Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

I'm a little late to the party on this one, I know. It's because I almost never read contemporary fiction, non-Japanese. Why? One, because I almost never read contemporary fiction, non-Japanese, so that when I do read a book, I can't properly contextualize it, and I find I have a hard time enjoying art I can't contextualize. So I'm an uptight academic at heart: surprise. Two, because no matter how much I enjoy it (and, to give the lie to that last statement, I enjoyed the bejeezus out of this novel), toward the end I start to feel guilty for not spending this time reading something that might someday contribute to a class, or an article. So I'm an uptight academic at heart: surprise.

But a dear friend recommended this to me, and in such specific terms that I just had to pick it up. Took me a while to get around to it, but.

Well, it is a masterpiece. It succeeds on so many levels, from the exhilarating bilinguality of the narration (I know just enough Spanish to get the frisson of catching some of the asides, and not enough to spoil it by catching them all) to the fascinating composite portrait it provides of, simultaneously, a family of Dominicans, and Dominican society as a whole (a society I freely admit I knew nothing about besides what you'd glean from the Boston media during the age of Manny, Pedro, and Big Papí). Plus, a lot of it takes place in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and by sheer chance I started reading this the day after I got back from a conference there. So I could envision some of the places it talks about...

Two things I want to mention about this book.

It dimly registered while I was reading it that the whole thing's a riff on Hemingway's "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber." It's such a magnificent book that you're almost embarrassed for Hemingway: put Oscar Wao in the ring with Francis Macomber, and Wao wins by a knockout in three. But this works to the book's advantage: you so quickly forget that Wao is an allusive variation on Macomber, you so quickly get immersed in the wondrous specificity of Díaz's achievement, that the inevitable ending may still come as a surprise. It was only when (spoiler alert) Oscar is out in that canefield that I found myself thinking, oh yeah, Mrs. Macomber. I mean, I should've been expecting it. That I wasn't shows that the book really worked for me. As an allusive variation. The Hemingway connection enriched the book for me, without overshadowing it.

Also: as something of a Tolkien aficionado, not to mention a nerd for all reasons, I thoroughly enjoyed Oscar's nerdessence. As a whitekid myself I'm always strangely embarrassed and heartened when I encounter people of color who co-inhabit my canon (I mean: why? but also, why not? but also, and again, why? etc.), so that's part of it. But mainly it's because I was moved, as a Tolkien reader, by Díaz's deep application of Tolkien to Dominica. I mean, us Tolkien apologists can talk about how there's depth there, meaning, significance; Díaz demonstrates it, by showing how Tolkien's imagery can, for one fanboy, capture deep feelings and understandings about a real-world event (the Trujillato). That is to say that, on a very deep level, Oscar Wao is about the power of literature in general, and Tolkien in particular, to help us make sense of life: Tolkien gives Oscar (not just Oscar: Yunior: Díaz) a vocabulary to talk about great evil, about torture, about destiny, about great beauty and strength, about death and violence and love.

Thanks.

Tolkien: The Children of Húrin

My recent Tolkien jag ended with me picking up The Children of Húrin, the latest (2007) product of Christopher Tolkien's work with his father's manuscripts. In a way, it's exactly what I wished for while slogging through The Silmarillion: a proper novel-style realization of one of the key incidents, which was told in dry, annalistic fashion in Sil. One wonders if Christopher might be able to come up with a similar synthesized version of some of the other key tales in the legendarium, such as Beren and Luthien...

Here's what happens. Húrin is a Man, and we know what that means in pre-LOTR Middle Earth. He's a loyal student of the Elves, a believer in their lore and more than that in their goals, and so he fights side by side with them when Morgoth invades. Húrin is captured, but despite his human frailty, he refuses to divulge to Morgoth the location of one of the hidden Elven kingdoms, Gondolin. So Morgoth curses Húrin's children, and curses Húrin to have to sit on an iron chair and helplessly behold the sufferings of his children.

The child whose sufferings we most follow is Túrin. I won't go into detail about his life; you can read up on it here. In short, he spends his whole life in exile among the Elves in their various hidden kingdoms; he wants to fight Morgoth - he wants to do good - but everything he does turns to evil. He ends up bringing at least one of those kingdoms, Nargothrond, to ruin, murdering his best friend, marrying and impregnating his sister: Túrin has it rough.

I described this book to Mrs. Sgt. T, and she said: "what a downer!" She's right. This is perhaps the most concentrated dose of Tolkien's grim outlook.

Túrin isn't a perfect man - he has his flaws, including pride and wrath and stubbornness - but he's well-meaning, full of pity and feeling, capable of love, and stalwart in his opposition to evil. But he suffers anyway. His flaws, in other words, aren't of the tragic kind; and yet his story is tragic. He suffers greatly; he suffers for his father's acts; and his father's acts, too, are blameless.

In short, I don't detect any didacticism in this tragedy - no "avoid hubris" moment. It's grimmer than that: all this suffering comes as a result of an unyielding opposition to evil. Evil, in Tolkien, can crush Men. Because they're weak.

I found it a strangely cathartic novel. I mean, it offers absolutely no hope, no redemption. But that's precisely what makes it so moving. Your heart just aches for Túrin, because he goes through so much, and he really doesn't deserve to: you pity him, which is an important emotion in Tolkien. It's a noble one, and a worthy aim for a story of this sort.

I found it interesting that (Christopher?) Tolkien chose to end the tale where he did, with Húrin, finally released, finding Túrin's grave. In The Silmarillion we learn that Morgoth more or less broke Húrin; he never willingly gave up Gondolin, but he unwittingly led Morgoth's servants there, and then managed to inadvertently trigger the fall of the third of the hidden kingdoms, Doriath. It's not hard to see this as the full end of the doom (as Tolkien would phrase it, and in fact does) of Húrin and his children. But it's left out of The Children of Húrin, which only brings the father back at the end of the story to see his son's grave and mourn, sort of a grace note to the tragedy. That may be for the best: seeing how all Húrin's valiant efforts, as well, come to naught might have been just too grim to take.

