Tolkien and Form: Generic Discontinuities in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
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With the success of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien has been tasked with writing a sequel, even though he would have preferred to publish The Silmarillion instead, a manuscript which was rejected by his publisher. He set out to write a work, “in a similar style and for a similar audience,” but whatever generic characteristics those various books by Tolkien shared—today, all three might be easily subsumed under the popular marketing label of fantasy—The Silmarillion (not to mention the far more heterogenous and inconsistent “Silmarillion” texts), The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings clearly represent rather different kinds of literary works. Tolkien later attempted to reconstruct these three texts as part of a single, unified story, the “Saga of the Jewels and the Rings,” but in attempting to give shape to this story, he had to experiment with multiple narrative forms. Ultimately, the project is marked by what Fredric Jameson has called “generic discontinuities,” as Tolkien’s writings integrate aspects of the epic, romance, the historical novel, and other genres in order to build his vast world-system. In this essay, I discuss these generic discontinuities in the context of his larger aim to realize and make meaningful History (as examined previously in “‘Don’t the Great Tales Never End’: Tolkien, History, and the Desire Called Marx”). I argue that Tolkien’s writings deploy genre strategically in ways that perhaps even Tolkien may not have intended, making for a richer, multiformal, and multilayered literary map of Middle-earth.
Abstract
With the success of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien has been tasked with writing a sequel, even though he would have preferred to publish The Silmarillion instead, a manuscript which was rejected by his publisher. He set out to write a work, “in a similar style and for a similar audience,” but whatever generic characteristics those various books by Tolkien shared—today, all three might be easily subsumed under the popular marketing label of fantasy—The Silmarillion (not to mention the far more heterogenous and inconsistent “Silmarillion” texts), The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings clearly represent rather different kinds of literary works. Tolkien later attempted to reconstruct these three texts as part of a single, unified story, the “Saga of the Jewels and the Rings,” but in attempting to give shape to this story, he had to experiment with multiple narrative forms. Ultimately, the project is marked by what Fredric Jameson has called “generic discontinuities,” as Tolkien’s writings integrate aspects of the epic, romance, the historical novel, and other genres in order to build his vast world-system. In this essay, I discuss these generic discontinuities in the context of his larger aim to realize and make meaningful History (as examined previously in “‘Don’t the Great Tales Never End’: Tolkien, History, and the Desire Called Marx”). I argue that Tolkien’s writings deploy genre strategically in ways that perhaps even Tolkien may not have intended, making for a richer, multiformal, and multilayered literary map of Middle-earth.
참고문헌 (29)
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