About fairy tales, Frederick Buechner wrote ‘It can be Calvin’s Geneva or Calvin Coolidge’s U.S.A. No matter what’s up politically, religiously, artistically, people always seem to go on telling these stories.’[1] I thought of this recently as I witnessed the flurry of excitement over the new season of The Rings of Power: a fantasy series based on the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. There are many reasons that these sorts of stories appeal to us and persist — they offer escapism, a cathartic experience of good triumphing over evil, the ease of good and bad guys clearly laid out without all the subterfuge and complication of modern life. But lately I’ve wondered if there might be a more fundamental ache that these stories answer. I wonder if they provide the intellectual and imaginative space to transcend the limitations of a strict and stifling secularism, making a religious interpretation of the world more plausible.
In A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor writes that ‘The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.’ Taylor traces this inquiry through the lens of a phenomenology of belief, describing the way in which belief shapes an individual’s experience and perception of reality. Over 874 pages, he artfully and meticulously describes what he thinks is the driving force of secularism:
New science gave a clear theoretical form to the idea of an immanent order which could be understood on its own, without reference to interventions from outside (even if we might reason from it to a Creator, and even a benevolent Creator), the life of the buffered individual, instrumentally effective in secular time, created the practical context within which the self-sufficiency of this immanent realm could become a matter of experience.[2]
Within the immanent frame, the natural world is perceived as mechanistic and self-contained. According to Taylor, the premodern individual saw the world as porous, where the immanent and the transcendent share space. Within a porous conception of nature, Rowan Williams writes that ‘things are not only what they are […] but give more than they have.’[3] With the advent of scientific discoveries, the natural world begins to be imagined as a system of cogs and buttons whirring on in infinite, indifferent exactitude. Immanence becomes something outside of this machine. Immanence and transcendence are therefore placed into separate planes, with the immanent being the “real” and “rational,” and the transcendent being the “possible” and “imagined.” One could still infer a Creator from the order of the natural world, but the natural order no longer disclosed anything about God.
James K.A. Smith summarises this shift as a ‘move from a “cosmos” to a “universe” [...] from an ordered, layered, hierarchical, shepherded place to […] an infinite, cavernous, anonymous space.’[4] In this frame there is no longer any “and” nature to the perceived world. This leads to what Alison Milbank describes as ‘The Kantian world of dead objects.’[5] The stars are no longer heavenly hosts, but great balls of gas in the cavernous beyond. To look at things in this way is not necessarily to preclude religious belief, but it does make the natural world impersonal and non-disclosive.
Fairy stories give us relief from this stifling view. To step into the world of the fairy story is to suspend disbelief. Graham Ward writes that to read a story is ‘a following after, a submission to, a living and experiencing beyond oneself and the visible.’[6] Through their natural function, fairy stories provide a window out of the immanent frame and beyond the vice grip of a reductive materialism, allowing readers both a different sort of world and a different way of experiencing it. While wandering through the world of a fairy story, the reader tries out a different way of seeing and is allowed a reprieve from the relentlessness of secularity. In doing so, they may find some way to transcend the claustrophobia of the immanent frame; they may find, for a moment, a way to believe in a world where belief and transcendence are possible.
Tolkien provides perhaps the most well-known description of the fairy story:
The definition of a fairy story — what it is, or what it should be — does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.[7]
What Tolkien describes here is a certain ethos captured in each fairy story. This could manifest itself in many ways — the snowy woods of Narnia, the empty halls of the Beast’s castle, the red sunset over the anarchist’s council — but the fact remains that these are stories contain an intangible but unmissable otherness. Buechner identifies a similar quality:
It is as if the world of the fairy tale impinges on the ordinary world the way the dimension of depth impinges on the two-dimensional surface of a plane.[8]
As the reader steps through the immanent frame into a fairy story, he finds a world overflowing with rivers that sing and landscapes that whisper; depth where before they saw plane. It is this that Tolkien calls the “arresting strangeness” of fairy land.
