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The petty bourgeoisie is/was a backward-looking class, and feudalism is often the thing they look backward to.
I think it's pretty obvious. It's permeated with rage against the breakdown of the idealized feudal order. I would argue that his villains can be seen pretty easily as a representation of his horror at modern industry, which is anathema, or should be, to any genuine revolutionary.
Plus the screamingly obvious racism of pasty-as-hell elves, white men, Scottish hobbits, Nordic dwarves = good, brown/black/"Eastern" men, black orcs etc. = bad.
I think it's true in most places that fiction novels have petty-bourgeois outlooks, since that's the class position most authors find themselves in due to the nature of their profession.
People had a go at me in my English paper last semester for not liking "Pride and Prejudice" because it was "girly". No, I hate it because it's about a bunch of 18th century boring rich people doing their pointless little bourgeois marriage rituals. Zzzzzzz. There's plenty of shit I like that is "girly". I just hate books that place meaningless twaddle to be of the utmost importance.
Does supporting the Spanish Nationalists in the civil war make him a "product of his time"? I never got the "product of their times" argument to explain reaction, there were plenty of progressives back in those times, it's just bourgeois history likes to gloss over them.
Oh yeah speaking of impenetrable prose, I tried reading "For Whom The Bell Tolls" for a high school English research assignment on fascism. I got a 3rd of the way through it before I was like nah fuck this
And when Marx says, 'Hitherto the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways', what that 'hitherto' means is not a renunciation of theory and that all we need to do is wade in with our fists and there will be no more need for thought. This idea is in fact fascist, and it would be grossly unjust to Marx to impute such views on him.
--Theodor Adorno, 'On Theory and Practice'
What about "War and Peace"?
Is that any good?
Wikipedia says:
War and Peace is fantastic, as is everything else by Tolstoy.
it isn't placing it as of the utmost importance though. jane austen is satirizing the entire process.
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
Ah yes, I forgot about Naked Lunch. I ''read'' it when I was twelve and it's probably caused me permanent damage. But I do use the term read quite loosely.
I'm adding to my list White Noise by Don DeLillo - it goes under the pretentious book heading along with Ian McEwan's stuff. Anything by Paulo Coehlo because it's supposed to be inspiring but makes me think of New Age healers trying to write a story. I still haven't made my mind up about Ulysses because I only read about 60 pages before deciding that I needed to lie down in a dark room.
Economic Left/Right: - 9.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: - 7.85
Why would they look back towards feudalism? Their class interests are rooted in small business and mercantilism, not in land-ownership and traditionalist hierarchy. The petit-bourgoise tends to be reactionary and aim for an idealized romantic past that never existed yes, but feudalism is completely opposed to their class interests.
You are partly correct on this one.
It's a highly traditionalist 'revolt against the modern world' piece of work yes and in that sense it's reactionary, I never said it wasn't, I just said it wasn't petit-bourgois.
The main forces of evil embody various things.
First of all there's Sauron who embodies supposed eastern barbaric hordes with pagan roots. They're seen as morally uneducated illeterate scavengers.
To a Catholic conservative with a Europe-focus like Tolkien, the image of 'barbaric' pagan plundering hordes embodies the traditional image of the periphery as an unexplored, wild, uncivilized area. This stands in sharp contrast with the traditionalist romantization of feudalist Europe which finds it's mirror image in Gondor and Rohan or the iddylic pastoral that is the Shire.
Then there's Saruman who seems to embody industrialism, moral decadence and general faustian modernism. Saruman embodies industrialisation, modernism,corruption and alienation.
This idea of the 'creeping corruption of modernism' was (and is) rather prevalent amongst conservatives and traditionalists.
To the conservative Tolkien, this was obviously anathema as well.
So in short, yes, his work WAS reactionary, just not petit-bourgoise. If anything, it's radically traditionalist. This isn't much better (quite the contrary actually) but it doesn't prevent me from enjoying the prose,plot and setting on a purely literary basis. I don't have to agree with the man's worldview.
