Tolkien’s “infantilism”

The critical rubbishing of Tolkien began with Edmund Wilson’s extended sneer about “juvenile trash” in 1956. Younger readers today may need reminding that Wilson was a pathologically ambitious critic who championed modernism in literature (and Stalinism in politics). In his pompous obsession, as a contemporary put it, “with being the Adult in the room” – and maybe, oddly enough, his priapism too – Wilson is a good exemplar of what Ursula Le Guin called “a deep puritanical distrust of fantasy” on the part of those who “confuse fantasy, which in the psychological sense is a universal and essential faculty of the human mind, with infantilism and pathological regression.”

Le Guin is undoubtedly right about Wilson and others of his ilk, but in a demonstration of the durability and ubiquity of this accusation, Tolkien’s “infantilism” (along with “nostalgia”, to which we shall return later) was recently revived by Michael Moorcock . Perhaps, therefore, it is no coincidence that Moorcock has now mostly abandoned his science fiction/fantasy – part of whose real appeal was precisely their rather adolescent charm (my, what a long sword you have!) – to write supposedly Adult novels. In any case, many science fiction writers are indeed committed modernists; and not a few are poorly placed to finger infantilism – witness in both respects, for example, the toys-for-boys technological fetishism of J.G. Ballard.

As Tolkien noted, the connection between children and fairy-stories is an accident of history, not something essential; “If a fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults.” But being Grown-Up is a recurring theme in modernism, with its teleological fantasy of collectively progressing towards the truth, and its mythoclasm as a necessary destructiveness in order to get there. The Lord of the Rings and its readers are thus doubly stigmatized, both individually/psychologically and collectively/socially. Tolkien’s enormous popularity then requires such risible explanations as Robert Giddings’s “PR men”, at whose behest the reading public apparently took him up solely because it was told to do so.

It is true, however, that modernist hostility to Tolkien need not be of the left. Private Eye sneered that Tolkien appeals only to those “with the mental age of a child – computer programmers, hippies and most Americans” (see Craig 1992). And despite his trumpeted sensitivity to elite literary contempt for the reading public, the populist Oxford professor John Carey (1977) repeated the charge of childishness, and attacked Tolkien for his lack of interest in “the writers who were moulding English literature in his own day – Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence” – as if English literature, to quote Brian Rosebury (1992:133), were “a single substance, appropriated for a definite period, like the only blob of Plasticene in the classroom, by an exclusive group (however gifted)…”

Patrick Curry
Tolkien and his critics