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Sport 7: Winter 1991

Truth and Desire

Truth and Desire

In his celebrated essay Tree and Leaf Tolkein [sic: Tolkien] speculates as to why Andrew Lang turned his adult study of myth and folklore into a series of stories for children.

'I suspect,' Lang writes, 'that belief and appetite for marvels are regarded as identical or closely related. They are radically different, though the appetite for marvels is not at once or at first differentiated by a growing human mind from its general appetite.' Lang, according to Tolkein [sic: Tolkien], may be implying that the teller of marvellous tales to children trades on the credulity that makes it less easy for children to distinguish fact from fiction; ,though,' Tolkein [sic: Tolkien] says, correctly I think, 'the distinction is fundamental to the human mind, and to fairy stories.' All the same, I think that the appetite for marvels may reinforce some aspects of truth that the fact or fiction dichotomy obscures.

Talking further about the appetite for marvels, and his own appetite for reading, Tolkein [sic: Tolkien] then says of himself:

I had special wish to believe ... At no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen or had happened in real life. Fairy stories were plainly not concerned with possibility but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while whetting it unbearably, they succeeded.

I think that, like Tolkein [sic: Tolkien] and many readers before and since, I was filled with an appetite for marvels, and desire alone seemed to me to be a sufficient justification for a story, even though longing for what is not true has been seen as a wicked thing to do, particularly by those readers who also strenuously maintain that we should not disturb the innocence of children by telling them all the truth. I tend to think, since the appetite for marvels appears to be so much part of humanity, that it exists in us for a reason, and that in an odd way it may be connected with truth. My enjoyment of a story certainly did not depend on belief while I was reading the story, for the story generated its own belief, but afterwards I would often try to adjust the world so that the story could be fitted into it. To find something that was page 13 marvellous was wonderful; to find something that was wonderful and true was ecstasy; for it meant wonderful things might be possible for me too.

'The function of the story teller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple, to integrate without reduction, for it is barely possible to declare the truth as it is because the universe presents itself as a mystery,' says Alan Garner, after saying that the true story is religious and adding that he is using the word 'religious' to indicate concern for the way we are in the cosmos. All the vital processes of our lives (like eating and reproducing) are reinforced with powerful pleasure principles. We take pleasure in stories, we desire them, because we need to know about them and to be able to use them. Stories enable us first to give form to, and then to take possession of, a variety of truths both literal and figurative. Once we have part of the truth caught up in a story, we can begin to recognise it and get some sort of power over it. But of course we have to be careful about the way we believe stories. They can make us not only into temporary heroes and wizards, but temporary villains too ... even into temporary sharks.