“On Fairy-Stories,” Part 3: Recovery

A woman find a fabulous necklace that she absolutely adores, so she buys it but leaves it locked in her jewelry case. A man falls in love with the exquisite face of a woman, so he marries her and soon forgets to appreciate the features he once dreamt about. An art collector purchases a rare and intricate painting, but when he hangs it on his wall, he never remembers to look up at it. In Tolkien’s opinion, what these three need is Recovery.

Last time we began looking at the purpose of fairy-stories. In Tolkien’s opinion, creating believable, artfully-written Fantasy is a purpose in and of itself. But this week we’ll see another purpose for Fantasy: Recovery.

Recovery From What?

When you hear that someone needs recovery, you probably think of it in relation to a sickness or injury. After all, if there’s no malady, then from what is he recovering? But Tolkien describes some artistic sicknesses that had begun plaguing literature during his lifetime, and the symptoms are still around today.

For example, he describes those who out of “boredom or of an anxiety to be original” have developed a dislike for literature and art that is “fine…delicate…and pretty” (145). Instead, they prefer “mere manipulation and overelaboration of old material, clever and heartless” (145). They’d rather see something new and hollow than old and beautiful. He also describes those who prefer to create distorted, misshapen stories. They enjoy “making all things dark or unremittingly violent,” depicting a world without hope or goodness (145-6). There are also those who, instead of displaying the world in bright colors and familiar shapes, choose to pass on “through subtlety to drabness, and the fantastical complication of shapes to the point of silliness and on towards delirium” (146).

If you took a modern literature course in high school or college, then these descriptions may bring several “-isms” to your mind. And if you know Tolkien, you know he dislikes almost all things modern, especially modern “-isms.” That’s why he proposes Recovery.

Familiarity Breeds Apathy

Part of the problem, Tolkien says, is that we’re suffering from a contempt of the familiar. Once we put the word “my” in front of anything, we risk taking it for granted or ignoring it entirely. The world around us tends to be like treasures that we “locked…in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them” (146). Rather than breeding fresh perspective, familiarity tends to breed apathy, if not contempt.

But this is why we need Recovery. Recovery, Tolkien says, is a “regaining of a clear view” in which we begin “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them” (146). And this is where fairy-stories come in. When we see trees or sheep or cottages or wolves in the world around us, we may not give them much thought. Well, maybe we would give some thought to a wolf, but you know what I mean. If these are just objects in “my” world, then there’s nothing very remarkable about them.

But if the cottage is on the edge of an enchanted forest, or if the wolf has mighty big teeth and your grandmother’s bonnet, then we at last begin to see them in a new light. We no longer see them through a window smudged with familiarity; we see them clearly as for the first time.

Earth Is an Alien Planet

In a similar way, we may get occasional glimpses of the world around us as though it were an alien world. Have you ever felt that way before? I sometimes have little “out-of-body” experiences where I look at what’s happening around me and think, “If I didn’t know this was normal, I would think it was very strange indeed.”

I remember feeling that way in a large auditorium after an orchestra concert one night. The room was full of people who all spontaneously and simultaneously began clapping after the song ended. I mean, what in the world? Why are we slapping the extremities of our upper appendages together? I’ve felt the same way when a group of people suddenly breaks into laughter at a joke, everyone barking, braying, wheezing, or guffawing in his own way but at the same time. What is this cacophony? And how did everyone know to do it at that moment?

Humans are very odd creatures.

Mooreeffoc

The sudden realization that the world around us is a strange and foreign land can be referred to by the term Mooreeffoc. Although G.K. Chesterton popularized the term, Charles Dickens really began it. Dickens wrote about sitting at a table in a restaurant and staring out the glass window on which was written the word Mooreeffoc. From the street, of course, the sign merely said Coffee-room. But from his perspective, Dickens felt that he was in a strange and foreign place. That one word sharpened his perspective on the rest of his surroundings.

Chesterton seized on this word, using it to “denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle” (146). In this way, Tolkien says that we may be able to see everything and everyone around us as utterly alien. We can look around us and “see the amazing oddity and interest of [the world’s] inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits” (147). With a change in perspective, we can see life as an observer and not a mere participant.

Simple Is Better

While this may be an interesting experiment or an entertaining pastime, Tolkien doesn’t think it’s the most helpful tool for Recovery. In fact, he believes that more recovery of perspective can come from reading fairy-stories. It’s not that the story has to contain a bunch of made up creatures or previously-unimagined colors. Instead, he says that “fairy-stories deal largely…with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting” (147).

The fantastic setting of a fairy-story sanctifies, as it were, the common inhabitants of the story. In fact, as Tolkien says, “it was in fairy-stories that I first divined…the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine” (147). It doesn’t take much to bring Recovery to our jaded, modern souls—just the fresh perspective that comes from a good fairy-story.

Today’s Question: Have you ever had a Mooreeffoc moment? I’d love to hear about it!

Check out the next post here!

Source:
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London, Harper Collins, 2006.