The Silmarillion

So if Tolkien's literature is essentially anthropocentric, if I'm right that his biggest overarching goal was to create in the reader this sense of doomy fatalism that he saw as characterizing the Nordic mythoi and worldview in the dawn of Northern European Christianity, if his most basic project was (as I suspect it might have been) to imagine what it must have felt like to be a seventh-century Finn or Icelander, then why does he spend so much time on the Elves, and not the Men? Why Elves at all?

I don't know if I have a complete answer to this (again, the History of Middle Earth still looms on my horizon). I don't know if I know how it all fits together. But here's my stab at it.

Tolkien was a Romantic. Generationally, he was too late; he was, in point of fact, a Modern; then too of course his Romanticism was more than tempered by his Medievalist temperament. But I think it's plain to see that his sense of beauty is straight out of the post-Romantic fairy stories and illustrations of the nineteenth century. His is a pre-Raphaelite sensibility, if you like. I probably can't characterize it more exactly than that, but I'm sure somebody has.

I think his Elves, and by extension The Silmarillion as a whole, are his attempt to imagine as fully as possible a world and a race of Beauty, as perceived by a pre-Raphaelite sensibility. Elves are, above all else, beautiful. At every turn in Tolkien, they're held up as the standard of beauty; even their flaws are above reproach, really, because of their beauty. And there's really no split in Tolkien between truth and beauty. Truth=beauty, beauty=truth, as much in Tolkien as in Keats. At least as far as Elves are concerned. Elves' bodies, their songs, their homes, their language, their eyes, their trees, their armor, their everything is beauty itself. And so is, thanks to the Silmarillion, their creation story: it's like Genesis rewritten by a pre-Raphaelite, all song and twilight and glowing trees and whatnot.

So Tolkien is all about trying to capture this beauty that, in his day, was really out of fashion. But in a sense, what could be more Modernist (and at the same time medieval) than his decision to locate that beauty so determinedly not in Men? Once Tolkien has grasped beauty, it's like he can't bring himself to imagine locating that beauty in Men. Men are too weak - if the 20th century taught us anything, it was that. If beauty is going to be in the world, it has to be in another race. A race that Men can't hope to emulate, and are usually too dull to want to.

This is Tolkien's aesthetic: mankind quaking in the presence of beauty, as much as basking in it. It's the ability to perceive beauty but the inability to join with it. It's Man being fundamentally cut off from beauty, isolated, whether by nature or (as I thought here) by age. It's not quite loss, although Tolkien's literature is permeated by a sense of loss; it's not truly loss because Man never actually possessed beauty, was never in communion with it; that's the province of the Elves.

Again, it's a commentary upon the human condition. I keep coming back to that. Most of his literary energies were spent on trying to capture this beauty, but I think it was essentially in an effort to show us humans what we're not and can never be. That that is our lot.

Akallabêth, continued

So of course Men eventually sail West and find Valinor, and must be punished. This punishment takes the form of a great cataclysm that sinks the island of Numenor. But the Valar go farther: they remove Valinor from the physical world altogether. This is a peculiar thing: if you're an Elf, or are invited, you can still sail there - this is what Frodo does at the end of LOTR. But most people can't. Why?

Because the world is round.

In Tolkien, the world was originally flat. It was only made round in the cataclysm that sinks Numenor. Ever after...well, let's let Tolkien tell it:

And those that sailed furthest set but a girdle about the Earth and returned weary at last to the place of their beginning; and they said: 'All roads are now bent.'

Thus in after days, what by the voyages of ships, what by lore and star-craft, the kings of Men knew that the world was indeed made round, and yet the Eldar were permitted still to depart and to come to the Ancient West and to Avallónë, if they would. Therefore the loremasters of Men said that a Straight Road must still be, for those that were permitted to find it. And they taught that, while the new world fell away, the old road and the path of the memory of the West still went on, as it were a mighty bridge invisible that passed through the air of breath and of flight (which were bent now as the world was bent), and traversed Ilmen which flesh unaided cannot endure, until it came to Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, and maybe even beyond, to Valinor... (pp. 281-2)

I find this fascinating. If we're going to discuss symbolic geometry, then I'd have to say I normally associate circles, spheres, with infiniteness, but here the sphere is the measure of finiteness. The mariners who return "weary at last to the place of their beginning" - what a sense of futility that phrase carries.

I can't think of a better thumbnail image of Tolkien's stance toward modernity on the one hand and the mythological past on the other than this Flat-Earthism. We moderns can't help but think of the discovery (or gradually realization) that the earth is round as an advance, but Tolkien is telling us that it's really a loss for humanity, a huge and definitive Closing of the Frontier. The moment we realize the earth is round, we experience a loss.

But it's what he does next that is so intriguing. He proceeds to imagine the period before we realize the earth is round, not as one of ignorance, but as one in which the earth really wasn't round. The earth's flatness in Tolkien is key: it means that those on earth, Elves and Men, are in lands that are contiguous with those of the Angels. All you have to do get there is sail far enough.

Until the cataclysm, and the rounding of the earth. After that, you can't get there by sailing. Not unless you're permitted to find the Straight Road, and that now takes - well, not exactly faith, not in Tolkien. Permission. Which certainly implies a kind of moral Straightness, although sin in Tolkien isn't very well-defined.

Again with that symbolic geometry. The spherical nature of the world does not connote wholeness (see Cat's comment on an earlier Tolkien post here for what wholeness meant to Tolkien and his generation), but brokenness - bentness, to be precise. Straightness is still possible, but it's no longer natural: now it involves transcendence, superhuman heroism or virtue or perception or favor. Something as simple as a straight line is no longer part of the natural inheritance of Men.

A sorry lot indeed.

