The Western Romance

CHAPTER 4

Both these works are in a romantic tradition.  Romance, even in its destructive forms, is bound up with a notion of the importance of the individual.  The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars are tales of individual destiny.

"Romantic" has meanings in literary criticism which are not of central importance in considering cultural and social events, and a comprehensive literary history or definition of the term is not attempted here.  It is a word with many usages.  At its widest, perhaps, "the romance of" something may mean its quality of otherness, like the sea-rat's description of the sea in The Wind in the Willows:

[W]as it speech entirely, or did it pass at times into song -- chanty of sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling in his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandolin from gondola or caïque?  Did it change into the cry of the wind, plaintive at first, angrily shrill as it freshened, rising to a tearing whistle, sinking to a musical trickle of air from the leech of the bellying sail?  All these sounds the spell-bound listener seemed to hear, and with them the hungry complaint of the gulls and sea-mews, the soft thunder of the breaking wave, the cry of the protesting shingle.  Back into speech it passed, and with beating heart he was following the adventures of a dozen sea-ports, the fights, the escapes, the rallies, the comradeships, the gallant undertakings;  or he searched islands for treasure, fished in still lagoons or dozed day-long on warm white sand.  Of deep-sea fishing he heard tell, and mighty silver gatherings in the mile-long net;  of sudden perils, noise of breakers on a moonless night, or the tall bows of a great liner taking shape overhead through the fog;  of the merry home-coming, the headland rounded, the harbour lights opening out:  groups seen dimly on the quay, the cheery hail, the splash of the hawser;  the trudge up the steep little street towards the comforting glow of red-curtained windows ...

Don Quixote and Mr Toad are unhinged by dreams of romantic glory, but their misadventures, instead of puncturing romance, add to it.  It can survive in unexpected places as a spirit of youthful adventure.  "Romance" has also meant, among other things, what Coleridge described in a letter written in 1797 as:

Dungeons, and old castles, and solitary houses by the Sea Side, and Caverns and Woods, and extra-ordinary creatures ...

Poe's "The Raven" is typical of one sort of "romantic" writing, with its self-conscious atmosphere of darkness and morbidity.  Another type altogether is his high and elevated love poem, with echoes of a strange glory, "To Helen", beginning:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
like those Nicean Barks of yore,
that softly, over a perfumed sea
the weary, way-worn wanderer bore ...

Also among the many different usages of "romantic" is that employed by some intellectuals and artists to indicate that intellectuals and artists such as themselves are not bound by the normal rules and observances of society but have a place of special superiority.

As many have found to their costs, visions of splendour, excitement, glory and achievement can very easily, like the powers of the Force or The Great Rings, turn to an obsession with pride and egotism (the Nazi spectacles come to mind).  But at bottom, notions of romanticism seem to revolve round the importance of the individual and individual aspirations and volition.  This is true even when "collectivist" political individuals and causes, like the Marxist guerrilla Che Guevara (or even Marx himself) are "romanticised".

C.S. Lewis wrote in the introduction to his semi-autobiographical religious allegory The Pilgrim's Regress, that though he had come to think "romantic" had acquired so many varying meanings as to have become useless as a word, he had previously used it to mean intense longing and that:

[T]hough the sense is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting of it is somehow a delight ... there is a particular mystery about the object of this desire ... that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves ...

Or, one might add, with the strange poetry of Obi-Wan's admonition to young Luke Skywalker:  "The Jundland Wastes are not to be travelled lightly".

Lewis said this longing had a superficial resemblance to nostalgia, but was really different.  It was a longing which often related to some numinous moment in the past, but that moment was numinous because that same longing had then been present also.  It is, Lewis said, perhaps confused with nostalgia because of the very thing which indicates it is different:  the clearest and most intense experiences of it often occur in early childhood and much of the subsequent feeling of this "joy" is coloured by the memory of those experiences, which occurred when there were no memories to be the object of the nostalgia in their turn.

Both The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars have been described as exercises in nostalgia, but, as Lewis indicates, it is not as simple as that.  They are romantic in that they deal with adventures and the "marvellous" with strange settings, love, and, most importantly, with individual destiny.

In any event, "romance" is not a generally admitted part of the progressive world-view.

The idea of "Western", like the idea of "romantic", is not well defined.  However around this word too there is a generally recognisable whole concept of "the West".  It is linked to the Graeco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic, Norse and other traditions, and in modern political terminology tends to mean countries which share a heritage of democracy, relative political and economic freedoms, high standards of living and technical efficiency.  Like most political terms it is full of exceptions and ambiguities.  Many non-Western countries, societies and individuals have "Western" aspects, and the ambiguities are probably increasing as more and more "Westernisation" is adopted elsewhere.

The Lord of The Rings is specifically not a direct allegory but in Tolkien's universe the Uttermost West is where the Undying Lands lie.  But even in Middle-Earth the West tends in general to be the home of peace, order, prosperity, happiness, kindness and beauty.  In The Hobbit the dying Thorin Oakenshield calls Bilbo "Child of the kindly West".  Aragorn, setting out on the apparently hopeless quest to regain his kingdom, names the Sword Re-forged Anduril, "Flame of the West".

In Star Wars, too, as at least one hostile critic pointed out (see Chapter 8), it is with "The West" that the rebels are culturally and socially aligned.

"Westernness", romance, and the Judeo-Christian religious, ethical and traditional heritage all contain notions of the importance of the individual independent of fates or forces.  In G.K. Chesterton's "Lepanto" the spirit of Mahomet warns, as "Western" resistance under Don John of Austria is mounted against the Ottoman Empire:

It is he that saith not "Kismet";  it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!

The writings of Poul Anderson, one of America's best and most successful fantasy and science-fiction authors, provide some good examples of triumphantly "Western" themes.  The High Crusade is a delightful and comic tale of a medieval English Lord and his village who capture an alien space-ship and, by luck, shrewdness and courage, not to mention noble ideals, spread a chivalrous, romantic civilisation through the Galaxy.  Brain Wave tells of the sudden trebling of the intelligence of every living thing on Earth.  After a period of turmoil there is eventual triumph, "the West" going on into space, not as imperialistic conquerors or even as paternalistic teachers, but as agents at least of "good luck" for other worlds.  Anderson, who was one of the relatively few writing highly literate, original and intelligent work in the genre of heroic fantasy before The Lord of The Rings gave rise to a host of Tolkien imitations, is a keen medievalist and practitioner of medieval martial arts, an admirer of Tolkien and, apparently, a holder of political values at odds with collectivist progressives.  He supported the Western defence of South Vietnam when it was unfashionable for writers to do so.  He has also, in tales like The Man Who Counts, not been afraid to depict trade, commerce and capitalism as beneficent agents of civilisation, peace and progress.

Sharing something of these Western values, and the theme of ennoblement, and another interesting popular success, is the 1980s American teenager film The Last Starfighter.  This concerns an unemployed youth whose only accomplishment is playing space-invaders-type video games.  One night the entrepreneur who installed the hardest of these games meets him and takes him for a ride in a futuristic-looking car.  During the ride, to the young man's considerable and understandable surprise, the car turns into a space-ship.  His companion explains the game was a test.  People with his skills are needed for a desperate defence far out in space against real invaders.  Suddenly the game is real, and the hitherto undistinguished hero has a real chance to play a noble part, if only he chooses to do so.

Though lightweight, The Last Starfighter is more satisfying as a story than such lavish but vacuous science-fiction epics as Dune or 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  It deals on its own terms with the process of ennoblement and individual destiny.

Another essentially "Western" science-fiction story is On Messenger Mountain.  In this two spaceships, one manned by humans from Earth, the other an unknown alien, come across each other in space.  Each instantly tries to destroy the other, not out of wanton aggression or xenophobia but necessity:  neither can risk allowing the other to capture it and possibly trace it back to its place of origin.  It is thought better to destroy possibly innocent strangers than put one's whole world at risk.  (This is in contrast to the pre-suppositions of those who launched the American Pioneer space-craft, which was sent out of the Solar System carrying a message to help aliens trace it back to Earth.  They apparently took it for granted that any aliens who did so would be benevolent.)  The ships crash on a nearby planet.  A survivor from the alien ship attacks the surviving humans and does great damage before being killed.  When its dead body is examined the aliens are found to be terrible creatures.  Able to change their bodies to survive extremes of natural conditions, they can also reconstruct themselves as tiger-like predators for battle.  Their greatest strength appears to be that they can adapt themselves perfectly to their environment, and the limited, unadaptable humans cannot match them.  The humans can summon help only by launching a rocket carrying a message, but the rocket must be launched from space.  To launch it they must carry it to the top of a mountain above the atmosphere.

The rocket must be carried by two space-suited men.  Two set off but along the way one realises his companion has been killed and replaced by an alien.  The alien too wants to get the rocket to the top of the mountain and launch it to summon his own people.  Each needs the other to help get the rocket to the top where, of course, a show-down can be expected.

In the event, the human wins.  He captures the alien while it is changing into its fighting form.  As he later explains to the others, contrary to what they had taken for granted, the ability of the alien to adapt was not its strength but its weakness.  "We humans don't adapt ourselves to our environment, we adapt our environment to us."  It is an unequivocally "Western" statement and viewpoint, rather shocking in an intellectual climate saturated with injunctions to blending, merging, harmony, unity, and adaptation.

Plainly both The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars, with their emphasis on individual destiny and the great things little people can achieve, are in a wide sense "Western" as well as romantic.

In contrast to the "Western" attitude of these tales and to the work of classical science-fiction writers like Anderson are many of the science-fiction stories of J.G. Ballard, winner of the 1985 Booker Prize, who has been associated with Michael Moorcock's New Worlds and attempts to create a "modernist" science-fiction.  Ballard's stories are among the most nihilistic and death-orientated in the genre, the most sympathetic character typically being portrayed as seeking adaptation, assimilation -- in fact death -- in weirdly altered environments, while the least sympathetic characters are those who build, struggle and resist.  Ballard has been much admired by Graham Greene, who described his collection of short stories, The Disaster Area, as "one of the best science-fiction books I have read".  Ballard, one of the least "Western" of all writers, is a hostile critic of Star Wars, which he has described as poor and unimaginative science-fiction. ⁽²⁵⁾

The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars, are "Western" in that they have a distinct affinity to historic western cultural values.  The fundamental outlook behind both is traditional and conservative.  However, they deal with challenge, change and active response to violent upheavals in the established order.  It is a basically Burkean conservatism.

