Detourned Literature: "The Last Ringbearer"

One of my good friends and comrades, knowing that I'm a sci-fi/fantasy geek at heart, recently emailed me a link to the translated file of Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer.  For those who are unaware of this novel, it is to The Lord of the Rings trilogy what Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea was to Jane Eyre or, more appropriately perhaps, what Gregory Maguire's Wicked (the novel, not the simplistic musical adaptation) was to The Wizard of Oz.  That is, a political literature of detournement: Rhys wrote the story of the racialized first wife of Rochester, excavating the colonial commitments of British gothic literature; Maguire challenged the colonial and sexist chauvinism of Frank L. Baum (it is worth recalling that this was a man who penned articles about the necessity of extreminating indigenous peoples) by transforming a Wicked Witch into a revolutionary, the Wizard into an imperialist.  Now we have Eskov who, in 1999, wrote a book that was both a sequel and reinterpretation of Tolkien's beloved trilogy that, like these other detourned novels, challenged the politics of its source material.

Before going further, let's briefly note the aesthetic problems with the Eskov manuscript that is available in English.  Although The Last Ringbearer was published in Russia to some acclaim, and translated officially into several non-English publishing houses, it failed to find an English publisher due to the Tolkien estate that still possesses the power to forbid and/or sue any "derivative" works for copyright infringement.  (Some fans have joked that, since so much shite fantasy is derivative of Tolkien, said estate should be suing hundreds of authors.)  Hence, Eskov's book hasn't been able to find a professional English translator and so the only translation available, made by a devoted fan of the original book (Markov), isn't entirely literate.  Idioms are mixed up, the supposed English equivalents of the Russian decades out of date; tenses are confused; paragraph structure is confusing; the entire English manuscript often devolves into awkward prose configurations.  There is no possible way to assess the literary qualities of the original, and it is something of a red herring when critics of the only English translation available complain about its literary short-comings––but let's be honest, and uncritical fans be-damned, Tolkien was not a very good writer to begin with.

So aesthetic qualities aside––since it is impossible to judge these qualities with only a translation that was an amateur labour of love––let us examine this book that politically reinterprets the story of the most famous fantasy trilogy.  In the first place, why does this even matter?  Because Tolkien's famous trilogy was an act of feudalism lite where the virtues of pastoral traditionalism were treated as superior to industrial progress and where eurocentric chauvinism was rampant.  Indeed, the movie adaptations, despite whatever liberties they took, did a good job of visualizing Tolkien's eurocentrism: Return of the King treated movie-goers to a spectacle of African- and Arab-looking enemies of Western civilization; there was a point where Aragorn even addressed the "men of the west" to hold their ground against the dark(er) hordes of Mordor.  This was not simply the affectation of Hollywood; it was an amplification of the elements of the original text, laid bare simply because they had to be depicted onscreen.  The only difference is that I'd rather waste my time watching this eurocentrism than reading it over again because the latter takes longer and, in any case, is weighted down by a turgid prose that I could ignore when I was in elementary school finishing Return of the King under my bedsheets with a flashlight when it was past my bedtime.  In some ways, and not to belabour the point, the troubled prose of Markov's translation of Eskov's book is actually easier to read than the English original of Tolkien's beloved books.

In any case, Eskov begins his book by recognizing all of Tolkien's chauvinist assumptions and making them apparent.  The narrative of Lord of the Rings is treated as propaganda, the story that was not only written by the winner by mystified by an order beholden to magic and irrationality.  In other words, the official narrative of the War of the Rings is a lie told by a side responsible for genocide, a mythical justification for an imperialist war that was intended to preserve the state of affairs.  Early on, since the book spends most of its time as a sequel and only the first twenty pages retelling the story of the War of the Ring from the perspective of the losers, we have Gandalf arguing for a "final solution" to the "Mordor problem".  The reason for Gandalf's genocidal imperialism is explained by a fear of enlightenment, an era of rationality that Mordor is ushering into existence against the mystified world of magic:

"Barad-dúr […] that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle Earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic. […] It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log 'castles' to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Númenor."

Fascism, of course, is reactionary precisely because it finds its politics in a rejection of enlightenment thinking by an appeal to a mystified past: in Logics of Worlds, for example, Badiou refers to the fascist subject as "obscure", the product of an "occulted" understanding of reality.  The War of the Ring, in Eskov's narrative, is precisely what Tolkien's pastoral view of reality, and his hatred of the "dark Satanic Mills" of technological progress, would actually mean.  Gandalf, a wizard afraid of a literal demystification of the world that will allow humans to escape what Samir Amin has referred to as "metaphysical alienation" convinces his wizard contemporaries, with the exception of Saruman, to join with the elves––beings of magic who see humans as animals and despise rational knowledge––and stamp out the social progress that is emergent in Mordor.  The fact that Mordor screwed up an irrigation attempt and thus ended up raising the saline levels of its soil and producing an arid wasteland (here it is interesting to note that Eskov originally started writing an essay about the odd geography of Middle Earth, attempting to nerdsplain its scientific origins) has already placed them in a position of peripheral dependency, despite their social and technological progress: they are reliant on food imports, a weakness that Gandalf and the other imperialists decide to exploit immediately so as to achieve their "final solution."

