quote from Terence Hawkes

[truepenny]

Terence Hawkes's essay "Telmah" (and, yes, that is Hamlet spelled backwards) is essentially a meditation on the intersection of text (W. W. Greg's positively heretical article on Hamlet) and politics (World War I and the Russian Revolution) in the psyche of John Dover Wilson in 1917. (oursin, the article also had some interesting things to say about class and education in pre-WWII England which made me think of your comment on the most recent Sayers post.) In the course of his argument, Hawkes discusses an article written about Russia by Dover Wilson in 1914, which asserts boldly and naïvely that the Russian peasants are HAPPY under the Csars; Hawkes has this to say:

World-picture fanciers will already have recognized in it [Dover Wilson's view of Russia in 1914] a version of what, by the time of the second world war, had become a standard British response to national crisis: the construction of long-past, green, alternative worlds of percipient peasants, organic communities, festivals, folk art, and absolute monarchy to set against present chaos. Dover Wilson's revised Russian World Picture of 1914 has developed, since his essay of 1906, features which surface regularly in our century as part of a recurrent siege mentality. It thus has much more than a coincidental resemblance to E. M. W. Tillyard's well known war-effort, The Elizabethan World Picture of 1943. A discourse which, seeking for the final, confirming presence of authority, nominates the linchpin of the political structure as "God's representative on earth" is clearly heard in both. Each represents, less an accurate picture of the world it purports to describe, than an intimate, covert measure of its author's fears about the fallen world in which he currently lives, and in the face of which he has constructed a peculiarly English Eden.
(Hawkes 324)

What fascinates me about this--aside from the light it casts on certain critical habits of thought among Shakespeare scholars of previous generations--is the way in which Hawkes's description could be, with only the slightest of changes, a description of J. R. R. Tolkien and Middle-Earth.

At least Tolkien had the decency to admit that his world was a fantasy.

---
WORKS CITED
Hawkes, Terence. "Telmah." Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen, 1985. 310-32.

Comments

[marith.livejournal.com]

I got as far as "percipient peasants" before thinking "hobbits!"

Hm. Even in Middle-Earth, Tolkien depicts the Shire as somewhat mythic, doesn't he. The societies of Men we see are grimmer and darker; they have to deal with war and the complexities of life, where hobbits don't. Even the Breefolk have gates and suspicions and Bill Fernys. (And can you imagine them having six and seven meals a day in times of plentiful harvest? They'd stock up for later like sensible people. Possibly one could also say something about the charming gift exchanges and "mathoms" of the Shire vs. the gifts given elsewhere. In the Shire you get an umbrella; in Rohan it would have to be an enchanted, camouflaging steel-tipped umbrella once used by the kings of Eorlingas to shield their horses from the breath of wyrms.)

Throughout the books people are surprised and delighted to find that hobbits really exist. They're a refreshing break from the real world. Theoden and Denethor (and Gandalf, in general) seem to adopt them as symbols of something. Innocence lost? Innocence worth protecting? The wise fool? Frodo is dragged into the world of Men by the Ring, and so needs his own assigned hobbit to keep him grounded.

Er. I had a point somewhere. What was it? ...Tolkien not only admits that his agrarian paradise is a fantasy, he makes it a comforting fantasy within the fantasy. Could there be some level of commentary on people like Dover Wilson here, conscious or not?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes.

Mostly that's all I want to say. Just, yes, I think you're right.

The hobbits and the Shire, it has always seemed to me, belong to the tradition of Spenserian pastoral, whereas the Men and Elves are all epic figures (no accident that Rohan is the land of Old English and Beowulf). The Shire is Arcadia, and "The Scouring of the Shire" is et in Arcadia ego.

But Tolkien lets his pastoral world recover from its brush with Dickensian realism--which I think says more than anything about how fundamentally idyllic and idealistic his conception of it was.

Pastorial /Realism

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

"But Tolkien lets his pastoral world recover from its brush with Dickensian realism"
But The Shire as much as the Elves is doomed to pass from the World. Long view -wise the future of Middle-Earth is our Presant. Its no sealed off Idyll

[marith.livejournal.com]

But Tolkien lets his pastoral world recover from its brush with Dickensian realism--which I think says more than anything about how fundamentally idyllic and idealistic his conception of it was.

Which is why Frodo can't stay there, presumably, and why Merry and Pippin keep leaving on long journeys. Sam is the only one who keeps his Arcadian nature.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, this is very resonant - though I think the 'blue remembered hills' and 'happy highways' of the 'land of lost delight' can be located in all sorts of times and places besides the Golden Age of Edwardian England.

However, there's an even deeper irony to this comment about 'green, alternative worlds of percipient peasants, organic communities, festivals, folk art, and absolute monarchy', because, lacking the absolute monarchy, this was also a very strong component within British Leftist thinking. There were a whole lot of anarcho-socialist 'alternative Englands' which tried to invoke this pastoral myth without buying into the feudalism part of it. See, for example, more or less anything by Edward Carpenter, but particularly Civilisation and its Discontents. (But this version of the Englishness and the pastoral I don't think has ever found its way into fantasy.)

But more generally on lost Golden Ages, I am reminded of a quote I saw last week (extracted from some interview or article I didn't see) by Fay Weldon, claiming that women were both nicer and happier before the Pill. My response to this was inarticulate cries of rage and to beat my head on the wall. The Past is Another Country and they do things differently there, but I don't think there are any grounds for saying they did them any better.

