marion montegomary- the prophet poet

The Prophetic Poet and the Loss of Middle EarthAuthor(s): Marion MontgomerySource: The Georgia Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, Focus on the Imagination (Spring 1979), pp. 66-83Published by: Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia by and on Behalf of theUniversity of Georgia and the Georgia ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41397684 .

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Marion Montgomery

T'he Prophetic Poet

and the Loss of Middle Earth

"True prophecy in the novelist's case is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meanings and thus of seeing far things close up." - Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners

". . . it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell."

- J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories"

"The position of the gnostic thinker derives its authority from the power of being. . . . Knowledge - gnosis - of the method of altering being is the central concern of the gnostic. . . . Gnosis desires dominion over being." - Eric Voegelin, Science , Politics & Gnosticism

"And so, sitting here in the ashes left behind by the con- flagration, let us try to work it out."

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, From Under the Rubble

FLANNERY the role of the O'CONNOR,

grotesque in attempting her fiction,

to remarks explain to

that her

"Since audience

the the role of the grotesque in her fiction, remarks that "Since the eighteenth century, the popular spirit of each succeeding age has tended more and more to the view that the ills and mysteries of life will eventu- ally fall before the scientific advances of man, a belief that is still going strong even though this is the first generation to face total extinction because of those advances." She is addressing herself to "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," but her perspective ranges Western thought, as the quotation suggests, and reaches beyond the geography of

[66]



MARION MONTGOMERY 67

the South. Thus she introduces into her argument Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in writing romances "was attempting ... to keep for fiction some of its freedom from social determinisms, and to steer it in the direction of poetry." Her concern is, largely, to bring her potential reader to a view of reality increasingly denied him "since the eighteenth century" in the wake of the Enlightenment's distortions of existence. Hers is a deliberate use of the grotesque toward the recovery of an old vision of

reality. But we must make a distinction between her enlargements upon reality as a "realist of distances" and the distortions one finds in Edgar Allan Poe's grotesque or, more particularly, in the grotesque fiction that

developed on the continent out of E. T. A. Hoffmann, to whom Poe was indebted. (Wolfgang Kayser provides a helpful background to this distinction in his Grotesque in Art and Literature.)

We may begin by suggesting that the poet, since the eighteenth century, has found himself increasingly contending with a popular spirit inclined to separate science and art, knowledge and belief, or- in a

popular phrase which signals the separation- "fact and fancy." That

popular spirit is largely given to assumptions about reality which have been determined by the new domination of thought by the Enlighten- ment, whose most immediate influence is through empirical science. The

authority of the imagination loses its general support as reason is ele- vated, a sign of which loss is the insistent and sometimes frantic defense of the imagination by the poet. For he has witnessed increasingly in the

past two hundred years the development of a millennial fantasy paraded as rational prophecy. Bacon's Neto Atlantis supplants the older imaginative quests until (figuratively) we find Bacon's adventure terminating for us in George Orwell's 1984.

The predominant effect of the new "rationalism" has been, in Miss O'Connor's view, that of an address to existence which limits reality to the sheer intramundane. The age of transcendence is replaced by the age of immanence. As the universe explodes toward the infinite in man's finite mind, existence is reduced from its spiritual dimension, and the unknown comes to mean only not yet known. "Reality"- the way things are- is presumed measurable in this new dispensation of reason by the same instrument that defines that reality: strict empirical law. And thus the poet discovers to his discomfort that the old grounds on which he

might once have met his audience has had dissolved from it the sense of wonder and awe in the presence of existence when it is seen imaginative- ly. Wonder and awe, those responses of piety in the presence of the



68 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

miracle of existence itself, are increasingly presumed merely superstition under the prohibitions of the new directors of the popular spirit.1

Given such a shifting of the ground from the poet and his audience, prophetic poets as various as Hawthorne or D. H. Lawrence or Flannery O'Connor find themselves increasingly forced to declare their vision, a circumstance dangerous to art. For with the growing sense of obligation as prophet, the poet tends to use large and startling images of what seem to him conspicuous distortions of reality, but with an insistence possibly inimical to art. His concern to recover an audience, to enlighten the

darkling lost, makes an ordinate control of art's distortions of reality most difficult. He would remind one of some lost state of spirit, of some old home denied by the intellectual follies that have made us so largely a gnostic civilization. Perhaps some glimpse of that old home may be recovered, the poet hopes, if his art can but stir sleeping memory. Thus the compulsion to wake sleepwalkers, as it were, which sometimes leads the poet to an emphasis on prophecy at the expense of art. As Miss O'Connor says, "to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures," but not every prophetic poet recognizes the dangers such grotesque figurings portend for his art. There is in Hawthorne the awkward intrusion of allegory; there is in Lawrence the burden of his excessively strident Old Testament out-

rage. The prophetic poet feels forced to the extremes of his art by an

awareness that his audience has been dispossessed of that country of the

imagination within which wonder and awe and a complex delight in existence are the high responses that may rescue one from intramundane

entrapment. He may also turn an angry concern upon the violators, the "directors" who corrupt the popular spirit. It is that angry turning that

brings us at last to 1984- Orwell's version of Bacon's New Atlantis. But one finds an interesting development of this anger in the nineteenth-

century grotesque fiction which Kayser examines- the work of Fried- rich Theodor Vischer or Jean Paul or Ludwig Tieck. For if the poet has felt himself progressively denied that territory of the imagination which J. R. R. Tolkien has so recently recovered to us in The Lord of

