Narrative and Intermediaries

“The main purpose of Tolkien’s stories of imaginary beings in an imaginary world was to provide a better understanding of our world and the real beings who inhabit it.” In other words, by using an imaginary world – the fantastic – as a way to make familiar things strange, Tolkien is able to comment upon the state of the ‘real’ world. C. S. Lewis wrote that by embarking on the journey to Middle Earth, “we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.” Tolkien himself described his hobbit story as “a study of simple ordinary man, neither artistic nor noble and heroic” and indicated that his novels did have “applicability” to modern life.  --  sections in quotes from Devin Brown, The Christian World of the Hobbit,  in Hobbit Hermeneutics

 Today's society recognizes, sometimes sophistically, the ways that narrative can influence interpretation of meaning.    Part of Tolkien's impact on literature seems due to what is described above.   

It is pretty well known that Tolkien first created fantasy languages as a kind of busman's holiday for a philologist, then created a mythology and world to fit the language.   Then he invented hobbits.   Michael Drout, in a course on fantasy called Rings, Swords, and Monsters , notes the fact that  Hobbits gave readers a kind of Everyman entry-point into Middle-Earth, so that its fantastical elements were mediated through a very ordinary perspective.    He says it better than that -- I don't have the guide at hand at the moment.   

But the point is very well made.    Fantasy makes familiar things strange, but also can mediate strangeness into familiarity.    Indeed, many successful fantasy stories, particularly for children, have been wrought this way.    CS Lewis's Narnia Chronicles are an obvious example; so are JK Rowling's Harry Potter books.    You could even read through Shakespeare with this in mind -- that the archetypical heroic or tragic figures are often cast into relief with much more prosaic, even comic characters.    You see it with many fairy tales. 

 And indeed, you could argue it's a rather intrinsically Christian literary approach, even if not the only Christian way of dealing with the intersection of the ordinary world with the uncommon and extraordinary one.    The disciples often present just this kind of contrast with what the Savior is saying and doing.    Please note that I am emphasizing Tolkien's idea of  subcreation here.   I am following his point that literature tends to reflect Revelation in its methods.     A method that is innately fruitful in respect to the human way of knowing and understanding will be fruitful in literature as well.

I brought modern society into it up there, and now I will have to tie that in.   While good literature uses devices that tie the fictional in with the everyday and bring more clarity to both, bad literature tends to push an ideology at the expense of the subcreation, reducing the literary attempt to a servant of the ideology.      

Not only bad literature is made this way,  but more generally, bad art; and bad narrative.   Whereas the good forms of these things help us to rediscover reality rather than restrict it or retreat from it.