discourse (especially among Gen X and under) that things ARE worse and that the destruction of Fangorn and the poisoning of the Isen and the mind of gears that drives Saruman are, in fact, the things that will kill us as a species. The scouring of the Shire and the rewilding of England are not entirely different. The very specific longing for restoration resonates with something that Lord of the Rings recognized but its contemporary critics did not.
I could handle the criticism better if it was better done. (Yes, really.) Tolkien's work is both wonderful and flawed and the capacity to name those flaws (yes, including the text's reactionary politics and racist characterizations and the ways that its American success may stem, in part, from an lack of familiarity with the specific class systems it implicitly espouses) is also necessary. That's neither reason to dismiss it or reason to exalt it despite. It's a "yes, and" and the fact that basically every essay is written as a review attempting to pass moral judgment rather than an analysis inviting critical awareness is just so irritating.
Because I am PROFOUNDLY interested in the question of why - given the purported politics of the book - progressive readers resonate with it. And presumably a work written in 1984 is not the correct place to seek answers to that question, but I wonder whether it points the way anyway. Some critics tend to assume that readers take uncritically from the text and if something does not explicitly match their politics, it implicitly speaks to something in them. But it's much more interesting to see what people DO resonate with - for LOTR, I think the compelling fantasy is "what if, in the face of overwhelming odds, good people could make a difference by not giving up?" Also "what if the people in charge were actually good?" To Tolkien's point about about escape and consolation, if pegasus ennobles horses then the fellowship ennobles our marches on power. (the essay with that title was also egregiously bad in how it misread "On Fairy Stories" and why should I trust your ability to read fiction if you can't even read nonfiction and understand what it's saying.)
And, yes, fiction is always more complicated than its politics and one of the most interesting things to watch as fantasy and science fiction and romance and horror get taken seriously as genres is what we get when we reckon with the space between readerly desire to have and readerly desire to pretend to have. Arranged queer marriage plots are a great example (and also one of my self-confessed beloved tropes). The queer-normative world is the desire, the "what if you ended up with the perfect person for you" is the imagine because who wants the risk of the reality? LOTR also exists in that slippage between and I am boundlessly curious about the parts of the story that draw us out and the parts that slip by. What is the meat of the nut and what is the shell in our love? (Am I saying that we are Rabbi Meir and literature is Elisha ben Abuya? Um.)
I am definitely not done with my random readings of Tolkien criticism that catch my interest and I still think that there is a lot more to be said about the way LOTR presents evil and power in a way that resonates and also, at the end of the day, I think JRRT is right about escape and recovery and consolation.
There are two other clever things that this book does. The first is the final essay on sex and desire, which is an irritating but--at least when it's textually grounded--reasonable read of both gender and desire in Lord of the Rings.
The other clever thing the book does is attempt to undercut critique of its premises by painting those who object to their criticism as themselves implicated in the problematic morals of the text.
Everything else was teethgrinding.
There are reasons for this. One is the state of critical fields interested in being part of this anthology in 1984. Barthes had killed the author, but that approach had apparently not made its way to the critics writing this work and it's returning me to my era of reading bad undergraduate essays where I'm trying to painstakingly point out that the purpose of reading the politics of the text is to talk about the politics of the text, not make arguments for the morality of the author. (Robert Browning is great for this.) And because it's not careful about the argument, it ends up doing the modernist "this is what the text means" (because 1984) thing. It's jarring to see both how different this is from how I was taught to reflect on my own interpretive lens and, equally, how different the fields I read from this era are from these essays. The ones that looked at Tolkien and the zeitgeist were interesting. The ones that complained about the kinds of people who would like this stuff were...less so.
(This is also the era before academia got interested in popular anything - not that it is doing that much better these days.)