1 Eric Voegelin examines in detail the succession to power of a new gnosticism and the emergence of "directors" who manipulate existence. See his From Enlightenment to Revolution and Science , Politics & Gnosticism . Miss O'Connor was a close reader of Voegelin's early work, reviewing the first three volumes of his Order and History . A helpful complement to Voegelin is Gerhart Niemeyer's Between Nothingness and Paradise.




the Rings , the country of Middle Earth, he has not always been able to conduct himself with the even-spirited assurance of Tolkien.

Of old, that country of Middle Earth was one where the poet could

sojourn more or less comfortably with his elected audience, whether in

popular ballads or old romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or in intellectual romances that rescued Middle Earth explicitly to the transcendent, as does The Divine Comedy. It had been an undoubted

country, one in which mind and heart, reason and feeling, were com-

panionable-a country existing somewhere between the ineffable transcendent and that natural world which the senses constantly speak. But it became a country dissolved under the empirical and rational purges of being, till it seemed quite faded into a "light of common day" to such saddened eyes as William Wordsworth's as he emerged from the eighteenth century. Thereafter art is commanded to make the "real" more real, if it is to be tolerated by the emerging popular spirit.

Now in response to such demands upon the poet, that lost country came to be replaced gradually by a new one, a country conceived by the exiled poet as (in some degree) an act of revenge upon the fickle modernist spirit. The prophetic poet of an aberrant world comes upon the scene. With him appears his imagined subnatural country, eventual-

ly named the Absurd but discovered by imaginative uses of sensual ex-

perience in techniques called the "grotesque." The loss of wonder and awe in the presence of existence was to be compensated for by the terror of emptiness beneath sensual experience. The imagination, that faculty of intellect that is almost a sixth sense to transport one beyond the limits of the body's five, was turned inward upon the lonely self. The busy worldly modern, caught up by the frenzy of getting and spending, became an immediate object for the prophet of the aberrant to irritate. The poet of the grotesque found himself increasingly isolated, trapped in a leisure of spiritual indolence which he is wont to call a new virtue: ennui. The sardonic and the masochistic become elements of the new art.

Miss O'Connor, in one of her book reviews, cites Thomas Mann's statement that "the grotesque is the true anti-bourgeois style." She goes on to regret that in America "the general reader has managed to connect the grotesque with the sentimental." To make that connection, however, is to short-circuit the force of the grotesque. Thus, if we focus popular attention upon a crippled child in an appeal to generalized charity, a

species of obscurity (in the strict sense of that term) is spawned. Little




Miss Polio of 1950 raises warm feelings about one's heart, not radically different from those feelings stirred by Miss Teenage America of 1950 with her tap-dance routine- neither one radiant with the spiritual mystery of existence. "Stories of pious children," says Miss O'Connor as she addresses the figure of the cancer-ridden child Mary Ann, "tend to be false." So do stories of the unfortunate to a people who have lost the distinction between the tragic, in which one participates in some degree as a causing agent, and the accidental or random- the aberrant "mistake of nature" to use Rayber Tarwater's phrase from Miss O'Connor's novel The Violent Bear It Away. Out of that confusion one may be more

easily recruited to the support of those gnostic methods of "altering being" and thus be born again as an emotional convert to gnosis which (as Eric Voegelin says) "desires dominion over being." One becomes convinced, through avenues other than of thought, that the properties once generally ascribed to God- omniscience and omnipotence- belong properly to man. One becomes thereby a citizen of the most isolated

precinct of the country of fantasy: that in which the gross distortion of

reality is taken for reality itself. Thus we become self-made victims in the perversion of reality. For

"when tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness," Miss O'Connor warns us, "its logical outcome is terror." When we lose "the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance" of evil and its attendant destructions, we find it increasingly difficult to distinguish the feeling that leads us to support Dr. Salk and his polio vaccine from the feeling that leads us to support Rayber in his arguments for euthanasia as the most humane response to "mistakes of nature" such as his idiot child Bishop. We come to lose what Miss O'Connor speaks of, in her essay on Mary Ann, as "the action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead." If we may save millions of fortunate children through vaccine-treated sugar cubes, it is just possible that we may be persuaded to save millions of unfortunate children like Rayber's hapless idiot son by cyanide-treated cubes. For such tenderness as the Raybers of the world are fond of preaching to us has certainly in the recent past ended "in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chambers"- those terrifying realities spawned by a gnostic fantasy which succeeded in capturing the popular spirit of a whole people.

