Tolkien and Narrative-based definition of Allegory

Intro:

I’m continually trying to work out things in my own literary theory. It’s just how my brain works, one of those hypomanic things (general thought patterns, not episode). And I’m also continually trying to check that and not give in to delusions of a “master theory” with everything tied out thoroughly, which gets close to ideology, the danger of which I have written on in my post on a final reading of Person ofInterest. It would also be a bit like the number in Darren Arnofsky’s Pi, some thoughts on which I recorded in a post. So, the theory of the current post falls under the heading of things about which, when they come to me, I scratch my head and wonder, “is it going out of balance in trying to tie everything together too neatly?” But I do think it has some validity and possibly some soundness, so I’ve decided to put it out there with the foregoing “cards on the table” caveat intro.

Anyway, “allegory” is a big issue in studying The Lord of the Rings and the Inklings in general. C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is commonly accepted as being pretty much straight up allegory for children, or at least Aslan is, but Tolkien is famous for disparaging allegory. So, questions arise like what exactly the nature of allegory is and whether Tolkien was justified in disliking it and even whether he actually did dislike it unequivocally. I’m of the opinion, and I think it fairly demonstrable from the instance I’ll discuss in a moment of Tom Bombadil, that Tolkien did not dislike allegory per se. I think that his take on allegory was that it is a useful but limited tool. This is pretty much the same take I think he has on modern drama from reading “On Fairie Stories,” in which he all but pits modern drama directly against what he is going for as “narrative art,” on which I have written more extensively in my post on Tolkien versus Shakespeare. I think Tolkien sees both allegory and drama as useful but limited tools, but what he really dislikes is when people take either of them to be the core of narrative art (and, as I said in that post, as far as I am able to process him on it, I think that one of his big beefs with Shakespeare was that he saw one of the major influences of the bard’s work being that that is precisely what people have done with drama, with Shakespeare used as a big justification for it).

[SIDENOTE: The content of this post relates to the content of my post on StarWars: Last Jedi and literary causality. END SIDENOTE]

The Basic Theory

(and previous bad attempts by others, or one other)

So, speaking of that post on Tolkien all but pitting narrative art against drama, that is what my new, recently discovered working definition “allegory” centers on … the narrative, the plot. I think that allegory proper is when the plot itself is carried over, not just that character X from story 1 (say Pilrgim’s progress) = character Y from story 2 (say the Bible) in a sort of static way. Character X can be symbolic of qualities without being allegorical of a character in another story, and for the character to be an allegory, the plot has to be copied. (I have not worked any of this further ramification out, but I suspect that, at least for me, this fits together with Paul’s Ricoeur’s theory that metaphor takes place on the level of predication rather than on the level of word definition, as discussed in his The Rule of Metaphor).

The best way for me to explicate this theory is to illustrate it with examples, which I will do in a minute. But I first want to note the difficulty in coming up with a solid working definition of allegory, lest any think that I’m trying to claim credit for something substantial when all I really did was state the obvious. (This concern is along the lines of Fr Lienhard’s intro talk on paper writing for his undergrads, in which he always said that a thesis is something that both needs to be proven and can be proven or disproven, meaning that it must not be so “by definition” that the thesis is not stating the obvious but that it also must not be so outlandish that, while you can’t prove it, you also can’t clearly disprove it either … just a non-conversation dressed up and passed off as a conversation).

The one example of a distinctly unhelpful answering of the question that I am going to use comes from a guy on whom I will actually spend some time in a future post called “Baked on Shake” (see the sidenote). I actually heard this guy talk once in a debate while working on my MA, and I was kind of more in his corner then than now that I have begun to read his published material (again, see the sidenote). The debate was on the validity of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, and he was the one defending them. So, eventually, as part of a sort of broader topic that one of the questions sparked, the question of allegory came up, including what is really the difference between what Tolkien does and allegory, if he is so against it. I forget what the interlocutor was saying on the matter, although I have a vague memory that its tone was the whole thing that is supposed to be “snarky” as “witty” but is really just asshole, but that’s beside the point. The point is what our defender was saying, which was something along the lines that, while allegory is a straight correspondence between just one thing and another, what Tolkien did is a sort of mediated correspondence, done through intermediary elements, and he was holding his arm up for a visual of pointing to imagined rings in succession going down his arm … and basically it was really just going nowhere as an explanation, just kind of stumbling around. As I say, I liked the guy back then, and I even have some sympathy now (again, see the side note), but in none of even my best receptions of this guy did I think that his handling of the allegory versus what Tolkien does or the core of allegory was good.