Akallabêth

The Elves have it easy. They're immortal, first of all. This doesn't mean they can't be killed; they can. But if they're not murdered they'll live forever. And, perhaps more importantly, if they are killed they know what happens to them: their souls go to the Halls of Mandos, where they wait. Kind of like the ghosts in Pac-man.

Furthermore, the angels (the Valar) love them and will do just about anything for them. The world the Elves are created into is innocent, and as soon as the Valar hear the Elves have popped up they rush to meet them and welcome them with open arms into Eden. Once there, as we've seen, the Elves figure out a way to screw things up - by making Things - but it's important to note that, while this dip into materialism ultimately dooms the Elves, and can thus be likened unto Original Sin, it's not characterized as a Transgression. The Valar never say to the Elves, hey, don't make a Silmaril. And in fact when the Elves make Silmarils, the Valar think they're pretty cool.

Men don't have it so easy. The world they're created into is one already under the sway of Morgoth, and no angels come running to see how they're doing, much less Elves.

Furthermore, and this is the big difference, Men die. They die no matter what: slain, sure, but also of old age. And when they die, they really die. The Elves don't know what happens to them. The Valar don't know what happens to them.

Now the Valar and the Elves insist that this is a gift the creator gave Men. "Death is their fate, the gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy" (p. 42). But try telling Men that: Hey, you know, you're going to die, and we've got no clue where you're going. Us? We're going back to Eden, but you? Tough titty. But don't get all sore about it: it's a gift, don't you know.

This gift, we're told, is part and parcel with Men's nature, which is to "seek beyond the world and...find no rest therein" and thus to escape fate, which rules the Elves - Men are free, in other words, in a way that Elves are not. Free, but given precious little guidance, it seems, save what they can beg from the Elves, if they're content to serve the Elves as stalwart followers - and let's remember that the Elves call them "Atani...the Second People; but they called them also Hildor, the Followers, and many other names: Apanónar, the After-born, Engwar, the Sickly, and Fírimar, the Mortals; and they named them the Usurpers, the Strangers, and the Inscrutable, the Self-cursed, the Heavy-handed, the Night-fearers, the Children of the Sun" (p. 103).

Men, we're told, are easily seduced by Morgoth and then Sauron, who play upon Men's fears. Fear of, it seems, death above all. And in the story of Numenor, we get an up-close view of how this works. And it works ironically.

So the Quenta Silmarillion tells us how the Elves screwed up. They mostly evacuate Middle-Earth in the wake of their disastrous experiment in living outside Eden. Then the Valar feel guilty for all the stalwart Men who died fighting at the Elves' side - Men didn't make the Silmarils, after all - and they give these faithful Men an island, Westernesse, or Numenor.

This is Men's Eden, a land of peace and plenty. But unlike the Elves in Valinor, Men don't dwell with the Angels. Numenor is a formidable distance from Valinor. And here's where Tolkien uses the apple motif from Genesis. Eden/Valinor is on earth: if Men sail west from Westernesse long enough they'll reach it. In fact they can see it from their highest tower on a clear day. But the Valar set a ban on them, that they're to never sail west out of sight of their own shores, and above all they're never supposed to sail to Valinor.

Here's Eden: but you can't go there. Now this is, like the apple, the kind of rule that's just begging to be broken. And of course Sauron shows up and starts playing on Men's fears, pointing out that the Valar and Elves in Valinor are immortal, and why aren' t Men? Why do they forbid Men to go to Valinor and share in that immortality? And so of course eventually the Numenoreans do, and that's all she wrote: the Valar sink Numenor, and the remnant of Men, the only ones who didn't want to eat the apple (so to speak) flee to Middle-Earth.

So that's the condition of Men in Tolkien. They're subject to Death. Nobody seems to know why, or in fact just what Death is to Men. They're told, once in a while, to take it on faith that Death is a gift, but just what kind of gift nobody's sure - and it's not like the Elves are in any hurry to find out for them. Men are afraid of Death, and it makes them weak and persuadable. Elves look down on them for this, as does the narrator of every Tolkien story I've read (and I haven't plunged into the History of Middle-Earth yet). And yet nobody seems to offer Men much help in overcoming their weakness, or understanding it.

It seems like a pretty sorry lot indeed, and from the point of view of The Silmarillion, it is, since The Silmarillion is a pretty quendicentric book. And yet I suspect that in the final analysis, all the Elven-immortality stuff, all the Valar/Valinor/Iluvatar stuff, is there precisely to create this gloomy outlook for men. I suppose I think it's an anthropocentric literature, after all. In the end what Tolkien's after most of all is that dark Norse worldview, where Men are doomed, end of story. Only against that kind of grim metaphysical backdrop can we see true heroism. Think of how many times in LOTR Aragorn or another human says something like "I keep no hope for myself." That fatalism is what comes through most strongly in Tolkien. To me, at least.

It's very hard for the modern mind to wrap itself around, I think. Men get a raw deal, but they're not allowed to point that out. There's no heroic rebellion in Tolkien, no hint that Men are at all justified in fearing death, desiring immortality, or in any way being discontented with their lot. Tolkien was in many ways a Romantic, I believe, but there's no trace in him of the Romantic identification with Satan.

Quenta Silmarillion

The centerpiece and longest part of The Silmarillion is the "Quenta Silmarillion," or "History of the Silmarils." To say it's dry would be accurate. Much of it reads like the begats in the Bible. Which is appropriate, since it's essentially a history of the Elves from their creation to the end of their dominion on Earth.

Why, then, is it not called "Quenta Quendi" or something like that?

