This postIt’s incredible how good we can get at avoiding something we don’t want to do. Take this Music 201 paper that’d due on Thursday, for example. I should be researching it right now so I can write it Monday, turn it in to the TA, and get feedback in time to rewrite it. Is that what I’m doing right now? No, I’m blogging about fairy stories.
Well, actually, I’m blogging about not doing my schoolwork, but fairy stories are what I’m going to blog about, in about five seconds.
So, this is a follow-up to my post about Beren and Lúthien the other day. I still haven’t read Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” because…hmm…I don’t know why. Lately I’ve been in a book frenzy, checking out two to three books a day in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that school has been eating up all my time. Lots of books — I took two bags’ worth back to the library this morning. And picked up Nephi Anderson’s Added Upon earlier this afternoon (it’s a novel about the pre-mortal existence, from what I can gather), and I’m planning on going back to the library once I finish this post so I can check out a collection of Mormon short stories. Oh, yes, and write that paper.
I suspect the Tolkien essay will be quite good (and I’ve read it before, although I can’t remember what he says in it), so I’ll probably be writing another followup post on the matter later. In the meantime, here are some good quotes from the two C.S. Lewis essays (”On Stories” and “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”):
No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.
Am I the sort who could find it in my own back garden? Assuming I had a back garden, of course. (But I can imagine one up, so that’s not a problem.) I don’t know, but I do think I’ll try to look at the world through a new pair of eyes.
Speaking of The Wind and the Willows, Lewis says:
The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.
Quite true, quite true. Sure, reading fiction is a kind of escapism, but like Lewis says, it’s the type that makes you feel more alive, that inspires you to a heightened level of reality.
And now an interesting perspective on movies:
If [Roger Lancelyn Green] had simply said that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure, and almost in no other way, then I think he would have been right. If so, nothing can be more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the camera.
I don’t yet know what I think about that. :) Concerning that which we receive from fiction, he goes on:
For excitement, in the sense defined above, is just what must disappear from a second reading. You cannot, except at the first reading, be really curious about what happened….
We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have the ’surprise’ of discovering what seemed Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia.
You’ll have to read the essay to get what he’s talking about, but I really do like the idea of there being more to stories than the mere plot. It’s something I’ll have to mull over some more…
And now to “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”:
I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story….
This canon seems to me most obviously true of that particular type of children’s story which is dearest to my own taste, the fantasy or fairy tale. Now the modern critical world uses ‘adult’ as a term of approval. It is hostile to what it calls ‘nostalgia’ and contemptuous of what it calls ‘Peter Pantheism’. Hence a man who admits dwarfs and giants and talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his fifty-third year is now less likely to be praised for his perennial youth than scorned and pitied for arrested development….
They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? … I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I have grown but only that I had changed.
The neat sorting-out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
[The fairy tale] is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be more like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did. All stories in which children have adventures and successes are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations.
In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale? — really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: this reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.
I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable.
Need I really say any more?
