Last Thoughts on J.R.R.

Reading experimental comics and high fantasy literature.

My recent daily comics-reading diet has consisted exclusively of the 2019 collection of late-Seventies strips MacDoodle St. by an unfamiliar cartoonist named Mark Alan Stamaty. I became aware of this book when a very skilled young cartoonist whose work I deeply admire showed me this MacDoodle St. book shortly after its publication. I was astounded by its density, ambition and aggression and knew that the book was something I would have to sit down and give full attention to if I wanted to honor it with the sort of reading it demands. Upon inspection it’s actually better than I thought at a glance, a strange and experimentally discursive strip that takes no prisoners in its determination to at once exemplify the best of and poke fun at the worst of most of the well-worn tropes of the newspaper comics medium.

To reach for one somewhat impractical illustration of what I’m attempting to describe, it’s both entirely correct and, if you haven’t ever laid eyes on the strip, probably annoyingly vague and confusing to say that the comic strip MacDoodle St. is quite literally a recurring character in the comic strip MacDoodle St., replete with its own agency and unpredictably shifting personae. Also the Stamaty of the late Seventies never came across a panel border or speech balloon that he didn’t want to bend, crack, weave and wormhole around his allotted space on the page of the venerable New York City alt-weekly The Village Voice, twisting the substance of his strip back and in upon itself, which partly explains (as he is always willing to point out before anyone else can) why the plot of MacDoodle St. is always flattening out and metastasizing into so many narrative cul-de-sacs before meandering in a daze back to one of its recurring themes or stories. Or, more often, complicating things further by tripping over some new thread to unweave.

MacDoodle St. is well worth a look or close reading, or preferably both. It’s a witty, clever, freewheeling strip that could be viewed as a precursor to the newspaper work of some of my other favorite cartoonists such as Matt Groening or Marc Bell who later explored novel methods of layout reappropriation within alt-weekly strips. (I have no idea if either of those cartoonists are aware of Stamaty’s work and wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it is so.) While what interests me most is the structural and technical playfulness and experimentation, the content itself is also diverting, a series of rambling meditations, kooky action sequences and genuinely very funny (and sometimes grotesque) jokes having to do with frazzled starving poet and dish-washing-enthusiast Malcolm Frazzle assuming his heroic position in a conspiracy story of world-threatening significance and nonsensical absurdity. Great and still-fresh stuff from the old New York underground, this MacDoodle St. is.

It hasn’t been the easiest going but I finished reading the J.R.R. Tolkien novel The Return of the King, or rather specifically have finished reading the actual narrative and have now moved along to the roughly one hundred and thirty pages of nerdily-detailed Appendices (histories, timelines, family trees, linguistical instruction and errata) that Tolkien parked at the end of the text which flesh out the universe in which the The Lord of the Rings books are set. I have to finish reading every word of the Appendices before I can justly add The Return of the King to my official reading list but I don’t anticipate having much to say about them in future newsletters, so I’ll jot down my several thoughts here and guess that this is most likely the last writing directly on the subject of Tolkien or his work that I will ever produce.

Peter Jackson’s The Lord the Rings film trilogy is more entertaining and engaging than the literary series on which it’s based, and not because I saw all three of the movies and their Extended Editions repeatedly before ever reading the books. It’s because they actually are more fun to sit through in every way. Tolkien’s books to me are ultimately a constrained, overly formal genre prototype and cultural curiosity while Jackson’s films use Tolkien’s characters and settings to create a visceral, emotional, thrilling and awe-inspiring cinema-going experience with considerable rewatchability. These are the facts.

My readings of the first two books in Tolkien’s trilogy comprised the imbibing of unabridged audiobook versions read by some stentorian Englishman who did a good job differentiating between all of the various characters. This was back in 2012 and 2013 respectively that I listened to The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers and in the intervening years of 2015 to 2016 for unrelated reasons I took the trouble to read the King James Version of the Holy Bible in its entirety.

So it was only just now while reading The Return of the King that I observed how apparent it is that the King James syntactical style was a heavy influence on The Lord of the Rings. Check it out for yourself; pull a random passage from, say, Exodus or Judges or Kings and compare the repetitive, plodding, distinctively weird and intentionally old-timey-sounding KJV style of English scriptural translation to The Return of the King, particularly the sections where Tolkien describes either military campaigns and battles or the bureaucratic and political processes involved in restoring balance and order to the realms of Middle-earth after the good guys have won the War of the Ring. Tolkien, a faithful and conservative Catholic, knew precisely what he was doing here and I’m genuinely surprised that it gets brought up infrequently enough that I had to read the entire Bible to even spot the connection. (I probably could have saved myself that trouble by reading some expert Tolkien analysis instead, but I had enough trouble getting through the man’s fiction and don’t care, thank you very much, to read much about the fellow himself beyond what I’ve seen in DVD bonus features associated with Jackson’s films.)

I suppose that one of the many things Tolkien was probably out to do with The Lord of the Rings was to write, possibly just for the hell of it, his own non-Christian hagiography; in so doing he ended up producing a new kind of adventure story that altered the literary form and captured the public imagination for generations. Not bad for a life’s work, and though the books aren’t my cup of tea, the ideas contained within them gave direct author to those outstanding movies I love and still find pleasure in revisiting.

