To many readers the whole idea of describing a writer like Tolkien as a ‘Christian fantasist’ may seem highly peculiar. Fantasies are fantasies; what relation can possibly exist between such a deliberately non-realistic fictional strategy, and a worldview such as Christianity, concerned (as a worldview must be) with reality?
To answer that question we need to understand what fantasy is. The problem is that definitions of fantasy often lose their way in the very area with which we are concerned: that is, the supernatural in fantasy functioning as an expression or reflection of belief in supernatural agency in the real world.
(This will be an extended post!)
This is true of Irwin’s stimulating volume The Game of the Impossible, where fantasy is described as a play of intellect that ‘projects the persuasive establishment and development of an impossibility, an arbitrary construct of the mind with all under the control of logic and rhetoric’(1) ; and of Manlove’s definition in Modern Fantasy, which includes a reference to ‘supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects’(2), the two adjectives being intended to be synonymous. Neither definition is at all adequate to, say, C.S. Lewis’ Voyage to Venus, the hero of which is transported by angels to a paradise made up of floating islands where he has to combat a demon-possessed foe. The Venus of Lewis’ fantasy is not the planet known to astronomers, and the angelic transportation and the paradise are obviously intended as constructs of the imagination. Yet we must also recognize that the angels and the demon are reflections of reality as Lewis perceived it; such forces – albeit without the physical details and astrological allusions with which Voyage to Venus enriches their portrayal – formed part of Lewis’ Christian orthodoxy. Thus the supernatural in Voyage to Venus can only be classed as uniformly ‘impossible’ if one assumes, as Irwin blithely does, the ‘long-foregone loss of any power of a particular supernatural to command belief’(3) – something Lewis would have hotly contested. This sort of definition says more about the narrowness of Irwin’s view of the world than it does about the books he is describing.
So although the dominant impulse in the creation of fictional fantasy worlds is frequently the creative imagination; although the fictional worlds are created primarily for their own sake; there is inevitably still some definite correlation with reality as the writer conceives (or choses to conceive) it. And that is why it is meaningful to describe the work of Lewis and Tolkien as ‘Christian fantasies’, and to convey something by that description which would be grossly inappropriate if applied to the fables of Kafka or Vonnegut. How then does this correlation operate?
Writers of fiction are sub-Creators (to use Tolkien’s phrase), builders of worlds; and some conclusions may be drawn from the absence of a particular element from the fictional world they choose to create, particularly if their novel apparently claims to give a fairly full and complete account of its world. If, for example, a full-length fantasy contains no reference to the sciences, it is correct to describe the world the author has chosen to create as one in which science is of no great significance. And in this sense it is also correct to speak of a fantasy text as being theistic or a-theistic, according to whether God is present or absent. These categories have little meaning in the lighter works of art, the divertissements (Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham, for example): they are really only of significance where we are faced with a more ‘serious’ work or one that portrays its fictional world with a fair degree of completeness.
But in fact the cosmological aspect is often highlighted – as against being left unstated – in works of fantasy and science fiction (4); because on the one hand there are few other genres so suited to handle the cosmological, the apocalyptic and the other-worldly; and, on the other hand, the act of ‘reshuffling the universe’ involved in the making of fantasy is itself ontologically interesting. And that fact will tend to come into prominence, because as a genre develops it tends to grow more self-conscious, more aware of its own procedures. For example, the ontological issue – what is it to remake the world? – comes out amusingly in Howard Schoenfeld’s story ‘Build Up Logically’ in The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus. Here the hero is a novelist who inserts himself into his own world, then unwisely creates a character who can himself create things ex nihilo, and who proceeds to ‘create the universe’ and take over the story, remaking his own creator in the process.
