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follow-up
Dear everyone:
The reason that "The Ones Who Walk Away from the West and the Sea" (a.) is a story rather than an essay, (b.) uses no proper names, (c.) gets certain salient details "wrong" is that it does not actually represent my ideas/opinions/wishes about the end of The Lord of the Rings.
It is an intertextual meditation between The Lord of the Rings and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." It takes issue with certain of the beliefs and ideas that led to the ending of The Lord of the Rings, specifically the refusal of partial recovery. In Tolkien, you either recover, or you don't. There's no struggle to negotiate the world with diminished capacity, to recuperate after a shattering tragedy. To live with what you have become.
This is a function of the kind of story Tolkien chose to tell as much as it is a function of his own beliefs (and I am not pretending that those beliefs can be deduced from his fiction). Epic heroes (in the literary sense of "epic," Beowulf, The Iliad, etc.) do not survive battles to live crippled or maimed. They die on the battle-field or they survive in triumph. Tolkien adulterates and ameliorates that epic sensibility by filtering it through his hobbit protagonists, but Frodo's fate is as much an acknowledgment of the destructiveness of epic as it is an acknowledgment of the destructiveness of evil.
No, I don't think going into the West is a "reward" or a question of "deserving." That's much too simple a reading.
What I do believe is that Tolkien's chosen ending allows him--and that's "him" the author rather than "him" the protagonist--to circumvent and elide the reality of thousands of men of his generation, the men who are the secondary characters, for example, of Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, men who actually have to live with the unredeemable pain and sometimes humiliation of having survived World War I. They are diminished, but they don't have the choice to go into the West. And what my protagonist is saying is that he, and his author behind him, shouldn't have that choice either. Not because it's a reward, or because he does or doesn't deserve it, but because of those thousands of men who maybe deserve it and maybe don't, but will NEVER GET TO CHOOSE. Their choices are between surviving--hurting, depressed, alienated--and suicide. They aren't given an opt-out clause.
I don't have an epic sensibility. I believe in partial recovery, and I believe that is damn well better than the alternatives (in, obviously, a situation where full recovery is not possible).
This is a philosophical argument with The Lord of the Rings as a whole, not with the ending. And "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is in there too because it understands that "deserving" is not the point. Is never the point.
Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?
The reason that "The Ones Who Walk Away from the West and the Sea" (a.) is a story rather than an essay, (b.) uses no proper names, (c.) gets certain salient details "wrong" is that it does not actually represent my ideas/opinions/wishes about the end of The Lord of the Rings.
It is an intertextual meditation between The Lord of the Rings and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." It takes issue with certain of the beliefs and ideas that led to the ending of The Lord of the Rings, specifically the refusal of partial recovery. In Tolkien, you either recover, or you don't. There's no struggle to negotiate the world with diminished capacity, to recuperate after a shattering tragedy. To live with what you have become.
This is a function of the kind of story Tolkien chose to tell as much as it is a function of his own beliefs (and I am not pretending that those beliefs can be deduced from his fiction). Epic heroes (in the literary sense of "epic," Beowulf, The Iliad, etc.) do not survive battles to live crippled or maimed. They die on the battle-field or they survive in triumph. Tolkien adulterates and ameliorates that epic sensibility by filtering it through his hobbit protagonists, but Frodo's fate is as much an acknowledgment of the destructiveness of epic as it is an acknowledgment of the destructiveness of evil.
No, I don't think going into the West is a "reward" or a question of "deserving." That's much too simple a reading.
What I do believe is that Tolkien's chosen ending allows him--and that's "him" the author rather than "him" the protagonist--to circumvent and elide the reality of thousands of men of his generation, the men who are the secondary characters, for example, of Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, men who actually have to live with the unredeemable pain and sometimes humiliation of having survived World War I. They are diminished, but they don't have the choice to go into the West. And what my protagonist is saying is that he, and his author behind him, shouldn't have that choice either. Not because it's a reward, or because he does or doesn't deserve it, but because of those thousands of men who maybe deserve it and maybe don't, but will NEVER GET TO CHOOSE. Their choices are between surviving--hurting, depressed, alienated--and suicide. They aren't given an opt-out clause.
I don't have an epic sensibility. I believe in partial recovery, and I believe that is damn well better than the alternatives (in, obviously, a situation where full recovery is not possible).
This is a philosophical argument with The Lord of the Rings as a whole, not with the ending. And "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is in there too because it understands that "deserving" is not the point. Is never the point.
Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?
no subject
Doesn't Frodo only get the Gray Havens offer after years (decades?) of doing just that, though? We don't get a lot of detail about those years, mostly just notes on how Sam is doing well and Frodo is not, IIRC. But he does try for a long time to live in the world as he is.