As some of my nerdish readers might be aware, around the time that the LOTR trilogy was adapted for film by Peter Jackson, McSweeney's produced a satiric "news commentary" by Zinn and Chomsky about the War of the Rings that made similar points.  Although this commentary was a good attack on the implicit imperialist framework of LOTR, like all things by Zinn and Chomsky it also did not go as far as Eskov's treatment.  For in Eskov's version of events, the people of Mordor and their eastern/southern allies are not the inhuman monsters in Lord of the Rings––Zinn and Chomsky still treat them according to this assumption.  Rather, they are simply human and have been racialized according to imperialist propaganda as "orcs" and "trolls" and what-not.  Here we have a nice analogy of orientalist discourse, the way in which oppressed peoples (and the Mordor coalition ends up in a position of oppression, crushed by the imperialist elf- and wizard-led alliance) are depicted as sub-human.  Even Sauron is simply a mortal leader, not some ancient demon, whose place of death is unknown, another body amongst the hundreds of thousands of Mordorians slaughtered in the war.

By maintaining that these "orcs" and "trolls" were just human cultures that were othered is what makes The Last Ringbearer more than just a parodic lampooning of a popular book's conventions.  This cuts right to the heart of Tolkien's own eurocentric assumptions because, as a consummate eurocentric who valorized Northern and Western European mythology and archaeology in his books, he would have understood human social groups outside of these European boundaries as less-than-human.  The orcs were indeed his "lesser races"––those vicious and war-mongering barbarians that did not share the rarified culture of a pastoral Europe that he celebrated.  And if he chose to confuse these others with the problems of industrialization he saw arising in his own European backyard, this was simply authorial license: far easier to ascribe the supposed sins of modernity to those who had been banned from modernity.

Here Eskov takes Tolkien at his word: yes, these others were responsible for Enlightenment and they were racialized.  This really isn't that far off the mark: the European Enlightenment came late, after all, the product of colonial ventures that, in the act of violently forcing subordination, stole most of its scientific and artistic concepts from the peoples it had reduced to subject populations.  And if we go back further in time, we can encounter those crusades where Western Europe invaded an Arab East that was already in the throes of an early Enlightenment––hell, that's how Aquinas ended up getting ahold of Aristotle, and why you find him quoting Muslim philosophers now and then (Averroes and Avicenna), because of a religious war where once side, though still gripped in the throes of religious mystification, was beginning to produce a mathematical and scientific order and challenge its own mystified categories of thought, only to be underdeveloped militarily by a group of people that could not tolerate Enlightenment.  If this same group of people claimed to originate said Enlightenment later, then so be it––the past has been intentionally obliterated.  Eskov has an answer to that anyhow in his book: the conquerors do end up producing a second enlightenment unintentionally (the Gondorian "economic miracle"), but this was simply the result of everything they stole, nearly a generation earlier, in an imperial war.

Thus, as with Wide Sargasso Sea and Wicked, Eskov's The Last Ringbearer is able to establish its fictional counter-narrative through its verisimilitude of the source material.  All of the major events of the War of the Ring are explained perfectly according to the counter-narrative, the only difference is war time propaganda––a grand narrative constructed by those who were victorious and remystified with bullshit stories about the destiny of kings and magical (evil) rings.  Aragorn, for example, is just some northern murderer who is an elvish puppet, his supposed lineage to an ancient order of kings based on an appeal to legend.  Boromir didn't die because he fell under the influence of the one ring, because the ring in question was simply an artifice designed by the Mordorian guardians to trick their magic-headed enemies; its destruction had nothing to do with the imperialist victory.  No, Boromir was assassinated by Aragorn so as to remove a potential political enemy, someone blocking the throne of Gondor.

But again, as with these other fictional counter-narratives, The Last Ringbearer is not just a rewriting of the "official" tale: it tells its own story that goes further in critiquing its source material and is thus a novel in its own right rather than simply a point-by-point rewriting.  As aforementioned, the counter-narrative of the War of the Ring is mainly explained in the first twenty pages.  The rest of the novel is about protagonists who are part of a shattered and losing army fighting a guerrilla war against the imperialist victors: a scout, a medic (who becomes an alter-Frodo), and a knight from Gondor who opposes the puppet-dictator Aragorn.

