The Art Of Cultural Memory

Preface

Since Maurice Halbwachs published his seminal studies on the social and communal aspects of memory in mid-twentieth century, the concepts of collective and cultural memory have gained wide currency with academics and researchers concerned with many areas of literary and cultural studies. Many eminent scholars pursuing research in the fields of cultural anthropology, medieval studies, oral-formulaic studies, but also studies of the new forms of communication which have emerged in the context of the technological advances of recent decades, have found inspiration in tracing the intricate, and frequently meandered ways, in which civilisations and societies continuously drew strength and inspiration from the legacy of the past, reaffirming cultural continuity, but also redefining and challenging the resident presuppositions embedded in the established norms and identities forming the collective traditions through which the societies take a look behind their present concerns to reaffirm and reappraise their historical roots.

Thus the outstanding academic work of scholars such as Jan and Aleida Assmann, Jacques Le Goff, Mary Carruthers, John Miles Foley, Eric A. Havelock or Paul Connerton, Pierre Nora, Astrid Erll (and others) has itself become a continuing inspiration and a binding link in ensuring the continuity of academic research devoted to the study of how the cultures and societies remember the past.

It is in this spirit and tradition that the conference Ars Culturae Memoriae/The Art of Cultural Memory was held, entirely online, for two days in January 2022. Unashamedly exploiting all the benefits of modern communication, it was conceived as an opportunity to ensure some continuity in the exchange of ideas and research in the midst of the bleak pandemic midwinter which inevitably highlighted the importance of memory in all its aspects and incarnations.

Here a word of gratitude must be extended to all from whose support for the project the organisers of the event drew comfort and encouragement. First, to all the participants and, especially, to our four distinguished guests – and keynote speakers – who graced the proceedings with their presence: Shiloh Carroll of Tennessee State University, David F. Elmer of Harvard University, Lynn Forest-Hill of University of Southampton and Fr. Guglielmo Spirito of Istituto Teologico di Assisi.

A word of thanks is also due to authorities of the Institute of English Studies and the Faculty of Modern Languages for their support and appreciation for the project.

Tolkien’s Conception of Recovery as a Function of Memory

Abstract: In his seminal essay “On Fairy Stories”, Tolkien says: “We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness” (28). There is little doubt, in my opinion, that this “blur of triteness” is the blur of modernity. What is immediately given should be overcome because it may lead us only to despair. The overcoming of the ugly modernity, and the recovery of our true selves, may take place either as a leap into the past, or into the future: “England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine” (29). Considering that time-machines do not exist, the only option left to us is to try to reach “England” with the help of history offering us a glimpse of her lost dignity hidden in “some remote past age” and capable of taking on some religious aspects. The recovered England is not something to be claimed as one’s own, but rather perceived and appreciated in her utter alienation “as a thing apart from ourselves” (28). The memory in question cannot naturally be an individual memory, but rather the collective memory of the English nation, or of any other nation. The paper deals also with the relationship the above ideas have with G.K. Chesterton’s perception of Charles Dickens as a mythographer.

Keywords: recovery, memory, inversion, fantasy, mythology, Christianity, fairy tale, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Ch. Dickens.

Tolkien’s artistic achievement seems to consist, among other things, in creating a represented world which strikes the reader as fundamentally impossible and unrealistic, and yet, at the same time, as strongly inviting what Coleridge called “a willing suspension of disbelief” and what Tolkien himself preferred to call “Secondary Belief” (Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, 37, 46) based on “inner consistency of reality” (Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, 44, 64). Should not we ask ourselves: what does the mystery of this effect reside in? I would like to argue that in order to understand the nature of this phenomenon we have to move beyond such often misleading notions as “inner consistency of reality”, especially if by this consistency we mean the proposition that the represented world should, as strictly as possible, imitate the empirical one. The represented world of The Lord of the Rings is much more complex and more meticulously planned than that of, for example, C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, but can we say, and on what basis, that the “inner consistency” of the former is superior to that of the latter? A world, in ←11 | 12→order to be “innerly consistent”, in the sense of agreeing with itself, i.e. avoiding self-contradiction1, does not have to be very complex, for example, our knowledge of the possible grammatical and lexical features that make the language of C.S. Lewis’s speaking animals, such as beavers, slightly different, or even very different, from the language of his speaking lions, in the represented world of Narnia, would not probably add much to the value of Narnia as an artistic vision.

