A few years ago at Sundance I watched a film called On the Road with Judas. It’s a very postmodern kind of film about the artists relationship to the art and things like that. However, ne part that stood out to me was a moment in which a writer in the film says that all writers are liars.
I think many of us carry this sentiment when we watch films. It’s just a story, we tell our children. It’s not real. In fact, the more fantastic the story, the more likely we are to brush aside it’s “truth value.” For some reason “realistic” films like Crash and Slumdog Millionaire (to a degree) touch us and inspire us because they feel so true. Yet fantasies and fairy tales do quite the opposite, don’t they? We watch them and think, that’s make-believe. That’s fun. But it need not affect my life in any important way.
Tolkien, the well known author of The Lord of the Rings was well aware of this sentiment. He writes in his essay On Fairy Stories about a young man who strongly disbelieved in the ability of myth to tell the truth.
I will say no more than to quote a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as “lies”; though to do him justice he was kind enough and confused enough to call fairy-story-making “Breathing a lie through Silver.”
This young man was actually C.S. Lewis who went on to write the classic children’s fantasies The Chronicles of Narnia. What led a man who called a myth “lies breathed through silver,” to become one of the most influential fantasy writers of our century?
In the collection of Lewis’s essays God in the Docks Lewis gives a shockingly different view of myths.
The heart of Christianity is a myth, which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history… By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle…Those who do not know that this great myth became Fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied.
The myths in our libraries and history books are then not simply imaginative explorations into fancy. They follow a sort of order. We imagined men like Gods, because there was a man who in fact was and is God.
But what C.S. Lewis is talking about sounds more like prophecy then the hard work of any salt of the earth arist. “Breathing a lie through silver” is not a very shocking phrase to someone who makes his living working for the “silver screen.”
Myths, it seems, were once like prophecies. If our culture has resorted to willfully telling lies, then where is the spirit of this culture headed? Can we become prophets again?
