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| 'If men could not distinguish between frogs and kings, fairy stories about frog-kings would not have arisen' (Tolkien) |
Today, we tend to treat stories
as escapism, but while they should entertain us, they serve a bigger purpose
than that. They can also make us think. We see different characters reacting to
situations in ways that we might approve, or disapprove, and we wonder how we
would fare in similar circumstances.
Stories feed our imagination,
stimulate our mind, illuminate the world, introduce us to fresh ideas and
outlooks, and enable us mentally to encounter the kinds of people and
situations we could never hope to meet in reality. Storytellers don’t usually
set out to teach something (didactic novels are usually contrived or boring),
but their imaginations reflect and illustrate their view of the world and its
challenges.
For Leo Tolstoy, the great
Russian novelist, the storyteller at their best should provide ‘a clear,
definite and fresh view of the universe’. To the American novelist Henry James,
the storyteller is a ‘“watcher at the window” whose consciousness works on all it
sees and presents to us its own version of reality’.1
Recent research by Toronto
University Professor Keith Oatley suggests that stories can improve our empathy
with others. ‘Fiction can be thought
of as a form of consciousness of selves and others that can be passed from an
author to a reader or spectator, and can be internalized to augment everyday
cognition,’ he suggests.2 That may be asking too much of
‘airport novels’ – the chunky romances or action adventures we take to while
away the hours on holiday. But it’s not too much to ask of others.
C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories have
charmed several generations and which begin with the strongly Christian themes
of the conquest of evil through death and resurrection. He claimed that fantasy
stories about animals led him ‘back to the real world with a renewed
understanding of it because the story presented such realities as “food,
exercise, friendship, the face of nature, even (in a sense) religion….The whole
story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. The
excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the
actual.”’3
J.R.R Tolkien, the creator of Lord of the Rings wrote that the best
fairy stories deal largely ‘with simple or fundamental things’.4 In
another essay he wrote that ‘creative Fantasy is founded upon…a recognition of
fact, but not a slavery to it. So upon logic was founded the nonsense that
displays itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll. If men really could
not distinguish between frogs and kings, fairy stories about frog-kings would
not have arisen.’5 So let’s look at the (allegedly) children’s
stories about ‘Alice’.
Alice in Bible land
Lewis Carroll, the 19th-century author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, was no fool.
He was clever and talented. His real name was the Revd Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson. He wrote the Alice books initially to amuse the daughters of the Dean
of Christ Church, Oxford, where Dodgson was an accomplished lecturer in
mathematics.
He wrote other ‘nonsense’ stories
and poems such as ‘The hunting of the Snark’ but also published several
important academic papers on maths and logic. He wrote on broad philosophical
and religious issues, too, was a proficient musician and entertainer, an inventor,
and a noted portrait photographer. He was an ordained Church of England deacon
and referred to his deep Christian faith in his diaries and letters.
Having been brought up in a
parsonage in the Anglo-Catholic (high church) tradition, which was also
espoused at Christ Church, it is possible that he was never fully comfortable
with its emphasis on ceremonial and preferred a simpler evangelical faith. This
may explain why he was never ordained as a priest, although he used a speech
impediment as his stated reason.
He wrote to a friend, ‘Most
assuredly I accept to the full the doctrines you refer to – that Christ died to
save us, that we have no other way of salvation open to us but through his
death, and that it is by faith in Him, and through no merit of ours, that we
are reconciled to God; and most assuredly I
can cordially say, “I owe all to Him who loved me, and died on the Cross
of Calvary.”’6
So it’s not impossible to regard
the Alice books as more than the strange fantasies of a diffident and
self-conscious academic. Indeed, they have long been regarded as satirical, and
he was a contemporary of other fantasy writers at a time when the genre was
becoming a popular vehicle for stories with a moral. Among them was George
MacDonald, his friend and mentor, who was also a major literary influence on
J.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) and
C.S. Lewis (the Narnia stories). Charles Kingsley, another Anglican minister,
was also a contemporary, with his moralistic fantasy The water babies.
The Alice stories are full of
clever puns, word plays and allusions to writers and ideas some of which would
have been beyond the comprehension of even a well-educated seven year old (the
age of Alice in the books) in Victorian England. Through the Looking Glass is based loosely on a series of chess
moves, which the author summarises at the start of the book (although he cheats
with the order of play).
The Wonderland adventures begin
with Alice shrinking in size in order to get through a door at the base of the
rabbit hole. One of Jesus’ sayings was, ‘Make every effort to enter through the
narrow door because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able
to’ (Luke 13:24).
Entry into Looking Glass World is
through a mirror. St Paul noted his own limited understanding of God: ‘For now
we see only a reflection, as in a
mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully,
even as I am fully known’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). But there’s more, softer,
allusions to theology and philosophy.