Instead, it's called the History of the Silmarils, those three stones made by one of the first elves, Fëanor, into which he put the light and power of the Two Trees, i.e., of the most mysticalest of the mystical ecstatic godnature of the Tolkien equivalent of the Garden of Eden, or something like that. See, Morgoth (Sauron's daddy) steals the Silmarils, and Fëanor and his sons swear to get them back, and never let anyone else have them. This oath basically guides the rest of Elven history, leading most of the Elves out of Eden and into the world, and at the same time introducing murder into Elvenkind; it's no exaggeration to say that Fëanor's sons' obsession with this oath leads to the utter downfall of the Elves.

Obviously, the Silmarils are connected with Tolkien's version of Original Sin. They get you kicked out of the Garden. But what is it about the Silmarils - it's not like the apple in Genesis, where it's put right in front of you and you're told not to eat it (Tolkien saves this motif for the men of Numenor). It's not a temptation.

No, the Elves' original sin is making things. Fëanor makes the Silmarils, and they're wonderful - even the Valar (the angels of Eden) love them. But once the light of the Trees has gone from being a ubiquitous phenomenon to a (mostly) self-contained thing that can be possessed, well, then it's all over but the weeping. If you can possess it, then somebody else can want to possess it, and kill you for it.

In short, I think the Elves' original sin is objects. Things. This is never quite spelled out, but it's all there in the Silmarils. The Elves are immortal, and they have what seems to readers an infinite capacity for apprehending beauty. They should be content just to be. But they aren't. They set about making things, the Silmarils. Making things is beneath Elves, or should be. Later we get an echo of the Silmaril making in the figure of Eöl, who has learned smithying from the dwarves, and who becomes a sort of foreboding, unElvish figure. But really, he's not that much different from Fëanor.

Sauron with his rings is another echo, and this is how Silmarillion can help make sense of LOTR. When Sauron made his rings he imbued them with his power. This made them powerful tools, but of course it made him hugely vulnerable.

You make a thing thinking it's going to be an increase for you, but instead it diminishes you.

Materialism. That's the big sin in Tolkien, isn't it?

Shamus Young's DM of the Rings

Props to my sister, who, no doubt provoked by my recent spate of Tolkien posts, sent me a link to this: a screencap/photoshop web comic that imagines the Lord of the Rings movies as a D&D campaign. The author, one Shamus Young, deserves a lot of admiration for seeing it through to the end - CXLIV episodes plus bonus tracks.

In order to fully appreciate this comic, you not only have to have memorized the LOTR movies (guilty), but you have to have been a Dungeon Master at some point (guilty, too). If you have, it's a wickedly precise parody of both. If not, it's at the very least a great glimpse into RPG culture.

It's been almost twenty years since I played D&D, and I have no plans to pick it up again, but I remember it vividly. There's no creative outlet quite like being a DM: it's incredibly rewarding to take other people, living breathing other people, through your creations in real time. But of course it's incredibly frustrating too, because those people will inevitably screw up your creations. It's a little hint of what God must feel like, which is to say, it's a good way of gaining insight into the mysteries of artistic creation.

Warning: it flags after the first thirty or forty episodes. And: you can pretty much skip his "moral of the story" essays below the comics. Unless you are a gamer.

Ainulindalë and Valaquenta, fragmentation and completeness

So I'm reading The Silmarillion now, for the first time since I was in junior high; this is the one I've never gone back to, no matter how many times I read LOTR. And immediately I find it rewarding, because the first two sections, the "Ainulindalë" and the "Valaquenta," are so different.

One of the tensions that drives LOTR to such aesthetic heights is that between fragmentation and completeness. Middle-earth (don't forget the hyphen) is a complete creation, with more language, history, mythology, culture, and geography than most of us know about the world we live in. Its completeness is part of its charm: at some point or another most readers, I think, are struck by the thought that they could just crawl into Middle-earth and live there (not to mention the desire we all feel to do so).

And yet for the most part this completeness is achieved - rather, I should say, it's communicated to the reader - by means of fragmentariness. LOTR never sets out the complete mythology of the elves to its readers; we get bits and pieces here and there in songs and poems and allusions by different characters, and these are so carefully arrayed, and so convincingly placed into the mouths of the characters, that they create the sense that they're parts of a larger and complete whole. Same with the languages, same with the histories of Gondor, etc. I'm convinced that it's this fragmentation - Tolkien's way of delivering to the reader shards of his vision, tucked into the pockets of his story-cloak - that makes his fictional world succeed.

The Appendices set a lot of this stuff out in more complete fashion, particularly the history of the kingdoms of men; but even if you read the Appendices (and I don't know how many readers do), by the time you read them, you've already bought into the reality of the world. Nobody starts with the Appendices. And, truth be told, the Appendices don't give you everything, not by a long shot. They mostly flesh out things that you could almost have deduced from the narrative.

I'm no expert on Romanticism with that capital R, but it strikes me that this fragmentation is part of Tolkien's inheritance from Romanticism. It's part and parcel of his Ossian-like pose, delivering survivals from a vanished antiquity. But as I say, I think it's narrative genius; and I think Tolkien on some level knew this, because he wrote Lord of the Rings rather than insist single-mindedly on completing The Silmarillion.

"Ainulindalë" and "Valaquenta" are what LOTR isn't, systematic and complete expositions of the mythology of the Elves. They're the Creation Story, the War in Heaven, the catalog of angels. And not only are they deadly dull reading (beautiful, though, both in conception and execution), but they feel a good deal less real than LOTR. When we encounter this stuff within the narrative of LOTR, we're experiencing it as the hobbits do, as hints of a vaster truth. When its laid before us like this, it looks, well, made-up.

But what a making-up. Suddenly Tolkien's project no longer feels Romantic to me, but Modernist. It's monumental: it's no longer the illusion of completeness, but the completeness itself. It's the fictional equivalent of, say, a Brancusi (how right Peter Jackson was to bring Brancusian elements into his representation of Gondorian art): Ideal, seamless, polished and smooth, entirely 20th century in its manner of evoking classical canons of beauty.

