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 Brontë’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 Brontë’s continually darkening sense of the alienating nature of English life.” (50)

l-        Barry Qualls

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

Qualls’ 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 Brontës, 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).

Qualls 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 the human search for 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 Qualls, what these mid-19^th century writers were exploring, and I would tend to agree with him.

Reading this book is touching on intuitions I’ve had about the stories of the authors he examines.  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, though not under that name_ calling it ‘journeying’ or ‘wandering,’ et cetera.  But I see, now, that it is a secular pilgrimage that many of these characters were embarked upon.

Qualls argues that progressive Victorians – such as Charlotte Brontë, 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 better balance between Reason and Emotion than the Romanticists had achieved, and they yearned to find a Path through life – as the Puritans had also always wanted to do – leading to meaningful connections between the journeys of characters toward self-fulfillment and traditional pilgrimage themes. The characters in these novels were simply travelling a secular path, with more secularized waystations, themes and foibles.

As regards Villette, Qualls 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.  I was glad to find his analysis of the end of Shirley agreeing with mine in that the characters are not as fully self-realized, perhaps, as Jane Eyre, and that their paving-over of the green vale in a pursuit of worldly progress, for instance, is not to be adulated (for this, see my blog, “The End of Shirley”)!  Seeing both of these possible ends in Charlotte’s second and third novels, is Lucy Snowe more like Shirley and Caroline, or more like Jane?

Of Lucy he suggests (see 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 Qualls see that term as appropriate if I were to ask him?)   The expression “Freedom and Renovation” comes from the opening of Chapter XLI – Faubourg Clotilde – where she says:

Must I, ere I close, render some account of that Freedom and Renovation which I won on the fête-night? Must I tell how I and the two stalwart companions I brought home from the illuminated park bore the test of intimate acquaintance? (¶ 1)

She starts out by claiming she has ‘won’ these two “stalwart companions” on the night of the Fetê in the city, when she was confronted with revelations that both un-reined her from certain presuppositions and which, at the same time, opened her toward new possibilities.  I can see this, having read the previous chapter.  Yet in the very next paragraph she laments their lack of power:

I tried them the very next day. They had boasted their strength loudly when they reclaimed me from love and its bondage, but upon my demanding deeds, not words, some evidence of better comfort, some experience of a  relieved life—Freedom excused himself, as for the present impoverished and disabled to assist; and Renovation never spoke; he had died in the night suddenly.  (¶ 2)

So they were at that moment “impoverished and disabled” or dead?  As she reflects more on that night, her noctabulations – under the effect of a sleeping draught foisted on her by Madame Beck – left her many questions on waking the next day. 

So my question still is, has Lucy achieved this “Freedom and Renovation” by the end of the novel?  Does Qualls believe she did; or am I mis-reading him?  Does her being alone and in exile from her homeland not count against her self-realization?  When I put it that way, I begin to doubt my own initial reaction to the end of Villette.  … Exile and solitude are not necessarily negative things.

I had not considered, until I read this book, that Lucy's self-exile from England might also have been connected with changes going on there that were social and cultural, transcending the simply personal.  Qualls says, in relation to the end of Shirley in particular, that:

"Machine-centered English life offers the individual almost no way to assert his/her inner life in creative sustaining work, and offers few landscapes for the imagination to work upon.” (49)

Given Qualls’ description of English society at that time, it is possible to see Lucy as also potentially dis-enheartened by the accelerated social change in  her home country, the effect compounding what she herself has gone through personally.  The England she knew was no longer 'there.'  It had slipped into the past.  Lucy has no life left there; for two reasons: personal and because of the way her country was changing.  In a way, she is similar to James Joyce; whose self-exile from Ireland was a literal reality in his life, not something that happened to one of his fictional characters only.

Whatever the components of her sense of loss, 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. [*]

Like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, Lucy leaves her home after a traumatic experience.   The England she knew as a girl is no longer to be found; in part, because of what she has gone through, but also because of the ongoing mechanization, industrialism and commercialism that was quickly transforming English society during the lifetimes of the Brontës.

Can I 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 Qualls 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

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[*] 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.

Jane, Shirley & Lucy Snow (28 August 2024)

I haven’t written anything on Villette since reading it in May and June, as I have come to realize that I misunderstood it.  From what I’ve read about it (which isn’t a whole lot, as yet, as friends and I read Tolkien all summer!) Villette is an early novel with an unreliable narrator.  I didn’t ‘get’ that on my first read; perhaps because I was looking for some of the same themes that I’d traced through Jane Eyre and Shirley.  I quickly realized, though, that this fourth and last of Charlotte Bronté’s novels was taking a different approach, and I tried to follow – and be open to – that approach – whatever it was – through to the end.

Reflecting on Villette recently, I am engaged in a comparison and experiencing the contrast between it and the two previous novels.  I have not read The Professor, so I don’t know how it would fit into this analysis (if anyone wishes to share their thoughts on this with me, I’d be glad of the input), but the three stories I have read all deal – each in its own way – with self-realization and the journey toward it.

