Children and stories

A dear friend of mine (who is homeschooling her two boys) posted the following quote on her facebook page not too terribly long ago.

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

It struck a chord with me, and harkened me back to some other posts I’ve made about children’s literature. I’ve been looking for a good topic so I could *finally* include one of my blog’s namesakes in a post! I’ve written about Pooh, but Harry Potter hasn’t fit in to any of my “literary” thoughts, until now.

There’s a lot of angst over Harry Potter, if you hadn't noticed. Witches! Magic! Evil things! Rule-breaking! And then you have the arguments in favor of the stories: Friendship! Self-sacrifice! Loyalty! Compassion! But Harry Potter is not the first, nor the last, to juxtapose good and evil. You see it even our earliest fairy tales:

The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. --Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

So really, maybe the point of having kids read Harry Potter, and Tolkien, and Lewis, and fairy tales, and parables, and… well, you get the idea…is to get them to THINK. To exercise that gray matter so they can learn something about the world in which they live. And what they’ll learn is that life isn’t always fair. Sometimes there are kids without parents. Sometimes there are difficult choices to be made. Sometimes people make the wrong choice and must live with that mistake. Sometimes there are wicked and scary things. And sometimes people find themselves in a moment of grace and peace and perfect Joy*. But if you don’t expose kids to these kinds of ideas when they’re young how then will they deal with life-changing, or scary, or even ordinary events as they grow older?

*Joy, in my sense, has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with [happiness and pleasure]; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is. --C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Dante's Inferno - the Game

I kid you not.

From About this Game:
"Inspired by the real Dante Alighieri, but adapted for a new generation and a new medium, the hero of the game is a soldier who defies death and fights for love against impossible odds. The Italian mercenary Dante returns home from the wars to find that his beloved Beatrice has been murdered, and her soul pulled down into Hell by a dark force. He gives chase, and vows to get her back. For weapons, he wields Death's soul-reaping scythe, and commands holy powers of the cross, given to him by Beatrice."

And then it goes on to say:
"At the midpoint on the journey of life, I found myself in a dark forest, for the clear path was lost" (opening line of The Divine Comedy). In the game, Dante goes on a spectacular journey through the afterlife to save his beloved Beatrice from the clutches of evil. But what starts out as a rescue mission quickly changes into a redemption story, where Dante must confront his own dark past and the sins he carries with him into Hell. He faces the epic inhospitable terrain of the underworld, huge monsters and guardians, sinister demons, the people and sins of his past, and the ultimate traitor: Lucifer himself."

OK. So let me get this straight. EA Games has released a video game based on Dante? And apparently Dante fights creatures and kills Lucifer? And they thought it was a good idea? I am appalled on so many levels I just don't know where to begin. He's not there to save Beatrice... here's there to save HIMSELF. And he certainly doesn't wield a scythe.

::she sputters with indignation::

This is a work that is full of political and religious allegory and allusion. It's not an action adventure story like you'd find in Robert Jordan or Tom Clancy or Douglas Preston. The Divine Comedy is a Christian story - a Catholic story - steeped in St. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. As Dorothy Sayers put it:

We must also be prepared, while we are reading Dante, to accept the Christian and Catholic view of ourselves as responsible rational beings. We must abandon any idea that we are the slaves of chance, or environment, or our subconscious; any vague notion that good and evil are merely relative terms, or that conduct and opinion do not really matter; any comfortable persuasion that, however shiftlessly we muddle through life, it will somehow or other all come right on the night. We must try to believe that man's will is free, that he can consciously exercise choice, and that his choice can be decisive to all eternity. For The Divine Comedy is precisely the drama of the soul's choice. It is not a fairy-story, but a great Christian allegory, deriving its power from the terror and splendour of the Christian revelation. Clear, hard thought went to its making: its beauty is of that solid and indestructible sort that is built upon a framework of nobly proportioned bones. If we ignore the theological structure, and merely browse about in it for detached purple passages and poetic bits and pieces we shall be disappointed, and never see the architectural grandeur of the poem as a whole.*

So the game creators expect us to leave this vast richness behind, and treat Dante like we would any two-bit crappy author, ready for conversion to an action adventure movie and a video game and action figures??!? Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

*From the introduction to her translation of The Divine Comedy.

