True Tales of Wonder Convey the Permanent Things

     In Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics , Russell Kirk points out that the duty to pass the torch regarding time-tested truths falls largely to the keepers of the written word. He singles out moral fantasy in particular as a great hope for achieving this lofty goal, and analyzes the enduring principles found in works by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. 

    ...The creative writer, the critic and the teacher of literature are heirs to an ancient civilized order. ... The real responsibility of the teacher of literature in maintaining the contract of eternal society is not that of a preacher of doctrines nor an agent of government. His duty is far loftier than this. Paul Elmer More describes the real function of the humane scholar as "a disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination to the end that the student may behold, as it were in one sublime vision, the whole scale of being in its range from the lowest to the highest under the divine decree of order and subordination, without losing sight of the immutable veracity at the heart of all development, which is only the the praise and surname of virtue." ...

    ... The work of recovering normality in letters has commenced here and there.  Its progress is most hopeful in ... the reviving art of moral fantasy, the ancient and persistent power of myth, fable, allegory and parable.  [These] are not falsehoods; on the contrary, they are means for penetrating to the truth by appealing to the moral imagination. ...

      "Fantasy" or "fancy" originally signified the enlightening imagination.  In fantasy, things are represented strangely, so as to rouse our wonder; yet the shock of the fantastic is intended to wake us from dullness and complacency. ... [Fantasy writers] show us the norms for man and society through conjuring up fanciful episodes in which our virtues and vices glimmer as in a looking glass. Were it not for the mirrored reflection, we should not take thought. ...

     And in a  time when professors in seminaries inform us that God has expired, and that we must be utterly demythologized, disenchanted, desacralized and deconsecrated -- why, these learned doctors are undone by the Christian fables and allegories of Clive Staples Lewis. ... For our fabulists will not permit us to become disenchanted, desacralized, and deconsecrated.  Imagination, given time, does rule the world ... and for every doctrinaire secularist who swears by Cox, a hundred young people will have read of Aslan, the lion-Christ of Narnia. ... The twentieth-century fabulist may or may not be orthodox in religious convictions. .. But he loves the permanent things. If we are arrested in our march toward Logicalism and its inhumane universalism, our rescuers may be the authors of true tales of wonder, not the theologians of our schools. To make myself clearer, I present to you Mr. Ray Bradbury, of Hollywood, a person in most matters very unlike Carlyle or Macdonald, yet a man who overthrows idols by the power of imagery. .....

    "Soul,"  a word much out of fashion nowadays, signifies a man's animating entity.  That flaming spark the soul is the real space traveller of Bradbury's stories."I'm alive!" -- that exclamation is heard from Waukegan to Mars and beyond, in Bradbury's fables. Life is its own end -- if one has a soul to tell him so.

      The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man's power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of any events.  Without the moral imagination, man would live merely from day to day, or  rather moment to moment, as dogs do.  It is the strange faculty -- inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only -- of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest.  And the moral imagination, which shows us what we ought to be, primarily is what distinguishes Bradbury's tales from the futurism of Wells' fancy. For Bradbury, the meaning of life is here and now, in our every action; we live amidst immortality; it is here, not in some future domination like that of Wells' The Sleeper Awakens, that we must find our happiness. ... Perpetual youth, and therefore, perpetual hope, defy in Bradbury's pages the fatigue of this century and the ambitions of exploiting scientism.

    If spirits in prison, still we are spirits; if able to besmirch ourselves, still only we men are capable of moral choices.  Life and technology are what we make of them, and the failure of man to live in harmony with nature is the failure of moral imagination. That failure is not inevitable.  ...

      To understand Bradbury's disquietude and his high hopes, we may look at his [works]. ...What gives these stories their cunning is their realism set in the fantastic: that is, their portrayal of human nature, in all its baseness and all its promise, against an exquisite stage-set.  We are shown normality, the permanent things in human nature, by the light of another world; and what we forget about ourselves in the ordinariness of our routine of existence suddenly bursts upon us as fresh revelation.

