A Pilgrim’s Digression

Or perhaps this post could better be titled “Reading of the Fall.” I am dallying with the idea of reading The Lord of the Rings again. It has been about two years since I last read it, or any part of it.

I re-read the third book shortly before the film The Return of the King appeared in theaters, and in the meantime I have read The Silmarillion but nothing else by Tolkien.

Also this Fall, I may take one or two weeks and re-read some Poe. I often do, at this time of year, and having just finished the book The Poe Shadow, in which the author purports to solve the mystery of Poe’s last days and death, re-reading Poe seems a definite possibility.

Or perhaps I’ll just read another novel about Poe. I’ve heard that The Pale Blue Eye is quite good.

What is it about certain authors that endlessly fascinates us? I have a good friend who has criticized me for never reading anything new. I only re-read. However, I feel like I’ve reached a point in my life when there is little new worth reading. Yes, I could read Gravity’s Rainbow, but why?

At age 32, I am already feeling the dreadful brevity of life’s span, so why waste my declining years poring over some potentially unworthy “text” (as books are called these days by the academics), when I could stick with a tried and true classic? I am not a Graduate Student anymore. I don’t have time or the temperament for “difficult” books.

Still, I wonder what it is about certain books and certain authors that require almost routine re-readings. Why Tolkien? Why Poe? The authors’ names may be different for you and for other people, but for me these are two authors whom I return to periodically.

Some books seem to age with us, taking on different aspects as we grow older, more experienced, and probably less wise. We read The Lord of the Rings differently at age thirty than we did at age twenty. For one thing, a real war has intervened in our understanding of the story.

Everywhere, we look for signs and analogies to explain our modern predicament, and one of those places we look is in Tolkien and on car bumpers. Every once in awhile, driving on the beltway around Washington, I see a bumper sticker that says “Frodo failed. Bush has the Ring.” Probably, Tolkien is not the best place for a political liberal to find solace, however.

Violence is often necessary in Tolkien’s world, but he reassures the reader that violence occurs in an unambiguous moral context. Ambiguity is the poison that Wormtongue spills into the ear of King Theoden, leaving him impotent and literally blind to the danger that grows at Isengard. Perhaps President Bush would suggest that like King Theoden, Americans have become complacent and enthralled by the soothing, silky words of wormtongue “terrorist appeasers” like myself, who daily speak their poison on liberal blogs across America.

I have to admit, for me, it is the lack of complexity in Tolkien’s moral vision that I find attractive, simply because it is so at variance with the world in which we live–a world in which the President of the United States can be equated with Sauron, in the minds of some. The scene in which Gandalf awakens Theoden from his suppine slumber is one of my favorites in both book and film. It quickens the heart to see evil confounded in its schemes, and a good man rise to the task of scourging those who would keep him in thrall.

Sometimes you just want to read a book like that. A book in which the bad guys look like deformed, dark goblins, and the good guys are braver and stronger than in real life.

Of course, there is no one meaning of Tolkien’s masterful works. People of multiple political stripes can make of these stories what they will. If you’re a liberal, Bush is Sauron (actually, Karl Rove makes a better Sauron, while Bush is more a pathetically corrupted Saruman). If you’re a conservative, Ahmadinejad of Iran is Sauron and “the terrorists” are orcs and Muslim Easterlings. Everyone wants to believe themselves a member of the Fellowship, however.

It is that desire to be part of the Fellowship that really binds the reader to these books. We want to see ourselves as part of some titanic struggle between the forces of good and evil. Yet oddly, we identify most with the Hobbit members of the Fellowship, not so much the brave heroes Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas. Like most Americans, the Hobbits are content to eat six meals a day and smoke their weed, without much thought to more than that. Apolitical, the Hobbits do not recognize the shadow that issues from Mordor until the Nazgul themselves ride through the Shire searching for the Ring. Even then, once the Nazgul ride on, the Shire returns to relative normalcy until the fallen Saruman arrives to enslave the Hobbits.

Even as Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin finally come to recognize the evil of Sauron that rises in the East, they are often preoccupied with thinking that there might be an easier way to defeat it. Frodo thinks his job is done once he reaches Rivendell, and he is throughly disheartened to learn that many, many miles yet lie ahead.

Thus the American venture in Iraq can be viewed as that quintessential Frodoan task, the progress of the Ring towards Mount Doom. Do we give up, or keep moving forward, in the hope that through this baptism of blood and flame we can break the power of Islamic facism forever?

In The Lord of the Rings, the answer is easy; in life, not so much.

Is the evil with which we are faced really so dire? By invading Iraq, have we brought ourselves closer to the end of Islamic extremism, or only irresponsibly prolonged the struggle, at greater cost to human life?

The answers to these questions are never so clear as in a good book, or when compared to World War II.

One of the reasons I have always rejected comparisons of the current war to World War II is that World War II had meaning, a meaning as clear and unambiguous as the War of the Ring. Evil rode on a swift horse into the Shire that was America in December 1941, and if people did not see it coming, they certainly saw it going and took to the pursuit. Few people, then or now, question the moral or practical justifications for World War II. It is nearly an anomolous war, in that respect.

Comparisons of the war on terror to World War II attempt to provide similar meaning where meaning is ambiguous. Someone brings up the point that the Islamic radicals are pursuing world domination, same as the Japanese and Germans of 1941. But what chance of success do they have? They have no state and no economy, no armed forces. They are little better than the Mafia trying to wage war on the United States. And we grant their efforts legitimacy by going along with the charade that we are “at war” with them.

So horrific were the events of 9/11 that the smoke, the shadow that floated over lower Manhattan that day five years ago must be nothing less than sign and sigil of World War III. But is it?

I have ranged far from my initial point of this post, which is that The Lord of the Rings is probably an inherently conservative book distinguished by its appeal to people of all beliefs and politics. Political people of the left and right always tend to see the world in terms of “us” versus “them.” It wouldn’t surprise me if someone has already created a bumper sticker that says “Frodo Failed. Hillary has the ring,” just in case Clinton wins election in 2008.