Tolkien, Kafka, and the Anxiety of Influence

Harold Bloom is rolling in his grave, but at least Tolkien and Kafka are resting easy tonight.

Anxiety of influence - Wikipedia

Anxiety of Influence is a concept in literary criticism articulated by Harold Bloom in 1973, in his book, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. It refers to the psychological struggle of aspiring authors to overcome the anxiety posed by the influence of their literary antecedents.

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Contrary to universally held beliefs that the literary influence of precursors can provide a purely benevolent and inspirational platform for aspiring writers, Bloom credits this influence also with the opposite effect.^[3] He contends that it can prove detrimental, that this influence instills in young writers a type of unease, apprehension, or anxiety as they psychologically struggle against past literary forebears to create something definitive and original and achieve literary recognition and success. Bloom equates this struggle to the Freudian family drama; particularly to the Oedipus complex and relationship of son to father, where the emerging writer is cast as the 'son' in a battle against the 'father'; a literary precursor.^[1] Bloom claims that this forces poets or authors into a type of 'creative misprision'; where they must distort the works of their literary masters in an attempt to create something revolutionary and innovative.^[3] The authors who triumph over this struggle are deemed 'strong', with some even receiving acclaim to the extent where the contemporary has the potential to transcend time, with some literary predecessors being read in terms of their contemporary successor. In contrast, writers who cannot prevail over this anxiety of influence are deemed 'weak', with their works regarded as markedly derivative and reminiscent of the works of earlier literary masters. Some great poets in which Bloom draws upon, who have overcome this anxiety of influence include Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Wallace Stevens.

The topic of Tolkien’s critics, especially ones which are also writers themselves such as George R. R. Martin, Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore is a frequent subject of controversy on Substack. I’ve often thought that maybe it might be essentially Harold Bloom’s idea of the anxiety of influence, even though I’m sure Harold Bloom would be appalled at his idea being applied to anything besides really conventional ideas of inaccessible poetry (he’s probably a guy for whom even Jane Austen and Charles Dickens would be too populist,) and he would probably also be offended by the idea that maybe even if his psychoanalytic perspective is generally correct, maybe the end result is actually that more good literature gets produced and not merely that culture suffers a gradual fall from grace. This latter point is itself Tolkienesque, with the whole eucatastrophe idea, that maybe writing is sort of a mistake and a fall in a way but it’s good that it’s a mistake and a fall, it’s not just a gradual degradation over time from the kinds of writing Harold Bloom liked.

This time I have come not to just defend Tolkien from his critics while also saying that I would rather read his critics’ works than his sycophants’, but I’ve also come to defend Tolkien thoroughly from my criticisms of him I made less than a week ago even if I’ve also softened those within a couple of days in the first place. I did say a couple of days after my first post where I decided I had criticisms of Tolkien myself that I messed up and criticized Tolkien based on things that were published in the Silmarillion and other books by Christopher Tolkien that were basically just J. R. R. Tolkien’s unfinished notes. Even though I said that though, I don’t think I’ve adequately really made a defense of Tolkien in light of my own recent criticisms and why it’s OK to say the Silmarillion is basically just bad because it’s unfinished, along with all the other unfinished things Christopher Tolkien decided to publish to try to cynically cash in on the Tolkien craze and make a name for himself, but also love the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.

I think most of it comes down to a point I liked making off and on weeks and months ago, which is that the published Silmarillion says that the Earth used to be flat, but Tolkien’s own notes said he didn’t like that, thought it was stupid, and wanted to change it, so you don’t actually see anywhere in the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit that the Earth actually factually used to be flat. This is basically just reasoning by analogy, but there’s no reason I shouldn’t have applied the same logic to the idea that Tolkien is promoting Gnosticism in his fiction even if he wasn’t explicit about that. If I liked Tolkien’s books, the movies, and all the music based on it (the soundtracks, Led Zeppelin, Camel, etc.) that really should’ve been my first instinct I think. If he thought the Earth being flat was stupid he probably also thought the Gnostic stuff was stupid and was working on writing that out too and it’s probably just Christopher Tolkien’s fault yet again. And yes, if you ever look at Christopher Tolkien’s notes and correspondences, Christopher Tolkien seemed like an awful and miserable person who I wouldn’t want to be around, very unlike J. R. R. Tolkien, so I can readily blame him.

