The age of anxiety:

[Mithalwen]

I heard this interview on Radio 4's Today programme last Friday about a symposium at Brunel, and have transcribed it since it will be available online only for a week.

It references The Lord of the Rings in comparison with Pullman's Dark Materials.

Sarah Montague :
Are we in an age of anxiety? And if so what effect is it having on culture?
....

Fay Weldon is professor of creative writing at Brunel University, Robert Eaglestone is professor of contemporary literature and thought at London University.

Do you accept, first of all RE, that we are in an age of anxiety?

RE: I think we have been in an age of anxiety for a very long time, for the last 150 years or so. What is interesting is what those anxieties are and how they've changed .

SM: And you think they have had an effect on culture and the way people write?

RE: I think they have absolutely had an effect on culture on people's writing people's thinking and as asour anxieties change and develop so writers respond to them in different sorts of ways.

SM: Before we look at how, FW.Do you accept that we are in an age of anxiety that has gone back 150 years or is it more recent?

I think it goes back even further, if you go back to Bocaccio he is writing in time of plague and managing to frame stories within that extreme anxiety. It gathers momentum and pace and yes, we are running scared.

SM: Running scared? Runing scared of what?

FW: We are running scared of who is going to publish us. We are running scared of the present. It is quite difficult to get students to write about now becasue it is too great to encompass.They like to write either about a dystopia a few years ahead, which they are very keen on, or what happened in the past - or even ten years ago. Anything but now.

SM:Hasn't that always been the case? Now is always difficult for people.

FW: Now is difficult but for the last 150 years indeed there has seemed to be something we could do about it. Writers have tended to be on the left - not the right -though some very good ones areon the right. And they have always felt that there was something they could do. If they only write properly and well enough then the world will be saved or Utopia will come.That if only you can improve people's understanding and comprehension of what they are and the world are (sic) there will be no more ignorance, peace and love will arrive, but we don't feel that anymore.

SM: Prof Eaglestone, do you find that with your students ?

RE: I think that my students are keen to write about the issues of the day and current anxieties. And I think Fay Weldon is right about a lot of what she said but what I think is important about the current age of anxiety is that as it might be before there are always two sides, them and us and you can choose which side
to be on and you had a set stock of responses .

I think one of the things that has changed now is that it is a lot more complicated and murky. One example you can see from Children's Literature is the difference between the Lord of the Rings which is written after the shadow of two world wars and written in the cold war, and in that everyone is very anxious but it is quite clear who are the goodies and who are the baddies. Whereas in the recent Golden Compass, Philip Pullman's books it is very murky and unclear no one is sure who's good or who's bad and people's motives are unclear... So its much more questions raised of judgement and trying to make decisions rather than belonging to a side.

SM: Sounds much more interesting? Fay Weldon?

FW: Yes it is but it's a difficult thing to do - if you like we are in the age of therapy too. Writing tends to be about how we face our own internal problems rather than external problems but they're pretty anxious making

SM:What would you point to now that is causing such difficulties?

FW: Good lord! Global warming..

SM: That tops your list ?

FW: Yeah yeah-
No, no! The collapse of civilisation as of last month, collapse of capitalism, collapse of everything we know. Of course it is there in the writers imagination all the time. It is the scenario of disaster ahead that writers tend to live in and actually sometimes quite enjoy!!


I thought this was quite an interesting perspective - and comments?

[Eönwë]

Well, I think he oversimplified LOTR, for a start.

And don't even get me started about global warming...(In fact, I'll change my sig in honour of that)

[Mithalwen]

To be fair he wasn't on to talk about LOTR he was on to talk about the Agge of Anxiety (topic of the symposium or whatever) - but I agree that it is easy to overlook the ambiguous characters inLOTR. The interview struck me particularly because I was thinking a lot about Saruman in connection to the Radio discussion.

However I suppose the difference is that while Saruman deludes some of the characters some of the time, the reader is left in no doubt that he is a wrong-un unlike in Northern Lights where the first scene (if I remember right) we see a subtle poisoning attempt by the heroine's custodians on Lord Asriel and left in a lot of doubt about him, Mrs Coulter and many others.

