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Fairy Tale Artwork

Travis Prinzi — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:37:17 +0000

Grimm and Other Folk Tales from Cory Godbey on Vimeo.

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Escape into the Perilous Realm

Travis Prinzi — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:28:00 +0000

“I don’t want to analyze a story. I don’t want to find hidden meaning. I just want to escape from the real world for a bit.”

I’m guessing you’ve either heard some variation of those words or said them yourself. Books are for “escaping.” Stories are for entertainment value. A page-turner is all we want – something that will help us to “veg out,” to leave the day behind.

I can’t begrudge someone entertainment. I like entertainment. I watch a few TV shows just for the mindlessness, and I watch others because they make me think. But a line often gets crossed in this type of thinking, which goes something like this: “It’s silly to think J.K. Rowling wrote the whole Harry Potter series on an alchemical framework, utilizing symbols and themes that are meant to transform one’s vision. She was just writing fun, entertaining books.”

Authors: Mindless Entertainers, or Careful Artists?

Believe it or not, I still come across a lot of people who take exactly that approach to the Harry Potter stories. Despite what seems to me to be very careful, deliberate artistry on the part of J.K. Rowling in selecting her symbols and magical parameters (literary alchemy), some still scoff at the idea, calling it gnostic secret-knowledge-finding, or looking for a “Da Vinci Code.”

The reason I think this crosses a line is that the one who quickly dismisses, out-of-hand, the very possibility that Rowling crafted a very deliberate alchemical drama, citing that she’s just writing exciting books for the profit and fun of it all, is insulting the craft of writing. Why is it the default assumption that authors don’t have imaginative keys to their work? Why is the author, by default, put in the role of mindless entertainer, instead of careful artist?

Escape to More Permanent Things

The real “gnosticism” in this discussion is not the artist who builds a story on an imaginative key, but one who thinks that books provide some “escape” from the “real world,” and that this escape is a good thing. Tolkien wrote,

Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

For Tolkien, the pejorative use of “escapism” was married to the false belief that current trends define Real Life – the electric street lamp, for example, is nowhere near as permanent as Lightning. But most of us know more about the lamp, because it’s more relevant to our daily existence. The fairy-tale takes us to the lightning, the “more permanent thing.”

This also answers the person who thinks that escape is simply a mindless, page-turning getaway, a vacation in your own armchair. The Escape is most certainly a delight, a joy, and a “break” from the daily mundane activities of life, as well as the more prison-like aspects of our existence. But it is an Escape that puts us in contact with themes and symbols and a cohesive, magical world from which we should not return unchanged for the better.

And if this is what Escape is, why would the careful artist not deliberately choose her imaginative key? Despite my overall dislike for the first Twilight novel, I do not have a default position that Meyer can’t possibly have chosen to weave imaginative threads through her work which are resonating with the genuinely human desire to escape to something “more permanent.” Whether or not she’s done it well is a different question; dismissing, out-of-hand, the possibility, or even probability, that she attempted it and that it is working on some level with readers, is not a wise starting point.

Tolkien’s true Escape is important to Rowling’s work, which can be characterized very much as Tolkien’s – “about death.” Tolkien noted that the true escapist, or the “fugitive spirit,” will be drawn by the “oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death.” This “Escape from Death” is at the heart of Rowling’s use of literary alchemy. Without the imaginative key of literary alchemy, it’s highly likely Rowling’s fiction would not have been as powerful.

For brilliant analysis on Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” and its relationship to Harry Potter, stay tuned for Amy H. Sturgis’s forthcoming essay, “When Harry Met Faerie,” in Hog’s Head Conversations (Zossima Press, Spring 2009).

Monday Magical Musings: Children Only?

Travis Prinzi — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:00:15 +0000

Discuss:

“The artist…must retain the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns and all the lovely creatures which our world put in a box and marked Children Only. ~ Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

Why are supernatural beings considered kids’ stuff?
What benefit does the adult derive from these “lovely creatures”?
What do you say to people who think you’re nuts for liking “kids’ stories”?

Theories and Stories

Travis Prinzi — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:09:15 +0000

Warning: The following contains an unpopular theological belief. I don’t want to get into a big theological debate here, so please keep the discussion to Kreeft’s thesis and not his example.

