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About J. R. R. Tolkien's Fantasy Novel, The Lord of the Rings (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Thomas Farrell
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So far as I know, Ong did not mention Tolkien in any of his publications.

But Ong does explicitly mention certain modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. (For specific page references to Shippey's mention of modernism, see the "Index" [p. 343].)

In any event, in Shippey's "Afterword: The Followers and the Critics," he also discusses Tolkien's critics.

Now, for a briefly annotated bibliography of Ong's 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations or reprintings as distinct publications), see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the anthology Language, Culture, and identity: The Legacy: of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (2011, pp. 185-245).

In any event, on the same page in Shippey's book where he refers to "the despisers of fantasy," he also says, "Tolkien cried out to be heard, and we have still to find out what he was saying. There should be no doubt, though, that he found listeners, and that they found whatever he was saying worth their while" (p. xvii).

Now, in Shippey's book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Shippey discusses fantasy extensively (for specific page references, see the entry for Fantasy genre in the "Index" pp. 339-340]).

However, just as Ong did not ever explicitly advert to Jung's account of fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking, so too Shippey does not advert explicitly in his book to Jung's account of fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking. However, I have no reason to think that Shippey was ever as interested in Jung's work as Ong was. For this reason, Shippey's failure to mention Jung's account of fantasy thinking is understandable.

Now, in some of my recent OEN articles, I have used Jung's account of fantasy thinking as involving images and associative thinking to discuss the emergence of incest-themed fantasy skits in porn videos on the internet and in DVDs. In short, thanks to the ready availability of porn on the internet today, what Jung describes as fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking may be far more common today that it ever has been previously in our Western cultural history.

Now a final word is in order here about Ong. In his most accessible and most widely read book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), he discusses what he refers to there as the inward turn of consciousness (pp. 178-179).

But to capture adequately here the import of Ong's basic valuation of the inward turn of consciousness (which is also characteristic of literary modernism), I want to quote Ong's succinct summary in his 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (pp. 10-11) of the Jungian psychoanalyst Eric Neumann's Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness, translated by R. F. C. Hull (1954; orig. German ed., 1949):

"The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (1) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with its tail in its mouth, as well as by other circular or global mythological figures [including Nietzsche's imagery about the eternal return?], (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change, (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, [thwarting] what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., "married" within one's psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism [such as Nietzsche's overman] - or, more properly, personalism - of modern man [sic])."

Ong also sums up Neumann's Jungian account of the stages of consciousness in his (Ong's) book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness (1981, pp. 18-19; but also see the "Index" for further references to Neumann [p. 228]), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.

As you can see, Ong values personalism, He characterized his own work as phenomenological and personalist in cast. I honored both of those two characterizations in the subtitle of my award-winning book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (2000), mentioned above.

But no inward turn of consciousness = no twentieth-century personalism.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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