[Properly, those mega-statues should be holding axes, not swords.]
Is there a creature more forlorn in fiction than Gollum?
Milton's Satan at least got the dignity of deserving his own Fall, and legions of loyal fallen angels to boot; Dickensian orphans are at least unambiguous objects of pity and motivators to social action; same with Faulkner and Caldwells' desperately poor Southerners; Poe's various grotesques at least encounter passionate sublimity in their madness; Joyce's cockulded Leopold Bloom suffers mere mediocrity and still gets a rich interior life; Hemingway's Jake Barnes still has his stoic pride; Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim gets to travel with space aliens and sleep with models; the drug-addled lowlifes of Burroughs' The Naked Lunch still become objects of fascination in their repulsion; Marvin the paranoid android gets some funny lines at least; and Gil from the Simpsons is at least harmless.
But Gollum, poor Gollum! The more I read and the more I experience, the more I appreciate Tolkien's most pathetic of characters. When I was in Puerto Rico, you see, I passed by the heroin addicts lurking under bridges at night, with the holed-spoons and cut soda-can lids scattered about to testify of their self-destruction. In the broad daylight, they stumbled about half-wake, half-dead, in the closest approximation of a zombie we have in reality. They subsisted mainly on the mangos that fell to the sidewalk. Once I was passing one on my bike, when he suddenly veered left such that his head collided directly into my shoulder at full speed. I stopped immediately to apologize and see if he was hurt, but he kept stumbling away, oblivious. In the thrall of their precious, they had been deadened to all else save the spell of their addiction. What more potent analog can Gollum have? That is, Gollum is so incredible precisely because he is so real.
Oh, but Gollum's affliction is so much worse than the addict's! At least in heroin, you eventually die from it, and are thus liberated from it, sooner than later. I don't write that flippantly: I recently learned a former roommate of mine was killed a year ago by his alcoholism. He was only 30-something. The question can be legitimately asked, what could possibly be worse than a drug that kills someone so young and strong? The answer is just that much more horrifying: how about a drug that never lets you die, never lets you find freedom even in death, one that makes you outlive all your friends and never win new ones, one that keeps you hopelessly dependent on it from ages to ages, forever filled with self-loathing and shame, pitiless and un-pitiable?
And worse still: a drug you can never quit, but which can quit you? It's one thing for a heroin addict to run out of heroin; it's quite another for the heroin to cold-shoulder you and leave you for another. I, like most folks, have some experience in spurned love, in the intense hatred and love one can feel for the once-beloved. But even I have never had it near as bad as Gollum, poor Gollum, who spends years--nay decades--suffering the unspeakable tortures of Mordor and the deprivations of the wilderness, without friend or consolation in the world, all to get one more sweet, sweet hit from that Precious that willfully scorned him, one that he does not deserve nor does it deserve him.
We'd feel for him, we really would, we'd almost make a Heathcliffe or some Byronic hero out of him, if he wasn't so absolutely pitiful and petty and pathetic--but even then, we would care for him if he wasn't so filled with murderous rage. Aragorn says he would like to get his hands on Gollum's throat, and we are not made to feel like he was out of line to say that.
This is all a long-winded, roundabout way of emphasizing what a fascinating character Tolkien has fashioned in Gollum. I likewise admire Tolkien's restraint in taking this long to finally bring him and Frodo face to face! This is the first moment, I think, that the reader begins to get a sense of the full scope that Gollum will play in The Two Towers. Such is Tolkien's careful craft that we hadn't even realized that Tolkien had been building up to this moment! So distracted had we been by Sauron, Dark Riders, orcs and Balrogs, that we kept forgetting that there was a whole different shark, independent of the machinations of Mordor, that had been circling in on them.
I think what I admire most about Gollum is how Tolkien so willingly throws a wrench into his own narrative! Sans Gollum, this quest is a pretty straightforward account of good vs evil, of Evil Empires and Rebel Alliances and so forth. But with Gollum, there is an X-factor, the unpredictable extra variable, that keeps everything so delightfully off-kilter. If he threatens to throw off-balance our heroes, well, he threatens the same to Mordor (as we well know from Return of the King)! With Gollum around, we can no longer just keep displacing our own potential for evil onto some distant, abstract Sauron, but must confront that same capacity for sin within ourselves--as well as both his and our capacity for redemption, and how difficult redemption can actually be. In Gollum, Tolkien will force us to confront the fact that even someone so utterly devoid of any virtue as Gollum still has value, still deserves our love and care--not for his utility, no, but simply because he is alive, a fellow living being!
Now our reductive good-vs-evil binary has been upset; now our simplistic morality tale has been complicated in genuinely interesting ways. It wasn't until "The Great River" that I really considered the brilliance of Gollum, who really just might be the most completely forlorn character in fiction.
I've already written too much, so I'll leave all the other wonderful elements in this chapter--the Elves' sense of rippling time, the haunting winter atmosphere, the striking vista of Argonath in the mists, the sudden transformation of our affable Strider into Aragorn, the once and future King--to Ben and Eric. I'll just finish on one more moment of admiration: I appreciate how Tolkien doesn't hold our hands with the re-introduction of the Nazgul. Legolas shoots down some dark thing that "stains" the night sky (Tolkien says the sky was "clean" again once it fell), and Frodo only needs to feel a familiar pain in his shoulder, and Gimli mutter something about Mordor, for us to know exactly what it was. In a sense, Legolas's arrow-shot doubles as Tolkien's warning shot: far larger things are afoot now, and if you thought the darkness was dangerous in this book, well, just you wait till The Two Towers! It is a wonderful (if overly literal) bit of foreshadowing.
And now, onward to the final chapter! Gentlemen, we are almost done with The Fellowship of the Ring, and then to The Two Towers!
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