Madeleine L'Engle Herself
Page 15
AN IMPORTANT COLLABORATION
The reader, viewer, listener, usually grossly underestimates his importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life. Creative involvement: that’s the basic difference between reading a book and watching TV. In watching TV we are passive; sponges; we do nothing. In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader “know” each other; they meet on the bridge of words.
CO-CREATORS WITH GOD
Reality is not something we observe; something out there, as some people used to think that God was something out there. Reality is something we participate in making, as co-creators with God. Making reality is part of our vocation, and one of the chief concerns of prayer. And it is an affirmation of interdependence.
When I turn to the piano and a Bach fugue, I compose it along with Bach as I hear it and attempt to play it. A writer, alone and with great struggle, writes a book. That book becomes real only as someone reads it and creates it along with the author. Each one of us, reading Genesis, will begin to create a new reality. The important thing is that our realities intersect and overlap.
STORIES MUST BE BELIEVABLE
Credibility in creativity is a hard lesson to learn, and I’m grateful that it was pointed out to me early by Leonard Ehrlich, who gave me those useful first two assignments. I had written a story for him in fulfillment of an assignment, and when he returned it to me, he said, “It’s well written, Madeleine, but I don’t believe it.”
“But it’s true,” I defended hotly. “I wrote it exactly the way it happened. It’s true.”
Calmly he replied, “If I don’t believe it, it isn’t true.”
Like many lessons, that was painful. But I had to take it seriously. No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed. I learned slowly, struggling to acquire the technique which will help me to become more able to put down on paper the truth I see. The artist seeks that truth which offers freedom and then tries to share this offering.
IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBILITIES
If we have to be infallible we are not free to seek truth. We are not free to say No, this time, and Yes, that time. Truth often comes by revelation when we least expect it….
My writing teaches me. It gives me truths I didn’t know and could never have thought of by myself. Truth is given us when we are enabled to believe the contradictory and impossible. Jesus is wholly God? Jesus is wholly human? That’s impossible. But it is the conjunction of these two impossibilities that make light.
STORYTELLERS SEARCH FOR TRUTH
People have always told stories as they searched for truth. As our ancient ancestors sat around the campfire in front of their caves, they told the stories of their day in order to try to understand what their day had meant, what the truth of the mammoth hunt was, or the roar of the cave lion, or the falling in love of two young people. Bards and troubadours throughout the centuries have sung stories in order to give meaning to the events of human life. We read novels, go to the movies, watch television, in order to find out more about the human endeavor. As a child I read avidly and in stories I found truths which were not available in history or geography or social studies.
FICTION IN SEARCH OF THE TRUTH
We’re not the only generation to seek titillation in perversion, though I doubt if it’s ever been so open since the days of the great Roman excesses. Our civilizations are not dissimilar, both reflecting the end of something rather than looking towards a new beginning (which is always the stance of the artist), and both are the expressions of a secular culture, accepting only the immediate and shunning the transcendent.
We shudder at the thought of the Roman arenas, with masses of people getting a thrill out of seeing other people being torn to pieces by lions, by each other. But we, too, have burdens on our conscience….
An artist seeking for the truth behind human brutality may express it in the bleeding body of an animal shot for sport rather than need. The truth of an incident may lie artistically far from the facts of that incident. The most difficult part of trying to show truth lies not only in believing in it oneself but in making it believable to the reader, viewer, listener.
THE TRUTH OF ART
Once when I suggested to a student that he go to the encyclopedia when he wanted to look up a fact, he asked me, “But can’t I find truth in stories too?” My reply: “Who said anything about truth? I told you to look up facts in the encyclopedia. When you’re looking for truth, then look in art, in poetry, in story, in painting and music.” Now this student was doing no more than making the mistake of many of his elders, confusing provable fact with truth, and then fearing truth enough to try to discount it. If I want to search for the truth of the human heart, I’m more apt to go to Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov than a book on anatomy.
TRUTH AND FACT
A lot of the world, including the Christian world (sometimes I think especially the Christian world), is hung up on literalism, and therefore confuses truth and fact. Perhaps that’s why someone caught reading a novel frequently looks embarrassed, and tries to hide the book, pretending that what he’s really reading is a book on how to fix his lawn mower or take out his own appendix. Is this rather general fear of story not so much a fear that story is not true, as that it might actually be true? And what about the word fiction? For many people it means something that is made up, is not true.
