Imagination and the Arts in C.S. Lewis: Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds

Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis




Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis

Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis




Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds

Peter J. Schakel

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2002 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 06 05 04 03 02 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schakel, Peter J. Imagination and the arts in C. S. Lewis : journeying to Narnia and other worlds / Peter J. Schakel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8262-1407-X 1. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963—Knowledge—Art. 2. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963. Chronicles of Narnia. 3. Art and literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. 4. Children’s stories, English—History and criticism. 5. Fantasy fiction, English—History and criticism. 6. Imagination in literature. 7. Art in literature. 8. Imagination. I. Title. PR6023.E926 Z885 2002 823'.912—dc21 2002023837 ⬁ ™ This paper meets the requirements of the 䡬 American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: Bookcomp, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Palatino, University & Wood Type Ornaments Unpublished material and manuscript reproduction on page 140 by C. S. Lewis copyright © C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Reproduced by permission. Also by permission of The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Photo of C. S. Lewis on page 136 copyright © The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by Peter Schakel.




To my grandchildren Jonathan, Thomas, Michael and in memory of Alex whose imaginative play keeps alive the wonder of childhood

Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Editions Used and Abbreviations

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1. “Feeding the Imagination” Lewis’s Imaginative Theory and Practice

1

2. “The Temptation to Get a Nice New Book” Texts and the Imaginative Reading Experience 23 3. “It Does Not Matter Very Much”—or Does It? The “Correct” Order for Reading the Chronicles 40 4. “Narrative Nets” Lewis and the Appeal of Story

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5. “He Looks As Though He’d Make It Come Out All Right” Lewis and His Storytellers 70 6. “Four Fiddles, Three Flutes, and a Drum” Lewis and Music 89 7. “Notable Dances and Feasts” Lewis and Dance 111 8. “Glimpses of Heaven in the Earthly Landscape” Lewis and Art, Architecture, and Clothing 137 9. “Let the Pictures Tell Their Own Moral” Lewis and the Moral Imagination 163 Appendix Table for Converting Page References to Chapter Numbers Bibliography Index 205

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Pref ace C. S. Lewis was in love with imagination, according to his friend Owen Barfield. He had a very powerful imagination, a fanciful and inventive imagination.1 In fact, “imaginative Lewis” is one of the three identities Barfield distinguishes in his friend (along with “logical Lewis” and “religious Lewis”).2 Lewis’s proclivity for imagination has long been well known and has been discussed in many books and articles. The imaginativeness of his writings in various genres has been one source of his great appeal to millions of readers for more than half a century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Lewis also was in love with the arts. He gave a great deal of attention to all of the arts from his youth onward, and references to music, dance, drawing, painting, architecture, and clothing are scattered widely throughout his writings. In the following pages I seek to examine imagination and the arts in C. S. Lewis in a more thorough, sustained, unified way than previous studies have: to consider his different definitions of imagination and the way they relate to each other; to treat him as a contributor to what is now referred to as “moral imagination” as well as artistic imagination; and to demonstrate the extent of Lewis’s interest in the other arts and show how the arts shape some of his deepest and most fundamental concepts about life and the universe. To know Lewis fully, one must understand the extent of his love of and devotion to both the imagination and the arts. It is inevitable that this study should focus considerable attention on the most imaginative of Lewis’s works, the Chronicles of Narnia. The arts appear more prominently in the Chronicles than in his other works and evoke an encompassing imaginative experience. Lewis was a teacher, by profession and in many of his writings. One of the effects of the Chronicles is to teach young readers about the 1. Barfield, “Conversations on C. S. Lewis,” 137, 135. See also Barfield, “Lewis, Truth, and Imagination,” 98. 2. Barfield, “Lewis, Truth, and Imagination,” 94–95.

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value of knowing and experiencing the various arts. In addition to the Chronicles, this book examines allusions to the arts in Lewis’s letters, literary criticism, Christian writings, poems, and fiction for adults. It provides a good way to connect the Chronicles to his other writings and to see his thought and work as a unified whole. Barfield held that Lewis’s love for imagination was like romantic love, like adoration, in the sense of having “a strong impulse to protect the beloved object from contamination,” to insulate imagination from “the harsh world of reality” and from “anything whatever to do with fact.” He found in Lewis a separation between reason and imagination, a resistance until late in Lewis’s life to allowing interpenetration between their two worlds.3 In an earlier book, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of “Till We Have Faces,” I made a similar case, though without Barfield’s illuminating comparison to love. I argued there that however deep Lewis’s devotion to imagination, he was unable to commit himself fully to its efficacy and relied on the intellect to convey his central ideas, even in his imaginative fiction. Only late in his life, in the Chronicles of Narnia, Till We Have Faces, A Grief Observed, and Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, did he begin to break down the barrier between intellect and imagination and allow imagination to work on its own. In Barfield’s terms, Letters to Malcolm is “irradiated by imaginative Lewis here and there in a way that the other books . . . are not.”4 The present book is not concerned with the tension between intellect and imagination. It treats Lewis not as being “in love with imagination” romantically and protectively, but as delighted at being in the presence of the beloved, desirous to share activities with the beloved, and eager to promote the good and happiness of the beloved. It seeks not like the earlier study to show separations in Lewis’s thought but to show unities. Its aim is to supplement existing biographies by a fuller understanding of Lewis’s life, through seeing the centrality of the arts in it, and to supplement existing literary studies by a fuller appreciation of his imaginative achievements. If imagination and the arts were among his great loves, their influence in his life and works deserves to be better known and more fully appreciated. 3. Ibid., 98, 100. 4. Ibid., 101.

Acknowledgments The idea for this book grew out of an invitation to do a presentation on Lewis for a weekend celebration of Christianity and the Arts at Hope College in January 1999. I am grateful to Joel Tanis, organizer of the event, for including me. Earlier versions of chapters 3 and 7 were published in Mythlore 12, no. 3 (Spring 1986) and 23, no. 2 (Spring 2001). An earlier version of chapter 4 was published in A Christian for All Christians: Essays in Honour of C. S. Lewis (1990), edited by Andrew Walker and James Patrick. Part of chapter 9 appeared in The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal, no. 100 (Autumn 2001). I am grateful to the editors of these publications for their permission to reuse that material here. I am also grateful to the C. S. Lewis Company Ltd., the Bodleian Library, and the Marion E. Wade Center for permission to reproduce extracts from unpublished letters and papers. I am indebted to many friends and colleagues for their help as I pursued this study. Both Charles Huttar and Doris Myers read the manuscript twice at different stages. Each corrected many errors and used their extensive knowledge of Lewis to suggest ways to develop ideas more profitably. Huttar also consulted with me frequently, read the proofs, and prepared the index. Bruce Edwards, Paul F. Ford, and Susan Woolley read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions. Myra Kohsel, office manager for the English department at Hope College, assisted in numerous ways to prepare the study for publication. Research on the book required several visits to the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Each time the staff were gracious, helpful, attentive, and patient. I am grateful especially to Christopher Mitchell, Marjorie Lamp Mead, Pamela Schwartz, Alicia Pearson, Aubrey Sampson, and Heidi Truty. I am very grateful and honored to have been selected to receive the 2002 Clyde S. Kilby Research Grant from the Marion E. Wade Center for research relating to this book.

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A major part of the book was drafted during a sabbatical leave, for which I am very grateful to Hope College. I want to express appreciation to the people at the University of Missouri Press who through their attentiveness and expertise have made this a better book than it would have been without them and who have at every point been a pleasure to work with. I am grateful especially to Beverly Jarrett and Clair Willcox for their confidence in the project; to Jane Lago for the alert and efficient way she moved the book through the production process; and to copyeditor Tim Fox and designer Jennifer Cropp for their careful and creative work. Most of all I thank my wife, Karen. She read and commented helpfully on several chapters. She believed in the value of the project and encouraged me through it. And she unselfishly put up with many months of more than my usual degree of distractedness and preoccupation.

Editions Used and Abbreviations Books by C. S. Lewis are cited from the first British editions except in the cases of Surprised by Joy, for the convenience of most readers, and the Chronicles of Narnia, where the first American editions, by Macmillan, reflect his last revisions (see pages 35–38). The following abbreviations of titles are used in citing the works by Lewis referred to most frequently in this book (less frequently cited books are included in the bibliography). The Chronicles are cited by page numbers; for locating equivalent pages in other editions, see the appendix. Books by Lewis which are available in only one edition are cited by page numbers. Those other than the Chronicles which exist in reprints with different pagination are cited by chapters or sections. AofL—The Allegory of Love. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. AofM—The Abolition of Man, or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. The Riddell Memorial Lectures, University of Durham, Fifteenth Series. London: Oxford University Press, 1943. AMR—All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927, edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 1991. CLetters—Collected Letters, edited by Walter Hooper. Vol. 1: Family Letters, 1905–1931. London: HarperCollins, 2000. DI—The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. EinC—An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. GD—The Great Divorce. London: Geoffrey Bles—The Centenary Press, 1946. [Cited by page number, and by the chapter numbers added in the U.S. edition.] H&B—The Horse and His Boy. New York: Macmillan, 1954. LB—The Last Battle. New York: Macmillan, 1956. Letters—Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), edited by W. H. Lewis. Revised

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and enlarged edition, edited by Walter Hooper. London: Fount, 1988. Lewis Papers—The Lewis Papers. 11 vols. Typescript “published” by The Leeborough Press. A collection of family papers assembled by Albert Lewis and edited, typed, and bound by Warren Lewis. The original is in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois, with a copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. LtoM—Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964. LWW —The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Macmillan, 1950. MC—Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. MN—The Magician’s Nephew. New York: Macmillan, 1955. “OnS”—”On Stories.” In Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis, 90–105. London: Oxford University Press, 1947. [Reprinted in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, edited by Walter Hooper, 3–21 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966); and On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, edited by Walter Hooper, 3–20 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).] OSP—Out of the Silent Planet. London: Bodley Head, 1938. PC—Prince Caspian. New York: Macmillan, 1951. Per—Perelandra. London: Bodley Head, 1943. Poems—Poems, edited by Walter Hooper. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964. PPL—A Preface to “Paradise Lost.” London: Oxford University Press, 1942. PR—The Pilgrim’s Regress. London: J. M. Dent, 1933. SbyJ—Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955. SC—The Silver Chair. New York: Macmillan, 1953. SL—The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942. THS—That Hideous Strength. London: Bodley Head, 1945. TST—They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963). Edited by Walter Hooper. London: Collins, 1979. TWHF—Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956. VDT—The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” New York: Macmillan, 1952.

Editions Used and Abbreviations

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For the discussion of the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling in chapter 9, I have quoted from the British editions (see p. 180n). Citations are by chapters, using the following abbreviated titles: Chamber—Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. London: Bloomsbury, 1998. Goblet—Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Prisoner—Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Stone—Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. [U.S. title, Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone.]


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“Feeding the Imagination” Lewis’s Imaginative Theory and Practice In a 1935 letter to Arthur Greeves, Lewis tells about a five-yearold boy, Michael, who had come to live with his mother as a member of Lewis’s household for more than a month. Every evening Mrs. Moore, mother of a deceased army comrade who shared a home with Lewis for more than thirty years, read to Michael from the Beatrix Potter books. “Would you believe it,” Lewis writes, “that child had never been read to nor told a story by his mother in his life?” Not that the child was neglected by his mother: he had the best in child care, food, and clothing. “But his poor imagination has been left without any natural food at all.” This makes Lewis wonder how the younger generation is going to turn out: “They have been treated with so much indulgence yet so little affection, with so much science and so little mother-wit. Not a fairy tale nor a nursery rhyme!” (TST, 476). Lewis repeats the charge of imaginative deprivation elsewhere. In a letter to Greeves in 1947, he expresses a concern about his own pupils, who seem to have missed out on youth: “They have all read all the correct, ‘important’ books: they seem to have had no private & erratic imaginative adventures of their own” (TST, 509). They sound much like Eustace Clarence Scrubb in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” who “liked books [only] if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools” and neither made things up himself nor enjoyed works of the imagination by others (VDT, 1). Prince Caspian presents two contrasting images of imaginative impoverishment in education. In one, the teacher is totally unimaginative, teaching a “sort of ‘History’ . . . duller than the truest history you ever read and less true than the most exciting adventure story” (PC, 167). The students long for nourishment—or at least one of them, Gwendolen, does and is set free from school, and freed imaginatively and emotionally, by Aslan and his merry revelers. A page later the revelers

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“came to another school, where a tired-looking girl was teaching arithmetic to a number of boys who looked very like pigs.” Here the teacher wants to nourish her students, but she is restrained by the educational system and by her students: “Let’s tell the inspector she talks to people out of the window when she ought to be teaching us” (PC, 168–69).1 The concern expressed in each of these cases indicates the centrality of imagination for Lewis. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis treats imagination as a major factor, if not the major factor, in his life: he describes his early years as ones in which “imagination of one sort or another played the dominant part.” He says he is telling the story of two lives—an outer life of realism and reason and an inner life of fantasy and imagination. As a young man he wanted only two kinds of talk—“the almost purely imaginative and the almost purely rational.” “The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast,” he explains. “On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’ Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary” (SbyJ, 82, 119, 136, 170). Imagination is evinced, illustrated, and discussed again and again in his writings—it would not be too much to say that imagination is, except for salvation, the most important issue in Lewis’s thought and life. He held that a healthy imagination in adults and children is vital because of the enlargement of being and enrichment of life it offers, and because of the potential it holds for the deepening of faith and understanding. Thus, neglecting the imagination is a matter of grave consequence. If Lewis felt children of the 1930s and 1940s were undernourished imaginatively, he would most likely regard many children of the past decade—with their diet of prepackaged visual images and simple narratives from television and video games—as starved. Books require that readers or listeners use their imaginations to supply images and fill in details; for children and adults, television and video stifle imaginations and lead to intellectual and 1. In a 1955 essay, “Lilies That Fester,” Lewis expresses concern that the analytic, prescriptive education being devised to prepare students to succeed in the managerial class stifles their imagination: “The hours of unsponsored, uninspected, perhaps even forbidden, reading, the ramblings, and the ‘long, long thoughts’ in which those of luckier generations first discovered literature and nature and themselves are a thing of the past” (42).

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imaginative laziness and inactivity.2 If Lewis were alive today, his concern would be much deeper than it was half a century ago. Mrs. Moore addressed imaginative undernourishment by reading stories to one young visitor. Lewis engaged the problem on a larger scale: he wrote poems and stories that would appeal to and stimulate the imaginativeness of his readers, and he used autobiographical, critical, and religious writings to clarify, defend, and support the imagination. A thorough understanding of Lewis as a person, as a creative writer, as a literary critic, and as an apologist for Christianity requires that imagination be given full and detailed attention, including discriminations between Lewis’s different uses of the word itself—between imagination as “creative” activity (a term Lewis disliked, because it incorrectly implies production out of nothing) and imagination as receptive action, and between “artistic” imagination and “romantic” imagination. By Lewis’s time the word had a long history, the modern sense having developed at the end of the eighteenth century. Prior to that, in the Renaissance, imagination was contrasted to reason and was looked upon as a means for fanciful conceptions (including poetry): “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact,” says Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “As imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (5.1.7–17). The finding of material by an author and fresh ways of expressing it was conveyed by invention, a term carried over from classical rhetoric. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries imagination (usually synonymous with “fancy”) was the faculty by which images were called up and which must then be subjected to the check of reason. In the later eighteenth century such imaging began to be regarded as transcending reason; its vividness and power moved the passions and created “a world of beauty of their own.”3 2. Communications researcher Patti M. Valkenburg reports, “The majority of studies suggest that television in general and television violence in particular have a reductive effect on imaginative play and creativity” (“Television and the Child’s Developing Imagination,” 124). See also Valkenburg and T. H. A. van der Voort, “Influence of TV on Daydreaming and Creative Imagination,” and van der Voort and Valkenburg, “Television’s Impact on Fantasy Play: A Review of Research.” 3. John Ruskin, “Chamouni” (line 56), in The Poems of John Ruskin, 1:158.

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The Romantic writers carried this further: imagination came to be thought of as a unifying mental power that enabled the poet to grasp such inner relationships as the identity of truth and beauty. Key texts for the Romantic (and subsequent) theories of imagination are several tantalizing fragmentary comments by Coleridge. In the Statesman’s Manual (1816), he offers his clearest and fullest definition of imagination: “That reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, . . . gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors.”4 In chapter 4 of the Biographia Literaria (1817) he distinguishes imagination—as the organic, creative, and unifying power—from “fancy,” the imagemaking power. And in chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria he separates a “primary” level of imagination, which like the creative impulse of nature itself forms a dynamic and emerging balance of the general with the specific, the abstract with the concrete, idea with image, and thus mediates between truth and feeling, the head and the heart, from a “secondary,” lower level which is less “original”— it dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates in order to re-create.5 Imagination, for Lewis, can be defined as the mental, but not intellectual, faculty that puts things into meaningful relationships to form unified wholes. Lewis does not include in his definition the initial dictionary entry and most basic definition, the power of forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses. This he labels “imaginatio, the image-making faculty,” and treats as separate from imagination.6 His interest begins a step further along: imagination connects things that were previously unconnected, not through 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Statesman’s Manual, 29. 5. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 82–85, 304–6. For studies of Coleridge, see J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination; I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination; and Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought. On the character of imagination and some of the questions and problems raised by it, see Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost: Studies in Imagination. 6. Imaginatio forms an important part of Surprised by Joy. The rich details from Lewis’s storehouse of mental images make the story of his life vivid and enable the reader to enter it visually. For example, he describes the suburbs of Belfast in which he grew up: “The woods . . . are of small trees, rowan and birch and small fir. The fields are small, divided by ditches with ragged sea-nipped hedges on top of them. There is a good deal of gorse and many outcroppings of rock. Small abandoned quarries, filled with cold-looking water, are surprisingly numerous. There is nearly always a wind whistling through the grass” (SbyJ, 153). Imagi-

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a logical or intellectual process but through association, intuition, or inspiration. This can occur at a lower or higher level (the significance of this distinction will appear shortly). Creative imagination, at either the lower or higher level, can lead to scientific discoveries, of lesser or greater originality and importance respectively.7 Lewis’s interest, however, is in literature and the arts. The composer connects notes, motifs, and movements in ways they have not been connected before but which have wholeness and unity. Visual artists arrange lines, shapes, colors, and masses in ways that are fresh and related. And writers connect words, images, and sounds in ways that articulate thoughts, depict characters, delineate events, and express emotions and experiences meaningfully and attractively. In the first chapter of Surprised by Joy, after claiming that at ages six to eight he was living almost entirely in his imagination, Lewis acknowledges the need for definition and offers three uses of the word: imagination as reverie, daydream, or fantasies of wish fulfillment; imagination as invention; and experiences of the imagination that produce the ecstatic experience he calls Joy (15–16). The first of these definitions does not involve artistic imagination. Imagination as wish-fulfillment fantasies includes, for Lewis, typical adolescent daydreams, picturing oneself as cutting a fine figure (SbyJ, 15). natio also appears in explicit references to the forming of mental images. Thus, when the young Lewis prayed for his mother to be healed, the God to whom he prayed (according to the older Lewis, looking back) was, “in my mental picture of this miracle,” to appear as a magician, not as savior or judge. Later, his bedtime prayers required what he calls a “realization,” by which he means “a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections” (SbyJ, 21, 61). 7. Lewis’s “mentor,” George MacDonald, writes: “But how does the man of science come to think of his experiments? . . . It is the far-seeing imagination which beholds what might be a form of things, and says to the intellect: ‘Try whether that may not be the form of these things’ ” (“The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture,” 12). Owen Barfield agrees: “There is no distinction between Poetry and Science, as kinds of knowing, at all” (Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 8.6; expanded on the preceding and following pages). For another elaboration of Barfield’s belief that figurative expression is central to meaning in all areas, see his “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction.” Of particular value among the many studies of the role of imagination in scientific research are Jacob Bronowski, The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature, and Science; Denis Dutton and Michael Krausz, The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art; and Ian Stewart, Nature’s Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematical Imagination. For an interesting discussion of Lewis’s use of the creative and imaginative side of higher mathematics, see David L. Neuhouser, “Higher Dimensions: C. S. Lewis and Mathematics.”

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This presumably led him at fourteen to aspire to “knuttery,” wearing flashy clothes and plastering his hair with oil (SbyJ, 67). He seems to have left such fantasizing behind when, two years later, he went to study with William Kirkpatrick.8 The second definition in Surprised by Joy correlates with the lower level artistic imagination mentioned above. Invention involves the conscious (or largely conscious) conception of character and construction of narrative, of organized sequences of events (what happens) or ideas (content), in either prose or verse (see SbyJ, 15; EinC, 53). Lewis says that his imaginative process as a story writer always began with imaginatio and continued with invention: “All my seven Narnian books, and my three science fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. . . . One day . . . I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’ ”9 Invention appears in Surprised by Joy chiefly in chapters 1 and 5 when Lewis discusses, at considerable length, the Animal-Land stories he wrote as a boy. He contrasts imaginative fantasies and imagination as invention in a sentence that summarizes the book’s consideration of both: “In my day-dreams I was training myself to be a fool; in mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist” (SbyJ, 15). Invention also appears in passing when Lewis says, about his father’s searching to find the perfect school for his sons, “While he thought he was interpreting Oldie’s prospectus, he was really composing a school story in his own mind” (SbyJ, 30). 8. The sixth chapter of An Experiment in Criticism deals at greater length with psychological fantasy, especially with egoistic castle-building in the reading of unliterary adults. These readers, because of “the extreme inertia of their imaginations,” require detailed descriptions of a recognizable, everyday world: “Though they do not mistake their castle-building for reality, they want to feel that it might be” (EinC, 55). Castle-building will be dealt with further in chapter 9 below. 9. Lewis, “It All Began with a Picture . . . ,” 42. He makes the point also in an earlier essay: “Everything began with images” (“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” 36). See also “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” 32–33, and “Unreal Estates,” 87. Owen Barfield comments that Lewis had a “very pictorial imagination,” what some people call an “ ‘eidetic memory,’ when your imaginative pictures are almost photographic. But he also had these purely inventive pictures, underived ones” (Barfield, “Conversations on C. S. Lewis,” 135–36).

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The third definition of imagination in Surprised by Joy describes “the highest sense of all” (16). This correlates with the higher level of imagination discussed above and includes two related meanings. On the one hand is “poetic imagination.” Lewis distinguishes between invention and poetic imagination when he says that his Animal-Land stories were training him to be “a novelist; not a poet” (SbyJ, 15). The organic and intuitive power needed to write “poetry” (including both mythic fiction and great lyric poetry) rises to a higher level than invention; it involves “inspiration” or “genius.”10 The same is as true for reading as for writing. The best poetry operates at a level beyond images. It conveys intense feeling, makes a powerful impression, through suggestiveness, not statement. Ideally it would be beyond words and in this sense akin to music, the highest art form, which, without words, can be “a sort of madness” in the strength of its effects (TST, 95). As he put it to Arthur Greeves, “All day . . . you have hundreds of feelings that can’t (as you say) be put into words or even into thought, but which would naturally come out in music. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off” (TST, 112).11 Poetry uses metaphor or myth to lift a work (whether in prose or verse) beyond events or ideas, to make it “profound and suggestive” (TST, 427), and to enable it to evoke extraordinary affective power and impact. When Lewis says that he was living “almost entirely in [his] imagination” (SbyJ, 15), he means that he was spending much of his time looking at, listening to, and reading highly imaginative works and being caught up in the powerful impressions created by them, as Surprised by Joy and the letters to Arthur Greeves demonstrate vividly. 10. Thus, “Shelley had a great genius, but his carelessness about rhymes, metre, choice of words etc [i.e., invention], just prevents him being as good as he might be” (TST, 136). Similarly, “If only the moment of inspiration cd. be identical with that of composition!” (TST, 275). See also SbyJ, 15–16; TST, 95–96. Lewis adheres to distinctions traditional since the eighteenth century between “fancy” and “imagination” (as “genius” or “inspiration”). He follows Coleridge in thinking of “fancy” as mechanical and logical, “the aggregative and associative power”; thus he writes, “Put the two side by side and see how imagination differs from mere fancy” (TST, 358). 11. In the fourth act of Prometheus, Lewis says, Shelley reached a note of ecstasy no other English poet, perhaps no other poet, has attained: “It can be achieved by more than one artist in music: to do it in words has been, I think, beyond the reach of nearly all” (“Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot,” 208).

