Gollum and the Fragmented Self

*The Lord of the Rings* Reading Challenge, week six

Here is a link to our reading schedule.

The Taming of Sméagol, as rendered by Alan Lee in the Centenary Edition.

A “Bundle of Perceptions”

Late in The Two Towers, as Frodo and Sam are on their way to their fateful encounter with Shelob, they take a rest, exhausted by their long climb and wondering whether Gollum has abandoned them. They both fall asleep, and I quote what follows at some length:

And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo's head, drowned deep in sleep; upon his white forehead lay one of Sam's brown hands, and the other lay softly upon his master's breast. Peace was in both their faces.

Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo's knee--but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers seen him, they would have though that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.

But at the touch Frodo stirred and cried out softly in his sleep, and immediately Sam was wide awake. The first thing he saw was Gollum—"pawing at master," as he thought.

"Hey you!" he said roughtly. "What are you up to?"

"Nothing, nothing," said Gollum softly. "Nice master!"

"I daresay," said Sam. "But where have you been to—sneaking off and sneaking back, you old villain?"

Gollum withdrew himself, and a green glint flickered under his heavy lids. Almost spider-like he looked now, crouched back on his bent limbs, with his protruding eyes. The fleeting moment had passed, beyond recall. (714-715)

Viewed simply, this is the resolution between what some have called the "split" in Gollum between two competing versions of himself, the two parts that Sam has dubbed "Stinker and Slinker." But a close reading of the passage reveals an even more fragmented self, shaped by a series of perceptions and impulses. As he approaches the two hobbits, Gollum is set on his plan to feed them to Shelob and reclaim the Ring (though the reader does not yet know this), but his perceptions of the scene that he finds awakens something in him—distant memory of family? desire for peace or connection? This awakening disrupts that narrative that he has been constructing, which he has hoped will culminate in his regaining the ultimate object of his desire. A sequence of perceptions and thoughts deconstructs his sense of purpose: the sight of the sleeping hobbits, his understanding of their love for each other, his feeling of exhaustion, his “spasm of pain,” his internal “debate,” his long-forgotten need for love.

Then comes the touch, his apparent attempt to join in the peace that can result from body touching body. But the touch enters Frodo's unconscious perception, and immediately awakens Sam, whose perception of the touch is quite different. This sequence results in the resetting of Gollum's earlier violent narrative.

What are we to take from this? Some readers have offered a Freudian interpretation, with Gollum's Id and Superego at odds. This reading would have annoyed Tolkien, though that does not necessarily mean that it is not applicable. These psychological concepts seem too coherent, however, to account for the sequence of impulsive and/or considered reactions that we find in Gollum through the course of Book Four.

Gollum makes me think of a concept of mind and self that is older than Freud's. In his Treatise of Human Nature, originally published in 1740, David Hume writes of his own fragmented experience of self:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.

Hume concludes from these observations that the self is not a coherent unity, but rather a "bundle of perceptions." While it is contained in one body and observed by others as a unified sequence of behaviors, the self does not exist as a unity for Hume, except, perhaps, in the narrative that we construct around it in order to create coherence.

David Hume, as painted by Allan Ramsay. For a “bundle of perceptions,” Hume had an exquisite fashion sense.

It is for this reason that I think Gollum is perhaps the most troubling figure in The Lord of the Rings for many readers. He reveals the fragmented, disassociated sense of self that many of us experience and that potentially deconstructs the narratives that we build in search of unity and coherence. We see ourselves in Gollum, and that is disorienting, frightening.

This lack of coherence manifests in Gollum’s speech, as he refers to himself sometimes in first person and sometimes in third person, sometimes in plural pronouns and occasionally in singular pronouns—sometimes in a bundle and sometimes in a semblance of unity.

It is surely significant that Gollum achieves his most concentrated unity of purpose with his “worship” of Shelob, as Tolkien describes it: “he had bowed and worshipped her, and the darkness of her evil will walked through all the ways of his weariness beside him, cutting him off from light and from regret” (723). The figure he most admires and who provides the focus of his narrative for most of Book Four is a figure constructed entirely from the indulgence of impulses, of the desire for consumption—the logical endpoint of gluttony. Gollum comes closest to a unified purpose when his pure desire for the Ring controls his actions, as the pure desire to consume controls the actions of Shelob. Even this unity, however, is disrupted by the sequence of perceptions when he returns to the sleeping hobbits. Unlike Shelob, he cannot completely reject all that stands outside his own desire. Hence, his fragmentation.

This fragmented psychology, however, is not Tolkien's only model of the self in Book Four. We have Frodo's determination and Sam's loyalty, for example. But I would like to offer Faramir as the most striking alternative to Gollum in this portion of the narrative.

Faramir and the Coherent Self

Way back in Book One, as we discussed a few weeks ago, Frodo asks Tom Bombadil who he is, and Tom responds: "Don't you know my name yet? That's the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?" (131). This view of the solitary self may make us think of Gollum: who lives alone and in the dark for centuries, to the point that his given name (Sméagol) fades with his memory of society and he is renamed by the noises that he makes with his body (Gollum)—hardly an identity at all.

For Tom, what gives the self coherence is our relationship with the world in which we find ourselves. Otherwise, we are simply a bundle of perceptions and impulses, as David Hume posits. Despite the western cult of the "individual," it is the collective that provides the self a context, without which the individual would be meaningless.

In Faramir, we find a figure who understands this construction of self—and the coherence of his subjectivity derives from the context of his enmeshment in the world, which he values over individual glory or desire, in contrast, for example, to his brother Boromir, who longed to serve his people but desired glory in the course of it. Faramir remembers Boromir questioning why the stewards of Gondor could not be kings rather than mere stewards after so many years of rule. "Alas! poor Boromir. Does that not tell you something of him?" (670). That desire for glory paired with the desire to serve his people culminates in Boromir’s fall, as he tries to take the Ring from Frodo in the last chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Faramir, on the other hand, while he acknowledges the necessity for self-defense in the current war, elevates the needs of the collective over individual desire for glory:

I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise. (672)

Note the focus on deep memory, a collective memory of a people, which is emphasized by Faramir's reverence for lore and learning and his admiration for the learned Gandalf. This devotion to learning widens the context of his selfhood beyond present needs and gives him a vision of past and future—which is why he is able to resist the idea of the Ring's power to be used against Sauron. Some readers have been surprised by his assertion that he would not use Isildur's Bane even if "Minas Tirith were falling in ruin and I alone could save her" (671). This refusal is based on an understanding that one's role in the world extends beyond current context and into the future: present salvation may come with long-term consequences. Only an understanding of the long narrative of the past can provide such an encompassing vision of potential futures.

It is this vision that leads Sam to say to Faramir that "you have an air too, sir, that reminds me of, of—well, Gandalf, of wizards" (682). It is, of course, Gandalf's long study of the deep past that allows him to envision a future beyond the needs and desires of the present. It is this vision that shapes the entire narrative of the book.

Like Gollum and like the rest of us, Faramir, as he experiences his own consciousness, is a "bundle of perceptions," but what he perceives extends to learning and an understanding of the past, which provides him a context that allows him to construct a coherent self that can resist impulse and immediate desire.

In a letter to a reader from 1956, Tolkien wrote that "as far as any character is 'like me' it is Faramir—except that I lack what all my characters possess (let psychoanalysts note!) Courage" (337). He does not further explain why is most like Faramir, but I suspect that it is this devotion to the idea of deep understanding of the past to shape the self, to allow for a vision of the world that can put aside the pettiness of impulse and make some order out of the "bundle of perceptions."¹

---

So, how do you read Gollum and Faramir? Do you see some of yourself in Gollum, or is this simply my personal neurosis? Why do you think that JRRT saw himself in Faramir?

I'll be back later this week with a bonus post for paid subscribers. Meanwhile, thanks for reading, from my fancy internet self to yours.

What a confusing admonition this can be. Hume would protest. Photo by Katrina Wright on Unsplash

1. Because of this deep identification that Tolkien felt with Faramir, I suspect that he would have been especially troubled by the treatment of the character in Peter Jackson’s film of The Two Towers, in which at first he does, indeed, intend to bring Frodo and the Ring to his father, before changing his mind.