"If I must someday die, what can I do to satisfy my desire to live?"
-Prof. John S. Dunne, CSC
"If life ain't just a joke, then why are we laughing?
If life ain't just a joke, then why am I dead?
DEAD!"
-My Chemical Romance
My senior year in college, I took this course in the Theology department called “Religion and Autobiography”. I got to write a paper on Madeleine L’Engle1, so I can’t complain. The professor was a Holy Cross priest named John S. Dunne, and while I did not realize this as I was taking his class, he is the author of twenty landmark books in his field and now one of my favorite Catholic theologians of all time. I sincerely wish I had paid more attention during the lectures, but I took Dunne’s class during the second semester of my senior year after I had already secured a post-college job, and Dunne happened to be a pretty easy grader, so I was perhaps not at the top of my academic game during his class. Let that be a lesson to you, kids.
I was originally planning to talk about Dunne very briefly in this piece - you’ll see why below - but after doing a little research, I decided to re-purchase and re-read his 1977 work A Search For God in Time and Memory to see how good at this he actually was. Turns out he’s actually extremely brilliant, which, again, makes my half-assing his class very embarrassing for me. Here’s how America magazine described Dunne’s legacy after his 2021 death, a legacy that cemented him as one of the greatest theologians you’ve never heard of:
“Newsweek singled Dunne out as a future giant in theology when his third book, The Way of All the Earth: Experiments in Truth and Religion, was published in 1972. By 2013, however, he had become nearly invisible, even after writing 17 more books. He did not contribute to theological journals nor present papers at conventions and conferences. Augustine and Aquinas are present throughout his books, but contemporary theologians are almost completely absent. When Dunne learned that the Rev. Peter Phan, the prolific and honored former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, had praised his latest book, he replied, in all innocence, “Who is Peter Phan?”...He taught and wrote about his life in ways that would help his students and readers understand the truth of their own. He wanted to show how a life, seemingly full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” may become “a journey with God in time,” as he titled his 2003 autobiography.”
Like Blase Pascal and Soren Kirkegaard, two theologians that Dunne obviously read and understood very deeply, Dunne focused his studies not on ritual or moral rules, but rather on the individual’s interior search for meaning and divinity in an otherwise baffling world, and he had an all-consuming curiosity that took him through every possible philosopher, artist, and novelist looking for an answer. In particular, A Search For God In Time And Memory focuses on great thinkers throughout history who wrote their autobiographies, and how they approached the process of looking back on their lives, attempting to discern some sort of narrative framework from the events in their lives, and turning that framework into a book with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s a very slow, deliberate read, but a fascinating one.
Now, one of Dunne’s favorite writers was the same favorite writer that every Catholic nerd has: Tolkein. I even remember Dunne opening our class with four key pillars that he had cited from Tolkein:
Things are meant
There are signs
The heart speaks
There is a way
I am not the only one of Dunne’s students who remembers him teaching these four “thoughts essential to a journey in time”. Tolkein, of course, wrote The Lord Of The Rings as a Catholic allegory, and a very complex one at that, one that explored all sorts of difficult questions around grace and temptation and failure. If you had to pick out four major themes from his writing that were informed by his faith, you could certainly do way worse than those, and they were clearly informative principles for Dunne as he tried to understand how the individual reconciled his chaotic life with his search for God and (more broadly) any sort of meaning or narrative.
Here’s something I don’t tell people very often: I actually am not super-into Tolkein’s writing. Perhaps that makes me a bad Catholic2. I saw the early-2000s Peter Jackson movies when I was in middle school, before I had the patience or skill to read any of the actual source material. When I finally did read Fellowship, my first feeling was astonishment at how good Peter Jackson was at cutting out all of the boring parts when he made the movie. I’m sorry, everyone. Art is subjective, different people like different things, it happens.
But the other reason I think that Tolkein’s writing doesn’t really click for me is because those four themes that my professor enumerated don’t really click for me, either. I am reluctant to embrace the ideas that “things are meant, there are signs, the heart speaks, there is a way” when I try to think through how I’m supposed to live in a vicious and broken world. My life in no way resembles a Tolkein-esque high fantasy novel, not just because I don’t know any elves, but because things do not always seem meant, and there does not always seem to be a way. Or, rather, if things are meant, and if there is a way, we don’t always seem to be heading there.
But, hey, Tolkein wrote an enduring fantasy epic that continues to influence literature today, and certainly did for most of the twentieth century. It’s not a surprise that the Newbery committee would give the medal to one installment of a multi-volume high fantasy epic, that was clearly influenced by Tolkein, that drew from Welsh mythology and Arthurian legend just like Tolkein did, that even borrowed obvious plot points from Tolkein, that had as its protagonist an ordinary boy from a pastoral village who would be destined for greatness, who fought a shadowy antagonist, and who brought his innocence to the ultimate battle between good and evil.
And you may be saying to yourself, “yeah, Tony, we know that book, The High King, 1969, you already covered that in an earlier entry.” No, I mean the novel that won the medal seven years later, which was a different medalist that was one installment of a multi-volume high fantasy epic, that was clearly influenced by Tolkein, that drew from Welsh mythology and Arthurian legend just like Tolkein did, that even borrowed obvious plot points from Tolkein, that had as its protagonist an ordinary boy from a pastoral village who would be destined for greatness, who fought a shadowy antagonist, and who brought his innocence to the ultimate battle between good and evil. This one is called The Grey King. Try to keep up.
