"On Fairy-Stories" (II) : Eucatastrophe if you want to

Time for part two of my commentary on Tolkien's commentary on fairy-stories. Last time I began with a look at Tolkien's views on what constitutes a fairy story, while they're so often derided, and how they have fallen from grace. I'll return to these themes here, but I want to begin with my main disagreement with Tolkien's essay. I ended the first part with some examples of technological progress that Tolkien dismisses as having claim on being especially "real", and while I agree with the sentiment, there are aspects of this to which I cannot but raise issue.

Against technology ?

In part three of my cosmology series, I cited examples of Tolkien describing beautiful crafts in steel and stone, home and hearth, as evidence against a perceived anti-technological bias. I still think this is true, but he was living at the wrong time. I can't agree that motor-cars and electric lights are mere passing fancies; as evidence that technology is temporary – let alone bad ! – these are surely ill-chosen examples. Certainly the exact details of artificial lighting and transportation will change, but to abandon them altogether ? It seems absurd. Man has lacked these things for most of his history, but has wished for them since the first monkey was afraid of the dark. They will not be relinquished.

Tolkien goes further than this, going on something of a more general anti-technology rant which is by far my biggest point of contention* :

* Besides the religious arguments. I'm going to largely omit these because it would be unfair and pointless of me to comment on them. 

It is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of “escapist” literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say “inexorable,” products.

The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant's bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot-factory, it is also... a great deal more real. Why should we not escape from or condemn the “grim Assyrian” absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories?

I agree that some implementations of technology are indeed ghastly, especially the factories of Tolkien's day – never mind the horrors of war. But this is rotten cherry-picking. What of modern medicine that heals the sick, keeps us in good health for years longer ? What of our warm homes with creature comforts undreamt-of to any castle-dwellers of old ? No, I think there's a distinct element of a rosy-tinted view of the past creeping in here. I think he makes a a much better point with :

For my part, I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley station is more “real” than the clouds. And as an artefact I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven. The bridge to platform 4 is to me less interesting than Bifröst guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn.

Again, the ideas in fantasy are inherently interesting; to consider them is a worthwhile exercise in itself, but if one wants a more pragmatic excuse : all abilities need to be operated at their limits or else they decline. To employ that "only real mind-expanding drug" of speculative fiction is inherently a healthy act. Yet Tolkien didn't seem overly-keen on fantasy's cousin, the far more technology-driven science fiction :

These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station. But from them it is as a rule very hard to gather what men in such a world-town will do. They... will use this freedom mainly, it would appear, in order to play with mechanical toys in the soon-cloying game of moving at high speed. To judge by some of these tales they will still be as lustful, vengeful, and greedy as ever; and the ideals of their idealists hardly reach farther than the splendid notion of building more towns of the same sort on other planets. It is indeed an age of “improved means to deteriorated ends.”

Certainly this is true to a degree... I remember reading somewhere (I cannot find the reference) that early weather forecasters hoped it would have a really transformative effect on all aspects of life. And to some extent it did, it's just that the effects have now become accepted as normal. But it didn't stop blood feuds or change politics, and nobody would really expect it to. Weather forecasting does not easily for interesting science fiction make.

But... oh, would that Tolkien had seen Star Trek ! To me this is the epitome of Utopian world-building, with technology at its heart that plays an explicit role in changing the nature of the beast. And this is far more relevant. Just because weather forecasts don't make us better people does not mean all technology is sociologically insignificant. Far from it. Man, in my appraisal, is technological by nature, driven with equal validity to fantasy as he is to imagine ingenious new devices. Technology and society go hand in hand, they cannot be separated. If only Tolkien had met H. G. Wells, what a conversation that would have been ! 

Tolkien might, I guess, argue that all our modern devices are fleeting in the grand span of history, but I would suggest that we have always wished for improvements. What's changed in the last few centuries is that conditions have become suitable to fully unleash this latent desire, not that the desire itself is anything new. Even now, much of its full potential remains unrealised, but to me, ultimately the dream is a harmony in which technology is the very thing which allows us to flourish without destroying the precious natural world. Both woodlands and WiFi can be enriching to the human experience; dreams of reverting to a more primitive lifestyle are fatally flawed. 

I think Tolkien expresses things far better elsewhere in the essay :

Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came. But of what human thing in this fallen world is that not true? Men have conceived not only of elves, but they have imagined gods, and worshipped them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors' own evil. But they have made false gods out of other materials: their notions, their banners, their monies; even their sciences and their social and economic theories have demanded human sacrifice. Abusus non tollit usum [abuse does not take away use]. Fantasy remains a human right.

Critically creative children

The important point for me has always been in distinguishing fantasy from reality. So long as that is done, almost any act of imagination has value. 

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.

That last part is, of course, a perfect description of QAnon and the like. Sigh.