That story is interesting to set beside John Barth’s remark that ‘If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn’t too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist’. (5) Robert Scholes comments,
For the post-World War II fabulators, any order they impose on the world amounts not to a symbol of the divine order, but to an allegory of the mind of man with its rage for an order superior to that of nature. It amounts to thumbing their nose at You Know Who.(6)
Another significant parallel is Brian Aldiss’ argument in his history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, that the archetype and progenitor of science fiction is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
If God did not have personal charge of creation, then might not man control it? In Shelley’s wife’s hands, the scientist takes on the role of creator. The concept of Frankenstein rests on the quasi-evolutionary idea that God is remote or absent from creation; man is therefore free to create his own sub-life… God – however often called upon – is an absentee landlord, and his tenants scheme to take over the premises.(7)
From this tale of man taking over the role of creator, argues Aldiss, sprang the whole science fiction genre – a genre which seeks to do precisely that. In these last two examples the cosmological and ontological reference is plain. We may make a further observation: in these particular examples the reference involves and is rooted in a particular stance towards the idea of a sovereign creator God, considered as part of any conceivable reality whatsoever.(8)
Such non-realistic writing, then, is capable of implying a definite ontological stance. It is the privilege – the Christian would say the gift – of the artist to create a new world that either does or does not include God. So Vonnegut, an absurdist, creates an absurd universe where God is unhelpful or absent; so Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year in Marienbad, if it can be seen as presenting a fictional universe at all, presents one without a sovereign God guaranteeing its coherence, its categories and the possibility of absolute truth; and Sartre illustrates his conception of the fantastic by improvising an example of this kind:
I sit down in a cafe. I order a light coffee, the waiter makes me repeat my order three times, and repeats it himself in order to avoid any chance of a mistake. He rushes off, transmits my order to a second waiter, who scribbles it in a notebook and transmits it to a third. Finally a fourth waiter appears and says: ‘Here you are’, setting an inkwell down on my table. ‘But’, I say, ‘I ordered a light coffee’. ‘And here you are’, he says as he walks away… If we have been able to give the reader the impression that we are speaking to him of a world in which these preposterous manifestations figure as normal behaviour, then he will find himself plunged at one fell swoop into the heart of the fantastic.(9)
‘Preposterous’; and yet Sartre as an existentialist declares the absence of absolute laws that could guarantee reality. In each of these cases the fictional universe created is not of a particularly realistic mode, and yet the author’s worldview tends to be reflected in the kind of story he chooses to tell. The same reflection is also evident in the two great comic fantasists of recent years, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett; both have expressed a dislike of Christian faith, and both have created fantasy worlds in which God, or the gods, though they exist, are manifest absurdities.
It need not be so: Lewis might, perhaps, have written the above example from Sartre – and yet the kind of fantasy he actually did write leaves room for the bizarre and miraculous but is clearly within the providence of God; the bizarre is the miraculous rather than the arbitrary. This reflection seems to be a common phenomenon, and the Christian writer will be no exception. Indeed, because they love the presence of God, they may feel uneasy at the use of the God-given imagination to create a surrealistic universe that neither contains nor reflects Him, since He is the determinant of all possible realities. And since to be a Christian is not merely to hold a belief but also to engage in a love-relationship with God, the notion of a universe from which God has been removed is not merely the fanciful reversal of a proposition, it is the notion of bereavement. Therefore, a Christian devoted to the sovereign God of Love revealed in the Bible is unlikely to choose to create a fantasy-world ruled by the distant dreamer-God of Lord Dunsany, the whimsical deity, slightly taken aback, who visits the world of T.F. Powys’ Mr Weston’s Good Wine, or the schizoid and sometimes sadistic ‘divine-diabolic’ First Cause of J.C. Powys’ A Glastonbury Romance. These are poor substitutes, false Gods. The God he will wish to portray, even in a fantasy, will probably be the God he worships in reality.(10)
So it is that when Tolkien, a committed Christian, elaborates a theory of fantasy, his concept of ‘sub-creation’ is determined by the notion of a Creator:
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.(11)
The same idea emerges in the semi-autobiographical piece Leaf by Niggle, where the artist Niggle discovers, growing, the imaginary tree he has planted:
‘It’s a gift!’ he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally.(12)
These remarks stand in sharp contrast to Barth’s remarks, quoted above, where the story-teller uses his art to ‘re-invent’ the world, almost in competition with God. For Tolkien, the dominant idea is one of stewardship of the gift God has given: a gift to be used, not for oneself, but for God. Christ is Lord of all; and therefore, to the Christian, aesthetics too is not autonomous but under His sway, and glorifies Him by the very act of fulfilling its created function. And one aspect of its position under the Lordship of Christ is acknowledging His presence.
