“Don’t the Great Tales Never End?”: Tolkien, History, and the Desire Called Marx
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In a memorable scene from The Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee sud- denly realizes the connections between his own story and those legends he had learned in his youth, marveling “Don’t the great tales never end?” Sam’s reference to such grand récits implicates the great metanarrative of History itself, into the midst of which these hobbits find themselves thrust. In this essay, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the “realization” of history is an important aim of Tolkien’s art. Tolkien’s yearning for a mythic past, despite its clear nationalism and chauvinism at first, reflected a deep desire to connect his modern world with an august, barely accessible past through forms of historical narrative. This is not an escape into a mythical, premodern realm as is frequently imagined. Rather, it is an attempt to take the broken and disconnected fragments of culture and put them together into a meaningful history, evoking what Tolkien would call “the seamless web of story.” Fredric Jameson, following Lyotard, refers to this as “the desire called Marx.” Tolkien’s experiments with different genres and styles betray the difficulties he had in organizing this overall narrative project, but his impulse in producing a grand narrative involving myth, fairy story, romance, history, and the modern novelistic form is to give shape to a world that had, in his view, lost its sense of history. Through his efforts, Tolkien’s great legendarium provides a historical sensibility for a world that had forgotten how to think historically.
Abstract
In a memorable scene from The Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee sud- denly realizes the connections between his own story and those legends he had learned in his youth, marveling “Don’t the great tales never end?” Sam’s reference to such grand récits implicates the great metanarrative of History itself, into the midst of which these hobbits find themselves thrust. In this essay, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the “realization” of history is an important aim of Tolkien’s art. Tolkien’s yearning for a mythic past, despite its clear nationalism and chauvinism at first, reflected a deep desire to connect his modern world with an august, barely accessible past through forms of historical narrative. This is not an escape into a mythical, premodern realm as is frequently imagined. Rather, it is an attempt to take the broken and disconnected fragments of culture and put them together into a meaningful history, evoking what Tolkien would call “the seamless web of story.” Fredric Jameson, following Lyotard, refers to this as “the desire called Marx.” Tolkien’s experiments with different genres and styles betray the difficulties he had in organizing this overall narrative project, but his impulse in producing a grand narrative involving myth, fairy story, romance, history, and the modern novelistic form is to give shape to a world that had, in his view, lost its sense of history. Through his efforts, Tolkien’s great legendarium provides a historical sensibility for a world that had forgotten how to think historically.
참고문헌 (25)
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