Authors and After Words: On Beyond Yertle – Three Classic Moralists

All art serves two masters:  form and content. The partnership between form and content varies from genre to genre, but in literature, which is the virtual reflection through Story of our actual experience, content is plot. Plot is driven by conflict. Conflict arises from a clash of needs or wants unmitigated by reason and/or morality. So then, under every story, we are bound to discover a bed of conflicting moral reasons. The art of fiction lies in the manner in which those moral conflicts are delivered and the degree to which the reader identifies with that conflict and its resolution, not as a matter of rules but as a matter of process, a matter of living and growing and internalization leading towards a fuller experience of life. What follows are three examples of such craft.

The first moral problem that comes to play in human experience is the problem of fairness. “That’s not fair” is one of the most frequently heard complaints of childhood, is it not? A certain fellow named Geisel who took the pen name, Dr. Seuss, knew that well. And knowing children as he did, he was able to construct plots that incorporated moral thinking with such charm that they seemed as natural as bees making honey. He said once that “Kids can see a moral coming a mile off,” but that did not stop him from dealing with issues. The Lorax deals with ecology; the Horton stories deal with responsibility, and Yertle the Turtle deals with misused power – with fairness.

Envious of the moon so high above, Yertle makes all of his subject turtles stack themselves one upon the other with himself on the top so he can overcome the moon. In the process, a tiny young turtle down below named Mack burps, causing the stack to fall apart only to leave Yertle the King of the Mud. In the end:  “And turtles, of course…all the turtles are free/As turtles and maybe all creatures should be.” That burp shook more than the stack of turtles for the word had never appeared in a children’s book before, but little Mack, simply by being himself, saved his pond from despotism. So far as turning the order of things inside out, Dr. Seuss once described himself and his books as “subversive as hell.” I once produced this story as a theater piece at a summer camp with 10-year-old boys and it became part of their daily life for, indeed, there was a 10-year-old bully in their midst. According to the leaders, the piece was welcomed and well used – the best kind of subversion.

By the time we get to middle childhood, fairness becomes more and more complicated. And one would hardly call C. S. Lewis subversive, yet, like all mystics, he could, through his fiction, shape and reshape orthodoxy through powerful and immediate experiences. Lewis came to write his Narnia series as a Christian apologist looking for a fresh way to introduce spiritual values into the reading lives of older youngsters. His take on Christianity was a particularly attractive combination of practical theology and mysticism. The latter takes pride of place in his fiction and his technique comes directly out of his literary criticism, a major concern of which was the study of allegory. His achievement in The Narnia Chronicles has been brilliantly encapsulated in the title of Kathryn Lindskoog’s critical study:  The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land.

Whatever else these stories may be, they are first of all finely crafted adventures in which a group of young folk are transported into a parallel world (Narnia) which resembles our own in the time of King Arthur – or thereabouts – but in which the creatures of classical Greece survive as well. It is among Lewis’s chief strengths that he is able to create allegorical images of enormously telling richness – a mouse driven by heroic intentions to sail into the light at the edge of the world; a boy who is changed into a dragon through his own selfishness only to suffer the exquisite pain of redemption at the claw of the Lion; a prince held captive underground to the idea that what he can see of the world is all there is to the world until that enchantment is broken by three characters from the world above, a boy, a girl, and a web-footed pessimist. In these uplifting tales, there is not one direct reference to the Christian scriptures yet in the life of the divine lion, Aslan, the archetypal process of the transfiguring power of faith is fully and concretely realized. Such is the function and the power of allegory in the hands of a master.

Best of all, in exploring moral and ethical issues through allegory and example, The Narnia Chronicles are a great read, seven times over. I have witnessed more than one youngster enraptured by the reading of Lewis’s tales. His fiction for adults is no less moving.

Caveat:  no matter how they are numbered, don’t read The Magician’s Nephew first! Wait until you’ve read all but it and The Last Battle. These two books are best read as a pair by themselves – which is how Lewis wrote them.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s parallel universe takes place in a similar time frame but it is constructed on the model of the great northern sagas, embracing a whole world in flux. So then, the three books are one great story, one epic, one saga. The Lord of the Rings was written in response to the success of The Hobbit that, with an adjustment here and there, became the prologue to the great virtual history that followed. Tolkien and Lewis were friends, however, and they shared both the elements of Christian belief and their theories about fiction. Despite the difference of scale, they were set upon similar projects that were undergirded by the ethics of faith. Like Lewis, Tolkien’s convictions are acted out and never become a matter of proselytizing. As a result, the structure of heroism is totally accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Frodo Baggins, is caught in the great battle between good and evil right down to the fur on his feet. Carrying the evil ring, he becomes the hobbit everyman thrust into vortex to bear the redemption of the world on his own small shoulders. In the course of Tolkien’s saga, practically every virtue is tested as the reader lives out the hero’s quest, page by page. Realizing the cost of that heroism deepens the meaning of home in sweet and bittersweet ways that feel like growing up.

Yertle the Turtle was published in 1958 so I was past it as a kid but, like Narnia and Middle Earth, I read it as an adult. Whenever I get with a group of middle aged and/or older children, I talk with them about the books they read. When these titles come up, it seems that these young readers come away with a feeling of deep accomplishment, not in the fact that they have read x number of pages all the way through, but rather in the sense that they, with Mack, with the young adventurers of Narnia and with Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, have gone a way towards learning and testing and becoming wiser, stronger, more considerate persons. This moral growth is crucial to the survival of our tribe so the reading and re-reading of such stories could well serve us as children and adults.