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On the other hand, Lewis also uses “imaginative life” to refer to the experiences that in The Pilgrim’s Regress he calls “Romanticism” and in Surprised by Joy he calls “Joy.” It is an experience of intense, even painful, but desired, longing, which, after his conversion, he came to believe was a desire for unity with the divine (though often intermediate objects are mistaken for the ultimate object). The experiences are similar to those he ascribed in his late teens to great music: its effect at “its greatest moments of joy is painful” (TST, 95). That effect can be approached by literature: “Poetry and great novels do sometimes rouse you almost as much as music” (TST, 95). “By the imaginative life,” he says when the experience returns in his teens after a long absence, “I here mean only my life as concerned with Joy”; later he refers to “the imaginative longing for Joy, or rather the longing which was Joy” (SbyJ, 78–79, 175). Joy is imaginative in that it makes nonlogical (or superlogical) connections between outer and inner events, or between events in the present and the past. It is imaginative in that it is often set in motion by literature or music, which are the products of the imagination; it involves being transported beyond the physical and emotional to a rapturous state that could take place only in the imagination at an inspired level, and it usually depends on memory (in the sense of imaginatio), as a remembered experience triggers a longing not for the past but for something of which a past experience is a symbol. “All joy reminds,” he concludes (SbyJ, 78). A key instance in the recovery of Joy occurred when he realized that the remembering of an earlier experience was itself a new experience of just the same kind (SbyJ, 166).12 Surprised by Joy is in large part a celebration of the poetic and romantic imagination, present in the books he read and the longings he felt, central to all aspects of his life—his work, his recreation, and ultimately his religion. Lewis’s ruling ambition in his teens and twenties was to become a great poet. As Owen Barfield put it, “At that time, if you thought of Lewis, you automatically thought of poetry.”13 It is natural, therefore, that at this time he was also deeply interested in the imagina12. See also Lewis’s 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory,” which focuses on “desire”—especially, in the fifth paragraph, the comment that if Wordsworth could have gone back to moments in the past that he longed for, “what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering” (24). 13. Barfield, “C. S. Lewis,” 5–6.

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tion, as were others, such as his soon-to-be antagonist I. A. Richards and his close friend Barfield, each of whom published in the mid1920s a book that had imagination at its center.14 And it is not surprising to find Lewis engaged in an extended dispute with Barfield in the 1920s about the nature and theory of poetic and romantic imagination. Lewis dubbed the dispute “The Great War”—a war because they fought over whether imagination was a way of attaining truth, as Barfield believed, or was not, as Lewis held. The war was carried on through a series of letters and philosophical treatises, some of them extant in manuscript, which move us beyond definition of imagination to its conceptual foundations. Stephen Thorson, in a series of fine articles, has analyzed the Great War manuscripts and reached important conclusions regarding Lewis’s ideas about the imagination.15 The starting point for considering the place of imagination in Lewis’s thought is that imagination cannot be considered in isolation. As Barfield put it, a theory of imagination “must concern itself, whether positively or negatively, with its relation to truth.”16 Lewis’s ideas about imagination, Thorson believes, must be examined in the context of his metaphysics (what we are) and his epistemology (how we know). He proceeds to demonstrate that Lewis’s metaphysics and hence his view of imagination changed significantly after his conversion to theism around 1929.

14. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, especially chapter 32; Barfield, Poetic Diction. See also chapter 11, “Imagination,” in Barfield’s History in English Words, and chapter 3, “The Psychology of Inspiration and of Imagination,” in Barfield’s Speaker’s Meaning. 15. See Thorson, “Knowing and Being in C. S. Lewis’s ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield”; “ ‘Knowledge’ in C. S. Lewis’s Post-Conversion Thought: His Epistemological Method”; the two parts of “Lewis and Barfield on Imagination”; and “Barfield’s Evolution of Consciousness: How Much Did Lewis Accept?” Lionel Adey’s C. S. Lewis’s “Great War” with Owen Barfield provides additional valuable information about the Great War letters, though Adey’s analysis of them is less helpful and reliable than Thorson’s. 16. Barfield, “Lewis, Truth, and Imagination,” 97. A sign of the recently changing intellectual milieu is a session on “Truth” held at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in Chicago, December 1999—a decade or two ago, such a session would not likely have been proposed for or included on the program. The papers were published in PMLA 115 (October 2000): Jonathan Arac, “Truth,” 1085–88, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Netting Truth,” 1089–95.

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In his preconversion, Great War years, Lewis believed that a human being is an evolving Spirit, and he held a high, Coleridgean (and Barfieldian) view of poetic and romantic Imagination (with a capital I) as Spiritual Awareness, “a consciousness of the soul’s oneness with universal Spirit as well as the soul’s oneness with the world of Nature.”17 Through Imagination we can “see things as Spirit sees them”18 and thus participate in Spirit. In Barfield’s epistemology, Imagination is a method of attaining knowledge of spiritual reality (truth). Lewis, however, starting from a different epistemology, disagreed. From the time he read Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity in the early 1920s, Lewis accepted Alexander’s distinction between Enjoyment and Contemplation (both terms used in a special, technical sense). When one sees an object, one “enjoys” the act of seeing and “contemplates” the object; if one begins thinking about seeing, one contemplates the seeing and enjoys the thought. One cannot simultaneously focus attention on an object and on the self that is focusing attention. This, Lewis says, he accepted as soon as he read it and regarded thereafter as “an indispensable tool of thought”: “You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself. Of course the two activities can and do alternate with great rapidity; but they are distinct and incompatible” (SbyJ, 218). Barfield noticed a contradiction here. Metaphysically, Lewis affirmed the oneness of soul and Spirit; but epistemologically, he denied that oneness by saying one cannot simultaneously be Spirit (the contemplating self) and soul (the enjoying self). Therefore, Barfield suggested that Lewis reject enjoyment and contemplation and accept that Imagination is a source of truth. Instead, Lewis rejected his belief in emerging Spirit and with it his belief in Imagination. As a result of his conversion, he switched from viewing humans as evolving Spirits to regarding them as created beings, and he scaled back his high view of Imagination, coming to regard it as a lower faculty, “able to reflect spiritual values, but not ‘spiritual’ itself.”19 17. Thorson, “Lewis and Barfield on Imagination—Part I,” 15. 18. Lewis, Summa Metaphysices contra Anthroposophos, 2.24 (manuscript, part of the “Great War” series); see Thorson, “Knowing and Being,” 5. 19. Thorson, “Lewis and Barfield on Imagination—Part II,” 18.

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In his new view, imagination (now with a small i) was no longer the highest human quality, though he still regarded it as a good and potentially valuable one. Imaginative experiences are not spiritual in themselves, though they may be an avenue leading toward the spiritual. With a metaphysic now compatible with his epistemology, Lewis could hold consistently that imagination was not the source of truth, but the source of meaning. Reason, he wrote a decade later, “is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”20 The imagination, by making connections and establishing relationships between ideas, enables one to grasp and internalize the truths apprehended by the reason; through metaphor, myth, and symbol, it renders them in concrete ways we can understand, or begin to understand. As Lewis put it in “Myth Became Fact,” “Human intellect is incurably abstract. . . . Yet the only realities we experience are concrete.” The imagination bridges the divide, reconciles the opposites, allows us to experience the abstract concretely.21 Lewis was deeply interested in the way those connections are made by artists in the creative process, but his stronger interest and more valuable comments involve the receptive process, the way connections are recognized and completed by the listener, observer, or reader. To engage with an artistic work is itself an imaginative activity, one which can be carried out at lower or higher levels, as the creative process is. Although imagination plays a part in almost every book Lewis wrote, this chapter, building on Thorson’s foundation, will deal with three—An Experiment in Criticism (1961), Surprised by Joy (1954), and The Discarded Image (1964)—and chapter 9 with a fourth, The Abolition of Man (1943). In each work, the nourishing of the imagination can be considered a central theme. An Experiment in Criticism is Lewis’s major defense of the imagination in all the arts. He wrote it as a reply to “Cambridge English,” the subjective, evaluative approach to literature promulgated by F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards at Cambridge University in the first half of the twentieth century. Lewis disagreed strongly with the prescriptive way Leavis and his “Vigilant school of critics” sought to use literature to improve society and with their vigilance against those who promote the wrong literature or ideas (EinC, 124). He 20. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare,” 265. 21. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” 65–66.

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objected to Leavis partly because Leavis made literature a means rather than an end, and partly because he allowed insufficient scope to the imagination and to appreciation of artistic beauty. Though he differed from Leavis, Lewis principally opposed Richards, particularly his view, as Brian Barbour summarizes it, that “poetry was our most certain source of value, and the successful reading of poetry was the best preparation for an ethical life.”22 Consistent with the postconversion position described by Thorson, Lewis resisted especially Richards’s overvaluing, or misvaluing, of imagination and literature—his belief, like Matthew Arnold’s in the previous century, that poetry could replace religion and that culture could become a means of salvation. Such personal and societal salvation depended on a psychological approach to literature that would replace aesthetic and metaphysical readings, an approach whose representation of the imagination as “good medicine for the nerves” and of “art as therapy” was antithetical to Lewis’s position.23 At the heart of Cantabrigian criticism were analysis and evaluation, with works being judged by the degree to which they promoted the ends pursued by Leavis, Richards, and their followers. From Lewis’s perspective, literature needs first to be understood, then received, and then appreciated for the enlargement of being it offers. Critical judgment should be a final, nonessential step, and when taken it should focus not on analysis of the text but on the imaginative experience of the reader. In his refutation of Leavis and Richards, Lewis turned in An Experiment in Criticism to a spirited endorsement of imagination as the lifeblood of all the arts, crucial and indispensable to proper reception of literature and the arts as a whole. The “experiment” of his title inverts the Cantabrigian process for evaluating literature. Usually literary critics focus on the work and judge its quality by the extent to which it adheres to predetermined standards. Lewis proposes that attention be concentrated on the reader instead of the work, on identifying what constitutes 22. Barbour, “Lewis and Cambridge,” 443. Barbour’s fine essay shows that much of Lewis’s writing on culture and literature is framed as a reply to the program of Richards and his disciples. Doris T. Myers’s important study C. S. Lewis in Context focuses on Richards as the central figure in establishing the intellectual context which influenced Lewis’s ideas about language and literary theory. 23. Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost, 3.

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“good reading” instead of what characterizes a “good book.” He begins by describing two kinds of readers, the “literary” (the “few” for whom reading is a constant and indispensable part of life, who love to reread and who are deeply affected by what they read) and the “unliterary” (the “many” who read to relieve boredom, who rarely reread a book, and who are not deeply influenced by what they read). Lewis initially applies his ideas to painting and music, demonstrating as he does so considerable experience with and critical understanding of the arts, which clearly were important and influential in his life. He can start here because, he believes, in their origins all the arts originally were one. “Once, song, poetry, and dance were all parts of a single dromenon” (EinC, 96). He uses painting and music to clarify two kinds of imaginative engagement with works of art: “using” them and “receiving” them. Using is how the “many” approach the arts. It is a subjective, selective encounter in which details of a work serve as a “self-starter for certain imaginative and emotional activities of your own” (EinC, 16). The “user” may admire what a picture is “of” or be moved (or aroused) by what is depicted; the “user” hums along with a piece of music or taps a finger in response to its tune and rhythm. Using picks out from a work what it finds stimulating and neglects the rest of what is there; it does not see or hear what the work is in itself, but cares about only those parts which serve as effective starting points for an independent creative activity. Lewis characterized himself as a user (without using that term) when he wrote to Arthur Greeves in 1945, “I . . . suspect that most of my enjoyment [of music] is emotion produced out of my own imagination at rather slight hints,” rather than full musical judgments (TST, 506).24 Using is an imaginative response to art, but a very limited level of response: it is a self-absorbed re-creation, or re-experiencing, of what is already in the person’s imagination. There is no openness to a new and larger experience. In applying this to reading, Lewis says that unliterary readers stick to the same types of story and concentrate on “Events,” on “what happen[s] next” (EinC, 30). They want generalized descriptive detail, out 24. As chapter 6 below indicates, however, this comment probably was selfdeprecatory. His comments on and discussions of music usually show him as a receiver, not a user.

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of which they fashion their own, familiar visual images and create formulaic, cliché characters and plots that can trigger the emotional response they desire from a story. Receiving is a much deeper, richer imaginative response. “Receivers” re-enact the fresh, surprising connections made by the creative artist and enter the meaningful relationships through which the work elicits profound and powerful feelings and impact. In order to re-enact those connections and enter the work as a whole, they concentrate intensely on the work, not on the self, and pay close attention to details and the whole. Receiving is an objective, “obedient” surrendering of the imagination to the work of art in its fullness and particularity. “When we ‘receive’ it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist,” though not completely at first: that is the value of rereading (EinC, 88). Reception requires, Lewis says, disengagement before engagement. To experience a work of art fully, we must lay aside preconceptions, self-absorbed expectations, and personal needs or cravings. We must make room for the work by, as far as possible, emptying a space for the work to fill: “Get yourself out of the way” (EinC, 19).25 Then we must engage with the work by surrendering to it,26 by looking at or listening to everything in it: look at what the picture is “of,” but also at line, color, and composition; listen to the tune but also to what the composer does with the tune, to “the structure of the whole work” (EinC, 24). Applied to reading, literary readers pay close attention to all aspects of a work—to its style, sound, and form as well as to what happens; they dwell upon, and temporarily within, the “world” of a story, play, or poem and can be profoundly affected by the “state or quality”27 which that world embodies; they reread works again and again to re-create, in ever enlarging ways, what they initially experienced; and they talk about books, frequently and at length—for them, books and the imagination are “a main ingredient in [their] well-being” (EinC, 3). 25. Experiencing nature fully requires a receptivity of a similar kind: “To be always looking at the map when there is a fine prospect before you shatters the ‘wise passiveness’ in which landscape ought to be enjoyed” (DI, vii). 26. Similarly, in his “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” (the Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy for 1942), Lewis asserts that “the first thing is to surrender oneself to the poetry and the situation” (95). 27. Lewis, “OnS,” 18—discussed further in chapter 4 below.

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An Experiment in Criticism culminates in an impassioned celebration of the imagination and the imaginative experience. It is an eloquent statement in the old, humane tradition, clearly juxtaposed to the modern, Cambridge approach. It praises the imaginative life for the way it enlarges human beings, opening them to a fuller understanding of others and of themselves. “What then,” he asks, “is the good of—what is even the defence for—occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing our inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist?” His answer is that we seek enlargement of being, we want to be more than ourselves: “We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.” Within the self, Lewis claims, is—in addition to an egocentric impulse—an impulse to go out of the self, to transcend its provincialism and salve its loneliness; and “in love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this.” The artist enables us to become other selves and to share experiences other than our own, offers us extension of being: “My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented” (EinC, 137, 138, 140). Imaginative experience enables us to enter the lives of others while yet remaining ourselves. If An Experiment in Criticism describes and affirms the literary reader, Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, depicts himself as such a reader. He mentions many authors and books which he read and reread. He discusses how he engaged imaginatively with and was transformed by the works he read. As imagination is the central theme of An Experiment in Criticism, so it is in Surprised by Joy, and the parallels between the two books are striking and informative.28 For example, he says in An Experiment in Criticism that the starting point for “real appreciation” of any art is first to empty oneself, and then to “Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way” (EinC, 18, 19). The source of that idea might well have been observing his 28. The best discussion of Surprised by Joy can be found in the opening chapter of David C. Downing’s valuable book Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, 8–33.

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father. Lewis describes him in Surprised by Joy as “a man not easily informed. . . . His mind was too active to be an accurate receiver” (SbyJ, 30). “He could never empty, or silence, his own mind to make room for an alien thought” (SbyJ, 184). His father illustrates perfectly the way “the many” use art as a self-starter for imaginative and emotional activities of their own (EinC, 18, 16): “His mind so bubbled over with humor, sentiment, and indignation that, long before he had understood or even listened to your words, some accidental hint had set his imagination to work, he had produced his own version of the facts, and believed that he was getting it from you” (SbyJ, 121). It is tempting to think that the father’s subjective readings of his sons’ aural texts, his use of them to form imaginary stories of his own, helped shape Lewis’s ideas about the subjective handling of written texts by unliterary readers. His father’s inability to listen is not the only, and not the most important, example of subjectivity and “use” in Surprised by Joy. More important are the ways Lewis began to “use” the Norse myths and Wagnerian operas and beauties in nature that had previously given him experiences of Joy. Initially he received them, was “surprised” by them into feelings of near ecstasy, similar to what he felt when, at a Christmas Eve program in 1929, “the glorious windy noise of the bells overhead, the firelight & candlelight, and the beautiful music of unaccompanied boys’ voices, really carried me out of myself” (TST, 321). Later, however, he began to study Norse myths and became an expert on them; in the process, he lost the imaginative ecstasy they once had created. He tried to recover the old thrill by forcing it, by “using” the literature to stimulate self-centered longings. Only when he again became a “receiver” did the old thrill return. The language Lewis uses is very similar to what he would use later in An Experiment in Criticism. He allowed himself to fall into subjectivism, to think that what he wanted was a “thrill,” a state of his own mind, “a whirl of images, a fluttering sensation in the diaphragm” (SbyJ, 168). Actually, he wanted something objective and external;29 the genuine imaginative experience returned only as he emptied himself and 29. It was true for Lewis, as he said it was for Spenser, that “these formless longings would logically appear as among the sanest and most fruitful experiences we have; for their object really exists and really draws us to itself” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, 357).

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fixed his whole attention and desire on something other and outer (SbyJ, 168). Surprised by Joy reveals a semiautobiographical dimension in An Experiment in Criticism, showing that the latter deals not just with Lewis’s understanding of how to read texts, but also with the relationship of the self to the other as he experienced it in his own life. In both An Experiment in Criticism and Surprised by Joy the premise of Lewis’s literary thinking is objectivism, as it became for him after his conversion in the moral, philosophical, and religious areas as well. Engagement with the arts, like Joy, must be objective; one must receive what is there, not attempt to force it or use it as selfgratification, as a self-starter for imaginative and emotional activities of one’s own (EinC, 16; SbyJ, 166–67). Receptivity to the arts, Joy, and the Christian life, for Lewis, all require “total surrender” of the self to the other, or Other (SbyJ, 228). Likewise, Joy, literary reading, and full appreciation of the arts all aim at a similar end, unity. As literary experience “heals the wound . . . of individuality,” allows one to “become a thousand men and yet remain [one]self” (EinC, 140, 141), so Joy is evidence of our yearning “for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called ‘we’ ” (SbyJ, 221–22). In literary experience “as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do” (EinC, 141). In the postconversion Lewis, with his lowered view of imagination, no antagonism or incongruity exists between imagination and religion. Imagination at its highest level—myth—and spirituality at its highest level—mysticism—approach each other, or perhaps even overlap. Lewis even uses the words together: for relief, after reading too long in Wordsworth and philosophy, he wanted “something mystical—pure unadulterated imagination” (TST, 263), though the mysticism here, in 1919, was non-Christian. Similarly, reading the Paradiso in 1930 in an especially “receptive” mood, he experienced “a feeling of spacious gliding movement, like a slow dance, or like flying” (TST, 325–26).30 In this context, where imagination approaches the mystical, he can say, of the evening he first read George MacDonald’s Phantastes, “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense,

30. Note this use of “receptive” thirty years before An Experiment in Criticism.

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baptized” (SbyJ, 181). That is, when imagination as spiritual experience encountered the true divine Spirit, in the quality of Holiness, a transformation was initiated. The imaginative experience of Joy, in order to be authentic, must not look to the inward, subjective spirit but must look outward to the objective reality of Spirit. Lewis’s emphasis in Surprised by Joy is on the receptive imagination—his receptivity to imaginative experiences he encountered and the enlargement and eventual transformation of self which resulted from it. The effect of the book depends on its readers’ receptivity to the imaginative description of those experiences. In a sense, all of Lewis’s critical writings and his apologetics deal with receptivity. But one book, The Discarded Image, provides a particularly striking and provocative example of Lewis’s exploration of the receptive imagination. The stated purpose for the book is to provide a map of the medieval world that will enhance “receptive reading” of medieval literary works (DI, vii). Lewis’s further aim is to help his readers enter, if inevitably only partially, the imagination and world of a person of the Middle Ages. Lewis lays out for his readers the image constructed by the great thinkers of the Middle Ages, which enabled them to comprehend the universe: “the whole organisation of their theology, science, and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental Model of the Universe” (DI, 11). He stresses that it is “only a model.” Every age constructs its own model to account for as many observed appearances in the universe as possible in the most economical way possible.31 That model, that image, Lewis says, provided in the Middle Ages a “backdrop for the arts,” as artists selected from it what was intelligible to a layperson and what appealed to the imagination and emotions (DI, 14). The artists and general populace may or may not have “believed” the model and may or may not have recognized the 31. At about the same time Lewis was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript of his often-repeated university lectures on the medieval world, stating that eras have models of the universe which are abandoned by later ages in favor of what they consider more adequate models, Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) published his argument that scientific revolutions take place when anomalies call into question explicit and fundamental generalizations of the existing paradigm and a crisis occurs; as a result, a “paradigm shift” takes place, as a new, “neater,” “more suitable,” or “simpler” paradigm (155) emerges to take the place of the previous one. Lewis hints at this same process in a remarkable paragraph in The Discarded Image, 219–20.

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extent to which it was provisional. The important thing is that it was imaginatively and emotionally satisfying to those who developed it and those who lived with it. Lewis emphasizes that the Model engaged both the creative and the receptive imagination of people in the Middle Ages. Its origins were not in the physical world but in books, as medieval thinkers drew upon auctours and wove what they borrowed into a new and intricate fabric (DI, 5). The result was an “imagined universe” (DI, 13), a universe of triads and plenitude (DI, 43–44); a universe composed of the four elements (DI, 4); a universe filled not with inert spheres reflecting borrowed light but with living beings, “planets as well as gods” (DI, 105); a universe full of light and resonant with music, moving constantly in expression of and response to the “intellectual love” of God (DI, 112, 115). It was a universe created— invented—by the imagination: the “supreme medieval work of art” (DI, 12). It was a work of the characteristically medieval “realising imagination,”32 one which provided abundant close-up details to “make sure that we see exactly what [the artist] saw” (DI, 206). “Few constructions of the imagination seem to me,” says Lewis, “to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree” (DI, 216). Medieval people responded to this universe with their imaginations and emotions. It delighted them (DI, 216); it satisfied them: “Other ages have not had a Model so universally accepted as theirs, so imaginable, and so satisfying to the imagination” (DI, 203). It held great significance for them, “as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it” (DI, 204). Thus they re-created it again and again in their art, because “their minds loved to dwell on [it]” (DI, 202–3).

32. In The Discarded Image, Lewis offers yet another set of definitions for the imagination: he contrasts the “realising imagination” of the Middle Ages with the “transforming imagination” of Wordsworth and the “penetrative imagination” of Shakespeare. One of the appeals of medieval literature, for Lewis, was its abundant detail and its grounding in reality. The vividness of medieval writers, he says, comes from “their devout attention to their matter and their confidence in it. They [do not try] to heighten it or transform it. It possesses them wholly. Their eyes and ears are steadily fixed upon it, and so—perhaps hardly aware how much they are inventing—they see and hear what the event must have been like” (DI, 206, 208).