In Lewis’ Voyage to Venus, indeed, the Lady makes it clear that there are certain fantasies she finds inappropriate, that are incompatible with such stewardship:
‘It is not from the making a story that I shrink back, O Stranger’, she answered, ‘but from this one story that you have put into my head. I can make myself stories about my children or the King. I can make it that the fish fly and the land beasts swim. But if I try to make the story about living on the Fixed Land [the one prohibition on Venus] I do not know how to make it about Maleldil [Christ]. For if I make it that He has changed His command, that will not go… But also, I do not see what is the pleasure of trying to make these things.’(13)
The worshipper is unlikely to desire an altered God; so God does not change in the fantasy world. Nor, says Tolkien’s Aragorn, do the deepest principles of good and evil:
‘I had forgotten that’, said Eomer. ‘It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange. Elf and Dwarf in company walk in our daily fields; and folk speak with the Lady of the Wood and yet live… How shall a man judge what to do in such times?’
‘As he has ever judged’, said Aragorn. ‘Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’(14)
Because, of course, the deepest principles are bound up with the very nature of God; God actually is Love and Truth.
It seems, then, that an author’s worldview will tend substantially to affect the type of fantasy they choose to tell, in Tolkien and Lewis as much as in Sartre and Vonnegut; and if they believe in God, then God will not be absent from their fantasy merely because it is a fantasy. In practice, as we’ve seen, Lewis’ fantasies declare themselves throughout to be explicitly within the Christian framework, and display different aspects of a cosmic struggle between the Christ of the Bible and the Satan of the Bible; and the paean of worship at the end of Voyage to Venus is certainly to no imaginary deity, but to the Christ whom Lewis worshipped in reality. If the author is a committed Christian, then their fantasy will in some measure be ‘Christian’ too.(15)
The Christianized Imagination
Some of Tolkien’s theoretical statements might seem at variance with these conclusions; and indeed The Lord of the Rings was not begun with any apologetic purpose in view. It seems from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien that the story has its roots in Tolkien’s linguistic interests, not theology. Tolkien himself says in the Foreword that his prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. He proceeds to deny any ‘inner meaning’ in the book:
As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical… I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.(16)
But these remarks should not be understood as denying a correlation between the story and the Christian worldview. To begin with, our understanding of this wholesale condemnation of allegory must be qualified by Tolkien’s fictional practice in Leaf by Niggle. That story concerns a man bundled off, rather unprepared, on a journey through a ‘dark tunnel’, firstly to a corrective ‘Workhouse Infirmary’ where he works hard and ‘during the first century or so’ sorts out his conscience and learns discipline. His moral past is reviewed, and eventually he is sent on to a kind of Paradise, where the imaginary Tree that was his work of art now stands as a real thing. After working creatively there for a while, he is led on by a shepherd into the Mountains – ‘What they are really like, and what lies beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them’.(17) It is difficult to see this short story as anything but an allegory of the Catholic view of the afterlife, with purgatory paving the way for heaven.
Be that as it may, it seems that in the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings Tolkien is using the terms ‘inner meaning’ and ‘allegory’ in a very narrow sense; one in which Sauron would actually signify Satan (if the allegory were religious), or the Ring the nuclear bomb (if it were political). ‘Applicability’ in contrast would seem to suggest a more general pattern that occurs in the fictional universe and which may match (can be read as) the shape of the reader’s experience in the real world; that is, a correlation of a general kind, owing its shape to Tolkien’s worldview and leaving its mark on his imaginative work. Lewis imagines Tolkien being asked why he uses a fantasy setting if he has ‘a serious comment to make on the real life of men’, and replies for Tolkien: ‘Because, I take it, one of the main things that the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality’.(18) ‘Mythical’, meaning, presumably, amongst other things, that human life is part of the cosmic struggle between good and evil, in which powers on both sides that we might call ‘mythical’ are in very truth actively involved. In such a view there is a definite correlation between the fantasy and the author’s view of reality. But such a vision, Lewis implies, can be better glimpsed when it is projected onto a fantasy context.