Another thing, and this made the book a brutal slog, is the number of essays in this book that offer editorial advice on a book that had been published for more than 20 years, advice that they think would have made the text better. Which, again, what? (My personal favorite was the person who thought that the problem was the lack of Campbellian hero with a moral struggle to hold the book together because that was what they imagined for themselves as a teenager and, my darling, my sweet summer child, my poor benighted writer who just needed a zine. Have you considered that maybe the problem is not the book?) Almost all of them boil down to "I don't see what the fuss is about and it would have been better if it had these things that are more to my tastes." Look, I too can excoriate popular books that I don't particularly enjoy because the things they do are not the things I care about. I can also go on a tear about why any number of widely acclaimed early 20th century writers suck because I don't appreciate their work (see everything Henry James wrote after Portrait of a Lady). But it's not interesting. These are texts that have almost nothing to say about Lord of the Rings, but invite--if the authors were not Dead in the critical sense--a fascinating investigation into the kind of person who writes it. Many of them reveal little about Lord of the Rings and much about how the narrative critical voice imagines meaning is made and literature works to morally improve. There is a thread of dulce et utile that underpins many of these texts - that by arguing against one or both of these features of LOTR, they can make it go away. Unfortunately for them, Peter Jackson exists.
Jackson is not the only reason LOTR survived and thrived; the entire rest of the field of fantasy is pretty relevant as well. This book came out a little less than 30 years after LOTR and it's been 40 since it was published so some of the fault I am finding in these essays is that of not being able to predict the future. Having said that, "how future-proof is this essay?" is a question more critics should be asking themselves. And, in this book in particular, "how much of my critique is based on a High Modernist presumption that any backwards longing is inherently suspect?" Whereas there is a prominent strain in our current discourse (especially among Gen X and under) that things ARE worse and that the destruction of Fangorn and the poisoning of the Isen and the mind of gears that drives Saruman are, in fact, the things that will kill us as a species. The scouring of the Shire and the rewilding of England are not entirely different. The very specific longing for restoration resonates with something that Lord of the Rings recognized but its contemporary critics did not.
I could handle the criticism better if it was better done. (Yes, really.) Tolkien's work is both wonderful and flawed and the capacity to name those flaws (yes, including the text's reactionary politics and racist characterizations and the ways that its American success may stem, in part, from an lack of familiarity with the specific class systems it implicitly espouses) is also necessary. That's neither reason to dismiss it or reason to exalt it despite. It's a "yes, and" and the fact that basically every essay is written as a review attempting to pass moral judgment rather than an analysis inviting critical awareness is just so irritating.
Because I am PROFOUNDLY interested in the question of why - given the purported politics of the book - progressive readers resonate with it. And presumably a work written in 1984 is not the correct place to seek answers to that question, but I wonder whether it points the way anyway. Some critics tend to assume that readers take uncritically from the text and if something does not explicitly match their politics, it implicitly speaks to something in them. But it's much more interesting to see what people DO resonate with - for LOTR, I think the compelling fantasy is "what if, in the face of overwhelming odds, good people could make a difference by not giving up?" Also "what if the people in charge were actually good?" To Tolkien's point about about escape and consolation, if pegasus ennobles horses then the fellowship ennobles our marches on power. (the essay with that title was also egregiously bad in how it misread "On Fairy Stories" and why should I trust your ability to read fiction if you can't even read nonfiction and understand what it's saying.)
And, yes, fiction is always more complicated than its politics and one of the most interesting things to watch as fantasy and science fiction and romance and horror get taken seriously as genres is what we get when we reckon with the space between readerly desire to have and readerly desire to pretend to have. Arranged queer marriage plots are a great example (and also one of my self-confessed beloved tropes). The queer-normative world is the desire, the "what if you ended up with the perfect person for you" is the imagine because who wants the risk of the reality? LOTR also exists in that slippage between and I am boundlessly curious about the parts of the story that draw us out and the parts that slip by. What is the meat of the nut and what is the shell in our love? (Am I saying that we are Rabbi Meir and literature is Elisha ben Abuya? Um.)
I am definitely not done with my random readings of Tolkien criticism that catch my interest and I still think that there is a lot more to be said about the way LOTR presents evil and power in a way that resonates and also, at the end of the day, I think JRRT is right about escape and recovery and consolation.
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