Niggle by Wilde
The word "niggle," it turns out, only recently means to
quibble. It did not used to connote criticize. And in this day and age,
you might assume its negative sense implies a racial origin, but it's
not the case. According to the dictionaries "niggle" does not come
from the Latin root, niger, which means black and is the forerunner
of Negro and, like we say, the n-word. Instead, niggle comes from
Scandinavian words like the Norwegian nigla which means to be
busy with trifles. It appears to be related to the word "niggard" and
its sources - Old Icelandic has a word hnøgger, meaning stingy,
which is cognate with Old English hneaw, and a Middle High
German word nouwe which meant careful or exact. To niggle is to
pay painful attention to insignificant details.
J.R.R. Tolkien's character Mr. Niggle in his story "Leaf by Niggle"
appears to do nothing except fuss painstakingly over trifles. His
neighbor Mr. Parish is always bothering him with his troubles,
while Niggle just wants to paint pictures of trees and leaves. When
Parish and Mrs. Parish get sick in the midst of a mighty storm that
damages their house, Niggle procrastinates helping them but in the
end can't say no and sort of half helps, which takes him away from
his canvases. This is the worst of it, but he's constantly being
distracted and rarely gets any long stretches of time to concentrate
on his paintings, one in particular of a tree. He thinks nothing of the
paintings, meaning he has no ambitions the way we think of
ambitious, fame-and-fortune- hungry artistes nowadays. Niggle is
just caught up in trying to capture the shape and sheen of a leaf.
He gets sick himself after the storm, and when he feels a little
better, in a sort of half-fevered state of consciousness, he goes out to
the shed to take up work on the big canvas again, the tree and its
leaves and the imaginary landscape it rests in. While he's painting
comes yet another interruption which exasperates him again, and
this time it's an "Inspector of Houses" who upbraids him for not
helping Parish, whose house is still in serious disrepair. "It's the
law," the man instructs him sternly. After making some niggling
rejoinders, Niggle is told that his canvas, wood and paints should be
used to fix up Parish's house. Just as he hears this, another man
comes in saying he's the driver of the carriage for Niggle's
"journey," which we've heard of in passing before. Niggle says he's
not ready, and what's worse, nothing is finished yet. But the two
men insist it's time to go, so Niggle hastily grabs a little bag of
things and departs.
Although there's no evidence to think Tolkien had it in mind, it's
hard at this point in the story not to think of these lines of verse:
Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me.
We have clearly entered allegorical territory here, despite Tolkien's
(now famous) insistence, "I cordially dislike allegory in all its
manifestations," made in a foreword to The Lord of the Rings.
Niggle's journey is to a hospital where his recovery consists of hard
work and time spent alone in the dark so he can "do some thinking"
according to the overseers. Niggle goes over a lot of trifles while he
thinks, and he comes to regret his neglect of Parish. Eventually he is
brought before a sort of tribunal of disembodied voices who debate
whether he is "ready" or not, finally decide he is, and ship him off to
an airy, beautiful place which turns out to be the landscape of
Niggle's own painting, including the tree.
The longer he stays, the clearer and wider the landscape and
surroundings become. Niggle finds he can enter the surrounding
forest "without its losing [its] particular charm. He had never been
able to walk into the distance without turning it into mere
surroundings. … [But now] as you walked, new distances opened
out; so that you now had doubled, treble and quadruple distances,
doubly, trebly and quadruply enchanting. You could go on and on
and have a whole country in a garden, or in a picture (if you
preferred to call it that)." In one sense this describes the vanishment
of that thing that happens to woods which seen from a distance seem
deep and mysterious, but as soon as you step into them become
"mere surroundings," just more trees. When Niggle enters the
woods, he enters into and becomes part of the enchantment. This is
a way of indicating that Niggle has more or less unified with his
surroundings. He is no longer at a distance from his own landscape.
This is a visionary state of consciousness, but that's a whole other
dimension of this story.
Soon Parish shows up, and together they set about gardening and
improving the countryside. Parish is astonished and impressed to
discover that it's the same landscape Niggle was creating with
paints and canvas back at the old place.
After a while Niggle is ready to move on again, but Parish is not.
Niggle takes his leave and looks out toward the mountains, which
had existed on the very fringes of his original painting. They are far
away and mysterious, "but what they are really like, and what lies
beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them."
Niggle's cosmos is multidimensional, and it seems like no stretch
to compare his journey to Dante's, except avoiding hell and going
straight to the toils (in the hospital) of Purgatory and then the
multiple spheres (in his landscape) of Paradise. And no stretch to
say this story is reflecting the idea from the perennial philosophy
that your own mental, or psychic, or imaginative state, creates your
reality, your own heaven or hell. Niggle's afterlife is at least
Catholic - on the morning they send him on from the hospital, they
give him a biscuit and some wine, which is an allegorical figure of
the bread and wine of the holy communion. Sorry Ronald, it's a
metaphor of allegorical significance; Tolkien himself was Catholic.