This understanding of The Lord of the Rings receives confirmation from Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories. Here Tolkien uses the term Fantasy:
in a sense … which combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of ‘unreality’ (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the domination of observed ‘fact’, in short of the fantastic.(19)
This essay is in part written to defend the legitimacy of fantasy against the suggestion that all literature must be in a more realistic mode; hence its primary emphasis is on the value of sub-creation:
That the images are of things not in the Primary World (if that indeed is possible) is a virtue, not a vice. Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.(20)
The goal of such a fantasy is to achieve ‘the inner consistency of reality’, that is, that ‘which commands or induces Secondary Belief’.(21)
But, as Tolkien goes on to say, there is more to it than that. The four major qualities of fairy-stories, he says (using this term, not for children’s stories, but for fantasy in general), are ‘Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation’.(22) Two of these are explicitly oriented towards the real world. ‘Recovery’ is the ‘regaining of a clear view … seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’.(23) ‘Consolation’ is concerned precisely with the patterning of events:
I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’, nor ‘fugitive’. In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is 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 world, poignant as grief… In such stories when the sudden ‘turn’ comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.
In passing beyond the ‘very web of story’, the impulse of the creative imagination coalesces with the realistic impulse:
Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: ‘inner consistency of reality’, it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality.
In other words, the ‘consolation’ is not just an anodyne, an encouraging opiate. To Tolkien as a Christian, the eucatastrophe mirrors, or partakes of, a pattern of true ‘consolation’ in reality:
The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question: ‘Is it true?’ The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): ‘If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world’. That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the ‘eucatastrophe‘ we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater – it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.
As we saw earlier, eucatastrophe is a dominant motif in The Lord of the Rings: not only for purely formal reasons, but because Tolkien believes in the same pattern within reality. This happy ending is embodied supremely in the evangelia, the four Gospels:
But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation…. This story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified… Legend and History have met and fused.(24)
Tolkien’s position may be summarised in these terms: because Man is made in the image of his Creator, his own creation of autonomous, non-realistic worlds is entirely valid, and is assisting ‘in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation’.(25) But if they contain imaginative ‘truth’, this is at root because they partake of the basic pattern of reality, in which God’s purposive ‘making’ is joyously at work to an ever more glorious end. Tolkien’s stories are in the first place stories, and not fictionalised apologetics; but the story that takes shape in his Christianized imagination is, he knows, one bearing the Christian pattern. At the end of Leaf by Niggle, the Second Voice says of Niggle’s ‘art’ that it is ‘very useful indeed… As a holiday, and a refreshment’; but he adds, ‘not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains’, that is, heaven.(26) Tolkien believed that art, just by being itself rather than through overt didacticism, could serve as an ‘introduction to the Mountains’.
Accordingly, the practical end result is not far from the position of Lewis. For although Lewis, unlike Tolkien, acknowledged an apologetic purpose, he nevertheless says firmly, ‘I’ve never started from a message or a moral’; his brilliant myth of the Fall, Voyage to Venus, began with the mental picture of floating islands. But then again, as he adds, ‘It wouldn’t have been that particular story if I wasn’t interested in those particular ideas on other grounds’.(27) Similarly, he records that the Narnian stories began their creative life as a series of images – ‘a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the bubbling.’ But slowly the ‘author as man, citizen, or Christian’ came to shape the initial impulse of the ‘author as author’.(28) The story’s shape was determined, we may say, by the fact that it arose in a mind with a distinctively Christian cast, rather than an agnostic one.
