J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings: Modernist Fantasy, Ecology, Trauma, and the Great War

J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings: Modernist Fantasy, Ecology, Trauma, and the Great WarMolly HallUniversity of Rhode IslandMy paper will examine how the trauma of the Great War has actualized a divorce between subjective and objective reality in modern subjectivity. From a frame of ecological inquiry, we might begin to see this divorce as a conceptual one between humanity and ecology. Furthermore, I will ask, how might we see fantasy literature as an attempt to address this dislocation of subject from ecology? To answer this question, I will examine how J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings (which I will here forth refer to as Rings) uses fantasy to negotiate the relationship between war and ecology in response to the trauma of WWI. In doing so, I will be reading Rings as testimony to subjectivitys divorce from ecology within the dominant historical narrative.

Modernist poet W.H. Auden suggests that both modernist and fantasy writers attempt to bridge the gulf between the subjectively real [] and the objectively real (quoted in Hiley 21) in response to the the loss of values and roots (quoted in Hiley 31) as a result of the trauma of World War One (WWI).

This breakage of frames of reference, to borrow a phrase from trauma theorist Shoshana Felman, resulted, Inklings Scholar, Margaret Hiley, explains, in the breakdown of the synthesis of objective reality and subjective reality (22).

The modernist reaction was to write under the assumption that only the subjectively real could be fully known, while fantasy writers chose to conjure up a fantastic secondary world [where] the gap between subjective and objective reality no longer exists(Hiley 22).

Caruth writes, dreams and wish-fulfillment [are linked in Freud] to the question of external reality [, to] a reality of death, catastrophe, and loss (93).

Despite fantasys shifty indefinability all [major fantasy theorists] agree that fantasy is about the construction of the impossible (James and Mendlesohn 1).

Rosemary Jackson has most famously applied psychoanalytic notions of phantasies which refer to desires, drives, or unconscious fears in an effort to read Freud and Lacans notions of the divided self into such texts because she believes, fantasy has a subversive function in attempting to depict a reversal of the subjects cultural formation . . . for Jackson, fantasy is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss (quoted in A.M. Butler 91). Caruth reminds us that the dream . . . in Lacans analysis [is] a function of awakening . . . to respond, in awakening, to a call that can only be heard within sleep (99). It is only by dreaming that we are able to awaken to the call of what she identifies as the voice of the wound, or of trauma itself. Fantasy, then, not only does not obscure reality, but facilitates the awakening (belatedly) to the subjects relationship to a trauma, which we were not before conscious of. Not only that, but, Caruth adds, Awakening, in Lacans reading of [Freuds] dream, is itself the site of trauma, the trauma of the necessity and impossibility of responding to [a loss which appears external to ones self] (100).Fussell has stated, Thus the drift of modern history domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable. And the catastrophe that begins it is the Great War (81).

Kate McLoughlin introduces Lawrence I. Langers idea of irrealism: a complex amalgamation of reality and unreality that is discontinuous and dislocated, and Michael Rothberg who: proposed something very like, if not identical to, irrealism in the phenomena he terms traumatic realism. Like irrealism, traumatic realism entails the survival of claims of realisms into discourses that could be considered modernist, even post-modernist. . . [It] comprises not-writing in the sense that it evokes the real as a felt lack: the traumatic realist detail, unlike the standard realist detail, points to a necessary absence. [which rather than expunging] the traces of the trauma or loss that called the narrative into being in the first place [instead] constantly recalls the site and origin of loss (138). Trauma theorist Shoshona Felman asserts that in order to bear witness to anothers testimony the narrative must make the [reader] feel [and] progressively discover, how the testimony cannot be subsumed by its familiar notion, how the texts that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounterand make us encounterstrangeness (7). The pastoral, according to ecocritic, Lawrence Buell, anticipates the dilemma of having to come to terms with natural environments while participating in institutions of a technological culture that insulates one from the natural environment and splits ones allegiances (19). It anticipates this split and insulation, Buell adds, because it first helps to create and then sustains and exacerbates them (quoted in Phillips 19). The pastoral mode does this, Phillips continues, by buying wholesale the distinction between natural environments and culture (19). He goes on to describe the process by which the pastoral mode performs a reductive process of the hyperspaces which constitute an environment, by constructing them primarily as Landscapes [which] are more easily apprehended than the environments in which they are situated in space metonymically (19). He adds that when the environment functions merely as landscape and not as hyperspace, one loses the sense of the ecological space as An ecological niche [which is] a multidimensional hypervolume of which not all of its dimensions are spatial (20).