The reason I have so many problems with this is really because I actually was looking to Tolkien as writing a spiritually-informed work, and I do agree that it is as long as you just stick to what he published during his lifetime. When I think about what I got out of Tolkien, it actually was really good for me. For example, the fact that Frodo decided to show mercy to Gollum actually taught me to be merciful to people in real life, and Gandalf being raised up like Jesus was one of a few examples that taught me to understand the Bible in terms of the story it tells instead of as just a list of rules for lawyers to argue over all day. Back when I was eagerly writing positive things about Tolkien I did link to an article saying Tolkien is basically science fiction and shouldn’t be associated with really any of the “epic fantasy” commercial writing that came after it and that really is true in light of all the technology that’s named things like palantír or after various Elvish words. Most of the “magic” in Tolkien really is just technology that wasn’t produced industrially and that’s clear, the rest is also basically just psionics as I’ve also written about or the bad guys do sorcery with spirit summoning and things, but none of it really resembles the rather stupid interpretations of “magic” in a lot of the Dragonlance spinoff types of fiction where people with no taste just play D&D and turn their campaigns into a novel (D&D is perfectly fun if you have the right people, but this kind of thing is why I don’t play with strangers. Almost all the strangers were actually literally failed novelists who were playing D&D to write these kinds of books and most of them got really mad at me with my ideas for not handing them some kind of generic shallow commercialized fantasy character they could easily slot into their generic awful book, and they talked about their incomplete books while often complaining vocally about my ideas.) If I hear that Tolkien had all these basically Gnostic beliefs and I don’t question that as being an addition by someone else I’m going to take those seriously. And guess what, I took those seriously and I think it did harm me, and I was right to feel freed by not believing those, but I also should’ve been like “hmm, maybe this is like the Earth was flat thing and not actually a real part of Tolkien’s work.”

Besides all the authors who criticized Tolkien very clearly and obviously not hating Tolkien in my humbly correct opinion, I think Tolkien himself sort of had an anxiety of influence. If you read about how the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit were written, a lot of it was actually C. S. Lewis’s idea. Of course Tolkien is going to try to find a lot of things to criticize C. S. Lewis for to distance himself from C. S. Lewis due to that.

How C.S. Lewis saved Lord of the Rings from J.R.R. Tolkien’s boring ideas - Ben Settle

(Behold, more curmudgeonly criticism of Tolkien! It seems like basically a law of the universe for people to curmudgeonly criticize Tolkien at this point. The stuff about C. S. Lewis inspiring the book is very true though, but there’s nothing wrong about it even if Tolkien inclines everyone to be curmudgeonly toward him because he was curmudgeonly toward everyone else.)

Additionally, he also wrote that he thought of his books as being fairy stories because they were more mature and he grew to like fairy stories more as he got older, as opposed to when he was younger and he only liked myths and legends like the Nibelungenlied and Arthurian legends. So why would he hate Disney? Disney is largely synonymous with fairy tales to lots of people just because they’re popular and they made the film versions instead of the book versions even if Disney didn’t come up with much any of the stories firsthand. Tolkien did say that the elves turned into fairies over time as they faded and he even had the whole “tra-la-la-laley, down in the valley” song at one point, I don’t really think Tolkien is that offended that Disney is making light of elves so much as that he wants to distance his version from Disney’s. And yes, Tolkien was way more personally critical of Disney than I was of Tolkien, so don’t say that Disney just wasn’t his thing or something. He straight up called Walt Disney an awful man even if maybe that was just a thoughtless comment.

J.R.R. Tolkien felt "a heartfelt loathing" towards Walt Disney and his movies (winteriscoming.net)

On a note of how awful Christopher Tolkien is, he hated the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit films, probably because it undoes all the hard work he did trying to steal his father’s legacy and mess it up against his clearly-defined will (e.g., don’t publish the Silmarillion with the Earth being flat and treat it as the secret legendary masterpiece of Tolkien when Tolkien explicitly wrote in some of his other notes he didn’t like that and the Earth was notably never described as flat in the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit.)