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Lewis’s aim in the book is not just to describe this imaginative achievement and contemporary responses to it, but to enable twentieth-century readers “to enter more fully into the consciousness of our ancestors by realising how such a universe must have affected those who believed in it.” Thus he invites readers to undertake an experiment, imagining themselves in the medieval world: “Go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place” (DI, 98). Looking up at the towering medieval universe is like looking at a great building, “overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony”—thus very different from the modern sense of looking out into the endless “space” of modern astronomy (DI, 99). “You must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” (DI, 112). Here, receptivity is pushed to the point of active, physical participation by the reader in what the text is describing. It is striking in this discussion of the medieval world that nowhere does Lewis tell readers “to see the object as in itself it really is,” as he did (using “see” metaphorically) in discussing literary works (EinC, 119). He knows, with Kant and Barfield, that human eyes do not see “the thing itself.” Many in the nineteenth century still thought that through inferences based on sense experience and amplified by measurements, “we could ‘know’ the ultimate physical reality; . . . the ‘truth’ would be a sort of mental replica of the thing itself” (DI, 216). The twentieth century, however, recognizes that every age, in looking at the universe, views not it but an image of it, and recognizes that the Model is not close to reality, but only the closest we can get. The Model “is a mere analogy, a concession to our weakness. Without a parable modern physics speaks not to the multitudes” (DI, 218, alluding to Matthew 13:34). This acknowledges an element of subjectivity; Lewis retains belief that reality exists, but he accepts that perceptions of reality inevitably vary. He restrains the resulting subjectivity by holding that the variations in perceptions are collective, not individual; the Model for a given age is the way many people at that time perceive reality, which gives a degree of objectivity to the Model itself.33 33. An element of subjectivity in Lewis’s re-creation of the medieval universe is evidenced by an important element of its thought that he leaves out: he makes

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The interesting thing is that Lewis does not extend this analysis to the perception of artistic works, as reader-response theory has done. Starting with the same principle, that one cannot see the thing itself but only the image formed in one’s mind by the stimulation of sense perceptions, much recent literary theory assumes that this is true of texts as well and goes on to deny the text any objective existence apart from what readers make of it. Lewis at one level anticipated in 1926 what later reader-response criticism would use as an axiom: “a poem unread is not a poem at all” (TST, 382). At another level, however, because of the results he saw in his father’s unchecked subjectivity as a receiver, and his need for objective foundations generally, he was not willing to accept the further implications of that sentence. Thus An Experiment in Criticism emphasizes the reading of the poem, not the poem as read, and Lewis oversimplifies, or distorts, the contrast between unliterary and literary readers by implying that the latter can engage directly with unmediated texts. Its emphasis on the text (the words on the page) rather than on the poem as formed in the reader’s mind aligns the book more closely with the New Criticism of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (from which Lewis in other respects wanted to distance himself) than with the readerresponse theory promoted by Louise M. Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser.34 The result is to limit Lewis’s theoretical and practical understanding of receptive imagination: he loved imagination and realized its importance to a rich and full life, but he resisted subjectivity in imaginative experience, engaging in futile efforts to keep imagination grounded in objectivity.35

no reference to the Virgin Mary, apparently because he found veneration of her personally repugnant. See Peter Milward, S.J., A Challenge to C. S. Lewis, 61–63. 34. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work; Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost” and Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities; Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” and section 4, “Interaction between Text and Reader,” of The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. In his excellent study A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy, Bruce L. Edwards, Jr., examines closely Lewis’s theories regarding text, intentionality, and the reader in the context of other reading theories in the late twentieth century. 35. The tension in Lewis between the appeal of imagination and the necessity of reason, and his increasing reliance on imaginativeness in his writing, are discussed in Peter J. Schakel, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of “Till We Have Faces.”

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Surprised by Joy shows that imagination was important in leading Lewis to a religious commitment: the imaginative pagan myths that filled his soul with longing from his childhood on, and the imaginative books by Christian authors that conveyed a sense of goodness as he read for his degree in English literature, helped prepare him for theism and Christianity; and the imaginative experience he called Joy drew him on and kept him searching for the object that would eventually give him fulfillment. Imagination, fantasy, and myth were, for Lewis, pleasurable and satisfying in themselves, and he came to see them as pointers to the divine. Lewis, after his conversion, regarded the ultimate purpose of the imagination—like that of romantic longing at the end of Surprised by Joy—as bringing one to a vision of God: “For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see my face and live” (PR, 9.5).36 Without imagination, Lewis suggests, he would not have been a Christian. Small wonder, then, that he placed such a high value on imagination, even in his postconversion years when he no longer regarded it as the highest thing; small wonder, too, that he defended and promoted it, that he wrote works of fantasy and imagination himself, and that he advocated that imagination be nurtured in children in every way possible. To understand and appreciate Lewis fully, as person and writer, requires attention to the ways he thought about, used, and fostered imagination, as the following chapters will demonstrate.

36. Charles Huttar has suggested to me that two parallels may be pertinent to this quotation. It has a parallel in the ending of Dante’s Paradiso, where Dante presents a vision of God while simultaneously acknowledging that the reality is beyond his vision, and indicates that not only his verbal powers but even his memory is inadequate for dealing with it. But the allusion to Exodus 33:20 may also be significant, since—with the play on “see”—it undercuts what the divine voice actually says: Lewis’s line emphasizes the point that the imagination is a way of supervening the prohibition imposed on Moses.

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“The Temptation to get a Nice New Book” Texts and the Imaginative Reading Experience Those whom Lewis characterizes as “the literary,” people who love reading, typically also are people who love books. They love having books around, in piles on tables, on shelf after shelf lining the walls. They love hanging around bookstores and libraries, and they love buying books, especially bargains in used bookstores. They love the look and feel and smell of a well-published book, and they care about the quality of the covers and paper and print. Lewis believed that physical characteristics, as well as the printed text, contribute significantly to the appreciation of a book. In his personal and critical writings, Lewis put forward a holistic view of the reading experience, which this chapter will explain and explore. The imaginative experience of reading involves of course the content and style of a book, as shaped by the text (and changes in that text); but it begins with and is affected by the look and feel of the book, and includes as well the context in which the reader encounters the work. Lewis grew up surrounded by books. Both of his parents were educated people and great readers. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis calls himself the product of endless books: My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. (SbyJ, 10)

Lewis learned to read early in his life, and already as a child he was a voracious reader: “Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the

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shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass” (SbyJ, 10). To experience books goes beyond just reading them. It includes shopping for books. Since Lewis’s father bought books, rather than borrowing them from libraries, it is safe to assume that he introduced Lewis to bookshops. Lewis mentions his love of finding books to Arthur Greeves, who in 1914 became his closest friend and who shared his love of books: “I quite agree with what you say about buying books, and love all the planning and scheming beforehand” (TST, 93). Like most book lovers, he enjoyed secondhand bookshops: “My regular book-monger keeps his second-hand stock downstairs in a 12th century crypt, at one period haunted by Guy Faulkes [sic]” (TST, 242).1 Acquiring books includes celebrating the arrival of the volumes one has ordered: “if they come by post, finding the neat little parcel waiting for you on the hall table and rushing upstairs to open it in the privacy of your own room” (TST, 93; see also SbyJ, 147– 48). And it includes arranging books on the shelves in a way that is both efficient and attractive: Lewis asks Arthur if he has noticed the effect of the red leather Everyman books “when two or three are together in a shelf” and later sends Arthur some new books from England and asks him to “put [them] in suitable places” on the shelves in Lewis’s room (TST, 88, 215). Lewis learned from Arthur to love not just reading books, but “the bodies of books”: “The set up of the page, the feel and smell of the paper, the differing sounds that different papers make as you turn the leaves, [become] sensuous delights” (SbyJ, 164). His early letters to Arthur Greeves are dotted with physical details about the books he was reading. “The Chaucer . . . is in the very best Everyman style—lovely paper, strong boards, and—aren’t you envious— not one but two bits of tissue paper”; “it is exactly the sort of edition you describe in your last letter—strong, plain, scholarly looking and delightfully . . . solid . . . the exact opposite of the ‘little book’ type we’re beginning to get tired of”; “it is also a good Everyman speciman [sic]: the paper is thin & crisp, the print just a comfortable 1. In an unpublished diary entry for May 2, 1930, Warren Lewis describes the twelfth-century crypt as “a queer musty place entered by a circular iron staircase through a jagged hole in the masonry” (Lewis Papers, 11.13).

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size & the margins larger than usual—making a very pretty page” (TST, 104, 112, 212).2 In contrast, he mentions a Russian book “badly printed on poor paper but exquisitely illustrated and illuminated,” describes a good Bible commentary as “a very fat, ugly volume in double columns,” and offers Arthur an extra copy of an “ugly book” that includes an essay by Joy Davidman (TST, 244, 500, 529). Like every author, he hopes that his own books will be printed in a way pleasing to look at and to hold and read. He worries about how his first book, Spirits in Bondage, will be printed: “I saw a book of poems ‘Counter-Attack’ by Siegfried Sassoon . . . published by [Heinemann] at 2/6 in a red paper cover and horrid type. I do hope they will give me something better than that” (TST, 232). And, when his first scholarly book, The Allegory of Love, is accepted for publication by Clarendon Press, he trusts that “binding, paper etc will be—in our old formula—excellent, exquisite, and admirable. In other words, if you can’t read it, you will enjoy looking at it, smelling it, and stroking it. . . . (It will be very funny, after this, if they do it in double columns and a paper cover).” After seeing the page proofs, he worries that “it will not be as tall a book as I had pictured—and what is the good of a scholarly work if it does not rise like a tower at the end of a shelf?! I fear it may even be thickish and stumpy” (TST, 474, 477). To experience books fully is to feel almost a personal relationship with them: he hopes Arthur will act as his librarian back home, to “keep me in touch with my books to some extent” (TST, 215). It means treating books with care and respect. Thus he is distressed by the way his tutor Kirkpatrick handles books: “Kirk has made me get [Pindar] in the Loeb library—nice little books that have the translation as well as the text. I have now the pleasure of seeing a pretty, 5/- volume ruined by a reader who bends the boards back and won’t wash his filthy hands: while, without being rude, I can’t do anything 2. Warren wrote in his diary on April 29, 1930, that Jack “has a beautiful little library, both qua books, (contents) and also pleasing to the eye and touch and smell: it is especially rich in leather bindings” (W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, 41). Most of the fine books were purchased before he returned from service in World War I, began providing a home for Mrs. Moore, and lived in near poverty. In 1922 Lewis wrote in his diary, “I seem almost to have lost the possessive love of books and shall henceforth be content with very few provided that I am within reach of a library” (AMR, 54).

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to save it. Of course it is a very little thing I suppose, but I must say it makes me quite sick whenever I think of it” (TST, 110; see also SbyJ, 164). And it means annotating them with personal responses— not marking lines with a yellow highlighter, but jotting notes and queries in the margins, and constructing indexes and maps on the flyleaves.3 The love of books Lewis displayed in his life is conveyed within his stories, with attention given to the physical qualities of books as well as to their subject matter. Books are referred to frequently in the Chronicles of Narnia. The professor’s house has a series of rooms that are “lined with books—most of them very old books and some bigger than a Bible in a church.” In her guided tours of the house, Mrs. Macready tells visitors about “the rare books in the library.” Mr. Tumnus has a shelf full of books with titles like The Life and Letters of Silenus and Nymphs and Their Ways (LWW, 4, 41, 11). Doctor Cornelius uses books as he tutors Prince Caspian, including Grammatical Garden or the Arbour of Accidence pleasantlie open’d to Tender Wits (PC, 38). Eustace Clarence Scrubb liked books “if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools,” or if they had “a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains” (VDT, 1, 71). Edmund has “read several detective stories” (VDT, 101). Reepicheep has a nice collection of books: “If he had Eustace at his own house in Narnia . . . he could show him more than a hundred examples of emperors, kings, dukes, knights, poets, lovers, astronomers, philosophers, and magicians, who had fallen from prosperity into the most distressing circumstances” (VDT, 84–85). Jill Pole “never liked giants even in books,” and she notices that books in which people live on what they shoot never tell you what a long, messy job it is to pluck and clean dead birds (SC, 61, 69). In Uncle Andrew’s sitting-room, “every bit of the walls was lined with shelves and every bit of the shelves was full of books,” in addition to the books piled on the big table (MN, 9). The Pevensie children have read a great deal, and Lewis assumes young readers of the Chronicles have too: “Edmund or Lucy or you 3. “I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined” (TST, 438). “Before lunch, began indexing my Bunyan” (TST, 320).

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would have recognized [the creature as a dragon] at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books. . . . Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair. . . . Eustace found . . . what any of us could have told him in advance—treasure” (VDT, 68, 71). Shasta, unfortunately, has had little opportunity to read: “It was a crazy idea and if he had read as many books as you have about journeys over deserts he would never have dreamed of it” (H&B, 76). Of course, for Lewis (or his narrator) to assume that his readers have read widely also becomes a way of encouraging them to read widely. In the magician’s house on the Island of the Voices, Lucy must go to a large room lined from floor to ceiling with books, “more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat and dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have ever seen, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned.” When she finds the Magic Book, she appreciates in it qualities that Lewis valued as a book collector: “The paper was crisp and smooth and a nice smell came from it; and in the margins, and round the big coloured capital letters at the beginning of each spell, there were pictures” (VDT, 124, 125–26). Books appear in Lewis’s other stories as well. Most haunting, perhaps, are the efforts of Orual to gather a library in Glome: “We built up what was, for a barbarous land, a noble library: eighteen works in all” (TWHF, 1.20). The library of which Orual is so proud is a ragtag collection: it includes books 1–15 of the Iliad, but not 16–24; some philosophy—a few dialogues of Socrates by Plato (or Xenophon), aphorisms by Heraclitus, and the Metaphysics of Aristotle; two plays by Euripides—his Andromeda (since lost) and The Bacchae; some lyric poetry, specifically the poem on Helen for which, legend has it, Teisias Stesichorus was struck blind; and a practical book about animal husbandry that may have been a precursor to or imitation of Xenophon’s On the Art of Horsemanship and On Hunting. As the books begin to arrive, Arnom and younger men come to the Fox to learn to read in them; they are learning to read the Greek language, but from this library they certainly are not receiving an adequate introduction to Greek thought. Orual does not say that she read the books herself, and she does not seem to know them well, as indicated by her general descriptions of the second play by Euripides and the dialogues of Socrates, instead of giving their titles,

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and by her incorrectly giving Stesichorus’s name as “Hesias” rather than “Teisias.” Here is further evidence that she “was too busy to be with [the Fox] much” (TWHF, 1.20): she had become an activist queen and no longer had time for bookish learning. There are few books in the “old stone age” culture of Malacandra: “It is better to remember,” the sorns tell Ransom, reflecting the ancient distrust of writing and preference for the reliability of oral testimony (OSP, chaps. 11, 16), in contrast with Western attitudes today. Ransom is author of Dialect and Semantics (THS, 9.3) and his first thought after meeting a hross and finding that it has a language is “the dazzling project of making a Malacandrian grammar. An Introduction to the Malacandrian language—The Lunar verb—A concise Martian-English Dictionary . . . the titles flitted through his mind” (OSP, chap. 9). There are, of course, no books as yet in the Edenic paradise of Perelandra. There is a library at Belbury, but it seems to be used as a meeting room, not for reading (THS, 6.3). The Belbury group shows no interest in imaginative writings, or in the traditional values that books and reading can convey. Mark’s rediscovery of books is part of his journey from the spirit of Belbury to that of St. Anne’s. The manor at St. Anne’s has “a pretty large library,” and when Jane is recuperating there from the tortures inflicted by Fairy Hardcastle, she requests “the Curdie books, . . . and Mansfield Park and Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (THS, 8.2). Such books are the sort Lewis liked to read when he was ill.4 All are excellent as examples of the literary imagination, but each also exemplifies the moral imagination (discussed further in chapter 9, below). After the horrors she has encountered, Jane stands in need of the comforting pleasure of reading imaginative works, but she also needs the nourishment of mind and spirit that authors like MacDonald, Austen, and Shakespeare can afford.5 4. “Will you think me affected if I number a small illness among the minor pleasures of life? . . . Work is impossible and one can read all day for mere pleasure with a clear conscience” (Letters, January 25, 1926; see also SbyJ, 189). Lewis mentioned in a 1930 letter to Greeves, “I read [The Princess & the Goblin] . . . for about the third time when I was ill this spring” (TST, 361). He read Austen’s Sense and Sensibility while ill in 1929 and her Northanger Abbey in 1937 (TST, 302; Letters, February 1937). “Jane Austen, Scott, and Trollope are my favourite authors when ill” (Letters, January 31, 1943). 5. The Curdie books are The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1873) by George MacDonald, Lewis’s “master,” a major force in Lewis’s

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There seem to be books—unsubstantial ones, presumably—in the Grey Town of The Great Divorce: the Episcopal Ghost who has written a paper to read to the little Theological Society down there will surely want to expand his ideas into a book (GD, 42–43; chap. 5). Screwtape’s opening comment to Wormwood is that “guiding your patient’s reading” isn’t enough (SL, letter 1), and in several later letters he mentions ways that reading can be turned to advantage, as for example, “give him lots of modern Biographies to read” (SL, letter 9)—that is, give him factual, not imaginative works, telling about contemporary figures who do not take the Enemy seriously, not the notable personages from earlier ages who did. In letter 13 he rebukes Wormwood strongly for allowing “the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his friends.” Reading for enjoyment is a pleasure, and, as Screwtape reminds Wormwood in letter 9, all pleasure is God’s invention, while pride of intellect belongs to our Father Below. If the setup on the page and the feel, smell, and sound of the paper could be sensuous delights for Lewis, the appearance and feel of a book can, or inevitably will, contribute to the experience for readers of Lewis’s works, particularly the Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis and his early readers were fortunate that three of the religious and imaginative development. After her arrest and torture, Jane would have appreciated the same qualities in the books that Lewis found in MacDonald, the “homely and humble” feel of the stories and the aura of “goodness,” conveyed in “that elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but sensuous desire” (Lewis, preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology, 21, 22). Mansfield Park (1814) is Jane Austen’s third novel: “I should almost say it was her best,” Lewis wrote to Greeves in 1915 (TST, 76). The story—about a young woman from a poor family who, after years of feeling like an outsider while living in the home of rich relations, finally finds love and acceptance, a true home and family there—is one Jane would have found comforting as she settled in at St. Anne’s. But she would also hunger for the moral strength of Austen’s work, the clarity of its moral principles (see Lewis, “A Note on Jane Austen,” 178). Lewis regarded the sonnet sequence as among Shakespeare’s finest imaginative works, “a masterpiece of Golden technique.” Jane, as a student of literature working on a study of Donne’s poetry, would appreciate the technical mastery of Shakespeare’s verse. But, given the state of her marriage and personal life, she would be drawn to them also for their celebration of love: they express “the quintessence of all loves,” Lewis wrote, and “are written from a region in which love abandons all claims and flowers into charity” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, 505).

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first four editions of the Chronicles were published in very attractive volumes. Until the mid-1980s, the Chronicles were published in just four editions—a clothbound and a paperback edition published in Britain and sold throughout the world except (because of copyright restrictions) in the United States, and a clothbound and a paperback edition published and sold in the U.S. The first British edition of each book was clothbound, on good paper; the printing was sharp and clear. The first five were published by Geoffrey Bles, the last two by the Bodley Head. They were, and remain, a delight to handle and read. The earliest U.S. editions were clothbound, published by Macmillan, and also were of excellent quality. First editions are becoming increasingly rare and prohibitively expensive, but early reprints generally maintained the high printing quality of the first editions, and bargains can still be found in used bookstores. The seven books were issued between 1959 and 1965 as Puffin Book paperbacks. These too are delightful volumes. They contain the full texts of the first British editions and all illustrations and maps, except the frontispieces for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, the endpaper map for The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” and four full-page plates in The Horse and His Boy. They have attractive covers, sharp, clear printing, and good bindings—for paperbacks: they stay open and are easy to hold. The original United States paperback edition, published in 1970 by Collier Books, a division of Macmillan, is much less satisfactory. It reprints the texts of the Macmillan edition but has few illustrations and neither the frontispieces nor the endpaper maps. The covers are less inviting than the Puffin covers. The books are slightly smaller than the Puffin paperbacks; that, and page after page of unbroken text, and the mass-market gluing which requires more effort to hold the books open, all make them less pleasant to look at and read. In considering a holistic reading experience, a book’s illustrations are very important, especially for children’s books. The original British clothbound editions of the Chronicles contained from 34 to 46 pen and ink illustrations, plus full-page color frontispieces in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, and maps in Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” The Silver Chair, and The Horse and His Boy. The choice of illustrator was left to Lewis, and he selected Pauline Baynes, who had earlier done the illustrations

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for Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949).6 Illustrations become a part of a text, vital to the meaning and feeling the words convey. Tolkien said as much when he wrote to his publishers in 1949, “Miss Baynes’ pictures . . . are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme. I showed them to my friends whose polite comment was that they reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings.” The joshing overstatement covers a nugget of serious truth, and Lewis acknowledged that truth in his reply to Baynes after she wrote to congratulate him when The Last Battle won the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book of 1956: “Is it not rather ‘our’ Medal? I’m sure the illustrations were taken into consideration as well as the text.”7 The imaginative experiencing of such a text is deeply affected by the illustrations, especially when children first encounter the books by hearing a parent or teacher read them aloud. These children “read” the illustrations before they read the words. The illustrations not only establish specific visual images, but also shape the way the entire story will be imaged. Thus Tolkien rejected the “fashionableness” of the first drawings for Farmer Giles of Ham and preferred the drawings by Baynes, which were influenced by medieval manuscript decorations, and Lewis was attracted to Baynes because her traditional style matched his concept of the flavor of his stories. 6. Pauline Baynes was born in Brighton in 1922. Her father was a Commissioner in the Indian Civil Service, and she spent her first five years in India. She was educated in private schools in England. She entered the Farnham School of Art in 1937 and then spent two terms at the Slade School of Fine Art, then in Oxford. During World War II she used her artistic talents in the war effort and began illustrating books professionally. In the late 1940s she left a portfolio with Allen & Unwin, publisher of Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien. When Tolkien rejected the illustrations the publisher had chosen for Farmer Giles of Ham, he was shown Baynes’s drawings. He liked what he saw, and she did a set of illustrations that Tolkien felt exactly suited the book. Lewis presumably learned about her from Tolkien (though Baynes says Lewis told her that he went into a bookshop and asked an assistant to “recommend someone who could draw children and animals”—Walter Hooper, Past Watchful Dragons, 77). In December 1949 Geoffrey Bles showed Lewis the initial drawings for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Lewis sent Baynes a note congratulating her on them, especially their vigorous detail. See Wayne G. Hammond, “Pauline Baynes”; Hooper, Past Watchful Dragons, 76–80; and Nancy-Lou Patterson, “An Appreciation of Pauline Baynes.” 7. Tolkien, Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 133. Lewis, letter to Baynes, May 4, 1957, original in the Bodleian Library (MS.Eng.lett.c. 220/1, fol. 158). For Lewis’s assessment of Pauline Baynes’s illustrations, see George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times, 190.

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Walter Hooper had all this in mind when he noted “how much our picture of Lewis’s imaginary world owes to the skill and imagination of this lady.”8 If illustrations are an integral part of the text, then to read an edition with fewer or different illustrations is in fact to read a different work. The original Macmillan clothbound edition of the Chronicles omitted many of the illustrations (in some books almost half of them); this edition, as a result, is significantly different from the British edition in ways that most readers in the U.S. were not even aware of. Even more distressing was the Collier paperback edition of 1970, which sold millions of copies between 1970 and 1994. That edition included only one illustration per chapter: while the British edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had forty-three illustrations, the Collier paperback had seventeen. Eight of those seventeen were cropped versions of the originals (the loss of details of the interior of the Beavers’ house is particularly sad), and four of the seventeen were the result of dividing two original full-page drawings in half. Thus, millions of readers in the United States (myself included), as we used the Collier texts, had severely impoverished reading experiences compared to readers of copies published in Britain. When I discovered the fully illustrated books later, I felt I had indeed found not different editions but different books from those I had read before. The imaginative experience was significantly enriched.9 In 1994 HarperCollins issued a uniform worldwide edition of the seven Chronicles, in a hardcover version and in trade and massmarket paperbacks. This edition follows the initial British texts and contains all of the original illustrations and endpaper maps, except the frontispieces. Unfortunately, the illustrations lack the clarity and sharpness of the early editions (this is true as well for later reprintings of the British edition by Collins and of the U.S. edition by Macmillan). The most pleasing to use, of course, are the hardcover volumes. They have high quality covers and bindings and a good feel as one holds them. The trade paperbacks are a good bargain, less expensive than the hardcovers but higher in quality than the 8. Tolkien, Letters, 130; Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 625. 9. In 1981 Macmillan published a hardcover version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe illustrated by Michael Hague, in a style very different from that of Pauline Baynes. As would be expected, the imaginative effect changes greatly.

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mass-market paperbacks: the print is larger, the page layout is more attractive, and the illustrations are larger and easier to grasp. The bindings are stronger, and the books stay open better and are easier to hold. Chris Van Allsburg designed the covers of the trade paperbacks in the United States, Leo and Diane Dillon those of the massmarket version—both are acceptable, with differing strengths and weaknesses. The trade paperbacks include, inside the back cover, a color reprint of Pauline Baynes’s beautiful Map of Narnia and the Surrounding Countries—an appealing feature, though the miniature size makes some of the words hard to read. The mass-market paperbacks begin with a “Cast of Characters,” which is much less appealing: it seems unnecessary, and its capsule summaries of characters present as fact what sometimes are interpretations a reader should develop for him- or herself (a particularly unsettling example is the incorrect statement that the Queen of Underland in The Silver Chair is another embodiment of Jadis, the witch in The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).10 If, as discussed above, the physical makeup of a book affects the experience of reading it, spending a bit more for the trade paperbacks seems worthwhile.11 10. The oldest owl in The Silver Chair suggests that the White Witch and the Queen of Underland are of the same nature, but not the same person: “Long, long ago, at the very beginning, a White Witch came out of the North and bound our land in snow and ice for a hundred years. And we think this may be one of the same crew” (SC, 50). The fact that the Queen of Underland is killed by Prince Rilian (SC, 156–57) is further evidence that she is not the White Witch. According to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Aslan killed the White Witch in battle (144; “the Witch was dead”—145); in that case she could not be the Queen of Underland many hundreds of years later. According to The Magician’s Nephew, the White Witch, then known as Jadis, gained immortality by eating an apple from the tree in Aslan’s garden (144, 157); in that case, it could not be Jadis who is killed in The Silver Chair. 11. In the past few years, HarperCollins has published versions of the Chronicles with illustrations colorized by Pauline Baynes. The colored pictures are attractive, but coloring creates an effect quite different from the black and white originals, requiring the reader to exercise the imagination differently, perhaps less energetically. The same is true of watching the colorized version of a movie originally issued in black and white—color distorts the integrity of the original composition and visual artistry and does not represent an improvement over the original artistic conception. In 1998 HarperCollins issued a single-volume edition of the Chronicles. The book has many attractive features, including colorized pictures and the use of Pauline Baynes’s map as the cover. But the text is in double columns and the volume measures 8 3/4 inches wide and 11 1/4 inches high and weighs nearly five pounds. It is not an easy volume to hold or read, especially for children.

