Tolkien's eucatastrophe, or the richness of the Good
A prose poem went around on Twitter.
There's laundry and a genocide to stop, by Vinay Krishnan
There’s laundry to do and a genocide to stop. I have to eat better and also avoid a plague. my rent went up $150. I’ll need to pick up more shifts. Twenty people died in Rafah this morning and every major news outlet is stretching the limits of passive voice to suggest whole families may have leaped up through the air at missiles that otherwise had the right of way. I just got a notification that my student loan payments are starting up again and my phone isn’t charged. My cousin got COVID for a fourth time and can no longer work or walk or even feed himself. The person across from me on the L train seems to fashion themself a punk rock revolutionary, but they’re not wearing a face mask, and that’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that makes me want to steal batteries. Fascists keep winning primaries for both parties, and I think I gained a few pounds. The CDC just announced there are no more speed limits on highways, and I think this Ativan is finally hitting. The NYPD farmer’s market only sells bad apples, have you heard that one? Listen it’s warm today, too warm for March. But I don’t have time to think through the implications because there’s laundry to do and a genocide to stop.
The poem provoked many reactions, including many people who hated it. Interesting, the power of poetry. One thing commenters objected to is how it seems to flatten all kinds of evil together in one miserable landscape: Bad apples, weight gain, covid that leaves on bed-bound, genocide. As Twitter user @ValoisDuBins remarked,
For me, the poem is partly about having everything forced into that flat landscape and the alienation that creates. The way close up and far away, now and tomorrow, all melt into each other.
But the poem reveals something enduringly fascinating to me. Authors as diverse as Augustine, Arendt, and Wang Yangming, have remarked on it. Evil is pretty banal. Bad things can be devastating, and this poem is a laundry list of them.
But ultimately, there's a kind of flatness to evil. Evil people are boring, uninteresting. They are pompous and empty. There's a reason vanitas, vanity, means both being full of yourself and emptiness (futility).
On the other hand, good people are so fascinating. Good things have such depth to them. A happy reuniting, a beautiful day spent with your friends, an inspiring moment where you find just the right turn of phrase. Poets and writers will talk about the Muse, because a moment of inspiration discloses profundity and seems to allude to a world that is much more wondrous than we know, something within you not fully accountable by what you have cultivated or what you are normally capable of.
Tolkien tries to account for this feeling—our persistent sense that goodness is wholeness and has depth to it—by coining the word eucatastrophy in his On Fairy Stories (1939 lecture) a long and wide-ranging essay on the enduring power of fairytales.
Tolkien first does away with the myth that fairytales are either for kids, or for adults who are merely nostalgically longing for their childhood, playing at being kids. So why do they endure? Why are they so universal? Tolkien says that fairytales have an important function, namely consolation (consolatio, as philosophers would call it).
Reminiscing about his own childhood, Tolkien remarks that he never wanted to believe, as Andrew Lang claimed, “I had no special “wish to believe.” I wanted to know.” Still, Tolkien acknowledges that we do have a deep desire that feeds into our enduring hunger for story, and that desire, that expectation is for eucatastrophy:
But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.
We do not expect the good to happen. It's not about probability.
Think of that awful story of the Palestinian girl Hind, who was stuck in a car while rescue workers tried to get to her, only for hem later all to be killed. As my husband was telling this gruesome tale to me, I thought “Of course, they couldn't save her. Of course, that's what happens.”
The “joyous turn” where she would have been saved, that is the power of fairy story. We know it's not realistic, but it somehow feels more true to us. The flatness is gone. A world of possibility opens up.
When that happens, “however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.”
This is why we say in our cynical moments “fairy tales” when we hear of good outcomes. We know they don't come, and the world phenomenologically presents itself as flatness where all the misery melts together in a homogenous mass.
In a CS Lewsian turn in the Epilogue, Tolkien equates this eucatastrophe with joy. And then, in a neoplatonic turn, he says that this joy we sense can be “explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?”
To buy into Tolkien's picture, I don't think you need to be a platonist and think there's sovereign Good underlying our world, or a Christian as Tolkien makes the link. The picture Tolkien outlines is, I believe, compatible with many different metaphysics (you could do an interesting neo-Confucian one where the Pattern is the joy you discern etc). Because I think Tolkien refers to something that is psychologically real: our minds numb at the bad, they open up in all their vulnerability whenever we get a taste of joy.
So there seems to be at least a psychological reality to Tolkien's account of fairy story: we just get numb with evil, there's nothing there, there's no deeper reality, there's just laundry and genocide. Once we dare to hope for good outcomes, the world truly opens itself up to us.