Every writer who attempts a work of fiction works in two directions. They work to set down a record of the world as they see it or as they think it really is. But they also work, whether they know it or not, to record their visions, a world that exists only inside their heads. So however much they might strive to be "objective" and be nothing more than a pair of eyes, sacrificing their egos to the objects of their love, every word they write is a personal choice that inevitably reveals their presence in the created work.
For the past few decades, a seismic shift has occurred in American popular culture. Its first manifestations occurred in the mid-1970s, when two filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, rose to such unprecedented prominence that they eventually established their own production companies, enjoying artistic freedom that rarely existed before. And they made a number of films that set box office records. The films they produced are examples of what I would call belated juvenilia - films that abide by an implied pact between the filmmaker and the viewer that adulthood is regrettable and that the point of their lives sometime prior to adulthood is not just preferable but endlessly renewable.
Go back still further in American pop culture to the 1950s, when the dictatorship of youth transformed popular music. A generation of Baby Boomer teens, with disposable incomes of their own, took music away from their parents' generation and haven't relinquished it since. So instead of songs written by and for adults, speaking from an experience of life and of love, exploring and satisfying that experience in creative ways, songs were passed into the hands of children who needed nothing but lyrics that strung together comforting platitudes through endless variations of cliché. A generation of singers, whose oldest survivor today is Tony Bennett, that responded to the challenge of singing and creating standards in ways distinctive enough to make the standards their own, were replaced by singers whose talents were drowned out by the screams of teen-aged girls, singing songs that addressed the problems of teenagers.
And if you look back still further to 1937, to popular fiction, an otherwise insignificant book called The Hobbit was published in England, quickly followed by an edition in America. It was an elaborate fantasy story marketed to children, replete with maps and illustrations of hobbit characters, as well as various elves and dwarves that inhabit an alternate world that existed long before industry and technology, where magic antedates religions, reminiscent of Europe's oldest fairy tales that emerged from extinct mythologies. The author of The Hobbit was J. R. R. Tolkien, a most unlikely teller of fairy tales: an Oxford scholar of philology, of ancient dead languages and the epics and sagas written in them. Spending most of his creative life with these languages and their obscure significance and meanings known only to him and his colleagues, Tolkien tried, evidently, to expand and improve on them, without having to appeal to any scholarly authority, but deriving from scholarship of the highest authority. But it was marketed as a children's book.
So serious was Tolkien, however, that his fairy tales should be taken seriously, when he learned of an American publisher's interest in The Hobbit that expressed their intention to publish color illustrations to supplement Tolkien's own drawings, Tolkien wrote to his British publisher, Allen & Unwin, “It might be advisable, rather than lose the American interest, to let the Americans do what seems good to them - as long as it was possible (I should like to add) to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).”
According to his biographers, Tolkien had gone to see Disney's first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, accompanied by fellow Oxford don C. S. Lewis, and took umbrage at the depiction of the dwarfs. Who else but the creator of a (literary) world filled with elves and dwarves [to use Tolkien's spelling] should sit in judgement of Disney's silly misrepresentation of a classic fairy tale? What probably bothered Tolkien the most was that audiences took to Disney's film precisely because it is unlearned. Otis Ferguson, who called Snow White the best film of 1938, said that he found "something beautiful about all of it, I think, because it does not try to be wise about fairy tales, or fairy talish about its birds, rabbits, people." (1)
In 2009, I wrote in a post called "The Fairest of Them All" the following: "It was perhaps inevitable that folk tales should have been exiled to the nursery. before we renamed them fairy tales and heavily censored them, they were a kind of cultural subconscious. The original tales, like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, are filled with strange imagery and associations that only an ethnographer would understand." Or, indeed, a philoligist. But Tolkien rejected my hypothesis: "Folk-lore origins (or guesses about them) are here quite beside the point. It is of little avail to consider totemism." This line is from Tolkien's essay, "On Fairy Stories" in which he addressed the subject with much feeling and authority. What is most clear from my reading of the essay is that Tolkien wanted to rescue fairy tales from the nursery and convince people that they were worthy of being taken seriously. "Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags."
