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.
- Lateral section through the left auxilliary fossa of Karen Novotny, the elbow raised in a gesture of pique; the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader.
- 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.
- 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.
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