What I’m about to say is a discussion thread comment, but could be expanded into an essay or a book. It’s my considered opinion and some people might dislike it, but Chrons seems to be a corner of the internet in which civil discussion is still possible.
My argument will be largely sociological, and that bears out one of my chief claims: that “all of us” in the English-speaking world and in Europe think and imagine “sociologically.” In some sense we’re all Marxists now. But sociological thinking and imagining are intrinsically and necessarily hostile to the kind of poetic consciousness in which great fantasy can be composed.
Tolkien’s fantasy was a culmination and late flowering of a widespread poetic consciousness nourished by contact with countryside, by language strongly influenced by the “unacknowledged legislators” (poets, storytellers whose media could be the spoken word or the written and printed word), by the learned life, and by myth.
As regards myth: when Tolkien grew up and began to write his great stories, even while unbelief was increasingly common among the urban uneducated and among the intelligentsia, many people still were invested in myth, namely Christian mythology of humanity’s origin and predicament, the activity of the divine being in history, and the possible destinies of each one of us.* People went to church and myth was interwoven with birth, the education of the young, sexual conduct and marriage, law courts, the making of war, outreach to the disadvantaged, sickness, and death. People thus felt the presence and pressure of unseen reality in their consciences, and in their reading and music-making and music-listening. Society was permeated by poetic consciousness as Tolkien grew up. Even though secularization was increasingly ascendant, the imaginations of many ordinary people were permeated by a sense (which you may regard as illusory, but they did not) of genuine meaning, significant agency, etc. This was reflected in things as quotidian as the way people dressed, the sense that one shouldn’t use the name of Jesus loosely, etc. (i.e. language was connected with the mythic), etc.
Who is a popular poet today? Who is the poet laureate right now? But in Tolkien’s day many quite ordinary people turned to poetry, whether folk verses or the poems of Tennyson and de la Mare, etc. Whether or not it was often taken from the shelf, there might well be a family Shakespeare or a broken set of Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson in the bookcase. Likely enough these books – along with the family Bible – were lavishly illustrated, and children might peruse them again and again (where now the essence of imagery seen by children is that it is in constant motion). These pictures too encouraged a poetic sense of life. Poor people might have no books, of course, but if the children went to school they would at least be encouraged to memorize poems (“The boy stood on the burning deck” or whatever) and would be taught stories from the Bible as being history, part of the story of the human race to which we all belong. They would also be taught, however unkindly, some sort of respect for language in the form of prescriptive grammar, etc. Music was likely to be melodic; a piano was a desired mark of middle-class life with one or more children getting lessons to play it, perhaps emphasizing what might be deplored as sentimental tunes but were things people liked to sing about love, loyalty, and loss (Tolkienian themes!).
There was a continuity between this household and schoolroom poetic culture and the world of the universities as Tolkien knew them. The universities were largely dedicated to humane learning. With his passion for language, Tolkien was no weirdo in the university, which spread a feast before him in classroom and library. Tolkien’s professors were on the same page with him as regards the learned study of languages. In our time, we have lately seen the casting out of Beowulf and Old English/Anglo-Saxon, and now e.g. the University of Leicester prepares to drop Chaucer and the remaining survivals of medieval literature. In their place? Sociology! Sociology applied to literature in the forms of feminism, decolonialism, and so on. That’s basically what “theory” is.
Politics, popular entertainment, ordinary etiquette, the education of children – all encourage us always to think sociologically. In the States, the teachers’ unions are now pledged to sociology in the form of inculcation of “antiracism,” etc. It is with this that the minds of the young are to be occupied. Whatever good may come of this, I don’t suppose it will be of much use to the young potential fantasist. If there were a young Tolkien, he or she would never flourish in the classroom of the teacher who knows very little poetic literature and instead thinks his or her job is exposing the sins of the past and present, and promotion of perpetual struggle on behalf of undefined social “progress.”
However, uncongenial as all this is for fantasy, science fiction often thrives in a sociological context (The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984, etc. all are marked by sociological-type thinking). We may see some great works of sf yet -- although I think there may be an imaginative crisis approaching for the genre, as it becomes too obvious that its tropes include evident impossibilities; it will be too discouraging to write stories of interstellar travel when, at last, hardly anybody believes any more that faster than light travel can be done somehow. That’s another matter. But as for great fantasy, I suppose its time is over. More and more people will find that Tolkien’s books don’t speak to them, that the books exude an air they can’t breathe; they put them aside and never manage to finish them or, if they do, don’t feel they get what all the fuss used to be about.
If any great fantasy is yet written, it may have to come from some culture other than the homogeneous one of America, Britain, and western (at least) Europe. I think there was a suggestion of this in the book Laurus by the Russian medievalist Vodolazkin, but it is not a huge story of a secondary world.
My main point is about poetic consciousness vs. sociological consciousness and the implications for inspiration for literary fantasy.
I close with a couplet adapted from Swinburne:
Thou hast conquered, O shaggy Victorian**; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
*As C. S. Lewis expressed it, in Christ “myth became fact” of history. This is my own belief and certainly was Tolkien’s, as his famous conversation with Lewis bears out.
**I had Marx in mind. Then I thought also of a "Notes on the Way" essay by George Orwell from 1940. Orwell thought in sociological terms, but his remarks are pertinent to my thesis. He wrote:
------I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul [cf. poetic consciousness], and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.
It was absolutely necessary that the soul should be cut away. Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. The poor were to be contented with their poverty, because it would all be made up to them in the world beyond the grave, usually pictured as something mid-way between Kew gardens and a jeweller's shop. Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a week for you, but we are all the children of God. And through the whole fabric of capitalist society there ran a similar lie, which it was absolutely necessary to rip out.
Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came.-----
Dale Nelson
