The Riddles of The Hobbit (25 page)

Now,
the standard defence of escapism goes something like this: ‘what’s
wrong
with escapism? Who is it that opposes escape? Jailers!’ It’s an incomplete logic, although there is a grit of truth in it. If you are a parent, and your teenage child spends eight hours a day upon their bed in heroin-induced lassitude as a strategy of escaping the anomie of modern teenagerdom, you do not need the soul of a jailer to want him, her, to stop. Art is about modes of engagement with the world, not modes of avoiding it.

Escapism is not a very good word, actually, for the positive psychological qualities its defenders want to defend; it is less a question of breaking one’s bars and running away (running wither, we might ask?); and more of keeping alive the facility for imaginative
play
, which only a fool would deny is core to any healthy psychological makeup. Kids are good at play, and have an unexamined wisdom about it; adults, sometimes, forget how vital it is. What is wrong with Art that insists too severely on pressing people’s faces too insistently against the miseries of actual existence is not that we should not have to confront Darfur or Iraq, poverty or oppression; it is that such art rarely gives us the imaginative wriggle room to think of how things might be improved, or challenged, or even accepted. Imaginative wiggle room, on the other hand, is something SF-Fantasy is very good at.

An art that simply depresses is liable to be an ineffective art because it will tend to disable rather than enable imaginative engagement. Fantasy carries us away. We want it to: that is why we go to it in the first place. As to why we get such pleasure in being carried away (get such pleasure, not to put a finer point on it, by focusing on what the world is missing, on its lack) … this is a large question and one with which this study must be largely concerned. But to begin with it is worth dwelling momentarily on this trope of ‘carrying away’.

The difference between a metaphor and a simile is a matter of semantic nicety that some people find hard to articulate. This is perhaps because there is not really a difference; the two words are used more or less interchangeably in many contexts. But I like to insist upon a difference for all that: simile, as the word suggests, is a way of talking about something by comparing it to something that is similar: ‘Achilles is courageous, like a lion’ focuses our attention on the point of likeness. The word
metaphor
, as rhetoricians remind us, means a carrying over, a passage of meaning from one thing to another thing.
This might sound like hairsplitting, but there is a difference here, and it seems to me one that opens a chasm of signification that speaks directly to the desire at the heart of SFF. ‘Achilles is a lion’ metaphorically carries across from one thing to a completely different thing. Because, crucially, Achilles is
not
a lion—there are a wealth of ways in which Achilles and a lion are different. To say ‘Achilles is metaphorically a lion’ is in one part to bring out a point of simile (in this one respect—his courage—Achilles is a lion) but it is always, inevitably, to do much more: it is to generate (in Samuel Delany’s words) an imaginative surplus, a spectral hybrid of beast–human. This imaginative surplus is what carries us away, and metaphor is its vehicle. That is partly what I mean when I talk about SFF as being in crucial ways a metaphorical literature: one that seeks to represent the world without reproducing it.

‘Desire’ then is, I am suggesting, at the heart of SFF’s appeal; and I am saying something else—I am saying that, whilst desire is also at the heart of the structuralist, systematizing urge, it is a desire radically opposed to the desire we call Fantasy. Fantasy, in a healthful, ludic, rejuvenating way, is precisely about escaping the grid. It is about the imaginative and affective surplus, the overspill. Indeed, I am tempted to say, because this is the case, the desire of Fantasy (let us qualify it a little: of the
best
Fantasy—and without wanting to sound circular, I would suggest that this is in fact by way of identifying what it is about those texts that makes them the best) comprehends the excessive nature of desire itself.

It tells us nothing about the reason so many people fall in love with (the phrase is not hyperbolic)
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
, to say that it is ‘a portal-quest fantasy’. That is indeed a feature of the text, and one it shares with many other texts; but most of these others texts are not enchanting—we do not fall in love with them) in the way we do with Tolkien. Actually
The Lord of the Rings
is a book precisely about desire, and what is so canny in its delineation of the operation of that desire is the way it dramatises it as simultaneously transporting and isolating; it excavates, we might say, our instinctive understanding that desire is captivating in a wonderful
as well as an enslaving sense
. It is a striking thing, in this respect, that nobody doubts the intense desirability of the ring at the heart of the narrative, even though, in Tolkien’s rendering, it is never made explicit what it is the ring actually
does
. It has something to do with
power, we are told; and the person who has the ring will be able to wield power—tyrannically—although at the same time the various people who have the ring in the book (Gollum, Frodo, Sam) seem to derive no social or practical empowerment. Indeed, on the contrary: the efficacy of the artefact seems pointedly antisocial: it can make them disappear, it can remove them completely from the social body.