Far from it, it's disgusting but as I said, what else would you expect from a conservative Catholic in the early 20th century? That doesn't make it good, it only makes it logical. I'm not defending Tolkien's politics, obviously
I'm merly saying I enjoy his works, although certainly reactionary, for their fictive content. It doesn't mean I agree with the message implicitly contained within his work. Far from it.
"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree..."
- John Milton -
"The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh"
- Amadeo Bordiga
You have a very different idea of what the 'classics' are than I do. The term makes me think of Dostoyevsky or Zola.
The impression that I got was that it was the thought of his life back in Europe which horrified Kurtz. I enjoyed the book. I think the ending of Apocolypse now was very different though it used the same words.
Me neither, I had to read 'Mansfield Park' at school. I didn't get past the first page.
And not only that, but the fact that she manages to write about a period of massive social unrest in England and Europe without managing to mention it at all.
Devrim
Not quite. The petty bourgeoisie is all about the idealized artisan and peasant in a feudal society when "things were better"...
Plus doesn't exactly work mechanically. As I said they are a backward-looking class by nature, it doesn't matter overly much whether the thing they look back to wouldn't have been friendly to them, or even if it never actually existed in the first place. Tolkien is a case in point. Plus the whole attitude of his books is resolutely middle-class, Michael Moorcock puts it pretty well:
"The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire [where the protagonist 'hobbits' live], are 'safe' but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are 'dangerous'. Experience of life itself is dangerous. Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron [the 'evil' dark lord] and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the mob--mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence--the worst aspect of modern urban society represented as the whole by the a fearful, backward-yearning class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable subsitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference.
The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob - mindless football supporters throwing their beer-bottles over the fence the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom "good taste" is synonymous with "restraint" (pastel colours, murmured protest) and "civilized" behaviour means "conventional behaviour in all circumstances". This is not to deny that courageous characters are found in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil (never really defined), but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure - because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders - if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we're told. After all, anyone who hates hobbits can't be all bad."
Michael Moorcock, "Epic Pooh": http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953
Which of course brings us back to the vicious racism. For that alone I fail to understand why a revolutionary could get anything out of his books. Sure there are white people like Grima, Saruman, Denethor etc who do bad things but they are the exception and are all seen as "traitors" to the order. In contrast there are no good orcs, no good Easterners, no good Southrons, etc. That only one color is seen as important and having the will to choose to be good or bad is racism at its height.
Eh to each his own I guess. Personally I'm not interested in appreciating a thoroughly reactionary, virulently racist set of books that in addition are harder to read than Joseph fucking Conrad, regardless of the high level of drama or that the author created languages just to make it more real.
Last edited by Random Precision; 16th December 2009 at 16:53.
Well the books I listed are thought of as "classics" in America and American education. I wouldn't be surprised if the term means something more than "a really influential book that you're forced to read in school" elsewhere in the world though.Originally Posted by Devrim
Well, I am not sure, I think American literature contributed very much on international classics which is more of an international term, at least for the Western world. Devrim is correct, when one says the classics I too think of Zola, Dostoevsky but also of Twain, London, Hemingway. I am not sure how much of a classic The Catcher in the Rye is, or whether Salinger is a world famous author such as Twain, London or Hemingway.
"Communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution." - Karl Marx
Pale Blue Jadal
^^^
Sorry but fiction or any literature for that matter does not have an existence independent of the context it was written in. The text doesn't exist separately from its author. Thats dialectics 101.
Excuse me, but what is that kind of fiction called other than... erm... allegorical?
Tolkien may "not have intended his works to be allegorical" but he mixed in all his reactionary views, yearning for an imaginary feudal utopia and anti-industrialism is in there right along with Christian propaganda. As well as a hefty dose of racism. It's so bleedingly obvious. Not that ignoring their reactionary character is exactly a feat of strength for people like you.
Ah. So his views were not incorporated into the text?