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In a holistic approach to the reading experience, the situation of a person’s initial encounter also affects how he or she experiences a book imaginatively and emotionally—such circumstances as age, location, and life situation at the time of reading exert an influence. And the memories of that initial experience have an enormous effect when a person rereads the book. A person can often remember exactly where and when he or she read a book before, and those earlier associations flavor the rereading experience, becoming an integral and important part of it. That is particularly true and important when the rereading is flooded with memories of the security of younger years and the warmth of home. These associations should not be dismissed as just an emotional overlay, separable from the actual book itself. As Lewis himself recognized, a book without a reader is only an object, like a rock or a vase: “It is we [as readers] who make the poetry,” not the poet.12 Current reading theory calls the experienced work the “real book” and regards it as more important than the text on the pages of the physical volume. A text becomes a book only as it is read—or heard. Texts can be read only by individuals, so every reading is private, intimately connected to the situation in which it occurs. The images, emotions, and associations experienced by each individual reader are unique, at least slightly different from those of other readers, and are not to be taken lightly. Many people hear the Chronicles read aloud, in school, or church, or the home, before they read the words themselves. Here too the conditions affect the experience, particularly if the books were first heard while sitting close to a loved parent or grandparent. The imaginative experience of hearing the books is significantly different from that of reading the books, especially if considerable time elapses between hearing them and reading them oneself. That was made clear to me by a student whose first memory of the Chronicles was from her parents reading them to her when she was seven and eight years old; she first read them for herself in her mid-twenties. She told me her memory of the world of Narnia (and the other lands in which the Chronicles take place) was of a very solid place, more solid actually than many real-life experiences. She speculated that this was because she was not the one controlling the experience: no reading ahead, or skipping pages, or speed-reading to get to the finale. The 12. Lewis, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy, 16.

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pace at which her imagination would travel through the stories, in memory through the years, was far slower than the pace at which she read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when she finally began reading the book herself. This too seems related to the strictly audience role she had when she heard the stories. She remembers the Chronicles as being magnificently long, unbearably suspenseful, and encompassing what seemed like lifetimes of events in the matter of a single chapter. Thinking back on it now, she feels this may relate to the freedom her imagination had to “run with” the images, characters, and events of the stories without being bogged down by written words on a page. And while reading the text has not destroyed or particularly altered the worlds she already held in her head, reading has made it harder to see from within that previously formed world. Although the text, whether experienced by hearing a book read aloud or by reading it oneself, is more than words, words are a crucial part of the text. And changes to the words affect the imaginative experience of the readers. In the case of the Chronicles, some textual changes have occurred. Because of union regulations in the United States, the type of the Chronicles had to be reset for the edition sold in the U.S. That meant Lewis had to read another set of proofs, several weeks or perhaps months after he finished reading proofs for the British edition. As he did so, he occasionally had second thoughts and made changes—usually minor ones, but at least one substantial revision. These changes do not appear in the 1994 HarperCollins edition, despite the fact that it is common practice in textual editing either to retain an author’s final revisions or at least to note such changes as variant readings. Paul Ford’s revised 1994 edition of Companion to Narnia fills the useful service of preserving and commenting on these alternate wordings.13 Some of the changes would have only slight and subtle effects on the reader. In chapter 1 of the original text of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as the Pevensie children think of animals they might see in the woods around the professor’s house, Edmund mentions foxes and Susan says rabbits. The American edition changes these to snakes and foxes, respectively (LWW, 3). Ford suggests, rightly I think, that Lewis’s afterthought better fits Edmund and Susan’s 13. Ford, Companion to Narnia, xli–xlii and 457.

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characters in this and later books and improves the imaginative experience of reading the books. “Snakes” conveys associations (including biblical ones) that suit the deceptive traitor Edmund is to become; and, while “rabbits” gives a warm, cuddly feel that ultimately doesn’t fit Susan, “foxes” suggests a wiliness that does fit and may also convey “a veiled reference to her desire for a high social life, riding to the hounds, and the like.”14 Two revisions in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe involve allusions to Scandinavian mythology. In the American editions Lewis changed the name of the captain of the witch’s secret police from Maugrim (meaning perhaps “savage jaws” or “ill will”) to Fenris, the great wolf of Scandinavian mythology who was spawned by Loki, god of strife and spirit of evil, and killed by the fearless Vidar, son of Odin.15 For readers who recognize the allusion, “Fenris” creates a much richer imaginative experience, carrying multiple ripples of meaning. Also, in chapter 13 of the British editions, the White Witch says that Deep Magic is written in letters as deep as a spear is long “on the fire-stones of the Secret Hill”; Ford thinks that Lewis “may have used the term to evoke in the imaginations of his readers pictures of annual druidical rites throughout the British Isles in which the old year’s fires were extinguished and the new fire was kindled at a sacred place, usually a low, round hill.” The associations are vague, but properly sinister. The American edition substitutes “on the trunk of the World Ash Tree” (LWW, 114), an allusion to Yggdrasil, the great tree of Scandinavian mythology, whose branches tower into the heavens, whose trunk upholds the earth, and whose three roots reach into the realm of the dead, the land of the giants, and the abode of the gods. For those recognizing the allusion, the tree reinforces the truth that Deep Magic, or Natural Law, is universal, embedded in the created universe from the dawn of time, and the foundation upon which social order rests. Opinion on whether this was a desirable change varies,16 but the later version, like the change to Fenris, offers the potential for a richer imaginative experience to readers aware of the mythic background. 14. Ibid., 164n. 15. Ibid., 189–90; see LWW, 47, 79, 107, 109. 16. On Fenris and the Secret Hill, see Ford, Companion, 366; on the World Ash Tree, see ibid., 447–48.

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More important than these is a change in the first chapter of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” where Lewis originally described Eustace as “far too stupid to make anything up himself.” In the American editions the corresponding line reads that he was “quite incapable of making anything up himself” (VDT, 5). Paul Ford suggests that Lewis may have felt he should tone the line down for American readers or was beginning to like Eustace better as he wrote about him.17 It is a line that should have been changed in any case: calling a character “stupid” in a children’s book is insensitive and unwise; it does not offer young readers a good behavioral model. Beyond that, and more importantly, “stupid”—as Ford says—is inaccurate; it does not fit Eustace’s character. Details throughout the chapter indicate Eustace has a high degree of intelligence, though he applies it in ways and to subjects for which Lewis did not have great respect. Still more important is a fairly extensive rewriting of the end of the twelfth chapter of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” that improves the imaginative experience considerably. As the Dawn Treader emerges from the waters surrounding the terrifying Dark Island, where dreams (not daydreams, but dreams) come true, and shoots out into the sunlight, the original British edition continues: “All at once everybody realised that there was nothing to be afraid of and never had been. They blinked their eyes and looked about them. . . . First one, and then another, began laughing.” Rynelf comments, “I reckon we’ve made pretty good fools of ourselves,” and a moment later, when they look back, the Dark Island and the darkness have vanished for ever. This version treats the episode itself as a dream, not as real. The effect is to diminish the seriousness of the adventure and of dreams themselves, which Lewis—who was bothered by bad dreams throughout his life—in all other cases regarded as very serious indeed. And this version treats Rynelf’s feeling as inconsequential, even as wrong, and risks conveying to children that their feelings of fear in the face of danger (or anxiety or grief) are equally inconsequential or wrong. The American version deletes the above passage and replaces it with: “And just as there are moments when simply to lie in bed and see the daylight pouring through your window and to hear the cheerful voice of an early postman or milkman down below and to 17. Ibid., 178n.

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realise that it was only a dream: it wasn’t real, is so heavenly that it was very nearly worth having the nightmare in order to have the joy of waking, so they all felt when they came out of the dark” (VDT, 157). This version preserves the nightmarish quality of the adventure, but by explicitly comparing it to a dream, retains the reality of the island and what they went through. In this version, the island did not vanish but “the hump of darkness grew smaller and smaller astern” (VDT, 158). The reader is much more deeply involved, imaginatively and emotionally, in this version. The reader cannot dismiss the island as unreal or as no longer existing: it is still there, and anyone who can get to Narnia still could get caught in it. More important, the inserted analogy, with its second-person pronouns, draws readers into the episode and evokes in them the same emotions the characters experience. This is no laughing matter, as the earlier version risks making it. The result is similar when Lord Rhoop asks Caspian to grant him a boon. The boon in the original British edition, “Never to bring me back there,” lacks the ring of authenticity. Of course they would not bring him back there; there is no need to ask that. The revised boon in the American version adds greatly to the power and fearfulness of the episode: “Never to ask me, nor to let any other ask me, what I have seen during my years on the Dark Island,” to which Caspian replies, “ ‘An easy boon, my Lord,’ . . . and added with a shudder, ‘Ask you: I should think not. I would give all my treasure not to hear it’ ” (VDT, 158). The new lines create what reader-response critics call a “gap,” which will be discussed further in the next chapter. What did Lord Rhoop see? His request not to be asked leads readers to begin imagining what he might have seen, to substitute their own nightmares for Lord Rhoop’s, and to shudder along with Caspian and agree that it was better not to be told. In revising this passage, then, Lewis recognized a flaw in its artistry and psychology and corrected it admirably. It is regrettable that Lewis did not include the revisions to this passage—and the other changes as well—in reprints of the British editions. It is even more regrettable that Lewis’s later revisions were not used in the uniform edition of 1994; because they were not, most readers henceforth will read and know only the earlier, less effective original wordings. Lewis adhered to an old tradition that viewed the imaginative reading experience as one which involves the whole personality. In

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An Experiment in Criticism he describes the experience of “literary readers” as follows: We entertain various imaginations, imagined feelings, and thoughts in an order, and at a tempo, prescribed by the poet. . . . This is less like looking at a vase than like . . . taking part in a choric dance invented by a good choreographer. There are many ingredients in our pleasure. . . . Looking back on the whole performance, we shall feel that we have been led through a pattern or arrangement of activities which our nature cried out for. (EinC, 133–34)

The imaginative experience of reading a book is affected in myriad ways and shaped by far more than just the words on the page. Books can be considered as tangible and appealing (or unappealing) objects, as objects to be collected and displayed, as objects to be respected and treated well, and as texts made up of illustrations in addition to words. In writing the Chronicles, besides wanting to entertain children, Lewis also wanted to move them toward being literary readers, toward being lifelong readers and lovers of books for whom reading is a holistic experience and who might come to experience at least some of the pleasure reading and books gave to Lewis throughout his life.

3




“It Does Not Matter Very Much” –or Does It? The “Correct” Order for Reading the Chronicles As chapter 1 has made clear, Lewis’s critical approach always included the reader, receiving and interacting with a text written by an author. Of these three elements in a literary transaction, Lewis was most concerned with readers and texts, least concerned with authors. Readers actualize the text on the page and thus are active participants in the reading process (“Books on a shelf are only potential literature,” he wrote in An Experiment in Criticism, 104). Texts too are crucial: without them there would be nothing for the reader to actualize. Partly because of his deep-seated rejection of subjectivism, discussed in chapter 1, Lewis held ultimately to the authority of the written text, quoting Matthew Arnold for support: “The important thing is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ ” (EinC, 119; similarly, 17, 19, 82, 120). Authors are necessary, of course, to bring texts into existence, but Lewis was more interested in historical context—the conventions of form and expectations of an age— than in authors’ statements about their intents; he even asserted that authors are not the best judges of their own works.1 Throughout An Experiment in Criticism and in earlier books and essays, Lewis held to 1. In an undated but late essay, “On Criticism,” he differentiates between intention and meaning (or effect) carefully and precisely: It is the author who intends; the book means. The author’s intention is that which, if it is realized, will in his eyes constitute success. If all or most readers . . . laugh at a passage, and he is pleased with this result, then his intention was comic. . . . The meaning of a book is the series or system of emotions, reflections, and attitudes produced by reading it. But of course this product differs with different readers. . . . Of a book’s meaning . . . its author is not necessarily the best, and is never a perfect, judge. One of his intentions usually was that it should have a certain meaning: he cannot be sure that it has. He cannot even be sure that the meaning he intended

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the autonomy and self-sufficiency of texts: it is the effect of the work itself, read carefully and closely with attentiveness to its context, that matters, not the effect the author supposedly intended it to have. In light of all this, it is ironic that recent editors of Lewis’s own work have used a particular interpretation of authorial intention to justify a renumbering of the Chronicles of Narnia. For those who were reading the Chronicles in the 1950s as each book appeared, one per year from 1950 to 1956, there was only one order in which to read and experience them—the order of publication. Most reprintings of the books in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s numbered them in that order: 1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: A Story for Children 2. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia 3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 4. The Silver Chair 5. The Horse and His Boy 6. The Magician’s Nephew 7. The Last Battle: A Story for Children.

So they were listed in the Geoffrey Bles and Bodley Head editions in Britain and the Macmillan editions in the United States once The Last Battle was completed, as well as in the later Collins clothbound it to have was in every way, or even at all, better than the meaning which readers find in it. (56–57) Note that both intent and meaning, here, are said to be dependent upon the effect the work has on the reader’s response. Writing to readers of the Junior Radio Times in 1956, he makes the same point about the unreliability of what an author says concerning his or her own works: “You must not believe all that authors tell you about how they wrote their books. This is not because they mean to tell lies. It is because a man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing it. . . . And afterwards, when the story is finished, he has forgotten a good deal of what writing it was like” (“Sometimes Fairy Stories,” 42). In a letter to Charles A. Brady, Lewis wrote, “A book’s not worth writing unless it suggests more than the author intended” (Letters, October 29, 1944). Lewis’s emphasis as a historical scholar was not on authorial intent but “what the work may be supposed to have meant in its own day”—consistent with his interest in the receptive imagination, not the authorial imagination (“De Audiendis Poetis,” 2). Bruce L. Edwards, Jr., holds that Lewis regarded intentionality as authoritative (A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy, 59–76); my reading of Lewis shows him treating the objective text, not subjective authorial intent, as authoritative.

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reprints in Britain, the Puffin paperback edition in Britain until the mid-1970s, and the Collier paperback edition in the United States until the mid-1980s. At the same time quiet but persistent voices began urging that they be renumbered in the order in which events occur in the stories (or nearly so: the events of The Horse and His Boy actually occur during, not after, those of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe): 1. The Magician’s Nephew 2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 3. The Horse and His Boy 4. Prince Caspian 5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 6. The Silver Chair 7. The Last Battle.

These voices have won out, at least to the extent that the uniform, worldwide edition of the Chronicles issued in 1994 is arranged in that order. People who purchase new copies of the Chronicles now may never become aware that The Magician’s Nephew was not always treated as Book 1, and that there is an alternative order for reading the series, one which produces quite different imaginative effects— specifically for the first reading of the series; the order for rereading does not matter much, once the strategies for initial reading have been encountered. This chapter will consider how the new ordering developed and compare the effects of the different orderings. The first time the stories were published with the new numbering was the set of “Fontana Lions” issued by Collins in 1980. Walter Hooper comments that “for the first time the books were given the order Lewis said they should be read in.”2 They were listed in that order several years earlier, opposite the title page of the Puffin paperback edition of Prince Caspian. The earliest copy with such a list that I have seen is a 1974 reprint, with this intriguing heading: “All seven stories of Narnia are published in Puffins, and the correct reading order is . . .” Other Puffin reprints of Prince Caspian, from the mid-1970s on, give this ordering, though without the explanatory statement. But what does “correct” mean here? Correct by what criteria? The 1994 uniform edition includes the following statement on 2. Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 453.

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the copyright page: “The HarperCollins editions of The Chronicles of Narnia have been renumbered in compliance with the original wishes of the author, C. S. Lewis.” Again, the wording is puzzling. Why “original wishes”? Does original mean from the time at which The Magician’s Nephew was completed? If so, why did Lewis not request the Bodley Head to include this renumbering in the new book, or in The Last Battle the following year, or have Geoffrey Bles change the order in later reprints of the other books? If it had been a matter of importance to Lewis, surely his publishers would have complied with his wishes, or included the renumbering in the paperback editions that appeared a few years later. Thus the strongest evidence that these were deeply held wishes of the author is missing. The renumbering presumably has grown out of a sincere respect for Lewis and a desire to follow his wishes. But the attempt to dictate a “correct” way to read the Chronicles reflects an inadequate understanding of the reading process and a regrettable reliance on “authorial intention,” an approach questioned by many literary scholars today. That approach assumes that the “correct” way to interpret a literary work is to find and follow what the author intended, the way the author said it should be read. Hooper, in C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, follows that approach when he calls the new ordering “the sequence in which Lewis meant for them to be read.”3 Literary scholars challenge authorial intent on two grounds. The first points out the difficulty of determining what an author intended. Often an author does not tell us what he or she intended; authorial intent in such cases is read into the work by arguing that the author must have intended this or that because of the structure or effect of the work. And even when authors do tell us what they intended, the question arises of whether they actually achieved what they intended, or really understood themselves what they achieved. The second asks if what the author intended makes any difference. What really matters is the effect of the work, which could fall short of or go far beyond what the author expected or sought to achieve. The unconscious dynamic of the writing process can lead a writer to achieve more than, or something different from, what he or she consciously set out to do. Lewis gave qualified approval to the chronological arrangement in a letter to a young boy, Laurence Krieg, dated April 23, 1957. 3. Ibid., 408.

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Laurence believed, after publication of The Magician’s Nephew, that it should be read first, but his mother believed the books should continue to be read in order of publication. Laurence wrote to Lewis to ask whether he or his mother was right. Lewis replied, “I think I agree with your order for reading the books more than with your mother’s. . . . [But] perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them.” Hooper reports that Lewis later reaffirmed his preference for the chronological sequence in comments to Hooper.4 Even if this letter and the comment to Hooper are serious expressions of Lewis’s intent, it is not wise to use them as a basis for limiting readers to one way of reading. Note that Lewis, despite expressing agreement with Laurence, does not say this is the correct order for reading them. When he says, “perhaps it does not matter very much,” he probably means that more than one order, or perhaps any order, is acceptable to him for reading the Chronicles. If, however, he is suggesting that the order doesn’t make any difference to the reading experience, then he is simply mistaken. The order of reading in that sense matters a great deal. Viewed in terms of the imaginative reading experience, the “new” arrangement may well be less desirable than the original one.5 The only reason for putting The Magician’s Nephew first is to have the reader encounter events in chronological order, the order in which they happened, and that, as every storyteller knows, is quite unimportant as a reason. Often the early events in a sequence have a greater impact or effect as a flashback, told after later events that provide background and establish perspective. Beginning a story in medias res is one of the oldest and most basic of narrative strategies, going back at least to the Iliad and the Odyssey, two of the earliest stories in the Western literary tradition. Lewis had used it before in Perelandra and would use it later in Till We Have Faces. In the Chronicles, the effect of Prince Caspian depends upon it. In chapter 1, the 4. Lewis, Letters to Children, 68. Walter Hooper, Past Watchful Dragons, 32. 5. Two days before he died, Lewis had a visit from Kaye Webb, editor of Puffin Books, which had at that point brought out paperback editions of three of the Chronicles—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Magician’s Nephew—and were soon to issue the other four. Webb reported that Lewis “promised to re-edit the books (connect the things that didn’t tie up)” (Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 307). There is no indication that this re-editing would include rearrangement of the books or the extensive revision that reordering should actually entail.

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four Pevensie children are whisked away from a train platform in our world to another world. They wonder if it might be Narnia, but everything looks unfamiliar. The children discover in chapter 2 that they are not only in Narnia but in the ruins of the castle Cair Paravel, where they had lived at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (the castle is in ruins because a thousand years have passed in Narnian time since they returned to our world). In chapter 3 they capture a Dwarf, who agrees to tell them what they need to know about events during those thousand years. Chapters 4–7 are a flashback containing the Dwarf’s story. Lewis carefully arranged the first three chapters so that the reader would share imaginatively what the children experience: the feelings of fear and uncertainty, the slowly growing awareness of where they are, the perplexity over why things have changed so much. He could have started the book with chapter 4, relating it from Caspian’s point of view, the way he did with Tirian in The Last Battle. Doing that, however, would have sacrificed the strategies through which he led readers into the story and got them involved in the action. So it is with the Chronicles as a whole. To read one of the other books before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sacrifices strategies that Lewis used to lead readers into the world of Narnia and to help them share imaginatively in the experiences of Lucy, and later the other children, as they discover what that world is like. Consider, for example, the careful use of details as Lucy enters Narnia for the first time. In an ordinary-seeming house in the country, Lucy steps into an ordinary-seeming wardrobe, to smell and feel the long fur coats in it. The vivid details enable the reader to share Lucy’s experience as she reaches ahead into the darkness of the wardrobe, hears a crunching underfoot, feels the cold wetness of the snow and the prickliness of the trees, and glimpses the light of the lamppost ahead of her. The reader shares her bewilderment and uncertainty about where she is and what she has gotten into, and her surprise as she hears footsteps and comes face to face with, not another human, but a creature which, though having the body of a man from the waist upwards, has legs shaped like a goat’s, with black hair, goat’s hooves, reddish skin, a short pointed beard and curly hair, two horns, and a tail. A key strategy in the book is use of what reader-response critics call “gaps.” All stories depend on gaps (details that need later to be

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clarified or questions that a reader wants answered, and immediately begins trying to answer by anticipating later events). The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe uses them very effectively. Its opening leads readers to ask, Who are these four children and the Old Professor? What are they like? What is the “something” that happened to them in the very large house far out in the country? The story, immediately or slowly as needed, begins filling those gaps. Notice that the story creates a gap by a reference to three servants, then quickly signals the reader that this is not an important gap: “(Their names were Ivy, Margaret and Betty, but they do not come into the story much)” (LWW, 1). The first mention of the name “Narnia” creates such a gap. Tumnus the Faun asks Lucy how she came into Narnia, and Lucy asks what the reader also wants to know: “Narnia? What’s that?” Tumnus replies, “This is the land of Narnia, . . . where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea” (LWW, 9). The reader will want and need to know more, of course, but for now he or she has been supplied the necessary basic information and given adequate orientation. The most important example of a gap in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when it is read first, is the buildup to the introduction of Aslan. The first reference to Aslan is by Mr. Beaver, when he meets the children in the woods: “They say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed.” These words create a gap for the Pevensie children and—presumably—for the reader: “None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different” (LWW, 54). In the long paragraph that follows, Lewis seeks directly and intentionally to help readers share imaginatively what the children experience: Perhaps it has happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning—either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in his inside. (LWW, 54)

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For the reader fully to participate imaginatively with this paragraph, to feel something mysterious jump in his or her inside, requires that it be the first book in the series to be read. The reader experiences the power of Aslan’s name but—like the Pevensie children—is left to wonder who and what this person is. The anticipation and eventual filling of that gap is one of the great pleasures of reading the story. The fact that other books were written later, including a book describing events prior to these, does not change the artistic strategy of this passage.6 The gap is partially filled, and the mysteriousness heightened, in the next chapter, when the children ask Mr. Beaver to tell them more about Aslan and he replies: “Aslan? . . . Why don’t you know? He’s the King. He’s the Lord of the whole wood, but not often here, you understand. Never in my time or my father’s time” (LWW, 63). The gap is filled still further, and Aslan made even more exciting and mysterious, when Lucy asks if Aslan is a man and Mr. Beaver replies: “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great Lion” (LWW, 64). The excitement builds as the Beavers tell the children that Aslan is good but not safe, that everyone’s knees knock when they appear before him, and that the children will meet him tomorrow. For readers who have read The Magician’s Nephew before encountering these passages, there are fewer, and smaller, gaps to fill, and as a result the story is less mysterious and less exciting. The imaginative experience of the opening sentences of The Magician’s Nephew is very different from that of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and has a different effect, depending on which book is read first: “This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. It is a very important story 6. Similarly, as Doris Myers has shown, the chronological order dampens the “leap of faith—the decision to trust beyond the evidence” which the books, in order of publication, require of readers as well as of the Pevensie children. “From a position of superior knowledge, the reader watches, but does not share, the children’s doubts and risks” (“Spenser’s Faerie Land as a Key to Narnia”). It “flattens” the stories, imposing a single reading on them, “whereas the Chronicles are in fact polysemic, having many layers of meaning.” Myers concludes, “As far as I know, there is no evidence that Lewis ever went back and read the books in chronological order to see if they held together that way as fiction.”

