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Comment
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(6/25/05 10:09 am)
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Question number 2: Tolkein and Jung?
Ambivalent about Tolkein. Just wondered if anyone knew to what extent he was consciously influenced by Jung. (Thinking of the ring, names like Shadowfax, eagles, nature vs industrialisation as maybe unconscious vs superego.)
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midori
snyder
Registered User
(6/27/05 5:12 am)
ezSupporter
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Re: Question number 2: Tolkein and Jung?
Not so sure about Jung, but certainly he was consciously influenced by his Catholic faith.
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AlisonPegg
Registered User
(6/27/05 6:19 am)
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Re: Question number 2: Tolkein and Jung?
Interesting question.... I wouldn't have seen a connection myself, but I'd be interested to know why you thought there was....
Alison
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(6/27/05 9:02 am)
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Re: Question number 2: Tolkein and Jung?
Alison - Just because they were contemporary, and both interested in myth and fairy tale. Both believed that people NEED myth. Also Tolkien's explicit themes were about nature vs industrialisation - yet his stories abound with classic symbols of the self, the unconscious and the superego, not to mention animi, shadows, and (far too many) wise old men. I'm assuming Jung might have taken nature vs industry theme to be symbols of the exploitation of the unconscious by the superego. (Which also resonates with the rise of Communism and Fascism.) So the story of the battles for middle earth mirrors the story of the ring, which can also be seen as a battle against the misuse of the unconscious. Anyway... Tolkien has too many negative associations for me to discuss this too long...
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AlisonPegg
Registered User
(6/27/05 11:26 am)
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Re: Question number 2: Tolkein and Jung?
As you say, the explicit themes are nature vs industrialisation, but it seemed that the hidden theme was really, where do men figure in the pecking order of men? I think that's why all men seem to be fascinated by it, and far less women are. Are you a hero or a hobbit? And can you be both? That would sum it up for me. The women are no more than icons.
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midori
snyder
Registered User
(6/27/05 11:48 am)
ezSupporter
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Re: Question number 2: Tolkein and Jung?
There are certainly a fair number of essays and articles that have already addressed this connection:
Patrick Grant's Tolkein:
Archtype and Word
The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes
of Middle-earth. Timothy R. O'Neill. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1979;
Thames and Hudson, London, 1979.
Secret
Fire: Spiritual Vision of J.R. Tolkien by Stratford Caldecott.
The appendices includes an essay "An Archetypal Journey: Tolkien
and Jung"
From some of the Tolkien quotes in these essays it would suggest he was very aware of the implication of Jung's ideas about the use of archtypes.
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(6/27/05 12:12 pm)
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Re: Question number 2: Tolkein and Jung?
Alison - Uncomfortable though with gender divisions in this matter (and most others)... Men can be just as bored with middle earth as women.
The beginning and end of Tolkien's interest for me lies in his obsessive completeness in the minutiae. Interesting as much for negative reasons though.
However, I don't think his popularity should be ignored. Those stories clearly supply something that a lot of people were/are looking for.
Midori - That's good to know, thanks... It was an idle question really, I know...
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AlisonPegg
Registered User
(6/28/05 11:20 am)
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Completeness, minutiae, and fantasy
I suppose that the more completely realised the world of fantasy
or Faery, the more you can lose yourself in it. This is probably
why I prefer myth, as it encapsulates the wisdom needed to deal
with this world, whereas in fantasy the real purpose is
to escape from this world.
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(6/28/05 12:57 pm)
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Re: Completeness, minutiae, and fantasy
Alison - Interesting - I don't know... I always thought of fantasy simply as half-baked myth... And doesn't everyone read stories firstly as an escape?
My ambivalence about Tolkien is this... I admire his passionate dedication to and belief in the power of myth and symbolic imagery. The reason why he's ultimately empty - and I mean on his own mythical terms - is that many of his most dominant ideas are divorced from the historical contexts he's got them from. The more brilliantly realised his elves, dwarves etc. the more divorced they become from real life. In other words, his elves are boring because they have nothing to do with real people.
Aside from his windbaggery, his stories do appeal on an allegorical level to the kind of personality that *does* seek to escape real life. A double affirmation for geeks. That's the root of his popularity, I think.
