by Karen Haber
Oh yes, right, I know: those who love Ulysses find new wonders in it every time they read. To which I say, cool. Read it again and again, you lucky Smart People; you really have it over the rest of us poor peasants who find it to be one long tedious joke, which isn’t very funny because it has to be explained. Pay no attention to us as we close the door to your little brown study and get back to the party.
My point is that Ulysses can be taught. But The Lord of the Rings can only be read. When someone takes you through Ulysses and discusses it in serious literary terms, you constantly get the pleasures of a cryptic crossword puzzle: Ah, so that’s why this chapter was so unintelligible! But when you discuss The Lord of the Rings, each explanation takes you, not farther into the text, but farther out of the story. Instead of “aha!” you keep thinking “is that all?”
Here’s why: “escapist” reading is by nature wild, while “serious” reading is by nature domesticated.
“Serious” reading is designed to bring readers to a common experience outside the story, by writing papers that attempt to persuade others that this is the (or a) “meaning” of this or that item in the tale (or attribute of the text).
But “escapist” reading brings readers together only when they are inside the story; and the more closely they compare notes, the clearer it becomes that they have not had the same experience, not in detail.
This is not simply because readers inevitably come up with different visualizations of the characters and milieux—for the same difference between “serious” and “escapist” can be found in the ways people make and watch movies, which forbid you to engage your visual imagination.
Rather, “escapist” readings vary so widely because the story is not the text. Rather the text is the tool that the readers use to create the story in the only place where it ever truly exists—their individual memories. Because the writer has provided the same tool to all readers, the stories in their memories will resemble each other, sometimes very closely. Can we conceive of any reading of The Lord of the Rings that does not have the Gollum biting off Frodo’s finger, and falling, finger, ring, and all, into the fires of the Cracks of Doom? But haven’t we all had the experience of discussing the story with someone else and having him or her refer to some moment, some event, that we had forgotten, or never noticed, or—and this happens surprisingly often—that is absolutely contradicted by our own clear memory?
Readers, in fact, make a jumbled mess of their reading. Like eyewitnesses who only remember what they noticed, and only notice what seems important enough to command their attention at the time, readers edit unconsciously as they go, linking moments in this present story to moments in other stories that were inadvertently called to mind. (How many times have I heard readers praise or complain about a particular scene or phrase or event that simply does not occur in the book in which they say they remember it?) What reader, upon rereading a particular story, especially after an interval of several years, is not surprised to discover that this scene is in the same story as that scene?
When readers are not “serious,” but rather are deeply, personally, and emotionally involved in a story, the story is transformed to at least some degree by their preexisting view of how the world works. They do not realize it at the time or, usually, ever. They think the story they love so much is Tolkien’s story. But in fact it is a collaboration between the-Reader-at-This-Moment and Tolkien-at-the-Time-He-Wrote. Tolkien is the author: when there are disputes about what happened in the story, it is to Tolkien’s text that disputing readers must return, with no extraneous commentator having even the slightest authority. But except for those rare moments of controversy or of the cognitive dissonance of rereading a familiar tale that turns out to be unaccountably strange, readers remain unaware of how they have transformed the tale.
Similarly, readers are rarely aware of how the tale transforms them. For that is the power of “escapist” (but not “serious,” or seriously read) fiction: The events of the story, their causes, their results, their meanings-within-the-tale, enter into the readers’ memory in a way that is ultimately only somewhat distinguished from “real” memories. In part, this is because “real” memories are in fact “storyized” whenever they are recalled or recounted, so that “real” memories become more certain even as they become less correspondent with the actual experience. But “escapist” readings gain most of their power to transform the readers’ worldview from the very authority of the author.
While we live in Tolkien’s world, it is with almost unbearable pain that we watch Gandalf fall to his death, locked in the embrace of the Balrog, or see the damage Sharkey and his gang have done to the once-lovely Shire. We have no doubt that Shelob must be stopped, not because she is part of Sauron’s evil plot, but simply because she is in the way. We are allowed some pity for her, but Frodo must be freed. This is a morally complex issue, in fact. The more we examine it, the more our sympathy for Shelob increases. She isn’t trying to rule the world, she’s merely trying to eat. Isn’t she in the category of the shoplifter who steals food because he’s starving? Well, not quite—after all, her idea of a snack is Frodo, not a bag of Oreos. But to her, what is Frodo but lunch on the hoof? He is not of her species. If he gets stuck in her web, he’s meat. What has she done that makes her worthy of death? And yet whatever pity we feel on first or second or third reading, the fact remains that we want her to fail; and because she is so relentless, the only way she can fail is to suffer incapacitating injury, and so we are relieved when she is hurt and retreats to her lair to suffer the agonies our heroes have inflicted on her.
This is a complicated process, and it is quite possible that Tolkien is creating or reinforcing an immoral morality. That is, if you subscribe to the worldview of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), obviously, Shelob is an innocent victim, and The Lord of the Rings supports an evil anthropocentric view of the animal kingdom, in which humans (or ur-humans) have the right to intrude wherever they want and kill or hurt whatever animals happen to get in the way.