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because it shows how all the comings and goings between our own world and the land of Narnia first began” (MN, 1). For someone who has previously read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this invokes recognition and memory: “Narnia” immediately connects the reader with earlier imaginative experiences and awakens a flood of memories. The word will not be used again in The Magician’s Nephew until the title of chapter 9, but that doesn’t matter: knowing that this story will connect with the earlier one engages the reader imaginatively and emotionally and enables him or her to proceed in eager and watchful anticipation. For the reader who reads The Magician’s Nephew before other books in the series, the opening sentence creates not the kind of skillful, satisfying gaps found in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but vague and unsettling ones. The words “all the comings and goings” create the first gap in The Magician’s Nephew. The reader who reads this story first is left asking, What comings and goings? The question is never answered in this book, though the next to the last paragraph of the final chapter repeats the phrase and adds “which you can read of in other books.” It does not yield the imaginative satisfaction of a skillfully filled gap (like the Aslan gap in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe); it feels instead like the “bait” authors use to sell other books. The second gap is “the land of Narnia.” The reader has the clue that it must be separate from “our own world” and is left to wonder what and where this land is. But it too is not a satisfying gap (understandably, since Lewis was crafting this as a flashback, not a first book). The second paragraph shifts abruptly to a different story, about Polly, Digory, Uncle Andrew, London, and Charn, which is set up and told very effectively, with skillful creation and filling of gaps. Indications of what Narnia is do not appear until the final lines of chapter 9: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters” (MN, 103). Consider the difference in the imaginative experiencing of those words for those who read The Magician’s Nephew first, and those who have previously read one or more of the other Chronicles. If one reads this book first, the account of the creation of Narnia is a beautiful, powerful story, told in vivid detail. It draws the reader into the events and enables him or her to experience the excitement, emotions, mystery, and magic of what is occurring. For a lion to bring a new world into being and breathe life into it is something

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a reader will never forget. The imaginative experience of reading it as a reader’s first encounter with the world of Narnia is exciting and wonderful. However, it will be even more meaningful and powerful when such a reader returns to it and rereads it after reading the other books and learning more about that mysterious lion; the memories, emotions, and associations from other stories make the creation of Narnia much more significant to the reader than it can be on first reading. For those who read other books before reading The Magician’s Nephew, the delightful elements of surprise and recognition are added to that of deeper meaningfulness. Readers who had shared with Lucy the mysterious experience of encountering a lamppost unaccountably placed in the middle of a forest have the pleasure, upon seeing the lamppost grow in The Magician’s Nephew, of recognition: “Oh! That’s how the lamppost got there!” (For those who watch the birth of the lamppost before reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, there is no mystery when they encounter it with Lucy.) Likewise, readers who have already encountered the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe experience surprise and recognition in The Magician’s Nephew as they gradually figure out who Jadis is and realize the long-term significance of the events in Charn. Readers who first were introduced to Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe experience the thrill of recognition as the lion comes into view, and perhaps the pleasure of accurate anticipation if they guess that the voice is Aslan’s before he comes into view or before his name is mentioned. The fullest imaginative experiencing of The Magician’s Nephew comes through reading the book as a flashback, for that is the way Lewis thought of it as he wrote it and those are the narrative strategies he consciously or unconsciously built into it. Thus, there is no introduction to Aslan in The Magician’s Nephew, no explanation that he is the king of the wood or the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea; there was no need to explain— readers already knew all that from earlier books. Imaginative experience extends also to the religious dimension of the Chronicles. The religious motifs are embedded in image and story, which the reader experiences imaginatively, not (as in Mere Christianity or Miracles) in concept and logical argument. The full religious significance of the Chronicles depends on viewing them as a unified series and on reading them in order of publication. I have

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demonstrated elsewhere that the Chronicles, intentionally or unconsciously, echo and parallel Mere Christianity, which Lewis was revising for republication at the time he was writing the early Chronicles.7 The Chronicles, read in order of publication, develop a sequential presentation of Christian ideas similar to that in Mere Christianity. Book 1 of Mere Christianity demonstrates the need for salvation; Book 2 explains the plan of salvation; Book 3 deals with morality, explaining how Christians should live as individuals and as a church, a company of the faithful, in light of their salvation; and Book 4 clarifies theological issues that cause difficulties for Christians. The arrangement of the four books is deliberate. Their full effect depends on the order in which they are read: “It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk” (MC, 1.5). The discussion in Book 3 (“Christian Behaviour”), if read first, will not have the same meaning as it does when read after the sections on “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” and “What Christians Believe,” which emphasize that the moral teachings in Book 3 grow out of the premises about law, grace, and faith laid out in the earlier parts. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe lays imaginatively a theological foundation for the succeeding books, much as Book 1 of Mere Christianity lays a foundation for the other three parts. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins, as Mere Christianity does, by establishing the existence of moral law, or “Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time,” and the fact that Edmund has broken that law and thus is forfeit and needs to be rescued. As Aslan dies in Edmund’s place, the story images Book 2 of Mere Christianity: “Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of Time” (LWW, 127) represents the love and grace that saved Edmund from the penalty of the law. Other themes from Mere Christianity are reflected in succeeding Chronicles, including the theme of Christian morality in The Magician’s Nephew. When The Magician’s Nephew is read in the order of publication, the earlier books create a context for the theme of morality, just as Books 1 and 2 of Mere Christianity establish a context for Book 3. Earlier stories imaging law, faith, spiritual growth, and divine guidance and care 7. Schakel, Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia.

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provide a Christian basis for the moral instruction. Morality grows out of faith, not just out of a desire to “do better.” Christian meanings can come through the chronological arrangement, too, but in a less unified, less imaginatively and intellectually satisfying way than the sequence that flowed out of Lewis’s imagination as he wrote the stories.8 Imaginative experiencing of the Christian motifs is even more important when viewed from the perspective developed by Doris Myers in a fine essay on the Chronicles. Myers argues that “the seven books, read in order of original publication, describe the emotional climate of Christian commitment at various ages, from very young childhood to old age and death.” The Chronicles present, “in a form attractive to young and old alike, the whole scope of a Christian life according to the Anglican style of gradual growth rather than sudden conversion, of love of tradition, and of emphasis on codes of courtesy and ethical behavior.”9 This is not an allegorical way of reading the stories. It holds that the characters and events in and of themselves depict and convey religious feelings at different stages of life, not that the stories point outside themselves to parallel characters and events that add a “deeper” meaning to what one is reading. These stages of spiritual development according to the Anglican pattern can be experienced imaginatively only when the books are read in order of publication. The foundation in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the subsequent steps built upon it are lost when the series is rearranged according to internal chronological order. In one sense, then, as Lewis said, the order in which the Chronicles are read doesn’t really matter, but it unquestionably does make a difference—which he didn’t acknowledge, and perhaps didn’t recognize fully. The decision to renumber and rearrange the Chronicles in current editions may or may not be considered unfortunate. But it is definitely unfortunate the publishers did not indicate that a different arrangement existed in earlier versions, remains an alternative 8. Walter Hooper, who endorses the chronological order of reading, does not discuss interrelationships between the books, but deals with each one separately (C. S. Lewis, 408–19). Doris Myers holds, rightly I think, that the chronological order resists efforts to read the series as a connected whole (personal correspondence). 9. Myers, “Growing in Grace: The Anglican Spiritual Style in the Chronicles of Narnia,” 185, 202.

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order for reading the books, and is preferred by a number of Lewis scholars.10 Principles of textual editing, past and present, call for signaling textual variants so the reader can evaluate the difference the variants make and perhaps choose between the alternative readings. Failure to indicate variants, of wording within the texts and of the numbering of the books, has the regrettable effects of wiping out the past and imposing a single, “authoritative” reading upon the Chronicles. It is a decision that detracts from, not enhances, recognition and appreciation of the artistry and meaning of Lewis’s best-known books.

10. See Paul Ford, Companion to Narnia, xix–xx; Evan K. Gibson, C. S. Lewis, Spinner of Tales: A Guide to His Fiction, 194–95; Margaret Patterson Hannay, C. S. Lewis, 23–71; Colin Manlove, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Patterning of a Fantastic World, 30–31; Doris T. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, 227 n; Schakel, Reading with the Heart, 143–45.


4

“Narrative Nets” Lewis and the Appeal of Story The appeal of story fascinated Lewis. In the title of an address to a Merton College undergraduate literary society in the mid-1940s, he called it the “hidden element” in fiction.1 When he published a shortened form of the address in 1947, he changed the title to “On Stories,” probably to indicate that his essay was not on fiction in the sense of the novel, with its emphasis on realism, characterization, and symbol; it was on the romances, adventure stories, and fantasies that he loved so much but that had received little serious critical attention. Literary scholars in the twentieth century have shown more interest in the novel, with its greater “seriousness” and “relevance,” than in romance or fantasy writing, typically dismissing them as casual reading and “escapist” literature. Lewis, by exploring the nature and appeal of “Story,” made a unique and important contribution to literary theory, and one that greatly helps to understand his own literary works. The ideas about narrative put forward in “On Stories” clarify the nature and appeal of Lewis’s own stories, especially the Chronicles of Narnia.2 Lewis offers in his essay a caution about fairy tales that applies equally to his adult fantasies: not all readers will find their imaginative approach appealing. The point is not that children like fairy tales or fantasy and then outgrow such tastes when they become adults (though it can be “educated” out of them, or lost through imaginative starvation). Rather, some children and some adults like fairy tales (and romances), while some children and some adults do 1. The title of the Merton College address was “The Kappa Element in Fiction.” According to Walter Hooper, “Kappa” stood for lsvqupo—the ( “hidden element” (preface to Of Other Worlds, viii). 2. The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces are not discussed in this chapter or the next. The Great Divorce is a medieval dream vision, and Till We Have Faces is “a myth retold.” Neither is romance, fantasy, or fairy tale, the genres he collectively called “Story.”

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not. Some children and adults respond enthusiastically to a fantasy world and unrealistic happenings, but some resist them, preferring realistic settings, characters, and events in their fiction, or preferring expository writing over fiction. Within the Chronicles Lewis depicts such a reader. Eustace Clarence Scrubb in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” does not like fairy tales or romances—or imaginative literature generally. His parents and his education have made him prefer expository writing over fantasy (“as he was quite incapable of making anything up himself, he did not approve of that”—VDT, 5).3 He had avoided romances and fairy tales: “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but . . . Eustace had read only the wrong books” (VDT, 71). Eustace overcomes his dislike of fantasy by living literally what he refused to experience imaginatively: he becomes a dragon and is enabled to go beyond himself and the limited, materialistic, rationalistic world in which he had grown up. Lewis’s purpose in “On Stories” is not to convince people they should appreciate romance and fantasy—he only wants to make clear what he and others who like them do enjoy. If the result of such clarification is that readers become more open to imagination, the way Eustace did, so much the better. The imaginative appeal of story begins with suspense and excitement. Almost all romances and fairy tales include suspense and excitement, and for some readers that is their main appeal. The narrator in Out of the Silent Planet says, “The last thing Ransom wanted was an adventure” (OSP, chap. 1), but he is plunged into one—and that is how a reader must engage imaginatively, sharing Ransom’s anxiety about his unexpected space travels and his encounters with unknown species in an unknown world. The reader must feel the suspense of the narrator’s fear, in the opening chapter of Perelandra, as he pushes himself to continue toward Ransom’s cottage, though unseen, unimaginable beings oppose him. The reader then must experience the tension as Ransom on a different planet battles—first intellectually, then physically—a no-longer-human opponent. The reader must also become open to the overwhelming threat to human freedom, moral values, and spirituality posed by the increas3. See p. 37 above on the way Lewis changed this text from the version first published.

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ingly strange and powerful diabolical forces pervading the England of That Hideous Strength. A reader who cannot find excitement in the trilogy and enjoy the atmosphere and suspense of the stories is not likely to finish them. Suspense and excitement is unquestionably one level of appeal in the Chronicles of Narnia. Each story involves danger to the children, or to Narnia, or both, and uncertainty and anxiety over whether, and how, disaster will be averted. Will Peter, Susan, Lucy, and the Beavers be able to escape from the White Witch as she pursues them, and will the Pevensie children and the good creatures be able to defeat the Witch and the evil creatures in battle? Will the four children reach Prince Caspian in time, and can Peter win in hand-tohand combat against the older, more experienced King Miraz? Can Caspian, Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace escape from the slave traders? Can the ship survive the storm and escape from the Dark Island? Can Lucy cope with the Magician’s house and the Magician’s Book? Can Jill and Eustace escape from the House of Harfang, and can they, Puddleglum, and Rilian overcome the enchantments of the Green Witch? Can Aravis, Hwin, Shasta, and Bree reach Archenland in time to save it from the treacherous attack by Rabadash’s army? Suspense and excitement hold strong appeal in story, especially in one’s first reading of a tale. For Lewis, however, suspense and excitement are not the main appeal. He believes this is true for most people who love reading romances and fairy tales, especially for those who like to reread them. On a second or third reading, the suspense is gone—rereaders know what is going to happen; yet they still derive great pleasure from the account. “It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the ‘surprise’ is coming we can now fully relish [it].” So it is with children: “Children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words” (“OnS,” 103). And so it is with the Chronicles of Narnia. Children enjoy hearing again and again the suspenseful episodes of Aslan’s death and rebirth in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the attack of the sea serpent in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” and the escape from Tashbaan in The Horse and His Boy. Freed from the “shock of actual surprise,” they can attend better to the “intrinsic surprisingness” of the outcomes.

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Suspensefulness, as opposed to simple suspense, is achieved when the story conveys the appropriate “feeling” of uncertainty or danger. Lewis gets at the difference by contrasting the original film version of King Solomon’s Mines with the romance by Rider Haggard on which it is based. In the book, the heroes are entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of the land, awaiting death by starvation. The film substitutes a subterranean volcanic eruption and an earthquake. The latter has more action and perhaps “sheer excitement,” but it ruins the story for Lewis. “What I lose is the whole sense of the deathly (quite a different thing from simple danger of death)—the cold, the silence, and the surrounding faces of the ancient, the crowned and sceptred, dead. . . . The one lays a hushing spell on the imagination; the other excites a rapid flutter of the nerves” (“OnS,” 92).4 Such a “sense” of a particular suspense and danger characterizes some of the most memorable scenes of the Chronicles of Narnia and helps to account for their appeal, for children and adults. The visit of the Dawn Treader to the Dark Island is perhaps the best example. The danger and the fear the voyagers experience there is qualitatively different from the danger and fear of the storm, or of Lucy’s venturing into the Magician’s House. The Dark Island conveys not just physical danger (fear of being smashed and drowned, or caught and punished), but fear of darkness itself—inner darkness as well as external darkness, the darkness of the subconscious even more than the darkness of night or death: How long this voyage into the darkness lasted, nobody knew. Except for the creak of the rowlocks and the splash of the oars there was nothing to show that they were moving at all. Edmund, peering from the bows, could see nothing except the reflection of the lantern in the water before him. It looked a greasy sort of reflection, and the ripple made by their advancing prow appeared to be heavy, small and lifeless. As time went on everyone except the rowers began to shiver with cold. Suddenly, from somewhere—no one’s sense of direction was very clear by now—there came a cry, either of some inhuman voice or else a voice of one in such extremity of terror that he had almost lost his humanity. (VDT, 152) 4. In 1943 Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves, “Each of those fairy tale dangers has a different flavour, hasn’t it? I mean a dragon is quite a different feeling from a giant, and a witch from either” (TST, 499).

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Here is not just suspense and surprise that lose their impact after a first reading, but a sense of “darkness” (quite a different thing, to paraphrase Lewis, from simple fear of the dark). It lays a spell on the imagination that is re-experienced upon each rereading. For Lewis, then, a central appeal in story is the evocation of a “feel” or “sense” that enables one to experience danger and uncertainty. Similarly, when Polly and Digory wander into the Hall of Images in The Magician’s Nephew the episode creates a “sense of the deathly,” as Lewis puts it in the passage from “On Stories” quoted above, “the cold, the silence, and the surrounding faces of the ancient, the crowned and sceptred, dead.” One reason for the imaginative appeal of the Chronicles of Narnia is Lewis’s ability to inject such feel or sense of danger or the deathly into them. A distinctive “feel” or “sense” is important beyond the suspense level, however. Lewis, in “On Stories,” talks at length about a quality he calls “atmosphere,” a more inclusive “feel” or “sense” that gave him much of the pleasure he found in story. Its importance comes out as he explains what he did not enjoy about The Three Musketeers: “The total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book—save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather. When they cross to London there is no feeling that London differs from Paris” (“OnS,” 93; see also TST, 451). He deals with the same quality when he discusses science fiction: one variety of it (the kind Lewis liked best) concentrates on atmosphere, on describing the “feel” of a place, on showing what it might be like to live in a place or condition no human being has ever experienced.5 Those are the best parts of Lewis’s own science fiction books Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength is less attractive in part because it lacks them. The most imaginative parts of Out of the Silent Planet depict the atmosphere of what Ransom learns to call “the heavens” and the feel of what it might be like to travel through them (OSP, chap. 5) and describe Ransom’s everyday life on Malacandra: “The wonder of [being on it] smote him most strongly when he found himself, about three weeks after his arrival, actually going for a walk. A few weeks later he had his favourite walks, and his favourite foods” (OSP, chap. 11). Lewis was so successful in creating the vividly imaginative world of Perelandra, with its golden dome, 5. Lewis, “On Science Fiction,” 67–73.

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floating islands, and distinctive colors and smells, that he fell in love with it himself.6 In the Narnian Chronicles, too, the appeal of atmosphere probably exceeds the appeal of suspense. For Narnia to have atmosphere there must be a feeling, when the children cross over to it, that Narnia differs from England. When Lucy enters Narnia for the first time, the countryside looks like England (or perhaps the Carlingford Mountains of southern Ireland),7 and she sees a familiar-looking London lamppost. But this is not London or England, as becomes clear by the first inhabitant she meets: She heard a pitter patter of feet coming towards her. And soon after that a very strange person stepped out from among the trees into the light of the lamp-post. He was only a little taller than Lucy herself. . . . From the waist upwards he was like a man, but his legs were shaped like a goat’s (the hair on them was glossy black) and instead of feet he had goat’s hoofs. He also had a tail, but Lucy did not notice this at first. . . . He had a strange, but pleasant little face with a short pointed beard and curly hair, and out of the hair there stuck two horns, one on each side of his forehead. . . . He was a Faun. (LWW, 6)

He invites Lucy to his home for a thoroughly English tea, in an English-style drawing room (though in a cave), captured beautifully by Pauline Baynes’s illustrations. But the questions he asks (“Excuse me . . . but should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?” “You are in fact Human?”—LWW, 8), the books on his shelves (Men, Monks and Gamekeepers: A Study in Popular Legend and Is Man a Myth?—LWW, 11), and the stories he tells about the Nymphs who live in the wells and the Dryads who live in the trees, about the wild Red Dwarfs in deep mines and caverns, and about visits from old 6. Roger Lancelyn Green tells of walking with Lewis on a clear, starlit night, with Venus shining brightest of all: “ ‘Perelandra!’ said Lewis with such a passionate longing in his voice that he seemed for a moment to be Ransom himself looking back with infinite desire to an actual memory” (Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 171). 7. “If you want to plunge into . . . the very quiddity of some Narnian countryside, you must go to what Lewis considered the loveliest spot he had ever seen. It is in the Carlingford Mountains of southern Ireland” (Walter Hooper, quoted in Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S. Kilby, C. S. Lewis: Images of His World, 143).

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Silenus and even Bacchus himself, signal that Lucy has not found a previously undiscovered part of our world, but has moved entirely outside it—to a world in which our myths exist as realities and our realities become their myths.8 The distinctive atmosphere of Narnia is shaped by the blending of familiar things with unfamiliar, and by the placing of familiar things in an unfamiliar context. The technique is illustrated nicely as the four children together pass through the Wardrobe into Narnia for the first time: “Behind them were coats hanging on pegs, in front of them were snow-covered trees” (LWW, 44). One should not find trees in a wardrobe, or coats hanging in a forest, but there they are. The mixture of the familiar (European types of plants and animals, the customs and codes of Edwardian England—and its foods and language, for example) with the unfamiliar (animals who think and talk, mythical characters who actually exist, the lack of other humans, reports of a powerful but absent Emperor) helps readers, especially young readers, adapt to and accept that world imaginatively and engage with its atmosphere. That atmosphere, once established, is elaborated for its own sake. The abundant detail describing the Beavers’ home and the supper the children help prepare, for example, has no role in furthering their adventure. It is there to help convey what ordinary existence in Narnia is like—what it would be like to live there. That is one of the great appeals of the stories—the sort of thing that could induce a child to smash through the back of his parents’ wardrobe and hack away at the wall behind it, in an effort to get into Narnia himself.9 The atmosphere of Narnia depends also on its depiction as a uniquely Lewisian pastoral paradise, blending the ordinary and the 8. See Peter J. Schakel, Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia, 57–60. Similarly, Perelandra, chap. 4—”Were all the things which appeared as mythology on earth scattered through other worlds as realities?”; also Perelandra, chaps. 8, 11, and 16. 9. See the story told by Walter Hooper in the preface to Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land: “A few years ago I learned of a family here in Oxford who, one Sunday afternoon, finished reading their little boy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. . . . While the parents were having tea downstairs, such a terrible racket began upstairs they thought the house was falling in. They rushed up to find their son with a hatchet. He had smashed through the back of his parents’ wardrobe and was hacking away at the wall behind it” (14).

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impossible. Narnia is rural, a land of grassy slopes, heathery mountains, plashy glens, mossy caverns, and deep forests. It is unspoiled by the side effects of urbanization and industrialization: Lewis’s ideal world has no cities, factories, pollution, or poverty. But it takes for granted the availability of many familiar, useful things which require labor, manufacture, and trade. Mrs. Beaver owns a sewing machine: where is the factory where it was made? Where were the raw materials obtained? Where did she purchase it? Purchase it with what? One could ask the same questions regarding the “gum boots and oilskins and hatchets and pairs of shears and spades and trowels” along the walls of the Beavers’ home (LWW, 59). Mr. Beaver drinks beer with his supper: who brewed it? If he brewed it himself, who grew the hops from which it was brewed? The story presupposes factories, shops, farms, laborers, shopkeepers, and farmers: but they are invisible. It is as Lewis says of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: “Meals turn up; one does not even ask who cooked them” (“OnS,” 99).10 It all helps shape the atmosphere and imaginative appeal of Narnia, a place of quiet natural beauty where simple wants are filled without the messiness and unpleasantness that usually accompany their fulfillment. The atmosphere of Narnia, the feeling that it is different from our world, is further established by the handling of time. That is a key imaginative aspect of the adventure in the first book: for Lucy to return from spending hours and hours in Narnia and find that no time has elapsed in our world reinforces the strangeness and separation of that world from ours. It is even stranger for the Pevensie children when, after many years as Kings and Queens in Narnia, they return “the same day and the same hour of the day on which they had all gone into the wardrobe to hide” (LWW, 153). The passage of time also contributes to atmosphere in Prince Caspian as the children 10. Having meals “turn up,” the way they do for children, and other needs taken care of without explanation occurs more in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe than in the later Chronicles, Doris Myers believes, and this contributes toward creating in the first book a tone of young childhood (personal correspondence). Poet Ruth Pitter, a friend of Lewis’s, stumped Lewis when she catechized him on how the Beavers could have put on such a splendid lunch for the children in view of the long winter which made it impossible to grow the things they served (quoted in Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 721–22; a briefer version of the catechizing appears in Pitter, “Poet to Poet,” in Stephen Schofield, ed., In Search of C. S. Lewis, 113).

