Down that Rabbit Hole

 

The point of the “green world” that Northrop Frye repeatedly discovers in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances is that it is the world of imagination, where the stories come from. In it the impossible happens, with magic and fairies and music from some unseen orchestra. 

As this is the place where stories come from, and where every reader goes to, the challenge, faced by every writer, is to propose some way to get there from the workaday world we know. This is the “willing suspension of disbelief” Coleridge identifies. We must believe in the world of the book or story.

It has to be some place people do not commonly go; because it is radically apart from our common world. In it magic happens. It is not sufficient to say it is a dream. Baum, in “The Wizard of Oz,” used a tornado spinning Dorothy over the rainbow. The film version transformed this into a fever dream; which is the one thing one must not as a writer do. Partly because that is too easy, even if true; partly because it harms the willing suspension of disbelief. We are too inclined to dismiss our dreams, rightly or wrongly, as unimportant. They fade and we forget them with the dawn.

Shakespeare frequently makes it a dark forest; hence Frye’s “green world.” Which he mistakenly imagines is some fertility ritual. Forest merely represents some place not commonly visited, away from the madding crowd. The forest is often a portal to fairyland in the fairy tales as well: Sleeping Beauty’s castle is beyond an impenetrable forest. Hansel and Gretel are lost in the woods and find the witch and her gingerbread house.

In “The Tempest,” Shakespeare also uses a voyage that loses its bearings and lands on a remote and uncharted island. This is an especially popular conception in British literature, England being a seafaring nation. Gulliver’s Travels, Lord of the Flies, Robinson Crusoe, More’s Utopia, Irish legends of Tir na n’Og and Hy-Brasil. 

Americans, influenced by their own geography, prefer to locate it on the frontier, past the next mountain barrier, somewhere in the West. 

Perhaps the best portal concept found in literature, to my mind, is the mirror in “Through the Looking Glass.” This is satisfying on several symbolic levels.

Science fiction has it easy: the world of imagination is out in space, on another planet.

Another common location is above the clouds; as in the child’s conception of heaven, or the land of giants in Jack and the Beanstalk.

Another is under the earth, perhaps entered through a cave. We see this as the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, but it is also familiar in the classical conception of the Underworld. Any cave in the area of Greece has a legend making it the entrance to the underworld.

In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, the portal to the magical land is through the back of a wardrobe. 

In Norse mythology, or some Irish legend, it is across the rainbow, perhaps using the rainbow as a bridge.

In Greek mythology, it is also at times on top of some inaccessible mountain: Olympus. Or it can be over the impenetrable mountains, in a mountain valley: Shangri-la; the Tibet of popular imagination. 

Or, in Greek mythology, reached by voyaging to the end of the supposedly flat earth, and crossing over into the metaphysical realm. There is a beautiful old print, that I have loved for year, and now feature as the background for my Facebook page, showing a shepherd on a hilltop poking his head through the veil of sky, and seeing the celestial gears beyond the physical.

Of course, all these are metaphors. Nobody should seriously think you can sail beyond the end of the Earth, or find some new world above the clouds. Nevertheless, the power of the concept of there being another world is so strong that many over the centuries have really set sail, or headed west, only, perhaps, in the end, to throw themselves in final despair off the Golden Gate Bridge. 

The next and obvious question: is this world of the imagination real? This is a separate question, after all, from whether you can get there by climbing the Andes, or leaning through a mirror. And a more fundamental one.

“The Matrix,” for one example, proposes the idea that this physical and shared social world is the illusion, and the other world, Wonderland, the green world, is the real one. 

Philosophically, this is just as tenable as the reverse. As Chuang Tzu famously asked, “Am I a man who dreamt last night I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly now dreaming I am a man?”

That question has remained unanswered for all the centuries.

Plato, in his analogy of the cave, proposes the latter. We are all butterflies dreaming we are men. To him, the portal is philosophy; meditation; prayer, if you like. 

The world’s religions say the same. 

Perhaps more accurately, prayer and meditation or art is the mirror, the looking glass, through which we see the real world. 

But it is as through a glass darkly, or through a crystal ball.

It is death that is the actual portal we pass though, and see it all at last face to face.

One thing is clear: we all have a definite sense that there is this other world; and we all have an inner yearning, stronger in some, weaker in others, for it. This is why we love listening to stories, reading novels, watching movies, playing video games. We are imagining ourselves into this other world. It is seemingly the source of almost everything we call joy or fun. From earliest years, for fun, we pretend to be cowboys, or pirates, or superheroes. We imagine the doll to be alive, and the truck to be full-scale.

One might almost suppose we were programmed for this, for this other place, by our maker.

Not that it is a paradise: it is clearly a place both of extreme good and evil. Dragons live there, and gorgons, and the wicked dead, in their own terrible zone of punishments; as well as the blessed, the saints and angels, the houris, in theirs. 

While the laws of nature no longer apply there, the moral law there is strict, evident, and absolute. In a way it is not in the present world. There is no longer any ambiguity or deceit surrounding good and evil. There is no chaos. There is nothing random about the imagination, although some of us may wish there were.

If Plato and the world’s religions are wrong about this other world, what is this inner sense of it always being just beyond the next bend, and this eternal yearning for it, evident in us all, at least as children? At least before the din of life drowns it out. Where is that coming from?