50 Greatest Villains in Literature

You just never know what you're going to find when you walk out the door in the morning. Or as Bilbo Baggins once said, "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Metaphorically speaking (of course) that can be applied to a few minutes of internet browsing combined with a hefty dose of serendipity. Today, while doing something completely different, I landed on an article that made my literature-major-antennae perk up and take notice.

The Telegraph (A London paper) got a few literary critics together and compiled a list of the 50 Greatest Villains in Literature. The article begins:

Compiling a list of the 50 Greatest Villains in Literature, without too much recourse to comics and children's books, proved trickier than we'd imagined - but gosh it was fun.

It's perhaps the nature of grown-up literature that it doesn't all that often have villains, in the sense of coal-black embodiments of the principle of evil. And even when it does, it's not always so easy to tell who they are. Is God the baddie, or Satan?Ahab, or the white whale?

Yet even writers as subtle as Vladimir Nabokov have spiced their work with a fiend or two. And here they are. We hope you'll furnish a few more we missed. These are the best of the worst: bloodsuckers, pederasts, cannibals, Old Etonians...the dastardliest dastards ever to have lashed damsel to track and waited for a through train.

So check it out. See where villains like Voldemort, the White Witch, Iago, Milton's Satan, Moriarty, and Sauron fall in the grand scheme of things. I'm still considering who I think was seriously overlooked. Certainly some Stephen King bad guys are missing - Randall Flagg and Annie Wilkes, and non-human characters like Cujo (who probably contributed to my deep-seated fear of large dogs!).

And the authors bring up a good question. Why is it that adult literature often has really distorted villains, such that we are never really sure they're a bad guy at all? And kids' books just nail it - you know exactly who the villain is and you rejoice in his ultimate downfall. Indeed, because you KNOW he's the villain you know, just KNOW, he will never triumph in his nefarious plans. Is it because the books for children have, as part of their structure, "life lessons" in the form of good guys and bad guys? With the implicit (or explicit) encouragement to be like the ones wearing white? And if so, is that really the ultimate purpose of literature? Should a book be read as an example of good and evil, a teaching tool for right belief, a way to discern and build upon a particular worldview?

Or, on the other hand, is literature simply a way to build upon more prosaic endeavours - the more you read the more you learn about good writing, the more you learn about good writing the better you write, the better you write, the better a student you become and so on and so on. The characters are interesting because if they weren't no one would read and ... well, you get the idea. (I'm not saying I have an answer here - it's an honest question.)

Well, I suppose I do have an ulterior motive, if not any kind of answer. The philospher is working on a book about classical education, and we've been having conversations about whether or not literature should be included as part of the trivium. And if it should be included... why? This summer we spent a large part of a West Virginia vacation with our favorite biologist debating this very question. We were talking about higher education, but the question applies equally well, I think, to juvenile literature. The philosopher managed to shoot down both of the theories I mentioned above, using his well-trained philosophic craft and deep understanding of the underlying issues. If I had a brain for that kind of thing I'd happily relate his conclusions, but I only vaguely understood him then and now that several months have passed the rhetoric is even more muddled in my mind. He tells me that he's come up with an excellent argument for the inclusion of literature in the classical trivium now, but I have yet to hear his exposition on that particular case.

So anyway, what do y'all think? Did you see any glaring holes in the villains list? And if you're so inclined to stretch your brain along the lines of my other train of thought, do you think there's a good argument for including the study of literature in the trivium?

Books and Movies

Frederica Mathewes-Green (A sometimes-contributor to Touchstone Magazine) has produced a list of movies which she considers better than the books on which they were based. You can see her article here. I will list her top ten, but definitely hop over to her article which expounds on her rationale.

