Breaking Through the Veil (27 October 2024)

“Words are the clearest record of that “long defeat” of which he wrote, and we may imagine that he saw them also as the vehicles for the “glimpses of final victory” for which he hoped.” (8-9)

-        Verlyn Fleger

Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (2002; Revised Edition)

 I keep re-reading the opening three chapters of Fleger’s book, in an inner dialogue with myself, as there is so much there, laying the groundwork for understanding, as she calls it in her subtitle, “Logos and Language in Tolkien’s Word.”  After describing the most important turning points in Tolkien’s early life, she then analyses his work on “The Reeve’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” exploring how Tolkien saw in it Chaucer’s use of northern dialect and what this implies for readers about what is actually happening in the tale.   She then talks about Tolkien’s article on a single word – “Sigelwara” and its meaning in relation to the Old English word “AEthiops.”  This leads into her discussion of words and their nature and use in Tolkien’s fictional works, which I thought about in my previous blog (“The Word in Tolkien.”)

This evening I came again to the epigraph to this blog, seeing in it the balancing act of hope; a perspective – an existential stance – in which one is neither optimist nor pessimist, but someone open to the future and aware of the past, holding forth for possible good-to-come, yet aware that it might not materialize, and if it occasionally does—realizes that it often dissipates in time.  For Tolkien, the world is Fallen; we are broken and yet contain within us – or can draw upon, from outside ourselves? – the Light that can draw us toward a better self-expression and better creation of worlds in which to live.  Whether one grounds this in a religious or a secular worldview, the fact is that we are ‘imperfect beings,’ as yet unfinished – one could say – like a lot of Tolkien’s tales beyond his two masterpieces, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – and are always stationed at a fulcrum between dark choices and choices that might allow the Light to become more manifest through us.

 In the next paragraph, I came to what inspired this blog.  After the discussions about “The Reeve’s Tale” and “Sigelwara,” Fleger relates how a student of Tolkien’s once asked him, with regard to his work, “You broke through the veil, didn’t you, and passed through?”  To which Tolkien “readily admitted” that he had done so!   “Breaking through the veil” refers to seeing the world as it might be; as it could be.  Fleger avows that:

 “Both question and answer betoken an awareness of and an acceptance of the word as one avenue into perception of the super-natural, the super-real.  To break the veil and pass through would be to penetrate beyond normal human perception into another reality, one always present but not readily accessible.” (9)

This resonated with my own experience as a writer, as I believe I have experienced this in my own creative praxis.  I would say that this ‘breaking through the veil’ is one way of describing why I write the stories and poems that I do.  I am not mimicking or merely reifying the world as it is – as we find it in our actual lived lives – but am hoping to look ‘through the veil’ to what might be; what could be – if we human beings took a step toward the “Light,” in the sense in which Tolkien uses that metaphor.

Now, re-presenting the world-as-it-is in fiction, poetry, film and art, can and does have value, as it challenges us to see things about our lived-in-worlds that are not obvious to us in our day-to-day existence; in our state of normal consciousness.  Breaking through that veil, it shows us what’s wrong in our world(s); what needs to be changed; it leads to an imaginative grappling with the way-things-are in tension with what we hope for—the way things could be.  This kind of creative re-presentation shows us the brokenness of our world(s) and the ways in which we are damaged by it; how the-way-things-are inhibits us in our attempts to live-life more fully.  Well-conceived art about the world-as-it-is reveals prejudices and biases that are harmful to us, personally, as a culture, and as a species.  However, it is not the only path a Creative Imagination can take.

‘Breaking through the veil’ is a metaphor; its meaning being ‘seeing beyond the worlds we have created to what might be a better world’—one in which we have moved beyond the prejudices that keep us at odds with others of our species, non-human species and Nature itself.  I appreciate literature and music, poetry and film that forces us to face the inequalities in our world, its discrimination against ‘this group’ or ’that group’ of human beings, and the often self-serving way in which we wield ‘ethical,’ ‘religious,’ and ‘political’ values and ‘ideals’ to deadening and violent ends.  But to go beyond the veil is to create art that can show us better possibilities; other ways of dwelling together in Earth & Spirit.