Modernism isn't something you tend to associate with Tolkien, who was at such pains to preserve, and to show himself preserving, pre-industrial ideals. I'm not up on the critical discourse on Tolkien, but it does begin to seem to me that if we don't think of him as a Modernist, we're missing something.

The Appendices

I'm one of those who reads the Appendices every time I read Lord of the Rings. Partly it's because of all the background info they contain on the fictional world: the fictional world, fully fleshed out, is what I read this for, as much as the story itself.

But partly I read the Appendices because they complete the story. They have extra little bits of key narrative tucked in here and there, such as the full tale of Aragorn and Arwen's love, and further info about what the Travellers did after coming back to the Shire. But more than that, the Appendices complete the novel, in a way, by allowing the reader to immerse himself or herself fully in Middle-Earth. "The Shire has been saved," Frodo says, "but not for me." But it is saved for the reader, and in the Appendices, we get it all.

One thing that hits you as you hit the hard road of the Appendices is the framing device. After a thousand pages of Tolkien's narrative you're lucky if you can remember that he ended the Prologue with that bewildering bit about the Red Book, and the Thain's Book, and the copy in Minas Tirith, and whatnot. Fictional historiography: dry stuff.

But then you read the Appendices, and they refer you back to the Prologue, and furthermore long sections of the Appendices' account of Numenor, Arnor, Gondor, etc., are given as direct quotations from something, and you realize, oh yeah, they're from the Red Book.

Then it hits you. The Lord of the Rings itself is meant - asks you to read it as - more or less Frodo's account, reworked in Rivendell and the Shire. I mean, sure, there's that scene at the end of the story proper where Frodo gives Sam the manuscript (Peter Jackson, admirably, retained it). But for me at least, it's not until I cross over into the Appendices and those significant quotation marks that I realize that everything that's gone before is meant to be read as a paraphrase of what's supposedly in this Red Book.

And that suddenly explains what is for me one of the most conspicuous features of The Two Towers and Return of the King. This is that Tolkien employs two very different prose styles for his narration. The chapters dealing with Frodo and Sam are written in the same style as Fellowship: detailed, novelistic narration, with lots of dialogue that sounds like authentic speech. Lots of description of place and feeling. The chapters in which Frodo and Sam don't appear - i.e., the sections in Rohan and Minas Tirith - are told in a more elevated, archaic, and in fact storybook style. Description of setting is often minimal, and conversations are rendered in a fair and graceful speech that you can't imagine anyone actually using.

I used to think this was a sign of two things that became true as the book wore on: one, maybe Tolkien was getting tired and rushed; two, as the deeds became greater, he decided to treat them in more of a legendary fashion. Because that's what it feels like: like you're listening to a storyteller. As opposed to the Frodo sections, which feel like you're reading a book.

But now - I don't know if this is what Tolkien intended, but I do think it fits - it seems to me that this stylistic divergence fits the frame device. The Rohan and Minas Tirith sections are things that Frodo didn't witness firsthand, things he learned about only later, through people telling him tales. It's only appropriate that the narration become more storybook-like here.

The proof, I think, is that the tone becomes most campfire-taleteller-like in scenes in which neither Merry nor Pippin are present. Exhibit A, I would say, is the first half of the chapter called "The Steward and the King." This is the part that tells of Faramir and Eowyn falling in love in the Houses of Healing. The tone here is perhaps the most elevated - courtly is the right word - of any section; you could almost be reading Malory. In terms of narrative, the tone actually weakens it, I think, because you can't really believe it as a love story in a novel, not the way you can believe, say, the courtship (deftly suggested through a minimum of details) of Sam and Rosie.

But if you think of it as a retelling of a retelling of a retelling of events that only the two principals really knew about (think of how your grandkids, or maybe your nieces, might one day tell the story of your own courtship), it becomes quite a charming passage, and a key part of the grand denouement of the novel.

Shelob and Galadriel

Isn’t there something interesting about how the first two volumes of an epic famously poor in female characters both feature strong, even primordial female presences at the height of the action?

The visit to Lothlorien and the encounter with Galadriel isn’t quite the climax of Fellowship, not the way the battle with Shelob is the climax of The Two Towers, but it’s close enough, I think, to invite us to compare the two characters.

Here we go:

Galadriel and Shelob are both female. Undeniably: Shelob’s feminine nature is adumbrated even in her name. She-lob, she-spider (even if this etymology is spurious according to Tolkien’s scheme, I have no doubt it’s what he had in mind).

They both come from outside Middle-Earth: Galadriel came with the rest of the elves, while Shelob came from “the Land of the Elves in the West” (p. 707). Both are beings of great power, essentially immortal; we’re not even sure if Sam’s attack kills Shelob.

Both now rule over their own pocket of Middle-Earth (Lothlorien; Cirith Ungol), which responds sympathetically to their psychic power – Galadriel’s calm, Shelob’s malice. Galadriel’s light, Shelob’s dark.

And of course each represents a pole of morality: Galadriel is one of many exemplars in the novel of pure, or as nearly pure as can be imagined good; one of many but probably the most memorable, because least challenged and most fleetingly glimpsed. Shelob is presented as pure evil, worse in her own way than even Sauron, if not as powerful.

What does this mean, this locating of two poles of mysticized femininity at the ends of the first two installments of the novel? I don’t know. But at the very least it’s a powerful parallel, an effective unifying feature.

Part of why I don't know what it means is because there's no obvious follow-up in the third volume. Several female characters make an appearance in Return of the King, ranging from the majestic Eowyn to the homey Rosie Cotton. But none of them have nearly the presence, much less the elemental overtones, of Galadriel and Shelob.

This could be intentional, as the extended ending, at least, of the third book is all about the reestablishing of normalcy, or rather the establishing of a new, post-Elven standard of normalcy, and it could be that Tolkien wants us to see in Rosie an earthy femininity that stands as a pole, in its own way, to the two kinds of mystical femininity that overshadow the ends of the first two books.

