The Black Speech: The Lord of the Rings as a Modern Linguistic Critique
2016; Mythopoeic Society; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-9339
Autores Tópico(s)Comics and Graphic Narratives
ResumoIN THE PAST, J. R. R. TOLKIEN'S THE LORD OF THE RINGS has suffered somewhat unfairly at hands of critics. Studies of novel have been marred by tendency to dismiss work as escapism, with Edmund Wilson in his article Oo, Those Awful Orcs! going so far as to describe it as juvenile trash (332). Or, as Verlyn Flieger notes in A Post-modern Medievalist, even those scholars who are willing to give piece any serious consideration often treat it as literary anachronism than as meaningful text that relates very specifically to concerns of its day and age (251-52). This misunderstanding could very well be seen as failure of such critics to respond to text beyond surface level. It is interesting that, historically, critics like Edmund Wilson, who often showed sharp eye for trends and tropes of Modern literature, fail to acknowledge that while book may lack experimental stream of consciousness of Joyce's Ulysses or dissociated sensibility of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, Tolkien's work is still reacting to what Peter Nicholls describes in Modernisms as complex of desire and (163); it simply does so by creating unified and relatable world of Middle-earth to serve as counterpoint to sense of disorientation and alienation that forms backbone of Modern literature. Much like works of T.S. Eliot and other canonical modernists, Tolkien's novel responds to culture shock felt by many in early twentieth century. The Lord of Rings pits poetic and metaphorical system of against more Modern of disorientation and shows poetic system to be more powerful. By doing this, Tolkien attempts to reinstate meaningful tradition in which to take refuge from ravages of hyper-literal linguistic model of modern world. It is easiest to define as reaction. Peter Nicholls argues that the Anglo-American version [of Modernism] developed in part as critique of (163). As Sara Blair notes in and Politics of Culture, this is clearly seen in major modernist works such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis's journal Blast, which Blair describes as a salvo directed against Victorian humanist social ideals and contemporary versions of populism, individualism, and liberalism they were thought to inform [italics added] (159). Modernism's penchant for manifestos such as T.E. Hulme's Romanticism and Classicism and vorticist manifesto included in Blast's inaugural issue also makes it clear that from its very beginning Anglo-American was as interested in looking back to Classical tradition as it was in novelty and existed as pointed stance against status quo of modernity. This modernity was widespread cultural fracture, which, on linguistic basis, grew largely out of new perception of language. Concerning this new perception of language, in Metaphysics of Modernism Michael Bell writes, rather than describing or reflecting world, was now seen to form it. Scholars such as Saussure and Wittgenstein posited an understanding of as arbitrary and a precise reversal of Adamic model of meaning as giving names to preexisting things, it sees that we only come to have things by creating names for (16). Ferdinand de Saussure addresses this in his posthumously published work from 1916, Course in General Linguistics, where he writes, Without language, thought is uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before appearance of language (112). Saussure argues that is an interface between humans, their ideas, and reality, which allows them to break down vague, uncharted nebula into manageable units. These ideas allowed Saussure to lay ground work for modern linguistics as distinctly scientific discipline devoted to analyzing relationship between linguistic units, supplanting discipline's more historical bent prevalent in nineteenth-century (Bell 16). …
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