One loses in modernist thought not only the wonder and awe of the old country of Middle Earth, where good and evil contend in gro-




tesque figurings at a level beyond the naturalistic; one loses as well the terror of the country of the Absurd, in which good and evil have no

meaning at all. Given such a warping of life and death by sentimentality, says Miss O'Connor of Mann's remark on the grotesque, the prophetic poet makes his serious and legitimate use of a wilder grotesque to shock his reader awake, since "the intellectual and moral judgments implicit in it will have the ascendency over feeling." But Miss O'Connor's position is at last quite different from Mann's. Mann's reading of the grotesque as "anti-bourgeois" needs to be seen as thrusting more deeply than he suggests. It probes not simply the comfortable complacency of middle-class presumptions about reality, though so far as the poet of the grotesque is concerned he intends to confound that complacency. Less obvious objects are les lumières to whom both folk and bourgeois are but manipulable parts of accidental, mechanistic existence. That is, the grotesque art which Kayser examines also attacks the intellectual

assumptions of secular gnosticism. The point is that the Enlightenment "directors" and their successors no less than their victims are objects of the destructive fiction of such nineteenth-century writers of grotesque fiction as Bonaventure or Paul or Vischer. In the vision of the new dark

poet, the demonic erodes the rational no less than the angelic as a force once believed to touch nature.

C. S. Lewis, citing chapter and verse in "The Longaevi" ( The Dis- carded Image), argues that the creatures of Middle Earth- the fairies- are visually ambiguous to the medieval mind. He traces a degeneration of thought, from the older awe connected with those creatures in the

popular imagination, creatures who (says an ancient source, Capella) are called variously "Pans, Fauns, . . . Satyrs, Silvans, Nymphs." From older perceptions of these creatures as beguilingly but ominously "other," they descend to us much reduced, as in the charming sylphs of Alexander Pope, till they reach our day "tarnished by pantomime and bad children's books," says Lewis.

Lewis does not make the following point, but given our concern for the rise of the grotesque we may do so. The history of the "fairies" that Lewis sketches reveals this interesting coincidence: as the Western mind grows intensely serious about its own authority as the measure and master of nature, its imaginative perception of mystery in nature is in-

creasingly relegated to the nursery (and only reluctantly admitted there, for the fear is that a child's mind may be warped from "reality"). The rationalist's mechanisms are turned upon those imaginative figurings of




mystery which Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, Yeats, and other such way- ward moderns would rescue to our imagination once more. Thus Tol- kien's creatures, through his arresting art, come to us with our shocked and delighted recognition of an old reality long denied us. Ores and Hobbits, Tom Bombadil and Bilbo Baggins, Sauron the Great remind us of known but forgotten things, forgotten because Middle Earth has been sentimentalized by art and denied by pragmatic science.2

As the longaevi are reduced to "fairies," creatures misplaced out of the old medieval model which Lewis adumbrates in his Discarded Image, they become precise and concrete even as they become rigorously diminutive. By the time of Swift and Gulliver's Travels the empiricist's increasing domination of mind through the obsession with measure, with "fact," is becoming apparent. It is also at this point that metaphor itself is called into question no less than mystery, to the increasing discomfort of poetry. The poet finds himself embattled by rationalist philosophy and science, and so increasingly he gives wilder battle to protect the

waning freedoms of the imaginative mind which would see likeness in unlike things. In the figure of Gulliver, Swift escapes somewhat from that threatening cold rationalism; by his art he turns the new realism in Western thought upon the imagination's province of the outlandish, with a devastating ironic effect at the expense of rationalistic distortions of the world and of man's nature. Swift's concrete, precise attention to

