How to Read the Language of Story

See with new eyes.

Photo credit: Natalia Y.

Disney’s version of the movie Snow White came under attack recently because it seems to promote “nonconsensual” sexual behavior. A girl is asleep, and a strange man shows up from the wilds and, without permission, cops a feel. He sneaks a kiss, and no chaste peck at that. She has no say. 

On one level, I can understand the concern. If this were a realistic story, I think we could all agree. I would never want a random stranger kissing my daughter because she took a nap.

But there are two problems with this:

1. What You See is Not What You Get

The problem is that many moderns read EVERY story as if it fits in the genre of realism—as if the story were a point-for-point direct reflection of real life, taken literally.

But fairy tales, fantasies, mythical stories - they all speak a different language, a language that we have largely forgotten. 

It gets worse. Not only have we forgotten this language, but we tend to assume there is nothing to learn. We can’t speak the native language, but we bluster into the tribe, hyper-imposing our preferred language, assuming we already know what they are saying and that if there’s any trouble, it’s their fault. 

What is it that we hyper-impose on stories? You can learn more here and here, but in a word, we assume one basic thing: what you see is what you get. Sensory data trumps everything. As soon as stories delve into the realm of symbolism, riddles, or double meanings, we get touchy.

2. Stories Are Easy to Consume But Hard to Understand

Part of what complicates the matter is that, on the face of it, stories seem so easy. Easy enough for a child to grasp, which they are, in one sense.

Yet despite appearances…

As I said in this article: Most of us actually don’t know the first thing about stories.

It’s like eating a delicious meal; easy to do. But that doesn’t mean you would know the first thing to do with a dead chicken lying naked on your cutting board.

You may be thinking, why should I care about this? Why should I learn to read the language of stories? 

After all, perhaps stories, at least these kinds of stories, aren’t your thing. If you’re reading this Substack, you probably at least possess a tepid interest in stories, but maybe there’s a line - and Grimm doesn’t make the cut. 

We don’t all need to learn everything about everything, right? I, for one, have zero interest in learning to fix the brakes on my car. 

But I’m here to say I don’t think you get off that easy. With stories, it’s different, at least if you’re a Christian. 

Why?

The Bible is a fairy tale. 

When I first started down this road years ago, I began studying stories because I wanted, and still want, to write them. But the more I understood, the more I realized that this is vital knowledge for every Christian. Hence my blog was eventually born. 

At the time, bless my heart, I thought I was one of the only people in our day to make this claim. I had rarely seen it anywhere else. 

I know now that, not only am I not the only one, I’m more late to the party than anything. Christians everyone are recovering an entirely different paradigm for understanding reality against the machine of modernity. 

Consider a quote from this article that I happened upon through pure chance recently. Writer and thinker Sebastian Morello wrote a review of a recently released book Living in Wonder by Rod Dreher.

He describes it as “a book about ‘re-enchantment,’ a word that one currently hears on almost every conservative podcast and reads in almost every conservative Substack post. The materialist, progressivist, efficiency-based paradigm in which we’ve been entrenched for decades—even centuries—is spiraling into oblivion as we have realized that we can neither live without meaning nor author meaning out of our own personal post-modern journeys of self-discovery. “

He’s using slightly different language, but as you’ll see if you read the article, it’s getting at the same thing.

An Enchanted Book

If someone gave you a novel and told you that it was full of wizards, warriors fighting dragons, legions of angels fighting demons, and wicked witches, you would assume that the book belonged in the fantasy section — a LOTR knockoff, suitable for D&D types. 

A garden variety modern wouldn’t automatically assume the book held any affinity with the Bible. Yet all these fantastical events and more occur in the Bible.

Moses’ showdown in Egypt was what N. D. Wilson described as a “wizard’s duel.” The Bible is full of angels fighting demons, Balaam astride a talking donkey who saw invisible angels, and Jesus accomplishing increasingly impossible tasks, proving himself master of elements and finally master of death through defeating a dragon.

Many modern find these sections embarrassing. We don’t know what to do with them when we regard them with our sensory-based, literal minds.

The truth is that classical storytellers understood all too well a basic truth that we can’t seem to grasp. Most fairy tales, for example, revolve around the theme that you can’t trust your senses.

And that’s the point.

As I said here: Aslan told Uncle Andrew in The Magicians Nephew, “What you see and hear depends on the sort of person you are.”

Which brings us back to Snow White. 

When the evil queen visits her in the dwarves' house disguised as a harmless old lady, Snow White proves herself unwise. The queen came to her disguised three times, and each time, Snow White showed herself spiritually stupid.

New Heart, New Eyes

The Medievals believed that learning discernment meant learning how to “see,” that darkness would come disguised as light, and that stories were training grounds for exercising our spiritual eyes. 

Snow White still trusted the empirical evidence of her eyes. The third time, the disguised queen came with an apple, Snow White, Eve-like, looked at the fruit and saw that it was good. Her temptation overcame her, and she ate and fell into a “deathlike” sleep. 

In the Grimm’s version, Snow White is not awakened by a kiss from the prince. Disney was trading endings with Sleeping Beauty but there are similar themes at play. For Sleeping Beauty, it wasn’t just any guy who could awaken her. It had to be a son of the king who comes “in the fullness of time,” and the kiss symbolically represents our spiritual awakening in Christ. 

Of course, you can read and understand the Bible without understanding its literary elements. But we may not know what we are missing. 

There is a massive void within our culture. Modern sensory-based education, with its feeble feast of watered-down facts, has left our world “haunted by a sense of loss… This is what we sense, and often regret the passing of, when we contemplate the medieval cathedral. God-forsakenness is an experience of those whose ancestral culture has been transformed and repressed by a relentless process of disenchantment, whose deprivations can still be keenly felt… The result is that the sacred is felt to have withdrawn from the physical, visible world…” [1]

So, if you are interested in learning the language of story, keep reading my articles! 

1. The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, Jason Baxter, March 15, 2022