The Grey King is the fourth installment of Susan Cooper’s five-volume The Dark Is Rising series. In the series, young Welsh lad Will Stanton learns that he is not just a young Welsh lad but actually one of the immortal Old Ones, charged with defending the Light - all that is good and right in the world - against the gathering forces of the Dark, led by the mysterious Grey King. This particular installment also has some stuff about a dog and a magic harp (The High King, incredibly, also prominently features a magic harp), and generally it's better than The High King, and feels pitched to a slightly older reader who still has to wade through a murky lake of impossible-to-pronounce Welsh names. But at least Cooper acknowledges it:
“‘Now,’ he said, ‘Read out the names that I point to.’ Will peered obediently at the moving finger. He saw: Tal y Llyn, Mynydd Ceiswyn, Cemmaes, Llanwrin, Machynlleth, Afon Dyfi, Llangelynin. He read aloud, laboriously, ‘Tally-lin, Minid Seeswin, Semeyes, Lan-rin, Machine-leth, Affon Diffy, Lang-elly-nin.’ Bran moaned softly. ‘I was afraid of that.’”
Like The High King, The Grey King also lifts very obvious plot points from Tolkein; the Grey King himself has some clear similarities to Sauron, notably that he has a powerful magic eye from which Will needs to hide:
“All around, throughout the countryside, he could feel the malevolence of the Dark growing, pushing at him. It could not focus upon him, follow him like the gaze of a great fierce eye; an Old One had the power to conceal himself so that his presence could not at once be sensed so precisely. But clearly the Grey King knew that he was about to come, soon, from somewhere.”
Oh yeah, and there are magic ghost soldiers who step in at the last minute to save the day:
“They were horsemen, riding. They came out of the mountain, out of the lowest slopes of Cader Idris that reached up from the lake into the fortresses of the Grey King. They were silvery-grey, glinting figures riding horses of the same strange half-colour, and they rode over the lake without touching the water, without making any sound.”
Ultimately, Cooper's saga about the war between the eternal Light and the eternal Dark explores the same themes that Tolkein and his countless descendants did: things are meant (Will has a destiny as one of the Old Ones), there are signs (his visions point him to the magic harp that ends up saving him), the heart speaks (Will's innocence, and his loving friends and family, are what will eventually win the war against the dark), and there is a way (Will's got a divinely ordained journey to complete in order to win the war). This war comes down to all of us, as Cooper has a character explain:
“‘People are very complicated,’ [Will] said sadly. ‘So they are,’ John Rowlands said. His voice deepened a little, louder and clearer than it had been. ‘But when the battles between you and your adversaries are done, Will Stanton, in the end the fate of all the world will depend on just those people, and on how many of them are good or bad, stupid or wise. And indeed it is all so complicated that I would not dare foretell what they will do with their world. Our world.’”
This is all standard for high fantasy, it's why people read high fantasy in the first place: to explore the questions about why we should be good, why we should fight for things that matter, whether everything actually does hang in the balance based on the decisions we make and the journeys we take. There aren't a lot of high fantasy works, especially for children, that were written to explore the themes of "the world is absurd, nothing makes sense, and if you try to go on a quest you'll probably mess everything up". But there's one!
Jules Feiffer was the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist for the Village Voice for decades, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who worked with Mike Nichols and Robert Altman, and a successful playwright, but if you've ever been a child, you might know him best as the illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth. His true masterpiece, though, is the children's comedy-fantasy novel A Barrel Of Laughs, A Vale Of Tears, which has been one of my all-time favorite novels since I first read it at age 12.
Barrel is the saga of Prince Roger, a carefree young man afflicted with a strange curse where nobody can come physically close to him without bursting into uncontrollable laughter. His father, the king, and his local wizard send him on a quest to discover himself, fight a giant, save a maiden, become a real man. But none of that goes according to plan at all. Roger doesn’t take the quest seriously at all for the first several years and just parties, minor characters keep elbowing their way into the story to try and get bigger roles, the princess that Roger is supposed to rescue has vanished for no reason and it turns out her lady-in-waiting was calling all of the shots anyways, the giant does not appear to be who everyone thinks he is, and the narrator has to step in and try to set things right frequently throughout the book, often unsuccessfully; in this sense, there’s some comedic overlap with, say, William Goldman’s original The Princess Bride novel3.
Without going too into the plot, things do eventually turn out okay, Roger does get through a lot of peril and come out the other side a different and wiser person. And, long after his quest is completed, after he marries the right woman and welcomes his first son into the world, in the final pages of the novel, he does run into the man who sent him on the quest in the first place, J. Wellington Wizard:
“‘Do you know that I nearly died on that quest of yours?’ said Roger.
‘The best thing that ever happened to you,’ said J. Wellington.
‘Do you know that I nearly failed?’ said Roger.
‘You did fail,’ said J. Wellington. ‘The quest you went on was the wrong quest. Not that I had anything special in mind when I sent you, but by your third year in the Forever Forest the quest you were meant to go on was quite clear.’
Roger could not believe his ears. ‘You mean I wasn’t supposed to marry [my wife]?’
‘You were supposed to marry Princess Daphne, who is not nearly as right for you,’ said J. Wellington. ‘All in all, I think you did brilliantly.’
Roger went home and told [his wife]. Then he went across the street and told [his friends]. Then he returned home and played with his baby son.
And what did he finally think of all this?
After a good deal of talk…Roger decided that in his lifetime there might be a doze, a hundred more quests, quests of all kinds waiting out there to be found. But where else would he have found this woman? Or this child? Or these friends?”
I honestly don’t know whether things are meant, there are signs, the heart speaks, or there is a way. I don’t know if there is a grand quest between the Light and the Dark where everything is going to work out. But, I can love the people around me, and I can play with my daughters, and I can make them laugh, and maybe, as Feiffer suggests, that can be enough.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1930 medalist, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Hillary Field.
We’re getting to her, don’t worry.
But it’s probably the only thing that does.
The same dude that wrote Marathon Man, whod’ve thought?