Tolkien certainly didn't reject science, even if he did have distinct qualms about technological progress. But it's this raw power of imagination, and the capability to apply it wisely, which gives fantasy more the potential to help, rather than hinder, rational thinking. Proper encouragement of fantasy, if we are suitably introspective, helps us ask exactly what it is about the tales that distinguishes them from reality :

No one, I fancy, would discredit a story that the Archbishop of Canterbury slipped on a banana skin merely because he found that a similar comic mishap had been reported of many people, and especially of elderly gentlemen of dignity. He might disbelieve the story, if he discovered that in it an angel (or even a fairy) had warned the Archbishop that he would slip if he wore gaiters on a Friday.

Last time we started examining why fairy stories have becoming erroneously aimed at children, but the importance of critical thinking in understanding the narrative raises the stakes considerably. At first glance Tolkien seems to have contradictory opinions about the extent to which children can make these kinds of distinctions. On the one hand :

The common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connexion between the minds of children and fairy-stories, of the same order as the connexion between children's bodies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.

Which is a sentiment shared by Pratchett in many places (and perhaps consistent with the sentiment that people mistake fantasy for idle, uncontrolled dreaming). But on the other hand, children are by definition ignorant :

Children's knowledge of the world is often so small that they cannot judge, off-hand and without help, between the fantastic, the strange (that is rare or remote facts), the nonsensical, and the merely “grown-up” (that is ordinary things of their parents' world, much of which still remains unexplored). But they recognize the different classes, and may like all of them at times. 

This surely makes it easier to convince them that stories are "true". At first I found Tolkien to be conflicted on this issue, sometimes seeming to argue that children are easily persuaded and at other times being more ambiguous. But his main point is that children do not have any special preference for fairy stories, that this is only something adults inflict on them. 

On thinking this over, I think the apparent contradiction can be resolved. I think children do have a preference for all things of an otherworldly nature in the broadest sense (cartoons, stories about animals, dinosaurs – stuff in general they don't experience in their everyday lives). But this is, as I've pointed out before, only because they're ignorant and know it, unable to avoid trying to fill their minds like a sponge, so naturally they're curious about anything they've never encountered : as Tolkien says, to children the worlds of adults are just as comparably different to their own as are those of fairy tales !* 

* The imaginative leap to a world of talking trees is perhaps less than one required to understand why in the world one would shut oneself in an office all day.

The key point is one of specificity : there's nothing special about fairy stories in particular in this respect. Children do need content which is simpler than what adults can process, but it's adults who have decided to make fairy stories simple. The stories themselves are fully capable of having rich complexity; it's only by design they have become reduced.

Tolkien elaborates that the need to "believe" as a child is nothing very pronounced (likewise, as a child I cared not a whit for acting ability because I simply wasn't able to distinguish the good from the bad), negating the importance of their critical thinking skills or lack thereof. For children it's about desire :

I had no special “wish to believe.” I wanted to know. But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in “real life.” Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability.

The dragon had the trade-mark of Faerie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire.

The world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft.

Which is a perfect description of little me ! (Albeit in my case dinosaurs came first, dragons later). And, I imagine, for many millions of other nerdy children too. This desire for other realities persists into adulthood, having nothing to do with childishness at all. Whither it comes, who knows ?

The chief flavour of that tale lingering in the memory was not beauty or horror, but distance and a great abyss of time, not measurable even by twe tusend Johr*. Without the stew and the bones — which children are now too often spared in mollified versions of Grimm — that vision would largely have been lost.

* German for "two thousand years" as used in a particular Grimm fairy tale.

(Re-reading The Hobbit, I find that Tolkien doesn't shy away from the darker stuff, but he doesn't ram it down the reader's throat either. The scariness is carefully tempered, but not absent. Childish imaginations easily run riot with this; they don't need the full horrors spelled out for them in graphic detail because they'll do that for themselves anyway.)

All the same, I think we're largely misled into believing this creative capacity is something that all children have, and have beaten out of them by the education system (or whatever one cares to blame). It's just an unformed, ignorant mind struggling to form a coherent world view, not something of some peculiarly spiritual significance to childhood that people seem to ascribe to it. In my experience, children are apt to taunt and even bully each other over things they deem silly, or even just for the sake of it – because they can. They are ignorant, but not uncritical, and not unjudgmental either.

Humility and innocence — these things “the heart of a child” must mean in such a context — do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness. Chesterton once remarked that the children in whose company he saw Maeterlinck's Blue Bird were dissatisfied “because it did not end with a Day of Judgement, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless.” “For children,” he says, “are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

The eucatastrophe (no, not Brexit)

Whether a story should end with justice or mercy is not a matter that can be easily generalised. For a fairy tale the key point, says Tolkien, is that the ending is happy – which I suppose can equally mean either punishing transgressions or forgiving those who repent. It's the happiness which matters. Had Red Riding Hood simply been eaten, it would be a cautionary tale about cross-dressing wolves and nothing more. If the Ugly Duckling had grown up to plot bitter revenge against the world, it would be the Count of Monte Cristo but with ducks. Had Cinderella turned up to the ball reeking of such a stench of pumpkin that no handsome prince would get within fifty paces, it would be a lesson in proper vehicle design and material engineering.