1. Gone with the Wind
2. The Godfather
3. The Wizard of Oz
4. The Princess Bride
5. Jaws
6. Forrest Gump
7. Blade Runner
8. The Lord of the Rings (series)
9. Harry Potter (series)
10. Adaptation

Indeed, I agree with her on the top 7. (And I haven't seen or read #10.) I've seen the movies and I've read the books. I might quibble with #4, because the book was written not merely as a novel. But the movie stands on its own quite well, so I won't quibble too much!

Ah, but the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I take decided umbrage with that (no pun intended!) Say what you will about the Potter series, but the movies cannot - by the simple expedient that you cannot fit all the details of a 900 page novel into a 2-hour film - match the depth and breadth of the books. Regardless of whether you think Harry Potter is a load of tripe or deeply meaningful or merely a smashing story, the books have the value of detail and character building and so much else that you cannot capture on screen.

The same is true, though even more potently, with the Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson turned out a beautiful series of films, but some of the glaring omissions, additions and horrible changes to characters and events make the movies pale by comparison. I could talk about the revision of Faramir's character, or the weakness of Elijah Wood's Frodo, or the reduction of Saruman's insidiousness in his destruction of the Shire. And yes, I could also talk about the stunning music and scenery that brings Middle Earth to brilliant, shining life and the tremendous fearfulness of the portrayal of the orcs, but the positives here just cannot outweigh the negatives.

But since the topic has been dealt with admirably in her article, I have a poser of my own: Are there any books out there - written after the movie was released - that can hold up as a story on their own? Admittedly, most novelizations are dry and boring, and only enjoyable if you like to re-live the screenplay in print rather than, well, on-screen. There have been some notable exceptions, though. I'm thinking here of Orson Scott Card's stunning novelization of the blockbuster movie The Abyss. Card brings to life the backstory, this history, of the main characters: Bud, Lindsey, Coffey, and the NTIs themselves. Coffey is not a mere villian, so after reading his story you become sympathetic to his plight deep underwater. You have a deeper understanding of what make Bud and Lindsey tick, and their interactions become more clear and understandable. Especially, though, you learn about the NTIs, where they came from and why they decide to "interfere" with the events on the surface. (And despite the additions in the director's cut, that is still quite vague in the movie version!) Did you like the movie? The definitely hope over to your local library and check out the book!

So, any other nominations for the (presumably short) list?

Of Prunes, Pumpkin Juice and Stewed Rabbit

This is one of my favorite quotes from Lewis, as he talks about how the author of children's stories needs to connect to his audience, not as a teacher or a parent, but beyond those types of relationships. He writes:

"Once in a hotel dining-room, I said, rather too loudly, "I loathe prunes." "So do I" came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities. ("On Three Ways of Writing for Children")

Which leads me into my main argument - that Good Stories have a universal appeal. And part of that is because the authors don't try to act like a teacher or parent to the reader. The reader is an equal, regardless of his age, and that must certainly makes any story more accessible and attractive! But I think there's something more to it, and that's where I'm headed...

I've been reading C. S. Lewis's collection of essays called Of Other Worlds, which is about writing and fiction and fantasy and fairy tales. I was having a discussion with someone here in the library about Harry Potter, and we were debating about whether or not Rowling's work should be considered in the same breath with Tolkien (and Lewis, and Le Guin, and all those others that seem to come up as comparisons). The ultimate question then, is "What makes a fantasy novel 'good'?" (Philosophers, feel free to chime in!) Lewis makes the comment:

If good novels are comments on life, good stories of this sort [the marvelous and fantastic] (which are much rarer) are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience. ("On Science Fiction")

Which reminds me of a quote by Frederick Buechner:

... faith is like the dream in which the clouds open to show such riches ready to drop upon us that when we wake into the reality of nothing more than common sense, we cry to dream again because dreaming seems truer than the waking does to the fullness of reality not as we have seen it, to be sure, but as by faith we trust it to be without seeing. (Sacred Journey)

So according to Lewis, a good fantasy story "expands our horizons", and I would say it also gives us a longing to return to that world. Admit it, you Tolkien and Potter fans, how many times have you read the books??!? Yes, I know Buechner is talking about Christian faith in this passage, but I might argue that our faith in the Story (to borrow from Tolkien again) has the same effect. Good novels and good stories open doors for the reader, and we are free to wander in and take up residence for as long as the story lasts. Indeed, once there we can take what we learn within the story and apply it to our own Story when we return to the world of the mundane.