Karl Barth wrote that he took the Bible far too seriously to take it literally. Why is that statement frightening to some people? There is no way that you can read the entire Bible seriously and take every word literally. Contradictions start in the first chapter of Genesis. There are two Creation stories, two stories of the making of Adam and Eve. And that is all right. The Bible is still true.
WRITERS REVEAL TRUTH
We all want truth, that truth which Jesus promised would make us free. But where do we find it? How could it have happened that even in the church story has been lost as a vehicle of truth? Early in our corruption we are taught that fiction is not true….Is Jane Eyre not true? Did Conrad, turning to the writing of fiction in his sixties, not search there for truth? Was Melville, writing about the sea and the great conflict between a man and a whale, not delving for a deeper truth than we can find in any number of “how to” books?
And Shakespeare and all the other dramatists before and after him! Are they not revealers of truth? Why then, in some evangelical colleges where I have lectured, are there “Speech Departments,” and the students produce and act in plays, but the department cannot be called “theatre,” because theatre is wicked, and not true?
THE TRUTH OF FICTION
I think that all writing, even the most scientific, is autobiographical, and there’s no such thing as an objective history. I don’t trust history as much as I trust fiction. Fiction tends to be more true. When you’re writing fiction, or what is called fiction, you’re more able to let go and you have to let go to get to the truth. When we’re controlling it, it’s never quite there. Our darknesses do change us sometimes, pulling us further in and sometimes opening us up to the most brilliant sunlight. We have to trust them. I don’t want to go through some of mine again, thank you please. But they were very important.
FAIRY-TALE WRITERS REVEAL A REALITY BEYOND
The fairy-tale teller must convey a far deeper sense of verisimilitude than the writer of slice-of-life stories which deal with a much more limited reality. In George Macdonald’s The Princess and Curdie we believe that the stairs in the castle which Irene must climb to her godmother are there, that they would be there even if George Macdonald had never written about them; we must believe it is quite possible t
hat one day we may be asked to plunge our own hands into that terrible, burning fire of roses. The fairy-tale writer tells about a world more real than that of every day. When I am deep in a story and am interrupted, I am jerked out of the “real” world into a much more shadowy world.
CHILDREN NEED THE TRUTH OF MYTHS
Children want to know, and perhaps it is our desire not to let them down that has led us into the mistake of teaching them only the unanswerables. This is a mistake, and we mustn’t refuse to allow them to ask the unanswerables just because we can’t provide tidy little answers. In our fear of the unprovable we mustn’t forget that they can learn from The Tempest as well as social studies; that they can learn from Aesop as well as the new math; that The Ugly Duckling need not be discarded in favor of driver education. There is a violent kind of truth in the most primitive myths, a truth we need today, because probably the most important thing those first storytellers did for their listeners back in their past in their tales of gods and giants and fabulous beasts was to affirm that the gods are not irrational, that there is structure and meaning in the universe, that God is responsible to his creation.
Truth happens in these myths. That is why they have lasted. If they weren’t expressions of truth they would long have been forgotten.
UNDERWATER WORLDS
It is frightening to go deep-sea diving. You can get the bends. So we have to go down slowly. But if we’re willing to open ourselves to the underwater world as well as the more limited world of provable fact, we’ll not only be better writers but we’ll have the joy of voyaging in that region where Shakespeare and C. S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen and Tolkien and Tolstoy and Mark Twain and George Macdonald wandered at will and where we can all become more fully alive, where we may have life and life more abundantly.
MYTHS HELP US FIND OUR WAY HOME
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
In literature the longing for home is found in the many stories of paradise, of the forgotten place where we once belonged. In the Judeo-Christian tradition we have the story of the Garden, the beautiful place of love and spontaneity where we were in touch with our Source. But there are stories of an almost-forgotten beautiful place in the myths of all cultures—and of course I am using myth in its ancient meaning—that which was true, that which is true, that which will be true, that strange truth which is as elusive as home.