2 In his Myth and Reality , Mircea Eliade includes as Appendix I his review of a study by Jan de Vries on the relation of myth to fairy tales. Many of Eliade's concerns, and particularly his comments in the concluding two paragraphs, are complementary to our argument. "Though in the West the tale has long since become a literature of diversion (for children and peasants) or of escape (for city dwellers) , it still presents the structure of an infinitely serious and responsible adventure, for in the last analysis it is reducible to an initiatory scenario. . . . [Although the tale always comes to a happy end], its content proper refers to a terrifyingly serious reality: initiation, that is, passing, by way of symbolic death and resurrection, from ignorance and immaturity to the spiritual age of the adult. The difficulty is to determine when the tale began its career of pure fairy tale emptied of all initiatory responsibility." One might quarrel with "pure" here, since the concept of fairy tale thus suggested is that it is a manipulated form, simplified to remove an unwanted element by "directors" of our sensibility. And Eliade's next sentence suggests the same: "It is not impossible . . . that this happened at the moment when the ideology and traditional rites of initiation were falling into disuse and it became safe to 'tell' what had earlier demanded the utmost secrecy." It is a process of "rank-loss of the sacred," or as Eliade prefers, the "banalization" of the religious experience. (To con- vince oneself of this, he says, "it is enough to analyze the valuations of 'Nature' by lay- men and scientists after Rousseau and the Enlightenment.") Thus, he concludes, "If [the fairy tale] represents an amusement or an escape, it does so only for the banalized con- sciousness; and particularly for that of modern man. . . . All unwittingly, and indeed believing that he is merely amusing himself or escaping, the man of the modern societies still benefits from the imaginary initiation supplied by tales."




a measuring of the fantastic turns sharply upon the new thought's de- basement of the imaginative largeness of mind, turns upon the egocentric presumptions of rationality.

We say that Gulliver's Travels may be read at two levels- the child's level of fantasy and the adult's level of mature reasonableness about man's ignorance and folly. Thus we incline to restrict the imagination to the nursery and (if we are ourselves the children of John Locke) there try to exorcise imagination by calling it fancy.8 Swift himself re- cords an exemplum of the "adult" mind with which the poet has had

increasingly to deal since his day: "A Bishop here [in Ireland] said that the book was full of improbable lies, and, for his part, he hardly believed a word of it." What earthly relation has such "fantasy" to the sober realities of the earth? That question when asked by a Bishop reveals how much territory is lost from the country that adjoins Heaven and earth. But unlike the satirical mimicry of the "reasonable" in sensational works from Gulliver's Travels down to Animal Farm and 1984, fairy tales (in G. K. Chesterton's words) "are not fantasies." They reveal the deepest realism, beside which our modern "realism" is but naïve illusion. "There is the lesson of 'Cinderella,' which is the same as that of the Magnificat- exaltavit humiles. There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast'; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable." And, continues Chesterton in "The Ethics of Elfland" ( Orthodoxy ), there is

always the underlying conditional if. "The vision always hangs upon a veto." Always the "Doctrine of Conditional Joy": "You may live in a

palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word 'cow.' "To suppose such merely a creation of fantasy, in its pejorative, modern sense, is to misunderstand man's deepest sense of reality: that is, his deepest recognition of his own weakness, his inclination to pride and its attendant temptations in the presence of the mystery of existence. But our

3 Even our simplest nursery rhymes are shot through with reminders of those deeper, timeless realities of fairyland that concern Chesterton and Lewis and Tolkien. One sees the gradual encroachment of the modern mind as it manipulates the timeless to its tem- poral relief, denying the timeless by a simple reduction of the matter of Faërie to history or psychology. "I had a little nut tree" (whose fruit is a silver nutmeg and a golden pear) is argued to be commentary on mad Joanna of Castile, who visited Henry VII; or as reflecting Charles I, sought as spouse for the Spanish Infanta. "Little Boy Blue" or "Little Tommy Tucker" may yield a Cardinal Wolsey to historical exegesis. "High diddle, diddle" seems to reflect Elizabeth I. (Such instances may be multiplied from William and Ceil Baring-Gould's Annotated Mother Goose.) Mistress Mary reduced to Mary Queen of Scots obscures the willful in us which would have nature bear more than nature can of its own accord. We would have the old "garden" restored by the act of our contrariness which descends to us from Adam.




modern discomfort with the severe justice meted out in fairy stories for violations of the doctrine of conditional joy, leading us to revise those tales to protect children from a horror they generally do not feel, is more to the comfort of the modern mind ("adult" mind) than to the child's. For, as Chesterton says (in a passage quoted by Tolkien), "children . . . are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy."

Tolkien, in his long essay "On Fairy-Stories," argues that we are drawn to the land of Faërie for the "satisfaction of certain primordial human desires." If this be true, we must not forget that Faërie is the "Perilous Realm," in which there are "pitfalls for the unwary, and dun-

geons for the overbold." For those primordial desires are of man's spirit, and not of his mind alone or of his animal nature. To make this imaginative Secondary World (Tolkien's term), as opposed to the Primary World of everyday reality, "inside which the green giant will be credi- ble, commanding Secondary [imaginative] Belief . . . will certainly de- mand a certain skill, a kind of elvish craft."4 The power required is that of "making immediately effective by the power of the will the visions of 'fantasy.' Not all are beautiful or even wholesome, not at any rate the fantasies of fallen Man. And he has stained the elves . . . with his own stain." Hence the spiritual danger of the perilous realm, the Secondary World pendant from man's imaginative powers in nature. For willful- ness tempts to the abuse of power, and enchantment becomes confused with magic. Magic, says Tolkien, "produces, or pretends to produce, an alternative of the Primary World. ... It is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills." Thus even in the land of Faërie one may not escape the gnostic temptation which Voegelin examines in that land of philosophical speculation called the Enlightenment- a land (we are arguing) which has largely replaced Middle Earth and requires the allegiance of the popular spirit through the threat of the stigmata of ignorance and superstition. On the other hand, the "elvish craft, Enchantment," desires rather a "living, realized