And you know what's really interesting to me? (I touched on this in my Pooh Lessons post) Many of the best stories are stories for children. Pooh. Wind in the Willows. Narnia. Grimms' and Anderson's and Aesop's fables and fairy tales. And (in my humble opinion) the best of these stories are not the "mundane", but the fantastic - those that take us out of our everyday world and plop us down in the middle of Someplace Else. I enjoy children's stories much more as an adult than I did as a child, and that's a good thing, according to Lewis. "... a children's story which is only enjoyed by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last." ("On Three Ways of Writing for Children")

Maybe as adults we are attracted to these stories, not only because we better understand the deeper narrative, but because they connect us to an age of innocence amd remind us how to "do nothing". In the final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner ("In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There") Christopher Robin tells Pooh that he won't be able to "do nothing" anymore.

"I like that too," said Christopher Robin, "but what I like doing best is Nothing."
"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going of to do it, What are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh nothing, and then you go and do it."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh. "This is the sort of thing that we're doing right now."
...Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands, called out, "Pooh!"
"Yes?" said Pooh.
"When I'm --- when --- Pooh!"
"Yes, Christopher Robin?"
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not much. They won't let you."
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.
"Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully.
"Pooh, when I'm --- you know --- when I'm not doing Nothing, will you be here sometimes?"
"Just me?"
"Yes, Pooh."
"Will you be here too?"
"Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh."
"That's good," said Pooh.
"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred."

Sitting down and getting drawn into a good book, for me, is the best and most beloved time of "doing nothing." Good novels, good Stories (whether they're about pumpkin juice or stewed rabbit) will always be there, and we readers won't forget about them. And that's the thing, I think, about children's stories. We read them as kids and they stick. We re-read them as adults and return to them, even if we're a hundred. Our childhood and our adulthood are made better because of them.

PoohSticks and PoohLessons

I had a very thought provoking chat with a friend yesterday about the Pooh books by A. A. Milne. If you haven't read them - specifically Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner - hie thee hence to the nearest bookstore, purchase and read them posthaste! Anyway, my friend professed that she really didn't think she understood the Pooh books. My initial thought was "oh my, how could anyone say that??" which slipped quickly into "oh, my - how do I understand Pooh??!? I have very specific ideas regarding Pooh, but I don't think I ever tried to articulate them in any coherent way. I've READ essays and articles that made me say, "Yes, indeedy! That is it exactly!" but my own cohesive thoughts were still unformed. So I will give it a go here, with the full confession that these ideas are most likely not original to me. Many deeper and more thoughtful minds wrote things that struck a chord, and helped me define what it is that makes Pooh so special.

Pooh just IS. Pooh, along with other books I read as a child, made me what I am today - a book lover with a deep appreciation of good literature. It's simplicity and beauty and childlike wonder prepared me for a world of filled with works of authors like Tolkien, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Pooh - and his bookshelf companions like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, Kenneth Grahame, E. B. White and Laura Ingalls Wilder - were the building blocks for my literary education. I surely didn't realize it at the time... but does any child really understand when her mind is being prepared for things to come?

It wasn't until after college (long after college) that a similar conversation about children's books made me realize how important Pooh and his friends were as part of my introduction to literature. The silliness and wonder of Pooh prepares us for an introduction to the more profound writings we encounter as we grow older. Those who read Pooh and all those bookshelf buddies become was saturated in myth, fable, and Story (a la Tolkien). These early forays into literature prepare the mind for the great books that come later, and give the reader a deeper appreciation of the stories within.

So, Pooh. Haven't read it? Do!

Was Frodo a Calvinist?

Have I admitted recently that I am a Tolkien nerd? If not, I humbly admit it now. {{grin}}

I recently re-watched The Lord of the Rings (LotR), and was having a conversation with someone that made me stop and think. First of all, I don't despise the movies as some die-hard fans do. I think Peter Jackson did all right most of the time. The Faramir thing, tho, and the Sam/Gollum/Frodo thing on the stairs in Mordor, are almost unforgivable. I do confess to fast forwarding through the latter during my last viewing. (And I probably will again, next time I watch!)