In my own praxis of looking beyond the veil, I whole-heartedly identify with something Tolkien said regarding his a letter: “I have long ceased to invent … I wait till I seem to know what really happened.” (9, from Letters, 231; as quoted in Fleger)  I believe I understand this_ as I am sure many writers and other creative people reading this blog do!

It happened a few weeks ago with the arche of a new story I have been writing called “The Hunter’s Dream.”  This has happened so many times in my praxis as a writer that it has nearly come to seem almost ‘the norm,’ though I know it is something much more, much other than ‘normal.’  “Of course that’s what happens,” I sometimes feel without thinking about it, until I read something like this quote from Tolkien.  I can honestly say I do not create stories in a mechanical way but wait for the tale to speak to me its truth.  Then I write what I ‘see’ or even sometimes ‘hear’ – as I did with “The Hunter’s Dream.”

“The Hunter’s Dream” was a title I scribbled down one day.  I felt something_ but could not define or describe it.  I had a character in mind, but nothing else.  I wanted to write something about the way in which this character – Ryan Steed – came to live at Merlynwood, the ‘Druid House’ – a setting in my imaginative world of Ross County.  I had such ‘origin stories’ for two other characters in the same sequence of stories (Michael and David, though not for a third character, Kenneth).  But I didn’t know what to write.  I tried ‘thinking up’ things to write, but nothing clicked.  _I’m sure many of you reading this have had similar experiences.

Then, one night, while I was reading Barry Qualles The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Literature: The Novel as Book of Life (Cambridge, 1982), I started hearing dialogue in my head—in my imagination, that is (I was not ‘hearing’ things with my physical ears)!  It was Ryan’s father talking, and I realized his parents were at a dinner at Merlynwood; where the four elder druids and their other three students – Michael, David and Kenneth – live!  The more I ‘listened’ to this dialogue, the more I realized what was going on: Mr and Mrs Steed were trying to decide whether or not to give their son their permission to live at Merlynwood and study to become a modern-day druid!

As I let this dialogue in my imagination emerge, the more powerful it became, I simply had to start writing.  I put Qualles down.  I opened a Word doc, and once I did, the whole story just flowed out of me!  I didn’t write “The Hunter’s Dream,” by sitting and rationally plotting-out a narrative.  I let it come; I waited until I knew what was going on, and then I let-go_ and started writing.  It is, perhaps, one of the most unique stories I’ve ever written.  I hope it will someday be published in either Ghosts in the Moon – a manuscript I am trying right now to bring to completion; a kind of spiritual and poetic autobiography, told through stories and poems about my relationship with ‘the Muse’ – or in another text that seems to be coming together without my ‘conceiving’ of it_ called The Fire and the Shadows.  I am hoping that however it gets shared with potential readers, it will be yet another story in which the characters are living in-the-world and yet striving to move ‘beyond-the-veil.’  _To realize themselves as being in-the-world-but-not-of-it_ as that old spiritual rann has it.

The Word in Tolkien (25 October 2024)

“The polarities of light and dark that generate the elements of Tolkien’s fictive world and motivate its action are created and conveyed through the power of the word.” (10)

“Behind the word is always that which it represents, but above it flickers an evanescent, changing meaning that carries within it the ability to heighten and ultimately transcend the limit of a given definition.” (10)

-        Verlyn Fleger

Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (2002; Revised Edition)

 Taking a break from Villette this Autumn, I have ventured back into Tolkien’s worlding and his understanding of words.  Being a philologist, which informed both his literary as well as his academic praxis, words and their contexts, meanings and worldings, were his life’s work.  I have been re-reading Verlyn Fleger’s Splintered Light[i], having finished the Qualls book on the secular pilgrims in 19^th century English Literature[ii]—and am instantly relating to JRRT as something of a kindred spirit, like Wordsworth—as I may have said last summer.  And to my surprise, I am also finding in him a complement to Martin Heidegger who, as a philosopher and phenomenologist, also dug deep into the roots and meanings of words, and whose works I read with passionate interest back in the 1980’s.