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are taken to an island that seems strange but familiar and discover they are in the castle of Cair Paravel a thousand years after they left it a year before. Their sense of discovery and nostalgia epitomizes a key imaginative appeal of the stories for readers: what happens is strange and new, but familiar and comfortable. It reminds adult readers of childhood experiences, of an era when life was less complicated and uncertain than it is now; and it reminds young readers of the previous book and creates a sense of how they already look back with longing to events and places they experienced before. At the center of the atmosphere of Narnia is the blending of childhood and adult experiences, established by the use of talking animals and of children. The effect again is similar to that of The Wind in the Willows: “The life of all the characters is that of children for whom everything is provided and who take everything for granted. But in other ways it is the life of adults. They go where they like and do what they please, they arrange their own lives” (“OnS,” 100). Lewis’s animal characters, like Grahame’s, are supposed to be adults but seem in many respects like children. Humanized animals, even old ones, invariably do not seem to be as old as human equivalents would be—perhaps because the life spans of animals in our world are so much shorter than those of humans: an old dog may have lived about as many years as some of the children in a family. Although Mr. and Mrs. Beaver in some respects have the feel of grandparents, they convey also the aura of children, of children fortunate enough to have potatoes and tea and hams and marmalade in the larder, without wondering how they get there. Human adults (except for Professor Kirke, Frank and Helen, King Lune, and the later kings of Narnia), when they appear, are usually the enemy. Children and animals achieve victories over evil or misguided adults, notably without the help of parents: parents are absent, doing war work or visiting America, or they are invisible— referred to but not appearing in the action. In Narnia children and animals are independent and self-sufficient, adult-like without having passed into the distant and undesirable state of adulthood. Becoming absorbed in the atmosphere of the Narnian world—with its fascinating mixture of England and other land, paradise and imperfection, animal and human, adult and childlike—being enabled to live imaginatively in that world for as long as the book lasts, is one of the powerful appeals of Lewis’s stories.

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The Chronicles appeal to readers also because they satisfy an imaginative impulse as old as the human race, the urge to “visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply.”11 The appeal is that of the mythopoeic, the making of stories involving the marvelous or supernatural. Myths are imaginative stories—that is, they are nonrational, nonintellectual (not irrational or anti-intellectual); they are explorations of matters beyond and above everyday life, concerning origins, endings, aspirations, purpose, and meaning. They open huge vistas, plumb depths of the emotions and the spirit, in ways realistic fiction cannot; but they are couched in simple stories children can enjoy and respond to. The sheer imaginativeness of myth, like that of poetry, adds to life, creates sensations we never had before, and enlarges our conception of possible experience. Myths deal with basic issues of existence, the kind children constantly ask questions about. Children ask: “Where did I come from?” “Why does the wind blow?” “How do airplanes fly?” Parents often respond with details about sperm and eggs, high and low pressure systems, velocity, vacuum, and lift—and by purchasing encyclopedias; and children can appreciate and respond to the wonder and beauty of nature and scientific understanding of it. But such responses may, at times, be missing the point, giving “cause and effect” information where imaginative understanding is sought. We think children are seeking answers science can give, when what they really crave is a perspective only story can supply. Here, perhaps, is the most important reason the Chronicles of Narnia appeal to children: the mythopoeic dimension. In the Chronicles, as myths, children find not answers to the questions they ask, but responses to the questions they did not know how to ask. And for adults Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra function similarly, arousing and satisfying an appetite for the mythopoeic. To read the Chronicles of Narnia is to be carried by myth to a new range of experience and to have one’s outlook dramatically enlarged. It is to watch a world coming into existence: The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just 11. Lewis, “On Science Fiction,” 68.

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as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose. Digory had never seen such a sun. . . . You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. . . . The earth was of many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else. It was a Lion. Huge, shaggy, and bright it stood facing the risen sun. . . . . . . As [the Lion] walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains. . . . . . . A little way off, along the river bank, willows were growing. On the other side tangles of flowering currant, lilac, wild rose, and rhododendron closed them in. . . . . . . With an unspeakable thrill, [Polly] felt quite certain that all the things were coming (as she said) “out of the Lion’s head.” When you listened to his song you heard the things he was making up: when you looked round you, you saw them. (MN, 90, 92, 94–95)

Children frequently ask “How did the world begin?” as if they desire a scientific account, because they do not know how to ask the deeper question, “What is behind it all?” Lewis, like the ancient writers, recognizes that the deepest questions are dealt with through story. Lewis’s story supplies the broader perspective children—and adults—actually are seeking. It invites readers to look at the world not as a thing composed of analyzable substances and organisms, but as a being, to which we are intimately, inextricably related. Myth shows that science does not have all the questions, let alone all the answers, and not the most important ones. In The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” Eustace raises the kind of issue modern western culture focuses on, but he is given a reply that thrusts him into a larger, higher mode of conception. He is talking to an ordinary-looking person who turns out to be a star, “at rest” or on a rest-and-recuperation leave. Eustace expresses surprise at a star who looks like this: “In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” (VDT, 175)

The creation story in The Magician’s Nephew is not concerned with what the world is made of, or the physical processes by which it came into being, but with what kind of thing that world is and what

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(or Who) is behind it. It does not give answers but “an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region” (“OnS,” 101). To read the Chronicles is also to watch a world coming to an end: Soon Tirian found that he was looking at a world of bare rock and earth. You could hardly believe that anything had ever lived there. . . . . . . The sea was rising. . . . You could see all the rivers getting wider and the lakes getting larger, and separate lakes joining into one, and valleys turning into new lakes, and hills turning into islands, and then those islands vanishing. . . . . . . At last the sun came up. . . . It was three times—twenty times— as big as it ought to be, and very dark red. . . . Then the Moon came up, quite in her wrong position, very close to the sun, and she also looked red. And at the sight of her the sun began shooting out great flames, like whiskers or snakes of crimson fire, towards her. . . . And the two ran together and became one huge ball like a burning coal. Great lumps of fire came dropping out of it into the sea and clouds of steam rose up. . . . The giant . . . stretched out one arm . . . took the Sun and squeezed it in his hand as you would squeeze an orange. And instantly there was total blackness. (LB, 147–49)

The Last Battle does not (like the best-selling Left Behind and its sequels) offer a “realistic” account of how events of the end times will take place.12 Its emphasis is on the broader and deeper issue: that worlds do end. The use of myth and imaginative detail (imaginatio) force cultural and physical existence into a wider perspective that exposes their temporality and fragility. Lewis moves next to the further question, which also is best explored through story: is there anything beyond the world’s end? The Last Battle goes on to offer a vision of a world beyond the end of the world: So all of them passed in through the golden gates, into the delicious smell that blew towards them out of that garden and into the cool 12. This series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins describes the premillennialist Christian interpretation of the end times (the “Rapture,” in which all Christians are snatched up to heaven, and the “Tribulation,” seven years in which an Anti-Christ is allowed to disseminate evil throughout the world, before Christ returns to defeat the Anti-Christ and establish the Millennium— a thousand-year reign of peace on earth). The series began with Left Behind (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1995) and has been followed by (at last count) eight sequels.

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mixture of sunlight and shadow under the trees, walking on springy turf that was all dotted with white flowers. The very first thing which struck everyone was that the place was far larger than it had seemed from outside. . . . It was not really a garden at all but a whole world, with its own rivers and woods and sea and mountains. (LB, 169–70)

Lewis’s myth asserts that there is an existence beyond the physical world many of us hold on to and that such further existence is more significant and meaningful than the present one. Jewel the Unicorn conveys that for Lewis when he cries, “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now” (LB, 162). The New Narnia, as the children go further up and further into it, should not spur speculation about what Heaven will be like— this, like The Great Divorce, “is a fantasy. . . . The transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us” (GD, 9; preface). In theology as in science, myth supplies not answers but experience of a larger existence than we can know cognitively. Such an experience touches depths the intellect cannot reach and conveys, to children and adults alike, the sense that this is not just true, but Truth. To read the Chronicles is, finally, to encounter Someone immensely greater and higher than ordinary mortals. Myth regularly deals with heroes and supernatural beings: that, Lewis believes, is part of its powerful attraction to human beings, whose natures need to have others above them to look up to and who crave having figures that inspire them. “There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality,” Lewis asserts. “Under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive.”13 Lewis’s inclusion of kings and queens in Narnia was deliberate and purposeful: A man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be “debunked”; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet 13. Lewis, “Equality,” 18, 19.

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Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.14

To Lewis a hierarchical order is not confining and restrictive: to know one’s place and to be aware of what stretches above is freeing and uplifting, drawing one’s attitudes and goals upward, not letting them slide horizontally into mediocrity and sameness. More important even than human kings and queens is Aslan, who, as the Narnian embodiment of Christ and the manifestation of God, shows the greatness and grandeur of the divine. An emphasis on the majesty and exaltedness of God was basic to all of Lewis’s Christian writings. It was in part a response to a need: “I have stressed the transcendence of God more than His immanence. I thought, and think, that the present situation demands this.”15 Lewis saw a tendency, echoing the pervasive search for “equality,” to bring God to our level, to treat God with familiarity, as a Big Daddy in the Sky. Lewis attempted in his expository writings and his stories to convey the sense of awe and mystery he thought was essential to a proper sense of self and relation to the Other. That Aslan is a lion, therefore, is no coincidence. Lewis claimed that the assignment of animal figures in such books as The Wind in the Willows is never accidental: “Does anyone believe that Kenneth Grahame made an arbitrary choice when he gave his principal character the form of a toad, or that a stag, a pigeon, a lion would have done as well?” (“OnS,” 99). So it is with Lewis’s principal character: the situation required a lion. “ ‘Aslan a man!’ said Mr. Beaver sternly. ‘Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great Lion’ ” (LWW, 64). There would be biblical support for depicting Aslan as a lamb—and he does appear briefly in that form in the last chapter of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” To make that his principal form, however, would limit him to qualities of meekness and vulnerability, while myth and Lewis’s theology required the awesome. Lewis, in fact, wants both. 14. Ibid., 20. 15. Lewis, “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger,” 181.

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Aslan, paradoxically, is meek and vulnerable as well as fearsome and “not . . . a tame lion” (LB, 15; see also LWW, 149), paradoxical because these oppositions do not fit the popular image of the divine. The doctrine of kenosis reveals an all-powerful God who is also a self-emptying and suffering God: power is held in check by volition. Resolving that paradox, accepting the mystery of those seeming opposites, can be accomplished only through the imagination, which can accept the counterrational and appreciate its immensity and beauty. Although young readers do not understand all of these implications, part of the imaginative appeal of the Chronicles is Aslan in his rich complexity of forms and moods—from playful, kitten-like romps to fierce, angry attacks on evil. As Lucy says, when Aslan tells her in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” that she will never come back to Narnia: “It isn’t Narnia, you know. . . . It’s you” (VDT, 209). In Miracles and Mere Christianity Lewis offers arguments to prove the existence of God. In Narnia there is no argument: through story and imagination the reader experiences God in a way that renders proof unnecessary.16 Lewis quoted his friend and former pupil Roger Lancelyn Green as once saying that the reading of Rider Haggard romances was to many people a “sort of religious experience” (“OnS,” 101). Lewis agreed, but qualified the statement: “It would have been safer to say that such people had first met in Haggard’s romances elements which they would meet again in religious experience if they ever came to have any” (“OnS,” 102). That is, myth and the kind of religious experience Lewis has in mind create a powerful imaginative and emotional appeal—the kind Lewis experienced through Joy, as described above in chapter 1—a sense of wonder and longing that can be satisfied only by something beyond the realm of this world. When allowed to work as story, the Chronicles can have just the effect Lewis granted to Haggard’s stories: readers do encounter imaginatively and emotionally elements they have met, or may later meet, in religious experience. Some readers, when they encounter such elements, try to confine them to the Christian rather than the reli16. Compare this sentence from The Personal Heresy: A Controversy: “We abstract to inquire whether God exists: Dante shows you what it would be like if He did” (110).

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gious. They seek biblical equivalents to every character and detail.17 To do so, however, violates the stories as examples of Story: that is, as fiction intended to appeal to and work on readers’ imaginations. To concentrate on “symbolic meanings” and parallels to things outside the story overintellectualizes the story instead of responding to it with the imagination; it can work only by suppressing details and distinctions that are an integral part of the story.18 It also limits and lowers Lewis’s mythic achievement. To have captured— through myths about beginnings, endings, other worlds, and divine beings—impulses that lie behind all religion is more valuable than to have created biblical parallels. For children and adults who, unlike the predragonized Eustace, are open to fairy tale, romance, and myth, and are willing to engage with them imaginatively, the Chronicles of Narnia appeal in various ways, at various levels: the suspense and suspensefulness in the narratives, the “atmosphere” of the Narnian world, and the mythic dimensions of the stories. They appeal also because children realize that, fantasy and “other-worldly” though they may be, they are fundamentally like life. Lewis concludes “On Stories” by suggesting that the tension in every story between the vertical movement of the narrative and the horizontal stasis of such qualities as atmosphere and mythopoeic resonance constitutes “its chief resemblance to life”: “In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied” (“OnS,” 105). Children—like adults—try to make friendship, happiness, or success permanent, something they can hold on to. But such states prove ephemeral and elude one’s grasp: they are experienced only momentarily, then slip into memory. So it is with Narnia: we want the story to last, the joy of being in Narnia to be permanent; but the 17. For example: “Peter deserves the role of the Apostle Paul. . . . Lucy is much like John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. . . . For a long time, [Edmund] seems to be Judas. . . . But he does come round in the end, rather in the fashion of the Apostle Peter” (Paul A. Karkainen, Narnia Explored, 15–16). Not only does Karkainen’s approach oversimplify the books and reduce their imaginative power, but the parallels he established are unconvincing: the closer parallels would be the high king Peter to the Apostle Peter and Eustace, with his radical conversion and being a latecomer to the inner circle, to the Apostle Paul. 18. See a fine article by Charles Huttar, “The Heresy of Allegorizing Narnia: A Rejoinder.” Also, Schakel, Reading with the Heart, 3–5.

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book ends and we must, like the children in the books, return to our own world. The elusive “bird” we tried to catch in our “net” of passing moments escaped—as it always will in life. But as we read the Chronicles the bird “was at least entangled in the net for several chapters. We saw it close and enjoyed the plumage” (“OnS,” 105). And until one passes to another world where such states are permanent, that is much, and must be enough.

5




“He Looks As Though He’d Make It Come Out All Right” Lewis and His Storytellers Lewis’s interest in story—romance, adventure, and fantasy— rather than in realistic fiction has a further bearing on his own writing. All of his stories except two, The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces, were written as third-person accounts with an obtrusive narrator. That is, he did not attempt, like Henry James and his followers, to disguise the narration and make the plot seem like reality instead of story. On the contrary, for Lewis narratives are of value because they are imaginative stories, works of art, and he called attention to the narrators who relate their own stories in rather distinctive ways: unsophisticated ways in his adult fiction, but very intriguing and effective ways in the Chronicles of Narnia, ways related directly to the objectivism discussed above in his literary criticism. Lewis’s first book-length story for adults, Out of the Silent Planet, is told in a conventional third-person mode, limited to Ransom’s perspective, until chapter 22, when the storyteller (named “Lewis”) addresses the reader in the first person and begins to participate in the action as a character. Nothing anticipates the switch from third to first person or Lewis’s insertion of his own persona into the story. The “I” suddenly appears in the opening sentence of the twentysecond chapter: “At this point, if I were guided by purely literary considerations, my story would end.” The line is ironic, of course, because the last chapter, and the switch to first person, are guided by purely literary considerations: the Lewis who disparages realistic fiction adds an unnecessary chapter and postscript to give his adventure story a greater sense of realism.1 He develops himself into a character in the story, an Oxford academic, apparently, working on 1. I regard the inclusion of chapter 22 and the Postscript as an artistic flaw, though useful for enhancing realism and setting up the later stories. “A pint of

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twelfth-century Platonists, who writes Dr. Ransom asking for help with a scholarly crux. “Lewis” is invited to spend a weekend with Ransom, listens to his story, and joins forces with Ransom, to the extent of writing up the adventure in the form of fiction. To counter “Lewis’s” fear that the fictionalized account would not be accepted as true, Ransom replies that there would be “indications enough in the narrative” for readers to believe in its reality. And, ironically again, Ransom was right: Lewis received letters from readers inquiring if this was a true story.2 There are, in fact, multiple ironies here. Lewis’s decision to start as a fiction writer with a conventional third-person approach may have been a result of his limitations as a fiction writer. But it was also in part a matter of control, a reflection of his need for objectivity, which we have seen in his literary criticism and theology as well. A reliable third-person narrator provides a voice of authority in the story, an objective “reality” one can trust. Despite Lewis’s interest in readers, he does not leave events solely to the interpretation of the reader. The decision to insert himself as narrator takes the authoritativeness of the narrative voice a step further. In the opening two chapters of Perelandra, the character “Lewis” is not just narrator, but has a major part in the action. Summoned by Ransom, “Lewis” provides a first-person account of his journey to Ransom’s cottage, an inside view of the terrors and obstacles he encountered—placed in his way, he learns later, by the Dark Lord, the Oyarsa of Earth, to prevent his arrival. After helping Ransom into the coffin that carries him to Venus, “Lewis” returns to Oxford. About a year later he is directed to go to Ransom’s cottage with a physician, Humphrey (modeled on Lewis’s real-life friend and physician, Robert E. Havard); they are to provide assistance to Ransom when he arrives home. After helping Ransom settle in, “Lewis” assumes the role of traditional narrator: “To that landing bitter, please” would have been the perfect ending to the story. Jared C. Lobdell, without justifying the ending, accounts for it as influenced by the tradition of the eighteenth-century novel: “The Ransom Stories and Their Eighteenth-Century Ancestry,” 219. 2. “Thanks for your letter. The day before I got a letter from someone else asking me if the ‘Silent Planet’ was a true story. It’s not the first I’ve had. So I’m beginning to think that some people . . . just don’t understand what fiction is” (Letters, February 2, 1955; similarly, August 16, 1960).

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[on Venus], as Ransom narrated it to me, I will now proceed” (Per, chap. 3). For the rest of that chapter, the narrator remains obtrusive: “I take it he was now in the outer layer of the Perelandrian atmosphere”; he even addresses readers directly: “You must not lose sight of the fact that his whole life on Venus up till now had lasted less than five minutes.” Although the remainder of the book is given as straight third-person narration from Ransom’s perspective, we are aware throughout—because of the way it is set up and the occasional first-person sentences as reminders—that the “voice” of the narrator is “Lewis’s” voice (in Out of the Silent Planet we are aware of that voice only upon rereading). The handling of the opening chapters establishes that voice and thus adds to the credibility of the narrator: because Lewis, as author and character, seems trustworthy, the story has reliability. “Lewis” again appears as storyteller in That Hideous Strength, but only in two passages. In chapter 1, section 2, the narrator says, “Though I am Oxford bred and very fond of Cambridge, I think that Edgestow is more beautiful than either.” And chapter 1, section 3 is a three-page narrative in which the storyteller recalls his only visit to Bracton College, describing what he saw and thought about as he walked through the college and went out to see Merlin’s Well. The rest of the story is told from a conventional third-person omniscient point of view, with the perspective alternating between Mark and Jane (though in one passage the perspective is that of a bear, Mr. Bultitude—16.2). Those two passages are sufficient, especially for someone who has read Perelandra, to establish the approach as a narrated story and to gain authoritativeness through the “objective” presence of the author as both narrator of the story and participant in it. The narrative approach in the Ransom trilogy is unusual, but straightforward. There is little subtlety or sophistication. The approach in the Chronicles of Narnia seems much the same initially—a first-person narrator who resembles the author and who is present in some sense as a character in the stories. However, a closer look reveals that the approach is handled with much more skill and subtlety than in the adult books. It serves not just as a means of adding objectivity to the stories, but as a way to infuse the stories with a distinctive and appealing “voice.” The aggressive and unpleasantly

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avuncular manner Lewis often showed as a conversationalist3 is replaced by that of a genial, likeable storyteller. Lewis’s ability to achieve and convey an attractive narrative approach and an appealing voice in the Chronicles of Narnia is one key to their success. The methods by which he did so are worth careful examination. From the opening lines of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, “Once there were . . .” and “This story is about . . . ,” the reader knows he or she is reading a narrative. It is not clear yet whether the events being described are an invented story or an account of things that actually happened. But it is clear that this is not real life unfolding without an interpretive intermediary, the impression nineteenth-century novelist Henry James sought to create in his realistic novels. Here events are being revealed by a speaker who refers to himself in the first person: “One of his hands, as I have said, held the umbrella” (LWW, 6). Thus the unfolding of the story is under the control of someone who is relating the events, who follows one strand, then returns to another: “And now of course you want to know what had happened to Edmund” (71); “Now we must go back to Mr. and Mrs. Beaver and the three other children” (81). The narrator may not be able to control events, but he can control the way the events are related. The events may at times be scary, but if the narrator seems trustworthy, the reader can have confidence things will turn out satisfactorily.4 The Chronicles succeed as stories in part because of the way Lewis is able, like the great eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding, to 3. See, for example, Simon Barrington-Ward, “C. S. Lewis Moves to Magdalene College, Cambridge,” 23–24. 4. Barbara Reynolds relates the following encounter: On [one] occasion, as I opened my front door, [Lewis] happened to be passing by. With me was my six-year-old daughter, to whom I had just then been reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A tender-minded child, she was very anxious about Edmund and had asked me to go out for a walk as she was finding the story frightening. Lewis stopped to talk with me and I told him what we had been doing. He was most affable. He wore a shabby grey-green overcoat, a battered felt hat, and he carried a knobbly walking stick. His large face was ruddy and cheerful, like a countryman’s. No-one would have taken him for an academic. When he moved on, courteously raising his hat, I said to my daughter, who had looked at him intently and in silence all through the brief encounter, “There! that is the very man who wrote the book we’ve just been reading.” She paused

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convert that narrator into a storyteller, to make readers forget they are reading and feel instead they are listening. This effect is reinforced, of course, when children hear the stories before they read them and they listen to the narrator being re-created orally. The storyteller, in Fielding and in the Chronicles, comes to life as a character, perhaps the most important character in the story. And in the Chronicles, young readers, in addition to the imaginative experience of listening to the story, have the sense of interacting with, even at times of replying to, the storyteller. The narrator does not emerge as a character in the first four chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The narrative simply describes events, often through dialogue—chapter 2 is almost entirely dialogue, with little intervention by the narrator. One doesn’t even have a clear sense, at this point, of the narrator’s age: it could be an older child retelling the story to a younger one. Events are related objectively, without much comment or interpretation. Even the interjections about not closing closet doors (“leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe”—LWW, 5) are presented simply as statements of common knowledge, not condescending advice or warnings. Despite the presence of a first-person narrator, the narrative approach is generally third person, as in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength earlier, with the perspective usually limited to the viewpoint of one character. A young reader becomes involved imaginatively through identification with the young characters, the intriguing events, and the narrative techniques discussed above in chapter 4. The reader is listening to a story told by a skillful but impersonal narrator; no clear personality emerges from behind the narrative voice. It is, after all, essential to establish the characters, setting, and events firmly; a storyteller won’t be listened to unless he has a good story to tell, one that can stand on its own. For the most part, the Chronicles are related from the perspective of one of the girls, an intriguing choice for an author generally more comfortable around men than women. The perspective is Lucy’s for

and then said thoughtfully, “Well, he looks as though he’d make it come out all right.” (“Memories of C. S. Lewis in Cambridge,” 380–81) Lewis’s storyteller clearly projects the character and values of the author.

