If the lowest form of flattery is imitation (or is it the highest?), then where does merely linking to other people’s writing about other people fit into that?

I have found myself thinking about Tolkien quite a lot lately (27March2003, urth1). Not only images stick in my head, but as well a certain sense of secret loyalty, as though I had dreamed the whole thing myself de novo. The Lord of the Rings is not only plausible psychologically and physically, as Auden claims, it is plausible as a dream.

But that deserves some explanation. Ask anyone about his dreams, and he will tell you stories that are, on the face of it, fantastic, unlikely, and essentially disconnected from the rules of the natural world. I walk strangely in dreams; gravity applies willy nilly; locations are impossibly complex; at times I am unable to keep my eyes open; women bear the names of women I have travelled thousands of miles for, but no physical resemblance whatsoever. But on closer examination dreams turn out to obey the rules of the world, not as we have formalized them in the guise of Nature, but as we perceive them instinctually. I am, I must admit, surprised at gravity, at the cartesianality of space. In my memories of women the duplicity of appearance is the rule, not the exception.

Consquently, I tend to find the greatest genius in Tolkien’s work not in his political or philosophical acumen, as Gene Wolfe finds (but then a perhaps even greater mark of genius is in how the same work finds resonance quite independently of the names we use to describe its effects), but in his ability to perceive, in the waking world, of a world that has appeared in part, in its form, and in its entirety, in its essence, in the seemingly arbitrary and unrealistic demands of our dreamed quests. No one objects, while dreaming, to the unlikeliness that a single, insignificant object could unmake the world or corrupt the best of us, and we find that the demands laid upon us by nightmares and (but there is no word for the sweet, lingering dreams) are of the type laid upon Frodo: we take them up not because the ends seem good or the means efficacious, but because we must.

Somewhere someone managed to coin the phase “suspension of disbelief” in describing fairy tales and science fiction. Nothing could be farther from the truth of what it takes to enjoy fantastic tales. Suspension of disbelief is what one finds necessary in order to sit through a bad movie. Belief, in dreams, and on just about any page of this story, comes without effort. It is the certainty of dreams that frightens you when you wake from a nightmare; certainty that is the essential tragedy of dreams, no matter how beautiful, for nothing in the waking world seems to bear such certainty. Even love is tempered with a certain skepticism toward desire. It is only in dreams that we are able to desire without being ashamed of being found wanting; only in the best of stories that the “must” of being good can exist apart from the will to appear good. For all that Tolkien may be criticized for being unrealistic about the unconflicted goodness of his elves and hobbits, it must be said that nowhere can you find any character being good because it seems proper. Or rather: the will to be good is directed outwards, toward the external world, and not toward the internal, intractable world of desires, which we, divorced from eden, can only long to be free of.