Two Thoughts on Eucatastrophe
‘Eucatastrophe’ is Tolkien’s term. He coined it in 1944 in a letter (he went on to discuss it in his ‘On Fairy Stories’ essay) for a particular kind of narrative shape, a particular kind of happy ending. The ‘eu’ part means good, and he’s taking ‘catastrophe’ in its original Greek sense of a narrative about-turn, a sudden switch.
For a story properly to be eucatastophic it needs to have more than just a happy ending (although it does need a happy ending). It needs to be tending implacably towards tragedy, to frame a sense of inevitable disaster, for ‘good’ to be facing overwhelming odds and certain defeat, such that the final triumph of good is both sudden and unexpected — or (because this is also part of Tolkien’s understanding of the eucatastrophe) both unexpected and not unexpected. This latter is so because, on a deeper level, the eucatastrophic ending chimes with something deep inside us, something Tolkien understood in spiritual, religious terms, and which he believed to be true about the cosmos. So The Lord of the Rings is eucatastrophic — it seems as if Sauron’s victory is unstoppable, the struggling forces of good are powerless to prevent it, until at the last minute the ring is destroyed and Frodo and Sam are rescued from certain death. Bam! This is one story. So far as Tolkien was concerned the greatest story — the Christian passion — was also eucatastrophic. This is the story God is telling, through the medium of His creation. Which is to say, Tolkien thought this was the deep structure of the universe as such.
‘Eucatastrophe’ is everywhere nowadays, an absolute mainstay of contemporary storytelling. Defeat seems inevitable — as the soldiers die, one by one, in the face of deadly and implacable German advance at the end of Saving Private Ryan, as Captain America stands, bruised and alone, before Thanos’s slavering, bloodthirsty hordes in Avengers: Endgame, as Harry Potter limps, exhausted, hounded, doomed to die before Voldemort’s inevitable triumph — right up to the moment when victory is snatched with a flourish from defeat’s jaws. It’s not just Hollywood. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice has a eucatastrophic story-shape. So does the Odyssey.
You can come up with a thousand examples, yourself I don’t doubt. It is a successful story-shape because it is so satisfying. But here is my problem with it: unlike Tolkien, I do not think it articulates a deeper truth about the universe. Sometimes inevitable defeat is overcome at the last minute, against the odds. Mostly it isn’t.
The problem is not that we enjoy the eucatastrophic story-shape. The problem comes, I think, when we take it to be true.
I’ll give you two examples of what I mean by problem. First: climate change. In this old review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) I praised the novel, specifically, for its structural repudiation of the eucatastrophe. The idea that climate disaster is a huge, impending disaster is true, and is widely accepted as such. But the predominance of the eucatastrophic story-structure leads us to believe that the irons will be yanked out of the fire just in time — by, let’s say, science. Perhaps a plucky band of scientists will invent some brilliant climate-change-reversal machine, as the clock ticks down. This is a bad belief, because I think it’s almost certainly untrue. This is what I say in that review:
Take ‘eucatastrophe’, Tolkien’s term for a thrilling story in which disaster impends, becomes more and more inevitable and then is averted at the very last moment. It’s a real workhorse of storytelling nowadays, is the eucatastrophe, especially in cinema. There is a threat to the whole world! Let’s imagine that as a singular, external thing: an asteroid on collision course, a huge invading alien spaceship. Then let’s draw out the approaching disaster and make it seem like it could never be overcome. Finally, bam: rabbit from hat, the hero saves the day at the last minute.
The Ministry for the Future is, in effect, saying: that’s a bad story — not bad in entertainment terms but bad in verisimilitude terms. It is saying: we are actually, right now, indeed facing a threat to the whole world, but it’s not a single thing it’s a complex and deeply-embedded function of human interrelation and social praxis. It’s not exterior to us, it is us. And it won’t be solved by a single heroic flourish in the nick of time. It will be solved by a congeries of difficult, drawn-out, collective labour, much of which is so inimical to ‘popular narrative’ that we dismiss it as boring. It’s not boring, though: it’s literally life-and-death. And so one part of our large, human task will be: to reconfigure the kinds of stories we are telling ourselves about disaster and how to avert it.
Recently I’ve been thinking about another example. Trump winning the 2016 election was disastrous. You’d expect me to say so of course, given my political beliefs, but I mean that it was a disaster in a particular way, one with malign and continuing consequences. The disaster is that, for Trump supporters, the 2016 election was a eucatastrophe. Nobody thought he was going to win. The polls all said he was going to lose. The media thought he was going to lose. He himself thought he was going to lose. Democratic victory seemed inevitable, right up until the moment when — amazingly — he won. This was not just unexpected, it was eucatastrophic; and for his supporters, especially his evangelical and Christian base, it was a sign of something deeper, an iteration of a profund truth about the universe. I’m not saying that Tolkien would have supported Trump (though he was a pretty politically conservative individual); but I am saying that a large number of Trump’s supporters feel as Tolkien felt, that the eucatastrophe proves something core about the nature of life — that though life is often hard, painful, crappy, perhaps even overwhelmingly, crushingly, killingly so, redemption is coming, simultaneously surprising and inevitable.
So the Tolkienian eucatastrophe is two things. One is: it’s elating — that’s a main reason why this story-shape is so popular, in Hollywood and so on. You build up levels of tension and anxiety in your audience such that when you release them, when the happy ending floods through, it is an exhilaration. But two, more importantly: to Tolkien the eucatastrophe is the shape of the universe, where ‘the shape of the universe’ is another way of saying God. It redeems your suffering; it not only gives meaning to your life it does so in a way that lifts you up, that both excites and validates you.
Trump supporters crave this exhilaration, this validation — crave it in inverse proportion to the extent their lives are crappy, I’d say — and believe it to be at once impossible and inevitable, because that is the nature of the eucatastrophe. I’m of course not saying that Trump voters think specifically in terms of Tolkienian terminology, or that they’ve ever heard the word or know who Tolkien was. But I do see the story-shape Tolkien named everywhere nowadays, its appeal speaking to a deep-seated need and satisfaction in people. But I do think that understanding these two things — the elation Trump supporters experienced on election 2016, and the way that elation felt to them like a cosmic validation — explains more, and predicts more, than more conventional socio-economic psephology.
I am in other words diagnosing a deeper disaster than Trump simply winning the election in the way he won, the way the eucatastrophic elation of election night baked-in a particular, beguiling — though, I believe, wrong — sense of the shape of the world as such. I think eucatastrophe is a very bad paradigm for thinking about climate change; and I think it is a very bad paradigm for thinking about politics too. But I think for many people it is deeply a part of their worldview.
To be clear, I think these two things figure in different ways, with different dangers. The first inclines us towards complacency; the second inclines a large proportion of the USA towards anti-democratic self-righteousness, paranoia and worse.
