Recovery of Wonder

Why I write and why I write fantasy

I was reading an excellent essay by L.M. Sacasas the other day, and it brought to light a couple of things in regards to my work as a writer. The first idea sparked by Sacasas’s essay is the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Sacasas, a technology theorist, uses this question as a starting point for his thesis, which is that the human capacity for wonder has been impeded by the technology with which we surround ourselves.

As soon as I saw this question — “What does it mean to be human?” — I realized that the reason I’m a writer is because I want to pursue answers to this fundamental question. What does it mean to be human? Fiction, in particular, allows us to explore characters living in the world (in a world?), and stories about characters living in a world are where we can seek answers to the human condition.

Nonfiction, particularly philosophy, can also pursue answers to this question, but philosophy and philosophical writing have limits. They are “head-only” attempts to get at the question. Philosophy gets us thinking and reasoning, and while these are important functions, they aren’t everything. Humans are feeling creatures as well as thinking ones. Fiction works at the level of emotion, and even more importantly, imagination, and therefore it can explore what it means to be human in ways that (in my opinion) go deeper than what our reasoning can attempt alone.

When we read fiction, we see through the eyes of others. There’s a lot that’s been studied and written about how fiction can increase our empathy, but I also think fiction can increase our awareness of our own humanness. In experiencing what the characters experience, we broaden our understanding of what it means to be human, but we also deepen our understanding of what it means to be ourselves. The things we respond to in the story are not necessarily what others will respond to, and what we imagine when we imagine the story is unique to our own perceptions of the world.

What fiction does, then, for readers is give them lots of “eyes” with which to envision the world, and turns the eye inward as well, so that their own interior vision is made more vivid. All of this happens at a level that goes beyond explanation, beyond attempts at articulation. Analysis and critique can never fully “explain” the experience of reading fiction nor why we respond to the things we respond to. The story goes beyond mere explanation. As Ursula Le Guin puts it,

In fact, art itself is our language for expressing the understandings of the heart, the body, and the spirit.

Any reduction of that language into intellectual messages is radically, destructively incomplete.

This is as true of literature as it is of dance or music or painting. But because fiction is an art made of words, we tend to think it can be translated into other words without losing anything. So people think a story is just a way of delivering a message…

If you read a story not just with your head, but also with your body and feelings and soul, the way you dance or listen to music, then it becomes your story. And it can mean infinitely more than any message. It can offer beauty. It can take you through pain. It can signify freedom. And it can mean something different every time you reread it…

Art frees us, and the art of words can take us beyond anything we can say in words.¹

As a writer of fiction, I get to experience this process too. In creating characters and worlds, I must plumb the depths of myself and my experiences with others (and the world), and my own imagination too, and use all of these to craft a narrative and a secondary world that goes beyond any articulation of mere ideas. I attempt to answer the question, “What does it mean to be human?” but it is always an attempt. We attempt and we attempt and we attempt, but we never answer the question fully because the human heart is irreducible to a single answer.

Writing (and reading) fiction is my attempt, over and over again, to answer a question that can never be exhausted.

Writing fiction is also an attempt at recovering a sense of wonder. This idea of wonder and what it means to experience wonder is at the heart of Sacasas’s essay. As Sacasas sees it:

Wonder is experienced as an interruption of our ordinary expectations or usual way of seeing the world. Wonder arises when the commonplace becomes suddenly perplexing or the ordinary takes on an extraordinary quality.

He is primarily focused on our ability (or inability in the digital age) to experience wonder when looking at images like the James Webb telescope images of outer space. As Sacasas points out, we all marveled at them for a bit, but then we lost interest and moved on to other things (both he and I are generalizing here for the sake of argument). The culprit, as Sacasas argues, is the relentless flow of images that cross our paths everyday, that inculcate us to the experience of seeing something immeasurably wonderful (like the James Webb images) and then moving on to the next thing without that wonder having any lasting effect on us.

In order to counteract this numbing or flattening effect that comes as a result of the relentless cascade of images in our digital world, Sacasas has some suggestions, but one thing he didn’t touch on is an idea that Tolkien wrote about in his famous essay, “On Fairy-Stories”: the recovery of wonder through the telling of fairy stories.

