November 13, 2014 Leave a Comment

Storytelling as the Creative Demonstration of Truth

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

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To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

 

Story as the Creative Demonstration of Truth

14.

I’ve been talking about stories as “promoting” either “thick” or “thin” conceptions of justice or love or whatever. This is an assumption well worth challenging. Do stories tell us truths about life? Is there any relation between stories and philosophy?

C.S. Lewis, in An Experiment in Criticism, appears to say “no.” In speaking about the differences between tragedy, comedy, and farce he writes: “None of the three kinds [of drama] is making a statement about life in general. They are all constructions: things made out of the stuff of real life; additions to life rather than comments on it.”

Lewis qualifies his point. Any story “will be impregnated with all the wisdom, knowledge, and experience the author has; and even more by something which I can only vaguely describe as the flavor or “feel” that actual life has for him.” However, to regard the story “as primarily a vehicle for that philosophy” is for Lewis an “outrage” to the thing the author has made for us.

What Lewis is keen on stressing here, rightly, is that stories, novels, plays–narrative art in general–should not be taken as mere vehicles for the dissemination of an author’s philosophy. A play, for example, is not just a delivery system for abstract comments about life—more diverting than reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to be sure, but essentially no different from Kant in being a philosophical proclamation. No story can simply be reduced to a statement of whatever wisdom the author may possess. “Don’t be indecisive” (I jest) is not a substitute for Hamlet.

A play, in other words, is not a philosophical statement plus some literary qualities that we may dispense with if we choose.

And yet, Lewis fails to do justice to the way in which stories do tell us truths. Robert McKee, in his wonderful book Story, formulates this idea quite nicely: “Storytelling is the creative demonstration of truth. A story is the living proof of an idea, the conversion of idea to action.”

A story is not a work of philosophy, but there is at least a perceived wisdom embodied in the decisions the author has his characters make. The “argument” of the story is its plot, which in its climax aspires to conclude something about the way life ought to be lived. But this truth, if it is one, will only be convincing to an audience who attends to the literary qualities of the piece.

* The image above is reproduced courtesy of James MacMillan at Wikimedia Commons under the following license.

So a story is not a mere vehicle for a philosophy, but a philosophy is embedded in every story like the seal of a signet ring is embedded in wax.

 

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot Tagged: , , , , , , ,
May 17, 2014 Leave a Comment

Imagination and the Order of Love

Here are some of the thoughts I’ll be sharing in the talk I’ll be giving today, “Children’s Literature, Catholicism, and the Golden World,” at the 2014 IHM Maryland Homeschool Conference in Mt. Airy, Maryland. These thoughts don’t touch on children’s literature directly; they are rather prefatory remarks on the central importance of the imagination to moral and spiritual formation…

Moral and spiritual formation simply means growing in virtue. St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris: an ordering of our loves or desires. So what are we supposed to order our love to? To truth and to the Truth. But how?

First of all, by using our intellect to know the truth of things conceptually. By studying great works of theology and philosophy.

But even better, by loving the truth as it is embodied in our friends, esp. our friends the saints. Nothing motivates us to act well as much as love for true friends.

Concepts, however important, do not motivate us to act. I can be a world-class scholar on St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the virtues while remaining a moral pygmy. Only love motivates us to do things, to change our lives. Only love forms the will, the emotions, the intellect and the imagination itself. Only love inspires us to imitate.

Because love motivates us, ordered love, or virtue, is more important than knowing all sorts of truths intellectually. In fact, C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man says that “without the aid of trained emotions [i.e. ordered love or virtue] the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.”

So: I can learn what humility is conceptually by studying the relevant portions of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. I can learn humility even better by watching my humble Aunt Edna. When it comes to learning how to act humbly in the world, Aunt Edna is more helpful than the Summa. That’s because my love for Aunt Edna and for the goodness of her actions motivates me to imitate her example.

Works of the imagination occupy a middle space between conceptual works (theology, philosophy) and our friendships in the world (Aunt Edna). Enjoyed in a contemplative, as opposed to practical, space, works of the imagination inspire our loves and thus enable us to imagine what it would mean to imitate certain human beings.

The picture of humility that we find in Edmund’s narrative arc of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is closer to the contours of human life as it is lived than the discussion of humility in the Summa. Lewis’s story is more “adequate to” real life.

Works of the imagination enable us to picture how actually to live out the decisions we have to make, the roles we have to play, the culture we have to rebuild. In order to achieve a thriving homeschool, parish, Church, or culture, we first have to imagine it and experience what it would feel like to love it.

Works of the imagination are thus critical exercises in ordering our loves. So if we diminish the role of works of the imagination, we diminish virtue and the bonds of community.

We tear down the walls of Jerusalem.

 

The image above, in the public domain, is entitled “Child Reading” and was painted by George Romney. It is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Filed Under: Art and Culture Tagged: , , , , , ,
May 30, 2012 2 Comments

Finding Faërie

So how does one enter the world of faërie?

This site catalogs the various ways that some famous fantasy authors have imagined the transition. I’ve added to it a bit in what follows, but the list doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive even of famous fantasy worlds. But it’s a good place to start.

You can see that I’ve distinguished two basic ways for a story to take us into faërie: by spiriting us away to another world entirely, or by taking us into a hidden dimension of our own world, whether that dimension be an obscure geographical facet of our world, or a world that exists in some way parallel to our own.

