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J.R.R. Tolkien and Creativity II: Symbols of Transitionality and the Fetish in The Lord of the Rings

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aim.2019.0011

1085-7931

John Rosegrant,

Comics and Graphic Narratives

J.R.R. Tolkien and Creativity II:Symbols of Transitionality and the Fetish in The Lord of the Rings John Rosegrant (bio) One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. With these lines J.R.R. Tolkien depicted the One Ring of Power, the central symbol of evil in The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 2004, p. v). The lines describe the Dark Lord Sauron's intent when he created the Ring: to use it to establish total domination over the world. In ancient times, the Ring was cut from his hand and lost, but if Sauron regains the Ring he will be able to enact his desire for complete power. At the beginning of the book, the Ring has come into the possession of the hobbit Frodo Baggins, and the central quest of the book is the effort of Frodo and his companions to destroy the Ring. In my paper, "J.R.R. Tolkien and Creativity I," I traced two biographical episodes that show Tolkien struggling to experience the transitional space necessary for his creativity, rather than being stuck in more concrete, constricted experience. In this paper, I will argue that The Lord of the Rings, as well as other aspects of Tolkien's fictional universe, can be read as an exploration of the dynamic contrast between transitionality (represented by the character Tom Bombadil) and concrete, constricted experience as represented by perverse thinking (the One Ring as fetish symbol). Viewed from one angle, transitional objects and fetishes are opposites, but viewed from another angle they are very similar to each other. Both are things that are imbued with tremendous importance by their creator/possessors, and both create illusions to soothe anxieties—the transitional object soothes anxiety resulting from increasing recognition of the external, Not-me world (Winnicott, 1953, 1967, 1971); the classic fetish soothes [End Page 165] anxieties about bodily intactness during the sexual act (Freud, 1938). Yet their meaning is otherwise opposite: the transitional object opens connections to the external world, other people, and imagination, and eventually develops into the wider transitional space of play, art, and culture (Winnicott, 1967); the fetish locks its creator into a repetitive scenario and disavows the external world and other people. Transitional phenomena integrate and share aspects of the internal and external world; the fetish splits the ego so that reality is simultaneously known and disavowed (Freud, 1938). Winnicott's (1953) original paper discussed transitional phenomena mainly in their adaptive aspects, but when Winnicott expanded the paper for a chapter in Playing and Reality (1971) he added a section on "psychopathology manifested in the area of transitional phenomena" (pp. 15–20). Here he described a boy whom he first saw at age seven who was preoccupied with string. The boy often tied objects together, and Winnicott understood this to be a denial of many separations he had experienced from his depressed mother. Winnicott saw potential for the string to develop into a fetish, and the potential sadomasochistic meanings of the boy's first drawings (lasso, whip, crop, a yo-yo string, a string in a knot, another crop, another whip) suggest even more perverse potential than Winnicott noted. Greenacre (1969, 1970) also emphasized that the fetish differs from the transitional object in being used to handle early object loss, deprivation, and aggression. She pointed out that sexual fetishes typically originate at puberty but also cited Wulff (1946) and Sterba (1941) on infantile fetishes. She thought that transitional objects and fetishes were opposite ends of a continuum with intermediate steps. As originally formulated by psychoanalysis, "fetish" referred to a sexual fetish, an object used to achieve sexual potency, and "perverse" referred to non-normative sexual practices (Bak, 1953; Freud, 1905), and thus both terms connoted the imposition of heteronormative standards. I will be following a second line of thought in which the terms refer not to specific acts or behaviors, but to underlying attitudes and experiences which may or may not motivate a non-normative sexual act, and which may or may not motivate a normative sexual act (Bach, 1994; [End Page 166] Benvenuto, 2016; Freud, 1924; Novick...