Tolkien and Bakhtin on Authorship, Literary Freedom, and Alterity Benjamin Saxton What a Tale We Have Been In, Mr
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Tolkien and Bakhtin on Authorship, Literary Freedom, and Alterity Benjamin Saxton What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we?” [Sam] said. “I wish I could hear it told! Do you think they’ll say: Now comes the story of Nine-fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Riven- dell they told us the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it! And I wonder how it will go on after our part.” (RK, VI, iv, 228–29) am’s narrative, which he imagines amidst danger and despair, Sindicates the vital place of stories and creative collaboration in Middle-earth. For Tolkien, the act of narration becomes a metaphor for living in the world. Listening to other voices and expressing one’s own are major considerations of his fiction. But despite many insight- ful treatments of fate and freedom in his mythology,1 critics have rarely focused on Tolkien’s presentation of literary freedom or, more broadly, how his theory of sub-creation can be situated among con- temporary views of authorship.2 This essay is principally concerned with the role of creative relationships in Middle-earth: the way in which authors (including Tolkien himself) enable or restrict the agency of their characters or their fellow narrators. Artistic creativity, when shared, becomes a liberating and life-enriching partnership; when denied, it becomes a harsh, suffocating kind of discourse. I read Tolkien alongside the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, whose provocative discussion of author-hero relations can illuminate Tolkien’s own exploration of authorship and alterity. I begin by dis- cussing how they both conceive of the author as a figure who shares narrative responsibilities with his characters. Next, I briefly discuss the ways in which this collaborative approach to authorship departs from contemporary critical views that call for the removal (or “death”) of the author. Finally, I consider how Bakhtin’s understanding of alter- ity appears in the character-character (or self-other) relationships in The Lord of the Rings. A second purpose of this essay, then, is to show that the relation between Tolkien and Bakhtin is much greater than has been previously recognized.3 While their views are certainly not identical—indeed, I will suggest that there are important differences between them—both writers emphasize what might be called an eth- ics of creativity: choosing to talk with others or to shut them out, deciding to craft shared stories or domineering monologues. 165 Benjamin Saxton Variations of Authorial Freedom and Control Bakhtin’s account of author-hero relations is intimately tied to his broader theory of dialogics. For Bakhtin, an individual is never a single, isolated person in full possession of his or her speech, but rather a person among persons whose voice gains meaning only with others: “Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree” (Problems 293). Each spoken utterance, as a result, “is accompanied by a sideways glance at another person” (Problems 32). A single word—“precious” comes to mind—gains its meaning in the space between speakers as di- verse as Gollum, Bilbo, Frodo, Pippin, Isildur, Gandalf, the narrator, and Tolkien himself. Even if life is irreducibly dialogic, this does not prevent us from de- fining each other and the world monologically—that is, as the condi- tion in which “another person remains wholly and merely an object of con- sciousness, and not another consciousness” (Problems 293). Monologic discourse shuts out the voice of the other, turning him or her into a lifeless object rather than a living subject. With very few exceptions, Bakhtin argues, this condition has characterized the history of the Western novel. Just as we are tempted to close out voices prematurely in order to exert a measure of control over the world, so too have au- thors imposed artificial unities in their work. The monologic author, standing outside the novel as an omnipotent judge, knows everything about his characters and can evaluate, contrast, and juxtapose them as he pleases. “An internal connection, a connection between conscious- nesses,” as a result, is completely absent (Problems 69). “The characters,” Bakhtin writes, “are self-enclosed and deaf; they do not hear and do not answer one another. There are not and cannot be any dialogic re- lationships among them. They neither argue nor agree” (Problems 70). In resistance to monologism and its corollaries—manipulation, false unities, even totalitarianism4—Bakhtin searched for an alterna- tive relationship between authors and characters, which he found in the fiction of Dostoevsky. This special relationship, which he called “polyphony,” can be considered an intense, very rare kind of dialogism. In the polyphonic novel, according to Bakhtin, the strict