Whenever Corinne summons one of these fragments of story talk, she lowers her voice and slips into a hushed, singsong rhythm that is, of course, her imitation of the special voice that adults use when reading or telling a story to children. In my experience, there is no better way to seize the attention of distracted children than to start speaking in this voice. They will drop the fought-over stuffed animal or the annoying toy drum and drift over to your knee with the faces of the hypnotized — attentive and pliable as long as you keep it coming. It is the kind of power that can go to your head.
Adults don’t become immune to this power, either; they just learn to respond to different cues. Instead of “Once upon a time,” we latch onto “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” perhaps the most famous first sentence in the history of the English novel. Equally effective is the grand, sweeping, and old-fashioned “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” from Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities. Or we might acquire a taste for laconic leaps into the middle of the action, such as Mickey Spillane’s opener for I, the Jury: “I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room.” A simple, even mundane sentence, that one, but it does the trick; it makes you wonder what happens next. You’re hooked.
Who can catalog the myriad ways that human beings use to signal, “Now, I am telling you a story”? The speaker leaves off ordinary talk, the listener recalibrates her attention, and both enter into a relationship older than the memory of our race. A story takes us, for a while, out of time and the particularities of our own existence. The initiation into this ritual might come as a pause, a change of tone, or even as the apparition of a studio logo shining on the screen in a darkened movie theater. This tells us that a special kind of language, the language of story, has begun.
Human beings speak thousands of languages, but most linguists agree with the theory, first advanced by Noam Chomsky, that there is a “universal grammar,” a common structural basis underlying all human languages. Despite the great variety of tongues, they all work in the same fundamental way. Our brains, it is thought, have an innate response to languages that employ this structure and we are particularly attuned to it during childhood, when we learn languages quickly and easily. An infant’s babbling sounds like adorable nonsense, but it’s really the evidence of a powerful information processor assembling itself, rifling through sounds and sequences of sounds and figuring how all the pieces fit together to form meanings.
Could stories work the same way? Could Corinne, when she corners me and launches into yet another installment of the Niniad, be practicing the grammar of storytelling, arranging and rearranging the components, trying out different kinds of voices, experimenting with repetitions, with dramatic conflict and its resolution, if not yet, alas, with endings? I think so. But while everyone learns to speak, not everyone learns how to tell stories, or at least not how to tell them successfully.
Most of us recognize a fully formed story when we hear or read or see it; this, to me, seems almost as universal as our ability to distinguish, in our own language, between a grammatically correct sentence — “John watched the dog chase the ball” — and a grammatically broken one — “The chase John ball watched the dog.” But, as Chomsky famously pointed out, a sentence can be grammatically correct but still nonsensical: his example was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Even a story with the requisite components of beginning, middle, and end can seem essentially meaningless.
Lewis suspected that, at base, story is difficult to analyze because it really can’t be taken apart, and myth was the prime example of story’s deep roots in the human mind. To Lewis, the word “myth” meant something more than just a tale from an obsolete religion; it was a unit of meaning. Sometimes it was only a sketch of a narrative; a myth might be no more than the image of a beautiful youth falling in love with his own reflection in a pond. Not all old stories qualified as myth in his opinion, and some new ones did. You could identify them not so much by their common characteristics as by how people responded to them.
Lewis considered Franz Kafka to be one modern genius in the creation of myth; reading The Trial and The Castle, he felt “a profound significance, but it emanates from the whole story and is not built up by understanding the parts, nor could I state it except by retelling the story.” There was something irreducible in the kind of story he called myth. We might come up with a thousand explanations for what it “stands for,” but none of them will ever be complete or sufficient. It’s impossible to say what the myth of Orpheus is about; it is exactly itself. The only way to convey its significance fully is to tell the story one more time. We might claim that the ordeals of Kafka’s K. symbolize the individual’s struggle against the modern state or some such theme, but we know that’s only one facet of its significance. When hassling with some red-tape nightmare, we call it Kafkaesque, not because Kafka wrote about bureaucracy but because bureaucracy often seems to be about Kafka’s myth.
Myth troubles critics, Lewis believed, because its value is “extra-literary.” The power of a myth doesn’t arise from the particular words used to convey it; it can be felt even when no words at all are used. A myth might be told in pantomime, silent film, or a “pictorial series” (such as a comic book) and still impress its audience with the sensation that “something of great moment has been communicated to us.” There is only one version of, say, Madame Bovary or Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”; it would make no sense to talk of an equally legitimate version of either work that used different words. But what is the definitive version of the Orpheus myth? Aren’t each of the renditions — Ovid’s verse, Monteverdi’s opera, the film Black Orpheus, Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending — equally valid and recognizably Orpheus? Although lyric poetry sometimes avails itself of mythic material, it is in a sense the opposite of myth, because “in poetry the words are the body and the ‘theme’ or ‘content’ is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul; the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes.”
