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Lang's Fairy Books are interesting though obviously very "of the time," as we say. But in those and his work editing the Folk-Lore Journal (of which I have a few volumes) he was taking on or nurturing some really serious anthropological literary work. Check out up Sidney Hartland's The Forbidden Chamber, which establishes Bluebeard tales as a "type" seen across multiple cultures and times.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Folk-Lore_Journal/Volume_...
Really interesting stuff. His translations with Leaf and Myers are nice but not exactly poetry, I wouldn't recommend them to anyone as a first read of the Iliad.
This has similar ideas to this review that was posted here a few weeks ago:
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/marshall-sahlins-n...
When times are tough our fantasies become more vivid. They are a tool to help us analyse our difficulties from a novel perspective and thus to overcome them.
I would have said the same but it strikes me that, in these highly stressful times, people are less interested in fantasy and art.
That said, I agree about their value. The Lord of the Rings, written in a similar time, with fascism on the march behind a tide of propaganda and the resulting chaos and despair, is to me now uncovered as a gift from Tolkien for the future crisis. It is the perfect book, the perfect myth, for today. (Not the movies, the book.)
You couldn't have said it better. Today it's, "think like I do or screw you!" Seeking middle ground or simply moving on is a lost art.
It’s funny you say that considering LOTR is one of the most black/white good/bad stories I can think of.
That isn't in the books, the way I read them (I don't recall the movies):
Sauron is obviously pretty clear (but I think even Sauron is a fallen angel of sorts?), but the rest of the story is about how everyone can be corrupted by power and defeated by despair. Even Gandalf, another 'angel' of sorts, could be corrupted. Sauruman, another being like Gandalf and the latter's superior, was corrupted.
In the end, the difference between the heroes and villians is whether they are wise enough to avoid exposing themselves to the corruption of power, and some cross that line. Finally, the ring is destroyed by someone who was thoroughly corrupted but, kept away from power and treated with love and mercy, was able to heal somewhat for a time.
How does that relate to the GP?
Delusions as described in the post are a form of fantasy. I'm not talking about the much more narrow sense of stories involving orcs and elves.
That's very interesting: Delusions help us feel safe in the face of something terrifying, but unless the delusion maps well to reality, wouldn't they also tend to lead us astray?
Arguably, the fantasy (and other art) I was talking about is more effective: By being a fiction in a very different place, it gives us distance. By being intentional, we can avoid misleading ourselves.
For some reason, in the current crisis, people have abandoned art as a way to explore and express their problems. Probably that's because, IMHO, the people trying to create the trauma and chaos have told them so - 'art is fanciful entertainment for the wealthy' you'll hear, even on HN - and bizarrely, after at least tens of millennia of art, they abandon it like lemmings.
Well I agree if a delusion doesn't map to reality it would lead you astray. It seems some groups even encourage such delusions to persist for millenia in order to serve their purposes.
But also, delusions can be an extreme form of analogy making which can be helpful to solve problems because they do map to reality in some weird way.
I also agree that creativity and art is something our society needs people to do more of right now. Art is also a form of fantasy.
I think a fundamental part of the problems we face is because our creativity has run dry. Just look at Hollywood's recent output. Sequels and remakes may make for a quick buck relative to investing in new ideas that may or may not work, but that approach is not sustainable.
In the wider world we're even suffering through a remake of the cold war because we are too scared to move past the mindset behind it and into a new, better era.
Even biblical stories are getting rehashed now by some to try and maintain the power they once had. They too are out of ideas on how to move past them.
Tell me, have you ever watched the film "The Never Ending Story"? I think it's relevent to these kinds of topics.
No, I haven't seen that film, but I'm going to look it up.
I see the same trends you do. Look at the current crisis; I hardly see any art address it. I think that's part of the reason people say art is irrelevant - in a way it is.
There's a great scene in the recent Todd Haynes fictional-bio of Bob Dylan, where someone says to young Dylan, who is playing traditional folk music: Why are singing about boxcars, etc. You've never been on one; those are ancient history. People who made those songs were singing about their world and their present experience; you need to make songs about yours.
It's a failure of everyone, but IMHO of artists in particular, to accept the narrative of despair (which I think is an intentional campaign(s) of propaganda). I think it's no more complicated than that people just need to wake up. The propaganda campaigns - and despair and paralyzation is the goal propaganda - keep undermining them, I suspect.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Or perhaps when times are tough, people are forced to use fantasies as a way to handle discontent which would be socially or politically dangerous to show too overtly.
Perhaps. If people's mindsets are constrained in one way their frustrations will be borne out in another. The more constraints, the more unusual the alternative will be. Somewhat like steam escaping from a pressure vessel.
When it gets really surreal it kind of emphasizes how a complete fantasy world can be constructed, sometimes merely verbally by those so inclined, and disseminated by those driven to getting increased attention.
Using more efficient mass-media as it arises allows greater numbers of the general public who might have an interest in such exaggerated stories, to indulge as deeply as they would like. Generally more so than previous generations.
With the overindulgence of some progressing to an unhealthy point, where fantasy is not fully separated from reality in the mind as well as it could be.
Yes, I totally agree with you there.
JRR Tolkien knew Lang's work very well and Tolkien's essay On Fairy-stories was originally presented, in an earlier version, as the (annual?) Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of Saint Andrews in 1939.
The essay is not only an incredible work itself, but has quite a bit to say about Lang, and remember Tolkien was a leading scholar as a day job. Tolkien writes, regarding the study of myth, "Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry." My edition's editors, Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson, flesh out that story:
"And Andrew Lang, as Tolkien well knew, was the man who pushed philology off its throne. Lang found and ruthlessly exposed the logical fallacies in using philological evidence to support the solar theory, turning for his own answers to another new discipline, anthropology. Lang and his supporters (like Muller he was not alone in the fight) proposed that rather than the degraded remnants of natural forces the problematic elements in the tales were the survivals of animal-worship and animistic magic. Lang's Darwinian assumption that fairy-stories were leftovers from the childhood of human development led to the corollary assumption that the tales were therefore leftover fare for human children, who would in the course of time, like the human race in general, mature into adulthood and put away childish things."
Another tidbit: Lang's Green Fairy Book was published the year Tolkien was born and it contains the story, "The Enchanted Ring". In it, the young protagonist is given a ring that makes them invisible but also very powerful, if they never make bad use of it ...
But such treasures of knowledge can lead us to trick ourselves: Tolkien probably didn't read the book that year (how precocious was the young JRR?) and Richard Wagner wrote Der Ring des Nibelungen - featuring a similar corrupting magic ring - before the Green Fairy Book came out. Tolkien despised Wagner, and likely all got their myths from somewhere prior.
Mandatory XKCD reference.[1]
As ever with the London Review, one may apprehend the occasional glimmering of a possible point among the masses of discursive digression, but may never accrue enough evidence to be confident of its actual presence.
I've been reading the LRB since I was a kid (30 years ago) and I'm not sure what happened: Did I grow up or has it taken a nosedive? Seems like the reviews have become meandering, and increasingly political. I used to learn so much from each article and now I can't bring myself to finish a whole paper.
What I said isn't a pure criticism. A meander can be quite pleasant, but it needs at least to visit somewhere interesting, preferably though not necessarily outside its author's head.
As ever with HN comments, one may encounter the occasional glimmering of a convoluted verbosity from one that thinks himself so cultured he may as well be a yogurt.
Its satire.