The Garden at the End of the Universe

A fairytale

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful, without believing there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” Thus muses the character of Ford in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. From his spaceship, he’s watching a binary sunrise over a mysterious planet. Some say it’s the legendary planet of Magrathea. The story goes that this wasn’t just any planet. It was a planet-making planet. That is, until it grew fat on its overweening capitalism, and the rest of the Galaxy was flung into poverty, and the Empire collapsed, and Magrathea faded into the misty mists of time and fairytale. Ford, being an enlightened man, doesn’t believe a word of this. He’s enjoying the spectacular sunrise, of course. But wouldn’t it be spectacular anyway?

Of course, at the end of the chapter, the narrator interrupts to inform us that the planet is in fact the legendary Magrathea. How this is meant to reflect on Ford’s enlightened grumbling, it’s not quite clear. The whole thing is so absurd. But Richard Dawkins, who heavily influenced Adams’s deconversion, took Ford’s complaint to heart as a little atheist motto. After Adams died in 2001, Dawkins dedicated The God Delusion to his memory, using the line as the epigram for the dedication page.

Perhaps within his storyverse, Adams was actually having some meta-fun with the bit. Or perhaps it really was his own radical atheism coming through. Either way, as appropriated by Dawkins, it’s rather obviously self-defeating. A garden, by definition, is a tamed patch of earth. As soon as we see it, we wonder who the gardener is. Every garden must have one, after all.

Then there’s the word “fairies,” which, like “fairytale” and other cognates, functions as a perennial conversation-stopper. It plays on the universal desire to avoid being caught still believing in fairytales. It would be as if someone caught us still sucking our thumb, or taking a teddy bear to bed. A fate worse than death.

J. R. R. Tolkien famously had something to say about this. His essay “On Fairy-Stories” is a sustained defense of the fairytale against its sneering critics. In fairy-stories, he argues, we see more clearly, not less. We see evil at its ugliest and good at its most beautiful. In encountering fantastical beasts, we recover our sense of wonder. When once we have met the centaur and the dragon, we may “perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves.” We should also embrace the fairy-story, unashamed, as an “escape,” in spite of all that attaches to the dismissive critique of “escapism.” “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”

And, finally, we take consolation from fairytales, especially that last and greatest, the Consolation of the Happy Ending. If Tragedy is the true form, the highest function of Drama, then this is the true form, the highest function of Fairy-Story. Since it doesn’t have a name, Tolkien gives it one: Eucatastrophe.

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.

As an example, he takes the old Scottish folk tale “The Black Bull of Norroway,” which, like many similar tales, features a hero estranged from his sorrowing, searching lover. The bull is, of course, a brave knight in cursed disguise. He leaves the woman behind to go and meet the devil in battle, instructing her not to move until he returns. If the sky turns blue, she will know he has won. If it turns red, she will know he has lost. As she waits, it turns blue. She shifts her position ever so slightly…and all is lost. Further long trials and wanderings ensue for our heroine, until finally she reaches the cottage of the wicked witch who is holding the knight hostage. They have his shirt, bloodied from the battle, with his promise that whoever can wash it will be his wife. Of course, the shirt is instantly washed clean at the heroine’s hands. But the witch tricks the knight into believing her own daughter succeeded in washing it. Then, in true witchy fashion, she brews him a sleep potion to ensure he doesn’t wake when the heroine is granted access to his chamber. Each time, his true love repeats a plaintive refrain:

Seven long years I served for thee,

The glassy hill I clamb for thee,

The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee,

And wilt thou not wauken and turn to me?

By the third night, the knight grows suspicious and doesn’t drink the potion. Again she comes and repeats her song:

Seven long years I served for thee,

The glassy hill I clamb for thee,

The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee,

And wilt thou not wauken and turn to me?

He hears, and turns to her.

Such turns, literal and metaphorical, offer “truth” on one plane—a literary plane. But in their “peculiar effect” on us, Tolkien proposed that they point to Truth on “the Primary Plane”—the plane of the Real. The plane of our own existence. Our whole nature, “chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of join [sic] had suddenly snapped back.”

And so he comes to the Resurrection. That consolation so complete, that Eucatastrophe so triumphant, it is the Fairy-Story to end all fairy-stories, of which all others throughout all time have been but a pale imitation. The only Story to be true on all planes at once. And would it not have to be so? As he writes in a letter to his son, “Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story.”

Except that, paradoxically, there’s a sense in which the consolation of the gospels is directly proportional to their failure to resemble a fairy-story. In their often dry, prosaic narration of extraordinary events, their artless interlocking, their awkward asides and loose ends, their oddly specific (and oddly accurate) small details, they have far more of the texture of memoir than myth. Why, when John and Peter find the graveclothes, are they described in such cumbersome fashion? Why do we need to know that the facecloth was “not lying with the linen cloths, but folded up in a place by itself”? We don’t. The detail is just there. Numerous such examples abound throughout the gospel narratives.

Tolkien, of course, recognized this, as did C. S. Lewis. These were men who prided themselves on having spent a lifetime in the study of Legend and Myth. They knew what fairy-stories were like. They knew none of them were like this. “Either this is reportage,” Lewis famously concluded, “or else, some unknown writer…without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic realistic narrative.”

And this is precisely the eerie power of the gospels, the power that still works on enlightened men to this day, however they try to deny it: that this story is nothing like a fairy-story, yet it is the greatest Fairy-Story ever told.

And so we find Mary Magdalene weeping, for the Beloved has been taken she knows not where. And so he approaches and asks her why. She looks back once and doesn’t recognize him, her eyes perhaps blinded by tears. We imagine she turns her face away, hiding them from the man she mistakes for the gardener. She is in a garden, after all.

“Mary,” he says.

She hears, and turns to him.