In both, "conservative" figures who do not meet challenge, but deny it, are doomed.  In The Lord of The Rings the Elves and the men of Gondor decline because they hunger for "endless life unchanging", attempting nothing new, and trying instead to arresl time and cling to the past.  In the War of The Ring the good side only begins to gain its first small victories when Gandalf spurs the mazed King of Rohan, and Pippin and Merry spur the Ents, into taking the strategic initiative.  In Star Wars Luke's uncle dies because he cannot face the fact that a passive, hard-working life is no longer enough.  He clings to his old way of farming until the Imperial storm-troopers come.

The values of these works may be "reactionary" in that they deal with the desirability of restoring a better past that has been usurped, but they also show the necessity for active reaction.  They are about rebellion and counter-rebellion and, either directly or by implication, about natural order and natural law.  In both the good side are seen and named by the Enemies as "rebels", and indeed they are in rebellion against the domination of evil empires.  They are, however, counter-revolutionaries, fighting to preserve the natural order against usurpers.

They are thus in the tradition of Edmund Burke, whose thought is central to the Western, or at least the English-speaking, tradition of legitimate rather than arbitrary authority.  Burke opposed the French Revolution even before the Terror (which he predicted) because he believed it was caused principally by the teachings of metaphysicians such as Rousseau who lacked experience of political reality and who held false and dangerous ideas.  He argued that "enduring rights can only emerge within the protective environment of a well-ordered society".  He regarded the social order as an organic whole, whose faults were to be approached like the wounds of a father "with pious awe and trembling solicitude".  According to Burke, radical and arbitrary restructuring of the social order to cure its faults (which today might be described as social engineering or coercive Utopianism) was as much a matter of horror as would be chopping one's own wounded father to pieces and throwing the bits into a witch-doctor's cauldron in hopes of a cure.  Yet Burke endured great political odium in Britain for supporting the American rebellion and better treatment for Ireland, both in the name of ancient rights.  A necessary part of Burkean conservatism is rebellion as a last resort to protect the permanent things.  Thus it is not a doctrine of subservience to the State.  One of the best recent Australian novels, and one of the few mythopoetic works Australia has produced, Peter Kocan's Flies of a Summer ⁽²⁶⁾ is in a sense specifically Burkean.  A stirring and profound story, Flies of a Summer tells of a fractured and enslaved society's rebirth through the rediscovery of heroism and valiant rebellion against tyranny.  It takes as its title and epigraph a quotation from Burke:  "No generation could link with another.  Men would become little better than the flies of a summer".

A few quotations from Burke show how much his thought and the tradition to which it helped give rise are in accord with the values of these two tales:

The nature of man is intricate;  the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity, and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs.  When I hear the simplicity of contrivances aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally negligent of their duty.  Simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them.

*     *     *

When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

*     *     *

All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is that good men do nothing.

The "rebels" in The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars are actually rebels against a greater rebel who has overturned the natural order (the religious implications of this regarding the place of man in a fallen world are obvious).  The theme is perhaps the oldest in Western literature.  Furthermore, they are plainly opposed to ideological solutions to the human condition.

Tolkien made his own position quite explicit.  Sauron aspired to divine honours, and given that:

[E]ven if in desperation "The West" had bred or hired hordes of orcs and had cruelly ravaged the lands of other men as allies of Sauron, or merely to prevent them from aiding him, their cause would still have remained indefeasibly right.  As does the cause of those who now oppose the State-God and Marshal This or That as its High Priest, even if it were true (as it unfortunately is) that many of their deeds were wrong, even if it were true (as it is not) that the inhabitants of "The West", except for a minority of wealthy bosses, live in fear and squalor, while the worshippers of the State-God live in peace and abundance and mutual esteem and trust ...

He continued that:

Some critics seem determined to represent me as a simple-minded adolescent, inspired with, say, a with-the-flag-to-Pretoria spirit, and wilfully distort what is said in my tale.  I have not that spirit ... but I have not made any of the people on the "right" side, Hobbits, Rohirrim.  Men of Dale or Gondor, any better than men have been or are, or can be.  Mine is not an "imaginary" world, but an imaginary historical moment on Middle Earth -- which is our habitation. ⁽²⁷⁾

The rebels are not inspired by dreams of Utopia or what Burke might call a "simple" (that is, simplistic or Utopian) government.  No simple solution to the problems of the human condition by some political or economic arrangement is or can be offered.  Even the desire for such a Utopia is potentially deadly:  it is part of the totalitarian temptation.  Both these tales, very notably, are against the idea of coercive Utopianism.  Sauron and Saruman, The Emperor and Darth Vader are all coercive utopians whose schemes to reform and "order" the world by the wielding of coercive power, even if originally embarked on with good intentions, have matured into terror and wars of conquest.

It is more than once said in The Lord of The Rings, even or especially at the grimmest times when the good side might be looking to dreams to sustain its morale, that even if the Ring is destroyed, this will not bring Utopia.  Other evils will certainly come, for Sauron himself is no more than a "servant or emissary" of the ultimate source of evil, the Satanic Morgoth.  However, there is still absolute morality, which does not change.  These moral absolutes, an intrinsic part of traditional Western thought, are the opposite of doctrines of moral relativism or positivism.  The ability to make moral choice, and to choose correctly, furthermore, is an essential part of the condition of being human.

In "The Two Towers" Eomer, bewildered by the changes in political alliances and the new or old forces emerging or re-emerging about him, asks:

The world is all grown strange ... How shall a man judge what to do in such times?

Aragorn replies:

As ever he has judged.  Good and evil have not changed since yesteryear;  nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men.  It is a man's part to discern them ...

Given the absolute fact of morality, no cosmic, ying-yang unity of good and evil is possible.  Nor are dualism or moral relativism.  C.S. Lewis, reviewing The Lord of The Rings, wrote that:

But the text itself teaches us that Sauron is eternal;  The War of The Ring is only one of a thousand wars against him.  Every time we shall be wise to fear his ultimate victory, after which there will be "no more songs".  Again and again we shall have good evidence that "the wind is setting East, and the withering of all woods may be drawing near".  Every time we win we shall know that our victory is impermanent.  If we insist on asking for a moral for the story, that is its moral:  a recall from facile optimism and waiting pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into Man's unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived.

Neither work is "progressive" in the Wellsian sense of containing a vision of continuing scientific improvement.  Nor does it look, like the strain of progressive thought associated with Frazer's The Golden Bough, to a happy future in which science will displace religion.  "What" asked H.G. Wells as scientific and socialist prophet, "is the culminating effect of a survey of history, of the science of life, and of existing condition?"  He answered himself, with full-blown if temporary confidence, that "It is an effect of steadily accentuating power, range and understanding. ... Progress continues in spite of every human fear and folly".

Star Wars was also set against this notion.  It showed a milieu of faster-than-light space-ships in which the implications of good and evil, heroism and cowardice, loyalty and treachery, kindness and cruelty, and the nature of selfless nobility, had not changed at all.  It was a message which its mainly young audience, in the last part of the twentieth century, seemed wholeheartedly to agree with.  This was in essence nothing less than a rejection of the whole heritage of nineteenth-century progressivism, or the notion of progress via technology, evolution, revolution and/or the unfolding of the dialectic towards a Utopia which would make individual moral responsibility obsolete.  The powerful myth that progress might bring perfection and a state in which morality and moral choice might eventually be meaningless, was shown to be discounted.  This myth had been pervasive for a long time.  In 1864 Victor Hugo, one of the most powerful progressive minds of his day, hailed the development of ballooning with a prediction that aircraft would make war impossible, and would instantly abolish armies and frontiers and liberate mankind. ⁽²⁸⁾  Dickens delighted to see telegraph wires pierce the "cruel old heart" of the Colosseum.  Cruelty, he felt, would hardly survive electricity (he died the year the Ems Telegram triggered the Franco-Prussian War).  Macaulay believed railways and steamships symbolised not only progress but a heartening advance towards universal peace.

The "unprogressive" nature of both The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars is plain.  In The Lord of The Rings nobility, beauty, glory and wonder have roots in the past.  One angry progressive critic of Star Wars saw "the sting" (the confidence trick) in it as being the fact that it was set "a long time ago" (see Chapter 8), implying that progress was not necessarily progressive.  Obi-Wan, showing Luke the old light-sabre, calls it "an elegant weapon, for a more civilised age ... before the dark times, before the Empire".

These works, however, are hardly "reactionary".  They do not suggest that time can be made to run backwards, but rather that the history and example of the past can enrich the present.  Further, to suggest that the future will not be inevitably better than the past does not necessarily mean that it will be worse:  the challenges facing the individual are, as they have always been, matters of the permanent things.

In Star Wars as in The Lord of The Rings there is no suggestion that the overthrow of the Empire and the destruction of the Emperor will bring Utopia.  The dark side of the Force, with its power to corrupt, will still exist.  In both tales the "rebels" fight to prevent the victory of absolute darkness and to preserve the best society possible.  At best there will still be troubles, tragedy, social and personal inequalities and threats of new ills.  And there will still be Death and whatever lies beyond it.  These themes run quite counter to nineteenth-century progressivism and utopianism and their twentieth-century legacies.

The utopian revolutionary is, ultimately, inspired by a quasi-religious eschatology, holding that the end of the Revolution will be the setting up of a new Jerusalem, or kingdom of heaven on earth.  The conservative rebel believes he is fighting against the setting up of a hell on earth -- against the Auschwitz and Gulag that Utopian revolutionaries bring -- and believes that the ultimate progressive dream of abolishing traditional good and evil will succeed only in the first part of that programme.  As Joseph Conrad put it in 1885:

[T]o pass through robbery, equality, anarchy and misery under the iron rule of military despotism.  Such is the lesson of common-sense logic.  Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism.

Or as Solzhenitzyn put it in The Gulag Archipelago:

Macbeth's justifications were feeble and his conscience tormented him.  Iago too was a mere lamb.  The imagination and spiritual resources of Shakespeare's villains did not carry them beyond the first dozen corpses.  For they lacked ideology.