This conception of myth comes in part from Owen Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends and a fellow Inkling; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is dedicated to Barfield’s daughter, Lucy, and The Allegory of Love is dedicated to Barfield himself. In 1928, Barfield published a book, Poetic Diction, based on his Oxford B.Litt. thesis, and it had an influence on both Lewis and Tolkien. Barfield suggested that myth is a remnant of an early stage of both language and understanding or consciousness, a time of “unitary, concrete meanings.” At this stage, for example, the story of Demeter and Persephone was not just associated with the experience of winter, it contained the very idea of winter — along with the concepts of waking and sleeping and life and death, among other things — in a single, dense unit of meaning. Such meanings, according to Barfield, “could not be known, but only experienced or lived.”
Very small children often think in this way, Barfield believed. When Desmond was just beginning to learn the names of people, I asked him to tell me who I was. He studied me for a while, and replied tentatively, “Mommy?” He knew I was not his mother, but because I sometimes cared for him, I was subsumed in the concept of Mommy-ness, along with the mother animals pictured in his board books and, possibly, physical warmth and food — the experience of being cared for itself. All of this was “Mommy.” Perhaps he regarded me as a minor manifestation of his own mother in the way the Romans considered the Celtic goddess Sulis to be one of the lesser faces that their goddess Minerva presented to the backward provincials of the world.
As languages develop, Barfield speculated, they begin to divide these larger units of meaning into smaller parts. This makes language more modular, and therefore easier to manipulate and more useful, but it also saps the intensity out of individual words and concepts. When, for Desmond, I became Laura, I was easier to think about as a distinct person who looked and behaved diff
erently from the distinct person who is his mother, Leslie. But in becoming an individual, I also lost my place as part of the wondrous continuum of nurturing presence that was “Mommy.” Desmond knows that I am like his mother because we’re both female grown-ups, but that category does not have the potency it once did; it is disenchanted. Now I am my own woman, but I used to be a goddess.
When human beings learn to generalize and abstract, to label oaks, elms, and birches as “trees,” for example, they arrive at a new type of unity that is practical and sterile, in Barfield’s eyes — very different from the kind of consciousness that understood the world to be an ash tree or an oak to be a god. Barfield believed that in metaphor in particular and in poetry in general, we recover a little of the old, lost unity; metaphor rejoins what has been split apart. This is the source of the sensation of illumination, of recognition that a powerful metaphor delivers. For, as much as our minds like to analyze, to break things down into their constituent parts in order to examine and manipulate them, we also long for synthesis, the sensation that our words and our world are connected and infused with “intrinsic life.” It is in myths that we find that life, that meaning, in its most intact form (although even here it is “mummified,” according to Barfield). Myth defies intellect — if by “intellect” we mean analytical, logical thought — because it predates it. An echo of this old, preanalytical unity is the “something inexpressible” that Lewis felt myth imparts.
Lewis read omnivorously and had ecumenical tastes, but fiction that conveyed this “something” had always been and always would be his favorite. A pulp novelist like H. Rider Haggard, he thought, exemplified the “mythopoetic” (mythmaking) art in isolation from all other literary gifts. A book didn’t always have to be good in any sense that matters to literary critics — in its prose, its construction of believable characters, its ideas, or its originality — to pack a mythopoetic wallop. Lewis knew that Haggard wasn’t a very good writer, but he also knew that he felt strangely swayed and captivated by books like She and King Solomon’s Mines. In Haggard, it was made apparent how the “daemon,” or mythopoetic genius, “triumphs over all obstacles and makes us tolerate all faults. It is quite unaffected by any foolish notions which the author himself, after the daemon has left him, may entertain about his own myths. He knows no more about them than any other man.”
To Lewis’s mind, no writer channeled this “daemon” better than his “master,” the Victorian novelist George MacDonald. Lewis had bought a copy of MacDonald’s Phantastes in a railway station bookstall when he was sixteen years old and far from home, boarding with his tutor in Surrey. Reading it, he was transported. The book somehow bridged a gulf within him, between his imagination, that “many-islanded sea of poetry and myth,” and the banal stuff of everyday life. He felt that MacDonald had shown him how Joy, an aura he once attached only to grand and distant things, to faraway mountains and Nordic heroes, might also be found in the nearby and the humble. “Up till now,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, “each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert.” In Phantastes, he saw “the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged.” His imagination had been, “in a certain sense, baptized.”
Phantastes, like The Prelude, would remain a touchstone book for Lewis, perhaps the single most powerful literary experience of his life — his Magician’s Book, you could say. Nevertheless, Lewis was a literary critic, and his critical judgment told him that MacDonald, like Haggard, was not a technically good writer. “If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words,” he wrote in the introduction to a 1946 collection of MacDonald’s writings, “then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank — perhaps not even in its second.”
It seems impossible to define literature as anything but an art whose medium is words. The term “literature,” from the French littera, for “letter,” seems to dictate that it can be nothing else. Phantastes itself was, of course, written in words, and not particularly felicitous ones. But there was something else in it, too, some other property that transcended words, a quality of story and image that Lewis would, years later, come to call by a name that Tolkien had invented, mythopoeia. As far as Lewis was concerned, MacDonald was “the greatest genius” at mythopoeia he had ever encountered.