There is a moment early in the first film of Jackson’s trilogy where Sauron is shown wielding the ring. He sweeps his arm on the battlefield, and sending scores of warriors flying into the air is a rare lapse of representational sophistication in a film-trilogy otherwise, I would say, sensitive to the point of the text. Certainly, subsequently Jackson abandons such literal-mindedness, and is much better about finding visual analogues for the ring’s appeal. Because this is the whole point. The ring does not work in this text as some kind active mcguffin. It is not a
gadget
. Rather the ring
construes desire itself
, and in doing so makes manifests its intense, destructive desirability, precisely
as absence
. It is something not there, a little hollow, a badge of literal invisibility, something associated with the dark in subterranean caverns or the inaccessibility of riverbeds. The ring is lack, and it is part of Tolkien’s brilliance to understand so thoroughly that lack is the currency of desire.

Actually, and to digress momentarily, I am not sure this is what Tolkien thought he was doing; I think he
thought
of his ring in terms of lack because he meant the ring to symbolise evil, and for his Boethian/Acquinian theological perspective on the world evil is absence: the world itself, as God, is necessarily good except insofar as it has been eroded or perverted by evil. But that does not alter what I am saying, I think. There are reasons why
The Lord of the Rings
has had the global impact it has, that its myriad imitators have not. Tolkien’s novel construes desire (readerly desire) because it understands desire.

Adam Phillips has some interesting things to say about masturbation which, strange as it might seem, are relevant here. Philips starts by quoting Leo Bersani:

Bersani once said in an interview that the reason most people feel guilty about masturbation is because they fear that masturbation is the truth about sex; that the truth about sex is that we would rather do it on out own, or that, indeed, we are doing it on our
own even when we seem to all intents and purposes to be doing it with other people. The desire that apparently leads us towards other people can lead us away from them. Or we might feel that what we call desire is evoked by details, by signs, by gestures; that we fall for a smile or a tone of voice or a way of walking or a lifestyle, and not exactly for what we have learned to call a whole person; and that this evocation, this stirring of desire, releases us rather more into our own deliriums of fear and longing than into realistic apprehension of the supposed object of desire. There is nothing at once more isolating and oceanic than falling for someone. Lacan formulated the ‘objet petit a’ to show us that the promise of satisfaction always reminds us of a lack … and that this lack, disclosed by our longings, sends a depth charge into our histories.
1

It would be almost fatuous to note that the ring, in
Lord of the Rings
, is an
objet petit a
; fatuous, really only because it is so extraordinarily obvious that this is what the ring is. But it is another phrase from that little passage that leaps out at me in the context of understanding the desire behind SF and Fantasy: ‘there is nothing at once more isolating and oceanic than falling for someone’. That is right, I think, as an account of what it is like to fall in love with someone. More than that, though, those two words, ‘isolating and oceanic’, seem to me wonderfully apt as a way of approaching how the best fantasy wins us.

The core of Tolkien’s book, then, is its apprehension, through its concrete realisation, its worldbuilding and backhistory and characterisation and so on, of the radical undesirability of desire; or the desirability of the undesirable. The point is that the phrasal superposition of desire and undesired only looks like a paradox. Actually it is an articulation of something much more significant. Philips again:

Anna Freud once said that in your dreams you can have your eggs cooked any way you want them, but you can’t eat them. The implication is clear: magic is satisfying but reality is nourishing … Indeed, we could reverse Anna Freud’s formulation and say that when it comes to sexuality it is the fact that you can’t eat the eggs that makes them so satisfying. The fact that, as Freud remarked, desire is always in excess of the object’s capacity to satisfy it is the
point not the problem; it is the tribute the solitary desiring individual pays to reality. This is a problem only if you are a literalist rather than the ironist of your own desire. It’s not that reality is disappointing, it’s that desire is excessive. It’s not that we lack things, it’s just that there are things we want.

