TOLKIEN: MAN AND MYTH. A LITERARY LIFE
Harper Collins, 1998. ISBN 0-00-274018-4
Published in MALLORN 37 (1999)
Dust jacket browsers might wonder whether this 'original', 'major new study' of Tolkien's
life, character and work, launched in the wake of Book of the Century controversies,
is a reconstruction of well-worn materials on the relatively safe territory of 'traditional
religious faith' to assure us that myth is 'real'.
For Pearce the ullulations of establishment literati and 'educational' axe-grinders
are more than an incentive: they make for a structural tactic to juxtapose assumptions
and prejudice with analysis, and to suggest that the modes and means of attack have
changed little since the first appearance of the Lord of the Rings, while positive
criticism has matured into the open-minded and scholarly standards he emulates. Qualities
evident where the biographical narrative or the discussion of intellectual influences
follows or admits Carpenter on the life and 'The Inklings', weighing this 'established'
authority against later, subtler interpretations from a surprising range of sources
and his own quietly interposed perceptions. Carpenter's gloss on the tenacity of
Tolkien's faith and allegiance to the Catholic Church in relation To Mable Tolkien's
death is incisively quelled, and Tolkien's approach to his own Mount Doom in the
1970s, in contrast to the 'official' biography, penetrates the joys, conflicts and
bereavements in terms of the writer's imaginative and spiritual aptitudes. The relationship
with Edith for example has been throughout a carefully considered thread and foil,
and citing a letter reflecting on her role and influence after her death, Pearce
comments illuminatingly that it is written 'in the way he had always expressed himself
when he had something to say beyond the power of mere facts. He reverted to the language
of myth and more specifically to the language of myth she had inspired...' Instances
among many where new perspectives, including a shrewd reappraisal of Tolkien-Lewis
relations, signal the need for a more comprehensive critical biography beyond the
purpose but on the lines of this book.
'If one is to understand the man behind the myth', it contends, challenging its own
process,' one must first avoid turning the man into myth.' No facile maxim but an
irony aimed at those who reject myth as unreal or escapist while inventing proofs
of what they have set out to discover. Eulogisers and debunkers alike should not
look for pseudo-psychological or ethical keys in the man, his formative influences,
and for good measure in the works. Typically in one of several balanced and contextually
appropriate surveys of Tolkien's marriage and family life there's well-documented
discussion of extremes like John Cary's schematic sexual decoding of the life and
work. Here again the eloquent but practical wisdom of the author's letters quiets
the storm. Pearce clearly appreciates how these articulate in response to queries
or anxieties nuances of feeling and belief subconsciously implied rather than imposed
in the fictional and even the academic writing, though these are scavenged 'for
tantalising titbits'. A rapacity demonstrated in a well-placed chapter about misconceptions
that stem from attitudes to myth, examining among other critical ingenuities Brenda
Partridge's Freudian fantasy over the hobbits' encounter with Shelob, from which
it is refreshing to return to Pearce's own cogent account of an episode whose controversial
aspects Tolkien took very seriously, the struggles of Frodo and Sam on Mount Doom
seen in terms of sublimated orthodox Christian preoccupations with sacrifice, free
will, the conflict of good and evil and what they signify in the light of eternity
or a greater reality beyond the hints and shadows of this perplexing world.
The central thesis of the book is that such moral and 'mystical' concerns are 'at
the core of all (Tolkien's) work'. Showing how and suggesting that these are integral
with the inspiration responsible for the quality and uniqueness of the work, evokes
an imaginative and far-reaching reappraisal of the creation myth in The Silmarillion
to demonstrate that Tolkien 'did not consider his sub-created myth as fiction, as
popularly understood, but as a figment of truth.' And to substantiate the argument
that 'if Tolkien was the man behind the myth, its sub-creator, The Silmarillion was
also the myth behind the man, moulding his creative vision', a letter recounting
a mystical experience of angelic orders is compellingly aligned with the principles
of world-fashioning in the legends. Pearce is adept at this kind of fusing and paralleling
of primary and secondary materials, and it adds conviction to an adjacent chapter
illustrating the paradox that while it is possible to enjoy the work without sharing
the beliefs, one cannot ignore the positive and aesthetic effects of Christian Orthodoxy
and the appropriateness of Tolkien's coherent myth for expressing these. Moreover,
the complex matter and significance of there being no ‘subcreated’ theology for the
creation and destinies of creatures other than humankind is deftly explored with
regard to how it both facilitates and debilitates the machinations of evil.
My enthusiasm for Pearce's lucid presentation was tempered by a chapter that sets
out to show the indispensable Englishness of the ‘hobbitical’ Tolkien behind the
myth, returns to materials in Tolkien's shorter experiments with Faërie vital to
an earlier chapter on The Truth behind the Myth, then expatiates on Chestertonian
analogues not all clearly related to the purpose of a chapter belatedly orientated
by reflections on English ale.
A more serious matter, though, for a book subtitled 'A Literary Life', is Pearce's
deference to the availability of specialised studies by Shippey and Flieger which
preclude direct examination of Tolkien's academic and philological career in an account
of his Christianity and its connection with the 'philosophy of myth that underpins
his sub-creation.' But since the formative linguistic and literary interests are
part of the equation, the general reader, at whom the book is aimed and whom I don't
want to deter, suffers a certain loss of perspective; and even if On Fairy Stories,
the minor fiction, and many enlightened commentators are correlated and examined
fruitfully to show the nature of Tolkien's myth-making, one cannot ignore Shippey's
concern that OFS is equivocal and 'circular', and how he attributes this to ' its
lack of a philological core or kernel' ( RTME, p.38), a reminder of Tolkien's recollection
that he 'began with language' and 'invented legends of the same taste.'( Letters,
p.231)
So it is worth noting by way of extension to the book's coverage of adverse responses
that Tolkien's professional immersion in pre-Reformation English and its cultural
and literary antecedents, as the lectures of the 1930s indicate, nurtured a penchant
for kinds of narrative and ambience (beyond the scope of Grimm, Andersen, Lang, or
even Macdonald) and predating the rationalist subdivision of 'real' and 'imaginary'
that gave rise to fiction where the journey of the soul becomes the struggle of the
psyche. Therefore much misapprehension and even conscientious criticism like Auden's
doubts over quest ( New York Times Book Review (2/1/56) derives not only from the
Christianised myth-making but from the way the familiar and perhaps delusive trappings
of the novel (dialogue, character conflict, careful chronology, geographical consistency)
are blended with a now unpalatable wholeness of vision to which the Ego is ultimately
subject, implying, as Pearce aptly says, that 'truth...is ultimately metaphysical
in nature; the physical universe...a reflection of some greater metaphysical purpose..'
*
References in order of appearance:
H. Carpenter : J.R.R.T.: A Biography & 'The Inklings' (Allen & Unwin, 1977 & 1978);
J.Cary: Review of Carpenter's Biog.in The Listener (12/5/77);
B. Partridge: No Sex, please-We're Hobbits. The construction of female sexuality
in The Lord of the Rings.(from 'J.R.R.T.:In This Far Land', Ed. R.Giddings: Vision,
Barnes & Noble, 1983);
V. Flieger: Splintered Light: Logic and Language in Tolkien's World( Eerdmans, 1983);
T.Shippey: The Road to Middle Earth (A.& U., 1981);
J.R.R.T.: On Fairy Stories (in The Monsters and the Critics ed C.Tolkien (A.& U.,
1983);
Letters of J.R.R.T., ed. Carpenter with C.Tolkien, (A.& U., 1981.)
