The Eucatastrophe

Penultimate Post in the Sketches in Messianism Series

In his lecture on the subject of Faerie, Tolkien noted some elements he believed were crucial to authentic fairy-stories. The highest of these is the sudden ‘turn’:

“Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of fairy-story. Since we do not appear to have a word that expresses this opposite - I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of the fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’, nor ‘fugitive’. In its fairy-tale — or otherworld — setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality [...] It is not an easy thing to do; it depends on the whole story which is the setting of the turn, and yet it reflects a glory backwards [...] When the sudden ‘turn’ comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of the story…”

This description of a literary device is, for me, one of those rare moments in which some unarticulated sensibility that I have always found within myself is given language by another. Literature is, after all, one of those places where people sometimes gather in astonishment and say, “I know what you mean…” We seem to be carrying in our pockets shards of experience that amount to a common mystery.

Walter Benjamin deepens more than he delights, but I can’t help feeling there is some connection between Tolkien’s eucatastrophe and what Benjamin calls divine violence. As I have outlined elsewhere, Benjamin sees two kinds of violence common to history. Establishing violence is the act through which somebody will seize power. It means there is a new boss in town and a new law to observe. Sustaining violence is the policing or the mob rule that maintains the position of whoever is in charge. He calls these kinds of violence “Mythical” — I’m not sure why. But divine violence is something else entirely; something that does not emerge from the system but interrupts it as an event from elsewhere. A good catastrophe that brings about the unimaginable, to the side of any earthly agency:

“If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood…”

I consider both ideas, the eucatastrophe and divine violence, as intuitions of a messianic kind. Something might yet occur; something unforeseen by the players round the table. Some extraordinary goodness might yet emerge, unknown and uninvited, to bring about a redemption that has been felt, beneath articulation.

It is not so ridiculous that we should feel such things. None of us, nor any of this, ultimately, came to be here out of our own will, power, ingenuity or intent. Things happen for reasons that have nothing to do with us. They always have and they always will. There is some strange and meaningful potency in choosing to live with possibility of the good catastrophe, in which, as Tolkien said, everything sad might come untrue.