Ideology!  This is what gives the evil deed its sought-for justification and the villain the lasting callousness he needs.  This is the social theory which helps him vindicate his deeds ...

It is significant that, in these works, ideology (though it is not called that) is the prerogative of the Enemy, seeking to impose coercive power.

However, these works, while not being "progressive", are not "conservative" either, except (and this is an important qualification) to the extent that conservatism tends to be an ally of certain permanent values, and, because of various historical developments, to be an opponent of Utopianism and of attempts to reconstruct society and human nature through social engineering and other types of systems control.  Thus again the main fault of the elves in The Lord of The Rings and of Luke's uncle in Star Wars is conservatism at all costs -- the refusal to face change.

By the same token, conservatism "gone bad", in the real world today is to be found in the rulers of the collectivist societies such as China and other immobilist Communist regimes, clinging to a dead doctrine and, by armed force, to power.  It is also to be found in certain institutions in Western democracies, such as the more determinedly nineteenth-Century attitudes of some unions, and in the preference for "order" over freedom often expressed in both domestic and foreign policies.

Conservatism "gone bad", as in these cases, and as in the case of George the Third's attitude to America, is directly and obviously at odds with the shared British and American traditions of Edmund Burke and with the spirit of these two tales.

To put the matter in a very large perspective, what the great success of these tales represented was a resounding popular rejection of progressivist, social engineering and social evolutionary ⁽²⁹⁾ notions such as had seemed part of intellectual orthodoxy since the Enlightenment.

---

ENDNOTES

25.  The Illustrated London News, February, 1978.  As a sample of Ballard's own writing when New Worlds was at its height, it may be reasonable to quote the following, singled out for particular praise by Brian Aldiss in his history of science-fiction, Billion Year Spree (Weidenfeld, 1973):

Pentax zoom In these equations, the gestures and postures of the young woman, Trabert explored the faulty dimensions of the space capsule, the lost geometry and volumetric time of the dead astronauts.

1. Lateral section through the left auxilliary fossa of Karen Novotny, the elbow raised in a gesture of pique;  the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader.
2. A series of paintings of imaginary sexual organs.  As he walked about the exhibition, conscious of Karen's hand gripping his wrist, Trabert searched for some valid point of junction.  These obscene images, the headless creatures of a nightmare, grimaced at him like the exposed corpses in the Apollo capsule, like the victims of a thousand autocrashes.
3. The Stolen Mirror (Max Ernst).  In the eroded causeways and porous rock-towers of this spinal landscape Trabert saw the blistered skin of the astronauts, the time-invaded skin of Karen Novotny ...

26.  (Angus & Robertson, 1988).

27.  Letters, page 224.

28.  Francois Mallet, La conquete de I'air et la paix universelle, 1910, page 73, quoted in I.F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War 1763-1984 (Oxford University Press, 1966), page 3.

29.  I do not necessarily use the word "evolutionary" in the biological, Darwinian sense here but in the sense of a belief in the steady advance of "Man" towards perfection or Utopia by social means or through some inevitable and ineluctable historical process.

The Designs

CHAPTER 3

Each these works has a similar pattern and development.  In the case of The Lord of The Rings this may have been imposed fortuitously, since it was not originally intended as a trilogy.  However, it is generally thought of as a trilogy now, and the trilogy structure in fact fits both the tales well.  In each case the first part sets the scene and outlines the magnitude of its hero's quest and perils.  The initial summons to adventure (in The Lord of The Rings beginning with The Hobbit) in each case resembles those in such classic tales as Treasure Island or The Lost World.

Soon, however, it becomes apparent that the summons is not to mere excitement or personal enrichment, but to a quest infused with elements of nobility and sacrifice.  At first much is small-scale, provincial and domestic.  Early in the piece the guide who had initiated the hero into the quest is lost.  A series of adventures end with a breathing-space.  As the first section concludes, immediate perils have been survived, and the hero is beginning to appreciate that he has taken on more than he bargained for.  He has grown in experience and wisdom, but the great Enemy's strength is basically intact and aroused.

The second part of each tale is more complex.  New characters appear, new complexities are revealed.  The heroes face new perils and are wounded.  At the end of each second part things are looking black, with important "good" characters in the hands of merciless enemies.  The good side is battered and in danger of losing all.  So far the development may be seen as reflecting, and symbolising, the development of an individual life.

The third part is "higher".  In "Return of the Jedi", Luke is not involved in a major conventional battle (nor is Frodo in "The Return of the King").  But there is a strangely enhanced sense of magic and mystery.  Partly this is due to a skilful use of names, like "the Forest Moon of Endor".  "Endor" is an echo of magic, and the Emperor's name for it, "The Sanctuary Moon", sounds hardly less "perilous".  Endor's still forests are also something like The Perilous Realm.  We are getting somewhere new, beyond mere adventure.  We are coming back to a human scale, but a significantly changed human scale.  The name of the shuttle "Tydirium" seems to suggest "tide" -- an echo of the feeling that a tide is now flowing.  The shuttle's cockpit aspect resembles the head of an heraldic horse, another hint that we are getting beyond the technological:  the matter is moving into the hands of higher powers.  An echo of the word "delirium" here also suggests that things are moving out of ordinary control and reality.

In The Lord of The Rings a similar process is at work, though it is much more explicit and needs less indication on these pages:  it is the process which has been at work throughout, by which language and atmosphere become "higher". ⁽¹⁶⁾  On the military level tactics and skirmishes are replaced by grand strategy and battles royal.

While the wars between the armies of Good and Evil go on, each hero is exposed to the confrontation with the black, Deathlike Enemy.  In each case the hero is subject to more than a flesh-and-blood individual (the spirit in the body) can bear.  In theological terms this may be seen as symbolising the fact that man alone cannot conquer Death.  To give oneself over, even with the best of motives, to the Ring, or the Dark Side, to the dream of Man becoming God, is to do Death's work for it.

In each case the hero, and the quest, are saved by an intervention at the last moment.  The Enemy, the Death-figure, is destroyed.  In the temporal or political sphere there is rejoicing.  The champions of good have grown during the struggle into nobility, but there are war-ravaged worlds to be rebuilt.

In both The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars technology is neither intrinsically good nor evil.  Indeed, it is not very important.  In the milieu of the Star Wars galaxy faster-than-light spaceships and laser-firing guns are taken for granted.  There is no science or pseudo-science to explain hyper-drive motivators.  The spaceships are there for the story, and to create "magical" effects.  The Imperial cruisers, ATAT Walkers and so forth bespeak power and menace, as the ramshackle rebel fleet creates an effect of desperate improvisation.  Other films with comparable visual effects have not had anything like as much success, partly because the effects have not been used coherently or with a sense of wholeness and rightness, and, often enough, because other film-makers have found themselves entrapped in cliches.  This is a matter of creative artistry.  Star Wars can get away with the spoof aliens in the Mos Eisley canteen and at the court of Jabba the Hutt because the scenes do not violate the spirit of the story.  Indeed they add to it, by reminding the viewer that the galaxy may contain all kinds of things and is a great place for adventures.  It is a logical development of the literary convention of setting adventures in remote and undiscovered countries, full of marvels.  Both tales have about them something of the atmosphere of the Arthurian "Matter of Britain" and of German märchen, a sense of islands of civilisation surrounded by The Wild -- which is also a metaphor of the human condition.

Though hostile critiques of both works have tended to be at bottom ideological, the common first hostile criticisms have been that they are artistically unoriginal.  As far as both are the product of long traditions, this criticism is hardly valid, unless it is attacking them for being what they are.  Their traditionalism is part of their structure, and to denigrate them as works of art for being what they are and not something else is illegitimate as an aesthetic judgement.  As works of art they may be judged successes or failures insofar as they succeed in being what their makers set out to make them.

In any event, within their traditions they are actually very innovative.  Tolkien could hardly, almost single-handed, have revived the entire genre of heroic fantasy by being anything else.  There had been nothing like The Lord of The Rings in modern times.  It broke practically every rule of commercial fiction publishing, and must have seemed to those who saw it first to be totally out of touch with the spirit of the times (a Zeitgeist perhaps more obviously reflected in something like 1984).

Similarly, to call Star Wars derivative is to miss the point:  there had been some good, even classic, science-fiction films before, such as Destination Moon, It Came From Outer Space, The War of The Worlds and This Island Earth.  But there had been nothing to touch it in its entirety.  Unlike 2001:  A Space Odyssey, its plot was well-made, consistent and unpretentious.  Star Wars departed from the more stifling Hollywood science-fiction conventions, but in a creative rather than a merely innovative way.  Princess Leia does not look like a standard Hollywood princess, for example, nor Obi-Wan like a standard Hollywood father-figure.

Forced to watch the destruction of Alderaan from the Death Star, Princess Leia, after having done her best to save it, does not resort to futile screaming like the standard Hollywood woman.  The ATAT and Scout Walkers -- war machines like prehistoric monsters and giant chickens -- were quite original.  Conventions of plot structure are successfully broken, because they are broken for good reasons.

In "The Empire Strikes Back" the normally climactic battle is at the beginning, and the rest of the film depends upon interaction between individual characters.  Another break with Hollywood and other film-making conventions, which in this context is most significant, is the growing "knightliness" of Luke.  The more ossified film convention (deriving perhaps ultimately from Rousseauian myths of the Noble Savage) would have cultured, well-mannered and well-spoken upper-class villains and loutish heroes (whose presumed hearts of gold become less apparent with the passage of time).

Another way the story breaks contemporary conventions is thai the characters are not motivated by egotism.  They are not "bound for glory" as if "glory" were the purpose of it all.  The motives ol the good people are (or, significantly, become) not to be "rich and famous" or to "win". ⁽¹⁷⁾  Fame, glory and honours are shown to be rewards (by-products, as it were) of great achievements, not ends in themselves.

This is an old-fashioned concept, hearkening back to the days when the term "hero" was reserved for someone dead.  The notion of heroism in The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars returns to something like duty in the Nelsonian sense.  It thus avoids two common contemporary perversions of heroism:  the "we-consciousness" of collectivism, expressed in things like Nuremburg rallies and May Day parades in Red Square, and the Nietszchean superman concepts expressed ultimately in the promotion and adoration of celebrities who have no particular qualities except being well-known.