Yet there is no room within the experience of the story to argue with Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings is not an essay, whose tenets are to be consciously considered. It is a story, plain and simple; and if during the Shelob passages your deep morality is offended, the effect is not an argument, but rather a withdrawal from the world of the tale. You close the book—perhaps you throw it against the wall. Or perhaps you grit your teeth and return, because the rest of the story is so good that you’ll just have to ignore the mistreatment of Shelob and move on.
That’s what happens when a story is so foreign to our own worldview that we cannot accept it. The Escape is over. We are forced to return from the story because we cannot bear to live in the author’s world any longer.
Often, we cannot name our reasons. It is nothing so plain as a PETA member’s reaction to the Shelob story. Rather, we find our attention wandering when we try to escape in a story whose world is unbearable to us. Or we find ourselves losing our willingness to suspend our disbelief. Or we simply don’t understand what’s happening—we can’t process the story, because the characters’ actions don’t make sense to us.
That’s why stories can never be wholly transformative. The author makes things happen in a tale for reasons that are only sometimes consciously understood. But having created the story, having offered it to the public, the author may find that many people read it with enthusiasm, while a few find it tedious, unbelievable, incomprehensible, or even evil. The same book! So variously, even perniciously misread! But it is the simple result of the fact that no two individuals actually live in the same world. Oh, we think we do—we have conversations and share food and bicker and so on—but nothing ever means exactly the same thing to any two participants in an event. (Note that I’m referring to meaning-within-the-tale, though in this case the tale happens to be reality.) And even when we explain our view and achieve agreement, we have to admit that even our agreement has a different meaning to
each and every person who agrees to it. We may agree that we agree, but in fact we do not fully agree.
All stories have to offer some common ground to at least some readers—some aspect of the worldview of the tale that feels true and right. Without that, the readers cannot escape into the tale for long. Indeed, my guess (though it cannot be measured) is that the vast majority of causal and moral assertions in the tale must already be shared by the storyteller and the culture that produced the readers who embrace it; it is within this flood of agreement that the author’s unique (and therefore strange-to-the-readers) views are able to slip through unnoticed, subtly but often significantly changing the way the readers see the real world that they return to when the Escape has ended.
Oddly, it is in the reading of fiction that we come closest to achieving communication—true harmony of worldview. When you and I both read The Lord of the Rings (or any other story), we have the chance to share memories that were shaped by a single consciousness—in this case, Tolkien’s. To the degree that we both take joy in his world and believe in it, to the degree that our worldview is transformed by Tolkien’s, then to that degree we approach the possibility of understanding, the possibility of being, however momentarily, of one mind. We never actually achieve it, but the mere approach, like the approach to lightspeed, has wild and powerful effects. Where “serious” readings result in scholarly papers and learned lectures, “escapist” readings plunge us into experiences that cannot be codified, even though we understand that, having read this story, nothing will ever be the same for us.
Now, I must be fair about this: “serious” readers guiltily admit, when pressed, that along with their “serious” reading, “escapist” experiences sometimes slip in by accident—and they enjoy them, too. Perhaps even more than they relish the pleasures of successful decipherment. Is what the lovers of Ulysses love that which must be decoded, or is it that which does not need decoding, but which must instead be (“escapistly”) experienced?
Fiction is valued in every human society precisely because it makes us who read it temporarily, approximately, One. We have memories in common—memories more complex and powerful than any but a few shared rituals can provide. And when a society embraces stories that create or reinforce worldviews that lead people to behave in valuable ways—nobly giving their lives for their country, for instance, or responsibly taking care of their children’s needs no matter how inconvenient or difficult that may be—then that society is more likely to survive than one whose stories create worldviews that celebrate a refusal to sacrifice for the good of others. And certainly it is worth-while to examine just what the worldview is that the writer has (probably unconsciously, perhaps inevitably so) offered to the readers who embrace the tale.
But we must remember that such an examination does not decode a story, but rather concentrates only on the meanings-within-the-tale. We do not look for what Shelob “symbolizes.” We look for what it means within the story’s own terms that Shelob tries to kill Frodo and, ultimately, fails; what it means in the story that Sam wears the ring repeatedly in order to search for Frodo and free him; what it means when Frodo snatches the ring back from Sam. Our judgment is not aesthetic, ultimately, but rather moral. (It can be argued, of course, that aesthetic judgments are all, ultimately, moral judgments, for reasons that should suggest themselves in what I have already said here.)
And we must also remember that honest, careful readers can still disagree about the same, beloved story. For instance, the denouement of The Lord of the Rings is extraordinarily complex. The ring has been destroyed, Aragorn enthroned, the Shire scoured. But Frodo is not happy in the Shire. He wore the ring too long. It scarred him. For him, joy can only come by leaving what used to be his home and sailing into the West with the elves, to a land of heroes and myths. His is a bittersweet parting, very much like death, very much like going to heaven. No, I am not retreating into decipherment. But Tolkien was a convert to Catholicism, and the deep story of Catholicism was a part of his worldview. It is bound to show up in his stories, not in an allegorical, conscious, encoded way, but rather as the-way-things-work. When you have borne such a deep, soulscarring burden, it cannot be healed in Middle-earth. Frodo has stared into hell as no other living soul has done; he can only be healed and become whole in the West. This is not allegory, it is honesty—it is Tolkien telling the truth, not by plan, but because this is what felt right and true to him as he was making the thousand unconscious decisions that a writer makes on every page of every story.