[davem]

Well, he's wrong in that LotR wasn't written after two world wars but during the second world war - maybe that's why there is such a clear division between good & evil in the book: when evil is so obvious its not too difficult to draw up sides.

Of course, the major difference between Tolkien & Pullman is that Tolkien had experienced war first hand, & knew what real evil was - he stated in one letter that there were Orcs & Angels on both sides. One thing Tolkien could not do as a result was think of evil in Miltonic terms - his 'Satan' is not a Byronic hero (a la Lord Asriel in HDM) offering defiance to God & liberation to man, but a gutless thug who, when the end comes doesn't go forth to face his foes & go down in a blaze of glory, but rather cowers in his deepest dungeon dreading the inevitable punishment for his crimes.

So, while Pullman can play games with evil, Tolkien cannot. Tolkien knows evil for what it is & can't pretend its otherwise than it is. Perhaps its true that Pullman's work does reflect the belief that this is an age of anxiety & that to him things are 'more complicated & murky', but I don't think things were that way for Tolkien. He'd seen the reality of evilmore starkly & clearly than Pullman & to him things weren't at all murky - they were clear & simple. Good & Evil to him were the same as they had always been, & it was a matter of recognising them & fighting against them. I suspect Tolkien would have said the problem wasn't that good & evil had become indefinable & relative ('one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'), but that people didn't realise that its always been a case of fighting the long defeat....if you tell yourself that evil is relative you don't have to stand up to it. In short, I don't think Tolkien ever felt the kind of anxiety being discussed in the programme.

All of which probably makes no sense, because I'm trying to type this while nursing a teething six month old. Please feel free to pull the forgoing to pieces....

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by davem

All of which probably makes no sense, because I'm trying to type this while nursing a teething six month old. Please feel free to pull the forgoing to pieces....

Lucky you! Babies are just a wonder... well, they keep being wonderful later on as well...

I'm not wishing to pull your post to pieces but I'd like to add a different perspective to it.

Originally Posted by davem

So, while Pullman can play games with evil, Tolkien cannot. Tolkien knows evil for what it is & can't pretend its otherwise than it is. Perhaps its true that Pullman's work does reflect the belief that this is an age of anxiety & that to him things are 'more complicated & murky', but I don't think things were that way for Tolkien. He'd seen the reality of evilmore starkly & clearly than Pullman & to him things weren't at all murky - they were clear & simple. Good & Evil to him were the same as they had always been, & it was a matter of recognising them & fighting against them.

What I see as the problem here is that Tolkien surely knew evil and good firsthand but that was not along the lines of the armies like "we Brits good - those Germans bad". Still in his books baddies are bad as such and goodies are good (with the exceptions to the rule already noted here). I could easily see Tolkien thinking "war evil, massmurder evil, killing-industry evil - peace good, compradeship good, sacrifice beautiful" with his own experiences. But why did that led him to make orcs or Sauron or Morgoth or... more or less pure evil or bad as the enemy?

Okay. Even if Morgoth or Sauron might be interpreted symbolically or allegorically to stand for evilness itself, the bad in the world, the wars he depicts look just like the absurd waste of human life in both World Wars and still the other side in his stories are just heroes and the others are purely black. And that means the basic soldiers.

So I'm a bit puzzled about that.

Also, today we can't make that division into the goodies and baddies that easily. It's a shame but also something we should rejoice in! I'm no relativist myself but I think we have to admit that the enlightenment views that brought relativism about are the greatest achievements in our own culture.

Before the enlightenment we thought that all those who agreed with us were good / right / pure / civilised (etc.) and those who disagreed with us were bad / evil / wrong / inhumane / lower / devillish (etc.). It's only a good thing we have gotten rid of that thinking. Well most of us have. Good riddance!

But as soon as we start to see shadows of grey instead of just black and white we get into problems. How can one justify a view or stance if it's all just shades of grey?

It's practically impossible today to think of all the German or Russian soldiers of the second world war as immoral beasts or subhuman monsters. We know now that most of them were loving fathers of their families, brave fellows of their mates, guys who were just thrown into the situation they were thrown.

But the orcs were bad by nature - because of the way they were born?

Something bothers me here.

[Nogrod]

Mith you just bring forwards the pessimistic reality.