Buried at the very end of the appendices, we find Tolkien noting (p. 1109) that he has anglicized the hobbit names that appear in the book, because "in hobbit-names a was a masculine ending, and o and e were feminine." This means, I suppose, but Frodo's real name was Froda.

Does it also mean something more, more than Tolkien's inscrutable linguistic groundwork? Tolkien's right: to the English speaker's ear, Froda sounds like a female. Are we here, at the end of all things, meant to have a moment of confusion, in which we see, ever so faintly, all the male hobbits whose adventures we have followed for a thousand pages, not as males, but as females? After all, hobbits are full of traditionally-conceived female virtues such as love of hearth and home, cooking and gardening - as opposed to forestry - they're not Ents, but Entwives. Certainly the hobbits aren't the lost Entwives per se, but maybe, just maybe, they're Tolkien's representatives of an unmystical, earthly, healthy femininity.

The Choices of Master Samwise

As I noted, each of the two sections of The Two Towers begins with the leader of that section (Aragorn in the first section and Frodo in the second) lamenting the fact that all of his choices have been wrong. “All that I do goes amiss,” says Aragorn, as the weight of his responsibility for the Company in Gandalf’s absence, and then the Ring-bearer’s, sinks upon him; “All my choices have proved ill,” laments Frodo, as the weight of his responsibility for the Ring, now that Gandalf is gone and Frodo himself has left Aragorn and the rest behind, sinks upon him.

Note, then, how The Two Towers ends: with a chapter called “The Choices of Master Samwise.” In which Frodo for the time being has failed in his stewardship of the Ring – outrunning Sam’s protection of him, Frodo has been stung by the giant primordial spider Shelob. Sam finds him and thinks he’s dead; we’ll later learn he’s not, but Sam doesn’t know this.

Sam has to choose: stay by his master’s side and defend/avenge his corpse, or take up the Ring and try to complete the quest on his own.

Sam, it’s important to remember, has never really been a free agent, not in the same way Frodo is. Sam is a servant, not quite indentured but still bound by tradition and social station to serve his master. He seldom acts for himself, and now he has to.

The chapter title refers to “Choices” in the plural, and of course he makes many decisions along the way, but I think it also refers to the fact that he makes the same decision several times, because he doesn’t have the strength to stick with what he’s decided. He knows right away what he has to do: “I’ve got to go on” (p. 714). But after he’s prepared Frodo’s body to be left alone, Sam revisits his decision: “in his heart keeping a debate” (p. 714). He finally arrives – again – at the conclusion that he has to take the Ring and try to finish the Quest himself, and duly takes the Ring.

But almost immediately he has second – third? – thoughts. “‘Have I got it wrong?’ he muttered. ‘What ought I to have done?’” (p. 716). As the narration points out, to strike out on his own, to assume his master’s responsibilities (and possessions) is “altogether against the grain of his nature” (p. 716).

But still he goes on. Three times now he’s made the same decision: to try to finish the quest himself. But then – then he puts on the Ring, overhears orcs finding Frodo’s body, and “he flung the Quest and all his decisions away, and fear and doubt with them” (p. 718). He goes back to Frodo’s body to defend it against the orcs.

His conclusion at this point is interesting: he knows this is the wrong thing to do, but he also believes it’s the only thing he can do. “‘I can’t help it. My place is by Mr. Frodo. They must understand that – Elrond and the Council, and the great Lord and Ladies with all their wisdom. Their plans have gone wrong’” (p. 718).

Again the emphasis on plans, choices, deeds going amiss. Here, though, the speaker isn’t talking about his own intentions going wrong, but those of others; which go wrong because he can’t carry them out. He believes he’s failing others, but only because he belatedly decides that to serve them he’d have to fail in his duty to his master, which he can’t do.

What’s going on here? First of all, I think that the earlier emphases on choices going wrong pays off here. Aragorn’s comments remind us that he’s in charge, and has been since Gandalf's fall; Frodo’s comment, echoing Aragorn’s, helps us realize that for the first time since the Quest began, really, Frodo is in a position of leadership too, forced to make decisions and experience their consequences. Now, at the end of the book, the emphasis on Sam’s choices, and the way his dilemma echoes Aragorn’s and Frodo’s (which way to go?), indicates that the role of leader has devolved upon Sam.

And what of his choices? In fact he does choose correctly, even if he comes to a fork in the road and takes both paths. By first (and second and third) choosing to take the Ring upon himself, he removes it from the path of the orcs who would surely have overpowered him and captured it had he simply stayed to defend Frodo’s corpse. His decision to continue the Quest at this crucial moment saves the day.

But he never could have finished it alone: he’s right to perceive that his role is to support Frodo, and that without Frodo he’s not much good. So he goes back, and it’s good that he does: he eventually rescues Frodo and together, they finish the Quest. He was right to choose to complete the Quest on his own, and he was right to rethink that choice and go back for Frodo. And, in his humility, he doesn’t quite realize that this tricky alternation of decisiveness and doubt has led him in just the right direction.

This is Tolkien’s irony. Heroism seldom looks like it. But even just attempting to do good may do some good. Despite appearances, it's a rather hopeful book.

Aragorn and Frodo in The Two Towers

"Alas! An ill fate is on me this day, and all that I do goes amiss." So says Aragorn on the first page of The Two Towers (p. 403). He's lost Frodo, and while he's searching for the missing hobbit, he hears Boromir's horn and realize that other members of the Fellowship are under attack. On the next page, after seeing Boromir draw his last breath, Aragorn repeats his lament: "All that I have done today has gone amiss." The formulation is striking enough to stick in the reader's memory. Not "I have erred," or "I made the wrong decisions," but "all that I have done has gone amiss." Is Aragorn expressing himself this way to evade responsibility for bad choices, or to correctly identify a malign influence on his fortunes? Maybe both. At the end of the chapter (p. 409) he seems to recognize the roles of both his will and blind luck, when he says, "And now may I make a right choice, and change the evil fate of this unhappy day!"