Charles Williams

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Following up to myself: This exchange got me thinking about Williams, who did not have a university education, and who often situated the numinous in modern realistic urban settings (?the Blake tradition). Even on a modern suburban housing estate no less in one of them - the titles for some reason tend to elide in my mind, this might be Descent into Hell - the one which has a frightening portrait of a historian (but might be any scholar) becoming corrupted.

And on reflection Williams' (sympathetic) characters are often of lower social class, even if this only means lower rather than upper middle, or suburban rather than county; and there are some nasty quasi-fascist aristos as I recall.

Yet he was very much part of the Inklings. Does anyone know any good recent work on either the whole group, or specifically Williams?

Re: Charles Williams

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

C William was a very pecuiliar member odf the INKLINGS. Tolkien never really took to him

Re: Charles Williams

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've not read anything about him beyond Humphrey Carpenter's group bio The Inklings (1978). But you're right about the class thing, and he does it really well, in a really closely observed way. The horrible horrible thing about Betty/Bettina in All Hallows Eve is that it's so real, so plausible, so exactly the way that sort of thing would work. I do not like Williams, I don't really like any horror, but I don't hate him the way I hate that smeared shadow of his work That Hideous Strength, where Lewis does the class thing in such an ugly and heavy-handed way. Williams also seemed to have noticed that women are actually people.

Re: Charles Williams

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I don't really consider Williams to be horror: this may simply be because I first heard his novels described as 'supernatural thrillers'. Many years since, his verse play Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury was one of my A-Level set texts, which was how I got to known about him.

He does that suburban milieu in Descent into Hell very well, and without patronage or caricature (at least, not on the basis of class or social status). And I agree, he does seem to like women and, even rarer, to give them agency in his plots.

One of those people I'd like to know more about, so if anyone does hear of a biography please do pass the intelligence on.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Speaking just for myself, I was not happier and nicer before the Pill. I was a pain-wracked wretch two days a month, which does not sweeten anyone's temper. Ahem.

The idea of the Golden Age is as old as literature (she says grandiosely). My memory for ancient Greek poetry isn't what it was, but the Latin elegists, for certain, are doing this same thing, looking back to a completely mythic past with the assurance that things were "better." They, too, had the grace to admit their Golden Age was a fantasy, but, poetically speaking, they yearned for it regardless.

And of course there's all the re-enactment societies and the SCA and Ren Faire ... I was deeply bemused when I moved to the Upper Midwest from the Mid-South to discover the passion for American Civil War reenactment. (I'm sure they do it in the South, too, but I'd never come across any groups.) Someone told me about it, and I thought, They want to reenact dysentery and gangrene and lice? And, of course, they don't. I don't know exactly what they DO reenact, because frankly the whole idea squicks me slightly, but it's not the suffering and pain. That's not the part of the past that people want to cherish.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

Hesiod has the golden age, doesn't he: definitely as far back as the Greeks and already a tired and mocked trope by the time of Ovid. Perhaps the Golden age was when we didn't wish for the Golden age?

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of a quote I saw last week (extracted from some interview or article I didn't see) by Fay Weldon, claiming that women were both nicer and happier before the Pill.

Heavens above! I do hope that the quote was somehow mangled by being taken out of context, because if not, then Fay Weldon is clearly losing her memory if not her mind. What a ridiculous thing to say! Not that I'm saying that the Pill and the resulting sexual freedom necessarily make women happy, but the Pill removed a lot of fear and uncertainty from women's lives, and decreasing fear and uncertainty is good.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I was particularly startled because in at least one of her novels Weldon satirised similar statements by Germaine Greer (Greer had a book out in the early 80s which was very anti-Pill and indeed most other forms of female controlled contraception - ?The Whole Woman?).

I don't really see fear, illegitimacy being covered up by widespread adoption, illegal abortions, etc, as being particularly halycon signifiers.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Sex and Destiny, unless she had two on the same subject, which I wouldn't put past her. S&D is one of those books which aren't even wrong, I kept reading it the way I might read Stirling or something like that, for the utterly skewed worldview.

George MacDonald Fraser likewise said in a recent book (The Light's On at Signpost) that life was better in the 1950s because people weren't confused about their sexuality -- well, unless they were Alan Turing, I snarkily replied. But that was the voice of white male heterosexual privilege -- Fay Weldon, who I have met but not read, is clearly remembering a likewise airbrushed lost paradise of crossed legs and white weddings.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, Sex and Destiny; that was one weird book. And talk about Golden Age and Noble Peasants with the rich wisdom of the soil and an organic way of life that she was promoting: TWFU.

The objects of concern of the Wolfenden Committee, 1954-1956, mostly knew perfectly well what their sexuality was. It was the 'experts' pronouncing upon them who were in a state of confusion.

Fay Weldon

[eileenlufkin.livejournal.com]

I googled for "Fay Weldon" + Pill. I only skimed the first page of results. The two quotes I found are:

They said what...?
Sunday August 24, 2003
The Observer
'It cheapened sex. We have had the magic taken away from us. Sex has become practical and rather horrible.'
Fay Weldon on the contraceptive pill


Timesonline BookCircle 10-25-01

Do you think HRT has been as liberating for women in the last 20 years as the Pill was in the 60s? Philippa Bynorth, Bath

Certainly HRT has enabled older women to live fuller lives in better health, but it has enabled them to go on working longer which, I suppose, is a good thing. The Pill was more liberating because a woman didn't have to choose between having sex and having babies, which used to be the case.

The woman's ability to control her own fertility and not leave it to men made a more profound change in the life of women then anything else. HRT enables us to make the most of that change.

I'm hoping the "They Said What...? column isn't a relible source.