But here's my biggest beef, I think. I'm just not crazy about the way Elijah Wood plays Frodo. Or at the very least, how he was directed to play Frodo (not sure if that was an actor or a director failing). In the books you get the sense that, yes, Frodo was "pulled" into this adventure through no design of his own. But once he gets on the Road, he is determined to see it through to whatever bitter end may come. You read about his fighting against the power of the ring, resisting it at every moment. For me, that internal struggle is very important. He knows what he has to do. He's fighting every step to do it, despite incredible pressure to surrender the ring to Sauron.

In the movies, Frodo seems much weaker. Sam saves him from surrendering the ring to the Nazgul in Osgiliath. Aragorn saves him on Weathertop. The few times you see him "fight" with the ring's power, he simply looks like he's about to barf (You know that look on his face - it's more reminiscent of indigestion than determination!). You just don't get that same sense of deep and abiding struggle that you read page after page in the books. Now, I do know that there are some scenes where you do see him fight... at least twice (off the top of my head) I can thing of Frodo and Gollum locked in battle. But in these cases, Frodo isn't fighting against the ring, Frodo is fighting to KEEP the ring. But I'm digressing....

Anyway, as we were talking about this after the movie ended, my conversation buddie said... "In the movies, Frodo is a Calvinist. In the books, he's a Thomist." First I must say that I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher, so what follows here can probably be picked apart by just about anyone. But I thought I'd throw it out for further consideration anyway! Why is he a Calvinist in the movie? Because everything that happens is external to him. Sam saves him from the Nazgul. He's mainly just going with the flow - you don't see him initiating or changing events, but reacting. Yes, I do know he's changing events by destroying the ring in the end, and changing events by saying he'll take the ring in the first place!) But on the whole, you don't see any internal motivation. In the books, he has an inner grace (I'm thinking here of the Anglican phrase: "The sacraments are an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace") that gives him strength and courage to keep up the struggle. That's more of a Thomistic (or Augustinian) attribute. You are given grace to draw upon in daily (or dire) struggles. The grace comes from God, but it is held within yourself. Calvinism would have that grace being from "without."

Tolkien even speaks of it outright in many cases. After Boromir tries to take the ring and Frodo has put it on to escape, he is seen/felt by the Eye on Amon Hen, which calls him to Sauron. We find later that Gandalf fights on his behalf, and the ensuing (internal) battle reads like this:

He heard himself crying out: Never, never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell. Then as a flash from some other point of power there came to his mind another thought: Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the ring!

The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose... (Fellowship, p. 404)

This deep internal struggle doesn't come across very well on screen. The force of will (the grace) he summons to defy Sauron is seen in the movies as events imposed upon him as opposed to through him. At the most, when we see Frodo make decisions, we get no sense of struggle when the decision is made.

So there's my foray into theology for the night. A pitiful attempt, I am sure, but that's all you get from a Zana of very little brain! 8-)

Cauldron of Story

I was reading the book From Homer to Harry Potter recently, and was reminded of Tolkien's notion of the "cauldron of story." My memory is that this comes from his essay "On Fairy Stories," but I'll confirm that and make the proper annotation later. This cauldron is where every writer goes (in his mind) to get ideas for stories. It consists of all life experiences, all stories and tales that have ever been read or written. So when the writer dips in the ladle, even his own original stories are infused with the essence of tales that have gone before. So we have Beowulf peeking out from the pages of The Lord of the Rings, and medieval heroism creeping about in Order of the Phoenix. It's why, when a Tolkien fan sees a large crane moving uprooted trees across the quad, the immediate notion is that it looks like the march of the Ents across Isengard.

Anyway, I find myself drawn to this idea - it's comforting, in a way, to know that even the most original and unique stories are part of something deeper and larger. And if I ever write a story or tell a tale, that too will be added to the cauldron - a tiny bit of my own flavor to season some other author's imaginings someday.