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 PrintableVersion From Homer to Harry PotterA handbook on myth and fantasy - part 1A new book on fantasy and myth suggests that we should be reading more fantasy such as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter because of the moral truths that they reveal. Eleanor Margesson gives it a read. BBC2 is presently showing a series called ‘Mythbusters’. It takes urban mythsâ and seeks to debunk them so that you can go about your life with fewer lies in your head. The bit I watched questioned the common supposition that a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building could kill a person walking on the pavement below. (Just in case you are aching to know, it can’t, since the terminal velocity and mass of a coin is not great enough to afflict much damage — it would sting a bit, though!) The premise of the programme is that scientific experimentation is the best route to discover the truth. However, is scientific truth the same as moral truth? The main question in the Mythbuster programme was, ‘Can this penny actually kill someone?’â but what really matters to people living in New York City is, is it right to go flinging coins off the tops of tall buildings if they might actually cause pain? Rejection?Myth and fantasy books are often rejected because they are not true. People might say that they want to engage with a realistic storyline rather than with creatures and places that don’t exist. In an essay on fantasy, Ursula Le Guin, author of the Earthsea quartet, disagrees with this perception; fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. When we talk about something being realistic, we must realise it is not necessarily the same as saying that it is true. American writers Matthew Dickerson and David O’Hara have recently produced From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy. They are men who are obsessed with truth. ‘I’d rather believe the truth, even if it makes me uncomfortable’â said Dickerson in an interview, ‘than believe a lie, even if it makes me happy for a time’. Even though, as university professors of computer science and philosophy, they care deeply about truth that can be scientifically or argumentatively proven, (see Dickerson’s website for complicated stuff about logarithms), they are keen to encourage others to read fantasy, myth and fairy tales for the more valuable moral truths that they offer. ‘Truth’, they say, ‘is not limited to that which has been proven by scientific experiment or deductive logic’. They are Christians who recognise the Bible as God’s Word and take as their starting point the fact that the Christian gospel is the one and only full communicator of the truth: Jesus. Yet they believe that all storytelling can reveal universal truth that is relevant for everybody; truth about good and evil, the human condition, forgiveness and grace. So good storytelling reflects the perfect truth in Jesus, whereas poor storytelling presents a worldview and moral framework that draws us away from that truth. Other worlds?Dickerson and O’Hara describe fantasy as ‘imaginative literature that gives glimpses of subcreative otherworlds, literature free from the domination of observed fact, providing instead images of things not found in our primary universe’. The practical outworking of all this is that we are lifted, by imagination and intellect, out of the experience that we are living in. Walter Wangerin Jr., author of The Book of the Dun Cow, identifies the experience like this: ‘And when the one who gazes upon that myth suddenly, in dreadful recognition, cries out: “There I am! That is me!” then the marvellous translation has occurred: he is lifted out of himself to see himself wholly’. They are also keen to point out that although people condemn the Bible as being ‘myth’, there are mythical elements in it. They do not mean that the Bible contains that which is inaccurate. Tolkien described these elements as, ‘stories of the divine that have relevance for the world of humans’ (FHHP, p.69), thus describing a genre of literature that is concerned with the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, a genre that covers all of the writings in the Bible that see God directly interacting with mankind. O’Hara says on the Matthew’s House Project website, that Augustine reminds us there is more than one way to look at biblical stories, but God is speaking truth through them. Just because I can’t comprehend something happening does not mean it didn’t occur. At the same time, there is a responsibility for me as a reader to recognise that we read different parts of the Bible in different ways according to genre. I read poetry differently from the letters, the gospels differently from apocalyptic literature. So, what classifies as myth and fantasy? Tolkien regarded it as part of the literature of ‘Faerie’, dealing with the adventures of men in the perilous realm. The perilous realm is a place different from our own, peopled by creatures and/or governed by rules of nature that we do not normally encounter. It is in these places among these new creatures and under these unusual conditions that adventures take place, often as a hero embarks on a journey or battles against some sort of evil. Dickerson and O’Hara claim that ‘Faerie’ works best when the imaginative outpourings of the author resonate with the imaginative receptors of the reader at a sub-conscious level. C.S. Lewis described its impact by saying: ‘It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives.’ Next monthWhen is fairy tale, myth and fantasy getting it right and when should Christians avoid it? The Harry Potter series, Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy and Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea books are all recent examples of writing that some Christians have banned from their bookshelves because of storylines concerning wizards and magic. Are they right to do this? In From Homer to Harry Potter, the authors provide questions about magic, good and evil, the human condition, grace and meaning which we can use to ascertain whether or not any given text is helpful for Christians to read. How do J.K. Rowling, Pullman and others fare under the scrutiny of these questions? We’ll find out next month. FROM HOMER TO HARRY POTTER © Evangelicals Now - September 2006 |
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