While idly thumbing through The Tolkien Reader this past week, I came
across this interesting passage from On Fairy Stories:
"In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to
words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation
of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the
mind, even to overthrow it. [NOTE 30] Silliness or morbidity are
frequent results.
NOTES
30 ". . . I am speaking here, of course, of the primary expression of
Fantasy in 'pictorial' arts, not of 'illustrations'; nor of the cinematograph.
However good in themselves, illustrations do little good to fairy-stories. The
radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible
presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible form.
Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive. It is at once
more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or
stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet
each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his
imagination.- Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer or
painter can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste Or fancy, but
the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some
form of his own. If a story says 'he climbed a hill and saw a river in the
valley below,' the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of
such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it
will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but
especially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first
embodiment of the word."
Tolkien is saying, broadly, that fantasy must be restricted to written
literature; that no form of illustrative art will suffice.
A. Does this make sense to you? Do you agree? Does the question make you want
to read the entire essay On Fairy Stories to find out what exactly his
terms are?
More specifically, he rejects pictorial art (e.g., painting, etc.) that
attempts to portray fantasy, as tending to "morbidity or silliness". He is
talking here of art that does not reference already-written fantasy, but is
original to the painter's imagination (Blake, Goya, Dali, come to mind; or the
many, many more contemporary fantasy artists). I have omitted some of his
writing on this, because I am more interested in where he goes next.
In his note 30, he explains that "illustration" (art that attempts to
pictorialize already-written fantasy) necessarily destroys the reader's freedom
to personalize the image and make the reading experience personal and unique.
To Tolkien, such personalization is the whole point of fantasy.
(Notice, by the way, how his theory explains his often-noted tendency to name
things and places in his fiction with generic names like The Water, The Shire
or The Lonely Mountain, or thinly-disguised in another language: Bree
means Hill, Theoden means King, etc.; and also explains his reluctance
to describe his characters' physical appearance. He does not want to override
your imagination as you read.)
B. Do you agree? Does the usual reaction to viewing an illustration of
Tolkien's works ("not quite right", "not how I imagined it", "almost perfect",
etc.) lead one to agree with his sweeping theoretical destruction of the very
idea of fantasy illustration?
Interestingly, Tolkien here includes Cinema in the category of Illustration,
not Drama (which is his next topic). To him the moving pictures on a screen are
enhanced illustration, not drama, and are subject to the same critical
failure.
C. Well, now. With the recent release of the well-received New Line trilogy of
films of The Lord of the Rings, we have some material to consider, don't
we? Christopher Tolkien stated as the films began production that he does not
think his father's works can be filmed, in an absolute rejection of the very
idea.
D. Rather than criticizing him for this crabbed attitude, should we not read
On Fairy Stories as he has, and conclude that J.R.R. Tolkien would have
rejected not just Peter Jackson's films, but any films at all, as inimical to
his goal in writing his massive epic?
E. Does seeing the New Line films' visualization of Middle-earth deprive you of
your own vision of Tolkien's writing?
"It is a misfortune that Drama, an art
fundamentally distinct from Literature, should so commonly be considered
together with it, or as a branch of it. Among these misfortunes we may reckon
the depreciation of Fantasy. For in part at least this depreciation is due to
the natural desire of critics to cry up the forms of literature or
"imagination" that they themselves, innately or by training, prefer. And
criticism in a country that has produced so great a Drama, and possesses the
works of William Shakespeare, tends to be far too dramatic. But Drama is
naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever
succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly
acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking
animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy.
This is, I think, well illustrated by the failure of the bastard form,
pantomime. The nearer it is to "dramatized fairy-story" the worse it is. It is
only tolerable when the plot and its fantasy are reduced to a mere vestigiary
framework for farce, and no "belief" of any kind in any part of the performance
is required or expected of anybody. This is, of course, partly due to the fact
that the producers of drama have to, or try to, work with mechanism to
represent either Fantasy or Magic. I once saw a so-called "children's
pantomime," the straight story of Puss-in-Boots, with even the metamorphosis of
the ogre into a mouse. Had this been mechanically successful it would either
have terrified the spectators or else have been just a turn of high-class
conjuring. As it was, though done with some ingenuity of lighting, disbelief
had not so much to be suspended as hanged, drawn, and quartered."
Here Tolkien moves on to his real target: the live and in-person "stage-play"
presentation of fantasy works or fantasy ideas. He rejects the idea that drama
is any form of "literature" because the written play is simply a template for a
live action experience. He points out the absurdity of attempting to enact
fantasy ideas using real people or props. He berates the English critical
community for rejecting fantasy writing because it is so unsusceptible to
dramatization(!).
F. What kind of drama does Tolkien restrict himself to liking? Have you ever
seen what he would call "fantasy", enacted on stage, in a way that engaged your
belief? Is Tolkien's argument about fantasy and drama out-of-date, because no
one goes to plays anymore anyway, or is his argument equally valid when updated
to films even though film is imagery and not live-action?