4 That the "elvish craft" may be rather devilish has been a constant fear to poets, those makers of Secondary Worlds. Hawthorne is concerned with the devil in his inkpot. Kierkegaard states the fear: ". . . the poet purchases the power of words, the power of uttering all the dread secrets of others, at the price of a little secret he is unable to utter. ... a poet is not an apostle, he casts out devils only by the power of the devil." Haw- thorne's fear is that the poet, in spite of himself, may violate the human heart, and the question whether the romancer may not be a subtle Chillingworth troubles him.




sub-creative art, which ... is inwardly wholly different from the greed for self-centered power which is the mark of the mere Magician."5

When we approach fairy stories perceptively and with the proper caution, we discover that in their complexity they present us with three faces: "the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Na- ture; and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man. The essential face of Faërie is the middle one, the Magical." That is its essential face, we

may suppose, since it serves as a warning, like the inscription over the

Inferno which arrested and disquieted Dante. For it warns of the dan-

gerous attraction in Faërie. We feel summoned to an ambiguous joy, to Chesterton's conditional joy, whose peril is that magic casements open- ing wide upon a fairyland forlorn may prove only a mirror, giving back our pitiful image, reflecting self-scorn and self-pity when we recognize man's presumption and the abuse of the gift of imaginative power through self-centeredness. For, again to borrow Tolkien to our argument, one of the notes of those faint horns that summon us to Faërie- in addition to the siren strain that promises power over eternal beauty- is "the necessity of keeping promises." Our "primordial human desires" are thus tested anew in a magic garden. "Thou shalt not- or else thou shalt depart beggared into endless regret. . . . Even Peter Rabbit was for- bidden a garden, lost his blue coat, and took sick. The Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation." To enter here does not require that we abandon hope, but it is to venture upon perilous risk in which the

deep, dark vision we hold of exercising power over being may give issue to a strangely evil beauty. And one of the signs of our loss of an old re-

5 Concerning the "primordial desires" of man, in relation to his spirit and its hunger to create Secondary Worlds, we might recall Tolkien's remark that man as poet- as maker - is a reminder that we are ourselves made in the image of God, the Supreme Maker of the Primary. In his "Epilogue" to this long discussion of Faërie's Secondary World as it relates to the Primary World, i.e., to reality independent of man's willful desires as maker, Tolkien suggests that the peculiar elusive Joy experienced in Fantasy is an effect of "a sudden glimpse" of a profound reality. It is the mystical face of Faërie turned toward the Supernatural. One has a brief vision of a "far-off gleam ... of evangelium in the real world," whose comprehensive vision we approach through the Gospels. The true fairy story for Tolkien as for Miss O'Connor's "romance" is created by a "realist of distances," to use her phrase. The story of the Incarnation and Resurrection, says Tolkien, verifies art. The Gospel story "has pre-eminently the 'inner consistency of reality.' " Christ "has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation [specifically, man as "maker"] has been raised to the fulfilment of Cre- ation. . . . For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation," beyond the gifts of being that are man's.



7 6 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

spect for Beauty's danger, at this moment of our history, is our difficulty in understanding how both evil and beauty may strangely coincide. The

disquieted passion in a Keats or a Shelley shows a sense of peril. As for us, says Tolkien, "The fear of the beautiful fay that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp."

If we do not grasp that haunting clue over the door- in the face

through which we enter Faërie- we shall miss the consolation possible in the Perilous Realm, that "fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief," and wake sadder on the cold hill- side of the world. For we shall confound the fay's beauty with "fantasy" in its most pejorative sense: that of the "flower-and-butterfly minute- ness" of the popular illustrations in children's books, a "product of 'ra- tionalization,'

" says Tolkien, "which transforms the glamour of Elfland

into mere finesse." For in Faerie's glamour truly seen, alas, there is the

hauntingly present, poignant cry which Milton captures in his own forlorn spirit, now fallen from a transcendent brightness:

The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

In that desperate Satanic hope lies the inception of a fantastic unreal world, neither earth's nor Heaven's; nor is it of Middle Earth, since it denies itself a Secondary role. It is the hope which translates Lucifer to Prometheus in the modern world through the magic of reason, which elevates intellect to the role of absolute. (St. Thomas sees the imagination as the mediate faculty between the senses and the intellect, crucial to a proper vision of existence.) That mind-centered hope posits the "unreal city" dreamed in a gnostic dream out of the Enlightenment- out of Hegel and Hume and Locke and a host of our ancestral minds trapped in Faërie's "dungeons for the overbold" by denying any country un- measured by intellectual law. That is, gnostic hope denies the complexity of the natural world it manipulates, while it decries one's pointing to mystery in those complexities as a superstition of the realists of distances.