[SIDENOTE: I have to finish this guy’s two books on Shakespeare first to make sure I have processed everything he has to say on the matters, but that reading is going on the back burner for right now to read Mary Douglas’s Thinking in Circles on ring composition in preparation for a possible podcast opportunity with John Granger on Mugglenet academy, which would probably drive readership on this blog way up, which would be pretty cool, but I have read about 50 pages of this guy’s first book so far and it is indeed causing me to slow down and take more time in processing what I think Tolkien’s problem was with the bard and how that fits into maybe a broader spectrum of ways in which literature can communicate meaning that might accommodate value in Shakespeare, but outside of the way Tolkien saw as primary … but I have to admit that reading this guy’s stuff is a chore for me because, while I find some definite substance of historical research that I have to take seriously and actually do find it enjoyable to learn about, I think his actual presentation of it betrays a latent but distinct Anglo-triumphalism, although that is maybe a byproduct of the more underlying polemical attitude of “us and them” that shows up most strongly in a recurring rhetoric against the bogey men of “post-modernism,” a rhetoric that sells very well for an insecure, defensive, and entrenched popular-level conservative audience. To he honest, as much as some of his polemics and his, what seems to me to be arrogance, turn me off, I can imagine reasons for such entrenched bile, meaning reasons for which one should be sympathetic, and parts of some of his projects I do like, meaning not just the individual data he digs up but also the idea of the project … he’s mainly a biographer of very particular types of folks, among which class he sees Shakespeare as being, and on that count, it seems to me like his historical evidence is relatively sound. END SIDENOTE] 

Test Case of Tom Bombadil

I’m not going to source the statement on Tom Bombadil here. If a reader wants it, they should get a copy of Carpenter’s edition of Tolkien’s letters and just look up Bombadil or allegory in the index in the back … it won’t be hard at all to locate.  What is basically there is that Bombadil is an allegory of pre-lapsarian nature, human nature before the fall in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. The primary character trait that carries this is the fact that he almost always speaks in verse, since poetry is always prior to prose in ancient cultures and felt to be a more intuitive and holistic approach to language (in other posts I have likened it to the “understanding” pole ofRicoeur’s spectrum of “understanding”–“explanation”), and “poetry before prose” allegorizes “pre-lapsarian before post-lapsarian” (but even here, when Tolkien admits of straight up allegory, it’s a bit more: for somebody like Tolkien, as so into ancient verse legend as he is, there is probably actually something ontologically purer and holier in verse; in the original mythology up to the change after the Book of Lost Tales version was set aside, his recurrent formulation was that the elves came from Valinor to teach men “songs and holiness”).

But my theory is that it is wholesale carrying over of actual plot that makes something allegory, so how do you get a plot out of Bombadil? This subplot of LotR is a pretty simple plot, which kind of fits with Tolkien seeing allegory as useful, but limited. The character representing pre-lapsarian nature (Bombadil) is proposed as a solution to a post-lapsarian problem (the ring and the need to destroy it) and then rejected as a solution because it is ineffective for the purpose (Gandalf at the council of Elrond says that the fact that the ring holds now power over Bombadil is not a solution because it would hold no power over his memory and he would forget he had it and forget the project of destroying it etc). That plot is pretty much an excellent straight up allegory for anit-Pelagian medieval theology: Pelagius and his followers said that nature is pretty all right on its own as what it is even now, after the fall, and can thus be used as is as a base upon which grace can build, which means that “post-lapsarian” nature is actually pretty close to pre-lapsarian nature and can help grace in dealing with post-lapsarian problems;  and orthodox theology replied that, no, it is not … it is broken and needs to be fixed precisely by grace before it can move forward … it is of no help on its own.