In Tolkien’s essay, he looks at three effects of the “fairy-story” (or a work of fantasy literature, as we might say). The first of these, “recovery,” is related to this idea of wonder, of what, in Sacasas’s words, “arises when the commonplace becomes suddenly perplexing or the ordinary takes on an extraordinary quality.”

For Tolkien, fantasy is well-suited to the recovery of such a “vision,” because fantasy uses the ordinary things of this world — tree, stone, bread, water — to fashion a secondary world, a world of “Faerie,” and even if the trees of Faerie are still just trees, the fairy story helps us see them more clearly. We see them with eyes filled with wonder. In giving us magic trees, or dragons, or stone trolls, fantasy gives us a way to recover our vision for the wonders of the ordinary world. We read about the trolls turning to stone, and now every stone or rock or craggy hillside is imbued with “trollishness,” and our “vision” of these ordinary things is recovered.

One need only think of Treebeard and ents to get at what Tolkien means, for who can know the ents and not look at an ordinary tree with recovered vision, seeing that tree for the wonder that it is?

Sacasas is concerned with how digital images — both the artificiality and proliferation of them — have impaired our ability to experience wonder, but is it possible to recover this vision with language, specifically the language of fantasy stories? Can language and stories restore our ability to see wonder in a tree or a stone or a cloud?

Perhaps more directly, can fantasy help us “attend to the world with love”?²

I know that one of my favorite experiences is when I finish reading an excellent fantasy story: I put the book down and look at the world around me — my ordinary living room, the trees outside the window, the shaft of light cutting through the clouds — and my vision of things is brighter, more wonder-filled. I have a kind of gratitude for the world and for life that I didn’t have — or had forgotten to have — before.

This feeling of gratitude, this recovered vision of the extraordinariness of ordinary things is one of the reasons I continue to read fantasy, and continue to write it.

It’s also something that I’m reminded of as we celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers.

I wrote about Fellowship’s twentieth anniversary last year, and I think one of the reasons those films mean so much to me is because they have helped me recover my sense of wonder. They came out in a time before social media had really become the overwhelming (oppressive) force that it is today, before our digital lives were so overburdened and cluttered by an endless stream of altered images, and when the camera swept over those New Zealand mountains at the beginning of The Two Towers — those Misty Mountains of Middle-Earth brought to life — it was a moment of wonder for me. It did, in fact, take my breath away, and the very idea of “mountains” was renewed in my imagination. These weren’t CGI mountains, they were the real thing, but just as the real tree or the real forest in a fantasy story can have this restorative power over our imagination, so too can the real mountains in a fantasy movie.

As the year ends, I might just queue up the Lord of the Rings trilogy and recover a sense of wonder — for trees and mountains, for fire and sky — and get ready for a new year of writing fantasy.

1. From “A Message About Messages” by Ursula K. Le Guin, included in Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. Abrams Image, New York, 2013, p. 68.

2. From the last paragraph in Sacasas’s essay, “The Virture of Noticing,” included in Comment, October 6, 2022: https://comment.org/the-virtue-of-noticing/. He quotes from Iris Murdoch here to support his point, but I think it’s important to note that Murdoch’s use of the word “fantasy” is not the same fantasy as the fairy-story or fantasy literature I’m referring to here. Murdoch means the word more as a system that blinds us from seeing the reality of ourselves and our world. A kind of self-decpetion, if you will. This sort of “fantasy” is precisely what fantasy literature can also help us escape. By traversing in the realms of Faerie and experiencing stories which deal with some of the most permanent realities of being human, realities of life and death, we recover our vision of the world as it is and we escape the fetters of the bleak, inhuman, mechanized world that seeks to dehumanize us. Fantasy often deals in archetypes and symbolism, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also seek to answer questions about what it means to be human. The answers might be more primal, more universal than the ones found in a realistic novel, but they also allow us that recovery of vision that helps us see the world with wonder again. That surely is an antidote to self-deception or systematic blindness.