A few weeks ago, Riley and I got together in Northern Virginia to spend some time working on Geeky Stoics’ future. For me, the highlight was taking a morning walk out in the Manassas Battlefield Park and sharing some ideas with each other about why we take fiction so seriously. The goal was a candid conversation.
At the heart of this exchange is a common disagreement between fans of stories like Star Wars, Marvel, or even The Lord of the Rings, which is….are we supposed to take these stories seriously as suggestions on how to live our real lives? Many will argue that Star Wars, for example, isn’t “political” or meant to be taken philosophically. “It’s escapist entertainment!”
Has seeing Luke Skywalker face down Darth Vader in Cloud City ever made a member of the audience more cowardly?
Did anyone ever walk away from seeing The Return of the King and say “I want to be more like Denethor?
I don’t know anyone who read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and then held up Edmund as a paragon of moral virtue which they sought to emulate.
I remember distinctly drawing on the popular anime Dragon Ball Z for courage when I was being bullied in the 5th grade. It was only “escapism” till I went to school the next day, carrying those ideas, battles and character arcs with me in my head.
Stories show us the way. They give us a lens by which to see the world. And don’t get me wrong…stories can offer us quite smudged glasses. They can lead us astray. If you listened to the ideas of George R.R. Martin as expressed in A Song of Fire and Ice (AKA Game of Thrones), you’d walk away believing honor and honesty were for suckers.
Every storyteller gives you a spin on the human experience and what good is. No one is neutral.
I hope you enjoy the video above, which is available in full to Paid Supporters of Geeky Stoics. Below is more reading available from C.S Lewis’ essay on the importance of children’s stories and how to write for kids.
This particular passage is about the cutting criticism of “grow the hell up” when someone wishes to steer you toward proper “adult” literature and stories. Why are you still watching The Empire Strikes Back and revisiting the Harry Potter books when you could be consuming something more elite and “grown-up”?
Enjoy.
On Three Ways of Writing for Children | C.S. Lewis
The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change. I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed. A tree grows because it adds rings: a train doesn’t grow by leaving one station behind and puffing on to the next. In reality, the case is stronger and more complicated than this. I think my growth is just as apparent when I now read the fairy tales as when I read the novelists, for I now enjoy the fairy tales better than I did in childhood; being now able to put more in, of course I get more out. But I do not here stress that point. Even if it were merely a taste for grown-up literature added to an unchanged taste for children’s literature, addition would still be entitled to the name ‘growth’, and the process of merely dropping one parcel when you pick up another would not.
It is, of course, true that the process of growing does, incidentally and unfortunately, involve some more losses. But that is not the essence of growth, certainly not what makes growth admirable or desirable. If it were, if to drop parcels and to leave stations behind were the essence and virtue of growth, why should we stop at the adult? Why should not senile be equally a term of approval? Why are we not to be congratulated on losing our teeth and hair? Some critics seem to confuse growth with the cost of growth and also to wish to make that cost far higher than, in nature, it need be.
The whole association of fairy tale and fantasy with childhood is local and accidental. I hope everyone has read Tolkien’s essay on Fairy Tales, which is perhaps the most important contribution to the subject that anyone has yet made. If so, you will know already that, in most places and times, the fairy tale has not been specially made for, nor exclusively enjoyed by, children. It has gravitated to the nursery when it became unfashionable in literary circles, just as unfashionable furniture gravitated to the nursery in Victorian houses. In fact, many children do not like this kind of book, just as many children do not like horsehair sofas: and many adults do like it, just as many adults like rocking chairs. And those who do like it, whether young or old, probably like it for the same reason. And none of us can say with any certainty what that reason is. The two theories which are most often in my mind are those of Tolkien and of Jung. According to Tolkien1 the appeal of the fairy story lies in the fact that man there most fully exercises his function as a “subcreator”; not, as they love to say now, making a ‘comment upon life’ but making, so far as possible, a subordinate world of his own. Since, in Tolkien’s view, this is one of man’s proper functions, delight naturally arises whenever it is successfully performed. For Jung, fairy tale liberates Archetypes which dwell in the collective unconscious, and when we read a good fairy tale we are obeying the old precept ‘Know thyself. I would venture to add to this my own theory, not indeed of the Kind as a whole, but of one feature in it: I mean, the presence of beings other than human which yet behave, in varying degrees, humanly: the giants and dwarfs and talking beasts. I believe these to be at least (for they may have many other sources of power and beauty) an admirable hieroglyphic which conveys psychology, types” of character, more briefly than novelistic presentation and to readers whom novelistic presentation could not yet reach. Consider Mr Badger in The Wind in the Willows—that extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness, and goodness. The child who has once met Mr Badger has ever afterwards, in its bones, a knowledge of humanity and of English social history which it could not get in any other way
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