What is at stake in the main story of Eskov's novel, however, is not only an interrogation of Tolkien's commitments but an attack on mainstream literature that follows in Tolkien's footsteps.  Rejecting Tolkien's valuation of reality is to reject this mainstream; the aforementioned "feudalism lite" has always been a problem with fantasy, even with some of those more grittier and transgressive-seeming novels that appear to be rejecting Tolkien's conventions.  Even though it might be the case that now, a decade and a half into the 21st century, we might have an anti-Tolkien high-fantasy narrative (Joe Abercrombie, for example, is a good example of an author whose books were intentionally aimed at pissing on those conventions inherited from Tolkien), Eskov's book was written in 1999.  And, more to the point, he was attacking the holy grail of fantasy literature itself, rather than producing a critique from afar.

The protagonists in The Last Ringbearer are recruited by a Nazgul mathematician to fight against the hegemony of an elvish order that seeks to annihilate human creativity so as to prevent demystification:

"The forces of magic will reconfigure this world to their liking, and henceforth it will have no room for technological civilizations like that of Mordor. The three-dimensional spiral of history will lose its vertical component and collapse into a closed cycle: centuries and ages will pass, but the only things to change will be the names of the kings and the battles they win. […] In two or three decades the Elves will turn Middle Earth into a well-trimmed tidy lawn."

For those of us who are marxists, and speak of how a dialectical materialist understanding (as opposed to an idealist understanding) of history is a "spiral" this is a nice description, the fiction a useful device for explaining a concept that is often trotted out in a formulaic manner.  The reason why we speak of historical repetition in a marxist understanding of history as being a spiral is because all seeming repetitions are not simply repetitions as such but, like a three-dimensional spirals, moments of actual change.  Thus when revolutionary movements dawn the masks of past revolutionary figures, as Marx discusses in the 18th Brumaire this is not necessarily a circular return, a constant repetition of the same, but also something different.  The past returns but is rearticulated; the circle is broken by the spiral, the apparent ellipsis is actually change.  When we speak of Spartacus now, for example, though it is tied to a repetition of a past slave revolution it is also and always something new, transformed by the concrete facts of the present: the echo is preserved, but not with a fidelity to the historical context from which it was gleaned.

More to the point, a "spiral" versus a "circular" understanding of history explains the difference between progressive and reactionary understandings of historical change.  Hegel's dialectic is always circular, a preservation of the Totality that was understood as Totality from the outset; Marx and Engels abandoned this closed circuit, choosing to adopt that element of metaphorical torsion where contradiction, composed of two counter-forces (like a screw and a screw-driver) produces a spiral: a movement that appears circular but that possesses a third dimension where each twist forms a progressive differential.  All retrograde understandings of history seek to preserve the two-dimensional and circular understanding of reality: Nietzsche's concept of eternal return, for example, though in appearance anti-Hegelian is just as anti-progressive––the same thing, over and over and over again.  We find this preserved in Foucault, regardless of his critical importance, where his genealogical method (derived from Nietzsche, of course) appears at first to be critical due to its rejection of the doctrine of progress but, in this rejection, leads to the preservation of the normative same.  Once you claim that even a critical understanding of progress is a lie (i.e. the assumption that the only thing that counts as "progress" is the revolutionary upheaval produced by a dominated class overcoming its dominators), you are simply accepting that a two-dimensional preservation of the status quo is destiny: "the only things to change will be the names of kings and the battles they win."  Indeed, Foucault says pretty much the same thing when he claims that the only thing that counts as "change" are these contingent moments when one murderous order replaces another, neither possessing any real value beyond their discursive frameworks of power-knowledge.

Tolkien, however, wanted to preserve some pastoral order of tradition; LOTR was an attack on technological progress, misunderstanding that the horrors produced by capitalist social relations were the result of scientific-technological change.  His solution was a return of tradition (the "return of the king" symbolized by Aragorn, cipher of a legendary order that had been forsaken by the Gondorians) rather than an overstepping of the capitalist limits of progress, much in the same way that fascists sought to occult modernity by binding it to a traditional order of the volk.  Everything is preserved and occulted under the "returning" king, a new return to a mystified past, and historical transformation is either denied or distorted according to this remystified order.  Eskov's book challenges this; the story that comprises the majority of his book is a story where defeated Mordorians embark on a reversal of Frodo's quest to destroy the hegemony of mystification.

Doubtless The Last Ringbearer will never receive a proper translation and publication for years due to copy-right laws and the conservatism of the Tolkien estate.  In the meantime fanboys (the gendered term is intentional because the most vocal pro-Tolkien fanatics are usually male) will continue to dismiss, as many of them already are, Eskov's book as some misguided work of "fanfiction" without having read it, simply appalled by the summary of its narrative (indeed, on many comment strings fans have denounced the book as "bad" simply because of its synopsis––badness, here, being a synonym of critiquing the inherent political commitments of LOTR).  Still, for those of us who are interested in how a popular narrative can be retconned so to critique imperialism, orientalism, and the always present danger of a remystification (that is fascization) of the past, this book is as interesting and important as those produced by Rhys and Maguire.