Peter Kreeft:

“Theories lie more readily than stories. That is why our psychologists tell us we are good but our novelists tell us we are evil.” ~ A Turn of the Clock

Warning: The following quotation is by Ursula K. Le Guin. Extended exposure to Le Guin – as with Tolkien, MacDonald, and many others – may result in believing things that could cause you to be labeled a “geek.” Though, if you’re reading and commenting on this site, you’re already there.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

“For 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. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom…. Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.” ~ Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, rev. ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1989.

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Happy Birthday, J.R.R. Tolkien

Travis Prinzi — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:35:45 +0000

Today is J.R.R. Tolkien’s 117th birthday. Since the theme here has been fairy tales lately, here are a couple of Tolkien quotes that get to the heart of it.

On Myth:

“History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.” ~ “On Fairy-Stories”

On Eucatastrophe:

Endings of this sort suit fairy-stories, because such tales have a greater sense and grasp of the endlessness of the World of Story than most modern “realistic” stories…. In its fairy-tale-or other world 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 glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. ~ “On Fairy-Stories”

Samwise Gamgee on being in stories:

What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we? I wish I could hear it told! Do you think they’ll say: Now comes the story of the Nine-Fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Rivendell they told us the tale of Beren One-Hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it! And I wonder how it will go on after our part. ~ Samwise Gamgee, The Return of the King

E. Nesbit and G.K. Chesterton on Fairy Tales

Travis Prinzi — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:43:13 +0000

“When you are young so many things are difficult to believe, yet the dullest people will tell you that they are true – such things, for instance, as that the earth goes around the sun, and that it is not flat but round. But the things that seem really likely, like fairy-tales and magic, are, so say the grown-ups, not true at all. Yet they are so easy to believe, especially when you see them happening. And, as I am always telling you, the most wonderful things happen to all sorts of people, only you never hear about them because the people think that no one will believe their stories, and so they don’t tell them to any one except me. And they tell me, because they know I can believe anything.” ~ E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle, Chapter II

“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not “appreciate Nature,” because they said that Nature was divine. Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads.” ~ G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter IV

E. Nesbit and Xenophilius Lovegood

Travis Prinzi — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:38:54 +0000

Discuss:

The Enchanted Castle, by Edith Nesbit, from chapter 1:

“It is an enchanted castle,” said Kathleen.

“I don’t see any castle,” said Jimmy.

“What do you call that, then?” Gerald pointed to where, beyond a belt of lime-trees, white towers and turrets broke the the blue of the sky.

“There doesn’t seem to be anyone about,” said Kathleen, “and yet it’s all so tidy. I believe it is magic. [...] If we were in a book it would be an enchanted castle – certain to be.”

“It is an enchanted castle,” said Gerald in hollow tones.

“But there aren’t any,” Jimmy was quite positive.

“How do you know? Do you think there’s nothing in the world but what you’ve seen?” His scorn was crushing.

“I think magic went out when people began to have steam-engines,” Jimmy insisted, “and newspapers, and telephones and wireless telegraphing.”

“Wireless is rather like magic when you come to think of it,” said Gerald.

“Oh, that sort!” Jimmy’s contempt was deep.

“Perhaps there’s given up being magic because people didn’t believe in it anymore,” said Kathleen.

“Well, don’t let’s spoil the show with any silly old not believing,” said Gerald with decision. “I’m going to believe in magic as hard as I can.”

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pp. 411-12:

Hermione looked outraged.

“But that’s – I’m sorry, but that’s completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of – of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”

“Yes, you could,” said Xenophilius. “I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little.”

Imagination as “Third Characteristic” of Humanity

Travis Prinzi — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:13:24 +0000

In between the strict rationalism of the scientific fatalist and the elusive, esoteric musings of gnostic spiritualism, and as a necessary alternative to both, is “Myth.” Clyde S. Kilby writes,

We intellectualize in order to know, but paradoxically, intellectualization tends to destroy its object. The harder we grasp at the thing, the more its reality moves away.