One of the great attractions of fairy land is precisely that it does not reflect the prosaic existence of everyday life. This is an obvious marker of fairy stories: non-correspondence with the primary world. The land of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) fascinates the child because it contains talking animals. Ordinarily, animals do not talk, which gives the series that air of “arresting strangeness.” But even this otherworldliness exists within a sort of limitation. For these transgressions from the primary world to work upon the reader, the strange phenomena must be believable. Tolkien notes that to have a world merely of strange phenomena without consistency is imaginatively inadequate writing: ‘“the inner consistency of reality” is more difficult to produce […] and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft […] story making in its primary and most potent mode.’[9] An excellent story will demand its reader’s belief (secondary belief) but also their wonder (arresting strangeness).
The inhabitants of Narnia, or Middle Earth, or The Wind in the Willows do not gawk as the readers do at the site of witches or lazy red suns. To the inhabitants of the fairy story, such things are as ordinary as dandelions; it is only to the reader they appear wondrous and strange. Just as the reader lives in a world where light filters through water in leaves to make them green and the universe is made up of and tiny vibrating strings, so Tumnus lives in a land where a Lion’s breath can turn stone to flesh and the world was made by the exultant voices of angels.[10] Fairyland is strange only to visitors, for which reason Chesterton writes, ‘Fairy land is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.’[11] Fairy land is, in its own way, a world just like the primary world, operating in its own, sensible, natural way.
The effect of this strangeness upon the reader is that, emerging from fairy land, they will possibly find the primary world stranger than they remembered, and perhaps this is one of the key purposes of fairy stories. As Chesterton writes:
These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found out they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember for one wild moment, that they run with water.[12]
According to Chesterton, fairy stories should stir us to the wonder of the world grown dull by repeated exposure. Fairy stories should therefore reawaken the reader to the startling otherness of reality and our small place in it.
Alison Milbank supports this suggestion and argues for the capacity of fairy stories for estrangement. She writes:
It is as though endowing them with strange attributes allows us to see them for the first time: they are importantly, no longer the dead objects of the Kantian world with which we can do what we like, things quite set apart from ourselves.[13]
To see the natural world in all its glorious strangeness and irreducibility is to contest the conception of the natural world as purely mechanistic. Recognising the given and encountered nature of reality makes allowance that it may give or point to more than it is. As Ward remarks, ‘At the very heart of the imagination and making belief believable, inhabits the very possibility of the irreducibility of the real.’[14] The irreducibility of the real does not negate the hard, cold explanations of science, but it casts doubt upon an absolutising claims of a reductive materialism. Recognising for a moment the utter strangeness and otherness of the natural world makes it evident that one cannot possess reality in its fullness.
Perhaps this is what we seek in fairy stories: to estrange ourselves temporarily from the primary world so that we might engage with it anew, in a more perceptive, complex, and open state of mind. This weakens the exclusive claims a deadened naturalism holds on our interpretation of reality. After a trip to fairy land, the individual carries back into the primary world a sense of the givenness of all things and a suspicion of claims that seem to have any complete possession of reality. A different way of seeing and feeling the shape of the world is afforded to the reader both within the fairy world and upon return to the primary world.
Closing the pages of the fairy story, one does not suddenly become convinced of the existence of God or understand the world to be a place of meaning and order, but the fairy tale has given us a reprieve, a space imagine what it would feel like if we did believe these things. Even this possibility can reorient our attitude in the world to one of expectation, possibility, openness to a world of meaning beyond our stressful and cynical times. The reader is given a new way of seeing the strangeness of the world that infects and animates the primary world, haunting the consciousness with the suspicion that perhaps the world is much more like fairy land than one had first suspected.
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Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977), p.76.
[2] Ibid, p.543.
[3] Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2006), p.26.
[4] James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), p.31.
[5] Alison Milbank, “Apologetics and the Imagination: Making Strange,” in Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition, Edited by Andrew Davison (London: SCM Press, 2011), p.39.
[6] Graham Ward, Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don’t (London: I.B. Tavris, 2004), p.152.
[7] Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” p.2.
[8] Buechner, p.77.
[9] Tolkien, p.6.
[10] I refer here to String Theory, the theory of physics developed by scientists like Leonard Susskind.
[11] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1909), p.85.
[12] Ibid, p.94.
[13] Milbank, p.39.
[14] Ward, p.157.
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