Allegory, noun. 1 : the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence; also : an instance (as in a story or painting) of such expression 2 : a symbolic representation
No. If he presents the Hitler as a noble hero trying to save a world in thrall to the Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy, then he is reactionary.
Although that view is disputed by even Marxist critics, when applied to Tolkien it should be born in mind that The Lord of the Rings was written in the 1930s and 1940s, and in fact does have an anti-fascist sub-text however regressive its idea of the good society may be.
That said, I can't get past Tolkien's prose style, though I wouldn't say that I can't stand the books themselves.
As to the classics of world literature in general, for those for whom English is our native tongue,and lacking fluency in another language, we must rely on translations, and any translation is bound to strip some nuances from the original work and may vulgarize the author's style in the bargain. If one wants to seriously engage with the classics written in a language not one's own, then we'll have to read multiple translations of any given work to arrive at a fair evaluation.
The racism in LOTR may be unintended. It is a reflection though, of racist attitudes prevalent in Tolkien's time and it is reasonable to assume that he held some of them himself. Unintentional does not make it less reactionary.
Tolkien was a smart guy. He knew what kind of book he was writing. I find it very hard to believe that he did not know what he was doing, for instance, when he gives the third part of his trilogy a title "the Return of the King" and be unaware what kind of image that summons to mind in a Christian culture. Similarly when Galadriel gives the fellowship "seven gifts" that are seen as "magical" by the "enemy". His whole mythology system is also deeply Christian.
I'm sure this is true of the modernization that Saruman carries out as well. Tolkien knew what his views were, he knew what he was against and this appeared in his book.
Or they can look at Lord of the Rings, see how reactionary his vision was, and decide not to.
Yeah, Tolkien was a genius at languages at least. And he was very persistent. There is no denying that. At prose, as anyone who reads his books finds out, he had somewhat less of a talent.
Well that is of course your prerogative. As for myself I find it hard to enjoy any book that is so rife with reactionary politics and racism, let alone written in such a poorly affected style.
Oh come off it. Tolkien made it abundantly clear that the Orcs were slanty eyed chinks.
From the Two Towers:
From his letters regarding a movie treatment of his work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc_%28Middle-earth%29
I've read some of those articles. It's crap from white fanboys who want to justify their literary fetish. There is no doubt about the racism inherent in this, just as there is no doubt of the racism in Sinclair Lewis's descriptions of African orgies in the Jungle.
The entire article is put together by white Tolkien fans, with nothing of a critical opinion presented. Thus, I wouldn't believe a damn word those fucking shits say. The fascists, however, know what's what.
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Racism
As for the topic of the thread. Lord of the Rings is not a classic. It's high functioning genre fiction. I'm sure that there are people here who could write work that is more riveting than that turgid tripe.
I suppose that the rest of us do not have the luxury of using our "free will" to interpret works of literature however we please, because we're just "leading ourselves into a hole" when we do.^^^
I'd rather see Orcs, Sauron and Saruman as representing capitalists/fascists and the Hobbits as representing the proletariat, with Men representing the vanguard of the proletariat and Gandalf as Marx. If you ask me why, I'd say its just my choice made out of my free will. My interpretation would be equally valid as the other interpretations of people like RP. After all, as revolutionaries, we seek to destroy and dismantle the existing order to bring about justice and one can interpret the War of the Ring in a similar fashion , but that's just me.You can have the last word in this though, RP.
Hypocrisy is astoundingly easy when one doesn't take one's own opinions into account when their deriding and criticizing those of others, that's for sure.
What is to be gained from eulogizing a bourgeois writer who treated the proletariat with suspicion and pined for the green merrie England of olde?
I'll answer it for you: Nothing.
Of course it has everything to do with it. The shire, the elves in the forests--this has a certain mythic resonance within British culture that evokes a sense of loss for the small producerist pastoral past. Americans have their frontier cowboys, and the Brits have their Shire. It's one of the most basic modes of populism in British political thought.
And of course Sauron and his armies are associated with fire and with industry--even to the point of vat-growing their supersoldiers.
