Humans need fantasies to be human

[Frelga]

I started thinking some time ago about why it was so important to me that my son read Tolkien, Pratchett, Rowling and other fantasy stories. I will post my own thoughts later, but for now, Pratchett said it best.

From Hogfather.

Susan: "You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."
Death: REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASIES TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
Susan: "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little--"
Death: YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
Susan: "So we can believe the big ones?"
Death: YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
Susan: They're not the same at all.
Death:YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER, AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE, AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET, YOU TRY TO ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD. AS IF THERE IS SOME, SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE, BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what's the point?
Death: YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?

[Teremia]

Hogfather! Which I, thanks to you, have read!!!!



Death and Susan are two of my favorite peoples, too.

[narya]

I still haven't convinced my parents of the utility of fantasy and sci fi movies. They want good old believable fiction, like, say, musicals.

[WampusCat]

When I saw the title of this thread, I immediately thought of that conversation from "Hogfather." (It helps that I just finished it last week.)

I'm tempted to agree with Death on this. We are a species that needs to exercise imagination just as much as our physical bodies and the logical part of our minds. We need to believe.

Experience tells me, though, that many people have absolutely no taste for anything that could remotely be termed fantasy. They want their stories grounded in Life As It Is, thank you very much.

[River]

TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

There's something very profound in that. It brings to mind an image that I wish I had the skill to draw. But I've noticed Pratchett has a knack for sprinkling these deep gut-punch comments on the human condition within the comedy.

Not everyone likes fantasy as a genre, but it's a rare person that can't tolerate any kind of fiction. It's true that we need to believe things are possible before we can make them happen but I also think there's more to it than just that. We need to feel like we're part of a something bigger than ourselves, like our existence has some meaning. Perhaps this is the cost of self-awareness and intelligence. And I'll meet your Pratchett with some Neil Stephenson (just because I ran across this in Anathem and it resonated hard). Here, the main character is meditating on what makes him, an avout (think of something akin to a monk, but instead of being praying to God and illuminating manuscripts he doesn't believe in God and does math) and his unlooked-for ally, a river guide, different from just about everyone else he's met outside his concent (think of a university that no one ever leaves): "Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power, but of story. If their employees cam home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part?"

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

Tom Stoppard wrote in Arcadia that "When we have solved all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore." Durkheim (I believe it was) who wrote in the 19th century that science was replacing spirit to the point that it was sapping humanity of something vital. I think it's the same kind of thing.

Pratchett (as usual) said it best, in The Last Hero. "He'd never been keen on heroes. But he realised that he needed them to be there, like forests and mountains . . . he might never see them, but they filled some sort of hole in his mind. Some sort of hole in everyone's mind."

I am keen on heroes, though. I think heroes, and fantasy, give us ideals. They're a picture of a more beautiful world, where heroism and justice can triumph and the encroaching darkness (be it an evil overlord or a collapsing economy) can be kept at bay or even just forgotten for a little while. Fantasy gives us something beautiful for which we can live instead of just surviving. I think a way stories are the soul of the world.

The hero doesn't always triumph and sometimes evil does win. I'll be the first to admit that I adore a good tragedy. In the balance, however, there always seems to be some good that comes out of the pain and general awfulness. That can be hard, if not impossible, to find in the real world.

They want good old believable fiction, like, say, musicals.

Are you implying that musical aren't realistic? Surely not.

[MithLuin]

Not everyone likes fantasy as a genre, but it's a rare person that can't tolerate any kind of fiction.

My sister is one such person. While she has read some works of fiction (certainly the ones required for school), she has never shown any interest or liking for them, and usually refuses to read novels. She has seen the LotR and Narnia movies, but will never read the books. In fact, she was much more willing to delve into Lewis' Mere Christianity, precisely because it wasn't fiction. Fiction with a 'realistic setting' doesn't make it any better for her - she'd rather read about real people (who actually lived), not characters, and get the ideas/philosophy directly rather than teasing it out of a story. She enjoys CSI, but also watching the Discovery Health Channel.

The only fiction my brother has read and enjoyed is the Harry Potter books; he does not read much, but when he does, he tends to read war memoirs, or something "based on a true story," like Into the Wild. He likes the History and Discovery Channels, and asked for the BBC's "Planet Earth" series for Christmas.

