Tolkien the Postmodernist

[Aiwendil]

All right, I admit that the title was clickbait, and I do not actually think Tolkien was a postmodernist in any sense.

But I was re-reading the Notion Club Papers recently, and I was struck this time by the elaborate narrative framework that Tolkien sets up for his narrative in the introduction. It is presented as a manuscript discovered in a wastepaper basket in the (then far future) year 2012, purporting to be the notes from meetings of the titular Notion Club at Oxford in the 1980s. But, our fictional editor goes on to say, the quality of paper and ink, as well as the writing style, suggest rather that it dates from the 1940s (i.e. the time at which Tolkien was actually writing it). And moreover, the names of the alleged members of the Club cannot be found in any of Oxford's records (neither from the 1980s nor the 1940s).

This introduction is delightfully elaborate, baroque, and - on the face of it - unnecessary. None of the matter of the provenance of the text that is discussed there would appear to have any bearing on the story itself (whether in the part that was actually completed or in the unwritten portions). Its function would, it seems, be instead to place it at a greater remove from the reader than it otherwise would be, to put it at one step further a fictional distance from the reader, and perhaps to call attention to the fact of its artfulness.

And on this recent re-reading, it couldn't help but remind me of the masterpiece by another of my favourite authors, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which begins with an introduction that does much the same thing. There, our fictional redactor recounts how he chanced upon the manuscript that forms the bulk of the book and translated it from Latin, but soon thereafter lost the manuscript and has since been unable to recover it. Further, he goes on to detail his attempts to track down its source, and he finds that the sources that it cited do not seem to exist.

The details are different, but Eco's introduction strikes me as doing exactly the same things as Tolkien's - framing the story he is about to tell as a manuscript of unknown origin and casting doubt on its veracity. Moreover, both introductions are (apparently) needlessly elaborate and complex, seeming to call attention to themselves and thereby to the artfulness of the work.

In Eco's case, of course, this introduction is often discussed as an element of postmodernism, with its interest in playing with form and metatextuality and the notion that "books always speak of other books". I find it profoundly interesting, then, that we see an introduction of exactly the same sort, achieving largely the same effect, written by someone like Tolkien nearly forty years earlier.

Anyway, this was something I found interesting that I thought I'd share. What do others think of this? Are there other instances in which you see Tolkien using devices that are more usually associated with postmodernist literature?