Gollum's Booke

 OK, here's something to contemplate instead of the rebirth of the Republic and transformationalness of President Barack Hussein Obama, which is a wonderful thing but what everybody else is writing about. In the absence of further developments, a simple 'yee-hah!' will have to stand.

So, Tolkien.

I've gotten in my re-re-read of the Lord of the Rings to probably the most problematic part of the book: after all that wonderful stuff in the first book of the Two Towers--the Ents, the Riders of Rohan, the Battle of Helm's Deep and the confrontation with Saruman--we go from that rich and crowded canvas full of nobility, magic, miracles from the Elder Days, to a spare, ugly depressing drama with only three characters in a horrible dreary landscape. To be sure, the story is advancing onward, but it's as if Tolkien takes all his narrative capital that he builds up in the first part of the book and spends it in the second part. Fans of the book grit their teeth in this section and try to get through it as quickly as possible, and breathe an audible sigh of relief when Faramir shows up. From Shakespeare and Malory and Spenser we seem to have dropped into a Beckett play by the most grisly of mistakes.

It's a peculiar choice, and one which other fantasy writers, who will in general follow Tolkien slavishly, tend to avoid. What is going on in these chapters, that Tolkien should spend so much time on slogging through an industrial waste site?

The answer, of course, is Gollum.

He's altogether a peculiar creation: the only obvious antecedent is Shakespeare's Caliban, but he's not an accessory or a diversion. In fact, if the first three chapters are anything other than getting from point A to point B at a tortuous pace, it's the delineation of Gollum before the eyes of Frodo and Sam.

If I were to ask you what the most interesting character in the Lord of the Rings, you might balk and say Frodo, or Sam, or even Éowyn: but Frodo is not much other than a hero, and Sam the steadfast companion. Éowyn is certainly a contender, but if you don't confuse the issue with being sympathetic, there's no real competition. It's Gollum.

The Lord of the Rings is not what most critics would recognize as a modern novel, and most critics don't get past the magic rings and Black Riders (with significant exceptions like W.H. Auden.) The folks on the fantasy side take the view that the critical criteria honed for Henry James are simply not applicable to the mythic/epic/lyric modes embodied in fantasy. But what if we were to take one of the central criteria bruited about in Intro to the Modern Novel classes--that the core of the novel is the transformation of a character--James's American or George Eliot's Adam Bede or Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary--and apply it to LOTR? It works with Gollum. (Presented for your consideration--the virtue of blogging wherein one can in fact juxtapose Sméagol and Emma Bovary. No English Department to get fired from here!)

But no, it's really not so ludicrous to look, at least for a while, at the Lord of the Rings as the story of Gollum. Certainly its the one thread that stands out from the others, tinged with magic and theological beauty: amid the noble heroes and ferocious monsters you have a half-naked sniveling little junkie. Nor does it really jar, because Tolkien, by the intense byplay between Frodo, Gollum and Sam, that this jarring creature is intimately related to the problem of the Ring, and the problem of evil--of Christian Sin, of Buddhist Attachment, of power and fear. It's no big deal to call the marsh-bound trio, ego, superego and id--but Tolkien makes it increasingly clear that Frodo has a Gollum writhing beneath his skin--that when Frodo acquired the Ring he acquired a shadow that gradually became visible--until in the end, it leaped upon his back, tore at him in the heart of a volcano, bit his finger off, and saved the world. And it's not all that outrageous to deem Gollum's schizoid Slinker-and-Stinker dialogue (so breathtakingly realized in Peter Jackson's movie--maybe the first real piece of CGI high art) as the center of the book--a center with a reflection in the Mirror of Galadriel--where it had an exalted tinge of faery, but which ultimately had nothing nice about it, muttering before the gates of Mordor.

This isn't all that the book is about--because The Lord of the Rings ain't the Modern Novel, and people don't come back to the book over and over again for Gollum. But deprived of good shadows, the rest of Tolkien's great picture would lack depth. The thuggish banality of the Orcs makes the Elves easier to understand; Boromir's failed heroism makes Aragorn's unfailed sort more comprehensible; Théoden's stature is appreciated after Wormtongue; and Aragorn's love for Arwen is given dimension by his shitty treatment of Éowyn. (Calls 'em as I sees 'em, folks.)

The Lord of the Rings was not the first sub-created novel of fantasy: that honor probably goes to the works of William Morris, like The Wood Beyond the World. But if you can get through that genuinely antiquarian, mannered, and shadowless narrative, you'll appreciate just how modern The Lord of the Rings is. Despite what's become standard escapist roadshow elements, you, you don't actually escape much in the pages of the Lord of the Rings. Well, cars and cell phones maybe, but certainly not human ugliness, despair, self-deception and cruelty. It's astounding and earthshaking because it includes more stuff at the other end of the spectrum than we had been used to, and it is that that shook the world and changed more than one generation. But if it ran from modern ugliness, the Light of Valinor would be that much harder to believe in. 

All this makes it no more pleasant to get through, of course, but as the Perfect Ascended Master Mary Poppins once almost taught, a spoonful of medicine helps the sugar go down.