I’ve heard a non-zero amount of discussion over the years about why Jackson and his collaborators chose to excise the infamous chapter on “The Scouring of the Shire” from the page-to-screen translation of The Return of the King. This is a sequence that in the book occurs in between the four main Hobbit characters returning from their life-changing Call to Adventure in the War of the Ring and the final separation of the Ring-bearer protagonist Frodo and his ever-faithful squire Sam.

In the book when Frodo, Sam and their hobbit compatriots Merry and Pippin, all of whom have now served officially or unofficially in the various military services of Middle-earth and have fought, bled and killed in the most important battles of their time, return home from their epoch-defining adventures to the quaint and parochial realm of the Shire, they find that in their absence their beloved home district has been overrun by a junta of corrupt hobbits and human ruffians (and, as it turns out, a defrocked wizard, which connects these events with the broader goings-on outside of the relatively isolated Shire). The four hobbit heroes have all become mature, confident, straight-talking doers from their many months in peril and combat and so set about marshaling the good folk of the Shire to set things right here at home as they have helped to do for the great kings and sages and warriors of the wider world.

I perceive two central points to this coming-home sequence, and it’s noteworthy that in addressing them Tolkien both abruptly elides the Biblical-syntactical style from earlier in the book and also dwells on the details and action of these relatively less significant goings-on in a chapter long enough to essentially constitute a short story unto itself.

The first is that, after all the hobbits have gone through in leaving the Shire, rising to meet their Call to Adventure and finding their parts to play in Saving the World for all of the other peoples of the land, the sequence that gets the most attention - that feels the most disquietingly and even painfully intimate and chronologically comes after all of the grand battles and ceremonies - is this discovery that home itself, the most unprepossessing and secluded part of their continent, has not gone untouched by the blood-dimmed tide that’s loosed in Middle-earth. I perfectly understand and agree with Jackson’s decision to declutter this sequence out of the structure of his film series and find the overwritten and somewhat boring content of “The Scouring of the Shire” less interesting than the observation that Tolkien devoted so many pages and detail to it. I’ve never read Joseph Campbell or other scholars of his sort but I wouldn’t be surprised if their analysis connected “The Scouring of the Shire” to the coming-home battle in, say, The Odyssey, and canonized this part of the hero-quest structure in which it turns out that the last and hardest challenge for the protagonist is to bring home what he’s learned in braving the challenges of adulthood and the outside world and use it to set himself and his community aright. This isn’t a scriptural, hagiographical or historical portion of Tolkien’s hundreds of pages of text; it’s the most personal and therefore counterintuitively but understandably the most significant part, as the shift in tone and attention to fine-grained detail make abundantly evident.

The other noteworthy point seems related to the part of Tolkien’s biography where he served in the English army in World War I and saw heavy action at the infamously bloody Battle of the Somme. During and after the chapter on “The Scouring of the Shire” Tolkien and reader begin to note Frodo and Sam’s respective and diverging reactions to their wartime experiences and homecoming. This is made manifest at the very end of the tale with Frodo acknowledging that his combat wounds “will never really heal” and that he must keep moving on because even a redeemed and blossoming Shire on a continent readying for a sunny new Age cannot contain the irrepressible wanderlust Frodo has permanently inherited in confronting the harsh realities of the world abroad. Sam’s destiny meanwhile is indeed to perennially water and nourish his roots in the Shire where he marries, sires offspring, becomes a person of responsibility and respect in the community of his upbringing and takes over the spacious Hobbit hole of which the departing Frodo no longer has use.

One can imagine “The Scouring of the Shire” and after-events being largely about Tolkien’s own feelings returning to England after the War and trying to relocate a place in a relatively sequestered society among people who could never fully understand what he’d done and seen and where grumbling about your problems, even ones like the post-traumatic stress of seeing many friends die from disease and violence, was culturally unacceptable. I think Tolkien was partly working all of this out for himself through finishing his epic saga in this way, and he may have been as surprised as anyone to find that these two characters, both extensions of his own mind and feelings, come to an irreconcilable difference about their homecoming experiences. Frodo represents the part of the returning veteran who lives with the uneasy reality of how his travails have unalterably changed him, represented quite literally by those wounds that will never physically or emotionally go entirely away. Sam represents the desire and, for some people, necessity to bring body, mind and soul home from a difficult and life-changing adventure and to take up a proper position as a mature grownup, not out in the wider world but in one’s own community of origin.

As Frodo tells Sam at their final parting, at Tolkien’s own imaginary reckoning between these two conflicted but intertwined viewpoints from within himself, “You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years.” Frodo can’t stay down on the Shire and Sam can’t turn away from his budding responsibilities to family and community by hitting the road, and so they have to allow their relationship with one another, the most consequential and important of their lives, to continue from this point forward only in fond memory.

These two characters whom peril, war and an impossible mission into the heart of darkness could never cleave asunder and who have come to represent mature but irreconcilable impulses from within the author’s heart will now be separated finally and by their own free choosing, which proves harder than any of the threats to life and limb they have faced in the course of their many adventures. For a story of this scale and influence I find this to be a fitting note of resolution. Jackson evidently perceived the same and, while not directly utilizing “The Scouring of the Shire,” still correctly saw this final parting of the heretofore utterly inseparable Frodo and Sam as the key to the series and the right note of peaceful reflection on which to close the grandiloquent proceedings.

Next: Getting back to a regular round-up of recent film-watching exploits.