E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #91: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
by Ernie on 10/01/08 at 10:40 am
Number 91: The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (1937). Given the extraordinary ease with which today’s readers have surrendered to the infantilizing pressures felt in most other parts of our culture, I feel I should consent to admit one children’s book to the list, and this is it. The one thing about art intended for children is that when it’s successful it is a sign that children are experiencing it in their own way, one largely unavailable to adults. The Hobbit is a book of certain grace and perfect timing. Unlike the grand, Anglo-Saxon-style epics that followed (the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Silmarillion), its world is inhabitable, its pace easy to accommodate, its cast of characters digestible. However, like most children’s literature, it is best read before the age of 15, when thoughts of dwarves, gold, and dragons should be turning toward thoughts of un-Hobbit-like things. The Hobbit may, in a sense, be Tolkien’s finest achievement, and it remains a classic of children’s literature. Note also the charming dust jacket on the first edition, designed by Tolkien himself.
Mike P
Jan 10th, 2008
Anyone who thinks “The Hobbit” is merely a children’s book and is therefore representative of “infantilizing pressures” is sorely mistaken. Have you recently read this work, especially the several chapters that occur *after* the dragon’s demise? No less an authority on “children’s literature” than Humphrey Carpenter (in the interests of full discolsure, JRRT’s official biographer) has aruged that, once the “childish” quest is over (not Carpenter’s words, but lperhaps E-Verse’s ), “The Hobbit” becomes a sophisticated examination of the insidiuous nature of greed and evil. Bilbo becomes a somewhat morally ambiguous character, and we are introduced to such notions as the political expediencey of scapegoating in the person of the Master of Lake-Town — hardly typical kiddie lit fare.
This rather condescending and patronizing “admission of one’s childrens’ book” onto the E-Verse list simply demonstrates current academia and literati’s sad inability to recognize much of value in either children’s or fantastic literature. Fortunately, the general readership has no such reservations.
So there! :-)
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Ernie
Jan 10th, 2008
Ah, it seems I hooked big one! My trap worked.
My point was more along these lines: the literary experience of a child is quite different from that of an adult, and it should be accepted and respected as such; therefore, a successful work of children’s or young adult literature should be understood as an altogether separate thing from the adult “cool” novels of the E-Verse list. A work of children’s literature should not be expected to perform double duties, though certain examples may be perfectly entertaining to adults. Yes, adult themes are covered in some works of fantastic literature, but children’s literature deserves to be treated for what it is. A list of the coolest novels is undertaken with the not-so-subtle understanding that these are novels whose complexity and subject matter were devised for and best appreciated by adults.
Often, readers of genre literature–westerns, thrillers, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, books that are marketed to a coterie of like-minded readers without even the intention of reaching a universal audience–feel that a list of serious modern novels that excludes the books they read for pleasure somehow exists as a personal insult to them. That is hardly the case and certainly never the intention.
So, to sum: there is much of value in children’s and fantastic literature, but it is of a different coin altogether from that to be found in the novels that appear on E-Verse’s top 100 cool novels.
E-Verse welcomes a list of the top 100 works of children’s literature. I might try to sneak Light in August or Ulysses in there and insist that modernist adult novels are undervalued and overlooked by people who value fantastic or children’s literature. After all, children can read Hemingway if they like, though I’m sure adult sexuality, aging, and the delicacies of literary style will interest them little.
:<})
That emoticon is meant to be a man with a beard smiling, by the way.
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Mike P
Jan 21st, 2008
“Children’s literature deserves to be treated for what it is,” you state. Yet if you adopt that as your critical starting point, you are excluding any possibility of discovering anything more (i.e., anything you would classify as “real” [not your word] literature.) This is like saying, “Well, I’ll listen to jazz, but I refuse to evaluate it by criteria common to all music, because, you know, it’s just a genre.”
Ernie responds:
Yes, but I am curious about the way in which this is always a one-way street. No one would say Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself deserves to trump Dr. Seuss and C.S. Lewis on a list of children’s books, so why is it permissible to take a book that was written for children and put it onto a list of adult novels (by the way, that’s what I did; I could have quietly just left it off)? Also, jazz, as in your example, is a very specific, though internally varied, type of music, with a very specific set of uses and audience. If I said you’re locking Green Day and Elvis out of the jazz world by having a preconceived idea of what “jazz” is, you would think I was daft. And you’d be right. If I insisted that a Virginia Woolf novel like To the Lighthouse be crowbarred into the genre of speculative fiction, knocking Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov off the list, I would be pilloried!
While any lines like this are, to some extent, drawn in the sand, subject to shifts and obliterations, the lines are part of a larger system that allows us to understand and appreciate the world.
So I think we’re faced with a taxonomic dilemma of Linnean proportions. If you insist that “literature” is simply another genre, alongside sci-fi, mysteries, and fantasy, with its own set of expectations and aims, then there is no reason to place things like children’s books, graphic novels, and the like onto a list of literary (or in this case “cool”) novels. However, if you see the literary novel as some sort of sanctified umbrella under which one may escape from the rains of history, then you’re beginning to deal with very slippery terms. The umbrella is only so big, and someone is pushed out in order to let another in. So we must make these decisions quite carefully, with an eye to the future as well as the past. Also, we don’t know who’s actually holding the umbrella or when the rains will stop, or, (and this may be closer to your point in some senses) if it’s even such a bad thing to get wet.
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