Williams, Tolkien, Landscapes, and Time

I recently reread Charles Williams's Descent into Hell for a book club I am in on the Inklings. These are some thoughts that occurred to me in reading the book for that, and they come in the form of contrast with Tolkien. The key contrasts are in the use of / instantiation in time and how that affects relationships of characters as symbolic.


 Williams, Overlay, and Identities

The central thing with Williams and time and characters is overlay. Actually he does similar with topography/landscape in other places, and Tolkien reportedly wasn't much into it (I would look that up further though to state Tolkien's dislike more definitively, but given the differences I'm going into in this post, it would seem congruent with their general ways of thinking that JRRT would be a bit down on this aspect ... I think it was in Carpenters The Inklings that I read it though). In his most concentrated work on the Arthurian material, an essay called "The Figure Arthur" that was published only posthumously with his two volumes of Arthurian poetry (the entire cycle through the eyes of the court minstrel) in a small volume known as the "Arthurian Torso" (because the essay there is only a portion, the rest was unfinished or lost), which is no longer in print but you can find a 1970s paperback used without huge amounts of effort through abe books etc, Williams talks about the kingdom of Logres and the kingdom of Britain being two opposed aspects of the historical kingdom of England (Lewis used the idea in That Hideous Strength), being, respectively, the mythical and the political. Between them in Williams's overlay topgraphy is the wood of Broceliande, which represents the tension between the two in its fallowness. In that wood is the chapel of the Fisher King, whose wound in the thigh (related to the infertility of the land) symbolizes the tension between the two leaders of the respective lands: the Pendragon of Logres and the political king of Britain. So, to Williams, the one thing of Britain in the time of Arthur (CW, like many English, unfortunately seems to be completely either oblivious or dismissive of the distinction between the actual Celtic Britons and the invading Germanic Angles who murdered them and took their island by violence) was an overlay of three realms and three rulers, the middle in each set symbolizing the tension between the other two.

In Descent into Hell, it is an overlay of characters: Pauline and her martyred ancestor, with the suicide thrown in there as a linkage when she finally overlays her ancestor and carries his pain of fear for him. There is also an overlay of staging with that suicide and Wentworth that takes after the staging of the everyman play of medieval literature, in which there was an upper stage and a lower stage: the suicide descends from his higher platform to the floor below in committing suicide and Wentworth descends out of the window to the street to follow to the succubus.

Over all, as far as time, this tends to make time static. In order for two to overlay each other, there is no movement between them on the same plane, along the same line called time ... and they have to stay still to coordinate with each other in the overlay. And one of the main points for this post is that the relation is direct contact: Pauline actually speaks to her ancestor and he actually hears her.

(It's actually a quite well-constructed passage that gives the novel a good construction: she can bear it for him because she already has born it in her lifelong living in fear of her doppleganger, which is why, when real-time Pauline is standing wondering what to do, the actual one who tells the ancestor to let her take the burden of the fear is her doppleganger behind her, and she doesn't have to turn around to see who says it, she knows because it is in the logic of the thing).

Williams accents the bi-temporality himself in Descent into Hell in a way that would also have made Tolkien less than sympathetic: Stanhope tells Pauline that they are all a bit strongly affected by or as  Elizabethan dramatists, standing in two time frames at the same time (and Shakespeare was the ultimate Elizabethan dramatist, and Tolkien was no fan of Shakespeare)..

Tolkien and the Biblical Mode:

For Tolkien, this thing of treatment of time relates to something that I have mentioned in various places in this blog, but rather than track and link to those and worry about whether I filled them out there the way that is most helpful here, it works better to give the rundown in brief again. I have stated that Tolkien, unique even among the Inklings, writes in "the biblical mode."

It's not that Tolkien uses the Bible more (his genre does not admit of using it directly the way Williams does ... Williams uses the Bible right, left, and center) or is necessarily more "true" to it. It's rather a matter that his mode of writing resembles the mode of the Christian Bible.

There are two ways he engages in the Biblical mode: 1. The first is that he has two installments that stand in a very linear relation to each other, especially in the Christian conception of the flow of the whole Bible. The Hebraic conception of the TaNaK is a little different in that the concept is more of circular radiation from a center: the center is the Torah, then it moves out to the Prophets, which involves the political identity resulting from the identity created in the giving of the Law and the land in tension with other political entities (especially allowing such alliances to impact worship), and then the Writings move onto a stage of wider interaction with the wider world, particularly the wisdom traditions.

For here, though, I'll focus on the Christian concept of the whole of the Christian Bible. The linearity (which, in the arena of the two modern writers, is what I am saying characterizes Tolkien) happens in two installments that have a certain relationship to each other, which relationship will be the particular way in which Tolkien is like the Christian concept of the Christian Bible. But first, I would like to briefly note the individual qualities of those two installments as to how Tolkien's two installments are like them. The Silmarillion is a story of peoples, the various branches of the elves, and it is very like the Hebrew Bible. When I used to teach the primeval history (Genesis 1-11), I used to give a little intro on the genealogies to tell students not to get too bogged down with them, and I used a funny movie line to be lighthearted about it: in the movie Slingblade, Dwight Yokim says at one point that he never understood any of the Bible -- "this one begat that one and that one begat this one, and low and behold somebody sayeth some shit to somebody." But there is a point, and that point is shown in the repeated used of the word "generations," a specific Hebrew word, toledoth: "These are the generations of Adam/Cain/Seth/Enoch/Noah/Abraham/Isaac/Ishmael/Essau/Jacob." The key thing is that line goes even further back than Adam: Genesis 2:4 begins, "These were the generations of the heavens and the earth in the day God created them." Part of the point in the TaNaK is to show that our people (Judaism) goes directly and visibly all the way back to the Father of the world, God. Likewise, Tolkien's tapestry of the histories of people begins with the creation of the world,

