Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll [1]
Copyright © Martin Gardner, 2000
eISBN : 978-1-101-15382-6
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INTRODUCTION
ALTHOUGH MANY ADULTS dislike fantasy, preferring fiction about the real world, it is surprising how many great literary works are fantasies. One thinks of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aenead, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream, and scores of fantasy novels that have outlasted myriads of once admired works of realism.
Among books for children almost all the classics are fantasies: P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins, Barrie’s Peter Pan, French fairy tales by Perrault, German fairy tales by Grimm, Danish tales by Andersen, Italy’s Pinocchio, Kipling’s Just-So stories, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, and of course Lewis Carroll’s two books about Alice. At the moment, Joanne Rowling’s incredibly popular books about Harry Potter, boy wizard, are fantasies, but whether they will become classics remains to be seen.
It’s hard to understand, but some adults, including a few peculiar psychologists, think fantasy is bad for children. G. K. Chesterton considered this belief close to mortal sin. His marvelous essay “The Dragon’s Grandmother” (you’ll find it in his book Tremendous Trifles) is, in my opinion, the best defense of juvenile fantasy ever written.
“I met a man the other day,” G. K. opens his essay, “who did not believe in fairy tales. I do not mean that he did not believe in the incidents narrated in them.... The man I speak of disbelieved in fairy tales in an even more amazing and perverted sense. He actually thought that fairy tales ought not to be told to children.”
Chesterton recalls his efforts to wade through some modern novels about the actual world. When this became tiresome he saw a copy of Grimm on the table and gave “a cry of indecent joy. Here at least, here at last, one could find a little common sense. I opened the book and my eyes fell on those splendid and satisfying words, ‘The Dragon’s Grandmother.’ ”
At that moment, the monster who hated fairy tales entered the room. Here is what Chesterton said to him:
It is far easier to believe in a million fairy tales than to believe in one man who does not like fairy tales. I would rather kiss Grimm instead of a Bible and swear to all his stories as if they were thirty-nine articles than say seriously and out of my heart that there can be such a man as you; that you are not some temptation of the devil or some delusion from the void. Look at these plain, homely, practical words. “The Dragon’s Grandmother,” that is all right; that is rational almost to the verge of rationalism. If there was a dragon, he had a grandmother. But you—you had no grandmother! If you had known one, she would have taught you to love fairy tales.
It seemed to me that he did not follow me with sufficient delicacy, so I moderated my tone. “Can you not see,” I said, “that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modem life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is—what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is—what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
“The cosmos