There is nothing, at least on the "good side", of the violent and apocalyptic assertion of the self that has been a feature of much fashionable contemporary writing (represented in America by, for example, the works of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, John Barth, William Burroughs, Ralph Ellison, James Purdy, Allen Ginsburg, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, John Rechy, Hubert Selby and Kurt Vonnegut).

Heroism can, in these tales, be achieved by anyone.  Once achieved, however, it is celebrated with ritual, ceremony and public honour. ⁽¹⁸⁾

Roger Scruton has written that "traditions arise and command respect wherever the individual seeks to relate himself to something transcendent". ⁽¹⁹⁾  No conventional Hollywood writer or director would have dared to have Luke Skywalker defy the Emperor's demands with the words "I am a Jedi, like my father before me", words that go straight to the values of honour and tradition.  Again, a convention-bound director would have made the Emperor a standard aristocratic villain, tall, well-spoken, cultivated, impeccably dressed, not a small, deformed, hissing black thing. ⁽²⁰⁾  In making Luke Skywalker "knightly" (quite literally a member of a knightly order), George Lucas turned against the whole cult of the anti-hero.  In The Lord of The Rings, of course, the knightliness of the heroes is explicit.

Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden of the traditional backdrop of the story, explaining that it came in part from:

[T]he deep response to legends (for lack of a better word) that have what I call a North-Western temper and atmosphere ... [I]f you want to write a tale of this sort you must consult your roots, and a man of the North-West of the Old World will set his heart and the action of his tale in an imaginary world of that air, and that situation:  with the Shoreless Sea of his innumerable ancestors to the West, and the endless lands (out of which enemies mostly come) to the East. ... ⁽²¹⁾

In the tale that builds on tradition much can be taken for granted.  We do not need to know details of how The Shire's economy is controlled, as in The Wind in the Willows we do not question that Mr Toad can drive motor-cars (however badly), ride a horse, impersonate a washer-woman, comb dried leaves out of his hair, and still remain a toad.  This does not, of course, mean that detail is unimportant.  Tolkien pointed out that:  "Tyrants even in such tales must have an economic background for their soldiers and metal-workers".  Our knowledge of the Shires and its atmosphere would be diminished if we did not know that Hobbit wills require seven signatures in red ink.  Tatooine would not be Tatooine without two suns in its eerie purplish sunset.  In both The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars there are few logical inconsistencies.

The way "technology" works is taken for granted.  The palantir, the fire-weapons of Sauron and the wizards and the Ring itself are important for what they are, not how they work.  In The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings characters are sometimes carried by eagles when special transportation over very long distances is required.  The eagles' role is similar to science-fiction's matter-transmitters and hyper-drives.  Both are convenient plot-mechanisms but both also contribute to an atmosphere and sense of wonder.

Machines are accepted as necessary but their potential is distrusted.  Tolkien wrote to his son in 1945, before the first use of atom bombs, that:

[T]he first War of Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter -- leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many injured and maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant:  the machines. ⁽²²⁾

On a superficial viewing Star Wars seems completely caught up in the excitement of machines and technology, but in both Star Wars and The Lord of The Rings the point is explicitly made that technology is not the last word, and it can be used for good or ill.  In "Return of the Jedi", Obi-Wan, arguing against Luke's hopes of saving Darth Vader, states sorrowfully that:  "He's mostly machine now".  Vader's part-machine body symbolises the loss of his humanity, as his action in cutting off Luke's hand and forcing him to use a mechanical substitute is at least a potential step in corrupting Luke.  In neither tale does much action take place in cities.

The line between magic and science in these tales is unclear.  Tolkien wrote that in Middle-Earth both sides live by mainly ordinary means, but evil magic and evil science have the same purpose, that is, power:

The basic motive for magia -- quite apart from any philosophic considerations of how it would work -- is immediacy:  speed, reduction of labour and reduction ... of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect.  But the magia may not be easy to come by, or at any rate if you have command of abundant slave-labour or machinery ... it may be as quick or quick enough to push mountains over, wreck forests, or build pyramids by such means.  Of course another factor then comes in:  the tyrants lose sight of objects, become cruel, and like smashing, hurting and defiling as such.  It would no doubt be possible to defend poor Lotho's introduction of more efficient mills, but not Sharkey's and Sandyman's use of them. ⁽²³⁾

Tolkien's work is saturated with the atmosphere and environment of England, a relatively small country and the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.  It is impossible to see England without being constantly struck by the contrast between its pre-Industrial rural and natural beauty and the spread of post-Industrial ugliness, not merely the derelict mills and mine-dumps upon which time is beginning to work a strange enchantment, but also the deliberate hideousness of things like 1960s tower blocks, typical artifacts of social-engineering tyranny, intended to intimidate and systematise the human material processed through them.

While Tolkien hated the pollution and destruction of nature, he did not have that extreme, frenzied hatred of science and reason that characterised, for example, William Blake and D.H. Lawrence.  (Blake, though hating the Enlightenment -- his famous phrase "dark Satanic mills" refers not to factories but to universities -- welcomed its child, the French Revolution, which he took as a joyous explosion of natural, anti-rational instincts).  Both Tolkien and Lucas seem to recognise the benefits of industrialisation and machines, the products of science, but to be acutely aware of their potential to be put to evil ends.

Part of Tolkien's "Englishness" is bound up with a recognition of the fact that the Industrial Revolution did radically improve life, particularly for the poorer classes, though of course it is not the purpose of the tale to spell such things out:  he was not writing an economic history text.  In The Lord of The Rings the people of the City of Gondor have a good and civilised life.  Gondor is not rustic, and its economy has surely developed to the point where people do not have to labour in fields in all weathers and sleep in hovels with animals as they did in pre-industrial England.

Tolkien of course rejected any sort of "scientism" (a belief that science, alone, can ultimately resolve everything).  In The Silmarilion, the lure of the Silmarils, jewels created by Elvish "science" for the best of motives, works to vast destruction.  In The Lord of The Rings the situation is precisely similar:  the Ring is an artifact of perverted science.  Gandalf, however, has aspects of a good scientist.  Tolkien wrote:

Sauron found [the elves'] weak point in suggesting that, helping one another, they could make Western Middle-Earth as beautiful as Valinor.  It was really a veiled attack on the gods, an incitement to try to make a separate independent paradise ... the elves came their nearest to falling to "magic" and machinery.  With the aid of Sauron's lore they made rings of Power ("power" is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales, except when applied to the gods). ⁽²⁴⁾

In Star Wars the first Death Star, referred to proudly by its commander as "the ultimate power in the Galaxy" is destroyed by Luke's use of The Force.  Darth Vader's warning:  "don't be too proud of this technological terror" proves justified.  Grand Moff Turk in perishes through hubris, refusing to evacuate the Death Star although warned, and Vader himself, partly dependent on technology, barely escapes.

Machines and magic offer the deadly-dangerous "short-cut", the temptation to God-like power.  In The Lord of The Rings the One King is the expression in Evil of supernatural power.  Its good side is expressed in the Three Rings of the Elves, but these are only for knowledge, healing and defence.

In Star Wars the Force is the expression of supernatural power, its Dark Side being, as Yoda says, "quicker, easier, more seductive".  A Jedi, Yoda says, uses the Force for knowledge and defence, not for attack.  The Emperor and Darth Vader, when attempting to corrupt Luke Skywalker, dwell on the point that aggression and power are part of the Dark Side.  Thus in both tales the supernatural seems at first morally dualistic though events show that in fact it is not.  Meanwhile, of course, evil not only has apparently dominating supernatural powers but also overwhelming "conventional" forces.

Both stories have a human scale, but with fixed values of good and evil their ultimate references must be beyond the human.  They are products of the notion that all individual lives are given meaning by a sense of destiny, not of the egotistical kind commonly romanticised in contemporary fiction but by a chance to be on the right side.

At the same time, the natural world is emphasised by the wild and strange landscapes in which the stories take place.  In a sense the human consciousness is taken out of itself by this:  it is an answer to the depressing claim that "inner space" is the true area of the science-fiction or fantasy writer.

---

ENDNOTES

16.  Compare these two descriptions of conflict from the first and the fifth books of The Lord of The Rings.  Kitchen-sink is replaced by Epic:

1. Frodo had a very trying time that afternoon.  A false rumour that the whole household was being distributed free spread like wildfire, and before long the whole place was packed with people who had no business there but who could not be kept out.  Labels got torn off and mixed, and quarrels broke out.  Some people tried to do swaps and deals in the hall;  and others tried to make off with minor items not addressed to them, or with anything that seemed unwanted and unwatched.  The road to the gate was blocked with barrows and handcarts.

   In the middle of the commotion the Sackville-Bagginses arrived.  Frodo had retired for a while and left his friend Merry Brandybuck to keep an eye on things.  When Otho loudly demanded to see Frodo, Merry bowed politely.

   "He is indisposed" he said, "he is resting."

   "Hiding, you mean" said Lobelia.  "Anyway, we want to see him and we mean to see him.  Just go and tell him so!"

2. Stern now was Eomer's mood, and his mind was clear again.  He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come thither;  for he thought to make a great shield-wall at the last, and stand, and fight there on foot till all fell, and do deeds of song on the fields of Pelennor, though no man should be left in the West to remember the last King of the Mark.  So he rode to a green hillock and there set his banner, and the White Horse ran rippling in the wind.

   Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising
   I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
   To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
   Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!

   These staves he spoke, yet he laughed as he said them.  For once more lust of battle was on him;  and he was unscathed, and he was young, and he was king:  the lord of a fell people.  And lo!  Even as he laughed at despair he looked out again at the black ships, and lifted up his sword to defy them.

   And then wonder took him, and a great joy, and he cast his sword up in the sunlight and sang as he caught it, and all eyes followed his gaze ...

17.  Much in this tradition, the later George Lucas fantasy film Willow has a very hobbitish hero, a halfling type whose domestic rather than Ubermensch or romantic-apocalyptic aspirations are emphasised by the fact that he is a contented husband and father, anxious to complete his task (delivering a human baby he has found into safe hands) and get back to his family.

18.  It would be interesting to know if critics who saw Fascist overtones in the final scene of "A New Hope", where Princess Leia presents medals to Luke Skywalker and Han Solo before a parade of troops in honour of their destruction of the Death Star were similarly disturbed by the manipulation of crowd psychology shown not in fiction but in real life by, say, contemporary rock singers.

