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Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli
We also can't discount the fact that literature faculties are in most places heavily politicized (almost invariably to the Left), and Tolkien is just too Politically Incorrect.
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After all, the main thrust of post-Derrida literary criticism boils down to ascribing some political view to a work, and denouncing it. Mosst of this (and God knows I've read a lot) is, under its incomprehensible jargon and the piling up of Authorities' polysyllabic coinages, just a pl;atform for the critic's sociopolitical rantings- certainly they tell you far more about the critic than the work criticised.
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What you say is most certainly true. But still I'd like to challenge that a bit.
If you look at the humanist departments - or those of sociology etc. - you can see that they are mostly manned (and "womanned") by people leaning more to the left than to the right. Whatever the context - like in France or Finland being leftist or rightist is a different thing from being one in Russia or the U.S., at least in scale.
But I'm not sure if your criticism can be founded on just politics this easily. Even if the view is luring: good-hearted conservatives against the reckless egoistic radicals...
In the 18th century France from where this dicothomy stems from the "modernists" or "liberals" (meaning the "bourgeois") were to the left of the chairman in the parlament and the conservative aristocracy were to the right. The liberals demanded more liberal economy (to boost their own situation in front of aristocracy's priviledges) and more liberal values (to suit their metropolitan experience of life) while the conservative aristocracy wished everything to remain the same as the status quo at that time was nicely on their side as they had all the wealth and priviledges.
But after socialism emerged these two parties joined hands to be the "right" against the terrible uneducated masses of the workers ("left") who demanded their share of the wealth they helped to pile for both the bourgeois and the upper-class.
If you have ever wondered about the irreconciability of the values both left and right, here's your deal. They are historically developed ideologies that have their roots that contradict themselves. Like the "rightist" belief in free market economy which automatically destroys small communities and traditional values or the "leftist" belief in the institutional or communitarian organisation of the society which leaves the free individual whom they praise in the shade.
So you can't add Tolkien to this soup without getting into problems.
Many ideals Tolkien goes for can be found from the agenda of the extreme rightist conservatists as well as from the most communitarian leftists.
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I don't claim to have understood a lot from those few texts by Derrida I have read but we should give him - as any human being - an honest judgement as someone who has tried to communicate something to us and thence worthy of recognition. I can't see anyone claiming that his life's work was just a sham! What I think was central to Derrida - and his followers - was the idea that you could handle the work anyway you wanted. There was no primacy of the author as we couldn't tell anyway what her/his intention was (as s/he her/himself couldn't do that because of the different psychological hindrances) and because language was a system that had an autonomy of it's own that governed our thinking and thence also the text we were treying to interpret. So it was a free space then: literary criticism was an area where nothing was right or wrong. A few people have actually read Derrida's studies but they stick to his general program - and scorn it understandably. I think he has quite an interesting ideas on many authors - philosophers included.
What ideology or party-membership Tolkien would have gone for today? Or what style of literary criticism he would have accepted?
It's hard to say.
Not so easy as to say that generally the leftists hate Tolkien and Derrida is a fake....