One of the many things I gleaned from Heidegger, when I was reading him back then was that there is a depth, behind and underneath, the words that we commonly use.  To uncover these older meanings was for Heidegger a way of deepening our understanding of the world(s) in which we live.  His explorations of philosophical words and their ‘original,’ i.e., ‘archaic’ (αρχη) – meanings initiated me into my own philosophical quest for meanings that were potentially hidden within the common, ordinary words we use, not only for philosophy but for everyday converse with others.

Tolkien, I am realizing, is for me a ‘British counterpart to Heidegger.’  He, too, was delving into the deep meaning of words; not philosophically but philologically—his explorations having philosophical import as well as existential and spiritual resonances.  Tolkien’s fictional and mythic exploration of the nature of humankind and the world(s) in which we dwell, his antinomies of Light and Dark which drive his stories and bring his world to have manifest ethical import, his awareness of our Fallenness and his Hope in “glimpses of final victory” – are all set in words; enacted through words and understood via the words he carefully selected to describe and delineate his lived-in-world (what he called “The Primary World”) and then the worlds he created (what he called “Secondary Worlds.”).  This applies to place names and the names of characters, as well as aspects of their behavior and the traditions that arose through the course of the Three Ages of Middle Earth.  I would venture to say that Tolkien’s life was spent immersed-in words and wording, exploring the hermeneutical bedrock of meaning.

How wonderful, I always think, to have an English professor doing what in many ways Heidegger was doing for me in German!  Tolkien directs me back through the history of English to Anglo-Saxon, as one deep-source, whereas Heidegger took me on a journey back through the Germanic languages and into ancient Greek.

 One of the things Fleger is exploring in the first chapter of Splintered Light, is JRRT’s fascination with words, his philological and historical reconstruction of words as used in literature beginning with a single word – Sigelwara – and then, in the next couple chapters, in Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales.  He uses just as much care in the words used to describe places, characters and other phenomena in his own mythic, fictional world of Middle Earth.  With a careful interpretive hand, he draws out for the reader what can be discovered of the languages he created, which give heft and clarity to his Secondary World, using a ‘philological praxis’ complementary to the one used to understand words in the Primary Universe, applying his understanding of the development of actual languages to trace out a ‘history’ for his created languages.

Tolkien sees clearly what should seem obvious, though we are often oblivious to the fact; that words are what texts are ‘made of’ and that to understand a text we have to understand the words and their history and early meanings.  Fleger says:

"For Tolkien, understanding and appreciation of any text depended on a proper understanding of the words, their literal meaning and their historical development.” (5)

What could be more simply stated?  This functions as a primary hermeneutical maxim for me; a kind of ‘fact’ – so obvious once you think about it (like a big ‘duh?’) – that I have valued and been grappling with for decades.  I first came to understand this ‘maxim’ – which should be obvious, but isn’t; being obscured by our often unthoughtful ordinary use of words – through my reading of Heidegger, in particular his Being and Time (1927), his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) and then a later collection of essays called Poetry, Language Thought (1971) among several other engaging texts, following his exploration of the evolution of the German and Greek words he was attempting to search to their rootstock.

Expanding the ‘maxim,’ Fleger says of Tolkien’s understanding of words, broadening the insight and principle to apply beyond the realm of the individual hermeneut, that:

“Words are important as the expression of any speaker or writer, but they are just as important as manifestations of the outlook of an entire culture, or of an age.  We do not truly understand a text until we understand the words not only as they are currently used but as they were used in the time in which they were composed.  Only with this understanding is it possible to touch the mind of the author and of his first audience, to bridge the temporal distance (whether short or long) between that time and the present.” (5)

This speaks to the gist and heft of historical and biographical criticism in our actual world(s).  Yet it also points beyond the ‘mere praxis’ of a literary method to an understanding that we are always immersed in a matrix of words; our worlding(s) arising out of our use of words and our adoption of them to describe, explain and comprehend our lives in the context of the worlds in which we live.

