Fellowship & Fairydust

There are two subjects which Tolkien’s works are very careful never to touch: the first one is sex, and the other is the machine. Tolkien talks at length about each of these in his Letters and in his essay Of Fairy Stories, but neither of them is ever even slightly alluded to in his works of fiction.

One might wonder why is that so. I think the answer lies in the problem of evil in pretty much the same way as the shadows lie in Mordor, that being by definition.

Sex and machines are not evil per se, but their deification indeed is. By deification I do not mean the process by which something is made into a god, but the process by which something is made into God, into God Himself. Both sex and the machine were deified back in very ancient times – we only have to consider the greek goddess Aphrodite (Venus in Rome) and the god Hephaestus (Vulcan in Rome) to see that she is a personification of sexual love and he is the epitome of the smith, the fabricator of tools and weapons, therefore a personification of the machine. But they are made into gods, which means nothing else but acknowledging their power. And indeed both sex and the machine have power, since the former guarantees the perpetuation of life and the latter provides oneself (or others) with control over the world around him/her.

The problem is when they are made not into gods among gods, but into the God, the only one there is, there was and ever will be. Sex becomes sexualization, the machine become mechanization. That is blasphemous and tragical in its consequences. But it is also the way the modern world has chosen.

Tolkien absolutely aborred this way of thinking, and imagined a world where both of these evils are absent, although their first origin is instead thematized and largely discussed.

Sexualization derives from lust, which ultimately derives from a desire of possession, which is a form of twisted amplification of the self directed towards others. Mechanization derives from machination, which ultimately derives from pride, which is a form of twisted amplification of the self directed towards oneself.

Therefore we can safely say that Evil is a twisted amplification of the self, be it directed towards oneself or others.

The chief example of lust is Shelob (or Ungoliant before her), a corrupted spider who seeks to devour everything in order to fill her inner emptiness. Scholars such as Marjorie Burns have pointed out how such an instinct has a possible sexual meaning, as a figure of that sexualization which tends to devour everything and reduce it to sex, a perverted way to fill one’s inner void.

On the other hand, we have machination and pride. As for the first, we have Morgoth, who spreads rumours of the desire of the Valar to keep the Elves in Valinor to prevent them from achieving their full potential, and the spread of such rumours leads to the rebellion of Fëanor and the departure of the Noldor, with the terrible happening of the kinslaying of Alqualondë.

Both Morgoth and Fëanor are also examples of pride, the first being utterly corrupted by it, the second meeting his death in battle against the Balrogs as its consequence.

Both of them realize something which can be compared to the creation of machines – Morgoth creates the Orcs by torturing captive Elves, Fëanor fabricates the first weapons.

The Orcs could be analogous to machines because of their mechanical attitude consisting in being driven by the worst pulsions, as devices programmed to fulfill a single purpose: to kill and to destroy, as we can see in The Lord of the Rings by their difficulty in taking Merry and Pippin captives and not eating them.

Weapons are also similar to machines, not only in being tools, but in being tools of death and destruction, a mean to achieve control over the world and other people.

I would not instead go as far as to say that the Silmarils could be compared to machines, since the wars and ruin they bring are not dependent on their nature, which is pure light, but on the nature of those who seek them and fight for them.

But we should at this point clarify what we mean by sexualization and mechanization.

Sexualization

Tolkien writes in 1941 to his son Michael (Letter 43):

A man’s dealings with women can be purely physical (they cannot really, of course: but I mean he can refuse to take other things into account, to the great damage of his soul (and body) and theirs); or ‘friendly’; or he can be a ‘lover’ (engaging and blending all his affections and powers of mind and body in a complex emotion powerfully coloured and energized by ‘sex’). This is a fallen world. The dislocation of sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall. The world has been ‘going to the bad’ all down the ages. The various social forms shift, and each new mode has its special dangers: but the ‘hard spirit of concupiscence’ has walked down every street, and sat leering in every house, since Adam fell (CARPENTER, p. 48)

The “dislocation of sex instinct” is what we have decide to simply call sexualization, since it sexualizes objects and areas of human experience which have nothing to do with sex outside the mind of men who think so. But it is not just a matter of thinking (or speaking). There are also perversions, which are actual dislocations of sex instinct, not focused anymore on its proper object which should be exclusively the genitals. And there is also another sense of dislocation, a social one, the sexual relationships before, after and, generally speaking, outside marriage.

The letter goes on:

The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favourite subject. He is good every bit at catching you through generous romantic or tender motives, as through baser or more animal ones.

Sex can be a sin when it leads to sexualization, when it is practiced through perversions or outside marriage and we should be aware that “monogamy (…) is for us men a piece of ‘revealed’ ethic” (CARPENTER, p. 51).

Monogamy is the way God chose to sanctify the sexual instinct, to give it a possible way of application and its reason to be outside sin.

Mechanization

It is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of ‘escapist’ literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say ‘inexorable’, products (OFS).

Mechanization, then, as the widespread diffusion of factories and machines, which has gone even further than what Tolkien experienced in his life-time, and deteriorating our lives and alienating us from the real world, much more than fantasy, which is at its best an expression of appreciation for the beauty which is left in our world, does.

What about men in the future as science-fiction writers thought them, then?

They may abandon the ‘full Victorian panoply’ for loose garments (with zip-fasteners), but will use this freedom mainly, it would appear, in order to play with mechanical toys in the soon-cloying game of moving at high speed. To judge by some of these tales they will still be as lustful, vengeful, and greedy as ever; and the ideals of their idealists hardly reach farther than the splendid notion of building more towns on other planets (OFS).

It is hard not to think that these words reflect so precisely the world in which we live in the present day. Truly it is an age of “improved means to deteriorated ends” (OFS), and this phenomenon is never talked about, the same Church does not express in clear letters a condemnation of modern technology, according to the idea that technology is not bad, only its uses can be bad.

But when the majority of people makes a bad use of a certain tool, is not it desirable that that tool never existed at all?

A sword can protect against other swords as well as it can kill, but would not it be preferable to have no swords at all?

Television brings the world into our houses – the good world as well as the bad world – but would it not be preferable that we had no television at all and instead had to visit the world ourselves if we wanted to?

But, even so,

The electric street-lamp may indeed be ignored, simply because it is so insignificant and transient. Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning, for example.

Evil

A. Shippey has pointed out that Tolkien shares on one hand what he calls the Boethian point of view, according to which Evil is the privation of Good, therefore not a substance or a thing, and what we might call a ‘substantialist’ conception, according to which Evil is a force and therefore has a substance.

This ambivalence might well be expressed by considering the Nazgûl and the Orcs. The former are wraiths, unsubstantial, ethereal, a mere shadow of a being, thus they could be linked to the Boethian point of view. As for the Orcs, instead, they are real creatures, in flesh and bone, and very material: one could even say that they represent matter in its rawest form, the degradation of the Spirit, because they used to be Elves. They could easily represent the substantialist conception.

Both sexualization and mechanization are understandable in such terms. Both are immaterial per se, being misinterpretations of sex and intelligence, respectively. But both are material in their applications, sex is material, machines are material.

That could be because, as Good has a soul, which is God, and a body, which is Man, in Jesus Christ, also Evil has a soul, which is Satan, and a body, which is Man again, in the Anti-Christ.

Ours is the choice.