So the simple plot of (1) proposal of prel-lapsarian nature as solution for a post-lapsarian problem and (2) discovery that it does not work is pretty much straight up allegorized in (1) the proposal to give the ring to Bombadil and (2) the rejection of that proposal on grounds of inadequacy.

Test Case of the West Door of Moria and Numbers 20

Now I am going to try to fill out the picture with a via negativa example, an example of something in Tolkien that seems like it should be “allegorical” but is not and how it is the plot that makes the difference. Biblical material can present a unique place where Christian authors are likely to do allegory, as is noticeable in such famous instances as Lewis’s Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Lewis himself has a nice, and much better, spin-off on Bunyan’s idea called Pilgrim’s Regress). And it just so happens that, at least as far as I can tell, chapter 20 of the book of Numbers in the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible clearly provides the model for the combination of the scenes at the west door and then at the east gate of Moria in Fellowship of the Ring (I came up with this on my own and can even remember when I noticed it in spot reading sitting on the floor in my bedroom when I got my copy of the one-volume edition with Allen Lee’s artwork in it while working on my MA, and I have not read anybody else do it, but if somebody has done it independently and I should be noting that, I apologize).

I think I may have gone into this in places in other posts, but it is too hard to track down, so I will just reproduce the pertinent points here and then describe how I think this is not allegory because the plot is not carried over. In Numbers 20, the people of Israel, having been brought up out of slavery in Egypt, are going through the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land, but they are continually complaining, asking “why did you bring us out of Egypt up into this wilderness, just to die here?” The continual issue is food and water, and in this case it is water. God tells Moses, his chosen messenger and agent by whom he has brought them out of Egypt and is leading them to the Promised land, to go to a particular rock at Meribah and to speak to the rock and it will send forth water. But, once they get to the rock, Moses loses his temper at the people’s complaining and instead strikes the rock with his staff. It does send forth water for them to drink, but for losing his temper and not following instructions, Moses forfeits his own personal entry into the Promised Land. The last thing to note in this story is that the people of Israel, who have been doing the complaining, are spoken of repeatedly as the “first-born” of the Lord among the nations.

So, when Gandalf brings the company to the west door to enter Moria, they find it closed and password-protected, and the particular protection says to speak to the stone door, just as Moses was told to speak to the rock. At his point, Boromir, the first-born son of Denethor, resembles Israel, the first-born of the Lord among the nations, by complaining in exactly the same words: “If you didn’t know the password, why did you bring us up to this desolate place, just to die here?” Then one of the things that you get in the book but not the movie is that Gandalf at one point throws down his staff in frustration and anger. So there is that part of the story. Now, another detail from the book that is not used in the movie is that Moria is 40 miles from east gate to west door, which matches the fact that the people of Israel wondered in the wilderness for 40 years, especially as Moria could definitely be described as a desolate place. On the other side of that 40 miles, we find Gandalf having to repeat the action of striking rock with staff—this time the rock bridge of Khazad Dum—in order to stop the balrog, thus forfeiting his entry into Lothlorien, the “golden land,” like Moses forfeits his entry into the Promised Land. All in all, it’s a pretty tight correspondence.

[SIDENOTE: I think I have mentioned this elsewhere as well, but this is one of the instances in which I think Jackson and Fran Walsh show a deeper knowledge of Tolkien’s artistry than they are usually given credit for. The whole Numbers 20 thing is not something you can really incorporate into a modern movie, but I think that they do know about it and give it a hat tip. They don’t keep the 40 miles, but they do change a line by Gandalf in a way that I find hard to explanation in any other way. In the chapter “The Ring Goes South” in the book, Gandalf says simply, “we stick to this course of the Misty Mountains for many days and many miles.” But in the movie, they have a voice-over by McKellan as Gandalf saying “… for 40 days.” Why would anybody change it to that specific number … unless they knew that the number 40 is significant in Tolkien’s artistry? END SIDENOTE)

So, with the correspondence so tight, how in the world can this not be allegory? The answer is that the plot is not carried over. There is a surface way in which it is not carried over in that it is two separate strikings, but that is, as I say, only surface. The real lack of plot correspondence, and the one that makes the difference, at least I think, for the core meaning of the incident, is that Gandalf makes a self-sacrifice for his friends to be able to enter the golden land and that it is precisely his striking the rock bridge that materially facilitates them being able to do so (by sending the balrog down into the abyss). In the story in Numbers, Moses striking the rock only forfeits his own entry; it does not materially facilitate his people’s entry.