19.  Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Penguin, 1980), page 40.

20.  A hint that this convention is wearing out in film is the 1970s vampire comedy Love at First Bite, in which the aristocratic vampire Count Dracula is presented as the hero.  Dracula, expelled from his Transylvanian castle by functionaries of the new People's Republic, at one point states "this time, we are the good guys", and makes the very pertinent and chilling point to the vengeful Transylvanian villagers that without him their life will be about as exciting as "Bucharest -- on a Monday night".

21.  Letters, pages 212-213.

22.  Ibid., page 111.

23.  Ibid., page 200.

24.  Ibid., page 152.

Patterns of Epic

CHAPTER 2

The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars are on different levels as works of art -- The Lord of The Rings being much the more complex and profound of the two -- but from political and cultural perspectives the similarities are more striking than the differences.  Each is a large work whose existence breaks the rules of commercial success, and whose backers took great risks with their investments in fields where failures far outnumber successes.  Each, when it went into the world, was seen as being in opposition to the spirit of its times and was attacked with considerable hostility by progressive intellectuals.  Each has been stupendously successful.

Each, starting from a humdrum environment, moves into a series of strange, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying, settings where an apparently ordinary character, finding himself in exile, must fight armies and monsters as well as temptations to seize totalitarian power for himself, before finally being pitted against a supreme Enemy, a "destroyer who would devour all".  In each, the initially ordinary central character grows to heroic stature as a result of consciously choosing to take a hard part, though this choiee is first made almost light-heartedly from longing for adventure and in ignorance of what the quest will really entail.  Later, more than once, the choice to go on has to be made again, each time with fewer illusions and more grim determination.

With the help, at first, of an old guide possessed of great wisdom and (limited) magical powers as well as formidable fighting abilities in a crisis, and accompanied by good if comic assistants, each hero thus embarks on a mission which seems more hopeless as time goes on.  But each guide, it turns out, has long watched the hero who, unknown to himself, is the repository of great and perilous hopes.  Early in each story the guide dies fighting a superior enemy to buy time to allow the hero and his party to escape from an enemy fortress, but undergoes a kind of resurrection to return later as a transmogrified, more spiritual being.

Each hero becomes aware of "the bad news", which Frodo calls "terrible", and worse than anything he had imagined.  There had always been dangers beyond the borders of the safe, mundane little worlds in which the respective heroes lived, like the barrow-wights in the sinister green burial-mounds beyond the Hobbit's Shire and the sand-people in the wastelands beyond Luke's uncle's farm.  But at first the supreme Enemy had been only a far shadow.  Then each hero finds that this supreme Enemy's malice, bad enough when perceived only as a distant generalised threat to the natural order of things, is also directed at him personally and individually.  He cannot even hope that he may be too unimportant to be spared the personal attention of the Annihilator.  But each hero also learns that forces and hopes for good are also focussed on him personally.  In each case the supreme Enemy is robed in black, like Death.

In each tale a subsidiary enemy, deeply wicked but less powerful than the ultimate Enemy, and once himself a champion of the "good" side, has ambitions of overthrowing the ultimate Enemy.  He offers uncorrupted champions of good the temptation of bringing peace and "order" if they will join him (Saruman offers Gandalf "knowledge, rule, order";  Darth Vader tells Luke Skywalker, "With our combined strength we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the Galaxy").  But this temptation to exercise coercive power is rejected.  The linguistic point is quite important here:  it is not a "natural order" that is offered, but an "order" artificially imposed for Utopian ends.

Each hero meets a lonely wandering warrior who, after a period of initial mistrust, becomes a firm friend and leader of the forces of good in a climactic battle simultaneous with the hero's eventual confrontation with the supreme Enemy.  The heroes are by that time partly outside the organised forces of the "good side":  their personal confrontation with the enemy is of a different type.

In each tale the heroes and their friends have a series of adventures and tests.  The mood and flavour change as the heroes grow in maturity and nobility and the conflict moves onto higher planes.  The two tales begin small, close to home, with a single individual about whom little is known.  They then move to take in a larger vision of great deeds and far wider existence.  New lands are entered, and new complexities and depths behind the original issues are revealed.  In the third part of each tale, the individual hero is again the centre, but he has grown in stature and his destiny is combined with the wider sweep of events.

The initial exile leads to eventual greatness.  The central characters come to be aware not merely of the great political and military issues into which they have entered, but also of their own moral responsibilities.  A major theme in each case is the contrast between the ordinariness of the heroes and the destinies to which they are called.

Each hero soon becomes aware that he is in a world in ruins.  The society on Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home planet, is obviously decaying under the dead hand of the Empire, while in The Lord of The Rings the description of the young hobbits coming to Bree, the village nearest their little shire, where all seems well-ordered, prosperous, placid and contented, has a subtly chilling undertone:

Bree was the chief village of the Bree-land, a small inhabited region, like an island in the empty lands about ... Down the Road, where it swept to the right to go round the foot of the hill, there was a large inn.  It had been built long ago when traffic on the roads had been far greater ... But the North Road was now seldom used:  it was grass-grown, and the Bree-folk called it the Greenway.

The peace and contentment which the hobbits take for granted, and have even become bored with, come to be seen as a local and temporary accident.  There is a gradual realisation that only the dwindling strength of old guardians still keeps these pockets of humdrum happiness in existence.

Both tales place value on physical competence.  Their heroes are people who do things.  However, they also take ideas seriously.  Each hero -- and in this the tales are unlike much modern drama -- gradually becomes a better and "higher" person.  In making a series of brave, difficult choices, each grows gradually in stature, responsibility and authority as well as moral sense, a process Tolkien described as ennoblement.  The last and hardest temptation that each hero faces is to "do the right deed for the wrong reason" -- Frodo is tempted to end the realm of Sauron by claiming the Ring, Luke to defeat the Emperor and Darth Vader by using the dark side of the Force.

When at last each confronts the Enemy, he fails in the penultimate moment -- but makes it possible for one of the Enemy's own creatures, at least partially regenerated by the hero's efforts and example, to rebel.  A general deliverance is brought about just as the last armies of "good", fighting against hopeless odds, seem about to be destroyed.

Each hero makes friends -- diverse in character and attitudes, some of them not human.  The friends grow too, from immature adventurers into figures of responsibility and authority.  Both heroes are physically maimed in their battles, and in the end they do not marry princesses (though their friends do).  They end spiritually comforted but alone.

Each hero, in his wanderings, as well as gathering friends, encounters various secondary and subsidiary enemies and monsters, some of these being direct agents and subordinates of the ultimate Enemy, and some (Shelob and Jabba the Hutt) being allowed a degree of independence because of their usefulness and because their altogether "lower", physical, appetites (symbolised by their bloated bodies) pose no threat of competition to the ultimate Enemy's own spiritual appetites.  On the spiritual plane the Enemy can tolerate no rivals.

The "good" sides are, in toto, quite powerful, but apparently hopelessly outmatched when pitted against the limitless power which the Enemies command.  The "good" are just "strong enough to fail" and to indulge in fools' hopes.  The "good" armies apparently accept military discipline and hierarchy voluntarily.  The "bad" armies are disciplined by terror, with death the explicit punishment for mishaps and mistakes.

Both tales, while dealing with battles and wars against cruel enemies, generally avoid depictions of extreme brutality.  Their outlook is ultimately optimistic -- but not in the socially progressive sense -- and they look to individual rather than social salvations.  Their "happy endings" promise no everlasting Utopias.

Each work seems hard to translate into the medium of the other, but many of the situations are strikingly similar.  The dive in Mos Eisely where Luke Skywalker and the robots meet Han Solo while an enemy circles and searches outside is not exactly like the Inn at Bree where Frodo and the other young Hobbits meet Strider, but there are similarities.  The description of Gandalf's sacrificial battle with the Balrog in The Lord of The Rings would serve well for the similar battle in Star Wars:

His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out ... But Gandalf stood firm.  "You cannot pass," he said ... "The dark fire shall not avail you ..."

From out of the shadow a red sword leapt gleaming.

Glamdring glimmered white in answer.

There was a ringing clash and a stab of white fire.

There are other similarities:  both works are enjoyed by children and adults, though they are frequently described by hostile critics as being "childish".  They can be judged by criteria appropriate to both juvenile and adult art.  They are set in milieu which take for granted a conservative and traditionalist view of love and the family and of romantic and sexual relationships.

Both stories are set in societies where a religion exists that has some similarities to a Christless ⁽¹⁴⁾ Christianity but which is in decline and out of step with the temper of the times.  Indeed the old religion seems only a vestige, while a new, evil demi-god, wielding supernatural power, seems to be growing towards god-like strength.  Presumably if the religion that was once the common property of good people had remained a potent force a healthier state of society would have endured.  In each tale an unhonoured, almost extinct, remnant of an ancient knightly order preserves a spiritual as well as a military heritage in wild and forgotten places.

Specifically religious issues are mentioned little, and doctrinal matters not at all, but in each story the struggle between good and evil causes the whole structure to be permeated with spiritual issues and questions.  By the end of "Return of the Jedi" it becomes plain that the Star Wars trilogy is not merely profoundly religious, but that it is more centrally in the Western religious tradition than perhaps any other popular film that has ever been made.  Certainly it is a far more religious film than any Hollywood Biblical epic.

In both stories some form of life after death, the immortality of the individual soul, and some form of final judgement are accepted.  This gives the stories a mental atmosphere at once both classically "Western" and at odds with much of the atmosphere of modern secular society, art and culture.

Family heritages of honour and tradition are very important.  On solemn and "perilous" occasions, in moments of great challenge or great portent, characters in The Lord of The Rings are addressed by patronymics, such as "Frodo Son of Drogo".  It is a sort of stiffening of the spine, an injunction to "Remember who you are!", and to remember both individual and family honour.  The individual is thus enriched by being connected to, and being the product of, the traditions and heroisms of the past.  This applies not only to people with lineages of high nobility but also the middle-class Frodo and the working-class Sam Gamgee ("Samwise, Hamfast's son").  All can benefit from a remembrance of their ancestry for it enriches their own identity and reinforces the knowledge that their own lives have meaning and importance as part of something greater than themselves.