My mother referred to every fantasy or sci-fi novel I ever read (including Tolkien and Verne) as "trash," and always urged me to read biographies.

My other sister was an English major, and our other brother likes to read mysteries and some fantasy and sci-fi (he likes Tolkien, Harry Potter and Ender's Game). I gave my father "The Divine Comedy" for Christmas, and he did make a good effort to read it. So don't worry, I'm not alone in my family


As a comment, I do not think that Justice, Mercy and Duty are not real simply because they are not material. Truth is very important, and very much 'real'. I don't think we make it so, either; I think that truth is something we can discover, learn about, or rail against...but it was there before us, and we can't change it, only engage with it or deepen our understanding of it. The fact that many situations are unjust does not mean that justice is not real. The very fact that we complain about injustice suggests that justice is real.

To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though 'breathed through silver'.

Philomythus to Misomythus

You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are 'trees', and growing is 'to grow');
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star's a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.

At bidding of a Will, to which we bend
(and must), but only dimly apprehend,
great processes march on, as Time unrolls
from dark beginnings to uncertain goals;
and as on page o'er-written without clue,
with script and limning packed of various hue,
an endless multitude of forms appear,
some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer,
each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
God made the petreous rocks, the arboreal trees,
tellurian earth, and stellar stars, and these
homuncular men, who walk upon the ground
with nerves that tingle touched by light and sound.
The movements of the sea, the wind in boughs,
green grass, the large slow oddity of cows,
thunder and lightning, birds that wheel and cry,
slime crawling up from mud to live and die,
these each are duly registered and print
the brain's contortions with a separate dint.

Yet trees are not 'trees', until so named and seen
and never were so named, till those had been
who speech's involuted breath unfurled,
faint echo and dim picture of the world,
but neither record nor a photograph,
being divination, judgement, and a laugh
response of those that felt astir within
by deep monition movements that were kin
to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars:
free captives undermining shadowy bars,
digging the foreknown from experience
and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.
Great powers they slowly brought out of themselves
and looking backward they beheld the elves
that wrought on cunning forges in the mind,
and light and dark on secret looms entwined.

He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-pattemed; and no earth,
unless the mother's womb whence all have birth.

The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.

Yes! 'wish-fulfilment dreams' we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem?
All wishes are not idle, nor in vain
fulfilment we devise -- for pain is pain,
not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will
alike were graceless; and of Evil this
alone is deadly certain: Evil is.

Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;
that seek no parley, and in guarded room,
though small and bate, upon a clumsy loom
weave tissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow's sway.

Blessed are the men of Noah's race that build
their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).

Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair,
and those that hear them yet may yet beware.
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have tuned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.

I would that I might with the minstrels sing
and stir the unseen with a throbbing string.
I would be with the mariners of the deep
that cut their slender planks on mountains steep
and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest,
for some have passed beyond the fabled West.
I would with the beleaguered fools be told,
that keep an inner fastness where their gold,
impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring
to mint in image blurred of distant king,
or in fantastic banners weave the sheen
heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends
if by God's mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker's art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.

In Paradise perchance the eye may stray
from gazing upon everlasting Day
to see the day illumined, and renew
from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.
Then looking on the Blessed Land 'twill see
that all is as it is, and yet made free:
Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,
garden nor gardener, children nor their toys.
Evil it will not see, for evil lies
not in God's picture but in crooked eyes,
not in the source but in malicious choice,
and not in sound but in the tuneless voice.
In Paradise they look no more awry;
and though they make anew, they make no lie.
Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,
and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
there each shall choose for ever from the All.

The poem is addressed to the 'Myth-hater', none other than C.S. Lewis, who was going through his 'the legends of the North are evil and lead people (namely me) astray' phase. I think a lot of people see the definition of a myth as "a story that isn't true," rather than "a story that tells truth through metaphor." The 'Myth-lover' is, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien, expounding on the wonders of human subcreation in "Mythopoeia" . He brings this up again in 'On Fairy Stories'.

[Primula Baggins]

Let me defend science against the charge of strangling spirit and myth. Durkheim in the 19th century was writing about 19th-century science, which was an orderly business engaged in classifying and labeling the natural world and explaining (as they thought) everything. Wasn't it in the 1890s that a prominent physicist said that pretty much everything was now known and science was over? And the whole time in his Swiss patent office Einstein was thinking things over.

