Tolkien once said that he wrote the work to create a mythology for England -- one of truly British origin, unlike the Mallory renditions of King Arthur's tales, with their Welsh origins tainted by the kissing of Norman butts. So, if The Lord of the Rings is an epic, perhaps the really traditional way for my kids to experience it is by playing these games before they read it.
What Eliot said about poetry -- that it "can communicate before it is understood" -- I think has some bearing on this. But something Wittgenstein said may be even more pertinent: "Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors." His point is that a tradition is something one is born into and lives. It isn't a course you take.
People who get too involved in the forms of tradition often forget one very important fact: Every tradition, without exception, is an invented tradition. At some point in time, everything we now take for tradition was new idea. None of it was ever really fixed in stone, or so eternal as to predate culture. Cultures create tradition by turning innovations into habits.
ReplyDeleteThis was Tolkein's point, on one level: He wanted to go back to Celtic and Pictish and autochthonously English roots to recreate (reinvent) a mythos, a tradition. He was well aware that a new story, told as if it was a very old story, could make that happen. And based on the continued popularity of his work, I'd say he was right.
Invented, yes. But in a strange way - the way folk songs are. The attempts in the Catholic Church to make the liturgy "relevant" revealed only that the people behind this knew neither the tradition nor what was relevant. Which is why they produced one of the most tin-eared and vulgar monstrosities imaginable. The English Mass in my view is a near occasion of sin -- at least in my case, since it tends to tempt me to great anger.
ReplyDeleteWell, that was hard left turn, not a gradual accumulation of changes. That's one reason it might not have worked so well.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the idea to be inclusive of the laiety by doing Mass in the vernacular is not a bad idea in itself. The implementation, as it were, might well have been done better than it was. I agree with you that really had no idea what was relevant to the times. LOL It certainly resulted in bad art rather than great art.
Leonard Bernstein's "Mass," by contrast, which I just heard again recently in a new recording, has still the power to make one stop and think hard about all this. Which is what great art can do.