The fact of "ancientry" has its own significance.  When, in Tolkien's posthumously-published Unfinished Tales, Aragorn retrieves the original and most splendid jewel of his household, the Elendilmir, from Isengard, he says of the later, imitation and inferior Elendilmir, which he has worn until then, that it is also a "thing of reverence" and beyond his worth, since "forty heads have worn it before".

However, it is not a matter of simply inheriting worth.  It must in addition be earned:

Was du erebst von deinen Vatern
Erwirb es, um zu besitzen.

This sort of notion was not, apparently, prevalent, at least among what some have called "the chattering classes", at the time The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars were attracting millions.  Tom Wolfe, writing of the 1970s, contrasted a Weltanschauung of feckless hedonism with more traditional views in the essay, "The Me Decade":

The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their personal assets in order to provide a better future for their children ... the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle ... the man who devotes his life to some struggle for his people that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime.  People (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills ... are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream.  Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children ... The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would soon be dead did not give you the licence to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things.

While in these tales some characters rise to greatness from nothing, the nobility or even simple goodness of parents who have gone before in a sense define and reinforce the honour and good conduct of children.  Early in the first Star Wars film, it is a solemn and portentous moment when Luke Skywalker is given his father's old light-sabre.  In "The Empire Strikes Back", Luke is more horrified to learn that his father is or has turned into the evil Darth Vader than he is by Vader's hacking off his right hand.  It is the only time Luke attempts to destroy himself.  From then on the salvation of his father, at any risk to himself, gives a new dimension to the quest.  Luke is reinforced in dark moments by the idea of the good and noble man his father must once have been.  In "Return of the Jedi", Luke rejects the seductive blandishments of the evil Emperor with the words:  "I am a Jedi, like my father before me".  This emphasis on honour, the worth of the individual, and the individual's links with the past, is quite at variance with ideas of salvation by social engineering or the creation of a New Order.  The integrity of the individual is aided by tradition and example.  (In the modern world the opposition of collectivists to hereditary titles, even when such titles confer no privileges, is often because they reinforce a feeling of identity with something other than the State.  They are glitches in social engineering).  Of course, not all may have an immediate personal "ancestry" from which they can take inspiration.  We know nothing of the background of many of the characters, and to suggest that such ancestry is necessary or sufficient for virtue would be snobbery of a particularly simplistic and false kind, completely at odds with, say, the Christian values behind Tolkien and with the idea of the individual's capacity for moral choice central to the Western epic.  What is really being suggested is that some contact with the idea of virtuous tradition is important.

It is loading a lot on a couple of adventure stories to take this matter far, but while it seems the remembrance of a good father or other example is a good thing to have, those without it are not thereby excluded from virtue:  indeed their ennoblement may be even more praiseworthy.

Ultimately both stories are concerned with the salvation of individual souls -- in the case of Star Wars in a rather surprising way.

Both stories are about the rejection of grandiose, totalitarian schemes of empire-building.  They are anti-utopian, but the best form of political organisation they look towards seems to be a free association of diverse states.

Since Star Wars was made primarily for an American audience it had no need to spell out that the good republic recently usurped by the Emperor was a free-enterprise, commercial republic.  That is in the background of American culture.  Things like spaceships were private property, as was Uncle Olwen's farm.  When Luke sells his land-speeder he complains:  "Since the XP-38 came out, they just aren't in demand".  There is still something left of a market economy.  In a scene omitted from the film but published in The Art of Star Wars, Luke's friend Biggs says to him:

What good is all your uncle's work if it's taken over by the Empire? ... You know they're starting to nationalise commerce in the central systems [and] it won't be long before your uncle's merely a tenant.

Plainly the old republic was not collectivist or socialist.  It is interesting that even without this information the implications and atmosphere of Star Wars were sufficiently plain for progressive and collectivist-minded intellectuals to give it a most hostile reception on its release.

Also, the Republic previously had a division of powers, presumably in a federal system.  As Darth Vader makes clear at his first appearance when he seizes Princess Leia's ship, there was previously a senate that provided some checks and balances on central power.  It is announced as a means of implementing totalitarian control that the regional governors are to be given direct powers.  This, of course, is a common desire of social engineers who find that the political process frustrates grand designs (for example the Third Reich's Gauleiters -- "region leaders" -- to override the old German states, or in a milder way, the Whitlam government's attempt to bypass the federal system through the Australian Assistance Plan).

Though the rebels in these two tales have no belief in Utopia, they are still prepared to sacrifice their lives to overthrow tyranny and restore an order which, though intrinsically imperfect, is immeasurably less bad than that of the Enemy.  This is not a conceit of romantic fiction, of course:  it is no more than people have been prepared to do in fact for centuries.  But it is opposed to the progressive and "liberalistic" slogan:  "Nothing is worth dying for!"

Good characters in both tales accept death both by sacrificing their lives in battle for others (for example, Gandalf, Obi-Wan and various other fighters), and by old age at the end of long lives (for example, Aragorn, Yoda).  Implicit here is a belief that earthly life is a preparation for death -- or rather for what lies beyond death.  The evil characters, however, are circumscribed by a purely Earthly consciousness.  They are at the last withered, hideous creatures clutching power at all costs, because this is the only form their desire for deathlessness can take.

The good people in both tales are led by aristocrats among others, but there are aristocrats on the evil side as well, and we hardly need to be told that aristocrats, like all other leaders, can be evil.  The potential of power to corrupt is a major theme of both works.  So is lack of power:  some of the lesser villains (Gollum, Salacious Crumb) have been corrupted by their own littleness.  Again, such notions are at odds with Utopian doctrines that see the solutions to human problems in better planning and the control of social systems.

In both tales the good uphold orders of hierarchy and some ritual splendour.  They utilise science and/or magic (that is, power) but do not regard it as an end in itself.  Institutionalised ugliness, drabness, and the exultation of perverted science are the province of the Enemy.  While the Enemy has imposed brutal and arbitrary discipline on his own forces, the good people accept hierarchy -- but an organic hierarchy, one in which individuals can quite properly rise.

Good characters, wherever they come from, grow when they do noble deeds of their own initiative and volition.  The young hobbits in The Lord of The Rings, and Han Solo and Lando Calrissian in Star Wars, grow from immature adventurers to responsible leaders, though their bravery does not diminish but increases with responsibility and their acceptance of a moral dimension to their actions.  In The Lord of The Rings Merry takes the first step towards "ennoblement" when he goes to help Eowyn in the apparently hopeless fight against the Lord of the Nazgul.  In Star Wars Han Solo begins the same journey when he turns back to help in the apparently hopeless attack on the first Death Star.  Lando, in "The Empire Strikes Back", at last throws away everything he has built up to thwart Darth Vader rather than collaborate in the final betrayal of a friend.

The attitude to power and to politics and social organisation in these tales is also at odds with progressivism.  It is taken for granted that a hierarchical structure which is accepted as legitimate rather than arbitrary, in which values depend on something more than the caprice of the rulers, is the only structure in which justice, and therefore freedom, are possible.  As Shakespeare put it in Trolius and Cressida:  "Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows!"

In both tales, the great Enemies, like twentieth-century totalitarians, make hierarchy dependent on their own power.  Their own lieutenants, however terrifying they appear to those below, themselves lead the precarious lives of a Röhm, a Yagoda, a Yezhov or a Beria.  In the evil empires not the state but society has withered.  The tyrants will kill their own subordinates for failures not their fault, without pity, whereas the good people would regard the violent deaths of any of their subordinates as a tragedy.  This is part of the difference between a just hierarchy and one ruled bv arbitrary terror.

A consequence of this is that the tyrants find themselves surrounded by sycophants, afraid to disagree with them or bring them bad news.  Yet, as in the real world, this is not an immediately crippling handicap.  The real problem for them is that Evil is smaller than Good in that Evil cannot understand Good in the way Good can understand Evil.  This is far more a Christian than a dualistic or a "New Age" religious view.

The enemy vision in both cases turns naturally to the idea of "dethroning" a leader as soon as any rising subordinate has the power to do so, recapitulating the social arrangements of some animals such as wolves.  In Star Wars the Emperor assumes Luke Skywalker can be corrupted by the temptations of the dark side, as he assumed Darth Vader is totally and irretrievably overcome by it (as does Vader himself, who says, when in "Return of the Jedi" Luke first asks him to remember his heritage and rebel against the Emperor:  "It is too late for me, Son".)  In The Lord of The Rings, Sauron never conceives that anyone else holding the Great Ring might try to destroy it, or do anything but trample down rivals to wield it.  In both cases their failure to understand anyone having a goal beyond seizing power proves fatal to them.

Part of the heterogeneity, and the humanity, of the "good sides" in these tales is that the beings making them up have diverse interests, emphases and gifts.  Even the non-human characters are recognisable as having certain individual human characteristics.

We see little of these aspects of the regimented forces on the enemies' sides, but some of them at least display courage and self-sacrifice.  In "The Empire Strikes Back", Captain Nida of the destroyer Avenger, which loses the Millenium Falcon outside the asteroid belt, sacrifices himself to Darth Vader's wrath, assuming "full responsibility" apparently to protect his subordinates.  Even an orc in "The Two Towers" returns to a foredoomed battle rather than forsake some "stout lads".  It is a conservative and individualistic rather than a progressive or ideological collectivist belief that it is possible to be a good person fighting in a bad cause.  (In The Last Battle C.S. Lewis made the point, on the religious aspect of this, that a good God will accept good things done in the name of an evil cause, not because Good and Evil are one but precisely because they are utterly apart.)

Star Wars' Emperor can hardly have built a star fleet of his own from nothing in a fairly short time, and presumably when gaining power he took over the Republic's existing fleet, as Caesar took over the legions, Hitler took over the Reichswehr and Lenin forced Czarist officers to serve the Soviets.  One can imagine in Star Wars an old guard of republican officers in the Imperial Star Fleet (Admiral Ousel and Captain Nida -- both killed by Darth Vader for failure -- might well be among them), doing their duty with increasing reluctance, never trusted by the new regime, and doomed to liquidation as soon as their services can be replaced (one may wonder if Ousel deliberately bungled the star fleet's approach to the Hoth base to allow the rebels time to escape).  In both tales (and again, as in real life) the power of the evil side depends on its abilities to put good qualities such as bravery and selflessness to evil uses.