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AlisonPegg
Registered User
(6/28/05 2:52 pm)
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Re: Completeness, minutiae, and fantasy
Yes, pretty much I'd agree with you.
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(6/28/05 10:02 pm)
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Re: Completeness, minutiae, and fantasy
Eeee! I won't argue about Tolkein, because that's a matter of personal taste. I will question the division of fantasy from myth.
For some reason a similar debate (at least I see similarities in it) is going on in sf right now, with the advocates of so-called "mundane sf" taking on spaceships, aliens, and faster-than-light travel. To me, demanding such a degree of literalness and "realism" from a fundamentally imaginative literature seems just wrong-headed. (I have no objection at all to the kind of mimetic, as-close-as-we-can-get-to-real-science stories they're pushing for, but they want to get rid of the other kinds.) It's true that we've never seen space aliens in real life, but that's not the point of, say, the aliens in The Left Hand of Darkness. Aliens are used in sf not just as stock bits of stage dressing, but also as vehicles for the examination and critique of humanity.
Vis-a-vis fantasy, I'm not sure I see that myth is, necessarily, at all well-connected to real life and in fact can think of lots of examples that are chock full of pure cognitive playfulness (i.e.., fantasy). Like, the story about Coyote borrowing the enormously long penis ("You'll hurt it!" "No, no, I'll be really careful!") in order to attempt intercourse with the beautiful women on the other side of the Columbia River. Or what about Coyote and his sisters (his feces) from whom he always seeks advice, and whose advice he always ignores? It's been argued that trickster figures, among other things, are outlets for people in very close societies to imagine what can not otherwise be imagined, like incest. Sexual fantasy, in this case.
You may have intended, although I am not sure, not "fantasy" in the sense of the fantastic, the imaginative, the playful and speculative, but in the sense of what I think of as "genre fantasy," that is, the kind of fantasy fiction that aspires primarily to be an exemplar of a particular set of literary conventions, and can do so well or badly, but is not aiming beyond those conventions. Tolkien can't belong here, by the way, as the conventions and the genre did not exist when he wrote. I also don't think you can argue, whether or not you LIKE Tolkien, that he wasn't aiming beyond mere escapist entertainment, intended no serious moral arguments in it about real life, etc.
I think you could make an argument for distinguishing between "inwardly turned" fiction that is most interested in literary conventions qua conventions, and "outwardly aimed" fiction that is more interested in using those conventions to talk about something else. But "realism" and "real life" and "real people" can become only literary conventions too, and using the fantastic to talk about the real is as old as the human imagination.
I have no idea what it means to oppose myth and fantasy except in the above senses--where by fantasy is meant only the most inwardly turned, conventionalized "genre" fantasy. One partial definition of myth that I would give is that it's a form of fantastic literature.
I've been thinking about Tolkein's elves myself recently, as I just read "The Hobbit" to my son and he also loves Steeleye Span. The elves in The Hobbit ("Wood Elves") are quite different from those in LOTR--greedy and even narcissistic. Steeleye Span recorded a fair number of traditional British Isles songs featuring elves, and those too are different from LOTR elves, so often having a cruel edge. But the elves in Tolkein are always set in opposition to both hobbits and human beings. His High Elves are not meant to be real in the way those races are, but very much the opposite.
Judith
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(6/28/05 10:13 pm)
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Re: Completeness, minutiae, and fantasy
Rereading that post I can see that I came to it already having had my buttons pressed by other things. So it misinterprets some of what has been said in this thread. Still wondering how you separate myth from fantasy, though...
One other thing--I agree completely with the bizarre lack and peculiar presence of women in Tolkein, but there are plenty of women who have read LOTR without hating it.
Supposedly women can identify more with male characters, and are more willing to read books in which the protagonist is male, than the other way around.
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(6/29/05 4:42 am)
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Re: Completeness, minutiae, and fantasy
I wouldn't want to denigrate fantasy in the fullest meaning of the word. It's something that's set against sensory experience with more or less equal force, and as such is as powerfully healing as it is powerfully destructive.
I think probably, (yet again) once you start analysing terms like myth and fantasy, their borders become so faint and cloudy, it all becomes a bit footling to laboriously delineate.
