{"id":8701,"date":"2014-06-21T19:22:17","date_gmt":"2014-06-21T19:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2014\/06\/21\/fantastic-fiction-is-accused-of-giving-children\/"},"modified":"2014-06-21T19:22:17","modified_gmt":"2014-06-21T19:22:17","slug":"fantastic-fiction-is-accused-of-giving-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2014\/06\/21\/fantastic-fiction-is-accused-of-giving-children\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

[Fantastic fiction] is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in But I think no literature that children could read gives them less<\/i> of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did. <\/p>\n

\u2026Do fairy tales teach children to retreat into a world of wish-fulfilment \u2018fantasy\u2019 in the technical psychological sense of the word\u2014instead of facing the problems of the real world? \u2026Let us again lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story or any other story which is labelled a \u2018Boy\u2019s Book\u2019 or a \u2018Girl\u2019s Book\u2019, as distinct from a `Children\u2019s Book\u2019. There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes. We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairy land. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who discovers the spy\u2019s plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage. But the two longings are very different. The second, especially when directed on something so close as school life, is ravenous and deadly serious. \u2026We run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery to the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration.<\/p>\n

The other longing, that for fairy land, is very different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale?\u2014really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. 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. \u2026The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can\u2019t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story.<\/p>\n

I do not mean that school stories for boys and girls ought not to be written. I am only saying that they are far more liable to become \u2018fantasies\u2019 in the clinical sense than fantastic stories are. And this distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest,<\/i> or The Worm Ouroboros:<\/i> he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes\u2014things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an askesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

C. S. Lewis, \u201cOn Three Ways of Writing for Children<\/a>\u201d<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Fantastic fiction] is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world … Continue reading <\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[831,830],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8701"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}