Phantastes is, like Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, a very strange book. A young man, Anodos — a name signifying “the way up” in Greek — describes the events following his twenty-first birthday, when he inherits an old desk with a secret compartment. A tiny, beautiful lady emerges from that compartment, and before vanishing, she zooms up to normal size, claims to be his great-grandmother, and promises him a trip to “Fairy Land.” He awakens the next morning to find a brook flowing through his bedroom and all the floral patterns on his carpet, furniture, and curtains turned to living plants and flowers. He then follows a footpath into a dense forest, where, during twenty-one days of wandering, he encounters flower fairies, evil and benevolent tree spirits, a fabulous book-filled castle whose inhabitants he can’t quite see, a statue of a woman that he brings to life, a penitent knight, a cottage whose several doors open onto entirely different regions of Fairy Land as well as into his own past, and more. In the course of this “faerie romance for men and women” (as MacDonald subtitled the book), the hero progresses from a selfish desire to be loved to a redeemed state of self-sacrificing altruism.
Like William Morris’s romances, Phantastes, first published in 1858, was innovative. Anodos, despite his allegorical name, is more or less a contemporary person, and no one else had yet hit upon the idea of setting a Victorian gentleman loose in the land customarily roamed by the Redcrosse Knight or Snow-White. (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland hadn’t appeared yet; MacDonald, who later became a friend of Lewis Carroll’s and whose children read and loved an early draft of Alice’s story, played a significant role in getting Alice published.) In letters he wrote to Arthur Greeves upon first reading Phantastes, Lewis enthused about the book’s phantasmagorical and uncanny elements — the magnificent fairy palace and an eerie tale that Anodos recounts of a young man who falls in love with a lady imprisoned in a mirror. It was only later that Lewis decided that the story was not merely a parade of marvels, that the “quality which had enchanted me in [MacDonald’s] imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live.”
This statement bewilders me. I know that how Lewis felt about Phantastes resembles how I feel about the Chronicles. True, I admire Lewis’s prose as he could never admire MacDonald’s, but that’s not the fundamental source of his books’ appeal. It was exactly the mythopoeic quality in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that caused me to hand it back to Mrs. Belden, effectively speechless. By all rights, the book that had had the same effect on Lewis ought to move me deeply, but it doesn’t. I have friends who feel differently, about MacDonald’s children’s fiction (The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind, for example), and I’ve come to appreciate the sweetness (it is never cloying) that pervades his books. Nevertheless, Phantastes seemed little more to me than an interesting, even trippy curiosity; the tremors that shot through Lewis when he first read it did not electrify me.
This was the difficulty with mythopoeia as Lewis defined it, that is, by the profundity of a reader’s response: not everyone recognizes it in the same books. Lewis knew this all too well. He could hardly fail to notice how many of his peers turned up their noses at his favorites. “It is plain,” he wrote, “that … the same story may be a myth to one man and not another.” If so, then how can we be sure that it’s really a myth? He had a passing interest in anthropological and psychological theories about where the recurring motifs in the world’s religions and legends might have come from, and was intrigued enough by Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes to look into it. Ultimately, though, Lewis conclu
ded that what Jung had to say was not so much a theory of myth as yet another myth. Jung’s description of the collective unconscious was magnificent, written in the quasi-mystical language of “good poetry,” but it wasn’t supported with sufficiently solid material evidence to merit the status of science. “Surely the analysis of water should not itself be wet?” Lewis quipped.
And, after all, Lewis didn’t need a theory of the collective unconscious — or of narrative “grammar” embedded in the neurological workings of the human brain. If he wanted to explain why we feel we recognize certain stories even when we’re encountering them for the first time, or why the same types of story seem to arise again and again in every culture, he had a perfectly adequate reason: they were facets of a truth that transcended the individual self. Myths were God’s way of calling us home.
But how can the skeptic understand such things? How to explain why certain stories exert a power that feels virtually biological over me, while leaving other readers cold? Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects. During the time I was working on this book, the information that I was writing about Narnia elicited very different responses in conversation. Some people would give me a look of politely blank puzzlement; if they’d read the Chronicles at all, they hadn’t especially liked them. Others would exclaim, “Oh, I loved those books!” and for a moment their gaze would drift off to some distant prospect, remembering. One woman, the proprietor of a bed and breakfast I stayed at in Ireland, came up to me holding seven frayed paperbacks, the old Puffin editions of the Chronicles published in Britain, pressed between her two flattened hands like sacred objects; she’d kept them safe for nearly forty years. I wasn’t sure she’d even let me touch them, and then hardly knew what to say about them when she did. These weren’t the editions I’d read, of course, but I’d seen similar ones before, so they weren’t a novelty to me. They were just paperback books, really. But I knew what they meant to her.
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