In both stories women do little fighting, though some of the leaders on the "good" side are women.  This is an integral part of the chivalrous tradition.  In The Lord of The Rings (the question does not arise much explicitly one way or the other in Star Wars) the "good" side are chivalrous fighters.  They spare the lives of their enemies if they can.  This is in marked contrast to many sadistic books and films of the last decade or so, including a rash of war films in the 1960s and 1970s -- Shout at the Devil, Play Dirty, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone etc. which took an indulgent or approving attitude to torture or other terror practiced by the "right side" or scorned the idea of "civilised" (that is, chivalrous) war.

Tolkien's own general attitude to this is made plain in a letter written to his son on January 20, 1945:

I have just heard the news ... Russians 60 miles from Berlin.  It does look as if something decisive might happen soon.  The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly:  destruction of what should be (indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted ... Yet people gloat over the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children passing West, dying on the way.  They seem to have no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour.  By which I do not mean it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable.  But why gloat?  We are supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted ... Well, well, you and I can do nothing about it.  And that [should] be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly lie attached to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual government.

[emphasis added] ⁽¹⁵⁾

In both tales the point is specifically made that the enemy armies are conscripted, and many of their members are, in a sense, victims too.  At one point in The Lord of The Rings Sam contemplates the body of a dead enemy invader:

He was glad he could not see the dead face.  He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from;  and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home;  and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.

The "good" side may conscript, but one gets the impression in both tales that the armies of good are formed of men who have voluntarily chosen to submit to military discipline.

Again, it is an important part of the tradition of Western chivalry that the enemy be seen as something other than a collectively evil and guilty mass of sub-humans.  A collectivist ideology, followed to its logical conclusion, makes the possible goodness or human worth of individual enemies practically a meaningless concept.  (Even today, unless things have changed very recently, officially approved Soviet writings on the Second World War usually refer to German soldiers simply as "the Fascists", despite the fact that the German armies were made up overwhelmingly of conscripted workers.)  To the ideological totalitarian, the defeated enemy must go to "the rubbish-heap of history" -- that is, die.

It is explicitly stated at the end of The Lord of The Rings and can be assumed at the end of Star Wars that, with the destruction of the Enemy, most of the personnel of the defeated armies were set free and also recovered liberty and dignity (as happened after World War II with the West German, Italian and Japanese populations).  This is the Western and chivalrous (or liberal) as distinct from the ideological or totalitarian end.  It is connected with Christianity, but does not necessarily imply some eschatology of universalism, apocatastasis or Pelagianism.  Not all are necessarily "saved", though Tolkien did write that he saw everything in the Creation as being ultimately good.

---

ENDNOTES

14.  This impression of a "pre-Christian" world is subtly reinforced by the fact that very few of the characters have Biblical names.

15.  Humphrey Carpenter, (ed.), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1981), page 111. (Hereafter referred to as Letters).

Mania for Iconoclasm?

CONTENTS

1. Mania for Iconoclasm?
2. Patterns of Epic
3. The Designs
4. The Western Romance
5. Wars, Heroes and Modernism
6. Attack on The Lord of The Rings
7. The Attack Consolidated
8. Attack on Star Wars
9. Religion in the Epics
10. Answer from the Underground

---

A NOTE ON NAMES:

Proper names of books, films, etc. are given in italics, except that names of sections within The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars (for example, "The Two Towers", "A New Hope") are given in inverted commas.

---

CHAPTER 1

In the late twentieth century every traditional Western value, system of ethics and art form is collapsing.  The notions of chivalry, heroism, nobility and valour which permeated traditional Western culture have vanished as if they had never been.  The culture previously based on these notions is being radically transformed.

Well, possibly.  But against this background of apparently endless upheaval and collapse there have emerged popularly successful works of literature and films that reveal strong underlying elements of traditional Western values.  This offers hope for the continuation of the Western tradition, for these new expressions of the old culture have achieved not only an immediate but a lasting popularity around the world.  Such works are multiple and diverse.  Two of the most popular and significant were the long heroic fantasy The Lord of The Rings, whose first volume was published in the early 1950s, and the film trilogy Star Wars, whose first segment was released in 1977, and which have remained continuously successful.

These works, and the deep responsive chords they struck, were important as indicators of the state of Western (and, in the time of the global village, of international) culture.  This study looks principally at them as major examples, but also looks in passing at some of the many others of the same tradition -- which, despite possible appearances to the contrary, is a continuing stream in Western culture.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was relatively little that could be said against the observation or impression that the collapse of traditional "Western" values seemed to affect all aspects of life.  The anti-hero, in various aspects, seemed to dominate "high", "serious" or intellectually fashionable culture.  Serious literature and art had largely embraced Nihilism, and established religions seemed to have become, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, a matter of "crazed clergy, empty churches, and total doctrinal confusion".  Bizarre pseudo-religious cults flourished and grew.

American failure in Vietnam cast doubts on the ultimate strength of Western arms.  Over several decades pseudo-Keynesian economics had eroded the stability and value of money, and undercut ideas of provision for the future.  There were big changes in acceptable sexual behaviour and in family structures.  A drug culture revolutionised notions of glamour, personal decorum, and even music, and a succession of playwrights revolutionised the theatre.  Positivism and situation ethics advanced from university departments to permeate the general background of intellectual life.

Much of this derived from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.  By the earlier part of the twentieth century it had come to be associated with secularisation and social transformism.  Influential names associated with this movement in various ways were innumerable.  They included, to mention only a few, Rousseau, Bertrand Russell, Frazer, Huxley, Wells, Freud, Madame Blavatsky, and Lenin. ⁽¹⁾  It is impossible to give a history of the phenomenon here, but a few examples of important spokesmen for it may be quoted.

Addressing a Komsomol congress on the subject of Communist ethical thought in 1920, Lenin stated:

Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new society ... We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we expose the falseness of all fables about morality. ⁽²⁾

Putting the same notion in a manner perhaps more acceptable to the progressive Western readers of the day, the influential socialist historical populariser and propagandist R.H. Tawney, wrote in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, published in 1926:

Circumstances alter from age to age and the practical interpretation of moral principles must alter with them ...

In 1946 the Canadian scientist Brook Chisholm, who had built up the World Health Organisation, acted for five years as its Secretary-General, and who was eventually elected President of the World Federation of Mental Health, had written on the need to abolish ideas of right and wrong in the following terms:

The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objects of psychotherapy ... the suggestion that we should stop teaching children moralities and right and wrong ... has of course to be met by an outcry of heretic or iconoclast such as was raised against Galileo for [sic] finding another planet, [but] the fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and many other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains ... The race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil. ⁽³⁾

This may seem an extraordinary prescription to put forward in the aftermath of Auschwitz, but it was a pervasive attitude among progressive thinkers, and at times seemed (correctly or otherwise) to be simple scientific orthodoxy.  For instance, Sir Julian Huxley, well-known scientific author and former Director-General of UNESCO, said in 1962:

In adapting our old education system to our new vision a lot of cargo will have to be jettisoned -- once noble but now mouldering myths ... There are no Absolutes of truth or virtue, only possibilities of greater knowledge and greater perfection ... ⁽⁴⁾

A few years later, in 1965, Philip Johnson, speaking on the BBC with Susan Sontag, summed up the development of this outlook at a time when ideas of anti-heroism and moral relativity seemed to dominate the cultural and intellectual establishment:

What good does it do you to believe in good things? ... It's feudal and futile.  I think it much better to be nihilistic and forget all about it.

This moral relativism extended into established Western religions.  Vatican II and its aftermath revolutionised much of the Catholic Church.  Other modernists revolutionised the Protestants.  While the evangelical and fundamentalist churches gained some converts, and made notable progress in the so-called Third World, the emptying of the traditional Western churches grew apace.  Christianity was, moreover, confronted for the first time in centuries with a resurgent Islam.

Meanwhile, in what may be seen as one of the most important and enlightening comments about the politics of artistic and cultural modernism, the British Marxist art critic Sir Herbert Read wrote:

Everywhere the greatest obstacle to the creation of the new social reality is the cultural heritage of the past -- the religion, the philosophy, the literature and art which makes up the whole complex ideology of the bourgeois mind. ⁽⁵⁾

In is not necessary to subscribe to wide-ranging conspiracy theories to see how pervasive these notions had become.  Many things were happening at once, which seemed to have in common the destruction of traditional values in all sorts of fields including art, literature, ethics, religion and politics.  The New Left revolutionised the notion of Revolution itself, and these various revolutions compounded one another.  Some saw a "mania for iconoclasm" abroad, with something profoundly self-destructive at the heart of it, and, for those who cared, it was possible to read an ominous warning in Golo Mann's description of the Weimar Republic:

What an intellectual babble of voices, that Weimar Republic! ... Philosophers demonstrating that there was no longer time for any philosophy, sociologists unmasking all creeds, values and moral standards ... legists affirming that the very notion of natural justice was a hoax and any positive law, duly codified, was as good as another -- far too many people assiduously sawing off the branch on which other people or they themselves were sitting.  There was then, I should say, too much intellectual freedom ... and all of a sudden there was none. ⁽⁶⁾

Observers such as former Private Eye editor Christopher Booker in the England of "Swinging London" identified a profound cultural sickness behind the craving for the "new".  The American liberal Lionel Trilling saw a "bitter line of hostility to civilisation" as the characteristic element of the most highly-developed modern literature.  Writing later in Encounter, British social scientist Jeffrey Richards claimed, not as one revealing a radically new idea but more with the air of re-stating a truism:

Sportsmanship along with chivalry fell out of favour in the 1960s.  Satirists ridiculed them.  They were deemed old-fashioned and class-based attitudes.  The twin processes of disillusionment with the status quo and liberation from restraint are reflected in the characteristic products of 1960s cinema ... the working-class heroes of the social realist dramas, like Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ("all I want is a good time -- all the rest is propaganda") ... the ubiquitous spy films embodied the twin faces of the '60's stance -- the le Carré style (bleak, bitter, anti-Establishment tone, with suave, heartless spymasters manipulating ordinary fall guys) ... and the Bond style (conspicuous consumption, colour-supplement chic, comic-strip sex and violence). ... The whole thrust of popular culture in the 1960s constituted a massive rejection of the old value-systems. ⁽⁷⁾

Worse symptoms of cultural disease than this were diagnosed.  A couple of comments by informed contemporary observers will stand for many more.  In the London Daily Telegraph, the columnisl Michael Wharton ("Peter Simple"), one of the most perceptive and thought-provoking conservative journalists of the age, wrote in late 1967:

"Vulgarity, ridicule and spectacle.  These are the three absolutes of the New York underground drama today," says a newspaper article, "It is an increasingly successful formula."

