eucatastrophe: piercing joy that brings tears

[mark12_30]

Well, lmp, I guess I'll have to reread On Fairy Stories again, and look at that definition more closely. In terms of the definition above, however:

And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of truth.... It percieves-- if the story has literary 'truth'...--that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.

Personally, I can't imagine that each fairy-story is allowed only one such sudden glimpse of the truth. I do separate wonder from that sudden glimpse of truth(revelation), and revelation is different than wonder, as it is also different than catharsis (although revelation can also produce both wonder and catharsis.)

In the quote from On Faery Stories, in one of the earliest posts, Tolkien says:

The Gospels contain a fairy-story .... The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.

By your logic, Tolkien can't have both; he must pick, one or the other, because the story of Jesus' life may only have one eucatastrophe in it. But he says it has (at least) two. So either he's talking about different threads in the story, each thread allowed its own eucatastrophe, or, he's wrong about his own word.

Since there seems to be more than one voice insisting that there can only be one eucatastrophe, one revelation, per book, I'm a bit baffled. I really have a very hard time with that, but, I can't prove or disprove it at the moment, since I'm anchored in the letters and not the essay...

[ August 19, 2002: Message edited by: mark12_30 ]