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most of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as well as Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” and Jill’s in much of The Silver Chair and The Last Battle. That choice may reflect Lewis’s relation to Lucy Barfield, to whom he dedicated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and whom he may have visualized as his initial reader while writing the first book. Edmund’s perspective is used when he is separated from the other children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as in parts of chapters 3, 4, and 13 and all of chapters 9 and 11; Eustace’s perspective is used in much of chapters 5–7 of the “Dawn Treader,” as we read his diary, follow his adventures as a dragon, and hear about how he was undragoned. Lewis does not attempt to hold rigidly—or puristically—to a single perspective: a clause is given from Mrs. Beaver’s perspective (LWW, 113) and even a paragraph from Governor Gumpas’s (VDT, 47). A fascinating passage in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” uses Eustace’s perspective from inside the dragonskin, as he slowly figures out he is not with a dragon but he is a dragon (VDT, 73–75). And a particularly interesting use of perspective occurs in chapter 15 of The Silver Chair, as Jill emerges from the underworld and the perspective switches from the others below, to Jill above, and back to the others below (SC, 183–84, 185–88, 189). The storyteller, who has referred to himself only once in passing in the first four chapters, steps forward in chapter 5 and alters his own role, beginning to evince a personality: “And now we come to one of the nastiest things in this story” (LWW, 35). The use of “we” gives substance and identity to the storyteller. The narrative is no longer impersonal and objective: a person is telling this story and commenting on the events. The statement, with its evaluative comment, is the kind an adult is more likely to make than a young person. The “we,” at the same time, draws the reader into the tale at a new level: we come to this together, the grown-up storyteller and the younger listener. That moment of intimacy is reinforced a paragraph later: “Edmund gave a very superior look as if he were far older than Lucy (there was really only a year’s difference)” (LWW, 36). The storyteller interjects an observation that on the one hand quietly reinforces his authority as narrator (he is privy to more information than what could just be observed), and on the other establishes a bond with the young reader, by uttering exactly the kind of put-down statement the reader would have said and hopes will

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be said. What Lewis says of an author is true also of his storyteller: he is not a parent, or even an uncle—“He is a freeman and an equal, like the postman, the butcher, and the dog next door.”5 The personality of the storyteller develops further as he repeatedly indicates that he lacks certainty about a detail. “In fact I really think [Edmund] might have given up the whole plan . . .”; “How long this really lasted I don’t know”; “I think the same idea had occurred to the leopards themselves”; “It was then that someone (Tumnus, I think) first said . . .”; and “How Aslan provided food for them all I don’t know” (LWW, 73, 76, 113, 140, 147). This is not an omniscient narrator. The storyteller seems, rather, to have obtained his information from the characters who were there (thus the narrative approach must be limited to their perspectives). One passage indicates this directly: Father Christmas “brought out (I suppose from the big bag at his back, but nobody quite saw him do it) a large tray” (LWW, 88). He cannot speak authoritatively, here, because he can tell the reader only what one of the Pevensie children observed or heard. The flashback in which Trumpkin the Dwarf fills in the background to the main events in Prince Caspian illustrates the narrative approach of the Chronicles as a whole: “So the Dwarf settled down and told his tale. I shall not give it to you in his words, putting in all the children’s questions and interruptions, because it would take too long and be confusing, and, even so, it would leave out some points that the children only heard later. But the gist of the story, as they knew it in the end, was as follows” (PC, 32). The storyteller tells what he heard from the Pevensie children, who tell him what they heard from the Dwarf, who tells them what he heard from Caspian and other sources and learned through his own experience. Likewise, The Magician’s Nephew mentions what Digory said “afterwards when he was telling the story to the others” (MN, 142). In the Chronicles as a whole, similarly, the storyteller does not relate the stories in the children’s own words, with all his questions and 5. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” 34. Lewis introduces this statement with a story that illustrates well his sense of the relation between the storyteller and the young reader: “Once in a hotel dining-room I said, rather too loudly, ‘I loathe prunes.’ ‘So do I,’ came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny.”

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interruptions, but transforms them into shorter, less confusing tales with better focus and organization.6 Having stepped into the story, the storyteller continues to interject himself into the narrative, as a distinct personality with strong tastes and opinions. “All the children thought—and I agree with them— that there’s nothing to beat good freshwater fish if you eat it when it has been alive half an hour ago and has come out of the pan half a minute ago” (LWW, 60). That personality begins to address readers directly. The passage above could have been phrased “if one eats it” instead of “if you eat it.” The “you” is more casual and conversational, but also more personal, spoken directly to the reader, offering the reader an opportunity to participate with the Pevensie children imaginatively, perhaps especially in the first book, with its feel of being addressed to younger children. “You” is used again and again to create the sense of the storyteller and the listener sharing in the action of the story: “From where the little house stood in the centre of the dam you could hardly see either bank”; “Mr. Beaver was just vanishing into a little hole in the bank which had been almost hidden under the bushes until you were quite on top of it”; “It made one cough and splutter a little and stung the throat but it also made you feel deliciously warm after you’d swallowed it”; “Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms” (LWW, 67, 84, 84–85, 97; similarly, 86, 96, 101, 107, 111, 115). In other places in this story and the subsequent ones “you” is not a synonym for “one,” but addresses readers directly, involving them at a deeper level as they read or listen to the story. The first occurs just after Mr. Beaver whispers the name “Aslan” and each of the children feels something jump inside: 6. Not everyone has the storytelling gift: Eustace, for example, never having read the right books, “had no idea how to tell a story straight” (VDT, 82). Presumably he started at the beginning, tried to include every detail, and didn’t know how to build to a climax or withhold information in order to keep a listener’s attention—the way Aravis does, in telling her own story, when she does not disclose the contents of a letter. As Bree tells Shasta, “She’ll tell us all about the letter in the right place” (H&B, 32). In Calormen, the skill of telling stories (whether true or made-up) is taught to children and highly prized: see H&B, 28, 29–35; LB, 153–57. The telling of stories, especially one’s own story, forms an important part of Narnian culture: see PC, 29, 31, 32, 56; VDT, 38, 91, 114, 116, 130, 135; SC, 171–72, 174, 193; H&B, 35, 82–83; LB, 47.

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To appreciate the story fully, the reader is forced to respond actively to the storyteller and to participate imaginatively in what he says. This sort of involvement becomes a recurring feature of this book and the ones that follow it: “You can think how good the newcaught fish smelled while they were frying and how the hungry children longed for them to be done”; “Have you ever had a gallop on a horse? Think of that; and then take away the heavy noise of the hoofs . . . and then imagine you are going about twice as fast as the fastest racehorse”; “I expect you’ve seen someone put a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny streak of flame creeping along the edge of the newspaper. It was like that now”; “And, oh, the cry of the sea gulls! Have you heard it? Can you remember?” (LWW, 59, 134, 136– 37, 148). Implied in such questions is a speaking voice more than a writer putting pen to paper. Such passages establish a sense of shared experience between the reader as “listener” and the storyteller. The storyteller is not just an abstract voice but a person, a person whom one is getting to know and, more importantly, to trust. That seems particularly true in the following passage: “I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been—if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you—you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness” (LWW, 128). These seem the words of someone who is speaking from experience. Readers who themselves have been that miserable will feel a bond with the speaker at a very deep, personal level. Even those who have not been will feel greater sympathy toward him. In either case, a deeper relationship has been established, a relationship of trust, openness, acceptance. It makes a

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reader more ready to go along with the kinds of things the storyteller has said all along, such as, “You mustn’t think that even now Edmund was quite so bad that he actually wanted his brother and sisters to be turned into stone” (LWW, 72). The Chronicles, thus, succeed in part because of the way Lewis develops the character of his storyteller and establishes a personal, trusting relation between him and his readers. Crucial to that voice is the prose style of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The style is conversational in tone and structure, which helps create the sense of listening rather than reading. The diction is basic, but not simple— Lewis is not condescending to young readers. The sentences tend toward short clauses and phrases. When sentences are long, they are usually cumulative; clauses and phrases are added with “and” or “but” to clarify and amplify meaning, or are inserted with dashes or parentheses. Introductory subordinate clauses are rare. There is a tendency toward strings of prepositional phrases. The rhythms are those of ordinary speech, not tightly knit argument. This is Lewis sitting by the fire swapping stories with his friends, not Lewis “talking to win.” Conversational rhythms and style are characteristic not just of the Chronicles but of all Lewis’s prose except his most formal scholarly work. In a letter to a schoolgirl in America who asked for advice on writing, Lewis suggested, “Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again” (Letters, December 14, 1959). A large part of Lewis’s distinctive “voice” as a writer results from his ability to follow the advice he gave here: in the Chronicles, the adult stories, the popular essays, even his great scholarly book English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, one hears a voice close to that in the BBC radio broadcasts, which he made “as like real talk as possible” (MC, preface).7 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe includes the frequent similes and analogies more typical of Lewis’s conversational style than of 7. The scripts of Lewis’s four series of radio talks during World War II were published as Broadcast Talks (1942), Christian Behaviour (1943), and Beyond Personality (1944); the preface to Mere Christianity (1952) explains stylistic changes made as Lewis collected and revised these three slim books for republication in a more “written” form, while trying not to lose the familiar, conversational tone of the original form.

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his formal style. Similes are used repeatedly, as for example “a funny little house shaped rather like an enormous bee-hive” and “a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest” (LWW, 56, 86—see also 24, 44, 56, 74, 87, 105, 106, 127, 133). The later Chronicles show a marked increase in the use of similes and analogies: “a noise like a small earthquake,” “like a slender girl,” “like a thunderbolt,” “rather like the stroke of a woodpecker,” “treading delicately, like a cat,” “gleamed like a little moon,” “rather like Blind Man’s Buff,” “shouting like crowds at a football match,” “pierced as if by a dozen skewers,” “growing as quickly as a fire grows,” “like a beacon” (taking selected illustrations just from Prince Caspian—59, 96, 100, 110, 125, 129, 131, 158, 163, 166, 178). Some two dozen similes and analogies appear in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; the number nearly doubles in Prince Caspian, nearly doubles yet again in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” and increases still further in The Silver Chair.8 In the later books, the storyteller’s character and voice develop in other ways as well (another feature which is obscured when the books are not read in the order of publication). It becomes clearer that the storyteller obtained his knowledge of these adventures from the characters themselves. Thus he does not know details the characters didn’t observe: “Whether [the trees] were still dancing nobody knew, for Lucy had her eyes on the Lion and the rest had their eyes on Lucy” (PC, 124; see also 169 and VDT, 82). The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” makes it clear that the storyteller heard about the adventures from the Pevensie children and identified closely with them and their experiences: “In describing the scene [Aslan passing by on Deathwater Island] Lucy said afterwards, ‘He was the size of an elephant’ ” (VDT, 105). Also, “Some people may disagree with Lucy about this, but I think she was quite right. She said she wouldn’t have minded if she could have shut the door, but that it was unpleasant to have to stand in a place like that with an open doorway right behind your back. I should have felt just the same” (VDT, 125). He tells us that he learned from Lucy about the song Ramandu and 8. There is a similar pattern in Mere Christianity. Similes are infrequent in Book 1, where the emphasis is on laying out a logical argument demonstrating the existence of moral law and a lawgiver behind the law. In Books 2, 3, and 4, where the nature of the Christian faith is being clarified and illuminated, similes abound, as they do in most of Lewis’s poetry and prose.

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his daughter sang—“I wish I could write down the song, but no one who was present could remember it. Lucy said afterwards that it was high, almost shrill, but very beautiful”—and that he talked to all three children about the song from beyond the end of the world: “Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwards. Lucy could only say, ‘It would break your heart.’ ‘Why,’ said I, ‘was it so sad?’ ‘Sad! No,’ said Lucy” (VDT, 171–72, 206).9 Similarly, he seems to have obtained his information about Digory’s adventures from Digory himself: “When he tried to describe it afterwards Digory always said,” “Years afterwards when he was an old man, Digory said . . . ,” “I think (and Digory thinks too) . . .” (MN, 26, 43, 64).10 Several times in later books point of view is treated as an epistemological issue as the storyteller calls attention to the importance of the perspective from which a story is told. For example, “It is no use trying to describe the battle from Shasta’s point of view; he understood too little of the fight in general and even of his own part in it. The best way I can tell you what really happened is to take you some miles away to where the Hermit of the Southern March sat gazing into the smooth pool beneath the spreading tree” (H&B, 158). Similarly, “We must now go back a bit and explain what the 9. The following parenthetical comment reveals a great deal about the storyteller’s method: “By the way, I have never yet heard how these remote islands became attached to the crown of Narnia; if I ever do, and if the story is at all interesting, I may put it in some other book” (VDT, 29–30). See also VDT, 26 (“I never heard”), 82 (“then someone said—people disputed afterwards whether Lucy or Edmund said it first”), 92 (“and there, for all I know”), 98 (“Lucy always said”), 187 (“Long afterwards when she . . . talked all these adventures over with Edmund, they thought of a reason and I am pretty sure it is the true one”), 205 (“none of them remembers”), 207 (“no one can truly claim . . . but my belief is”). 10. Only occasionally does the storyteller supply information that is not obtainable from a character or from visiting Narnia and that therefore implies an “omniscient” perspective. That occurs, for example, after members of the Narnian army rescue Edmund from the White Witch but are unable to find the Witch or the dwarf who was with her. The storyteller cleverly uses “you” to disguise the shift in perspective: “It was perfectly still and presently the moon grew bright, if you had been there you would have seen the moonlight shining on an old tree-stump and on a fair sized boulder. . . . And if you had watched long enough you would have seen the stump walk across to the boulder . . . for in reality the stump and the boulder were simply the Witch and the Dwarf” (LWW, 111). Similarly, at night among the tombs in The Horse and His Boy Shasta thinks he hears a lion roar, though it “was really the cry of a jackal. But of course Shasta did not know this” (H&B, 72).

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whole scene had looked like from Uncle Andrew’s point of view. It has not made at all the same impression on him as on the Cabby and the children. For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are” (MN, 111–12).11 For Lewis, point of view is important to the imaginative experience of a story thematically as well as artistically. As he put it later in An Experiment in Criticism, “Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself . . . [though] we want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.” That is what stories (and plays and poems) enable readers to do, to participate imaginatively in other lives and other worlds. Doing so “enlarge[s] our being” (EinC, 137) and enables us better to empathize with other persons. That is demonstrated in The Horse and His Boy when Shasta asks, after Aravis has finished telling her story, “What happened to the girl—the one you drugged?” Shasta can reach out of himself and identify with others; Aravis at this point does not even try: “Doubtless she was beaten for sleeping late” (H&B, 35). Later in the story, in what for me is one of the most problematic episodes in the Chronicles, Aslan chases her and scratches her shoulders, and subsequently explains, “The scratches . . . tear for tear, throb for throb, blood for blood, were equal to the stripes laid on the back of your stepmother’s slave. . . . You needed to know what it felt like” (H&B, 121, 171). The books following The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe also develop further the personality of the storyteller. They make it explicit 11. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” without calling attention to the importance of the perspective, uses irony to lead the reader to recognize it. The storyteller reports Eustace’s view of the aftermath of the storm by quoting at length from the diary Eustace began to keep in his little black notebook: “What Eustace thought had best be told in his own words” (VDT, 24). Hearing Eustace’s whining, self-interested voice, particularly his defense of his attempt to take more than his share of the water, is more effective in revealing his character than a third-person account of it could have been (VDT, 58–62). The diary breaks off with “What awaited them on this island was going to concern Eustace more than anyone else, but it cannot be told in his words,” because, as the reader finds out a few pages later, he has turned into a dragon and can no longer write (VDT, 62).

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that the voice is that of someone older than his assumed readers: “When I was at school one would have said, ‘I swear by the Bible.’ But Bibles were not encouraged at Experiment House” (SC, 5); and, “You have never seen such clothes, but I can just remember them” (MN, 67). Even so, he is someone who can relate to young readers and share their attitudes and values—“Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country” (VDT, 3); “as some of us have done at parties when we weren’t quite sure which knife or fork we were meant to use” (H&B, 132); “some grownups (you know how fussy they can be about that sort of thing)” (MN, 135). The storyteller respects his readers highly, taking for granted that they know a great deal—“If you had been there you would probably have known (he didn’t) that he was seeing oaks, beeches, silver birches, rowans and sweet chestnuts” (H&B, 117). The storyteller is someone who realizes that adults tend to talk down to children (“King Miraz had been talking in the tiresome way that some grownups have, which makes it quite clear that they are not really interested in what they are saying”—PC, 34) and who will avoid that mistake himself. In addition to the information the storyteller receives from the children who go to Narnia, he also has independent, firsthand familiarity that could come only from having been in Narnia himself. Thus, for example, he gives a detailed description of the Great Snow Dance, being more specific about it than would have been possible by relying on what Jill saw before being hit by a snowball and more intimately knowledgeable than she could have become by having it described to her. He ends by saying to the reader, “I wish you could see it for yourselves,” as (it would seem) he has at some point seen it for himself (SC, 187). He also could have found out only in Narnia what happened in the centuries after Polly and Digory returned home (MN, 165). Other examples of firsthand experience include: “Indeed, though one meets bad Dwarfs, I never heard of a Dwarf who was a fool” (PC, 30); “I know nothing so disagreeable as being kissed by a giantess” (SC, 98); “To this day in Calormene schools, if you do anything unusually stupid, you are very likely to be called ‘a second Rabadash’ ” (H&B, 188); “This, by the way, was true. A Hunter, a Man, had killed and skinned this lion somewhere up in the Western Wild several months before. But that doesn’t come into this

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story” (LB, 6); “Narnian Dwarfs, though less than four feet high, are for their size about the toughest and strongest creatures there are” (LB, 73). When or how did the storyteller visit Narnia? That is not revealed. The question can be approached from within the stories and from outside them. At the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the professor talks as if there have been other visits to Narnia (the plural pronouns suggest other persons in addition to those Lewis was to write about later in The Magician’s Nephew): “Yes, of course you’ll get back to Narnia again some day. . . . But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. . . . And don’t mention it to anyone else unless you find that they’ve had adventures of the same sort themselves. . . . How will you know? Oh, you’ll know all right. Odd things, they say—even their looks—will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open” (LWW, 153). From within the stories perhaps we can assume the storyteller was drawn into Narnia for reasons, or on missions, that are not recounted in these books. And the children would feel free to tell him about their adventures because they could see in him the signs of a fellow traveler. From outside the stories, the storyteller is “Lewis,” closely akin to the author C. S. Lewis, whose imaginary world Narnia is and who presumably visited it often without the Pevensie children.12 Later books continue the use of passages in which the narrator actively involves young readers by asking them questions, such as “Have you ever bathed in a mountain river that is rushing in shallow cataracts over red and blue and yellow stones with the sun on it? It is as good as the sea: in some ways almost better,” and addressing them directly: “They even thought they had struck an old path; but if you 12. Could the storyteller be the Professor? We know from The Magician’s Nephew that he did visit Narnia as Digory. He could have referred to himself in the third person in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but it would seem uncharacteristic of him to say of himself, “the Professor, who was a very remarkable man . . .” (LWW, 153). His knowledge of Narnia extends beyond what he could have learned during his visit when Narnia was created, so we would need to assume that he made later visits. It would seem odd that these later visits of someone who is a character within the stories were not recorded or mentioned in other stories. The main argument against the Professor being the storyteller is that Lewis’s practice in writing adult fiction was to think in terms of a narrator-character named “Lewis,” which also fits very well the narrative approach in the Chronicles.

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know anything about woods, you will know that one is always finding imaginary paths” (MN, 138; PC, 99). The use of passages requiring readers to engage their imaginations increases noticeably: “Have you ever stood at the edge of a great wood on a high ridge when a wild southwester broke over it in full fury on an autumn evening? Imagine that sound. And then imagine that the wood, instead of being fixed to one place, was rushing at you. . . .”; “It is rather hard to describe, but you will see what it was like if you imagine yourself looking into the mouth of a railway tunnel—a tunnel either so long or so twisty that you cannot see the light at the far end”; “You know how sad your own dog’s face can look sometimes. Think of that and then think of all the faces of those Talking Beasts . . . all far sadder than that . . . . It would have broken your heart with very pity to see their faces” (PC, 164; VDT, 147–48; LB, 31–32).13 The increasing use of active reader participation in the later books supports Doris Myers’s claim that the images and emotional effects of the series, when read in the order of publication, engage readers at an increasingly mature level.14 Humor also becomes a means of actively engaging readers. There is little humor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,15 but in the stories that follow wit and humor become important parts of the style and of the storyteller’s character. The storyteller’s wit appears in some of his choices of comparisons: the “nose and chin [of the hag] stuck out like a pair of nut-crackers”; “He [Giant Wimbleweather] checked himself at once and looked as grave as a turnip”; “The cheeks of the Telmarine soldiers became the colour of cold gravy”; “His cheek bulged out as if he were sucking a big bit of toffee” (PC, 143, 155, 172; LB, 7). It emerges also in his ability to turn a phrase 13. For additional examples of passages requiring reader participation, see PC, 86, 90, 97, 108, 114, 128, 164, 172; VDT, 6, 131, 157, 185, 186; SC, 8, 11; MN, 75, 105; LB, 38, 93, 94, 110, 161. 14. Doris T. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, 125, 149, 167–69, 176. See also her essay “Growing in Grace: The Anglican Spiritual Style in the Chronicles of Narnia.” 15. The titles of the books on Tumnus’s shelves—such as Men, Monks and Gamekeepers: A Study in Popular Legend and Is Man a Myth?—are amusing; so are Giant Rumblebuffin and the overly enthusiastic lion whom Aslan brings back to life in chapter 16; the policies pursued by the four children as reigning monarchs in Narnia show a comic touch: “They liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers” (LWW, 149).

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effectively: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it”; “what used to be called a ‘mixed’ school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it” (VDT, 1; SC, 1). There is subtle wit in his chapter title “A Parliament of Owls,” with its allusion to Chaucer’s A Parlement of Foules [fowls] (SC, chap. 4). And there is wry wit in his comment that Eustace as dragon could dispatch a wild goat or wild swine so swiftly that “it didn’t know (and presumably still doesn’t know) it had been killed” and his quip about Pittencream, who was left behind on Ramandu’s island while the brave Reepicheep went to and beyond the end of the world: “He lived happily [in exile in Calormen] ever after. But he could never bear mice” (VDT, 83, 183). In addition to the humor that is part of the narrator’s genial character (given to him, of course, by the author), the stories are filled with comic touches that arise naturally out of the personality of the author and the fictional situation. There is humor in the choice and arrangement of the details the author decides to include: Trumpkin’s mistakes in understanding words because of his deafness (“rangers” for “strangers,” “kill” for “Jill,” “useless” for “Eustace”—SC, 32). There is the reply Glimfeather the Owl says Trumpkin would make if they tried to give him advice: “You’re a mere chick. I remember you when you were an egg” (SC, 45). There is humor in the choice of names (such as Reepicheep, Puddleglum, Wimbleweather, and “Adela Pennyfather and Cholmondely Major, Edith Winterblott, ‘Spotty’ Sorner, big Bannister, and the two loathsome Garrett twins” at Experiment House—SC, 206) and in the way characters are sketched out: Eustace with his Plumptree’s Vitaminised Nerve Food, his not caring much about subjects but caring a great deal about grades, his being so sulky that no one would take him as a slave, even thrown in free with other lots (VDT, 11, 24, 51).16 There is the humor of Lasaraleen’s vanity and preoccupation with herself, and of the warnings she issues to her servants: “Anyone I catch talking 16. Likewise, the Governor of the Lone Islands, who makes appointments only “ ‘tween nine ‘n’ ten p.m. second Saturday every month” (VDT, 44); the not-too-bright but totally agreeable Dufflepuds (offering such sage observations as “water. Powerful wet stuff, ain’t it?”; washing their plates and knives before dinner to save time afterwards; and accepting both sides of incompatible, opposing positions—VDT, 121, 137, 143); and Puddleglum, who can find a dark lining on the brightest of clouds (SC, 62–63).

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about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks” (H&B, 82). There are the wonderful comic scenes of The Magician’s Nephew: Uncle Andrew’s misadventures and the disastrous attempts of the Narnian animals to help and feed him (MN, 111–19, 151–53); the first three jokes in Narnia (MN, 106, 108, 116); the animals’ early discussions, with the objections raised by the Bulldog (MN, 116–18). And there is humor in the use of irony—in Eustace’s diary (VDT, 24–25, 58–62), Jill and Eustace not realizing as quickly as the reader what “you’d like to have us for your Autumn Feast” really means (SC, 93), and Shift’s deceptions of Puzzle (LB, 4–11)—and of satire, which will be appreciated more by adults than young children: the Head who is a failure at Experiment House and at supervising other Heads being made a Member of Parliament, “where she lived happily ever after” (SC, 207), and in Shift’s version of a socialist paradise (LB, 29–31). All of this (directly addressing the reader, wit, humor, irony, satire) creates in the stories the impression of a genial, likeable storyteller whose tales are a pleasure to listen to. The storyteller’s presence also establishes in the stories the commonality of a shared moral perspective. The Chronicles have been unfairly criticized for their alleged didacticism.17 However, the stories do not talk down to readers, preaching about correct behavior and values. Rather, they present proper behavior and values objectively, as something readers already know perfectly well. The storyteller does not instruct but reminds, the way Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century moralist Lewis admired, said moral instruction should: “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”18 Although the storyteller never is shown in Narnia or participates in any action, 17. Doris Myers defends Lewis’s stories as didactic in the positive sense that Spenser’s works were, as they taught the virtues by making them concrete, and led readers to become truly human by helping them learn to make good stock responses (C. S. Lewis in Context, 121, amplified in a lecture, “Spenser’s Faerie Land as a Key to Narnia”). 18. Johnson, The Rambler (No. 2), edited by W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 14. Paraphrased in Mere Christianity, 3.3: “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” According to Claude Rawson, a student of Lewis’s in the 1950s, Lewis resembled Johnson in a number of respects, and “was almost certainly conscious of this and felt a certain pride in it. . . . In Johnson, Lewis found a model for a whole range of behaviour patterns, from insatiable tea-drinking to ‘talking for victory’ ” (“The Schoolboy Johnson,” 863); see also Rawson, “C. S. Lewis, Schoolboy among the Moderns,” 9, 11, 17, and 18.