So the ending must be happy. In particular, Tolkien describes the "highest function" of fairy stories is to facilitate a very special kind of happy ending, the eucatastrophe (see link for a discussion of the notion in a wider context) :

A sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

I suppose that like any good plot twist, the reader should never be able to see the eucatastrophe coming, but as soon as it occurs it must feel inevitable. 

The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.

In Tolkien's own works, the destruction of the Ring is a eucatastrophe, a triumph beyond all hope. Others have noted how this is due not to luck but to fate, with Tolkien having considered various alternative ways to get the Ring into the volcano – not always as pleasant as the final version, but effective nonetheless. Of course the reader basically knows the Ring is going in one way or another, but they also know it's thwarted such efforts before. It's a shame that the Lord Of The Rings was published before The Silmarillion, because in that work the villains more frequently win outright. 

For Tolkien the eucatastrophe reflected a deep religious belief about the way the world works, with Christ being mankind's ultimate salvation, on which I will not comment. More practical examples might include the invention of vaccines and antibiotics, the theory of evolution... these things may have been inevitable, but they were also unknowable before they occurred. We don't ever expect something as monumentally transformative as the discovery of how to harness electricity to occur, yet such things do happen.

Eucatastrophes then, reveal an underlying "truth" that not all is joyless, that the unpredictable nature of reality is not always to our detriment. That while we can commit acts of limitless horror, we can also overcome them. "That there's some good in this world, Mr Frodo. And it's worth fighting for."

Conclusions

For me the key point of fantasy, the thing that makes it challenging to do well, is that it must be believable but unrealistic. It must contradict known laws or it's mutated into science fiction (not that there's anything necessarily wrong with a blending of genres !). Reality and realism must simply "go hang", at least as far as the physical principles which are at work, and without that it's simply not fantasy.

And for the greatest works this lack of realism can, nay must, apply even to characters. In The Nature of Middle Earth, Tolkien is explicit that the Valar must behave with higher moral standards than us flawed mortals, at "whatever cost of peril" their principles require, regardless of the risk. "A wizard should know better !" is a line thus charged with cosmic significance, that these higher beings are not Olympian gods fraught with all the flaws of ordinary humans, but actually morally superior as well – they are in that sense all the less real, less pagan, and more Catholic. Avoid all that and the myth sinks to the level of Harry Potter, giving ordinary belligerent schoolchildren magical powers just for shits and giggles.

Well, that's maybe a little unfair. There's nothing wrong with this sort of fantasy-opera, of course, just as there's nothing wrong with space opera. Rather this distinguishes the different sorts of fantasy, the mythical from the merely magical. These kinds of adventure stories do have value, but a value all of their own, altogether distinct from the ancient myths.

If the eucatastrophe is the "highest function" of the fairy tale, then what is the highest function of fantasy more broadly ? Besides considering how different world views are interesting in and of themselves, I suggest that it's examining the effect these changes would have on us, above all their sociological and moral implications.

For example, I consider The Time Machine one of the greatest works of science fiction not only because it takes the science extremely seriously (likewise Tolkien says that the one thing in fantasy that must not be mocked is the magic itself), but also because it explores sociological issues. It looks at the changes that occur on a species-wide level, rather than trying to wedge-in some new-fangled device without actually changing anything more broadly (in essence is giving its characters no more than an amusing toy), or giving some special ability to a single chosen individual.* You can have fascinating moral and psychological examinations in such restricted cases, of course, but when you open these radical ideas up to everybody, only then do you full embrace what they really mean. An island full of dinosaurs makes for one of my favourite movies, but it's only a metaphor for the powers of genetic engineering, not a full-throated examination in itself of just how far it could go. 

* One of the biggest annoyances of Stargate SG1 was that they kept the stargate an implausible secret for the whole run of the show; far more interestingly, The Long Earth series gives the ability to jump to parallel worlds to absolutely everybody. That said, the political episodes of SG1 tended to be dreadful, and I think the writers lacked both the skill and desire to explore the full ramifications of a public Stargate. It probably wouldn't have worked.

Jurassic Park of course raises another key difference between science fiction and fantasy : the difference between could and should. In hard sci-fi the author ought to strive for the greatest realism and honesty they can, to consider what would (or at least could) happen regardless of their own preference, to consider how it would affect people who were not similar to themselves. In fantasy the remit, perhaps, is instead to consider what should happen, how fantastical developments can be best utilised (or horrific ones overcome) – in short, to explore morality. And not even the most bigoted literature-drama-snob could possibly consider that issue to be silly or unimportant.

Perhaps science fiction and fantasy aren't two halves of the same coin, though they certainly share some important characteristics. Perhaps instead science fiction and fantasy are more like mathematics and physics : fantasy explores all of parameter space with minimum of hindrance, whereas science fiction follows the same principles but under much stricter constraints. Perhaps instead of being the sides of a coin they're more like branches in a great Tree of speculative fiction, each with its own distinct purpose but rooted in the same soil. Regardless, for me this remit to consider other possibilities, to examine the human condition under other skies and other Suns, makes for the greatest stories of all, "the ones that really mattered.... Those were the stories that stayed with you".