I think David Jones wrestled with the excess of human history, and the overwhelming responsibility of the vatic poet to somehow acknowledge the depths that reveal themselves precisely as what announces itself as that which cannot be contained in the linear expositions of the historical record.
The mythic binds, because it arises from elemental relations that ground the historical, rather than simply embellish it. Or put another way, the instance of historical event that acts as seed flourishes as narrative account because there is openness to what is hidden in the manifest. There is a porosity to being, and a rootedness that transcends the narrow confines of what is ordinarily taken as the fictive enterprise. All this is lost on the heirs of post-Enlightenment rationalism, and the post-modern or late modern, what have you, tends, even when it reacts against Enlightenment, to accept some of its founding principles.
For certain, modernity lacks awareness of living tradition or the legendary penumbra that is not falsehood as the literalism of moderns assume, but an acknowledgement of the surplus of the earthy, and what philosophers might call the open-ended reach of the analogy of being. Tolkien's achievement is still resonant with this chthonic and linguistic history that is secretly illumined by grace. The art that knows this is also a wounded art, because it is fruitfully open to revelatory depths. There is a necessary suffering that is also joyful.
I don't think any of this is understood by Tolkien's epigoni. Surface technique and mimetic imitation occurs, but the very earthy, elemental source of insight is replaced with the ersatz and the virtual. It is anodyne, because it has rejected the way of the Cross.
Anyway, as always, I look forward to your further thoughts, Jonathan.
Thanks, Brian. There are a few fantasists up to the present day, including some of the greatest, who have preserved the link between primary and secondary reality. But in terms of the convention of the genre -- once it became a genre, which I think did not really happen until after LOTR -- they have been reversed from the situation that obtained in pre-generic fantasy: now linkage between realities is the exception rather than the rule.
I really do think that we now take for granted the wild idea that fiction can be totally detached from reality (even as we more and more seem to expect it to justify itself by recourse to some obvious moral effect in the real world). The rise of the term "autofiction" a few years back (it seems to have lapsed somewhat from popularity now) is another symptom of the wider breakdown between fiction and reality. That is the paradox I'm dancing around in this post: my biggest fear is that we increasingly cannot tell fiction from reality, or virtuality from reality, and this is something that only happens once we've too neatly separated fiction and reality. As long as they are decorously bound together, each clarifies the other. Another generation would have felt no need to remark on fiction that seems to be very closely based on reality, nor to confine the term "fantasy" to fiction which usually appears to have no link with reality.
When I talk about E R Eddison we'll see a non-Christian fantasist contemporary of Tolkien attempt to work out a different model of the relation of primary and secondary realities that we call fiction. I'm interested in such metafictional projects -- Gerald Murnane's is, as you know, in my view the most brilliant such metafiction in the present.
Oh, and yes, absolutely David Jones is a great one for the feeling of deep time. Edwin Muir was as well, among the poets, and this can be traced back to the first impulses of Romanticism, things like Macpherson's Ossian poetry or Hölderlin. The sadly unknown 20th century American expat Gustaf Sobin is another who possessed a keen sensitivity to the poetic quality of the palimpsest past.
I think David Jones wrestled with the excess of human history, and the overwhelming responsibility of the vatic poet to somehow acknowledge the depths that reveal themselves precisely as what announces itself as that which cannot be contained in the linear expositions of the historical record.
The mythic binds, because it arises from elemental relations that ground the historical, rather than simply embellish it. Or put another way, the instance of historical event that acts as seed flourishes as narrative account because there is openness to what is hidden in the manifest. There is a porosity to being, and a rootedness that transcends the narrow confines of what is ordinarily taken as the fictive enterprise. All this is lost on the heirs of post-Enlightenment rationalism, and the post-modern or late modern, what have you, tends, even when it reacts against Enlightenment, to accept some of its founding principles.
For certain, modernity lacks awareness of living tradition or the legendary penumbra that is not falsehood as the literalism of moderns assume, but an acknowledgement of the surplus of the earthy, and what philosophers might call the open-ended reach of the analogy of being. Tolkien's achievement is still resonant with this chthonic and linguistic history that is secretly illumined by grace. The art that knows this is also a wounded art, because it is fruitfully open to revelatory depths. There is a necessary suffering that is also joyful.
I don't think any of this is understood by Tolkien's epigoni. Surface technique and mimetic imitation occurs, but the very earthy, elemental source of insight is replaced with the ersatz and the virtual. It is anodyne, because it has rejected the way of the Cross.
Anyway, as always, I look forward to your further thoughts, Jonathan.
Thanks, Brian. There are a few fantasists up to the present day, including some of the greatest, who have preserved the link between primary and secondary reality. But in terms of the convention of the genre -- once it became a genre, which I think did not really happen until after LOTR -- they have been reversed from the situation that obtained in pre-generic fantasy: now linkage between realities is the exception rather than the rule.
I really do think that we now take for granted the wild idea that fiction can be totally detached from reality (even as we more and more seem to expect it to justify itself by recourse to some obvious moral effect in the real world). The rise of the term "autofiction" a few years back (it seems to have lapsed somewhat from popularity now) is another symptom of the wider breakdown between fiction and reality. That is the paradox I'm dancing around in this post: my biggest fear is that we increasingly cannot tell fiction from reality, or virtuality from reality, and this is something that only happens once we've too neatly separated fiction and reality. As long as they are decorously bound together, each clarifies the other. Another generation would have felt no need to remark on fiction that seems to be very closely based on reality, nor to confine the term "fantasy" to fiction which usually appears to have no link with reality.
When I talk about E R Eddison we'll see a non-Christian fantasist contemporary of Tolkien attempt to work out a different model of the relation of primary and secondary realities that we call fiction. I'm interested in such metafictional projects -- Gerald Murnane's is, as you know, in my view the most brilliant such metafiction in the present.
Oh, and yes, absolutely David Jones is a great one for the feeling of deep time. Edwin Muir was as well, among the poets, and this can be traced back to the first impulses of Romanticism, things like Macpherson's Ossian poetry or Hölderlin. The sadly unknown 20th century American expat Gustaf Sobin is another who possessed a keen sensitivity to the poetic quality of the palimpsest past.