Customer Reviews

The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America

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"The Natural History of Make-Believe," by John Goldthwaite is just the kind of juicy-dry study I love. Juicy, because he probes the inner workings of fairy tales heirs, and dry, because ... he probes the inner workings of fairy tales heirs. Goldthwaite tends to prattle on when the reader would rather get on (100 pages on the subliminal "Alice in Wonderland," for example), but in spite of that I gleaned several new opinions and gobs of interesting quotes.

In the same breath, I chucked Goldthwaite's stuffy analysis of C.S. Lewis. Honestly, hasn't all that "self-absorbed misogynist" stuff been hashed out a hundred times? It's beyond me how millions of children can adore his "Chronicles" when, apparently, Lewis was just using Narnia as a vehicle for his poisoned pen.

But on to a (rather extended) sampling of my juicy notes and quotes:

Magic realism ... when the miraculous becomes real by association with the mundane and the mundane is transformed by its association with the miraculous.

With the advent of the fairy godmother, we have crossed the threshold of the church ... a composite of Christian and pagan elements.

Where the light of agape is occluded, Poetic Genius will be found floundering in the dark, spitting out scorn and non-sense.

To awaken rather than impress the meaning ... what the reader sees is not a rite but a wonder.

Because it presents the child with a portrait of a world he is, in real life, only just coming to know, every book teaches a new way of thinking about that world. The question is not whether a book teaches but what and how and whether its intent is to humanize a child or merely to socialize him.

Didactic purpose in children's stories (see the Lobster Quadrille, porpoise=purpose): inevitable inclusion vs. intrusion. Very fine line.

Such a belief, that the world is Sustained in its travels, is the one just warrant for inflicting pain in a children's book--for only by its felt presence can the pain be borne.

The business of fantasy authors is the business of miracles; their problem, in an age of rapid secularization, is how to redefine miracles so as to preserve them for the sake of the story. For what do you tell children when your instincts are for whimsy but you are either without a faith or no longer certain of the underlying warrant for dealing in miracles in the first place?

Feodor Rojankovsky: telling the truth like a tale, telling a tale like the truth.

Allsense, a gift of understanding, a confirmation to the meek and the powerless that they are alive in a world that is indeed invested with the imminence of wonder, which we call mystery, and the imminence of joy, which we call gladness. If these two imminences do not intimate the One imminence of a creative and self-revealing God, furthermore, they must by definition be specious and the miracle stories conveying them vain and sentimental entertainments.

Author as godparent ... if an author can discharge his role with a sympathetic wink and a push of the swings (like Perrault), so much the better. Never, however, should he deceive himself that because his tale is only a make-believe for children there is nothing more involved than a jolly hour or two at the playground.

Every work of make-believe announces to a credulous audience that the world is possessed of a quality that is beyond empirical knowing.

The only lasting justification for make-believe literature is the redemptive grace of agape, through which the world, with all its perils and squalor, may be revealed to children as a comic arena socially and a terra incognita invested with true mystery and true light.

This book focuses on the history of English children's fantasy literature over the past several centuries.

The book presents much material on the topic, from the tales of Perrault and Grimm to Maurice Sendak's works. Deeper biographical information on the authors and how the stories came to be written is also presented, as well as historical information on the interrelationships between these works of literature.

On the negative side, the book's coverage of authors and works is rather spotty. Any book on fantasy literature that fails to treat the tales about King Arthur, the Arabian Nights stories and the works of William Morris is sorely lacking. Other books serve the task better, such as Children and Books by Arbuthnot and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy by Clute and Grant. Also, much historic context is lacking, such as the sources of some European fairy tale elements in earlier mythological writings.

The book is also filled with the author's idiosyncratic opinions and rants about books and authors he dislikes. He spends about thirty pages giving his negative subjective opinions about Tolkien and Lewis. The author is very opinionated. One recalls the old saw, "A fool delights in revealing his own mind."

This having been said, the book has much useful information on the development of English fantasy literature that is potentially helpful to those interested in the subject.

The ideal tale teaches moral wisdom as represented in the Book of Proverbs; the fairy godmother represents Dame Wisdom. Goldthwaite presents a rare Christian literary point of view and criticizes writers who represent the world in some gnostic or pagan point of view. He does not bother to argue the validity of his point of view. He believes. Earth and the Heavans are God's. Writers who do not reflect this are either heretics or pagans From his position akin to Dante's, you may sense how much of modern literature inhabits either limbo or hell.