We tended to be "enlightened" for a couple of hundred years but now at the times of "the war on terror" we're slowly crawling back to the caves from where we will take that old stance: those thinking and behaving like us are good and right, those who don't are evil.

How about we asked for the reasons for all this hatred against the western world first? If those who hate us are not evil as such (as they can't be) then there has to be a reason.

And to come back to the topic of Tolkien: why didn't he make it clearer if he was such a pacifist we tend to think he were? So individual orcs weren't bad but it was the evil system that forced them to be that way? Do we ever find that on Tolkien?

[Hookbill the Goomba]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

I could easily see Tolkien thinking "war evil, massmurder evil, killing-industry evil - peace good, compradeship good, sacrifice beautiful" with his own experiences. But why did that led him to make orcs or Sauron or Morgoth or... more or less pure evil or bad as the enemy?

Okay. Morgoth or Sauron might be interpreted symbolically or allegorically to stand for evilness itself, the bad in the world. The wars he depicts look just like the absurd waste of human life in both World Wars but still the other side in his stories are just heroes and the others are purely black.

There are a few possibilities that spring to mind.
An 'evil race' is not only unrealistic but probably dangerous as well. One will probably find it much more plausible that these people have been corrupted by a powerful figure with ill motives. The orcs themselves, perhaps, are in need of liberation just as much as the 'free peoples' are.
Another possibility is down to the narrative structure. In a big adventure like this you need a focus point. A goal to be a chived and barriers to overcome. Sauron, I would argue, represents a sort of ultimate obstacle, the overbearing shadow of the story to keep the narrative going. The same goes for Morgoth.
These two things are related. Even in the Silmarillion we get a hint of it. Feanor curses Morgoth but not, interestingly, the Orcs (if I remember correctly). He is the focus of his ire and scorn. The Orcs, while, perhaps, representing an extension of his will, are not what he is fighting. He wants revenge on Morgoth.

I'm sure I read somewhere that C.S. Lewis commented on the attitude of some British soldiers who refused to believe the propaganda in the Newspapers and thought the Germans couldn't be all that bad. Perhaps Tolkien had witnessed similar things. It's not the people who are evil, as it were, but the power that drives them. This, again, likely derives from Tolkien's theology as well as experience.

But, as for the 'enlightenment', one must always be a little cautious of something that gives itself such a presumptive name.

Anxiety does seem like a major factor in a lot of the Lord of the Rings anyway. Frodo comments, of Saruman, that he wasn't evil in the beginning. Perhaps the threat of Sauron isn't just his ability to destroy, but his tendency to turn things to his will, to bend the hearts of his followers. Corruption seems to be a large theme in Tolkien and there are many examples of it.
We can see a lot of this fear and anxiety in the attitudes of The Hobbits. They don't like change. Bilbo, in The Hobbit, is very reluctant to go on a 'nasty disturbing' adventure that would make him 'late for tea'. The thing that Saruman does when messing with the Shire is to change it almost beyond recognition, not just in the physical land, but also in the people. Ted Sandyman was probably a good enough Hobbit when he wanted to be, but Saruman's influence couldn't have done him much good. The same probably goes for Bill Ferny and others.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it...
Fear of change has always been around, but the end of The Lord of the Rings points to a future in which, not only are they returning to the Golden Age of old, but are moving forward into a New Age; the Fourth Age. The Elves are leaving, their influence is pittering out. The Wizards are lost, dead or sailing away. As much as the Hobbits may dislike it, "The World is changing".

[Hookbill the Goomba]

This is rather interesting. They obviously teach creative writing differently here up north.

I'd like to focus on this comment:

the Lord of the Rings which is written after the shadow of two world wars and written in the cold war, and in that everyone is very anxious but it is quite clear who are the goodies and who are the baddies. Whereas in the recent Golden Compass, Philip Pullman's books it is very murky and unclear no one is sure who's good or who's bad and people's motives are unclear...

What strikes me as odd is that this murky morality is being, at least in my university, frowned upon. Perhaps it's a case of 'retro is the new 'new'' or something, but the comment has sort of bugged me.