Tolkien described how he himself came upon fairy stories:
"I was keenly alive to the beauty of 'Real things,' but it seemed to me quibbling to confuse this with the wonder of 'Other things.' I was eager to study Nature, actually more eager than I was to read most fairystories; but I did not want to be quibbled into Science and cheated out of Faerie by people who seemed to assume that by some kind of original sin I should prefer fairy-tales, but according to some kind of new religion I ought to be induced to like science. Nature is no doubt a life-study, or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not 'Nature,' and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it."
But one important aspect of Tolkien's "escape" into fairy stories was his first-hand experience of war. He served in the British Army in World War I and his experience created in him a profound hatred for the modern world. "A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war." In other words, his discovery of ancient languages at university, followed by the traumatic experience of war, gave him a place of refuge from the modern world that could create such things as the maxim gun and mustard gas, whose effects on human beings he witnessed in the trenches.
But the subject of writing stories exclusively for children became an issue for Tolkien when his Lord Of the Rings trilogy was published, books that he insisted were written for an adult audience rather than for children. Literary critics (some of them anyway) took exception with Tolkien's claim. One review of The Rings that has had its own kind of immortality was written by Edmund Wilson. "Oo, Those Awful Orcs" is available for perusal in Wilson's collection, The Bit Between My Teeth, but, curiously, it is available online, quoted in its entirety, on some Tolkien fanzine sites, where Wilson's essay is used as an illustration of the lengths to which a literary critic will go to express his skepticism of their religion.
"Dr. Tolkien has announced that this series – the hypertrophic sequel to The Hobbit – is intended for adults rather than children, and it has had a resounding reception at the hands of a number of critics who are certainly grown-up in years." But Wilson, who had previously expressed his distaste of detective and horror fiction, refused to taken in by Tolkien's fairy stories. "One is puzzled to know why the author should have supposed he was writing for adults. There are, to be sure, some details that are a little unpleasant for a children’s book, but except when he is being pedantic and also boring the adult reader, there is little in The Lord of the Rings over the head of a seven-year-old child. It is essentially a children’s book – a children’s book which has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the “juvenile” market, the author has indulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake ... An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly."
Instead of simply dismissing Wilson's review as the expression of opinion that it is, and agreeing to disagree, some of these online Tolkien sites interrogate - feebly - Wilson's own motives for not falling in line with their orthodoxy. Especially since Wilson briefly examines the psychology of Tolkien's fiercest supporters - their insatiable taste for what I identified above as Belated Juvenilia:
"Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser – both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched."
Perhaps in anticipation of Wilson's incredulity, Tolkien, in his "On Fairy Stories" essay, attacks the criticism directly:
"I do not deny that there is a truth in Andrew Lang's words (sentimental though they may sound): 'He who would enter into the Kingdom of Faerie should have the heart of a little child.' For that possession is necessary to all high adventure, into kingdoms both less and far greater than Faerie. But humility and innocence - these things 'the heart of a child' must mean in such a context - do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness. Chesterton once remarked that the children in whose company he saw Maeterlinck's Blue Bird were dissatisfied 'because it did not end with a Day of Judgement, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless.' 'For children,' he says, 'are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.'”
The issue arises again whenever J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are examined by anyone other than fans of the books. They wonder that such "young adult" fiction [a stupid term, equal to "old child" perhaps?] that centers on the fantastic adventures of adolescents in an imaginary world should attract adult readers. I won't go there, since I have never read any of Rowling's books, and the films did nothing to change my mind. (I loved, however, all of the great old actors in the films, some of whom we have since lost to various ailments of extreme old age.) I could, but I have not, expressed the wish that Harry Potter had come along in 1970, when I might have been (but wasn't) more amenable to its attractions.
Tolkien wrote about one of the requirements of reading fairy stories, the "suspension of disbelief."
"Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."
But this is precisely where I find myself when I read Tolkien, or listen to popular music (which includes several genres, like rock, pop, rap/hip hop, country, et al), or watch the Indiana Jones or Star Wars movies - on the sidewalk outside, in the Primary World, my credulity reawakened, my disbelief functioning fully.
All of which reminds me of a remark made by G. B. Shaw in reference to the faith we have developed (even while some of us - including the current American president - seem to have abandoned) in Science:
"I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe."
Look out. The Flat-Earthers are back.
(1) Otis Ferguson, "Walt Disney's Grimm Reality," The New Republic, January 26, 1938.
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