And something that is missing from the LotR version is that, in Numbers, there are actually two companies, the first generation and the second generation, and Moses’s identity with the first generation is actually cemented in this incident, and particularly in the fate of non-entry, because that first generation was already barred from the land because of their lack of faith in God’s promise to give them victory when the twelve spies returned and, while ten of them said it was too daunting, two of them, Caleb and Joshua (the latter of whom would be the one to lead the second generation into the land and conquer and settle it) said God would help them overcome if they went in now. Moses’s failure only builds an identity with people not entering the land, rather than materially facilitates a group entering the land, as does Gandalf’s. They are substantially different plots, and thus not allegory.

[SIDENOTE: An interesting fact on the two generations and the book of “Numbers” is that the Hebrew title of the book in the TaNaK, the Hebrew canon, is not “Numbers,” but rather “In the Wilderness,” which refers to the 40 years of wandering, obviously. “Numers,” or Arithmoi, is the name for it in the Greek Septuagint version, and it refers to the two censuses taken in the book, the census of the first generation before the 40 years and the census of the second generation after the 40 years. END SIDENOTE]

Given the strong expectation one would understandably have that the clear correspondence with biblical material means allegory, I should say what I think that it is that Tolkien is doing with the material, if he’s not doing allegory. I think that Moses is one among many models that Tolkien draws on parts of to make his own unique individual named Gandalf, a leader. Every leader will have faltering, and for the instance he shows of Gandalf faltering, he uses the model of Moses from Numbers 20. But Gandalf is always ultimately Tolkien’s character, a true act of what Tolkien calls “sub-creation” (which always involves borrowed material … there were only ever three original ideas in the whole of the world: creation, sin, and redemption … and the only one humans could ever claim complete originality for is the middle one). One of the unique things in Tolkien’s story is what he does with the new idea of it being sacrificial: it becomes an instance of one of Tolkien’s main ideas in narrative art, what he called “eucatastrophe” (a catastrophe that, by providence, results in something good).

Revisiting Lembas

I already have another post dealingwith lembas bread (the “waybread” of the elves) as being not allegorical of the Eucharist, but rather symbolic of, in Tolkien’s world he built, sacramentality as such. Before giving a brief statement on the role of plot in this issue, I’ll just give a few summation comments of the issues I touched on in that other post. First, I said that the Eucharist is involved in the arrangement but only in providing the image of bread and a “more than regular physical food nourishment” schema, and those image traits are what clue the reader to looking at sacrementality as such (not the particular sacrament) as a referent of the symbol. But the “more than” is not the same thing for lembas. In modern analysis terms, what lembas provides would be something like psycho-kinetic aid: it helps to master sinew and bone. It would be more proper to allegory for it to be providing some support in moral fortitude, some help in acting in an upright way or at least in making prudent decisions in battle, as representing the spirituality of grace.

Furthermore, there are key elements of the Eucharist that are completely lacking. The first of two key ones that I will mention is any sense of sacrifice. And the second is that there is also no sense of presence, but I will pick that up when talking next about the narrative it would need to be allegorical of the Eucharist.

