Tolkien and Modernism
Nov. 27th, 2009 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeLifted from a Crooked Timber comments thread: "I fully understand why a lot of people don’t like Tolkien; they’re still invested in the War over Modernism, in which Tolkien was one of the last holdouts on the losing side, on more than one front."
I wouldn't say that Tolkien was a holdout in that war; more like one of the last generation -- the one that came of age before the Great War -- which, being formed in a context in which Modernism was not a defined presence, could formulate their literary methods and structures without reference to it. He was a holdout in the Lang. vs Lit. wars in the English Curriculum, but that is a different battlefield. Nor am I sure that the side he represented "lost": it was displaced by a new old guard. (Making allowances for the differences between Anglo- and Roman Catholicism, T.S. Eliot and Tolkien could be argued to have had pretty convergent substantive views on many core subjects, including the religion which bulked so greatly in both their lives).
Another relevant question: if you make two heaps of writers from the twentieth century and toss them into the piles based on affinities, and Tolkien goes into one pile, and, say, Hemingway and William Carlos Williams go in the other, which pile does David Jones go into?
There are a lot of things which tend to distinguish Tolkien from most subsequent writers, and he was certainly not a Modernist, but I'm not sure that a view which uses the presence or absence of Modernism as an organizing schema is a very helpful way to approach Tolkien.
I wouldn't say that Tolkien was a holdout in that war; more like one of the last generation -- the one that came of age before the Great War -- which, being formed in a context in which Modernism was not a defined presence, could formulate their literary methods and structures without reference to it. He was a holdout in the Lang. vs Lit. wars in the English Curriculum, but that is a different battlefield. Nor am I sure that the side he represented "lost": it was displaced by a new old guard. (Making allowances for the differences between Anglo- and Roman Catholicism, T.S. Eliot and Tolkien could be argued to have had pretty convergent substantive views on many core subjects, including the religion which bulked so greatly in both their lives).
Another relevant question: if you make two heaps of writers from the twentieth century and toss them into the piles based on affinities, and Tolkien goes into one pile, and, say, Hemingway and William Carlos Williams go in the other, which pile does David Jones go into?
There are a lot of things which tend to distinguish Tolkien from most subsequent writers, and he was certainly not a Modernist, but I'm not sure that a view which uses the presence or absence of Modernism as an organizing schema is a very helpful way to approach Tolkien.
