Realistic Magicism in Tolkien and Modern Fantasy

Tolkien is an interesting grandfather to modern fantasy. Namely, he relates to the field he started in exactly the way H.G. Wells didn't.

On the surface, one might expect a number of similarities. After all, both Wells and Tolkien lived in an England that is quite alien to contemporary life, and which profoundly influenced their texts (how many Wells stories center around a discussion in a Victorian library?) Yet as LeGuinn points out, the driving force behind Wells's SF is essentially modern in its worldview. "Wells was the first writer of real note to write fiction as a scientist, from within science, whether than as an outsider looking on with excitement or complacency or horror at the revelations and implications of the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century." Despite his enormous sloppiness regarding the nuts-and-bolts of his invented scientific processes, Wells establishes the spirit of SF from Robert Heinlein to William Gibson as an exploration of humanity's newfound and newly-recognized ability to reshape its fate--for good or ill--with technology. A modern SF reader may laugh at the naieve science behind Wells's time machine, for instance, yet the far-future war between two equally alien forms of humanity, or the sublimely beautiful account of the ending of the world, often come across as fresh as if they'd been written today.

Tolkien, at least according to the dominant narrative, is quite the opposite. As an Oxford don, as a Medievalist, and as a Roman Catholic he repeatedly insists on his nature being rooted in ways of looking at the world that are far removed from Modernism. "It is a curse having the epic temperament in an overcrowded age, devoted to the snappy bits." His fiction, then, is largely seen as a sort of reactionary escapism by its detractors and as repackaged ancient wisdom by those (from whatever political background) who embrace it. Central to this retroactive mindset, certainly, is Tolkien's immense ability to craft utopian communities from a mix of history and magical legend. Neither Hobbits nor Elves are precisely unfallen, but their essential bits of "magic" combine with their pastoral nature to reveal a community distanced both from the harsh mechanisms of the industrialized 20th Century and the harsh power-politics and political expediency of the history 20th Century scholarship came to reveal. Elves make things that are impossibly beautiful, it is true, but to them it is nothing but an extension of their nature, and in many ways of the natural surroundings in which they live. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that so much of the American countercultural Left embraced the visions of the conservative Roman Catholic as a possible alternative to Cold War jingoism and inhuman (not to mention antienvironmental) commercialism. To steal from the title of LeGuin's 1976 "different kind of love story," Tolkien offered the idea that a near-Eden could be imagined that was "Very Far Away from Anywhere Else," and the refreshing powers (and popularity) of his texts proved that such exercises were not without use in our modern society.

Yet those contemporary authors who seem to best understand Tolkien seem to consistently take a different tack, reverentially evoking the unironic purities he imagined even as they place them into an ironic relationship with contemporary life. Tad Williams Otherland essentially recapitulates the central conflicts of The Lord of the Rings within a virtual-reality internet, but the wonder and beauty of the lands visited by the protagonists is constantly marred by postcolonial realities, globalized greed, and their foundation on heinous crimes against an innocent child. Neil Gaiman frequently cites the formative effect that Tolkien (as well as Lewis and Chesterton) had on his childhood, yet magic in his stories is almost always associated with the tensions and inconsistencies of Freudian/Lacanian psychology and thereby anchored, no matter how far it may soar at any given moment, within the contemporary self-view of modern humanity. And for LeGuin herself, probably the best reader of Tolkien to write post-Tolkien fantasy, realms of the imagination may be liberating, but are rarely allowed to exist without some specifically-defined purpose within reality. The Earthsea cycle creates a world of immense sociological realism in which the cycles of life are recapitulated with sensitivity and insight, but few readers long to dwell in Earthsea. The Beginning Place offers an exquisitly Tolkienesque twilight realm of rest and healing, but only with the strong caveat that the place is just an alternate "road to the city"--that is, fantasy self-consciously serves as another path towards maturity, love, and self-realization.

But perhaps the fully-realized world is not precisely what Tolkien really brought to us anyway, and perhaps those authors who are also his most sensitive readers saw something that isn't immediately apparent. The thought came to me when I was thinking about the musical adaptation of Gregory Maguire's Wicked. Elphaba, as everyone knows, was born green--but the question is at one point opened why she was born green. I mean, sure, her father gave her mother a magically green elixir on the night of her conception, but maybe it was some sort of genetic aberation. After all, her father is (like Dorothy) from Earth, not Oz.

The pattern is an interesting one. As in many detective stories, a phenomenon exists that may be explained quite easy as the result of magic, or perhaps more elaborately as the product of a handful of improbable-but-mundane processes. In El Labyrinto del Fauno, Ofelia's mother might be healed by the magical properties of mandrakes, but really couldn't it just be a relapse that happens to occur only when the mandrake is placed under her bed? And thinking back at this narrative ploy, I can't imagine an author who uses it more generously than Tolkien himself. Faramir is not alone--is in great company, in fact--when he "saw, or it seemed that I saw, a boat floating on the water, glimmering grey, a small boat of a strange fashion with a high prow..." In a traditional detective story (according to Woolfe the most Modern of genres, since the main character is dead when the curtain rises) the conclusion ties everything in a nice, clean knot, announcing the triumph of scientific reason over nature and the imagination. Tolkien's persistent engagement with dual possibilities is not, of course, unique--Conrad teems with such tensions between grim reality and life-giving ideals--but Tolkien's placement of the imaginary on equal (if not superior) footing with the mundane is perhaps his greatest gift to 20th-Century literature. In a world of increased mechanization of thought and life, Tolkien reminds us of the possibility that life may be better than we have made it, hinting that the green grass may yet be "a great matter of legend, though we walk on it under the light of day."