The article describes some of these dramatic offerings:  "At the moment you can see two plays dealing graphically with narcissism and rape ... "Conquest of the Universe" is ... played in a style of exuberant lewdness ... Unnameable acts are casually performed on stage and in the final scene nine new-born infants are carved up with a dinner knife.  The whole thing is hysterically amusing."

The whole thing must certainly be hysterically amusing to the single-minded enemies of the United States in Moscow and elsewhere, who will conclude, rightly or wrongly, that a nation which permits such increasingly successful spectacles will neither survive nor deserve to do so.

As for us in the West, less single-minded and more sophisticated, what should be our critical reaction?  We may search for appropriate phrases ... "alienation" ... "problem of non-communication" ... "neo-expressionism with dadaistic elements" ... "Theatre of the Abominable" ... "fearless confrontation in theatrical terms with the human predicament in the post-Christian era ..."

But at the back of them all there seems to nag at the mind some other critical reaction, older, simpler, and more universally applicable than any of them both to art and to life.  What can it be?  "Deliver us from evil"? ⁽⁸⁾

In his 1972 collection of essays, Nine Lies About America, a vast and rich compendium of then current intellectual and cultural pronouncements, the outstanding American scholar and former trade union official, Arnold Beichman, wrote:

[O]ne must ask in sadness, and even desperation, whether a country and its culture can survive such a decadent onslaught on thought and rationality.

These warnings were not the apocalyptic prognostications of simple-minded millenarian fanatics.  On the contrary, their authors were among many wise, intelligent and cultured men, drawing what seemed to be inevitable conclusions from the cultural despair and destructiveness of the day, men whose own powerful writings may have made a real difference in preventing the coming to pass of the cultural and political disasters they warned against.

*     *     *

After the first half of the 1970s some things changed.  Dissident writers from Communist countries, Solzhenitzyn pre-eminent amongst them, did much to expose the nature of Communism to a new generation in the West, as did the stories of horror that escaping refugees brought from Liberated Vietnam.  The former editors of Ramparts magazine, a leader of anti-American new leftism in the 1960s, now called for aid to Afghanistan not as a CIA secret but as a matter of public policy and national honour.  Conservative or neo-conservative values seemed to be regaining strength in intellectual circles.  Meanwhile, economists influenced by the Austrian and Chicago schools began to reassert the values of free markets, breaking the spell of Keynes in the West.  The decade ended with the landslide victory of an American president who promised a renewed commitment to the defence of freedom and the restoration of Western military strength.  Britain saw the election of a Conservative prime minister whose values were set against statism and social engineering.  The styles of both these leaders were in striking contrast to those of their dim, time-serving predecessors.  Furthermore, they were elected in spite of the extreme hostility shown towards them by much of the intellectual, cultural and artistic "establishments" in both countries.  Not long afterwards, public responses to the British campaign in the Falklands and the American operation in Grenada showed feelings of traditional patriotism to be strong in both these societies.

Even in communist states the economic disasters of collectivism came -- at first gradually -- to be acknowledged, and in many parts of the world, with the plain failure of statist planning to deliver on its promises of material abundance, statism moved into retreat.  As an economic system, democratic capitalism operating in a free-market economy had abundantly proved itself.

Beyond this, it was becoming evident that the ethical revolution had not succeeded.  In the light of the experiences of the Age of Ideologies, the whole group of concepts associated with moral relativism was becoming utterly discredited, in societies like those of Eastern Europe at least.  Again, the voice of Solzhenitzyn was among the most important here.  In Poland, values and notions apparently hopelessly reactionary began to reassert themselves with strength and courage.  In 1984 a persecuted Czech dissident named Vaclav Havel, speaking valiantly out of an apparently endless and hopeless darkness, was able to say:

It is becoming evident that wholly personal categories like good and evil still have their unambiguous content, and, under certain circumstances, are capable of shaking the seemingly unshakeable power with all its armies of soldiers, policemen and bureaucrats ... ⁽⁹⁾

As the 1980s began, then, anti-leftists and anti-collectivists could feel they might be more than a doomed remnant vainly shouting "Stop!" to history.  But as the decade moved towards its close, they could feel more than that:  suddenly the bankruptcy of political collectivism was obvious from Hungary across the Soviet Union to China.  In one of the most astonishing political revolutions in the history of the world, Communist governments and parties in country after country of Eastern Europe handed over power or voted themselves out of existence.

There was also, in many circles in the West, a widespread if still inchoate questioning of the results of morally relativistic education, and a feeling that something had gone amiss with the application of notions and values which had been hailed by the consensus of intellectuals as progressive and inevitable.  In January 1987, Lawrence Kohlberg, a professor of Educational Philosophy at Harvard University whose theory, that moral judgement develops spontaneously in a sequence of upward stages but cannot be taught, had been enormously influential in moral education (see Chapter 5), walked into an icy tidal marsh on Boston Harbour and drowned himself.  It seemed, perhaps, symbolic of changing times.  In Afghanistan, it was shown that technologically poor tribal people inspired by an ancient faith could defeat a great scientific military power.

Setting aside the great events in Eastern Europe, however, in the West this was a strangely incomplete defeat for collectivism, confined largely to sectors of the economic front.  Collectivist dominance of acceptable cultural values and the realm of the human imagination seemed largely unchallenged.

Furthermore, there seemed in the West, if one believed what one read, to be no sense of cultural renewal.  In particular, there seemed to be a continuing decay of moral consciousness, expressed in, for example, a decline in religious values.  In one example among many of this view, the theological writer and former Jesuit priest Malachi Martin, while holding that "the Christian viewpoint is still the viewpoint of the majority", wrote in 1976 of:

[T]he insistence of latter-day opinion-makers that the religious view of good and evil is outdated. ... In our mass entertainment -- motion pictures, television, novels, theatre -- there are no hero figures and no concept of right and wrong, good and evil.  We are shown human life as alternating between a bleak despair and a desperate struggle with banal forces against which our only allies are ourselves and our own resources. ⁽¹⁰⁾

In the same year John Lennon, of The Beatles, expressed a rather similar idea:

If the kids have nobody bigger to believe in than people like us, there's not much hope for them.

Throughout these decades Leftism and varieties of Nihilism apparently held the cultural high ground.

*     *     *

It is because of this apparent state of affairs that the successes of The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars are culturally significant.  They were a small part of a thorough-going revolution, which may still be only beginning.  In retrospect, 1977, the year of the release of Star Wars, might have been a watershed.  The next year, The Times commented that it had become much harder than a decade previously to find collectivist writers (that is, political essayists) of "any mental vitality at all ... the gas has gone out of the bag". ⁽¹¹⁾  The major intellectual history of collectivist thought to be published during this period, Leszek Kolakowski's magisterial Main Currents of Marxism, ⁽¹²⁾ plainly suggested an analogy between Marxism and an organic life-cycle approaching the end of its days.  And by September 1982 it was possible for Hilton Cramer to write in The New Criterion that "Scandal no longer attaches to the idea that modernism has run its course".

Not too much importance should be given to two fantasy tales in the area of immediate practical politics, but the fact that they had some symbolic and symptomatic significance is undeniable.  The British leftist historian and CND activist E.P. Thompson, for example, claimed that President Reagan's perception of the world came "from too much early reading of The Lord of The Rings". ⁽¹³⁾  The label "Star Wars" was attached to the US Strategic Defence Initiative as part of a campaign to discredit it.

I do not intend to suggest here that these two tales created a significant change in culture or values.  The people of Eastern Europe did not need stories from another society to tell them of the necessity of resisting evil.  These tales, along with many other things, may have made some contribution in the West.  Culture is made up of many influences.  In particular, I find it easy to believe that "early reading of The Lord of The Rings" and other literature of the same sort might well help to confirm or reinforce existing moral, ethical and cultural notions.  Far more significant for our purposes here, however, was the way in which they reflected and expressed the values of a strong and continuing culture whose existence had been discounted by much conventional wisdom.

I have tried to concentrate on a cultural rather than a literary or artistic analysis of these works.  I have also tried to bear in mind Gandalf's injunction that he who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.  This study is concerned only minimally with the technical construction of either work, and hardly at all with the tracing of direct sources which may have acted on J.R.R. Tolkien or George Lucas, a game to which I see little point.  It is not a piece of conventional literary or film criticism.

Finally, I have found no alternative to using words and phrases like "popular culture", "Western", "collectivism" and "modernism" to describe briefly things which some may feel need complex and elaborate definition.  Apart from anything else, space makes such a task impossible and if definitions are felt to be inadequate I can only ask for a common-sense understanding of these terms.

---

ENDNOTES

1.  See e.g., Paul Johnson's Intellectuals (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988).  The admittedly ad hominem elements of Johnson's arguments do not detract from the great value and interest of this study.

2.  Quoted in Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford University Press, 1978), Volume II ("The Golden Age"), pages 515-516.

3.  George Brook Chisholm, "The Re-establishment of peacetime society", the Williams Alanson White Memorial Lecture, quoted in F.A. Hayek, New Studies (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pages 16-17.

4.  Julian Huxley, "Education and Humanism", the ninth Fawley Lecture, reprinted in Essays of a Humanist (Pelican books, 1966), page 127.

5.  Sir Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (Frederick A. Preager, 1986), page 16.

6.  Golo Mann:  "The Intellectuals:  Germany", Encounter, June 1955, page 47.

7.  Jeffrey Richards:  "The Hooligan Culture", Encounter, November 1985, page 22.

8.  Reprinted in Michael Wharton:  Peter Simple:  The Stretchford Chronicles (Paper-mac, 1980) pages 121-122.

9.  Quoted in Quadrant, (Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, Sydney) March 1990, page 18.

10.  Malachi Martin, Hostage to the Devil (Century Hutchinson, 1976) page 409.

11.  "On the side of Liberty", leading article, September 27, 1978.

12.  Kolakowski, op. cit., 1978.

13.  See Chapter 7.