Reviews
Print the Myth: The imagination of C S Lewis
After the popularity of the film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, its sequel Prince Caspian is likely to be another hit in the UK as it already is in the US. But how did a lecturer in medieval literature with no children of his own, write some of the most popular children’s stories of the 20th century? And why? CS Lewis fiercely denied that the Narnia stories were allegories, in the sense of being translatable into religious concepts. Instead, he saw them as ‘myths’ that engaged the imagination and communicated what could not be conceptualised. As such, they could stir up mythic longings, which played such a profound role in Lewis’ own conversion to Christianity.
‘The experience of myth is not only grave but awe-inspiring,’ he said. We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us. The recurrent efforts of the mind to grasp – we mean, chiefly, to conceptualise – this something, are seen in the persistent tendency of humanity to provide myths with allegorical explanations. And after all allegories have been tried, the myth itself continues to feel more important than they.’1
Those who draw on Freud, such as Joseph Campbell, attribute this quality of myth to its effect on the subconscious. But for Lewis the mythic experience was a signpost to something outside himself. ‘The quality which had enchanted me in [George 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.’2
Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy of how certain experiences stirred up longings in him for he knew not what until he found Christ. What he had loved in Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, and in Macdonald’s stories, had been that echoed of the story of God himself. When Lewis came to the gospel account of the dying God raised to life he believed he had found the myth that was also fact. Other mythologies were good stories precisely because of their similarity to the Christian story.
This theme is central throughout the Narnia stories but is particularly well encapsulated in Prince Caspian. Early on, Caspian tells his uncle, ‘I wish – I wish – I wish I could have lived in the Old Days…When all the animals could talk…And there were Dwarfs Fauns’. Caspian’s longing for this Old Narnia, which Miraz insists is just a fairy tale, leads him to ask questions, and prepares him for the discovery of such creatures, and ultimately to fight a war with their help.
Through reading stories and engaging the imagination, Lewis believed we could often attain deeper insight than through studying analytical works of theology or philosophy. He goes so far as to suggest that ‘men may have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed’.3
But did the Narnia stories simply spring from Lewis’ desire to provide ‘spiritual sustenance’ for his readers? He himself was frequently at pains to point out that he did not begin by sitting down and thinking ‘What do children need to be told?’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe began with images in Lewis’ mind: a faun and a white witch; the story came together when he was dreaming a lot about lions and invented the character of Aslan. The genesis of Prince Caspian was with the image of what it might be like to be summoned out of this world like a genie is summoned into it.
Of course the Narnia stories make very explicit connections with Christianity. For instance, the relationship between Christ and Aslan is clearly made in Aslan’s speech to Lucy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, ‘I have another name... The very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there [your world]’. Lewis explicitly stated his desire to communicate the passion of the cross in its full emotive force through the Narnia stories: ‘Supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency?’.4
This apparent contradiction, between what he called an intuitive ‘bird watching’ of images and a conscious intention to communicate, is familiar to most professional story writers. The best creative writing is generally produced when authors listen to their intuition, and then engage their rational mind to shape the text. Some writers actually structure their working habits so as to keep these two processes distinct. Lewis himself drew a distinction in creative writing between ‘the author’ and ‘the man’. The author saw images and let them tell their story; the man found the stories could be shaped to allow glimpses of spiritual truth.
Though storywriting necessarily involves both the intuitive and the rational mind, there are those who are profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of ‘sending messages’ through art, arguing that art should exist for its own sake. Lewis expressed strong views on this in a private letter:
‘I do most thoroughly agree with what you say about Art and Literature. To my mind they are only healthy when they are either a) definitely the handmaid of religious, or at least moral, truth or b) admittedly aiming at nothing but innocent recreation or entertainment. Dante’s alright and Pickwick is alright. But the great serious irreligious art art for art’s sake is all balderdash; and incidentally, never exists where art is really flourishing.
‘In fact one can say of Art as an author I recently read says of love (sexual love, I mean) “It ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god.”’5
Lewis believed that art should not come from and glorify human subjectivity but should be inspired by, and point to, God. Leanne Payne writes: ‘Lewis found it essential that imagination lead us beyond ourselves to the Source whence we came’. She suggests that he considered the greatest of art to be like an icon, consisting of ‘images through which the transcendently real is, as it were, sacramentally channeled’. In an anthropocentric framework, people may view is a servant out to discover what is already there. If Lewis’ art of myth-making had not pointed to the creator, then by his own criteria it simply would not have been great art.
Hugo Foxwood
1 C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1992, c.1961) 44.
2 C.S. Lewis, George Macdonald: An anthology (George Allen & Unwin, 1932) 21.
3 C.S. Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 1970) 67.
4 C.S. Lewis, ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say What’s Best To Be Said’ Of Other Worlds ed. Hooper, (Geoffrey Bles Ltd, 1976) 37.
5 The Collected Letters of C.S.Lewis ed. Hooper (HarperOne, 2004) 391.
6 Leanne Payne, Real Presence (Crossway Books, 1988) 135-43.
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