A little further on, Tolkien continues, turning to a more theoretical obstacle
to dramatic representation of fantasy:
"A reason, more important, I think, than the
inadequacy of stage-effects, is this: Drama has, of its very nature, already
attempted a kind of bogus, or shall I say at least substitute, magic: the
visible and audible presentation of imaginary men in a story. That is in itself
an attempt to counterfeit the magician's wand. To introduce, even with
mechanical success, into this quasi-magical secondary world a further fantasy
or magic is to demand, as it were, an inner or tertiary world. It is a world
too much. To make such a thing may not be impossible. I have never seen it done
with success. But at least it cannot be claimed as the proper mode of Drama, in
which walking and talking people have been found to be the natural instruments
of Art and illusion. [NOTE 31] For this precise reason--that the
characters, and even the scenes, are in Drama not imagined but actually
beheld--Drama is, even though it uses a similar material (words, verse, plot),
an art fundamentally different from narrative art. Thus, if you prefer Drama to
Literature (as many literary critics plainly do), or form your critical
theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to
misunderstand pure story-making, and to constrain it to the limitations of
stage-plays. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the
basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into
a play."
G. Do you think Tolkien is right to separate film from stage in his
distinctions of illustration vs. drama vs. literature? How common was "fantasy
film" in the 1930s, when he wrote On Fairy Stories? Does the "magic" of
today's special effects, so much more complex and realistic-looking than they
were in his time, finally negate his argument, as some have claimed? Or is his
finely theoretical perception of the "tertiary" world of dramatised fantasy
correct: it is a "world too much", and you can have one or the other, but not
both?
NOTES
31 "I am referring, of course, primarily to fantasy of forms and visible
shapes. Drama can be made out of the impact upon human characters of some event
of Fantasy, or Faerie, that requires no machinery, or that can be assumed or
reported to have happened. But that is not fantasy in dramatic result; the
human characters hold the stage and upon them attention is concentrated. Drama
of this sort (exemplified by some of Barrie's plays) can be used frivolously,
or it can be used for satire, or for conveying such 'messages' as the
playwright may have in his mind-for men. Drama is anthropocentric. Fairy-story
and Fantasy need not be. There are, for instance, many stories telling how men
and women have disappeared and spent years among the fairies, without noticing
the passage of time, or appearing to grow older. In 'Mary Rose' Barrie wrote a
play on this theme. No fairy is seen. The cruelly tormented human beings are
there all the time. In spite of the sentimental star and the angelic voices at
the end (in the printed version) it is a painful play, and can easily be made
diabolic: by substituting (as I have seen it done) the elvish call for 'angel
voices' at the end. The non-dramatic fairy-stories, in so far as they are
concerned with the human victims, can also be pathetic or horrible. But they
need not be. In most of them the fairies are also there, on equal terms. In
some stories they are the real interest. Many of the short folk-lore accounts
of such incidents purport to be just pieces of 'evidence' about fairies, items
in an age-long accumulation of 'lore' concerning them and the modes of their
existence. The sufferings of human beings who come into contact with them
(often enough, wilfully) are thus seen in quite a different perspective. A
drama could be made about the sufferings of a victim of research in radiology,
but hardly about radium itself. But it is possible to be primarily interested
in radium (not radiologists)-or primarily interested in Faerie, not tortured
mortals. One interest will produce a scientific book, the other a fairy-story.
Drama cannot well cope with either."
H. Did the New Line films fall into the trap Tolkien foresaw, by emphasizing
the "human drama" of his characters rather than capturing the magic of the
human/Faerie interaction that his writing so emphasizes? Did Troy do the
same thing when the producers of that film dropped the Greek Gods from their
script?
And finally: Common sense tells us that the films and illustrations of LotR are
simply to be enjoyed on their own terms; nothing is stated more often here on
TORn than the qualifier "nothing can replace the books", and Jackson and Boyens
have often said the same. Who are these critics that Tolkien is arguing with?
The key phrase in this passage, it seems to me, is "Thus, if you prefer Drama to Literature (as many literary critics
plainly do), or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or
even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-making, and to
constrain it to the limitations of stage-plays." Here I take Tolkien to
mean that the literary critics of his day insisted that all literature be
confined to that sort of action that could be, if need be, dramatized and
produced on stage with realistic effect.
H. Has Tolkien won? Is fantasy now accepted as a respectable form of
literature, fifty years after Lord of the Rings made his final statement on
this subject, or is this kind of literary criticism still ruling the academy
and the reviews? Or has some new literary theory taken hold since Tolkien's
time, that does not insist on dramatic realism, but still rejects fantasy as an
inadequate or childish form of literature?
I. Would Tolkien view the New Line films as an admirable dramatization of his
book once he understood that critics do not view the more "realistic" film as
an improvement or replacement of his writing? Or would he still "grump" that
the films are simply the very negation of the essence of fantasy as he
understands and writes
it?
squire online:
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