Modris Eksteins, explains that the war affects the becoming, the emergence, in the first half of the century, of our modern consciousness (xiii). This modern subject, possessing of this new consciousness, is characterized, according to Eksteins, by the questioning [of] the integrity of the real world, the visible and ordered world [which] was undermined . . . as the external world collapsed in ruins, the only redoubt of integrity became the individual . . . what came after [the Somme offensive, which poet David Jones] called the Break [was that] the I became all-important (211). The collision between the events [of WWI] and the language available . . . was one between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress (Fussell 184).

The challenge for war writing, Kate McLoughlin explicates, is to convey this charged space, to communicate the complex situationpart psycho-physiological, part geographicalthat is conflict (84). To be in the trenches was to experience an unreal, unforgettable enclosure and constraint, as well as a sense of being unoriented and lost. One saw two things only: the walls of an unlocalized, undifferentiated earth and the sky above (Fussell 54).

Fussell elaborates that the writer-survivors of the war perceive[d] things as regrettably disjointed if not actively opposed and polarized (115). This division is most obvious in the real and metaphorical division of landscape (Fussell 86-7). Great War poet Max Plowman noted the change between Victorian and modern conceptions of nature among soldiers, writing: [In the nineteenth century] the upper and more glorious half of Natures pageant [the sky] goes unseen by the majority of people . . . the trenches have altered that. Shutting off the landscape, they compel us to observe the sky; and when it is a canopy of blue . . . and when the earth below is a shell-stricken waste, one looks up with delight, recalling perhaps the days when, as a small boy, one lay on the garden lawn at home counting the clouds as they passed (italics mine, quoted in Fussell 58).

those who passed through the estranging remoteness of battle were not broken, but reborn echoing a common rhetoric of Conversion in literature of the Great War (Plowman quoted in Fussell 123).

After the war, writes Fussell, Prolonged trench warfare . . . establishes a model of political, social, artistic, and psychological polarization . . . whether enacted or remembered . . . which I take to be the primary mode in modern writing (83), explaining, What we can call gross dichotomizing is a persisting imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, it would seem, to the actualities of the Great War (82).

Addressing the pastoral paradise of home, Fussell explains, For the modern imagination the last summer [before WW1] has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrevocable lost [David Lowe has said] like those other generations who were given to witness the guillotining of the world, we never expected it. And like that of our counterparts, our world seemed most beautiful just before it disappeared (25).

Christopher Brawley says, the industrialization of our world divorces us from an experience of the sacramental vision [of nature], and hence there is more of a need to experience it within literary forms . . . the Shire is a peaceful place [its] pastoralism . . . is the first image of home . . . the Shire represents a closeness to nature (304).

Timothy Morton has propounded, It is necessary to reconceptualize, beyond this negative mode, the violence invoked whenever we speak of environmental damage. This first of all requires re-considering what is meant by nature. . . . conceiving of a metaphysics of nature as . . . an objective thing that is out there beyond us . . . is to ignore the very ecological relations that already characterize the specifically human (quoted in Tim Matts and Aiden Tynan 154).Galadriel explains, Do you not see wherefore your coming to us is as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlrien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten . . . the love of the Elves for their land and their work is deeper than the deeps of the Sea (Tolkien 365).