Fate vs. free will, as an explanation for bad happenings. That may be what Tolkien's getting at with this wording. But I also think he's just trying to get us to remember this scene. Why? Because The Two Towers is such a bifurcated book. The story splits into two when Frodo and Sam take off on their own, but rather than intercut between their narrative and that of Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas (as Peter Jackson does so masterfully in the films), Tolkien spends the first half of this second book following Aragorn and company exclusively. It's not until the second half that we rejoin Frodo and Sam, and then we follow them exclusively.

And when we rejoin Frodo, what do we find him saying, almost immediately (p. 590)? "All my choices have proved ill." This isn't happening precisely simultaneously with Aragorn's laments - a little time has passed by now since Frodo and Sam left Rauros - but it's close enough. The similarity in sentiment, if not wording - the idea that one's best intentions are being thwarted - reminds us of Aragorn, and that in turn serves to remind us that, in shifting to Frodo's story, we're traveling back in time several days. I imagine Tolkien realized that his decision not to intercut the two stories (after all, in the first half of the book he does some intercutting, switching between Aragorn and co. and Merry and Pippin) was bound to create an odd experience for the reader, and he did what he could to remind us, despite the time dislocation, that these storylines are parallel. This doubling of sentiment is part of that effort (along with Frodo and Sam seeing Nazgul fly overhead, Nazgul that Aragorn and co. will soon see).

The doubling of sentiment also subtly equates Aragorn and Frodo. When the company was whole, Frodo, though Ring-bearer, was a follower; first of Gandalf, then of Aragorn. Now Aragorn leads only two followers, while Frodo leads a party of his own, although he only has one follower. Furthermore, Aragorn has the right of leadership due to his royal lineage; Frodo only has the Ring, and his social status as Sam's superior. Nevertheless, he's now called upon to lead: his choices, all he does, now matter. If they go ill, amiss, there are serious consequences.

Frodo in Lothlorien

Frodo's first view of Lothlorien (p. 341):

...Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured forever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lorien there was no stain.

"A vanished world" is the first thing to note here. The beauty of Lothlorien is something Frodo is experiencing in the here and now - it's not part of the past, but the present - but later we learn that it's something of an island in time, sealed in upon itself. It isn't really of the present, but the past. Its fate is sealed, and it's already gone, even as Frodo first sees it. Thus, for all its intense and glorious presence, Lothlorien is really part of the discourse on absence, the doomy nostalgia for a better vanished age, that permeates all of Tolkien.

You could call this conservative, in a temperamental sense: the feeling that the world's best days must be behind it. The world as it presently stands isn't heaven: on that we can all agree. There must be something better. The question is, is heaven yet to come, or has it already gone? Tolkien would say it's gone, and that all that remains is a valiant fight in a losing cause, because things are just going to keep getting worse. As a literary quality, it's tragedy, with all the beauty of tragedy; and beauty is why we love Lord of the Rings. But as a philosophy of life it's no more self-evidently true than it's opposite, the belief that things are just going to keep getting better. You could argue either way, and never prove your case: belief in a golden age in the past and belief in a coming millennial paradise are both equally acts of faith. Tolkien's faith is firmly in the past, and his faith is strong enough to vouchsafe him, through Frodo, glimpses of the perfect beauty that exists in the past. Lothlorien. Heaven.

But what struck me this time through Lothlorien was that maybe there's something more going on here than just a yearning for a past beyond all but species memory. Note the way Frodo's perceptions are described here: "the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes...He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful."

I've felt this way. At 16, 17, 18 I could look at a tree (damn near any tree) and see so much beauty in it, so much divinity, that I felt that nobody in the history of seeing could ever have seen a tree before me. The gold of leaves in autumn was so gold that I thought I could say the word "gold" and have it mean more than anybody else could. You probably felt this way, too. I dare say anybody who was a teenaged Romantic did. There's something about youth, madly in love with nature, newly aware of beauty, that makes it think it invented these things, or invented the perception of them. And it's the very naivete of the perceptions that lends them intensity - or at least the intensity goes hand in hand with the naivete.

If you're lucky, you die young like Keats and these perceptions never dim. If you're not, you get old. As you get older, things happen - disillusionment, or just fatigue - and you lose the intensity. You may still find trees pretty, even breathtaking at times, but you're no longer able to lose yourself in them the way you once did. If you're lucky you find new ways to love them; if you're not, maybe you look back wistfully on the ecstasy that was once accessible to you, and no longer is. What happened? Is it the tree's fault? Is it yours? Or is that just the way life is? Whatever, now there's a "stain" on the land, at least for you.

In short, maybe Tolkien is writing not only about a golden age in the distant, prehistorical past, but also one in the near past, within living memory of everyone who was once young, and is no longer. About not only the youth of the world, but the youth of the reader.

I certainly didn't get that the first time I read LOTR.

Rivendell-gaeri

In the twelfth chapter (entitled "Suma") of the Tale of Genji, the Shining Prince's philandering begins to catch up with him, and he's obliged to leave the Capital for a while. He goes into exile in the region of Suma, on the Inland Sea coast.

Any reader who follows Genji down to Suma has already struggled through, as noted, eleven chapters of the Tale - eleven chapters of very demanding, if beautiful, archaic Japanese. And it may hit the reader, at this point, that he or she is less than a quarter of the way through the whole. Furthermore, the reader has already encountered a good many of the book's most famous scenes. It's perhaps no surprise, then, that a lot of readers find their concentration flagging right around this point. Having escorted Genji as far as Suma, these readers turn around and go home. This is a common enough phenomenon that there's a word for it in Japanese: Suma-gaeri 須磨帰り, "returning from Suma," i.e., making it as far as Suma (or "Suma") before turning around and heading back.

