Sunday - More Like A Success Plus Tolkien and Marx Minus Fall of America

Headaches plagued me most of Sunday. They hit me in waves during the start of liturgy yesterday, I shucked the reading glasses for a while. Even the ibuprofen I took when I got back to Muncie had a hard time against these headaches. But there was one sign of success - no napping, no succumbing to that temptation. I had started the morning watching Argyle and finished that. I texted a few times with MW while going through more clips from the Sharpe series. Finally, I went off to the laundry. I had a long chat on the phone with KH to get me through that. Back here for dinner, and Mr. Moto, and then came the texting with my sister and with MW. Sister got the idea I meant to take the driving test next Tuesday when I am supposed to be in court. MW could not help. Back and forth I went with my sister. I think we got things fixed up for later in the week. My own fault - it took me over a year to get this far with the driver's license. Finished the night off with CC, who is in trouble again. 

I know I am not Chicken Little, there is too much reality in  Bezos, Trump, and the Failure of Democracy by Jonathan V. Last.

I was surprised by the racism shown Mr. Moto by white people. I feel sure more will be made about Peter Lorre doing yellowface, but Moto is always smarter than the racists. It is the racism that lets him succeed - racists being inherently stupid.

Time to learn a new language? Learn Scots: resources for adult learners

The plan for today: work, a trip to BMV, phone to sister, see CC, and restart a writing project with a deadline next week.

 Okay, this one is mostly a lark: Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited by Dennis Wilson Wise -

For myself, I wouldn’t want to hang a tenure case on that line of thinking. It reeks of big fish, small pond. Yet it raises a competing complaint, another frustration I’ve heard expressed by fantasy scholars outside of Tolkien circles. Although my subfield is large and welcoming, this grumble goes, we’re also quite insular. Our work remains crushingly author-centric. Too often, articles and books on Tolkien ignore the debates and methodologies embroiling the wider discipline. On one hand, this insularity does support some first-rank research in things like biography, source studies, textual editing, genetic criticism, Tolkienian linguistics, and direct historical influence—what some call the “old” historicism. But our insularity harms us in other ways. Let me use an analogy from another small, tight-knit academic cohort: James Joyce studies. Whenever a Joycean issues a new book, other scholars of modernism take note. The same, though, almost never happens with new work by Tolkienists. Because we too often bypass key debates within literary studies writ large, scholars in other fields, including science fiction and fantasy, see little reason to pay us much heed.

There are several reasons for this insularity, but our separateness highlights why two recent books on history and Tolkien should command our attention. The first is Nicholas Birns’s bluntly titled The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien  (Routledge, 2023), and the second is Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. (McFarland, 2023). Now, as James Gifford and others have shown, most scholars of fantasy in general have tended to borrow heavily from Marxist critical precepts inherited from science fiction studies, a field that arose slightly earlier in time. For these scholars, the concept of history (or History) obviously matters a great deal. So when two prominent Tolkienists take up history as a subject, there naturally appears a golden opportunity for some real cross-field dialogue, a rare chance to address the conversations on fantasy and Tolkien happening outside our own narrow sliver of academia.

***

Given the long-standing antagonism between the two, Representing Middle-earth thus bridges both fields in a way few other critics could manage. Tally’s argument is refreshingly simple: Tolkien helps us think historically. Marxist critics have long bewailed the seemingly ahistorical archetypes of genre fantasy, but as Tally points out, The Lord of the Rings is literally inundated with historical depth. A key moment occurs on the stairs of Cirith Ungol when Sam Gamgee reflects that the “great tales never end.” When Sam suddenly recognizes himself as participating in one such great tale, Tolkien manages to render history both visible and knowable to its participants. The Lord of the Rings thus fulfills what Lyotard once called the “desire called Marx”: our collective wish to make sense of the world in terms of a narrative. Enhanced by such techniques as Tolkien’s deployment of multiple generic forms (myth, realism, fairy tale, and more), this narrativity enables readers to form “cognitive maps” that encompass a larger global system. Far from living for ourselves alone, Tally claims, Tolkien lets us see ourselves as historical beings.

***

 I doubt many non-Marxists would take this dismissal so easily for granted, yet Tally pulls the same side step with medievalists. He suggests, rightly, that Tolkien renders the medieval and the archaic “real” to contemporary audiences, but by this he means that The Lord of the Rings enables readers to envision preindustrial social formations in a dialectical and materialist fashion—not quite what Tolkien himself, a medievalist with little sympathy for Marxism, had in mind. For Tally, though, while divine providence and Chaucer might be nice, Jamesonian Marxism is the One Hermeneutic to Rule Them All.

The Gifts of Fredric Jameson (1934–2024 might make put some of the foregoing in perspective.

How to start any day:

Must get ready for work now.

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