Tolkien’s achievement seems to consist, among other things, in carrying out a recovery of a long forgotten, or perhaps never properly remembered, world which is not a fictitious world but rather our world that we feel, from the point of view of the present, as transformed, but, at the same time, cunningly restored to what may have been its original form. It is a vision of the infancy of our world offering us a glimpse of a very early and very fresh experience of life. In this springtime of the world, or perhaps only that of Europe, human beings are imagined to have existed side by side with other intelligent species, such as the Elves, the Dwarves and the Hobbits. This fact alone contributed to the richness and versatility of life being then much greater than in the historical time that followed that “recovered” past. The idea of recovery, it has to be remembered, is a complex one, it includes healing or convalescence, a return to normality and the process of restoration, of getting back what has been lost. But in all of its senses, recovery is based on the assumption that it makes sense to try at least to return to the past so that we can, as it were, move forward by moving backward. This might be called an unashamedly reactionary and nostalgic project, but its purpose is certainly not some kind of backward time travelling for the sake of itself, or for the sake of putting the clock backward, in the sense of carrying out some very conservative social project, but rather this purpose consists in “regaining of a clear view” (Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, 53) so that one can see more of one’s present condition and understand it better. It is reactionary in the basic sense of reacting, or acting against what is perceived as the ugliness and deadly routine of modern life, which may remind us of the Russian Formalists’ impassioned argument against the rapidly growing automatization and mechanization², and ←12 | 13→nostalgic in the basic sense of trying to relieve the pains of homesickness by providing us with an imaginary space that feels like coming back to a long lost home. What does then the future look like from the perspective of the home retrieved from the past?

The nature of Tolkien’s recovery involves, however, much more than just an inversion of the time perspective. It involves a vision endowed with deeply religious meaning. The “clear view” he hopes to “regain” consists in “seeing things as were meant to see them – as things apart from ourselves” (53). The power that “means for us to see things” in a specific way is probably the Christian God, so what is at stake in Tolkien’s recovery is a return to Christ’s sheepfold. It is a distinguishing feature of Christ’s sheep that they “hear his voice” (Jn 10: 16, 27), otherwise, they could never be “brought [back] to this fold” (Jn 10: 16). The ability to “see things apart from ourselves” is a precondition for hearing and following “the good shepherd”. Those who see things, in the final analysis, only as part of themselves, or as something that has to be destroyed because it cannot be appropriated, that is, those who are immersed in solipsistic ”possessiveness” which taints the world around with “the drab blur of triteness or familiarity” (Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, 53), will never meet this precondition. The fact that in Tolkien’s Middle-earth there are other races apart from that of human beings is clearly a means to emphasize the importance of this positioning oneself as not necessarily the centre of creation, because “humility is enough” (“On Fairy Stories”, 54). At another place, Tolkien insists that we are supposed to “make Fantasy” not as those who “make”, but rather as those who “are made”, and even “made in the image and likeness of a Maker” (“On Fairy Stories”, 52). So we have to do here, apparently, with an interesting reversal of the traditional Christian way of ←13 | 14→thinking. Instead of the optimistic and forward looking project: “there shall be one fold, and one shepherd” (Jn 10: 16), we come across an attempt to retrieve a vision of that “one fold” as a nostalgic and backwards-looking recollection of what once was there, or at least can be imagined to have been there, but is no more, and there is little chance for this project ever to materialize. To what extent this is compatible with orthodox Christianity is not for me to judge. As Kevin Pask asserts, concerning Tolkien’s readers,“Christian belief is largely secondary, or nonexistent, for much of his readership” (128), which may suggest a certain incompatibility between Tolkien’s vision and orthodox Christianity.

Boromir follows the ancient lore concerning the Fairyland. It is a dangerous, even though beautiful, place. Mortals are seduced into it and perish forever,3 even though their indefinite stay in the Fairyland may not always be represented as death. But Boromir is himself an ill-fated character, whose downfall is caused by his letting himself become seduced by visions of political power embodied in the One Ring, rather than by some femme fatale. He would have done better if he had, like Gimli the Dwarf, let himself be seduced by the queen of “the perilous land”.

The character who has the most negative attitude to Galadriel is Grima Wormtongue, a thoroughly negative and obnoxious figure connected with the evil and treacherous wizard Saruman. In the scene where he attacks verbally Galadriel he calls forth the effect he least expected: