J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis tempt us to escape to a self-evidently numinous world rather than to seek out the texture of wonder in this one. What we need is an unsparing literary realism—literature without recourse to fantasy, literature in which talking trees do not come to the rescue.
It’s quiet at Wyoming Catholic College this Friday. Elsewhere, at other colleges, it’s Spring Break, but here it’s “Outdoor Week” when students and their leaders go all over the Mountain West for adventures—kayaking, whitewater rafting, canyoneering, rock-climbing, and more. One group is camping on the ranch where we keep our horses; they spend their days riding their favorite mounts up into the nearby mountains and meeting at night around the campfire for storytelling and prayer. I’m not sure yet how they’re coping with the foot of wet snow that fell overnight. Another group is deep into rehearsals for T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral out at St. Stephen’s Mission under the direction of Mrs. Denise Trull and her son Thomas. It’s all part of the vision of WCC—the real experience crucial to the formation of the whole person.
In the absence of the students and most of the faculty this week, with a little time to muse, I’ve been thinking about an accompanying need for realism in art—and I might as well voice a persistent worry. The great majority of our students come to us steeped in the Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, both of which I admire. But, unlike some of my own children, I have a fairly instant aversion to the genre of fantasy per se, and it is also true that I first encountered Tolkien when his fans were part of a 1960s counterculture that Tolkien himself deplored. Prejudice aside, I still find Tolkien’s manner of writing a bit hard to take, with its archaic word order (“Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest.”), the propensity for sententious statements, the invented languages, the catalogue of names from Old English and Old Norse, the portentous atmosphere—all things that my literary friends who love Tolkien greatly admire. I have less trouble with Lewis stylistically. In fact, my first encounter with passages from Perelandra—especially Ransom’s experience of the floating islands in that water world—have remained with me undiminished for decades.
The effect of Lewis and Tolkien on the imaginations of our students is undeniably good. Both Tolkien and Lewis saw the effects of a secular world full of Nietzsche’s all-too-comfortable “last men,” and they countered modern indifference to God and complacency with imaginary landscapes and actions that required the cardinal virtues—and, more subtly, the theological ones as well—to oppose the great cosmic threats posed by Satanic powers. They dramatized those powers and the opposition to them in ways drawing heavily, not only upon ancient and medieval heroic literature, but also upon orthodox Christian theology, unlike, say, the Harry Potter series. Tutored in the lore of Elves and Dwarves and Orcs, full of the threat of the White Witch and the promise of Aslan, our students crave adventure, as this week’s trips demonstrate, and they carry a potent mythology, especially Tolkien’s, into their education here.
So if the effect is good, what worries me? I suppose I get more like Robert Frost in “To Earthward” the older I get. Frost writes that when he was young, he craved “strong sweets,” whereas “Now no joy but lacks salt, / That is not dashed with pain / And weariness and fault.” The salt I mean is a healthy but unsparing literary realism—literature without recourse to fantasy, literature in which talking trees do not come to the rescue. Tolkien and Lewis both countered what Charles Taylor in A Secular Age calls the “disenchanted cosmos,” a world that has lost its belief in the numinous. But so did Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Bernanos and Greene; so did Flannery O’Connor, Caroline Gordon, and Walker Percy—and also, in their different ways, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and other great writers of our tradition, including Dickens and Herman Melville. At a conference in New England last year, Anthony Esolen praised Dickens’ Bleak House as the “second-greatest novel” in his estimation, right behind The Brothers Karamazov. I do not want our students to neglect the high imaginative perception it takes to render the “lived world” (as the novelist Milan Kundera calls it) with a mimetic accuracy that intensifies the sense of reality instead of displacing it into an alternative cosmos. To my mind, this accuracy brings vividly before the mind the being of the real world and the particular act of existence.
At such accuracy, Tolstoy was unsurpassed. In Anna Karenina, he shows the protagonist Levin coming home to his country estate to be greeted by his dog Laska. One of the servants comments that the dog recognizes his low spirits—and it’s a surprise to Levin that even the servant herself can see through him so well. Levin now notices his dog. “Laska kept poking her head under his hand. He stroked her, and she promptly curled up at his feet, laying her head on a hindpaw. And in token of all now being well and satisfactory, she opened her mouth a little, smacked her lips, and settling her sticky lips more comfortably about her old teeth, she sank into blissful repose. Levin watched all her movements attentively.” Such a passage takes the reader directly into a complex of real relations—the long creaturely affection between Levin and Laska, the saddening sense of the passage of time (“her old teeth”), her contentment in the exact moment of her master’s presence, the difference between her “blissful repose” and his own mood. Laska changes Levin’s perspective, not to mention the reader’s, in a way as subtle as grace. With a writer of genius, the real world yields up the texture of its small wonders, and it is in this real world that we find our good and evil, grace and despair.
The worry, then, is that it might be tempting to escape to a self-evidently numinous world rather than to seek out the texture of wonder in this one. Perhaps I’m exaggerating a danger. Perhaps I think too quickly of those conventions where all the attendees dress up in Star Wars or Harry Potter regalia. It is especially necessary to inhabit this real world imaginatively in a season of recollection and self-scrutiny like Lent. It is tempting to fantasize, tempting to think that we are better or worse than we are—or that the world is.
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.
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Editor’s Note: The featured image is a detail from the cover of The Chronicles of Narnia boxed set of 1950-1956, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Dear Prof. Arbery,
It seems to me (and I may be 100% wrong) that you may be mistaken about your students’ love for Tolkien et al. Perhaps you would find Tolkien’s “On Faerytales” useful just for some insights on the subject. Plenty of academics of the usual kind would tell you that Wyoming Catholic is predicated on fantasy because you are guiding young people to be Christians–inconvenient and useless creatures that they are, instead of being “realistic” and perhaps running a Planned Parenthood Association or other contribution to make the world a better place etc. But I suspect that those youngsters will see more reality than they desire in this world to come and they won’t need Tolstoy to show them. So don’t worry about fantasy. It doesn’t speak to you as it doesn’t to my husband. But for some of us (and I refer only to Tolkien, a completely Catholic writer in this case) works of the imagination point toward our glorious Creator and His endless, ever varied gifts! PS How I envy your students!
Both good fantasy and realistic fiction can help one live in the actual God-replete world instead of the world of our disordered imaginations and shrunken intellects and self-serving emotions. Which one helps more depends upon each person. I should judge the value of whatever literature I read on its effect on my soul and my relationships: Is the literature I am reading making me more attentive and loving and compassionate to the reality of the person in front of me and to the graced dictates of the present moment, or is it making me sink further inside my own cultivated autism that annihilates from my consciousness anything uncomfortable to my egocentrism and emotional narcissism and carefully crafted self-image, including my responsibility of humble loving service of others in justice and love, leaving my hypocrisy and delusions of moral superiority intact? That’s what I try to ask myself anyway, on my good days.
Periodically allowing my imagination to escape into a numinous world, helps me to see things more clearly in this world.
Tolkien inspires me to behave and to think nobly, to appreciate beauty, and to be wary of the orcs and Sarumans that (for now) rule here and tempt us to think & to act as they do.
And archaic language: you may need to read a sentence more than once to understand it, but it is worth the trouble. This may seem odd, but I find it helps clarify and elevate my thinking. Maybe for the same reason we greatly prefer the King James Bible over modern translations. As C. S. Lewis wrote of his protagonists near the end of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, “…for they talked in quite a different style now, having been Kings and Queens for so long…”.
I’m afraid the author misses the point of Tolkien’s use of archaic language. Professor Tom Shippey, in his book length treatment of Tolkien, demonstrates how Tolkien used different narrative voices at different points in the book, and how different characters speak in different manners, to convey something about age, character, time and place. As an expert in language, Tolkien almost certainly new exactly what he was doing. His archaisms (and his anachronisms) make a point. So do his place names, personal names, and lineages–not least because they help create an impression of a world beyond what the story tells us.
Good day Professor Arbery,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I began your article ready to get here and disagree with you about the role of fantasy in literature, but I admit that you’ve moved me in a different direction. Like your students, I grew up on the fantasy of Tolkien and Lewis. As you mention [in connection with the culture in which Tolkien and Lewis wrote], their fantasy gave me the vision to see the world differently than my secular education instructed. Now, as I write myself, I find Tolkien and Lewis’ influence leading me to the “epic of the everyday.” As you point out with Tolstoy, there is an exceptional awareness of God’s reality in the everyday moments of life, so I can take Tolkien’s talking tree and move to Tolstoy’s resting dog to bring people into the everyday reminder of God’s reality. Thanks for wrestling with the advantages of both kinds of literature; I found a sense of encouragement in it.
I don’t know any person that has read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and “uses” it to abjure from daily life, even if they “play” dressing as Tolkien characters. The role of archetypes in traditional thinking it is undoubtely powerful. Realism in a Thomistic sense has not to be contradictory with this kind of fiction, remember S. Th. III, q. 42, a. 3 when discussing parables as the literary style chosen by Our Lord to explain difficult things.
Regarding C.S. Lewis, his Ransom cycle, especially That Hideous Strength, you cannot even call it fiction without hesitation. Every time I read the news, it seems everything has been “prophetized” by Lewis in this last novel.
Thank you for a much needed rejoinder to those who praise only fantasy literature. I grew up with fantasy and it will always have a special place in my heart, but it rarely rises to the level of Greene’s The Power and the Glory or Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, to mention two of my favorites. For me the issue always becomes that secondary creations, as Tolkien called them must by nature emphasize the world-building (in and of itself a rather meaningless term, as all novels have “world-building” to some degree) over subtle nuance of character. There are of course writers who can pull it off, but they also have to sacrifice some characterization for the sake of brevity (assuming the reader is not likely to read a 2000-page book). All in all, I’ve come to respect the old classics much more of late, and it just seems like we lose something precious if we suppose that only literature that deals in imaginary worlds is worth our time.