It's still the business of science to classify and explain what it can, but the explosion of study and experiment and the vast improvements in the quality of research tools mean that science mostly seems to be discovering new unknowns and raising new questions, some of which may not be answerable by any means we have. The horizon of the unknown has been pushed far out and is immeasurably huge. The universe is disorderly and full of mystery, and it's science telling us so.

I find that as inspiring, as compelling as story and myth (and I do find story and myth compelling; I'm not dissing them!). Myth offers more because it is not limited to the real; but how cool is it that what is real is also so deeply layered with mystery and amazement?

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

I completely agree with you, Prim! I hope I didn't come across as saying that science strangles spirit still because that's absolutely not what I meant. I think Durkheim's idea is solid and still in some ways applicable, but I would be the last person to accuse science of trying to explain away the human spirit. Particles that can be in two places at once, wormholes, etc -- I think those things are pretty darn good for my spirit at least.

[River]

The appeal of myths over science is myths are mysterious but, somehow, even in their mysteries, easy to understand. There's order to them. You can make sense of it.

Science, OTOH, is mysterious and such a mess that even the practioners have a hard time with it. Part of this stems from underlying randomness of nature, particularily at the molecular level. Stuff happens because it can. Living systems have evolved means of controlling that randomness to a degree that they can almost be considered deterministic (and for almost all practical purposes are treated that way) but the randomness is still there and it still bites us in the bum in very real and heart-wrenching ways. Non-living systems also turn deterministic once you get past the molecular level, though many are chaotic enough that you may as well stick to probabilities (weather forecasts, anyone?).

The human mind has a hard time with all of that and that's why the myths have such an appeal. There's an order to them. That's also why I like fiction, preferably fantasy or sci-fi. Some human built that world. Human minds love patterns and order so much we'll even see it when it's not there, so, almost by definition, a world built by a human will have an underlying order to it.

[axordil]

All fiction is fantasies, in that they all are contrafactual. Otherwise they would be NON-fiction.

But even "non-fiction" isn't REALLY True. Things get left out of the text, choices are made as to style and rhetoric, and points of view are winnowed down until the result is manageable. Non-fiction, even at the level of a textbook, is a product. Non-fiction that attempts to describe objective reality is neither objective nor, ultimately, "real" in the sense of providing a full model of reality. Approximation is as good as it gets, ever.

But some approximations are closer than others. And that's what our brains do, approximate, every moment of our lives, turning the stream of the Now into an episode in a narrative, one we compose on the fly and revise in memory as we go.

So we're all purveyors of the fictions we call our lives. I wish mine WAS a musical now and again...

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

How does the dragon in Beowulf differ from the gunmen in Shane? If we can tell that, we can understand the importance of fantasy (or faerie or myth).

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

How does the dragon in Beowulf differ from the gunmen in Shane? If we can tell that, we can understand the importance of fantasy (or faerie or myth).

The other half is understanding how they are the same.

BrianIs AtYou

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

Agreed. They are both threats from outside that are beyond the capacity of the ordinary person. They both are candidates for the hero to vanquish. One can pull out other similarities too. But what is the mythic strength of the dragon? Or the werewolf or the alien or the shark?

[Primula Baggins]

The uncontrollable unknown, the power that can do anything it wishes to ordinary people and can only be contested by heroes.

We know there aren't dragons now, but at the time those stories began, the people who told them and listened to them knew no such thing. Anything might exist on the other side of the horizon or even the other side of the hill. There was no distinction between fantasy and what might be real.

Now we have to reach back into fantasy to find uncontrollable unknowns for our heroes to fight. Or, some people choose to read crime books and murder mysteries that deal with the real monsters among us.

I prefer dragons.

[axordil]

Ah, but dragons ARE monsters from among us, or rather, within us. Where did the story of dragons come from? Dinosaur bones, perhaps, or some such (gryphons may have had their roots there, as cyclops may have with mammoth skulls) but to put the flesh and sinew on those bones and come up with something as monstrous as a dragon--that's something only we could come up with, by externalizing the inborn fear of the unknown into a creature.

[MithLuin]

'Fairy tales don't teach children that dragons are real. Children already know dragons are real. They teach children that the dragons can be defeated.' ~ G. K. Chesterton

[axordil]

Precisely. Dragons live in us first, and then migrate to various far away (or not so far away) places.