We are meant to shed tears (or to wish to shed tears), as believers would at the deathbed or funeral of a good soul of whose eternal happiness we have no doubt.
And if that had been the only ending of The Lord of the Rings, I don’t know if I would love this story the way I do. Because of course there is another ending, one that Tolkien no doubt thought of as “second prize”: Sam’s return to the Shire, and his happiness there.
Most readers of The Lord of the Rings I have talked to, you see, regard Frodo as the great hero of the book, and certainly that is what the text would lead any rational person to believe. But I, and a certain subset of readers of The Lord of the Rings, don’t see it that way. When I read the story, with the great climactic scene at the Cracks of Doom, I saw Frodo as a failure. When he reached the moment of choice, he could not do it. He did not walk on his own legs to that place, he was carried there; and when it was time to let go of the ring and see it fall to its destruction, he instead declared himself the ringmaster and put the damned thing on. The ring won. It was stronger than Frodo. He failed.
Most people accept this as Tolkien clearly intended—after all, he has told us more than once that, without naming God, someone was planning these events, and had a role for Gollum to play, and that role was to bite off the finger and its ring from the hand of the failed ringbearer, and then die along with the ring he loved so much. In other words, no man, not even Frodo, had the power to do what had to be done, and only because it was meant to happen did the ring end up being destroyed.
Here’s my eccentric reading (which is also justified in the text, but with different emphasis): There was one ringbearer who voluntarily, willingly surrendered the ring after having worn it repeatedly: Samwise Gamgee. It was Sam, not Frodo, who actually carried the ring those last miles to the Cracks of Doom, by carrying Frodo who carried the ring. There is no analogue to Sam in the Christ story (which is one reason why allegorical readings of The Lord of the Rings fall apart). Nobody picked Christ up and carried him to his sacrifice. Yet something in Tolkien knew that the ring was too terrible for Frodo to carry it himself, right to the end. Maybe it was, in Tolkien’s mind, something as trivial as the necessity of the plot—having written that Frodo was carried off from Shelob’s lair by the Ores, the only way he could think of for Frodo to get free was for Sam to put on the ring. Whatever Tolkien’s conscious reasoning was, however, the fact remains that Sam was also a ringbearer. But because he was of a humbler social class, he never once conceived himself as being truly worthy to bear it. Oh, the ring worked its magic on him, and he had his moments of imagining what such power in his hands might accomplish. But he knew that even these wild dreams were humble and silly (in the ancient meaning of the word), and his humility made him laugh at his own ambitions.
Samwise Gamgee was, in fact, the quintessential servant, and no doubt there was something in Tolkien that resonated with the idea that “whoever would be greatest among you, let him be the servant of all.” By such reckoning, it is Sam, not Frodo, who was the greatest of the heroes—and all the greater, I felt at least, because it never crosses Sam’s mind or anyone else’s that this might be the case. Indeed, Sam is so purely focused on the greatness of his master that it is almost impossible actually to consider him for himself; he exists only in relation to Frodo. It is not until Frodo sails to the West and Sam returns home that at last he is freely and fully himself. Now at last the servant is master in his own home, able to take joy in the company of h
is wife and children, to labor happily in his garden, and watch and take part in the blossoming of his beloved land and his beloved neighbors.
In my reading of the story—and remember, this was my original, natural reading, not analyzed, simply the way I took the story—Sam was the great hero; and The Lord of the Rings had a perfect ending because he was, finally, the only ringbearer who had no regrets. He had borne the ring but had done nothing wrong with it; and despite temptation, he had surrendered it more freely than anyone who had ever worn it. So it was fitting that he received, not the contemplative life of Frodo’s apotheosis, but rather the idea of heaven that I had grown up with in my definitely non-Catholic religion: to live in a garden made by his own hands, surrounded by his family, and able to watch and help his family and his garden improve and increase.
Certainly everything I saw in the story is there. But over the years I have found that most people receive the story as Frodo’s, and his passage into the West as the ending, with Sam’s return to the Shire as simply a way of putting period to the tale. Still, a significant number of readers do agree with me in my admittedly eccentric reading, in which Frodo’s passage west is sad, a melancholy end to an injured soul, while the true ending of the story is Sam’s return home as a man at last unsubservient (and yet still serving), who deserves his true happiness because he is the only one who obeyed and acted nobly in all cases, even when his first desire was otherwise.
This is not some coded meaning, it is how I experienced the meaning of these events within the world of the tale. These events did not “stand for” anything in the real world. But my own worldview caused me to receive the story with different emphasis, different moral weight, different values from the way many others received it. It is not even terribly interesting what Tolkien “meant” as he wrote it; to the degree that his choices were unconscious, they can be trusted to reflect what he truly believed; and to the degree that his choices were conscious, they can be trusted only to show us what he believed that he believed.