Once upon a time…
A recent article by Maria Konnikoiva examines the enduring power of these four little words. As she notes, some variation of the phrase appears in most languages, pointing to its near universal use and appeal. But why is the phrase so powerful? What makes stories, especially fairy tales, so affective? Konnikova argues that the phrase offers us both distance and vagueness by placing us in another time in an upspecified place. Such psychological distance allows us “the possibility of comprehending far more about reality than can come from reality itself.” And such vagueness allows us to insert ourselves into the story, to try out different lives and scenarios. Such stories, then, offer a kind of virtual reality in which we can process our own stories. As Konnikovia says,
“The world of once upon a time is not reality. It is a creation of make-believe. It is an invitation for fantasy and imagination to take the stuff of real life and do with it what they will—and perhaps, to translate the newfound truths back from story to actuality. In the realm of the imaginary, anxiety doesn’t become less anxious, nor tragedy less tragic. But in that world, you can make sense of it all from a distance. It can’t touch you in quite the same way—and yet it can lead you to a much deeper understanding and feeling of realities that would be too impenetrable without those four magic words at the fore.”
Konnikovia argues that stories, especially fairy tales, have psychological value because they give us a place to ennact pieces of our own lives and a means to process our own anxities. And while I don’t want to deny this pscyhological function of stories, because I have experienced it myself, I do want to contrast it with what I take to be a Christian understanding of story.
Take the way the Bible begins. “In the beginning…” pulls us into the narrative in similar way to “Once upon a time.” But while “In the beginning” gives us a sense of distance, it is only a chronological distance, more akin to “Once upon our time.” No matter how far back those words stretch, we are placed firmly within our own time and space. Whatever one thinks about the historiticity of Genesis in general or of chapters 1-3 in particular, the Bible wants us to know that this is our story and this is where we came from.
As another example of Biblical storytelling, consider the opening of Samuel. It begins, “There was a certain man…” Such a phrase offers us neither distance nor vagueness. Here we have a specific man in a specific time with specific wives and and specific problems. We are not distanced from this man, Elkanah. Rather we are thrown into the middle of his family sorrow–his beloved wife Hannah is barren. Yet in the midst of all the specificity, fairy tale like things happen. Against every odd, Hannah conceives a child. Even in our age of fertility doctors and artificial insemmination, the reversal of barreness is a kind of miracle. And the song Hannah sings in exulatation to the Lord has all the sweep and force of epic poetry, cataloging a host of reversals: the rich become poor, and the poor become rich, the proud are cast down and the humble are exalted, the fertile become barren and the barren become fertile. Indeed, one of the great tropes of stories is reversal–the unexpected the rise of the unlikely figure, and it is one of God’s favorite tropes. We need only look to the incarnation and crucifixion to see that God loves reversal and that he knows how to tell a story.
To put the contrast another way, while Konnikovia’s approach rightly affirms the benefit stories have for our understanding of reality, the Scriptures point to something even bigger–the narrative shape of reality. It is one thing for us to examine our lives by means of other stories. It is quite another to affirm that reality itself is a kind of story and to thereby conclude, whether consciously or not, that there is a storyteller. From my bias, one reason fairy tales are powerful is that for all their fancy, for all their distance and vagueness, they point to the narrative shape of reality. Indeed, even when stories aren’t “true” they inevitably speak to the narrative shape of our lives by pointing to true things. This is because we live in the world of “in the beginning” where God spoke or “narrated” everything into existence. In the God narrated world, we cannot help but place ourselves in stories because we cannot help but see our lives as part of his story.
I suppose a merely psychological understanding of narrative would say that natural selection is telling the story. If so, then one reason I believe in God is for completely aesthetic reasons–I think a creator God who narrates the world and who is bringing reality to its ultimate conclusion makes for a better story than Darwin and the Big Bang.