In this passage I am tempted to replace ‘dreams’ with ‘Fantasies’, and to extend the observation to those novelistic excrescences of fantasy life booksellers label under that term. And I am tempted to suggest that ‘sex’, here, connects with the fundamentally libidinous energies that flow through our love for these narratives.

There is one further point I want to make, to do with ‘escape’. A reason why people look down upon Fantasy is that they see it as evading moral and social responsibilities more realist modes of art press upon their readers. If a contemporary of Dickens read about the extreme poverty of Jo the Crossing Sweeper, he or she was being confronted with an emotionally engaging example of a real social phenomenon. Dickens’ humour and sentimentality were both designed to engage his readers in the problems of the world. We do not read about the (it seems weird even putting it in these terms, but you see what I mean)
extreme poverty
of Gollum in the same way. Gollum is extremely poor, in a material sense; I could believe that Smaug is a victim of Dragonism, his evident intelligence and many talents overlooked by those who are too prejudiced to see beyond the scales; I daresay many of the rank and file soldiers in the orc army come from broken homes, and had little opportunity for advancement except joining the military. But it would be ludicrous to read the books this way, because they frame their ideological concerns not linearly but metaphorically.

This, however, is, in the popular idiom, a feature, not a bug. One reason Tolkien’s imaginary realm has proved so successful is precisely its structural non-specificity. What I mean is: Tolkien treats material that has deep roots in, and deep appeal to, various cultural traditions; but he does so in a way—as fictionalised worldbuilding rather than denominated myth—that drains away much of the poisonous nationalist, racist and belligerent associations those traditions have accumulated over the centuries. A thumbnail history would go like this: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wagner’s
Ring
melodramas spoke to a great many people about a particular
northern-European cultural identity; about a group of linked, potent emotional attachments to history, landscape, to the numinous and the divine, to matters of heroism and everyday life. I am trying not to sound sneery as I say this (I mean melodrama in the strict sense of the word), because these things did, and do, matter intensely and genuinely to many people. But there is a reason, a room-filling elephant of a reason, why
Der Ring des Nibelungen
no longer has this general resonance. It is because the cultural reservoir from which it draws much of its power also supplied cultural capital to the worst regime ever to take charge in Germany, and therefore lubricated the most catastrophically destructive war ever to be waged in the world. In saying this I am not, of course, blaming Wagner for the Nazis. Indeed, the endless debates about Wagner’s own ideological ‘purity’ (‘was Wagner an anti-semite?’ Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes,
like just about every other gentile in nineteenth century Europe
) seem to me to miss the point. The restless churning through this question happens because we are desperate to acquit Wagner so that we can enjoy his music with a clean conscience. We ask the question, get the uncomfortable answer, and ask it again. In our guts resides the queasy comprehension that Wagner
can not
be acquitted. Politics can not be neatly separated out from the
Ring
cycle, leaving only a washed-and-scrubbed sequence of pretty orchestral tone poems behind. I love the
Ring
cycle, and listen to it regularly; but I would never try to deny that it is political all the way through, down to its very marrow. It is, to be precise, about the notion that history and myth are in some sense the same thing—a very dangerous notion indeed.

Tolkien’s story is not the same as the
Ring
cycle; his ‘ring’ (as he crossly reminded correspondents) not the same as Alberich’s ring. But a considerable amount of the heft and force of
Lord of the Rings
derives from the way Tolkien draws on the same broader cultural, mythic, northern-European heritage. What saves
Lord of the Rings
is that it is not about Germany, or about England; or to be more precise, that it is about England and Germany only secondarily, in an eloquently oblique (a cynic might say: in a
plausibly deniable
) manner. Tolkien found a way of articulating the same deep-rooted cultural concerns in a way that avoids being poisoned by the cultural specificity of European Fascism. I offer these thoughts not as a value judgement of his fiction, so much as an explanation for why
Lord of the Rings
has done so extraordinarily well—resonated so powerfully
with so many people—in the postwar period. It rushed in to fill the gap that more culturally specific art had supplied before that kind of art was discredited by the 1940s.