ADDENDDUM ADDED: 9/13/2017
I forgot originally to include an aspect that I noted when the reading group did Silmarillion up to Beren and Luthien (the idea for a comparison post came about only when we read Williams's Descent into Hell). The Silmarils, I think, have the character of the Ark of the Covenant in that they house a certain presence (the Shekinah in the Ark and the light of the two trees in the gems, and there is strong research suggesting that the imagery in Genesis 2 is all sanctuary [desert Tabernacle and Jerusalem Temple] imagery: gold [furniture] and gems [in the ephod], and most importantly the "tree of life" in the form of, as found in archeological research, the Menorah being a highly stylized tree of life ... Gordon Wenham had an article about all that). And both are taken captive (the story of Israel taking the Ark into battle and it getting captured by the Philistines is possibly among the oldest actual compositions in the Hebrew Bible) and fought over. Further more, all the Silmarils disappear (one used as the guiding light for Eärendil to Valinor, another into a fiery chasm, and another into the sea), just as the Ark disappeared from Jerusalem sometime probably during the occupation by Babylon between the original deportation in 597 and the final destruction in 587 (for an interesting read from a guy whose historical research method has definitely been seriously criticized [and I definitely think he gets the meaning of the relationship between Ark and Grail backward: the Ark is foreshadow of Eucharist, not the Grail a cypher for the location of the Ark, regardless of Wolfram and the architect of the north porch of Chartes cathedral using it that way] but who presents probably the most concise statement of the theories, see Graham Hancock's The Sign and the Seal, who describes how the Ark would have been removed to a miniature model of the Temple on the isle of Elephantine in the Nile for safekeeping when they could see that Babylon might eventually think it wisest to destroy the Temple and raze Jerusalem, and then, when this proved to be the case, the Ark eventually made its way to an Ethiopian Coptic church, where it rests still, only one person seeing it in a lifetime seeing it, and once that Copt priest becomes guardian, that's pretty much all he sees the rest of his life).
END ADDENDUM

The second installment, the New Testament, dwells on one single character, Christ, and begins with four accounts of his life in which he does a lot of telling of parables. Likewise, The LotR is more about single characters whose character arcs span the whole narrative and who display/represent virtues in a morality tale manner.

2. The second, and most important, way in which Tolkien writes in the "biblical mode" is in the relationship between the two installments, and this is called typological fulfillment. Characters do not overlay in the same folded time space as they do for Williams. Characters who are unique and individual to their time, with their own deal going on, still represents certain themes, and then another version of the same thing comes along later but with a little more filled in. The best example is the marrying of the two lines of the two children of Iluvatar. It happens three times. The first is Beren and Luthien, and they get a Silmaril back but then go off and live their life in relative happy seclusion because their role is pretty much to be the inception of the idea of the mingling and show that is has some good effect. But they didn't finish Melkor. In order for that to happen, another melding, this time Tuor and Idril, had to produce a son, Earendil, who would sail to Valinor to beg the Valar to come and help finish Melkor off for good. The final melding, Arargorn and Arewen, produces a line of kings that rules the peace of a new age.

In all of this, linearity and distinction of character is the mode. There is no contact between Beren and Aragorn, save the impact the story of Beren has on Aragorn (which fits Tolkien: the literature is where the impact is), but nothing on the lines of Pauline in Descent into Hell talking to her martyr ancestor telling him to let her bear the pain.

History and Myth, Sinai and Zion, Tolkien and Williams

I said just above that the Christian concept of the Old Testament, indeed of the whole Christian Bible, is different from the Hebraic conception in that the Christian focuses more on the linearity and the Hebraic on a widening circle of activity. But the Hebrew Bible itself does contain a very strong element of linearity, and in fact it is what it is known for among ancient literatures. Scholars call it the Heilsgeschicte ... "sacred history," literally "history of the sacred." This means that, rather than organizing belief and fidelity around a sacred topography with the mountain of the king god at the center, being the axis mundi (the center of the world), the the emphasis is on the sacred chronology, the history of God intervening in the real world time and space to save ... a history of sacred saving events rather than topography of sacred space. The biggest instance is the exodus. And the exodus leads to the wilderness wanderings and to Sinai, and so these are called the Sinai traditions. But the sacred topography is also present in the Hebrew Bible in the traditions of Mount Zion, the mount of the Temple, the axis mundi, the home of the king, the son of David who is God's adopted son, similar to all of those semi-divine royal sons of gods in other cultures around then. Jon Levenson, a well-known Jewish scholar, has an introduction to the thinking of the Hebrew Bible that is used a lot (I got it for an MA level intro to OT class) and is called Sinai and Zion, and his thesis is that you can organize the thinking of the whole TaNaK around the tension between these two traditions and concepts: Sinai's linear history and Zion's static topography.

So my final point would be to put Tolkien and Williams into that structure. Tolkien is like the Sinai traditions and Williams like Zion traditions. And just as Sinai and Zion can meet and work together for the meaning of the Hebrew Bible but without either losing its distinctiveness or the tension disappearing into some cheap muddled hybrid, I think Tolkien and Williams can both be read for what is of value in them without denying or ignoring the real differences.

Sinai (Tolkien) and Zion (Williams)