And this is similar to Tolkien’s account, although Lewis’ apologetic tendency was deliberate:
I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood… The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them appear for the first time in their real potency?(29)
(Note: This post is part of a more thorough appendix on fantasy fiction and providentialism available in the Chronicles of Heaven Unshackled section of the excellent bethinking.org site; along with some explorations of C S Lewis’ supernaturalistic fiction, such as Till We Have Faces which isn’t easy but should be much better known than it is.)
References
(1) W.R. Irwin. The Game of the Impossible (Illinois,1976), p.9.
(2) C.N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy (1975), p.3.
(3) Irwin, op.cit., p.160.
(4) For example, many science fiction writers have tried their hand at rewriting the early chapters of Genesis: eg Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Last Question’, in his anthology Nine Tomorrows, and Eric Frank Russell’s ‘Sole Solution’ in The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (which also contains Arthur C.Clarke’s creation apocalypse story, ‘Before Eden’, and John Brunner’s rewriting of the Flood, ‘The Windows of Heaven’). Vonnegut gives an absurdist parody of Genesis 1 in Cat’s Cradle. Of the Christian fantasists, Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and Voyage to Venus deal with the Fall; and their friend Charles Williams handles the naming of the beasts (Genesis 2) in The Place of the Lion.
(5) Quoted Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York,1967), p.106.
(6) Scholes, ibid., pp.106-107. The last phrase is from the end of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut may be considered both as an absurdist fabulator and as a writer of science fiction.
(7) Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, p.26.
(8) Another interesting example is the hatred towards God that seems evident in Harlan Ellison’s fiction; made explicit in the Nebula-winning ‘The Deathbird’, for example, and implicit, one suspects, in the Hugo-winning ‘I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.’
(9) Quoted Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland,1973), p.174.
(10) However, it is worth pointing out that Lewis makes use of the classical mythology, reworked slightly to fit in with the Christian cosmos, as a strategy to circumvent scepticism in the reader: he also writes, ‘Paganism` [speaking historically] `is the religion of poetry, through which the author can express, at any moment, just so much or so little of his real religion as his art requires’ (quoted Gunnar Urang, ‘Tolkien’s Fantasy: the Phenomenology of Hope’, in Shadows of Imagination, ed. Mark R.Hillegas (Southern Illinois,1969), p.106.) (The reflection of the worldview may be limited by factors such as what the author feels their audience will be able to accept, and this may serve as an example. Other such limits may be what they conceive of as the formal possibilities of their chosen genre, and the extent to which they choose to reveal and express their own attitudes and beliefs.) It might be said, however, that the move into ‘paganism’ involved in the ’distancing’ of Tolkien’s God from the lives of His creatures, in The Lord of the Rings and still more in The Silmarillion, tends to result in a sense of hopelessness and abandonment, and hence in The Silmarillion at least of pervasive sorrow.
(11) Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, p.55.
(12) Tolkien, Leaf by Niggle, in The Tolkien Reader, p.104.
(13) Lewis, Voyage to Venus, p.102.
(14) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), pp.427-28. Unless otherwise indicated all references are to the one-volume Harper Collins paperback edition of 1995, henceforth referred to as TLOTR.
(15) Cf. Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien: ‘Tolkien cast his mythology in this form because he wanted it to be remote and strange, and yet at the same time not to be a lie. He wanted the mythological and legendary stories to express his own moral view of the universe; and as a Christian he could not place this view in a cosmos without the God that he worshipped.’ (J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977), p.91.)
(16) Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, pp.xvi-xvii.
(17) Leaf by Niggle, p.110.
(18) Quoted Gunnar Urang, Shadows of Heaven (1971), p.134.
(19) Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, p.47.
(20) Ibid.
(21) Ibid.
(22) Ibid, p.46.
(23) Ibid, p.57.
(24) These quotations are from ibid, pp.68-72.
(25) Ibid, p.73.
(26) Tolkien, Leaf by Niggle, p.112.
(27) Lewis, Of Other Worlds, pp.87-88.
(28) Ibid, pp.35-36. Cf. Tolkien’s reference, cited above, to ‘the artist part of the artist’.
(29) Ibid, p.37.
