I love this quote from C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism (1961), which is easily applicable to film as well as literature:

This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. They are not, any more than our personal experiences, all equally worth having. Some, as we say, ‘interest’ us more than others. The causes of this interest are naturally extremely various and differ from one man to another; it may be the typical (and we say ‘How true!’) or the abnormal (and we say ‘How strange!’); it may the beautiful, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, the pathetic, the comic, or the merely piquant. Literature gives the entrée to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. (pp. 139-141)

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Coraline (see my article) is a deliciously creepy film, but it’s raised again the question of whether children should be watching scary films, or reading scary books. It was raised last week on The Times’ ‘School Gate’ blog. I agree with Sarah Ebner when she writes:

However, in my (limited) experience, I feel that as long as there’s a warm or positive conclusion at the end of a book or film, children love to be scared, and it can even be good for them. It’s as if they are taking a journey and some famous tales are real rites of passage. Why else would fairy tales be so successful, or a huge range of books from Where the Wild Things Are to The BFG, The Gruffalo to Harry Potter?

It reminded me of comments made by both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien on the subect. Here’s Lewis:

By confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happened, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable. For in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones; and the terrible figures are not merely terrible, but sublime. It would be nice if no little boy in bed, hearing or thinking he hears, a sound, were ever at all frightened. But if he is going to be frightened, I think it better that he should think of giants and dragons than merely of burglars. And I think St. George, or any bright champion in armour, is a better comfort than the idea of police. (‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’ in On Three Ways of Writing for Children)

In Tolkien’s famous essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ (originally given as the Lang lecture), he talked about the three functions of fairy stories being recovery, escape and consolation. He wrote about the value of the ‘eucatastrophe’, the story’s ‘sudden joyous turn’:

But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite — 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 walls of the world, poignant as grief.
It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.

The writer of Tolkien-Online.com is correct when he writes:

I would argue that ‘eucatastrophe’ pertains not just to the happy ending, but to the redemption of morality in the tale. Evil falls, but because of its own greed, its hatred, its fatal character flaw.

Good triumphs, and triumphs in some way because of its inherent good.

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I wasn’t able to see The Narnia Code on BBC One yesterday, but I watched and enjoyed it this evening. Directed by Norman Stone, it profiles the discovery of Michael Ward who, while working on his PhD on Lewis, stumbled onto a secret no one had ever seen before. He was reading Lewis’s poem about the planets (expressing a Medieval cosmology, of course, because he was a Medievalist and because it’s full of symbolism, not because he thought it was scientifically true) when he spotted a line which had an unmistakable connection to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It talked about Jupiter bringing an end to winter and forgiveness for guilt – central themes in LWW. He began to wonder whether the other books might also be connected with the one of the seven planets in the Medieval view (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter) and in a very short space of time realised that he had discovered what is probably the most important interpretive key to the series. His work was finally published as Planet Narnia, though I seem to remember hearing a more accessible version of the ideas is coming out this year under the title The Narnia Code.. If you’re at all interested in The Chronicles of Narnia, it’s well worth watching, and it includes some great observations from Brian Sibley, Eric Metaxas, Alan Jacobs, Jerry Root (not enough of him) and others. It loses focus a little when discussing the compatibility of modern science and faith, but there are some good comments from John Polkinghorne and Owen Gingrich so it’s not wasted.

The Narnia Code is available on BBC iPlayer until 11:34pm (UK time) Thursday 23rd April 2009. Buy Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis from Amazon.co.uk (and help support my work!).

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