Jane’s journey is the most successful.  Through a kind of Eros & Psyche cataclysm in the middle of the story – the rupturing of the relationship between Rochester and Jane on their wedding day; via the revelation of Bertha Mason – Jane leaves Thornfield and heads off on a journey in which she continues her process of self-realization.  Unlike the Eros and Psyche myth – where Eros flies from Psyche after the revelation of his true identity – it is Jane who flees from Rochester after the revelation of his secret; the “madwoman in the attic” – his wife.

Jane Eyre ends, after Jane’s journey brings her finally to Ferndean (a very faery name!), in a plausibly hopeful and positive place.  Rochester is redeemed through fire, being maimed in his attempt to save Bertha from the flames she had first ignited in the governesses (Jane's) bedroom, and which then spread to the rest of the house, and Jane has come into her own, as a self-possessed, powerful woman, capable of loving the maimed man (a Beauty and the Beast theme, I always think?).  There is hope that their future may be a good (enough) one.

Shirley then follows the lives of four characters who, in the end, get paired off (Robert and Caroline; Shirley and Louis) and whose future might seem worthy of a similar hope until – as I suggested in my blog “The End of Shirley” – you analyze their final station in life in the last chapter.

All through this novel, the characters are moving amidst the motifs of faery and haunted places.  The faeryfolk would seem to be present, if not actual actors in the story.  I don’t think one actually appears to any of the characters – just as they never do in Jane Eyre either – but there is a faery ambience that touches the story (as I explored in my third blog on the novel).  The characters themselves – especially Caroline and Shirley – are likened to faeries, just as Jane is in the previous story.

So, as I read Shirley I was following what seemed the ley-lines of self-realization for various characters; especially Shirley and Caroline and to a lesser extent perhaps Louis and Robert.  But these ley-lines all seemed to dissipate into a situation of rather banal and the all-to-be-expected conventions of ‘progress’ and ‘industry’ by the end.  I kept asking myself, after finishing the novel, “what happened to cause these characters to fall back into such an ordinary conformity to the normative social and cultural mores?”  (I also explored this in “The End of Shirey”)

The self-realization that I was seeing unfolding in the course of the novel appears to fail at the end.  It may well take these two couples – Robert & Caroline and Shirley & Louis – years to come into a genuine state of self-realization.  I could imagine a second novel -- Shirley II – which would follow how these characters lived and finally broke with the conventions and conformities into which they had fallen, after which they reached a mature self-realization—and then engaged in life without such conformity and obedience to conventions of the time.  I think that could be a very interesting novel!

Then, reading Villette, I had yet another experience altogether; one in which – I would argue – the journey of self-realization fails utterly.  Though I have to read the novel again – and possibly again and again – I’m fairly confident in saying that Lucy Snow never gets over what it was that seems to have undermined her when she was young – after leaving the house where she was visiting with her godmother in Bretton; which is where she met two of the other significant characters in the narrative—Graham and Polly – for the first time.

After whatever happened in her late teens, Lucy set out to establish herself in life.  Pessimistic about her options, she became the live-in companion to an elderly women named Ms Marchmont.  I thought as I read this scenario that it might inspire revelations of Lucy’s personal tragedy and perhaps be the beginning of a process of revaluation for her?  But it doesn’t happen.  Not even after that iconic, poignant experience one night during a raging storm, when the elderly woman is stirred to deep memory of a night when she was young and witnessed the death of her fiancé one Christmas Eve.  I was quite moved by the story; pondering the depths of its implications for the experiencer and how it may have charted a course for her life which over time brought her to the present moment; telling the story of that night to her young companion!

Something about Lucy’s reaction to this story led me to think that perhaps whatever tragedy had occurred to her was of a similar nature?  Yet there is no textual evidence of this.  Lucy remains reticent and does not tell the reader – for she is the first-person narrator of the story – anything about what happened in those years between the months spent in Bretton and when the story resumes.  There is little healing of Lucy’s soul; no ultimate release from the effect of whatever it was that actually happened to her.

The novel keeps putting Lucy Snow into situations where I would have expected – or at least hoped – that there might come some healing for her.  But it never comes to fruition.  All of the experiences at the school in Labassecour (i.e., a fictionalized version of Belgium), her reunion with Graham (now Dr John Graham Bretton) and Polly (who is now Paulina Mary Home de Bassompierre via her father’s inheritance), her experiences at a Catholic church one night and via a growing friendship with M Paul Emmanuel—do not in the end provide sufficient transformative energies to liberate Lucy from whatever has wrecked her soul-journey.

At the end, having lost M Paul to shipwreck, Lucy seems to me ‘disconnected;’ going through life and doing what is expected—and in this state I don’t see any hope of release from what binds her.  While she seems to have had a good stint as a teacher, she has never confided in or shared with anyone – expect, perhaps, to the priest she goes to confession with, one night, on an impulse during one of her wanderings in the city, though we as the reader do not know what she said to him! – and remains an un-self-realized self at the end.

So over the course of these three novels I see the journey toward self-realization moving from (1) a reasonable fulfillment, portending a possible good life together for Jane and Rochester, to (2) potentially failed self-realizations where the four main characters are concerned, though the journey they have each undergone seemed propitious of some better end, to (3) at least at the end of the novel, a state of failed self-realization for Lucy Snow.

How all this will be nuanced by a re-reading of Villette and possible re-readings of Jane Eyre and Shirley, I may only discover in the process of those readings.