I'm talking here without any strict definition of this kind. But fantasy as a derogatory word, as epitomised by the kind of "fantastical" "story telling" you might see on kids' tv, is led by convention and formula. For me, it's not so much story telling, more plot layout. "Star Wars" would be a mainstream example. True story telling, I believe, is about and is directed by (1) the character and (2) their roles. (Which holds true even in fairy tales, where the characters have no character and seem only to have roles.)
In fantasy of this kind, characters are not allowed to take the story anywhere unexpected. They are therefore not real characters, but photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of characters... and any connection to the power of their psychologies is lost.
As for Tolkien, I don't understand the absence of women. But while there are reportedly many women who enjoy his stories in spite of the lack of women, there are also many men who hate them - because of it.
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(6/29/05 9:24 am)
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Re: Completeness, minutiae, and fantasy
>I wouldn't want to denigrate fantasy in the fullest meaning of the word. It's something that's set against sensory experience with more or less equal force, and as such is as powerfully healing as it is powerfully destructive.
I don't see that fantasy is necessarily opposed to sensory experience, either. A lot of fantasy (in the broader senses of the word) is very much about imagining some sensory experience. If you mean that things we imagine are less sensory than things that happens to us, I also don't that's always true. Moreover, ALL fiction is something imagined and not real. That's what fiction means.
>In fantasy of this kind, characters are not allowed to take the story anywhere unexpected. They are therefore not real characters, but photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of characters... and any connection to the power of their psychologies is lost.
Completely agree. But this isn't a peculiar characteristic of third-rate fantasy as opposed to third-rate any other kind of story. I am frequently struck by the flatness, triteness, and simple-mindedness of a certain kind of children's storytelling that seems to have as its main goal indoctrination (a kinder word would be socialization) as to normative moral and social behavior. Prefab behavioral templates. Please shoot me if I ever again have to read another Berenstain Bears story.
>As for Tolkien, I don't understand the absence of women. But while there are reportedly many women who enjoy his stories in spite of the lack of women, there are also many men who hate them
I've heard quite a few men talk about being completely unable to enjoy Tolkien, for a range of reasons.
I'm somewhat amused, now that I'm out of the late-night haze, to see that I stated I wasn't going to argue about Tolkien and then proceeded to do so.
On the subject of definitions, my own tend to be anthropological and based in ethnogeneric classification, i.e., socially and culturally defined categories. There's also quite a body of comparative literature on myth in anthropology and folklore and a relatively standard comparative definition.
With ethnogeneric categories, you're dealing with something as empirical and subject to pinning down as grammatical categories in language. There are always exceptions and anomalies, but it's still rule-based.
Re defining fantasy, I think that where discussion of it takes you depends so much on whether or not you are using the term to refer to a particular ethnographic category (and which one you're using it for). For example, children's cartoons made for TV, or books shelved in the "fantasy" section of a bookstore, versus some comparative concept like use of the fantastic (Hamlet's father's ghost).
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(6/29/05 11:17 am)
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Re: Completeness, minutiae, and fantasy
>I don't see that fantasy is necessarily opposed to sensory experience, either. A lot of fantasy (in the broader senses of the word) is very much about imagining some sensory experience. If you mean that things we imagine are less sensory than things that happens to us, I also don't that's always true. Moreover, ALL fiction is something imagined and not real. That's what fiction means.
I should've made it clear I meant basic sensory experience in the philosophical context of "sense data". Imagined sensory experience isn't sensory experience. And yes, absolutely, all story telling (arguably including documentary story telling) is a kind of fantasy.
>this isn't a peculiar characteristic of third-rate fantasy as opposed to third-rate any other kind of story.
Agree. I suppose when a story is told badly, we tend to categorise it disparagingly by genre. When it's told brilliantly, it transcends whatever conventions it uses. All I was saying was I thought when a fantastical story is told badly, we tend to call it fantasy. When it's told well, we call it myth (or at least mythICAL).
I'm afraid I know next to nothing about anthropological categorisations of story telling. But I was wondering about psychological categorisations and whether such might correspond with categorisations such as yours. For instance, the sense of personal identity of a member of a primitive hunter-gatherer society would I think be structurally different to that of a member of a reality-tv-gazer society. Which might go some way to explaining different story structures... Maybe...
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