A realm perilous, then, but not unlike the world we take as the real one just at hand. That is why in their several ways Hawthorne, Chester- ton, Lewis, Tolkien, O'Connor are so insistent that "romance" and/or "fantasy" are less at odds with reality than either eighteenth-century rationalism or modern popular science. Fantasy, says Tolkien, "certainly does not destroy or even insult reason." And he adds:



MARION MONTGOMERY JJ

Fantasy does not blur the sharp outlines of the real world; for it depends on them. As far as our western, European, world is concerned, this 'sense of separation' has in fact been attacked and weakened in modern times not by fantasy but by scientific theory. Not by stories of centaurs or werewolves or enchanted bears, but by the hypotheses (or dogmatic guesses) of scientific writers who classify Man not only as 'an animal' - that correct classification is ancient - but as 'only an animal.' There has been a consequent distortion of sentiment.

Chesterton argues that this rationalist law is itself the fundamental

ground of a "fantasy" more untenable than that which the modern mind denigrates when fantasy is associated with Faërie. In Faërie, "You cannot

imagine two and one not making three." To which Tolkien adds, "Fan-

tasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy- stories about frog-kings would not have arisen." But one may (and now Chesterton resumes our argument) "easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hang- ing by the tail We [in fairyland] believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five." Thus fairy tales build on the most "elementary wonder" of our experience, the miracle of existence itself. This wonder (we might add) makes such "children's" literature of the imagination parallel to St. Thomas Aquinas' own reasoned

approach to the Cause of existence through the wonder of existence: mere somethingness is arrestingly awe-full.6 As Chesterton says, "A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a

dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door." The world is a shock, not merely shocking, and existence a sur-

prise, but a pleasant surprise. The wonder attendant upon a recognition

6 A "perfect judgment of mind," St. Thomas says, "obtains through turning to sense- objects which are the first principles of our knowledge . . {Summa Theologiae , гагае. 173, 3). The imagination, the mediate faculty in relation to the senses and intellect (174, 3) aids our seeing the being of things and leads to our discovering the cause of all being. Even prophecy may occur "by an impression or arrangement in the imagination" of experiences of the world: "in prophetic revelation images previously obtained from the senses are so ordered as to make them apt for the revelation of truth. In that instance antecedent experiences have some effect on the images themselves." (173, 2) It is such argument that underlies Miss O'Connor's conception of the "prophetic poet," whom she takes herself to be.




of the marvelous carries a strong degree of praise of existence also. Awe is a mode of worship. Thus the repetitions in nature appear to the child "not to be a mere recurrence" but a "theatrical encore ," repeatedly re-

freshing to the spirit. Wonder frees the mind to the marvel of unlimited possibility, which

the sober view of nature's repetition kills through suppositions of that "modern Calvinism" (again, Chesterton's words) which one finds in thinkers like Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer: "the neces-

sity of things being as they are." To such a mind, one elephant having a trunk seems odd, "but all elephants having trunks look[s] like a plot." But there is a difference between counting on recurrence, as Huxley and

Spencer do, and betting on it as Chesterton's wiser visionary does. As for the mystery of existence itself, though we know many hows, "we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can

say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As ideas , the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears." Facts abstracted from nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson and de- clared the new miracle of mind (see Nature) are something quite different to Chesterton: "I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful; now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful . . . repeated exercises of some will." Thus all elephants having trunks is not so much a determinist plot as it is "an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again."

We see then a kindred thought in Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien in this matter of the imagination's access to the deepest realities of existence. (Lewis' chapter on the longaevi begins with an epigraph from Chesterton: "There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in the workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work.") The old longaevi , Lewis points out. are "lawless vagrants," but they are nevertheless " more natural" than supernatural. That is, they were to the medieval mind the natural intensified by the deep hungers of the human heart for that old home lost to man. They, unlike man, are liberated from "slavery to nutrition, self-protection, and procreation, and also from responsibilities, shames, scruples, and melancholy of Man." They are, we might say, our mediate vision of the deepest realities of human nature, including willful longings. It is as if they were figurings of the ideal life of Eden lest earth be lost- as if to be given fully to Heav-




en's life should require a surrender of the world. In this willful man-taint

upon the longaevi, which makes their world lost Eden and not Heaven, we find a parallel but opposed figuring in Bacon's New Atlantis. To Bacon strict reason, through its power over nature, must transform the world into a quite different sort of Eden. "One might have expected the

High Fairies to have been expelled by science," Lewis says, but "I think

they were actually expelled by a darkening of superstition." The new science, we suggest here, is indeed in its general uses by

the popular spirit largely a new superstition, one which develops in millennial literature from Bacon down to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, moving from hungry hope to bleak despair. The rise of em-

piricism and the Enlightenment clearly drove such old disturbing visions of reality to the suburbs of the mind, relegating them to Ireland, to the west of England, and to scattered peasant communities. Still, modern determinist psychology has discovered them lurking in the central city of our thought and tries once more to neutralize them by the special chemistry of reason: psychoanalysis.