Alice becomes an
allusion
Beyond the looking glass, Alice discovered a very strange
world. To begin with, everything was back to front. She soon got used to that,
except when trying to cut a cake. The cake had to be eaten before it could be
cut. There’s a lot in Christian faith that’s back to front as far as
conventional wisdom is concerned, like valuing giving before getting.
Once she got her bearings, she
realised the creatures she met viewed her very differently to how she viewed
herself. To the gossipy flowers, she was just another plant with peculiar
petals whose looks and views existed only for the onlookers to pass judgement
on. They are the embodiment of today’s gossips on street corners, school
playgrounds, social media, reality TV programmes and in magazines and
newspapers.
To the shop-keeping sheep, with
its limited experience of the world, she was a goose, the only category of
creature it could conceive that walked on two legs and flapped its arms. We’re
very fond of categorising people according to our knowledge, not according to
their real selves. Humpty Dumpty thought she looked just like all the other
humans. We often fail (or refuse) to see that people are different: ‘Men!
They’re all the same!’ Actually, they’re not.
As for the unicorn, he didn’t
believe she existed at all. Most of us have encountered unicorns. They inhabit
some government departments, commercial call centres and web system algorithms.
These unicorns tend to regard people as a homogenous mass and not as a varied
collection of individuals. They tend not to regard disembodied voices or
electronic keystrokes as emanating from living humans with feelings and needs,
but just as a number to be crunched or a case to be unpacked. They’re trapped
in a mythical database.
Then there was the small matter
of the Red King’s dream. Was it Alice who was dreaming about Looking Glass
World? Or was she just a figure in the Red King’s dream, so that when he woke
up she would disappear, just as Tweedledum and Tweedledee so confidently
predicted?
That of course is a long-standing
and deep philosophical question. Do we really exist at all? Is what I perceive actually real, or just a
freak combination of neurological sensations? Or is someone else (a god,
perhaps) imagining it all, or controlling a game in which we’re just helpless
players? Are there, as some physicists are now suggesting seriously in ideas
once restricted to sci-fi books and films, parallel universes in which we or
our doubles live differently?
Besides, in Wonderland, Alice considers
(more than once) who she really is. As she seems to change with alarming
frequency, she asks, ‘If I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the
world am I? Ah, that’s the great
puzzle!’ Let’s face it, each of us is a different person in different
situations. (If you doubt it, just think how you live at home compared with how
you operate at work.) The question of personal identity has become even more
acute in our impersonal clockwork society than it was in Carroll’s era when the
industrial revolution and scientific discoveries were taking off.
Of course, each reader will see
in a story something different, but if we gloss over the allusions we can be
missing a point. They illustrate – they simply show, without the author having
to describe – an important and unique part of being human. We have an
imagination and we can roam way beyond the confines of our bodies without ever
leaving our minds. So far as we know, no other creature can do that. And that
mental agility is closely related to our spiritual faculties.
Leland Ryken, a former English
Professor at Wheaton College in America, suggested that ‘My conviction as a Christian
is that to explore the world of imaginative literature is to explore part of
God’s created reality…. Studying that world will tell us things that are just
as crucial to human well-being and to God’s glory as an exploration of the
physical world around us is.’7
Think and talk
1. Why did Jesus tell stories? See Matthew 13:10-17 and ask
what is he really saying about human imagination and the nature of spiritual
truth. Is he deliberately misleading some people, or being deliberately
obscure, or do his words mean something else more profound about human nature?
2. Why do you think the author of Judges spent so long on
the trivial pursuits of the tribal leader (and rogue) Samson? See Judges 13-16.
Note also the general introduction to the book in Judges 2:6-23.
3. Read Romans 15:1-7.
What sort of things can we expect to learn from past events about God, about
human nature and human behaviour?
4. When did you last read a story (of any kind) and discover
thought-provoking ideas and insights? Share them with your friends and find out
what they have learned from stories too.
References
1. Miriam Allott, Novelists
on the novel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965, pp. 116, 131.2. Keith Oatley, ‘Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 20, Issue 8, pp.618–628, August 2016.
3. Leland Ryken, Triumphs of the imagination, InterVarsity Press 1975, p.96. He is quoting Lewis ‘On stories’ in Essays presented to Charles Williams.
4. Quoted by Ryken, Op.Cit.
5. J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, Unwin Books 1966, p. 50.
6. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The life and letters of Lewis Carroll, T. Fisher Unwin 1898. It is cited in the Wikipaedia entry on Dodgson.
7. Ryken, Op.Cit. p.77.
© Derek Williams 2016. Material in this post is part of a
book in preparation and should not be reproduced in part or whole without the
author’s permission.