All of this idea of someone with questionable morality taking a beloved work and trying to cynically capitalize it while also spreading their questionable morality reminds me a lot of another master author: Franz Kafka. Did you know Franz Kafka did not publish a single novel during his lifetime? Franz Kafka published the Metamorphosis and some books of short stories (but not all the short stories attributed to him) and that was it. In English classes and other circles where people try to be intellectually sophisticated, you might encounter various Franz Kafka novels and stories with the claims they’re “absurdist,” which is used as a euphemism for nihilist rather than just meaning that there’s absurd humor. Kafka was full of absurd humor which is literally why people like him in the first place, but his writing was absolutely not nihilistic even if it was often pretty dark. The Metamorphosis is about how the main character wakes up as a bug but his boss is just mad that he’s late for work and doesn’t even seem to care that he literally turned into a giant insect for no identifiable reason. All the nihilistic stuff really seems to be because Max Brod published and edited a bunch of unfinished stories that Kafka told him to burn, not anything Kafka actually wrote. Kafka was basically my segue from just reading sci-fi basically to more “traditional” literature, not that Kafka is all that traditional but it’s more people’s idea of standard literary classics than, say, me working for the high school library and asking them to add The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury because they didn’t have it for some reason. Contrary to popular belief though, Kafka didn’t ask for all his books burned, he did publish some books in his lifetime. Just stick with those and I guess it’s not a crime to read the others as long as you don’t treat it like it’s official, but that’s basically at your own risk considering that’s how some people promulgate harmful ideas, same as the books published by Christopher Tolkien under J. R. R. Tolkien’s name.

Also, I do think both Marxists and throne-and-altar conservatives really should stop trying to appropriate Lord of the Rings. I can agree he was a devout Catholic, but that doesn’t mean he held every belief that someone with a negative stereotypical view of Catholics thought he believed. He believed he had actual memories from Atlantis so he might have believed in reincarnation but at least believed in some kind of before-birth memory (I didn’t see anything saying he explicitly believed in reincarnation but some people infer that,) he actually believed in Atlantis and elves and lots of things like that even if I’m pretty sure he didn’t believe his books were all nonfiction, his politics was literally anarcho-monarchism which is one of the criticisms Michael Moorcock made of him because Michael Moorcock thought that was weird and naïve, and he is on record as having read Howard’s Conan the Barbarian books and Asimov’s Foundation series and liking them. Tolkien reading those and liking them while writing a religious allegory (yes, he did describe his own books as an allegory at one point despite his famous comments about not liking allegory) with no sex scenes, no graphic violence, and not even one swear word is probably another example of Tolkien’s own anxiety of influence for trying not to be Howard, Asimov, Lord Dunsany (this is the influence Tolkien and H. P. Lovecraft have in common by the way,) or any of his own influences rather than some grand vision for how he wants everyone in society to act. Tolkien shall not be appropriated by your silly paranoid extremist ideologies. I love Substack but Substack really wears me out with all the really nonsensical conspiracy theories. Not all conspiracy theories are nonsensical of course, some things like Watergate and MK-Ultra actually happened and some that aren’t officially confirmed are reasonable too, but most conspiracies are way stupider than that and on Substack someone posts one of those an average of every three seconds. OK, I made that statistic up.

To make all the extremists who want to appropriate Tolkien to promote their stupid ideologies even madder, I think Tolkien would’ve liked George R. R. Martin, Michael Moorcock, J. K. Rowling, and Ursula K. Le Guin while hating all their garbage if Tolkien were really around to see what those people wrote. After all, he liked Conan the Barbarian and Asimov’s Foundation. Why wouldn’t he? If Tolkien and his influencees had more overlap of their lifespans there would probably not have been really any bad blood ever, even if it’s also kind of clear that for example Michael Moorcock softened his opinions over time anyway. When you’re a teenager you rebel against your parents and when you make your own way in the world you like them again. The whole idea of the anxiety of influence seems basically the same to me. It’s not a big deal but both non-writers with bad taste and writers who aren’t very good so they act like sycophants due to being too weak to make their own way make a big deal out of it too often, thus fueling a lot of drama on Substack. Instead of reading the Belgariad which was written by a literal pedo who only wrote it because he was on a pedo record and therefore unable to get a regular job, let’s read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny and listen to Michael Moorcock’s band make a hard rock cover of it, it’s what Tolkien would do despite all the reeeeeeeeing to the contrary.

Also, Tolkien was nominated for a Nobel prize and didn’t win one. In light of the idea of the anxiety of influence, it seems rather obvious why he didn’t win one despite the fact that some really conventionally literary people like W. H. Auden supported him, and obvious why other people like Tolstoy were passed over: no one wants to give a Nobel prize to the authors who are actually popular because they’re intimidated and jealous and have Freudian stuff going on. That’s basically it. If you’re a writer your life’s goal should probably be to not win a Nobel prize at this point considering they gave one to Thomas Mann and one to the lobotomy when you’d think they’d just give Thomas Mann a lobotomy and skip all these extra steps.