Fairy Tales and Scientific Romances

What have Scientific Romances to do with fairy tales? Quite a lot, as a matter of fact. One might even argue that they're hardly even discreet categories: for a weblog about Scientific Romances to wax poetic on fairy tales is to engage the generic form of which they are a specific manifestation. What are Scientific Romances, after all, but a type of fairy tale? Once upon a time, there was a man with a fantastic ship that sailed beneath the water and he showed a group of people the world beneath the waves. Once upon a time, there was a man who built a machine to take him backwards and forwards in time. Once upon a time, there was a group of brave explorers who found a lost world where dinosaurs still live... Here there be dragons indeed!

However, as we have been asserting throughout this weblog, Scientific Romances are also a way of approaching and appreciating the real world. It is the Romance of science and exploration, the Romance of nature and the phenomena of the cosmos. Can there be anything further removed from that reality than stories about fairies and monsters and ghosts and immortals?

Fairy tales are themselves a Romance... Fairyland is a beautiful place, as well as a sublime place. It's the most aetherial forests and craggy mountains. And like their specific manifestations in Gothic horror and Scientific Romances, they each, in their own way, explore the dimensions of Space, Time, Nature and Divinity.

That fairy tales are allegorical is nothing new. G.K. Chesterton, one of fairyland's greatest citizens, notes:

But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the chivalrous lesson of “Jack the Giant Killer”; that giants should be killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such. For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite. 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. There is the terrible allegory of the “Sleeping Beauty,” which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep. But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfand, but with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak, and shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

And therein lies the rub... Fairy tales are not merely an allegory of reality. Reality is an allegory of fairy tales. A fairy tale isn't a story reflecting reality, but rather, a truth claim about reality.

Fairy tales encompass all modes of thought... They are an epistemology, a theodicy, a metaphysics, even a physics. Chesterton again articulates it more wonderfully than I could:

It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) NECESSARY that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases: it really must be. If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne: and we in fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses, there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened—dawn and death and so on—as if THEY were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot IMAGINE two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five.

Fairy tales, then, are a higher epistemology. Governed by imagination and wonder, they entertain all possibilities, including Reason. There is nothing wrong with Reason after all... The ardent critics of free thinking - in the ironic name of "freethought" (if I am not mistaking simple comedy and parody for irony) - are right in science having produced a great many good things. But so too was Verne right, and there is more to beauty than smoothly operating clockworks. Science is one thing, Scientific Romances are a greater thing. Once upon a time, there was a man with a fantastic ship that sailed beneath the water and he showed a group of people the world beneath the waves. Or even more fantastically, once upon a time there were people and water and waves and a world.

From Chesterton,

the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstacy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity. The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale. The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

Even theology is a fairy tale, but not in the crude and critical sense. It is the queen of the fairy tales because it is the queen of the sciences. Theology wrestles with the question of Ultimate Reality, and in doing so, it must understand all the specific manifestations of reality... The fairy tales of psychology, biology, physics, economics, chemistry, psychiatry, history, philosophy... Theology has always been the supreme integrative discipline. The nature of the inquiry requires transcendence as well, since we're not dealing with the sum of reality, all those weird repetitions, but with Ultimate Reality. Not specific manifestations of Space, Time, Nature and Divinity, but all of them in the metaphysical mystery of God.

Therein lies Scientific Romances as a fairy tale. They move beyond a chronicle of the weird repetitions into a hymn of praise and astonishment that such a wonderful world full of weird repetitions and eyes to behold them should exist. So when we look to fairy tales in general, we do so understanding them as narratives about the wonders of Creation, beautiful and sublime.