In Middle Earth you do indeed have a divide between good and bad, there are one or two grey characters, one who redeems himself to an extent (Boromir) and one who does not (Gollum)*. The 'good' people are anxious about the enemy, but as a byproduct of this anxiety, as it were, more groups are bound together and a sort of peace can be made. Thus there is a message of hope that, no matter how terrible the enemy, people will always band together and strong relationships can be born.
However, in Pullman's, as it were, 'murky' characters, there is a little less of this. The 'you can't trust anyone' motif begins to raise its head and we are left with a world of despair where each person is out for themselves. Now, it seems to me that, ultimately, Pullman does not take this rout as HDM concludes. I would still argue that there is more 'hope' in Lord of the Rings than in HDM. This may come down to the authors' differing theological stances, or perhaps, as the interview suggests, their cultural setting. Perhaps there is a lot of both.

As far as the tendencies of modern writing students I will make a few observations regarding the idea of 'the age of anxiety'.
A lecturer for one of my classes commented recently that she has seen a 'disturbing rise in the number of stories about murderers, paedophiles and insane people'. What makes them a little more unnerving is the fact that most of them are written in the first person. It seems that this is a good reflection on how people are more aware of 'what the dangers are', so to speak. I think people and writers have always been aware that the world is a dangerous place. In the past it seems to have come down to (I am over simplifying here, but bare with me), whose side you were on. These days, yes, things are more complicated because it is becoming difficult even for the sides to define themselves. Moreover, with the interwebs and all that we do have much more information on the more, shall we say, unnerving aspects of society. Being aware of all these things will, inevitably, lead many people to either become more anxious or to, I suppose, do something about it.

I'm probably rambling now, so... end.

*Although, I'm sure this could be argued further.

[Eönwë]

I know this isn't strictly lotr (and maybe not entirely relevant), but what about the Sil? Is Feanor on the good or bad side? He's sort of more on his own side. And what does that count as?

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by Eönwë

I know this isn't strictly lotr (and maybe not entirely relevant), but what about the Sil? Is Feanor on the good or bad side? He's sort of more on his own side. And what does that count as?

Feanor is a bit more Miltonic / Byronic but I think he is an earlier creation?

LOTR is that much later and WW2 was a lot more clear cut and though it was started during the War it was published as the cold war developed. Again the younger downers may not realise that nuclear war seemed a real possibility at a time when I was young. It did seem much more "us against them" . Glaost and the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed quite miraculous.

Terrorism is not a recent phenomenon - think of the clicheed drawings of the anachist with a bomb - and the threat is something Brits raised under the shadow of the IRA usually take in their stride - but it has never had such prominence, we have never perhaps been so encouraged to suspect the people around us.

[Mithalwen]

I don't think you are rambling, Hookbill, after all there is perhaps a related factor that you cannot assume a common culture within a culture - if that makes sense.

When I did my A-Levels probably before most downers were born, we had to do a course on Classical Mythology because a basic knowledge of the classics was felt necessary to understanding references in a lot of earlier literature- they felt a knowledge of the bible was essential too but never managed to make classes compulsory!

Until comparitively recently a thorough knowledge of both the Bible and the Graeco-Roman mythology would be presumed in an educated person. I was unusual in my generation to have gone to Sunday school and I never had the opportunity to learn latin until I studied diachronic linguistics. The references that were common place have taken on a new obscurity.

There has always been things to fear but they were less explicit - fairy stories are often a way of teaching children to be scared without for want of a better expression telling the truth.

Now people are less innocent, we know exactly what the bogeyman will do to the child lost in the wood and this knowledge creates it's own frisson which is exploited by the press as can been seen when a pretty little girl goes missing as opposed to an older boy.

But there is also ignorance - and this I think is a cause of anxiety in modern Britain, we have the increased suspicion of the Muslim community, and a new wave of Eastern European immigration. Having lived overseas I am far from xenophobic but even in my very Shirelike corner of England it is very strange to be in the Library and surrounded by people speaking languages you can barely recognise let alone understand. It is easy to see how people less educated, less travelled and with a less international background could feel threatened indeed - especially since modern education does not seem conducive to creating a positive identity. But that maybe bias form having had a historical education that comprised almost entirely of the Industrial Revolution as if teaching us anything involving the British Empire might turn us into apologists for it... there is a big difference between knowing about history or religion and believing in it.

Now I am ranting....