Now on to what I have to say about plot, in which I will first describe what lembas would have to have plot-wise to be an allegory of the Eucharist. I edited a book on the Eucharist in which I learned a new thing, or a thing was brought into focus by him for me: the Eucharist is an extending of the Incarnation, a continuing to be “made flesh.” This is basic Catholic theology of the Eucharist. It not a new sacrifice but rather a re-presentation of the one sacrifice of Calvary, and that brings in the theology of the Cross. I write mainly as a Catholic, and while I try to be cautious not to paint too broadly, I think it has to be admitted that, in broad strokes, Protestantism (particularly Luther) focuses on the juridical aspect of the Cross, the natural result of which is that, logically, the Incarnation is mainly a material means to that end, whereas Catholicism tends to focus on the Cross as really the culmination of the Incarnation (a condensed version of this Christology can be seen in the ancient “Christ hymn” found in Philippians 2:6–11). Since the Eucharist as sacramental in the Catholic understanding (sacrament defined as material elements conveying grace) is the only thing here that would be eligible for allegorization in a bread that provided more than mere nutrients (even the Lutheran and Anglican versions of “consubstantiation,” which are fairly difficult doctrines to pin down in the first place, let alone the “spiritual communion” idea of Calvin or the symbolism doctrine of Zwingli, do not really ascribe a role to the elements themselves), the Catholic concept of the Eucharist is the only one that could be in play here in an allegory anyway, and that concept is bound up in the concept of the Cross, and that is the culmination of the Incarnation. This is why, in order to allegorize the Eucharist, lembas would have to somehow contain an element of “presence,” that “Real Presence” of the person that is a continuation of the being “made flesh.” In order to be allegorical of the Eucharist, lembas would have to somehow have that whole plot in its backstory: incarnation, sacrifice, instantiation in the bread.

One could be tempted to say that the love of the elves for nature going into the bread is a stand-in for incarnation because there would obviously be no such thing in the world of Middle Earth, but there are two problems with this. The first is that the elves are not even the valar, let alone Iluvatar, so it would not be the same level. But the bigger problem is that there actually is an issue of incarnation in LotR, and a very problematic instance of it at that. In fact, it is the main central evil thing in LotR. The reason that destroying the ring destroys Sauron is that he poured so much of himself into it. That is actually the difference between him and Gandalf, who was actually himself once an ainur like Sauron. But when Gandalf incarnated, he left behind the majority of his power and came to operate mainly as an advisor, moral guide, and inspiration to the races of Middle Earth. He has some power when there is really need in a fix, but only to a certain extent, and he has never been a direct power player like Sauron. Like certain political figures in 2016, Sauron would not divest himself of his powers and poured that power instead into his ring, poured himself into it to such an extent that to destroy the ring was to break his presence in Middle Earth (in a way similar to that in which the fall of Numenor into the see ruined his fair form in Middle Earth; he could appear as a terrible dark lord, but never again in a fair form to deceive).

So, incarnation is on the page as an issue in LotR, and a problematic one, and the elves pouring their love of nature into the making of lembas bread is nowhere near it. It is a completely different topic. It’s narrative is one in which the first children have a love for nature that makes a connection that the hobbits call “magic” and that connection enables them to craft a substance that provides more than mere nutrients, providing psycho-kinetic aid (not a moral aid). They love physical nature, and so they make bread that helps one master one’s own physical, helps one master “sinew and bone” in one’s own body.

If the eater can receive more than materialist benefit from the bread, it is because the makers put more than materialism into making it, but the elves are not Iluvatar, or even the Valar, and so it cannot be the same sort of making as the Euharist. The actual Eucharist plot cannot be carried over into the lembas story because the character type/slot of God is not at play in the latter at all. Therefore, it’s not an allegory for the Eucharist.

As one last bit of plot analysis in lembas, there is the plot of the receiver. In Catholic teaching on the Eucharist, when we eat worthily, it is the reverse of regular eating, in which what we eat becomes us, because here we become what we eat by it conforming us to Christ in unity with the body of Christ, the Church. With lembas, there is no element of even inclusion in corporate identity or fellowship, let alone of being conformed to the maker or giver of the bread.

(I hope that all of this is not overdone on the religious side for any who are not as interested in that side and may find it awkward, but it is where Tolkien was coming from himself: in one of his letters to his son Christopher, he said something to the effect of “out of the darkness that has been my life, I set before you the one thing in this world truly worth loving, the Eucharist” … so the question of whether or not lembas is allegorical of the Eucharist is undeniably fitting for study of Tolkien.)