The Gospel and the Fairy Tale

For Christmas I received a book entitled The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing, an anthology of essays and reflections compiled by Leland Ryken, professor of English at Wheaton College. This has been one of the best gifts I have ever received. I have not finished it, but it has already enhanced my appreciation for literature and taught me new things about reading and writing. (And it might just convince me that realism is on par with fantasy, which is why I avoid the realism section. The first essay on the topic was already good, and I am scared of what follows it.)

The book is divided into ten parts; each part features essays on a particular subject. I am and have been since childhood an unabashed fantasy fan, so I flipped straight to Part 8: Myth and Fantasy. To my delight, the first selection came from Frederick Buechner's Telling the Truth: The Gospel As Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. This particular excerpt was (obviously) the Gospel As Fairy Tale. (I had read about Buechner from Gene Edward Veith, Jr.'s Reading Between the Lines, which is responsible for getting me hyped up about literature in general [I even read the poetry section, despite my dislike of poetry. {Except for Shelley's Ozymandias. Seriously, that poem is good -- and understandable}]. Veith recommended quite a few of Buechner's books, one of which was Telling the Truth. Hence, my excitement.) The Gospel As Fairy Tale begins with a topic familiar to me, (again, due to Veith) the universality, timelessness, and appeal of the fairy tale. Buechner includes a beautiful quote from Tolkien about the fairy tale:

...[the fairy tale] does not deny the existence of... sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of the deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat..., giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of the 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 that given by any form of literary art.

Buechner continues to write of the Joy of the "happily ever after", not as portrayed in spotless Disney Land but that which happens in a dark world akin to ours -- the happily ever after which gives "a fleeting glimpse of Joy... beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief" which can bring tears to our eyes.

Tolkien's "turn" mentioned in the quote above deserves more explanation, because it is one of his most brilliant concepts. This "turn" is what he calls eucatastrophe, the "good turn", which he believes to be the opposite of tragedy. Tolkien writes in his essay "On Fairy-Stories" that the "eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function". He continues to write of the Gospel as fairy tale, a notion that both he and Buechner share:

I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels... and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. The story begins and ends in joy.

 Buechner writing on the same point is a vivid storyteller:

Like the fairy-tale world, the world of the Gospel is a world of darkness, and many of the great scenes take place at night. The child is born at night. He had his first meal in the dark at his mother's breast, and he had his last meal in the dark too.... In the garden he could hardly see the face that leaned forward to kiss him, and from the sixth hour to the ninth hour the sun went out like a match so he died in the same darkness that he was born in and rose in it....

In  the world of the fairy tale, the wicked sisters are dressed as if for a Palm Beach wedding, and in the world of the Gospel it is the killjoys, the phonies, the nitpickers, the holier-than-thous, the loveless and cheerless and irrelevant.... It is the ravening wolves who wear sheep's clothing.... When Jesus is asked who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, he reaches into the crown and pulls out a child with a cheek full of bubble gum and eyes full of whatever a child's eyes are full of and says unless you can become like that, don't bother to ask.

And as for the king of the kingdom himself, whoever would recognize him? He has no form or comeliness. His clothes are what he picked up at a rummage sale. He hasn't shaved for weeks. He smells of mortality. We have romanticized his raggedness so long that we can catch echoes only of the way it must have scandalized his time in the horrified question of the Baptist's disciples, "Are you he who is to come?"; in Pilate's "Are you the king of the Jews?"... in the black comedy of the sign they nailed over his head where the joke was written out in three languages so nobody would miss the laugh.

But the whole point of the fairy tale of the Gospel, is of course, that he is the king in spite of everything. The frog turns out to be the prince, the ugly duckling the swan.... There is no less danger and darkness in the Gospel than there is in the Brothers Grimm, but beyond and above all there is the joy of it, the tale of a light breaking into the world that not even the darkness can overcome.

Returning to Tolkien:

But in God's kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the "happy ending". 

These two essays have heightened my appreciation of the Gospels and the story of the Bible as a whole as narrative. They have portrayed the Gospel in a wonderful way -- freshly wonderful. Tolkien's eucatastrophe has altered how I see Christ's first coming in history, and Buechner has beautifully portrayed Christ's work as a fairy story -- or, as Tolkien wrote, a larger kind of story "which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories". Indeed, the fairy tale that is the Gospel is larger and better than all other fairy tales, greater than the legends which it has hallowed, simply because this "tale of a light breaking into the world that not even the darkness can overcome" happened not in a land far, far away, but in our very time-space, and this fairy tale gives us not only glimpses but tastes of that "Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief". Tolkien writes:

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would fell, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be "primarily" true, its narrative to be history.... The Christian joy, the Gloria, is... pre-eminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous.

I still have more to blog about, especially on fantasy, and simply need more bursts of diligence to do so. These two essays are a mere 16 pages in this 465-page book, and there is much more to be gleaned. (Although I am not too excited about realism and poetry.)