    Wells would have had man usurp the throne of God. Bradbury's hope is that man will let God work through him; for it is not the dead universe which is divine, but "God fleshing himself in sentience" -- the living God making Himself felt through human energies.  "I speak of no errant usurpation from the Deity. I speak of no paranoiac illusion of mythology which would supremacize man to the detriment of the Supreme Being. I seek only to weld the two. I seek to fuse them in religious fervor until they cleave, entwine, are bound so feverish tight no light can be seen between them; they are light." ...

     Bradbury discovers... ancient truths beneath the surface of existence in Waukegan, Illinois, say, about 1928 ... in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

     A carnival comes to a small town; and two boys, thirteen years old, Jim and Will, are fascinated by it.  But this particular carnival is not merry. Its master is the Illustrated Man, Mr. Dark, seeking whom he may devour. His captive freaks are sinners whose monstrous bodies are the personifications of their sins.  His carousel, running forward or backward at great speed, will give human beings their desire of youth regained or age attained -- and send the iron into their souls. His Mirror Maze will entrap the folk who seek what is not in nature, and will convert them into caricatures of themselves.  Mademoiselle Tarot, the Dust With, can murder with a whisper. For centuries, preying upon frailty and folly, this carnival has wandered the world, its proprietors setting teir snares for the unwise and the unwary, and often with success.

      Only one man in town -- Will's father, the library janitor, growing old -- recognizes the carnival for what it is. The carnival is Death. "But I think it uses Death as a threat," says Charles Halloway, the janitor, to the terrified boys.  "Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, tying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy.  All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we're more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something."

     This carnival is the evil that men do to one another, and to themselves; it is fed by pain and fear. What Cooger and Dark's Carnival desires is not worthless dead souls, but ulcerated egos, given up to will and appetite.  "A dead soul is no kindling. But a live and raving soul, crisped with self-damnation, oh, that's a pretty snoutful for each of them." Enslaved to freak-masters, such souls in agony supply te fuel for the carnival's perpetuity. For every need, want and desire the carnival proprietors promise a satisfaction beyond the bounds of nature. But their victims fall instead, into madness and ghastly distortion.  There is no need for devils to buy souls, for "most men jump at the chance to give up eveyrthing for nothing." This carnival has traveled "a long way on an easy map, with people handy by every crossroad to lend it lustful pints of agony to power it on.  Soaybe hte carnival survives, living off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets."

    This carnivals' power is mighty, and it converts the ligntning-rod salesman into a hideous crumpled dwarf, old Miss Foley into a lost child. Jim, who would grow up too soon, stands on the brink of being whirled by the carousel into monstrosity. By lusting after the abnormal, by flouting the nature of things, old and young betray themselves into the freak-masters' clutch.

     Yet one power is stronger than the temptations and threats of the carnival; and that power is laughter. We laugh at the incongruous, at the absurdity of the unnatural. Rediscovering the weapon of humor, Halloway first baffles the Dust Witch, and the shoots her dead with a bullet on which he has printed a smile. Evil, after all, is ludicrous; and though God is notmocked, thse creatures who batten upon tormented souls are aghast at healthy mockery.

     Just when all had seemed lost, Halloway and the boys destroy the carnival by mirth. But other creatures who prey upon warped souls will come to town presently, in some other disguise, and the fools who want everything will become their freaks.

     Evil, in essence, is the appetite to undo the natural order of things. It is the glorification of abnormity. And the price one pays for clutching at the unnatural is metamorphosis into a freak,or into a freak-master.

    In Bradbury's fables...,, fantasy has become what it was in the beginning: the enlightening moral imagination, transcending simple rationality. The everyday world is not the real world, for today's events are merely a film upon the deep well of the past, and theywill be swallowed up by the unknowable future. The real world is the world of the permanent things, which often are discerned more clearly in the fictional dead cities of Mars or the fictional carousel of Cooger and Dark than in our own little private slice of evanescent experience.  ...

    The trappings of science fiction may have attracted young people to Bradbury, but he has led them on to something much older and better: mythopoeic literature, normative truth acquired through wonder.  Bradbury's stories are not an escape from reality; they are windows looking upon enduring reality.