So what is to be done? Man finds himself a third characteristic called imagination, by which he can transcend statements and systems. By some magic, imagination is able to disengage our habitual discursive and system-making and send us on a journey toward gestures, pictures, images, rhythms, metaphor, symbol, and at the peak of all, myth….

Myth is necessary because reality is so much larger than rationality. Not that myth is irrational, but that it easily accommodates the rational while rising above it. (Forward to Christian Mythmakers)

Note the place of imagination in discovering and comprehending truth. While no strict definition can be given to this process, for it defies it, this is as it should be, for the world defies strict categorization. It is, as Chesterton said, “as wild as an old wife’s tale.”

This is why people are drawn to myths and fairy tales. More than ethical lesson, which are important, is a philosophy of the world which helps our minds shape our existence. Kilby notes Lewis’s belief that “enchanted trees give all ordinary trees a measure of enchantment.”

So, too, fairy tales and myths give our world a measure of enchantment that we forget is there in our clock-ordered, bottom-line ruled daily existence.

“Myth is vision,” Kilby writes. Indeed. I’d point you once again to John Granger’s work, especially chapter 5 of The Deathly Hallows Lectures. This is why King’s Cross is so important. It is both physical and spiritual – indeed, the perfect restoration of both – and Harry can see without his glasses.

Imaginative literature is the path of this transformed vision, as Mr. Granger has argued, and imagination is, as I have argued, the way between two worlds, the way of making sense of this world and the ways in which Faerie both overlaps and is distinct from this world.

Harry Potter, Christmas, and “Mythic Space”

Travis Prinzi — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 03:56:28 +0000

I’ve argued before, as well as in my book, that never does a Christmas go by in a Harry Potter book without some significant plot developments. You can read a bare-bones version of Christmas at Hogwarts here and get a bit more detail in Harry Potter & Imagination. What I want to address in this space is what Christmas actually means in Harry Potter, and how it contributes to the storyline and the “certain mood and power” of Faerie in the Potter story.

Christmas to Easter

While I argued in the post linked above that Christmas is a significant event in each book, that post was written prior to Deathly Hallows, and it could easily have been countered that there was nothing about Christmas itself that was particularly special. It makes story-sense to have interesting things happen at Christmas, because there’s a change in the overall feel of the school year – most students are gone. But Deathly Hallows confirmed my suspicions, I think, that Rowling was creating a deliberate Christmas to Easter “feel” in each book.

This is not unprecedented. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe frames the breaking of the White Witch’s power and her ultimate defeat on Christmas and Easter. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship departs on their journey on December 25th, and the Ring is destroyed on March 25th (an old Anglo-Saxon tradition dated the crucifixion to this date; it is also the traditional date of the Annunciation). Tom Shippey, in his book, The Author of the Century, notes the significance, writing that the major elements of the plot of The Lord of the Rings takes place in the “mythic space” between Christmas and Good Friday.

Mythic Space

The mystery of Christmas, with the mind-bending claim that God himself became a baby, is certainly “mythic.” It evokes the mood and power of Faerie. From “no room in the inn” to the widespread attempt on the Christ’s life by Herod, “perilous realm” is an apt description. Never was there a time in the history of the world when Faerie intruded so poignantly. When John the revelator was shown this period of time from heaven’s viewpoint, it was demonstrated with apocalytpic – and indeed mythological – language. The woman is in labor, and a Dragon awaits the child’s birth in order to swallow him up. But the woman is given wings to fly away, and the dragon’s vomitous river is swallowed by the earth.

This “mythic space” contains some of the richest ingredients in Rowling’s story soup. Here Harry battles with his own darkness as the Christmas carols stop, the lights of the church go out, and he finally sets eyes on his parents’ graves. The concept of life after death has no meaning to him in this moment; he is in desperate exile. And moments later, in the town of his own birth, a snake would wait for him, the “Chosen One,” and he would just barely escape.

Harry is in need of the coming of a savior, and that savior takes on the unlikeliest of all forms: “Here lies Dobby, a free elf.” This, of course, is after Harry’s “Epiphany” experience, in which Ron, the always-sidekick, pulls Harry out of the water in his attempt to retrieve the “silver cross.” On Easter morning, as Harry rises out of Dobby’s grave, the journey through this mythic space of Christmas to Easter reaches a climax, and after 6 and 3/4 books, Harry Potter finally looks like a hero.

