Dystopian Awakening

By Paul M. Gould

I’ve been thinking a lot about stories. I love stories. They awaken me. They remind me that God created me to live a dramatic life. A great life. A life of adventure. They also help me to see the world in a fresh light and the best stories help me see the world as full of wonder. My love for stories, and my theology and philosophy of stories, have been nourished by many thinkers, but chief among them is C. S. Lewis. Lewis, along with Tolkien and Chesterton, talks a lot about fairy stories. For Tolkien (and Lewis), fairy stories are valuable because they provide escape, consolation, and recovery (these three values are explicitly discussed in Tolkien’s famous essay “On Fairy-Stories”). When we read fairy stories—at least good ones—we enter fully into the secondary world of the story, meeting along the way talking trees and dragons, heroes and villains, and the idea of quest. Fairytales help us re-enchant the world. Lewis describes the imaginative awakening of fairytales as follows:

Does anyone suppose that he [the lover of fairytales] really and prosaically longs for all of the dangers and discomforts of a fairytale, really wants dragons in contemporary England? It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.[1]

Fairy tales arouse within us a longing “for he knows not what.” They awaken within us this “dim sense of something beyond . . . reach.” Even more, reading fairy stories helps us see the goodness and beauty of this world: they give “it a new dimension and depth.” We read of enchanted woods and then we look at real woods as enchanted. This all seems right to me.

I’ve been thinking lately about dystopian stories. We love those too: perhaps we love those more than fairy stories, as evidenced by the amount of new dystopian literature and shows on offer today. I’m wondering if dystopian stories, or at least the really good ones, function in a similar way as fairy tales, awakening us to the goodness and beauty and sacredness of the real world and the innate human longing for something beyond this world.

Consider Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. If there ever were a (good) dystopian novel, this would be it. It is, in many ways, the antithesis of a fairy story. There is a journey, a quest, but it isn’t a quest to a state of bliss (at least if I’m interpreting the last line of the book correctly). Rather, it is a story about the last quest, the end of the line, for humans. The world has been destroyed by some unnamed catastrophe. For twelve years, humans have survived in this post-apocalyptic world but as the (unnamed) man and boy journey on the bleak road, as told by McCarthy, the human species, along with all life on Earth, is very nearly extinct. We could very well be reading of the last quest in human history:

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone.[2]

And the secondary world of The Road is not enchanted. It is, in fact, very disenchanted: a world emptied of meaning, bereft of names, bereft of beauty and goodness. The woods are an “ashen scabland” full of lifeless rot and decay.[3] Humans too are hardly majestic or enchanted. Rather, we see the evilness and frailty of desperate humanity pushed to extremes. It is a kill-or-be-killed world. And yet, there is the man and the boy. They literally inhabit two different worlds. The man is morally mixed, tainted by the world that was as he seeks to survive and protect the boy at almost any cost. The boy, born after the world-destroying event, is innocent, or nearly so.

So, we have the last humans, and things are not pretty. And we have a world emptied of beauty and nearly all goodness. The opposite of a fairy story. Yet, the story moves me in a similar way as described by Lewis in that quote about fairy tales. In reading The Road, the horror and emptiness of that world helps me see the real world with new depth and dimensions. When considering the “last instance” of humans, I’m moved to consider the majesty and greatness of all real humans in this world. And I’m awakened, by reading of a world emptied of names, emptied of meanings, of the longing for the “I know not what” of something more.

One of my favorite passages comes roughly halfway through the book. As the man and boy slowly make their way on the road, the man ponders the end of all things:

He was beginning to think that death was finally upon them and that they should find some place to hide where they would not be found. There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all.[4]

The horror of the broken world aroused in the man a longing for a time when all was well, a time when he could rest in the presence of the good and the beautiful. That world had passed, and while he did travel in hope, he knew that fire would soon be extinguished too. In reading this passage, I’m reminded that I do have the ability—right now—to think about beauty and goodness. It is all around me. Our world—the actual world—is not dystopian. It is not tragedy all the way down. There is tragedy, to be sure. But there is comedy. And there is fairy story. The tragedy of The Road helps me see, with fresh eyes, goodness, truth, and beauty in the real world: a world full of drama and intrigue, evil and goodness, and thankfully, real hope.

So, what do you think? Do dystopian stories awaken you too? Do they remind you that what we long for, most deeply, is a world full of meaning and purpose and love and goodness and beauty? Does it suggest something more, something eternal? If so, then let McCarthy’s The Road (or your favorite dystopian novel or show) remind you that there is a road, a real road that leads to life: the road that leads us to Jesus.

Notes

[1] C. S. Lewis, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1996), 399; quoted in Charles Taliaferro, A Narnian Vision of the Atonement (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2022), 3.

[2] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 28.

[3] Ibid., 16.

[4] Ibid., 129–130.

— Paul M. Gould is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Director of the M.A. Philosophy of Religion program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author or editor of ten scholarly and popular-level books including A Good and True Story, Cultural Apologetics, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction, and The Story of the Cosmos. He has been a visiting scholar at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Henry Center, working on the intersection of science and faith, and is the founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute. You can find out more about Dr. Gould and his work at Paul Gould.com and the Two Tasks Institute. He is married to Ethel and has four children.

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