(I also tend to think of Eowyn and Faramir as having to give up part of themselves after falling in battle. They live on and choose a new direction, but as far as epic heroism is concerned they are less then they were.)
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Like I said, this is a philosophical point, and one highly open to interpretation. All I'm offering is my own.
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Ah, I had been confused on that point. What has always bothered me about Omelas is that it *does* seem to offer opting out as a choice. Those who reject the system simply leave, as if their refusal to participate somehow solves the problem. But it doesn't -- the whole horrible thing is still intact. So the confusion arose because I thought that someone who leaves after having sacrificed much to fix his world's flaws (as he understands them) was being set as a parallel to someone who leaves having done nothing.
no subject
They can't fix Omelas because it doesn't want to be fixed.
no subject
... except for the one person in Omelas who wants VERY BADLY for it to be fixed.
And I know, that's reading the story *way* too concretely. In the story, Omelas is a localized system, whereas in our world the mindset of Omelas is distributed all around us, and refusing that mindset constitutes fighting against it. But the concrete images of the story are so powerful, it's hard for me to make that leap to the abstract at the very end, rather than objecting You can't just leave the kid there! You can't let them keep doing this!.
(Possibly it also pushes my buttons about people wandering off to fix what they perceive as other people's/cultures'/societies' problems instead of working where they find themselves. Which again, is taking it too concretely. But the buttons are there, so....)
no subject
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on, they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in.
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Sorry but it got my knickers in a knot.
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Thanks!
MKK
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I don't quite understand this, as the struggle to get up and heal and fight onward is certainly the stuff of drama all the time, as heroic as anything done by folks with bulging thews and hearts of steel.
When Tolkien made his hero a hobbit, he undermined so much of that whole stereotype that it's very peculiar he should fall prey to it at the very end, as if he was simply giving up. There's a crumpled, run-together quality to it, "and-he-lived-happily-ever-after-for-all-his-pains," which strikes the ear oddly.
In plotline terms, as a writer, I'd be wondering why the elves *really* want Frodo with them, instead of living out his admittedly extended lifespan in Middle Earth. One begins to wonder if they fear him staying behind, and what he might become eventually. Will he be easier prey to great evil in the future, when they aren't around in Middle Earth to keep an eye on him?
It doesn't appear to be anything to do with his alleged virtues. They had no pity on anybody else, it appears, so why him in particular? As you quite rightly pointed out, in the end it was sheer chance the Ring was destroyed, and Frodo was not the only one whose efforts and sacrifice made that chance even remotely possible.
And yet part of Tolkien's point was that in real life the cost of the epic adventure is very often a huge toll in lives and happiness. I'm wondering why he doesn't talk about surviving in the teeth of habitual pain and so on, when he does talk about surviving in the face of overwhelming terror and hopeless odds.
I'm with you on the surviving as well as you can, whacking the rude nurses with your cane from your wheelchair, if needs be.
Dorothy Sayers is so economical. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club suggests a whole world in so very few hints, just a tinge of blood in the sherry here and there. You can even ignore the hints.
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I agree with you on this one, though I also think that in some ways The Lord of the Rings was his own attempt to confront and deal with that--it's just that he chose the route of mythologising the experience, which so few other WWI writers did. There are some strong suggestions in his letters that he didn't consider himself 'recovered', that he recognised that recovery in many instances wasn't possible.
There are a couple of books and papers that look closely at Tolkien's WWI experience and its effect on his writing--John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War is one, have you come across it? I found it very interesting.
However, I've also always suspected that one reason Tolkien came to dislike Sayers' work so strongly was that she did confront issues like shell-shock and the impossibility of recovery and the experience of survival and living as a survivor quite directly.
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I tend to think of the philosophical issue as being a vision of the world as once perfect, now fallen; and that doesn't sit right with me as an evolutionary biologist.
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'Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured', said Gandalf (III 268) – not in Middle-earth. Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over Sea to heal him – if that could be done, before he died. He would have eventually to 'pass away': no mortal could, or can, abide for ever on earth, or within Time. So he went both to a purgatory and to a reward, for a while: a period of reflection and peace and a gaining of a truer understanding of his position in littleness and in greatness, spent still in Time amid the natural beauty of 'Arda Unmarred', the Earth unspoiled by evil.
----
I find interesting his inclusion, "if that could be done." It casts doubt on the ability of going to the West as a complete restorative for Frodo, at least in Tolkien's mind.
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And don't forget that Sam, Legolas and Gimli were also allowed to go into the West in due course...
Still, your story is an interesting and very thought provoking one, TruePenny - thanks for sharing it.
Michele
http://scholar-blog.blogspot.com/