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truepennyDear 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?
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-13 07:48 pm (UTC)They can't fix Omelas because it doesn't want to be fixed.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-13 08:09 pm (UTC)... 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
Date: 2007-02-13 08:28 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-13 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-14 04:53 am (UTC)Sorry but it got my knickers in a knot.