Incarnation

It is this mythic space that many enter this time of year, having passed through the darkness and exile of the Advent season, looking for the light that was coming into the world. There are many important things to say about Christmas, and one of them is this: the physical stuff matters. That doesn’t sound very profound. Let me quote George MacDonald:

With his divine alchemy, he turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries.

The incarnation of the Son of God is the vindication of the created, physical world. Did you wonder why it was so important for Lupin and Bill to try to retrieve Mad-Eye’s body after he fell? Did you notice no one said, “It doesn’t matter; he’s gone on to a better place”? That’s because bodies matter. There is an intention and a purpose in the created world; physical bodies weren’t made as “traps” or containers for spirits. It’s only in the notion of created intent (however long or by whatever process you believe the world came to be) that any definition of evil begins to make sense. We were created for one thing, and we become less than human when we do otherwise. The magic of incarnation has vast implications for what we do with our bodies and what we do with this earth. To do evil is to dehumanize one’s self; to dehumanize one’s self is to do evil. To be less than a fully human being – disregarding the errors of both the over-spiritualizing gnostic and the scientific fatalist – is to do evil. This is why Gothic depictions of evil are pictures of dehumanization – the distorted creatures in The Princess and Curdie, the talking beasts who lose their ability to talk in Narnia, and Voldemort in Harry Potter.

The Politics of Christmas

Another important thing to say about Christmas is that the world has never been the same since that first one. And this is fundamental to fairy tales because if MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, and L’Engle are right, fairy tales actually matter – they make a monumental difference in the way we live, and they can change the world. Whatever you believe about religion and the historical Jesus, was there ever a more profoundly world-changing event than the original Christmas to Easter progression? Not even the previous pagan myths that sorta-kinda sound like the Christ story had anything near the impact of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

But a good number of Christians today forget the kind of person Jesus was. Like it or not, he was a subversive of his time – touching the untouchable, loving the outcasts, forgiving the unforgivable. This is not to try to force Jesus into one particular political stance – being a conservative or a subversive is all about context. A good and just context should be conserved and preserved, and an unjust one subverted. Two years after Jesus was born, all the male infants and toddlers in the surrounding region were murdered. Oppressive political regimes ruled the day (Rome), and within those overarching regimes, smaller regimes maintained oppressive power (Pharisees, Saducees). Oppression and power-lust made up the atmosphere of the time.

Christmas doesn’t let a person become a social crusader without radical inward transformation. People who fight the “War on Christmas” miss the point. People who stoop to be Christmas – self-sacrificial, incarnational love toward all, without discrimmination – these are the ones who change the world. It’s the magic of Christmas that informs and inspires the work of Christmas.

This is the heart of J.K. Rowling’s imaginative fiction. Harry needed 6.9 books’ worth of personal transformation before he could change the world. He needed to pass through 7 cycles of Christmas to Easter before walking his own path to his own Golgotha. You can’t change the world as a social-crusading Hermione. You have to be a self-sacrificial Harry Potter. Spending time in the mythic space of Christmas is transformative, for in it we find both magic and the the most self-sacrificial act in the world’s history.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas.

If you enjoyed this article, these themes are expounded upon at length in Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds.

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Hog’s Head PubCast #63: Faerie Christmas

Travis Prinzi — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 04:36:27 +0000

Christmas and fairy tales; the magic of wonder; an excerpt from Harry Potter & Imagination

You can subscribe to the Hog’s Head PubCast through iTunes, or Odeo. Nice reviews are greatly appreciated!

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The Hog's Head » Fairy Tales

Fairy Tale Artwork

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Escape into the Perilous Realm

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Monday Magical Musings: Children Only?

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Theories and Stories

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Happy Birthday, J.R.R. Tolkien

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E. Nesbit and G.K. Chesterton on Fairy Tales

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E. Nesbit and Xenophilius Lovegood

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Imagination as “Third Characteristic” of Humanity

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Harry Potter, Christmas, and “Mythic Space”

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Hog’s Head PubCast #63: Faerie Christmas

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