So fantasy stories either

Spirit Us Away To A Completely Other World By…

  1. dreaming (H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands; Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland)
  2. entering into a child’s imagination (J.M. Barrie’s Neverland)
  3. stepping through a wardrobe (C.S. Lewis’s Narnia)
  4. the author simply positing a world of faërie without explaining its relation to our own (J.R.R. Tolkien, Middle Earth–though Tolkien was of more than one mind on this throughout his life. Sometimes he spoke of Middle Earth as a prehistoric version of our own world.)

or

Take Us Into A Hidden Dimension Of Our Own World By…

  1. burrowing into the depths of the Earth (Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar)
  2. stumbling onto a hidden valley (James Hilton’s Shangri-La; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World)
  3. venturing into a whimsical or even magical forest (Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden; the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
  4. coming upon strange islands (Gulliver’s World of Jonathan Swift; St. Thomas More’s Utopia)
  5. traveling through time (Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe)
  6. traveling through space (C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy–taking other planets to be part of our own world or cosmos)
  7. running through a wall in a train platform–among other methods (the magical world in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books)

In this light, I see my own Kingdom of Patria stories belonging in the second category, in that they take the reader into a hidden dimension of our world by introducing us to a tiny, secret kingdom nestled in the woods of northern Indiana.

Another cut at the various ways of getting into faërie is this set of distinctions by Nikki Gamble.

  1. A setting in which the primary world does not exist (e.g., Tolkien)
  2. A setting in which the secondary world is entered through a portal in the primary world (e.g. Lewis’s Narnia tales)
  3. A setting that is a distinct world-within-a-world as part of the primary world (e.g. the Harry Potter books).

Given this new set of distinctions I would say my Kingdom of Patria belongs to number 3, being a world-within-a-world as part of the primary world.

But is this right?

Because all three ways of getting into faërie distinguished by Nikki Gamble pertain to high fantasy, where a plausible, self-consistent “secondary world” is imagined. My original distinction also has to do with authors who present us with fully-realized secondary worlds.

But there’s also low fantasy, in which the setting is very decidedly our world, reimagined with some fantastical or even magical elements. Many popular middle grade children’s books are low fantasies: e.g., The Adventures of Pinocchio, The Borrowers, The Indian in the Cupboard. I would also add the two comedies of Shakespeare mentioned earlier to the genre of low fantasy.

And low fantasy, in the end, is the genre of fantasy literature to which my Patria stories belong. Patria is very decidedly in our world–there’s no portal to another world, no parallel dimension, no magic. It’s present-day Indiana through and through, but with some rather fantastical elements thrown in.

Like a kingdom founded 3,000 years ago by refugees from the Trojan War…

What’s your favorite work of fantasy?

Is it high or low?

If high, where does it fit within the categories of high fantasy discussed here?

Is there a better way of capturing the distinctions I’ve been working with?

Filed Under: The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
May 26, 2012 3 Comments

Is Fantasy Literature Escapist?

I am contemplating a work of fantasy right now–I have one or two seeds of ideas, but haven’t yet settled on a narrative or even a demographic. But the prospect has me thinking through various questions related to the genre, one of which is whether fantasy literature is escapist.

Meghan O’Rourke, writing in Slate at the time of the release of the Walden Media/Disney Pictures film version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, had this to say about the inspiration behind C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books:

His bleak childhood, so vividly present to him, made him intuitively understand that kids long to be treated as adults yet simultaneously look to escape from the harsh truths of dawning adulthood in the refuge of their own inventions. Narnia was his synthesis of these conflicting wishes. It is a place where girls like Lucy–the youngest of the Pevensie siblings–can serve as a queen and feel responsible for the arrest of a friend by the “secret police.” But it is also a place where she can bring her brother, Edmund, back from death’s door with a drop of a magical potion.

O’Rourke mentions the child’s psychological need to escape from the harsh truths of dawning adulthood as one inspiration behind Lewis’s creation of Narnia. Could the point be extrapolated to the entire fantasy genre? Is it, if only in part, escapist? (I say in part, because O’Rourke also notes that part of what fantasy literature answers to is the child’s longing to be treated as an adult.)

Compare, however, Bradley J. Birzer’s discussion, in his wonderful book, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (ISI Books, 2003), of Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien’s attraction to what Tolkien calls the world of faërie. Drawing upon Tolkien’s famous lecture, “On Fairy Stories,” Birzer writes that for Tolkien

fairy stories provide humans with a means to escape the drabness, conformity, and mechanization of modernity. Tolkien warned that this is not the same thing as escaping from reality. We still deal with life and death, comfort and discomfort. We merely escape progressivism and the progressive dream, which reduces all complex reality to a mere shadow of creation’s true wonders (Birzer, p. 39).

So we must distinguish: escaping from reality as opposed to escaping from the progressive dream.

Which is not to say that O’Rourke is claiming that Lewis and the children who love his stories, in seeking to escape from the harsh truths of dawning adulthood, are seeking to escape from reality in a negative sense. For it could well be that the harsh truths children seek to get away form in turning to fantasy and fantasy literature are the harsh truths of the progressive dream. Not the progressive dream, perhaps, in the forms of mechanization or consumerism. But any aspect of that dream–or nightmare–that obscures for the child nature’s true wonders.

A return to a golden place of wonder, the chance to operate as an adult (or hero) within it–these I’m reckoning are what we long for in escaping into faërie.

And far from being a flight from reality, fantasy literature, in this light, seems instead to be a flight to it.

“We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it; our whole nature…is still soaked with the sense of exile.” –J.R.R. Tolkien

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