The Capturing of Myth

[Bêthberry]

I am going to stick my neck out and question a major premise here that davem has taken from Tolkien.

Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly & audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve fantasy....

Drama has, of its nature, already attempted a kind of bogus, or shall I say at least substitute, magic: the visible & audible presentation of imaginary men in a story . That is in itself an attempt to counterfeit the magician's wand. To introduce, even with mechanical success, , into this quasi-magical secondary world a further fantasy or magic is to demand, as it were, an inner or tertiary world. It is a world too much.
On Fairy Stories

However good in themselves, illustrations do little good to fairy-stories. The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible presentation & true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind & is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal & more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination. Should the story say 'he ate bread', the dramatic producder or painter can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general & picture it in some form of his own. If a story says 'he climbed a hill & saw a river in the valley below', the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, & it will be made out of all the hills & rivers & dales he has ever seen, but specially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.
On Fairy Stories

I don't think this necessarily has to be the case at all. To tell you the truth, it even raises my hackles just a little. I profoundly respect a great deal which Tolkien argues in On Fairy Stories, but that does not mean I think every statement he makes there is carved in stone. Any time I see a theoretic statement about art that claims something cannot be done, I want immediately to go out and find examples where it has been done. I stick my feet in the ground and refuse to be dragged along.

I wonder if in part this attitude derives from a long-standing prejudice against drama--a fear of representation as well as a misunderstanding of drama and visual arts. (Just why did the Puritans close the theatres and why are there religious injunctions against depicting the deity and even people?) It suggests that literature is purely imaginary and therefore somehow better or more pure than other arts which rely on other forms of human senses. It is part and parcel of a major western tradition which denigrates the body (the physical aspect) while giving priority to the mind (the intellectual) aspect. Reading is a profoundly creative, interactive activity, but to hold it supreme among the arts is, to me at least, a rejection of art which requires physical or bodily participation.

There are other ways of experiencing art than just through our minds. We can use our ears. We can use our eyes. We can use our bodies as we sway and stomp and dance to music. The physical experience of the concert hall or theatre reaches out to other aspects of our human nature. Just as teachers in classrooms now must plan lessons to accommodate all the different learning styles, so I think we need to be more careful that we not laud one form of knowing over any others.

Where, after all, did Greek drama originate? It originated in the stories of Greek mythology. And what is the role of ritual in religion or mythology? There are strong links between ritual and theatre. I can think of several other examples where mythologies are represented in art and in the physical form of dance and drama: I have seen Canadian First Nations myths enacted in dance and song and story. And I have seen West Coast mythologies carved on totem poles, represented in masks, and shaped into canoes and boats. And I know the brutal story of how aboriginal culture and mythology was nearly wiped out by a mainstream culture which feared a cosmology that did not denigrate the body.

I am not of course attributing all of these points directly to Tolkien. What I mean to question is the idea that drama, in being a physical presence, cannot be a symbolic art. I am amazed actually that Tolkien uses the examples of bread and wine in his essay, for he certainly knew the ritual of transubstantiation.

This is leading far away from Imladris's first points. But I did want to suggest that it is possible to question this first premise that fantasy cannot be represented in the theatre or on the screen because somehow it escapes physical form.

Oh, and, just as an aside. I have said this elsewhere, but I will repeat it here. I have seen an actor portray Gollem on stage and he was in every way more wonderful than our CGI Gollem. I can understand the desire to want to explore the new technology to its finest extent. But I also know that when I felt the floor boards shake when Gollem jumped, when my body jumped at the appearance of the dragon, when my eyes went large with wonder at the non-realistic images projected onto the screens/backdrops of the stage, I was experiencing The Hobbit in a different way, a very sensuous way. And that isn't to be confused with sensual. And it does not rob my reading of The Hobbiti in any way. It is simply a different experience of it.

EDIT: A very long telphone call interrupted my posting, so I have cross posted with Essex and Lord of Angmar.