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On Tolkien's Reappraisal of the Fairy-Story On Tolkien’s Reappraisal of the Fairy-Story Joanny Moulin To cite this version: Joanny Moulin. On Tolkien’s Reappraisal of the Fairy-Story. In-between : Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism, G. R. Taneja, 2015, 14 (1), pp.3-12. hal-01138378 HAL Id: hal-01138378 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01138378 Submitted on 3 Apr 2015 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Contents Editorial Advisory Board In-between 0 0 11 II Bialostosky PennsylWlniQ SIIJJe U,,'versuy Essays Essayt and StlXfic.s in E D Blodgett Uni".,.iry 0/ Alberta JOANN YMOULIN On Tolkien 's reappraisal of th e fairy-story I..I+ct'ory Critia sm Ronald Bush Ex.ltr Colle,.. Oxford 3 Paul A Cantor 0/ Yi,.,lnia ANTlE M. RAUWERDA White man burnt black: R K DosGupta C.lcutta VOLUME 14 : I Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient R W Desoi Universlly oJDr/hi MARC" 2005 13 lIoward fork Univenity JOSHUAPARKER The Alltobiography ofAlice B. Toklas: G D K III. m Unl ...,./lya/Gur/ph The self-marketing memoi r Nigel L... k Qu..n '. ColI.,e, Cambridg. is publisbed 25 in John Lucas Vnlv<F,ity oJLoullhlwrougl, NICK FREEMAN ' Perfect and Poisonous': Wilde's Fatal Book Mareh & Claude Rawson fait! University 31 Vln.d S... Vnl".,.lry a/Dr/hi GEHRETT ELLIS Gardens and Labyrinths and the Dionysian Esther S<hor Pr/" CdDn V"lverslty World: Stan Smirh Un/vt!rsiIY 0/DU'lIue Dorian Gray and The Immoralist Du nca n Wu SI Calh"I" . 's CoIl.g.. Ox/oro 41 Conl enlS ofln-be lween arc listCl! I abstracted I BRAD WrNDHAUSER The power of confession: the closets of annotated in Animal B,bliography ojE" glisll Dorian Gray LangJ/age alld [A BELL]. MLA 51 In/ernallonal BIbliography und World Shauspeare ALEXANDER MO UDROV Wilde rereads Ihe myth ofOrpneus and Bibliography. For mall", oJusage and/orm dies authors should use 'he Mf..A style-sheet, fifth 61 ttdiliofl. Submis.f i o ns may be!orwa,ded as e-mail MAR tA BEV tL LE Dorian Gray: The 'Decadent ' Gothi c ODd (111achmen IS along willi hard.copit!s air-mailed. the Terror of ' Selr Tille page and I"de_" are Included in tilt September 71 issue The State ofLeiters Subscription. T\I.. o )'cnrsltbur issues: Rs 300 I NEEL UM SARAN GA UR Rel hinking Rao USS28 post-fre • . Lif. subscription for inSlitutions 79 IS Rs 1,500 I USS I50, and for individuals, Rs 1,000 I US$ IOO. Sing I. iss ue: Rs 75 1 USS7 Book Reviews Subscription, permissions. and missi ng Issue$: CHRISTINE REYNIER Virginia Woolfand the Bloomsbllry Avanl- Post Box 5205, Chanakyapuri. Garde: War Civilization Modernity by Christine Froula New Delhi 11002 1 India 87 9198t0427831 mobile 91 112271 4607 fl\cs lmile ROBERT REHDER Ezra POllnd: A Lilerary Life by Ira B Nadel 91 I I 2271 5435 home 91 II 2411 2557 college 89 <Jnbttween@rediffmail. com> AMY C SMITH Fairy Tale.\' and the Fit:lion ofIris Murdoch. Margarel Drabble. and A S /lyall by Lisa M Fiander ISSN: 0971-9474 93 STEPHANIE FISCHETTI EM For.<terand Ihe I'olilk., of Imperialism by Mohammed Shaheen 97 MARKUS OPPOlzER The Sea by John Banville 101 Contributors Published and ed ited by G. R. Taneja 2 Depart ment orEnglish, R .L. A. College Univers ity of Delhi , New Delhi 11 0021 Ind ia On Tolkien's reappraisal of the fairy-story JOANNY MOULIN Universile Ai..·Marseille I lthough many scholars have produced an abundance of reflec- tions on the fairy-story, especially since the rediscovery of the A genre by the Romantics, there is no such thing as a theory of the tale. This essentially ill-defined province of literature still lacks a well-developed body of theoretical texts that could compare with the research accomplished for mimetic fict ion, notably in the second half of the twentieth century. This gap in literary theory is due in part to the rather wide-spread view, held among others by Northrop frye, that myth and the folk:tale remain pre-literary categories. However, frye's archetypal critidsm, as well as other schools of criticism in the wake of post-structuralist and anthropological studies, has something to say about the literary genre of fantasy, of which Tolkien is rightl y considered as a foundin g father. fantasy has asserted itself only re- cently in literary hi story, perhaps, for the academic community to take it seriously. Yet there is a growing tendency today, particularly in the United Kingdom, to bring this widely popular branch of lit erature within the pale of academic research. This is sometimes called 'cross- over' literature, or more playfully 'kiddult' or 'chadult' literature, because these works often started off as juvenile literature but gradu- ally conquered an increasing adult readership. Tolkien had addressed this issue as early as the I 960s, by insisting that 'actually, the associa- tion of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic hi s- tory'. (34) He compared the fa te of fairy-tales to that of precious ob- jects gradually defaced and deteriorated through too long a relegation to the nursery, like a valuable antique left over for children to play IN-BETWEEN: ESSAYS & STUDIES IN LITERARY CRITICISM V OLUME 14 MARCH 2005 NUMBER 1 4 IN-BETWEEN On Tolkien's reappraisal of the fairy-story 5 with. 