Oft, this acceptance of words and the worldings to which they give rise is unconscious and uncritical.  The words we use, before we come to that state of self-awareness wherein we begin to reflect on what we have come to believe and experience, are largely preset by the culture in which we grow and come to maturity.  But once we become aware of the evanescence flickering around words; through which we may begin to notice them in a way not just as ‘common place-holders’—we may find ourselves empowered to enter into an experience of their potential depth.  Then, beginning to think critically about words—accepting some words, rejecting others, putting some words to different uses—we begin to communicate with others as well as understand more fully the world into which we find ourselves ‘thrown,’ in Heidegger’s potent term.

Like Tolkien and Heidegger – each of whom have been mentors in my life-journey – I try to choose words as well as I am able, despite not being a trained philologist.  As most writers will certainly agree, when creating a text, the choice of words is one of the most important challenges.  Sometimes, the words simply come to you, and you only discover later just how appropriate the ‘choice’ was; though you didn’t consciously make it.  Other times, a word in one sentence or another will become a problem, sometimes for hours, days or even longer, until a more appropriate word presents itself or is found in the seeking.  This is a common experience, I believe, among writers.  In this quest for the ‘right’ – most revealing, most deep-delving, most expressive – words, I so appreciate people like Heidegger and now Tolkien, who have done a good deal of deep delving, and given me – and other writers – a wellspring of possibilities!  They have opened certain key words for me, and also inspired me in my own attempts to seek-out and discover older meanings of words that I want and have used; that are meaningful to me.

Referencing JRRT’s essay on “Chaucer as Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” and the two-part article “Sigelwara Land,” Fleger says something which also resonates with own praxis, and I’ll conclude with this; she said:

“Research into early forms and uses of words, the search after obscure meaning and the revealing of lost nuances – scientific study in the truest sense of the term – led him through science into art and through art into an almost spiritual realm wherein the word was the conveyor of primal truth, the magic vehicle not just of communication but of communion.” (8)

This movement – Science to Art to Spirituality – is one I have experienced myself over the last thirty years, after turning from religion to science to re-ground my being-in-becoming in Earth & Cosmos.  And for me, the “spiritual realm” is certainly one linked to participation in imaginative story, myth and poetry, abiding in and discovering their access to truth, leading me into communion with the ‘Spirit’ – the energy of our existing here – with which the Universe is invested.

 SCIENCE – ART – SPIRITUALITY

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[i] Fleger, Verlyn  Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World

(Kent & London: Kent State University Press, 2002; Revised Edition)

 

[ii] Qualls, Barry  The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life

            (Cambridge University Press, 1982)

Secular Pilgrims and the End of Villette (17 October 2024)

“That Bronté’s heroines also achieve a certain happiness attests to her romance impulse: that her final heroine, Lucy Snowe, can achieve that happiness – “Freedom and Renovation” – only in exile and alone attests to Bronté’s continually darkening sense of the alienating nature of English life.” (50)

-        Barry Quales

The Secular Pilgrimage of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life (Cambridge University Press, 1982)

 

I have been deeply engaged reading this very interesting book over the last month, the chapter on Charlotte Bronté’s novels broadening and challenging my own perceptions!  Quales’ grounding idea is that Thomas Carlisle was a key writer in a transition from the kinds of religious pilgrim stories that were written before his time (e.g., Pilgrim’s Progress) and the secular pilgrim stories that he sees evident in the novels of writers like the Brontés, Dickens and George Elliot.  He then argues that many of the great novels of this period function as Books of Life; that the main characters pilgrim through life – in the secular, industrializing, increasingly mechanized and rationalized world of the 19^th century – seeking fulfillment, meaning and ‘self-realization’ (my term).

Quales says that while the religious-based temptations presented in writers like Bunyan were serious for the intended audience (and perhaps still are), the protagonists of many 19^th century novels were facing temptations and trials of their own; challenges of a secular nature to their moral compass and deep values—these being just as sure to ruin a soul as were the temptations characters endured and struggled with in the earlier religious paradigm.  Three of these secular temptations were Materialism, Rationalism and Industrialism.  These three threats to the soul and to well-being participated in_ and furthered the tendency to use_ a machine metaphor for all of society; of God, and all of life within the world—as well as the very practical mechanization of daily life that was its mantle.  The question is how do you maintain the integrity of a human soul; how to keep it fed and nurtured – in a world so quickly transforming; in a world more and more devoid of a connection with Nature; in a world where people were becoming more and more cut-off from deep and compassionate interactions?  This is, for Qualles, what these mid-19^th century writers were exploring, and I would tend to agree with him.