hierarchy be- tween author and hero has been somehow dismantled. “A plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world,” engage on equal terms with the author, who is one voice among many (Problems 6). Characters can disagree with the author, surprise him, and devel- op in ways that the author himself could never predict. Bakhtin com- pares the polyphonic author to Goethe’s Prometheus, who “creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus) but free people, capable of standing 166 Tolkien and Bakhtin on Authorship, Literary Freedom, and Alterity alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him” (Problems 6). Two of the points mentioned above have special relevance to Tolk- ien’s conception of author-character relations. First, in a striking par- allel to Bakhtin’s contrast between monologue and dialogue, Tolkien distinguishes between “magic” and “enchantment.”5 The latter tech- nique, used by the Elves, “does not seek delusion nor bewitchment and domination; it seeks shared enrichment, partners in making and de- light, not slaves” (TL 48; OFS 64). This kind of free and shared creativ- ity is entirely different from the “magic” of those who create as a means of enslaving others, which spoils the freedom implicit in the creative act and represents a monologic attempt to rival Primary creation (TL 48–49; OFS 64). When Sauron forges the One Ring, for instance, the object-ification of others becomes strikingly literal, as the Ringwraiths, Gollum, and Sauron himself are bound by its seductive power. Dialogic and monologic discourse, then, reinforce the tension in Tolkien’s my- thology between shared storytelling, an act that preserves freedom and creativity, and the impulse of Sauron (among others) to reduce people to self-enclosed objects, appropriately symbolized by the One Ring. A still deeper connection exists between Tolkien’s view and Bakhtin’s: they both see a natural connection between the artist as “sub-creator” and God as Creator.6 While Bakhtin seldom discussed theological questions—he was an exceedingly private man who also wrote under the shadow of Soviet censors7—a rare passage details how Dostoevsky, in his novelistic activity, operates as God-Creator. For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky appears as God “in His relation to man, a rela- tion allowing man to reveal himself utterly (in his immanent develop- ment)” (Problems 285). If Dostoevsky’s relation to his fictive world re- sembles the activity of God in his relation to man, as Bakhtin suggests, then the “divine” principle behind Dostoevsky’s activity is freedom— open-ended dialogue, transition, conflict, and unfinished searching. His heroes and antiheroes are granted the unconditional ability to develop, even if (as is often the case) this freedom leads to their ruin. In this sense, the fictive world that Dostoevsky created is the world “as it is”: a place of many competing truths, unresolved arguments, and perpetual struggles between good and evil. The artistic position of Dostoevsky as God-Creator is therefore one in which Dostoevsky does not overwhelm his characters with supreme power and knowledge, but respects their intrinsic freedom and independence. Whether Dostoevsky actually achieved this special type of dialogic relationship—or whether polyphony can, in fact, exist at all—is debat- able.8 Without entering into these debates, the question that I want to consider here is whether Tolkien’s fiction meets the conditions of 167 Benjamin Saxton the polyphonic novel. As we have seen, Bakhtin’s conception of the God-Creator as a purveyor of freedom, enabling man to “reveal him- self utterly,” bears a striking resemblance to Tolkien’s understanding of proper sub-creation, which features partners in making rather than slaves. Tolkien expressed similar views in his much-quoted dis- tinction between applicability (“the freedom of the reader”) and al- legory (“the purposed domination of the author”) (FR, Foreword, 7). Here, Tolkien resists the constraints of allegory in which the charac- ters and plot are merely instruments that are “dominat[ed]” by the author’s engineered moral or idea. In this way, the freedom of shared creation between Primary creators and sub-creators is extended to readers as well. Tolkien’s fiction is also “unfinished” in a way similar to (though not identical with) Dostoevsky’s fiction. Verlyn Flieger has noted that the Ainulindalë, creation story in The Silmarillion, “is a portrait in music of the real world as it really appears—unfinished, conflicted, containing harmony and discord, love and hate, war and peace” (“The Music and the Task” 162). In my opinion, the Music of the Ainur stands as a meta- phor for Tolkien’s mythology as a whole: a magnificent, incomplete corpus that was conceived as part of an ongoing, self-revising process. In addition, Martin Simonson has recently discussed Tolkien’s ample use of the ever-changing, multigeneric form of the novel.