'Collections of fairy-stories', he said, 'are. in fact, by nature With Tolkien, things are more subtle, and probably altogether attics and lumber-rooms, only by temporary and local custom play- different. But this conscious, determined resistance to anything like an rooms'. (35) But hi s approach to the fairy-story is innovative pre- allegorical mode of writing may also help explain why those theories cisely in so far as it is no longer merely an antiquarian's interest, but of the fairy-tale which bear heavily on psychology or psychoanalysis demonstrates the creative potential of the genre. are of no avail for Tolkien, because these are inherently allegorical The limited space of this article does not allow for a wide- modes of interpretation. For instance, Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian ranging study of such a vast topic. The present argument, therefore, reading in The Uses of Enchantment (Psychanalyse des contes de will concentrate on two remarkable essays by Tolkien - his 1964 /lies) amounts to little more than an instrumenta li sation of some tradi- article, 'On Fairy Story', and, to a lesser extent, his ground-breaking tional fairy-tales for the proper education of children, interpreting 1936 paper entitled 'Beowulf. the Monsters and the Critics'. My poin t them as allegories of the typical problems of adolescence. Similarly, of departure, as far as the critical reception of Tolkien's theses on Marie-Louise von Franz, in The Interpretation of Fairy Tales and fairy-stories is concerned. is an article by Robert J. Reilly, 'Yolkien other books in the same vein, undertakes a brilliant, long,winded and the Fairy Story', reprinted in the 1968 collection of essays, translation of the imagery of fairy-stories into the appellations of Tolkien and the Critics. I propose to address briefly two main issues - complexes and archetypes of Jungian psychology. When all is told, Tolkien's rejection of allegory. which can be considered as a case of these forms of theorising have little to say fTom a literary point of intentional fallacy, and his revision of some high-romantic concepts view, and one might even consider that they evacuate the tales qua and ideas such as Imagination and the organic conception of litera- literary texts. Marie-Louise von Franz tends to relegate these literary ture. artefacts a little deeper down the lumber-room of some pre- Tolkien's take on fairy-story notoriously distinguishes itselfby a psychoanalytical dark age. Bruno Bettelheim's methods could be radical rejection of the notion of allegory. He repeatedly and rather applied to those living ti ssues of the genre that children'S literature polemically contends that fairy-stories are not in their essence allego- constitutes, but only fTom the exclusively allegorical point of view of rical. Speaking of The Lord ofthe Rings, in a commentary on his own modern educationists who would have swapped the Christian doctrine essay, ' On Fairy Story', he declares in a 1956 letter to Michael for a Freudian Weltanshauung in which. after all. art and li terature are Straight that 'There is no "allegory." moral, political, or contemporary little more than clinical symptoms or provisionally useful instruments. in the work at all. It is a " fairy-story,'" and he goes on to say that These basically allegorical analyses of fairy stories could be 'fairy-story has its own mode of reflecting "truth." different fTo m generically called 'archetypal criticism', because their essentially allegory, or (sustained ) satire. or "realism," and in so me ways more slructuralist r.eadings always aim at reducing the literary text to their powerful'. Of course, he does not pretend to deny that 'something of structural or archetypal components .. An epitome of th at species of the teller's own reflections and "values" will inevitably get worked in critics is no doubt the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, whose Mor- 'but he insists that 'This is not the same as allegory' (Lellers 232-3).
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