In the allegory there is also the matter of his relationshas Cip to
Parish - whose name unavoidably implies a church community, the
body of people who make up the church. Niggle in his niggling
seems to be neglecting Parish; indeed one of the things he learns at
the hospital is that he regrets this neglect. One upshot of this is that
the people together create the world they live in, and there's a
fundamental, natural necessity of cooperation. Likewise, in the
afterlife Niggle has created through his imagination of the tree and
forest not only his own psychic state of being, but also Parish's.
There is a very rich irony here about what actually constitutes
niggling, or fussing over trifles. It turns out Niggle's care with each
leaf turns into a whole dimension of reality for not only himself, but
also for Parish - or the whole community, including Parish's wife
who is due to come along later, after Niggle sets out toward the
mountains.
Then at the very end of the story, the irony is, well, doubled, or
trebled, or quadrupled: Back at Niggle's and Parish's little
community, the town fathers recollect Niggle as "a silly little man."
His canvas, wood and paint have gone toward what most of them
regard as a far more important use than an obscure artwork - they
have been used to patch up the housing. For one of the men,
Niggle's devoting himself to painting instead of something useful,
"like washing dishes in a communal kitchen," directly implies the
worthlessness of Niggle himself. This man is more strident than the
others about Niggle's worthlessness, but they all more or less agree
painting was a trifling waste of time. One man notes he was struck
by the beauty of a torn corner of Niggle's painting he found later in
a field. Eventually, we learn, the leaf in that torn fragment is
deemed worthy by one or two people of being preserved, and is
hung in an obscure corner of the town museum. After that the
museum burns down, and neither Niggle nor his leaf is ever thought
of again.
The collective wisdom of the townspeople is that Niggle's
materials and energy should have gone for the common good -
fostering food and shelter for the needy, actually. The irony of
course is that Niggle's niggling turns out to have been an act of such
creative power that it affected whole worlds and people far beyond
his shed and Parish's cottage. Despite his lack of worldly ambition,
his activity had cosmic effects. It created the reality he and Parish
came to live in.
Now, in Tolkien's time (this story was written in 1943) there was
still a sense among literary people and even literary academics that
literature and art were expressions or links to or evocations of inner,
or spiritual, realities. For those who think this way, there's really no
mistaking a central theme of "Leaf by Niggle": the creative
imagination produces your experience of reality. The effect, if not
the purpose, of art, literature and music is to create landscapes that
shape - and ground - people's psychic, spiritual reality. Art both
creates and reflects where you live, where your mind is living. And
where your mind is living, you are living. If you have a religious
disposition, it also creates and reflects where you will be living
after you depart this life.
* * *
In our time, here in the early 21st century, this sense of the effect,
function and-or purpose of art and literature is well into a process of
being exterminated. In their insistence on the social, political and
racial themes of literature, the town fathers are taking over colleges
and universities and insisting on the essentially exclusive
importance of food and shelter. A good many of them, like the
townspeople at the end of "Leaf by Niggle," say explicitly that the
sole usefulness of art and literature is to foster social causes, such as
feeding the hungry, promoting the rights of women and minorities,
calling attention to racial injustice, or ending war. A high-powered
professor told Harold Bloom in the 1990s that any reading that fails
to be social or political is irresponsible and meaningless. The
canvas, wood and paint of a painter should be used to patch up
damaged buildings.
The professors who teach literature as artifacts reflecting social and
political conditions - and any document of social, political or
historical significance as interchangeable with literature - are the
same people who use Niggle's canvas to repair the roof. One of the
few ways these people could profitably read "Leaf by Niggle" would
be to misrepresent the etymology of "niggle" - to somehow make
something of its similarity to Latin niger, which eventually became
the n-word - in the way the etymology of the word "history" was
misrepresented as having as a root the masculine possessive
pronoun, "his." But this would be seen as niggling. There are bigger
canvases to rip up and repair roofs with.
The people who are blind to the imaginative and spiritual
components of art have always been with us. Tolkien's story is one
among many that treat the theme in literary history. But what he
might not have foreseen is that the very people whose job used to be
to help Niggles learn to paint, are now engaged in diverting the
Niggles into repairing roofs.
This is a blindness hardly to be believed. "Do we really want these
people teaching our children?" Frank Kermode asked some years
ago. Well, they are.
Tolkien, if the later comments of his relatives can be believed,
apparently felt like Niggle, felt like he was niggling but understood
what its stakes might be. Everyday life constantly interrupted his
niggling, which he nonetheless continued, copiously, and eventually
created an imaginary world so vividly given that it has for all
intents and purposes become real in millions of imaginations. He
never expected The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion - never
mind the thousands of other manuscript pages that his son
Christopher has edited and brought into daylight - would ever be
much read or widely valued. He just niggled on, fascinated by its
most minute details. The effect, which in the last 20 years of his life
surprised him, was extraordinary: it provided a whole world to tens
of millions of readers who, at that time, knew how to read.
That art, however, appears to be getting obscurer by the semester,
like the fragment of a painting of a leaf tucked away in a corner of
museum.
Meanwhile, a few of us go on niggling.
© Dana Wilde 2008
Niggle by Wilde