Pretty Little Lies? - Part I
On the Reliability of Fiction
Faeries. Elves. Talking lions. At the turn of the twentieth century, these icons marked the advent of a definitive moment of invigoration in a world grown cold. In the wake of a strict rationalism, two world wars, and what condescending men with hard smiles called a ‘necessary disenchantment’, these figures clapped loudly in the imaginations of an entire generation and continue to echo down the years. Their inventors, or rather their re-inventors, could never have known that the hunger for their brand of storytelling was so voracious, but even within their own lives something essential was crying out from what T.S. Eliot called The Waste Land.
George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and many of their contemporaries found within themselves a need to reconnect with the storied past of their culture, and they each gave an account of the impact of ‘Faerie’ on their entire outlook on life. Lewis pointed to a moment in his youth when, from a train car, he first encountered the possibility that behind every bush, or nook, or brook lived the potential for another world. It was not until later in his life, however, that his friend J.R.R. Tolkien was to take this initial wonder and transform it into a vivid new worldview through his own earnest belief in the encapsulation within myth of the true, good and beautiful, what he called ‘Mythopoeia’. His ultimate contention was that true mythology, true ‘Faerie’ led one to the ultimate Truth, and this Truth was Christianity. This idea was first radically expressed by Chesterton some years earlier, when he argued that Christianity is myth come true. These authors believed that through the vivid world of sub-creation, man’s eyes could be re-opened to the reality that reductionist rationalism had stolen from them, and by means of true imagination they could once more drink of the draught of wonder that leads ever upward and ultimately into the eternity of God. Fantasy, they believed, could bring man back to reality—more particularly, it could bring man back to the Church.
In the early stages of the twenty-first century, it is hard not to view this perspective with a sort of regretful nostalgia or perhaps a grim cynicism. When the world of fantasy comes to mind, the last image one thinks of is church pews bursting with eager occupants. Rather more likely are thoughts of convention halls packed to the seams with all manner of wildly costumed beings gathering around new figures for popular devotion—sometimes charging $100 a selfie. Or maybe theme parks built with startling attention to detail and stuffed with paraphernalia, including ‘authentic’ Butterbeer. Weddings conducted with an entire regiment of ‘Stormtroopers’, or a ‘Lightsaber Arc’ of honor among citizens who register themselves on national census documents as ‘practicing Jedi’. Contrary to the picture of man returning to reality, we find instead a flight from it so intense it is almost bewildering.
So, what happened? Why did the dream fall so short of the expectation?
While we have brought ‘Faerie’ to the fore in this example, the fact is that the same question can be asked of fiction more broadly—even fiction of the gritty ‘realist’ type. What is the point of telling ourselves stories? And is it successfully leading us to the Truth or more successfully distracting us from it? Were the greatest fantasy authors of the twentieth century only telling pretty little lies?
Plato listed poetry (his explanation of which broadly encapsulates our understanding of ‘fiction’) as the least valuable kind of knowledge. His reason? It is, at its foundation, a falsehood, which means it cannot be an ideal vehicle for the truth. We can all connect with this judgment, I think, when we imagine the cry of the indignant youth: “You just made that up!” ‘Make believe’ is not fact. So, how can it get us closer to the truth? How can a lie connect us to reality?
Saint Thomas Aquinas, taking from both Aristotle and Saint Augustine, recognized that storytelling, while essentially ‘made up’, could very much tell the truth through what the Greeks called mimēsis. Popularly translated as ‘imitation’, or ‘representation’, mimēsis is the act of reflecting an existing reality to make it particularly present in time and space. This can be a distant reality, a past reality, even an invisible reality, which is why Saint Thomas thought metaphor (an act of description through mimēsis) was essential to theology.
This perspective takes for granted that art (or in this case fiction) aims at representing some reality to bring it to the attention of our senses and help us to perceive and better understand it—albeit in a limited capacity. I think we readily understand this perspective, too, in the common complaint about stories being ‘far-fetched’ or ‘unrealistic’. Formulaic modern romance novels, for example, are often criticized for the cringeworthy portrayals of human love that give them a quality well-deserving of the title ‘trashy’. We recognize that good art, even if it is set in Middle Earth reflects something real, something true. Even the art world’s former ideal of ‘authentic self-expression’ adapts itself to this expectation, since it desires to experience what is ‘really’ in the soul of the artist and recoils against false ideas and kitsch representations of inauthentic sentiments. Current post-modern trends, agnostic as they are to truth claims or ideas of reality, are the only ones that really kick against the mimetic goad, challenging any notion that there can be an authentic anything!
This question of reality in art is richly answered in Saint Augustine’s philosophy of signs and symbols. (What we today call ‘semiotics’.) As creatures made up of spirit and body, we learn through our senses. We know what we know through what we observe and experience—only very rarely do we learn things directly from spirit to spirit, such as through God-infused knowledge. For Christianity particularly, even God’s Self-Revelation came to us through His Incarnation, a representation of the Almighty Godhead in the finite, vulnerability of a mere man who could be seen and heard.[1] These sensible indicators of a reality resting in or just behind them, we call signs and symbols—images or objects that either point to (signs) or represent (symbols) reality to us. Those signs that actually effect what they represent, we call Sacraments, and they are the pinnacle of the order of signs with the Real Presence in the Eucharist at their summit.
But what does this mean for how we engage with fiction? In what way can we take in these signs and symbols for our profit, instead of our downfall? As we recently discussed surrounding our experience with beauty (O Precarious Ally – Part I), fiction can be a powerful tool to lead us into understanding the Truth, even if it represents events that never actually happened. If it represents the Truth, it helps us to understand new facets of that Truth, and provide us with richer and deeper data for understanding that Truth more deeply. If you’d like to delve deeper into this thought and see how we can gain from it in our contemplation of the Truth, join us next month as we explore the importance difference between sacramentality and sentimentality.
[1] 1 John 1:3.
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