In a triumph of reason over this strange country of existence, the American novelist Sylvester Judd could celebrate American maturity of thought in his Margaret , which appeared ten years after Emerson's Nature , but five years before Hawthorne's "psychological" Scarlet Let- ter showed such optimism not well founded:

There are no fairies in our meadows, and no elves to spirit away our children. . . . Our wells are drugged by no saints. ... We have no resorts for pilgrims, no shrines for the devout, no sum- mits looking into Paradise. We have no traditions, legends, fables, and scarcely a history ... no chapels or abbeys, no broken arches or castled crags. You find these woods as inspir- ing as those of Etruria or Mamre. . . . The Devil haunts our theology, not our houses, and I see in the latest edition of the Primer his tail is entirely abridged. . . .

Such had been our progress, then, that we seemed to stand at a new

golden age of letters. But, as Chesterton was later to remark in defense of the "Ethics of Elfland," it is the "minor poets" who are naturalists and "talk about the bush or the brook" at the "naturalistic" level. What

Judd takes as a new glorious freedom, Henry James finds abject poverty, so far as the serious writer is concerned. Hawthorne was to feel the same earlier, as his Transformation shows, a book given a more sensational

fairyland title in its American publication as The Marble Faun. Reality,



8o THE GEORGIA REVIEW

it would seem, is a more complex mystery than nature literalized by reason can reveal.

Thus, the rise of the grotesque in our literature suggests that, when reason's measure of nature becomes so severe as to make it an intellectual sin to believe in any country save nature's (seen at its most measurable level), nature itself becomes a most unsettling fairyland, a country of

meaninglessness. That is a significant commentary, for there persists in us a belief that existence is more profound than either the senses of the

body or the sciences of the mind can comprehend. This yearning belief leads to Vischer's theory, and his dramatization of the theory in grotesque literature, of a "female" demiurge which refuses to yield to science's "male" principle. When mind overwhelmingly rejects the supernatural, it finds itself drawn to the dark fascination of the subnatural as last refuge. That is, it turns from its hungers for the Heavenly City to a

hunger for the obliteration promised by the void. It is a considerable rescue from this modern submission to the absurd that Tolkien performs, we should observe. He restores once more to the imagination that land of the longaevi, rescuing it at once from the Absurdist's appropriation and from the gossamer fancy of modern children's literature, the latter now largely a dispirited sentimentalizing of the older vision. That is why the popularity of Tolkien's work is a sign of new health in the popular spirit of our own age.

Chesterton is right when he makes a Thomistic point (without summoning Thomas as authority): "Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth." Only when we have lost that wise perspective upon existence do we become sentimentalist of the literal, thus divorcing vision from nature.

Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. ... A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. ... A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossoms, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boy- hood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own [by calling his how the why], apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not



MARION MONTGOMERY 8l

see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crim- son tulips; it sometimes does in his country.

The cool realist, if he is denied the ground of his reasonableness by that modernist thought which denies faith, will apply his reason to the sup- posed ground established by those who have robbed him. Thus the writer of the grotesque moves satirically, with a ruthless joy it seems, upon the scientific sentimentality. He reveals the terrors of the abyss, the im-

plication in that scientific sentimentality which Chesterton presents to us. For that "scientific" world is underlain by the void. The tongues Shakespeare heard in trees become diabolic, speaking with an increas-

ingly wild and mock-comic insistence that existence is empty, meaningless. (Mock-comic in contrast to Dante's comic vision.) The nineteenth-

century grotesque which trenches upon the void appears to us, then, as an older imaginative vision now blinded and made desperate in its en-

trapment by modernist gnostic thought. Its cry of emptiness is a cry for rescue; its destructive resistance is that of the spirit cornered.