A similar thing happens, I find, with Lord of the Rings. The first couple of times I tried to read it (back in seventh or eighth grade), I gave up when I got to the Council of Elrond. It's one of my favorite parts now - all those different actors supplying different parts of the puzzle, different perspectives on the problem, each new bit of light shed revealing the problem to be even worse than previously suspected - but at the time I thought it dreadfully difficult going. And I don't think I'm alone. Mrs. Sgt. T tried to read LOTR a few years ago, got as far as the Council, and hasn't picked it up since.

We laughed when we realized we'd both gotten discouraged at the same point, and as I say, I'm sure we're not alone. And since we're both familiar with Genji, we immediately recognized the phenomenon. So we gave it a name: hereby we propose that "Rivendell-gaeri" be added to the lexicon of LOTR studies. Particularly appropriate, I think. By the time of the Council we've faithfully followed Frodo through many perils on the long road to Rivendell, but Elrond lays no charge on any of the Fellowship to go farther than they will, and makes a particular point of allowing a couple of the hobbits to go back to the comforts of the Shire if they wish. Surely any novice readers may be forgiven if we take him up on his offer.

Tom Bombadil

So I'm about halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring now.

Tom Bombadil is one of my favorite characters. This LOTR blog (unfortunately it looks like the author has abandoned it) gets at a lot of the reasons why (there's no search function, but he's got a nice series of three posts on Tom in February 2008). But what he doesn't really nail is the sheer musicality of Tom's speech.

Tom Bombadil speaks in old-fashioned (i.e. Old English-fashioned) stressed verse. He doesn't have quite the alliteration that Beowulf has, but his speech does break down consistently into seven-beat lines, with a caesura between the fourth and fifth beats. Sometimes his speech is presented as poetry - i.e., Tolkien italicizes and indents it, as in the following well-known couplet (p. 122 in the Houghton Mifflin trade paperback):

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.

Note the rhythm: four strong beats (óld Tóm Bómbadíl), a pause, then three more beats (ís a mérry féllow). This couplet rhymes, reinforcing the notion that it should be recognized as poetry, or song. But all of Bombadil's speech does this, even when it doesn't rhyme, even when it's presented as nothing more than conversation. Let's take a random passage (p. 126):

"Sun won't show her face much today, I'm thinking. I have been walking wide, leaping on the hilltops, since the grey dawn began, nosing wind and weather, wet grass underfoot, wet sky above me. I wakened Goldberry singing under window; but nought wakes hobbit-folk in the early morning."

Let's reformat it as poetry, with the beats italicized and a double vertical line to indicate the caesura:

Sún wón't shów her fáce || múch todáy, I'm thínking.
Í háve been wálking wíde, || léaping ón the hílltops,
sínce the gréy dáwn begán, || nósing wínd and wéather,
wét gráss únderfóot, || wét sk´y abóve me.
Í wákened Góldbérry || sínging únder wíndow;
but nóught wákes hóbbit-fólk || ín the éarly mórning.

Beautiful, no? Almost hypnotic. And significant: given Bombadil's very ancient nature (well detailed in the blog posts I link to above), it's appropriate that his speech is given this old-fashioned poetic form.

I must note that I'm not the only one to comment on the rhythms of Tom Bombadil's speech. But I'm proud to say I discovered it independently.

Since Tom's one of my favorite characters, it may surprise you, O Reader, to learn that I'm not particularly bummed that Peter Jackson left him out of the movies - which I love every minute of, by the way. But I'm not. As excellent and admirable a job as Jackson did, I'm not sad to have one character left wholly to my imagination, and Tom's the best one for it. It fits with what Tolkien himself said about Bombadil's mysterious and unexplained nature.

The Hobbit, clotted cream, and evocative details

So I'm reading Tolkien again, as I do every few years. This is the edition I'm reading, by the way, with the Alan Lee covers. I think they're about the most attractive I've seen. Check this site, for an impressive account of the different covers through the years. For what it's worth, the first time I read Lord of the Rings, it was the hippie covers. Thanks, Dad!

But that's not what I wanted to note here. I think Tolkien is a brilliant writer. Not necessarily the best plot-architect (although when I start reading him I can seldom stop), but a brilliant writer. Part of this is his choice of words, and his sentence-smithing, but part of it - and this is probably more important to his success as a novelist - is his eye for the telling detail. He's not the most descriptive writer, for the most part: you can go through the whole of The Hobbit and only have the vaguest idea of what an orc or a dwarf really looks like. But when he does include details, they're extraordinarily evocative.

Proof? Every time I read Tolkien I get hungry. Take this passage, from The Hobbit (p. 118 of the Houghton Mifflin trade paper edition pictured above):

At last Gandalf pushed away his plate and jug - he had eaten two whole loaves (with masses of butter and honey and clotted cream) and drunk at least a quart of mead - and he took out his pipe.

This is at Beorn's house. It's a casual moment, and what Gandalf actually ate is for the most part relegated to parentheses. But it immediately gives you a feel for life at Beorn's. The honey reminds you of the wondrous bees the company saw in Beorn's gardens - and if it also makes you think of Winny the Pooh and his hunny jar, so much the better. We're in bear territory. The butter and clotted cream suggest the master of the house's mastery over his animals, while the absence of meat suggests the restraint with which he uses them. The whole spread, notably the loaves (and what kind of bread must that have been?) suggests a wholesome richness, humble and close to the land but as luxurious as you could ask for.

And if that doesn't make you want to sit down to a hunk of good solid bread, some honey and real butter and clotted cream - well, in that case, you're probably thinner than me, at least.

(Bonus link: if you're an American like me you may have to consult Wikipedia to know what clotted cream is. Once you know, you may find yourself, as we did, running to the nearest imported-foods store [for us it was Cardullo's in Harvard Square] to see if they carry it. They did, Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki whipped up some scones, and we had a hobbit breakfast yesterday.)