I am, and have been for many years, a fan of fantasy and science fiction. Fortunately for me, as an English major, I attended a college with an English department that was generally open to such things, without too many professors who drew a distinction between ““genre fiction” and “real literature.” (I could go off on a rant about how “literary fiction” is just another genre, and indeed one of the more rulebound, hidebound and unprofitable ones, but . . . some other time.) I appreciated that at the time because it meant I didn’t have to feel put down (very often) for my reading preferences; over the years, I’ve come to appreciate it even more as I’ve come to realize just how constraining the standard academic view of literature really is. John W. Campbell, Jr., founding father of modern science fiction, famously argued that science fiction is the only real literature because it alone encompasses all possible pasts, presents and futures (and thus includes all literature); I think his conclusion is overblown, but he has a point.
It seems to me that what distinguishes real literature from efforts which don’t rise to that level is that real literature opens our eyes, our minds, our ears, and our hearts—it helps us to see, hear, and understand people, including ourselves, for who we are, and our world for what it is. The thing about science fiction, moving forward and backward along the axis of time (including onto the parallel tracks of alternate history), and fantasy, moving sideways along the axis of alternate worlds, is that they offer far more angles from which to do this. Indeed, by adopting an “unreal” setting, I think they make it easier for us to see and understand our world and ourselves more deeply than we can within a “realistic” frame of reference. (The flip side to this would be the way in which “reality shows” are the most unreal things on television.)
Now, I’ve been convinced of this for a long time, and in the process I’ve learned a lot of good theology from fantasy writers like C. S. Lewis (no surprise), J. R. R. Tolkien (ditto), and Stephen R. Donaldson (which might be a little more unexpected); but it’s not a case I’ve heard many people make. Now, however, along has come Alison Milbank with her book Chesterton and Tolkien As Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real to explore the truth of this in the work of these two great English Catholic writers. I can’t comment directly on the book, since even on Amazon, it’s going for $93.60, and that just isn’t in the budget right now; but from the review Ralph Wood wrote for the First Things website (in “On the Square”), I’m very much looking forward to reading it. In Chesterton and Tolkien (among others), we are caught by the understanding that the world is more real, and high and beautiful and perilous and terrible, than our senses tell us it is; and from what Wood has to say, Milbank captures this well.
Both writers resorted to fantasy as an escape into reality, as Tolkien liked to say. They were fascinated with fairies because Elfland, as Chesterton called it, enabled them to envision the world as wondrously magical no less than terribly contingent: as “utterly real and enchanted at one and the same time.” Whereas conventional Christian apologists often cast theological stones at the obduracy of atheists and materialists, Tolkien and Chesterton answer them with dwarves and ents.
Beautiful. I look forward to reading this book.