I have come, [Frodo] said. But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine! And suddenly, as he set it on his finger, he vanished from Sams sight . . . then [Sam] saw a strange and terrible thing. Gollum on the edge of the abyss was fighting like a mad thing with an unseen foe (Tolkien 945). Tolkien writes, To and fro he swayed, now so near the brink that almost he tumbled in, now dragging back, falling to the ground, rising, and falling again . . . Frodo gave a cry, and there he was, fallen upon his knees at the chasms edge. But Gollum, dancing like a mad thing, held aloft the ring, a finger still thrust within its circle . . . even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell (946). The significance of the traumatic fall is, as explained by Caruth, to be located in the recurring image of the accident . . . as the illustration of the unexpected or the accidental . . . becom[ing] the exemplary scene of trauma par excellence . . . because it tells of what it is, in traumatic events, that is not precisely grasped (6). As Caruth explains, the unexpected realitythe locus of referentialityof the traumatic story . . . associates reference with an impact . . . the impact of the fall . . . the story of the falling body . . . the story of the impact of reference [in which] the story of trauma is inescapably bound to a referential return (7). Tolkien first depicts Frodo on the anniversary of a war wound from his journey, found . . . lying in his bed; he was clutching a white gem that hung from a chain about his neck and he seemed half in a dream. It is gone forever, he said, and now all is dark and empty (1024). Flieger writes that the loss of the ring is Frodos final, awful test that he will fail . . . he will have lost his innocence . . . his ordinary physical and psychological self, and his home. All that on top of the greatest loss of allthe Ring . . . The loss has saved him from wraith-hood but left him bereft and diminished (289-90).

The Hobbits Return to the Shire...Concerning the presence of a leave-taking within narratives of trauma, Caruth writes, the narration of the trauma of leaving [inscribes] words that do not simply refer, but . . . convey the impact of a history precisely as what cannot be grasped about leaving (21). Sam, distraught at Frodos departure, asks, [a]nd I cant come.; To which Frodo replies, No, Sam. Not yet anyway . . . You cannot always be torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years, I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I have tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. . . . keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and love their beloved land all the more (1029-1030).

Using Moses and Monotheism, Freuds text on leaving, which is itself a mix of history and fantasy, as an example, Caruth demonstrates that a falling . . . is transmitted precisely in the unconscious act of leaving. It is this unconsciousness of leaving that bears the impact of history (22), but, she continues, Leaving home . . . is also a kind of freedom, the freedom to . . . bring [ones] voice to another place . . . [the] freedom to leave is, paradoxically, not to live but to die: to bring forth [ones] voice to others in dying. [the] voice emerges, that is, as a departure . . . that addresses us (23). The fall which traumatizes Frodo on Mount Doom is due to, as Flieger asserts, Frodos failure [and his] sacrifice which depict Middle-earth as a place where the Fall . . . is a gradual process . . . is continual . . . We might say that Tolkiens world is falling rather than fallen . . . leaving at the center a space for the audience to see itself, and thus to participate in the story (230-231). As Michael Livingston writes, [Frodo] simply wishes to be whole once more. But his trauma is too great. . . . The world he has saved, sadly, is one to which he can no longer relate (89).

There and Back AgainShires RecoveryThe trauma of World War I is not enacted, therefore, upon ecology, but within us, people, and our perceived separation from it. As Bombadil and Treebeard have implied, they, and nature, in the end, are indifferent to the fate of humanity. Ecology will persist regardless of our actions, it just may not persist in a fashion conducive to the sustainability of the human species. Rings is, after all, a work of literature, and we, literary scholars, and not scientists. Although there are very real material consequences both of World War I and our subjective disjuncture, what I address here is our loss not the loss of a world. Throughout Rings, as many people from scholars to fans have noted, we experience wondrous magical things, places, and creatures. We may desire strongly to actualize and dwell in that fantastic realm, desire for all this to be true. But the tragic beauty of The Lord of the Rings is that at every step on Frodo and the Fellowships journey they (and we) experience the magic of a world where our absence from it is always already implicit, both in its nature as fantasy, as well as indicated by the pervasive sense of loss throughout the story: future, past, or actualized in the plot. What we get in reading Rings is a reenactment, a performance, of our missed encounter with the fall from, or leaving of, ecology within our own psyche, a placement humanity was never fully conscious of holding in the first place. Although the Great War did not create this displacement, it awoke us to it, belatedly, to a traumatic impact of reference for which we had no frame of reference, and whose fantasy frames Tolkien tries diligently to recreate for us in this epic tale, as the Men of Middle-earth are created, empowered in that world, as modern people, Fourth-Agers, if you will, in the very historical act of losing all that once defined their home-place of Middle-earth, the place where Elves and Men and talking trees may mingle, at the end of history, after the war to end all wars.