Hawthorne sensed the danger posed to Middle Earth by the new

popular spirit, a point we may establish by brief recourse to one of his lesser pieces in Mosses from an Old Manse, "The Hall of Fantasy." The

paraphernalia of the sketch is that of the medieval dream allegory, in which the spokesman accompanies a friend out of the present reality and comments with the new insight thus gained upon the modern world. In the land of imagination he looks back on "reality" and remarks that "An author is received in general society pretty much as we honest citizens

[a sardonic epithet] are in the Hall of Fantasy. We gaze at him as if he had no business among us, and question whether he is fit for any of our

pursuits." But in this never-never land of fantasy, the narrator discovers honest citizens of the stock exchange: "what poet in the hall is more a fool of fancy than the sagest of them?" These minds, suited to "Chamber of Commerce" our narrator says, would not be startled at the idea of cities to be built, as if by magic, in the heart of pathless forests. . . ." But

these, in contrast to the poets, are most dangerously seductive to the

popular mind, to the "honest citizens," because "they mistake the Hall of Fantasy for actual brick and mortar, and its purple atmosphere for

unsophisticated sunshine." It is the poet who is the true realist, because he knows the difference. The modernist city in the pathless wood, it is worth recalling, is a creation out of eighteenth-century thought: the city of man as the perfect construction of reason. And as Kayser points out,




it is the city in darkness that becomes the locus of the individual's aliena- tion and dissolution, a "recurring theme in the history of the grotesque." It is notoriously the setting of Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil." It is also the setting of Hawthorne's strange adventure of Robin Goodfellow, whose self-reliance and native shrewdness prove insufficient to ration- alize the experiences of his quest for his kinsman, Major Molineux.

The poet in Hawthorne's sketch of the Hall of Fantasy sees that, no matter how strongly the honest citizen may deny it, he too occupies that hall from time to time. Here there is likewise "the herd of real or

self-styled reformers," representatives of "an unquiet period," the present moment of the real world (c. 1843), "when mankind is seeking to cast off the whole tissue of ancient customs, like a tattered garment. . . . Here were men, whose faith had embodied itself in the form of a potatoe; and others whose long beards had a deep spiritual significance. Here was an abolitionist, brandishing his one idea like an iron flail. In a word, there were a thousand shapes of good and evil, faith and infidelity, wisdom and nonsense- a most incongruous throng." But all men find their way hither, "either in abstract musings, or momentary thoughts, or bright anticipations, or vivid remembrances; for even the actual becomes ideal, whether in hope or memory, and beguiles the dreamer into the Hall of

Fantasy. . . . [Some] possess the faculty ... of discovering a purer truth than the world can impart, among the lights and shadows of these pic- tured windows," this "refuge from the gloom and chillness of actual life," if wisely used.

Those "some" are the writers of romance, one concludes, the prophetic poets, who realize that "the fantasies of one day are the deepest realities of a future one." The place of the Hall of Fantasy, however, is near Hawthorne's town pump. It is in reality and involves a vision of

reality which reveals purer truth than the ordinary honest citizen seems

prepared to recognize or acknowledge. And it is the prophetic poet who sees the destructive contradiction represented by the reformer on the one hand and apocalyptic prophets like "Father Miller" on the other, each of whom struggles to seize the Hall by a violence of one sort or another and command it to his own uses. (Hawthorne's Father Miller announces continuously the imminent destruction of the world, a theory which swallows up all other theories and reform programs.) The mil- lenarian optimists are confronted by the prophet of annihilation. As for himself, says Hawthorne, he seeks an answer to the riddle of existence, a vision whereby time is reconciled to the timeless, not obliterated al-




together in a surrender to despair over a meaningless world. And that answer must lie within the country of the imagination insofar as finite man is concerned, the imagination whose seat is the Hall of Fantasy. "For those who waste all their days in the Hall of Fantasy, good Father Miller's prophecy is already accomplished," of course, for "the solid earth has come to an untimely end." But for those who look askance at the prophetic poet, those who profess never to sojourn in the world of

fantasy, the same conclusion holds, since they see only a limited and therefore distorted reality as well. Man is made wonderfully perceptive of reality only if he neither refuses his passport to the country of Middle Earth nor underestimates the dangers to be encountered there. His open- ness to the complexity of existence reveals to him distant as well as near realities in their mutual luminosity.

Flannery O'Connor, among Hawthorne's following, sees the des-

perate emptiness in the modern Absurdist's cry, the cry which becomes shriller as emptiness becomes more intense and pervasive of our faith after Hawthorne's early warnings. She sees with a cold reasonableness out of faith, and she would stir in her reader a new hope. She recognizes in the writers of the Absurd an innocence that stirs some pity in her, as we see in her remarks on Kafka and Camus in Mystery and Manners. But hers is a severe pity nevertheless, one which makes no concessions to the illusion practiced through that innocence. Thus she uses the grotesque towards ends larger than those one finds in the manipulations of the natural world by disaffected existentialists and absurdists. Such "visions" of reality as these others present must be destroyed, so that a

larger vision of reality may be restored than that provided either by the

prophets of emptiness or by the strictly mundane rationalist who sees nature's repetition as mechanistic and so voids existence of its wonder.



marion montegomary- the prophet poet

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