RECAPTURING WONDER
Abraham Heschel says, “As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines.” Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information but for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.
So I turn again and again to story to retrieve the sense of wonder. Story does help us to bind our fragmented selves together, does help us to recognize ourselves in all our terrible and marvelous complexity. Story affirms that there are constants, despite the change and decay in all we see around us. One of the constants is question. One particular question which is asked in every generation is “Who am I?”
Story helps us answer that question. As we identify with the various characters, we help to build ourselves. We may not be able to slow down the accelerating changes in the world around us, but we are free to react to them in our own ways. And our very reacting is going to change not only ourselves but also whatever it is that we react to. We are surrounded by disillusioned people, frightenedly zealous people who have forgotten that they can cooperate with change by writing their own stories because they have forgotten that story is their prime vehicle for truth.
WHY WE TELL STORIES
Story makes us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically. It is we humans who either help bring about, or hinder the coming of the kingdom. We look at the world around us, and it is a complex world, full of incomprehensible greed (why are we continuing to cut down our great forests that supply our planet with so much of its oxygen?), irrationality, brutality, war, terrorism—but also self-sacrifice, honor, dignity—and in all of this we look for, and usually find, pattern, structure, meaning. Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
THE GLORY OF WRITING
In one of his letters, the playwright Sherwood Anderson wrote, “The disease we all have to fight against all our lives is, of course, the disease of self.” I am pretty sure that writing may be a way of life in itself. It can be that because it continually forces us away from self toward others. Let any man or woman look too much upon his or her own life, and everything becomes a mess. I think the glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
In the end, the real writer becomes a lover. We’re all called to be lovers in the true godly sense of the word, not in the current and limited sense of sex partners only. Let’s discard all that the media has to say on the subject and return to the difficult understanding of lovers. How do we know God? As lovers. There is no other way. Adam knew Eve. That is how we know God, caught in the mystery of love. We may know that which we cannot comprehend and that indeed is a marvel.
APPENDIX I
Sources for This Book
And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings. Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1983.
Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation. Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1997.
A Circle of Quiet. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.
The Irrational Season. New York: Seabury Press, 1977. Excerpts reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols. Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1996.
The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth. Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1993.
Sold into Egypt: Joseph’s Journey into Human Being. Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1989.
A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob. Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1986.
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1980.
Wheaton College Writing and Literature Conferences
In Appendix II, sources indicated by a WC followed by a number refer to audiocassette tapes of Madeleine L’Engle’s interviews, writers’ conferences, and lectures. These tapes are part of the Madeleine L’Engle Papers held at the Special Collections part of Buswell Memorial Library at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Excerpts from all the following tapes, except WC 35, WC 113, and WC 130, are used by permission of Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections.
WC 1—“A Good Story Is Worth a Thousand Pictures.” Speech. 27 October 1972.
WC 4—“We Who Live by Words.” Lecture. “Of Dragons and Seraphim” Workshop, 8–9 October 1976. 8 October 1976.
WC 9—“The Christian Faith and the Creative Process.” 28 September 1978.
WC 10—“The Christian Artist and the World.” 28 September 1978.
WC 11—“Christian Creative Living.” Chapel talk. 29 September 1978.
WC 23—Writers’ Workshop, Session I. 25 January 1983.
WC 24—Writers’ Workshop, Session II. 26 January 1983.
WC 25—Writers’ Workshop, Session III. 26 January 1983.
WC 26—Writer
s’ Workshop, Session IV. 27 January 1983.
WC 27—Writers’ Workshop, Session V. 27 January 1983.
WC 28—Writers’ Workshop, Session VI. 27 January 1983.
WC 29—Writers’ Workshop, Session VII. 28 January 1983.
WC 30—Writers’ Workshop, Session VIII. 28 January 1983.
WC 31—Writers’ Workshop, Session IX. 31 January 1983.
Interviews
WC 34—Interview by B. Wenniger. In the Wheaton Record. 27 January 1983.
WC 35—Interview by Studs Terkel. 30 January 1983.
Other Lectures and Conferences
WC 38—“Reflections on Literary Art in a Technological Age.” Lecture, questions, and answers at Wheaton College. 14 July 1987.