Reading this book is allowing intuitions that I’ve had about the stories of the authors he examines to coalesce.  I have noticed this theme of pilgrimage in many of the 19^th century novels I love and have been analyzing, reflecting and meditating upon over the years!  I am awakened to these intuitions, reading Qualles, who is drawing my attention into a clearer focus upon them!

Quales argues that progressive Victorians – such as Charlotte Bronte, Dickens and Elliot – were seeking a way beyond both the Puritanism and the Rationalism of the Enlightenment as well as the limitations of the Romanticist paradigm that arose in their wake.  Romanticism, he says, came forth and was formulated at a time just before the surge of industrialization and mechanization that came to dominate the Victorian World by mid-century in England.  The Progressive Victorians wanted a balance between Reason and Emotion, and they wanted to find a Path through life – as the Puritans had also always wanted to do – leading to meaningful self-fulfillment. They were simply travelling a secular path, with more secularized waystations, themes and foibles.

 As regards Villette, Quales is the second critic I have encountered who seems to see Lucy Snowe in a more positive light by the end of the novel.  My first read left me feeling that she was as yet un-self-realized and that she had a long way to go before she might reach the kind of state in which we find Jane Eyre, for instance, by the end of her story.  He agrees with me that the characters at the end of Shirley are not fully self-realized, and that the way they have paved over the green vale in their pursuit of progress, for instance, is not to be adulated (for this, see my blog, “The End of Shirley”)!  But of Lucy he suggests – in the epigraph to this blog – that she has navigated through life and come to a place where she is herself; alone, yes, but not un-self-realized?  (Would Quales go that far if I were to ask him?) 

Has Lucy really achieved “Freedom and Renovation” by the end of the novel?  Does Qualles believe she did; or am I mis-reading him?  Does her being alone and in exile not count against her self-realization? When I put it that way, I begin to doubt my own reaction to the end of Villette.  Exile and solitude are not necessarily negative things.

I had not thought, until I read this, that her self-exile from England entails an implicit critique her homeland.  She has no life there; perhaps she felt herself somewhat of an outsider there—possibly because of the suffering she had undergone in that 8-year period after the initial Bretton sojourn?  Given Qualls’ suggestion of an implicit critique of English society in the novel, perhaps Lucy is similar to Joyce; whose self-exile from Ireland was a literal reality in his lived-life, not that of one of his fictional characters only.

It is obvious from what she says that there was nothing left for her back in England.  At one point just before going to Villette, Lucy avers that she has no family, no home and that no one who would miss her if she left England, never to return.  Writing this, just now, I thought of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings who, in the end, cannot stay in Hobbiton; he cannot really dwell there, having become who he now is.  The world of The Shire is not for him as it was before he left, though he has played a key role in saving it for everyone else.   Frodo and Lucy have both gone through life-changing experiences; both have been traumatized by what they went through.

But whereas Frodo does not criticize the Shire after his return, he has achieved a kind-of self-realization through his experiences which makes him unable to stay there, Lucy leaves England as there is nothing left for her there.  Obviously not because she has ‘saved’ it, as Frodo has helped save Middle Earth – at least for a time – but because she cannot come into her own, become self-realized, if she stays in England.  The England she knew as a girl is no longer to be found; in part, because of what she has gone through.

Can I really accept the idea that Lucy is ‘happy’ – or at least reasonably satisfied with her existence – at the end of the novel, even if this is what Qualles is implying?  Perhaps the close re-reading in which I am now engaged may lead me to a different conclusion than did the first read.  I will certainly allow that.  However, I still feel that somehow – at some level – Lucy has never come to terms with whatever happened to her in that unnarrated 8-year period.  Does she need to?  Or maybe she has come to terms with her past ‘off stage,’ not in the overt narrative that she is giving us?  Perhaps my current re-read of the novel will divest me of this feeling, and I will see her as reasonably self-realized? 

We’ll see.

Any comments or responses, please share them.                                                     - MW