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he—apart from Aslan—is the most important character in the Chronicles. He establishes the appealing tone of the stories and creates an intimate, personal bond with the reader. He conveys a reassuring feeling that events are under control, that ultimately, for followers of Aslan, everything will turn out in a satisfactory way. And he creates a moral center for the stories, a sense of decency, honor, respect, common sense, and intelligence, which indicates to young readers that these are qualities that should be reflected in their own lives.19

19. For example, “I can’t excuse what he did next [to strike the bell in Charn] except by saying that he was very sorry for it afterwards (and so were a good many other people)” (MN, 45–46). “Things like Do Not Steal were, I think, hammered into boys’ heads a good deal harder in those days than they are now” (MN, 142). The moral dimension of the Chronicles will be examined further in chapter 9 below.

6




“Four Fiddles, Three Flutes, and a Drum” Lewis and Music

There is a widely held impression that C. S. Lewis did not like music, or that he liked only Wagnerian music. That impression was created, probably, by his outspoken dislike of hymns and of church music generally, and his pointing toward Wagner as the source of “his own personal Renaissance” (SbyJ, 71). But it is inaccurate. Though Lewis did not play a musical instrument or like to sing, he knew a great deal about music and loved it deeply, even at times passionately: in a 1916 letter to Arthur Greeves cited earlier, he called music “the highest of the arts” (TST, 112).1 Music influenced his thinking in a variety of ways and appears frequently in his writing. It forms an especially prominent motif in the Chronicles of Narnia, and engaging with it imaginatively there becomes an important aspect of experiencing the stories fully. From his earliest years, music was one of the great pleasures of Lewis’s life. His love of music comes through particularly in his long correspondence with Arthur Greeves, who was an accomplished musician and shared many of Lewis’s musical tastes. Lewis expressed to Greeves his disappointment that among his schoolmates at Malvern College existed an “absolute lack of appreciation of anything like music or books” (TST, 47), and he noted that everywhere it was only the few who could talk about “the really important things—literature, science, music & art” (TST, 56). To Lewis in his younger years, music was a really important thing, an art that reached to his emotional depths, that drove him “wild with

1. In a diary entry in 1923 Lewis notes that his new friend Nevill Coghill “seems very ignorant of literature and thinks music the greater art, because it can do two things at once. He is quite right there” (AMR, 195).

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delight” (TST, 84). In 1934 he attended a concert of Beethoven, Debussy, Sibelius, and Elgar “which I enjoyed more than any I have ever heard” (TST, 471). The following year he wrote that he had “seldom enjoyed anything more” than a magnificent philharmonic performance of the Ninth Symphony: “How tonic Beethoven is, and how festal—one has the feeling of having taken part in the revelry of giants” (TST, 475). Ten years later he mentioned being “greatly moved” by a gramophone performance of Holst’s Planets (TST, 506). His musical tastes ranged widely. He knew a great deal about opera and attended many performances, though his familiarity probably came mostly from records;2 he mentioned, in addition to Wagner’s works, Faust, Carmen, Aïda, The Magic Flute, and Tosca. The Lewis Papers include an essay Lewis wrote at Cherbourg House around 1912 (when he was thirteen) on Richard Wagner, which begins with a brief history of the development of the opera and how Wagner influenced its development (3.233–35).3 At Malvern College he wrote an opera libretto, Loki Bound, based on Norse mythology (TST, 50–53). He also liked and referred to a wide variety of orchestral music, urging Arthur in 1935 to buy “big works (symphonies etc)” and “never play them except in their entirety” (TST, 478). He describes at length, in two different letters, his enjoyment of Sunday evenings at the Kilns in the early 1930s, when, after a quiet supper, Lewis, Warren, Mrs. Moore, and Papworth the dog would gather in the study and listen to a complete symphony on Warnie’s excellent 2. Lewis: “I’ve never seen Aida, but I’ve known the music since I was a small boy: and how good it is” (Letters to Children, 48). In 1916 he wrote to Arthur Greeves, “I should give anything to be at home for these operas” (TST, 146); discussions of operas appear in that and the next two letters. 3. From the time he discovered the Ring of the Nibelung through a review in a magazine, Wagner held a special place throughout Lewis’s life, for his music and for the myth of Northernness his work epitomizes. “I am a romantic person who has frankly revelled in my Nibelungs, and specially in Wagner’s version of the story, ever since one golden summer in adolescence when I first heard the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on a gramophone and saw Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to The Ring” (“First and Second Things,” 278; see also SbyJ, 72–76). In his letters to Greeves and elsewhere he mentions going to London on numerous occasions to attend a performance of one or all of its parts. “I will by no means join in the modern depreciation of Wagner. He may, for all I know, have been a bad man. He may (though I shall never believe it) have been a bad musician. But as a mythopoeic poet he is incomparable” (“The Funeral of a Great Myth,” 84).

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gramophone—“I am sure one gains enormously by always hearing one symphony as a whole and nothing else” (TST, 450; see also 467–68).4 “Violin solos were never much in my line” (TST, 84), he informed Arthur, and he noted in his diary that “the organ is a thing I cannot learn to like” (AMR, 255). But he was very fond of the piano as a solo instrument: “One sort of music still holds me as much, or indeed more than ever—piano music” (TST, 167); urging Arthur to look up the Chopin piece he liked so well, the 21st Prelude, he asked if it was not “the best music in the world” (TST, 124).5 Lewis says in his autobiography that their father gave the boys a gramophone as a present (SbyJ, 73)—the brand was His Master’s Voice, with a large horn, according to George Sayer (see photo 1, p. 125). One of Warren’s most vivid memories of their home, Little Lea, was of “rare warm summer afternoons in the garden with the gramophone.” In 1967, some three years after Lewis’s death, Warren was swept up by such memories in a wave of nostalgia: “a fine 4. The “excellent gramophone” Lewis mentioned on March 25, 1933, was replaced just five days later by an even better one. Warren noted in his diary on March 30, 1933, “This afternoon my long expected new gramophone arrived by [road] in charge of two men, who set it up in the study where we tested it with a Debussy, a bit of the Pastoral symphony, and a chorus from Beethovens Mass. I am delighted with it. . . . After supper J [i.e., Jack, the name he wanted to be called from early childhood on], Minto [Mrs. Moore] and I sat cosily in the study and I played them the Pastoral Symphony and a sonata of Bach” (W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, 100). Jill Freud, who stayed at the Kilns the summer of 1943, recalls such evenings: “Almost every Sunday night the brothers listened to a complete symphony on Major Lewis’s old gramophone. It had a large, wooden, handmade horn. The sound was good and he was proud of it; no one else was allowed to use it” (“Part B: With Girls at Home,” 57). E. L. Edmonds mentions that in his Magdalen rooms in the mid-1930s, “Lewis showed me his magnificent record player which had a long, tubular horn interfaced with green felt” (“C. S. Lewis, the Teacher,” 42–43). Robert E. Havard mentions, without indicating a date, that Lewis “had in The Kilns an old-fashioned gramophone with an enormous horn filling one corner of the room” (“Philia: Jack at Ease,” 226). 5. An interesting sidelight on Lewis’s listening to music is provided by one of three schoolgirls who were housed at the Kilns during World War II. The bedroom the girls shared was above Lewis’s study, which had a bay window with a flat roof. Lewis would pass food up to the girls in the evening, or help them down so they could visit the kitchen when they were hungry. “Sometimes we climbed through the window of his study and listened to his records with him” (Margaret M. Weyland in a letter dated February 11, 1977, published in The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 12–13 [December 1989]: 55).

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summer morning, P safely off to town, J and I with two chairs in the shrubbery and the gramophone.”6 Among those memories was the “Incident of Mrs. Mop and the Dinner.” On the cook’s days off, the boys’ dinner was prepared by the charwoman. One week the charwoman, Mrs. Mop, served them raw steak, lightly browned on the outside, and potatoes immersed in warm water for a couple of minutes. After trying in vain to eat the food, Lewis suggested the only thing to do was to give it a ceremonial burial. According to Warren’s description of the episode, “We advanced on the flower bed in Indian file at a slow pace, Jack in front carrying our gramophone playing Chopin’s Funeral March, I following with a trowel in one hand and our dinner in the other. A grave was dug, the meal buried, and after a minute’s reverent silence we withdrew to the house in the order in which we had come, the gramophone still playing.”7 Lewis and his brother, in their teens, were avid collectors of gramophone records. Lewis approached this interest with the thoroughness he would later devote to his scholarship: he received the monthly lists issued by various record companies—“gramophone catalogues were . . . one of my favorite forms of reading” (SbyJ, 73)— and he ordered more records than he could afford to (“the bill is rather a staggerer . . . I am thinking of sending it out to my brother to pay”—TST, 93). He compared the performances on various records and contributed to “The Leeborough Review,” which Warren describes as consisting “almost entirely of reviews of new gramophone records.”8 He knew which records lasted longer than others (Odeon records “wear out in a month”—TST, 74)9 and regularly asked Arthur about records he had purchased or would recommend (“Any new records?”—TST, 102). But he also expressed concerns 6. George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times, 17; W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 16, 269. 7. Recorded by Warren on page 25 of “C. S. Lewis: A Biography,” the typescript (now in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois) from which, considerably abridged, Letters of C. S. Lewis was published in 1966. 8. Lewis Papers, 3.259. One issue of “The Leeborough Review” is reproduced in appendix 11 (11.248–50). 9. In 1930, Warren played a new recording of Beethoven’s Second Symphony, done with the latest technology, and Lewis was “greatly impressed with the difference between electrical and non-electrical recording” (W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 62).

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about the effects of relying too heavily on recorded music in developing one’s knowledge and tastes: “The taste in music developed by a gramaphone [sic] is a bad, artificial, exotic one”; a gramophone “gives you opportunity of hearing things that you might otherwise never know: but . . . it teaches you to expect a standard of performance which you can’t get . . . on the stage” (TST, 84, 89). Although his love of classical music was deep and his tastes in music were wide-ranging, he disliked church music intensely. “Hymns were disagreeable to me” (SbyJ, 234). His preference was to attend “said” services, because for Lewis hymns were the “dead wood” of a service.10 However, an intriguing comment on hymns occurs in the creation story in The Magician’s Nephew. After Polly, Digory, Jadis, Uncle Andrew, and the cabby fall into a pitch-black, silent, breathless world, the cabby tries to calm and reassure the others, suggesting that the best thing they could do would be to sing a hymn: “And he did. He struck up at once a harvest thanksgiving hymn, all about crops being ‘safely gathered in.’ It was not very suitable to a place which felt as if nothing had ever grown there since the beginning of time, but it was the one he could remember best. He had a fine voice and the children joined in; it was very cheering” (MN, 86). Lewis’s reason for selecting Henry Alford’s well-known hymn “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” (1844) may in part have been humor—for the incongruity pointed out by the narrator—and in part because it was a hymn likely to have been familiar to many of his young readers. Lewis disliked hymns partly because, he said, the lyrics are not good poetry—they often are sentimental and “cheap” and frequently contain “confused or erroneous thought and unworthy sentiment.”11 When Screwtape mentions the “shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print” (SL, letter 2), he reflects closely Lewis’s own view: “fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music.”12 He also disliked hymns 10. Lewis, letter to Eric Routley, July 16, 1946, in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, 331. 11. Lewis, “Christianity and Culture,” 13, and “Christianity and Literature,” 2. 12. Lewis, “Answers to Questions on Christianity,” 62. On May Day, 1930, Warren and Lewis climbed to the top of Magdalen tower and at dawn heard the choristers sing “a Latin hymn which was very effective and a beautiful tune: why on earth don’t they sing these hymns in church?” (Lewis Papers, 11.11).

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because he found the airs, like those of certain popular songs, “vile and ugly” (EinC, 25), and because the English, unlike the Welsh and Germans (and the cabby), are not good singers13—therefore, the singing in English churches is not the offering of “our natural gifts at their highest to God,” but people “shout[ing] their favourite hymns. . . . What I . . . chiefly desire in church are fewer, better, and shorter hymns; especially fewer.”14 Beyond that, he questioned the spiritual value of church music— whether it glorifies God or is only an aesthetic rather than truly spiritual aspect of worship. He had such an aesthetic experience when he, Arthur, and Maureen Moore attended a choral evensong at New College in 1922, at a time when he did not consider himself a Christian and would listen to the music as if at a concert; he “enjoyed the music immensely, especially the psalms and Stanford’s Magnificat: I wondered why I had never troubled to go before” (AMR, 71). He also feared that the way both highbrow and lowbrow church music alienates and divides a congregation may outweigh its potential benefits.15 He acknowledged, however, that such difference in tastes can be an opportunity for exercising spiritual humility: it can “teach us humility and charity towards simple lowbrow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. I naturally loathe nearly all hymns: the face and life of the charwoman in the next pew who revels in them teach me that good taste in poetry or music are not necessary to salvation” (Letters, December 7, 1950). Lewis does not say specifically when or how his education in music began, or what influenced the love of classical music that he and his brother shared from very early in their lives.16 Presumably, their father set an example by his own appreciation of music, as well as providing a gramophone and money for records; as George Sayer puts it, “Note that it was the father whom he disparaged who encouraged him in literature and art, not the mother whom he loved and admired.”17 They attended concerts together, and corresponded 13. Lewis, letter to Eric Routley, September 21, 1946, in God in the Dock, 331. 14. Lewis, “On Church Music,” 95, 96. 15. Ibid., 99; letter to Routley, July 16, 1946, in God in the Dock, 330. 16. His love of music began long before his discovery of Wagner: “My general appreciation of music was not, at first, much altered [by the discovery of Wagner],” he wrote in 1955. “ ‘Music’ was one thing, ‘Wagnerian music’ quite another” (SbyJ, 75). 17. Sayer, Jack, 19.

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about others that they couldn’t attend jointly. Lewis wrote to his father on February 2, 1911, about a month after entering Cherbourg House in Malvern: “We had great fun this week, we went to the ‘Messiah.’ It was only an amateur performance, but still it was simply lovely.” His father wrote to him on December 17, 1915, “I am sorry you are not home here tonight. John Harrison is singing the tenor of the Messiah and we might have gone.”18 What the father sowed bore abundant fruit not only in Lewis’s life but also in his writing. Music appears in ideas, plots, images, or figures of speech of virtually every book Lewis wrote, usually presented with positive, at times heavenly, implications, but occasionally as a danger tempting one away from the heavenly. The depth of music in Lewis’s life and thinking is indicated by how frequently he used music in similes and metaphors throughout his writing. Only a few, varied examples can be cited here. He wrote to Arthur Greeves in 1915, “On Saturday I met the prettiest girl I have ever seen in my life. . . . She is just like that grave movement in the Hungarian Rhapsody (or is it the ‘dance’?) that I love so much” (TST, 76–77). The early morning aromas on Malacandra “did to the sense of smell what high, sharp violin notes do to the ear” (OSP, postscript). Wine, Orual learns, can make sorrows “seem glorious and noble, like sad music” (TWHF, 1.19). In the story “The Shoddy Lands,” Peggy’s clothes, bath salts, and general voluptuousness “were a huge overture to an opera in which she had no interest at all.”19 Lewis frequently uses similes and metaphors involving music to clarify points in his literary criticism. Looking for the “point” of a story “may prevent one sometimes from getting the real effect of the story in itself—like listening too hard for the words in singing which isn’t meant to be listened to that way (like an anthem in a chorus).”20 The medieval universe can be compared both to a great building and “to a fugue—the orderly and varied reiteration of the 18. Lewis, Lewis Papers, 3.228 and 5.40. Similarly, Lewis’s father wrote to him November 4, 1912: “Next week we are promised an opera company. They are doing Carmen and Maritana and others that Warnie and you would rather like to hear. I am sorry that they did not postpone their visit till Xmas” (Lewis Papers, 3.301). 19. Lewis, “The Shoddy Lands,” 105. 20. Lewis, Letters to Children, 36

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same ‘subject.’ ”21 To convey the difference between danger and danger from giants, “turn it into music and you will feel the difference at once”(“OnS,” 94). Comparing English poetry with Old French, “Ours is ‘all instruments’; theirs is the ‘lonely flute’ ” (AofL, 135). The Parlement of Foules is “like Mozartian music” (AofL, 174). Spenser’s Epithalamion is extraordinary because of its ability to express joy: “Music has often reached that jocundity; poetry, seldom.”22 A romance or fantasy story “is in a way more like a symphony than a novel. . . . The images are in every possible relation of contrast, mutual support, development, variation, half-echo, and the like, just as the musical themes are.”23 Music is especially noticeable and important in A Preface to “Paradise Lost.” Not surprisingly, figures of speech involving music appear particularly in Lewis’s discussions of Milton’s style (“It is common to speak of Milton’s style as organ music”—PPL, chap. 7). Thus, to blame Milton for lacking an intimate speaking voice “is like damning an opera or an oratorio because the personages sing instead of speaking” (PPL, chap. 7). To convey the pause needed at the end of a verse paragraph, Lewis says, it must be felt “as we feel the pause in a piece of music, where the silence is part of the music, and not as we feel the pause between one item of a concert and the next”; later, to emphasize the effect at a certain point, he adds, “Then a pause, as if after a crashing piece of orchestration” (PPL, chap. 7). Anticipating An Experiment in Criticism, he stresses the active role the reader must accept: “We are [Milton’s] organ: when he appears to be describing Paradise he is in fact drawing out the Paradisal Stop in us” (PPL, chap. 7). But music also is used to clarify other aspects of the work. Concentrating on “universal” elements in a work may be twisting it into a shape the author never gave it, making him “use the loud pedal where he really used the soft” (PPL, chap. 9). That the Fall is disobedience and results from pride is reiterated by every character in Paradise Lost from every possible point of view, “as if it were the subject of a fugue” (PPL, chap. 10). Discipline exists for the sake of its 21. Lewis, “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” 57. 22. Lewis, “Edmund Spenser,” in Major British Writers, 1.96. 23. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, 116. Likewise, Spenser “can be as prosaic as Wordsworth: he can be clumsy, unmusical, and flat” (AofL, 318), and Virgil’s hexameters are “more like the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony and less like the Walkürenritt” (“Metre,” 284).

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opposite, freedom, as “the heavenly frolic arises from an orchestra which is in tune” (PPL, chap. 11). Music appears prominently and appropriately in Lewis’s lyric poetry. It runs through his earliest collection, Spirits in Bondage, as a sustained motif, in titles—“French Nocturne,” “Irish Nocturne,” “Song of the Pilgrims,” “Song,” “Hymn (For Boys’ Voices),” and “Lullaby”—and in the imagery and figures of many poems.24 Later poems display the same interest, in titles—“Pindar Sang,” “Evolutionary Hymn,” “Science-Fiction Cradlesong,” “Coronation March,” “Angel’s Song,” “Evensong,” and “Narnian Suite,” with its subtitles “March for Strings, Kettledrums, and Sixty-three Dwarfs” and “March for Drum, Trumpet, and Twenty-one Giants”—and in action, imagery, and figures.25 In Dymer music creates the kind of romantic longing discussed above in chapter 1: “He heard the music, unendurable / In stealing sweetness wind from tree to tree” (1.27); and in the concluding stanza of Dymer, for example, the sound of “clear trumpets blowing,” “such a music as the dumb would sing,” signals the efficacy of Dymer’s sacrifice and the coming of “great good” into earth: the transformation of the wasteland into a paradise and the monster into a god, the resolving of discord and establishment of harmony (9.35).26 Music runs throughout The Nameless Isle, Lewis’s retelling of The Magic Flute, climaxing as the dwarf’s playing on the flute brings the marble statues back to life.27 References to music are prominent also in the Ransom trilogy, particularly Perelandra, with its operatic tone and movement.28 On Perelandra Ransom awakes to hear Tinidril singing to herself in a low 24. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics; see the prologue and the poems numbered 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 17, 18, 21, 22, 25, 29, 31, 33, 35, 38, and 39. 25. See Lewis, Poems, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, 24, 27, 30, 32, 41, 46, 50, 57, 67, 71, 74, 76, 81, 82, 90, 94, 97, 104, 105, 114, 115, 123, 124, 133, and 136. 26. Lewis, Narrative Poems, 14, 91. Music also appears in passing in Launcelot and The Queen of Drum (Narrative Poems, 97, 98, 100, 147, 167). 27. Lewis, Narrative Poems, 121–22. In 1922 he wrote in his diary, “I . . . looked into a book on Mozart and read the story of the Magic Flute which I found very suggestive. . . . I thought curiously of how this might be used for a big poem some day” (AMR, 112; see also 115–16 and 125). The poem his editor entitled The Nameless Isle (Narrative Poems, 105–27) is the result: see Charles A. Huttar, “A Lifelong Love Affair with Language: C. S. Lewis’s Poetry,” 86. 28. “You will also see, if you look, how operatic the whole building up of the climax is in Perelandra” (Lewis, Letters, October 29, 1944). Nearly two decades later, Donald Swann and David Marsh collaborated on an operatic version of Perelandra. Lewis heard the first performance of it on June 29, 1963, and said it

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voice, and when she tells Ransom that she is the Mother of the planet, he seems not just to hear her voice, but “a phantom sense of vast choral music was all about him” (Per, chap. 5). Perelandrian thunder is “like the playing of a heavenly tambourine” (Per, chap. 10). Ransom’s body, as he prepares for physical conflict with the Un-man, is an “instrument . . . tuned up to concert pitch” (Per, chap. 12). Of his long period of convalescence after destroying the Un-man, he remembers a song: “It floated through his sleep and was the first sound at every waking. It was formless as the song of a bird, yet it was not a bird’s voice. As a bird’s voice is to a flute, so this was to a cello: low and ripe and tender, full-bellied, rich and golden-brown” (Per, chap. 15). And there is musicality in the liturgy-like conversation between Ransom, Tor and Tinidril, and the oyarsas of Perelandra and Malacandra; their speeches are described as being “like the parts of a music into which all five of them had entered as instruments” (Per, chap. 17; this passage is discussed at greater length in the next chapter, on dance). On Malacandra the hrossa are great singers (OSP, chap. 17), and Ransom records the words of their song at Hyoi’s funeral (chap. 19). He later recalls with longing “the sound of their singing”—“great hollow hound-like music from enormous throats, deeper than Chaliapin, a ‘warm, dark noise’ ” (OSP, postscript)—and the haunting qualities of the funeral music: “They go down, singing, to the edge of the lake. The music fills the wood with its vibration, though it is so soft that I can hardly hear it: it is like dim organ music” (OSP, postscript). And in That Hideous Strength one result of Jane’s first meeting with Ransom is to remember that music has not played any part in her life recently, and to resolve “to listen to many chorales by Bach on the gramophone that evening” (THS, 7.3). Later, the descent of the spirit of Mercury leads the St. Anne’s group to “such talk— such eloquence, such melody (song could have added nothing to it).” But the spirit of Jupiter (which inspires Arthur, the only musician among them, to get out his fiddle and accompany the group in a festive dance) can be captured only faintly by such symbols as the pealing of bells and the blowing of trumpets, or the first beginning moved him to tears (see Donald Swann, Swann’s Way: A Life in Song, 202, and William Phemister, “Fantasy Set to Music: Donald Swann, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien”).

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of music in the hall of a high king. Ransom and Merlin are “caught up into the Gloria which those five excellent Natures perpetually sing” (THS, 15.1). In contrast, music frequently appears as a temptation in The Pilgrim’s Regress: the haunting sound of music draws John into the woods and to a glimpse of the island from whence his desires come (PR, 1.2, 4, 6). The songs of Mr. Halfways evoke for John a vision of the Island, but seduce him to substitute the charms of Media Halfways (PR, 2.5). Lack of genuine music reveals deficiency in character and values: the avant-garde music of the Clevers in Eschropolis, which John dislikes (PR, 3.1–2), the song Savage bellows about violence and heroic nihilism (PR, 6.6), and the croaking, self-centered songs of Superbia (PR, 10.5) and the Northern Dragon (PR, 10.8). Juxtaposed with such music are the songs of praise, worship, and encouragement sung on their journey by John (PR, 8.6), the hermit (PR, 8.10), Vertue (PR, 10.1; 10.5), and their Guide (PR, 10.3, 4, 6, 10).29 Although allusions to music are scattered throughout Lewis’s writings (those above are only a small sample), the use of music is most important, and most pervasive, in the Chronicles of Narnia. At least forty-five references to music appear in the Chronicles, in six of the books and in many different contexts, creating a wide variety of imaginative effects.30 Music appears first when Tumnus the Faun, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, pulls a strange little flute from its case and begins to play for Lucy. The tune he plays moves her 29. Music seems less important in Till We Have Faces, though there too it does have a role. One of the earliest memorable events occurs as the King forces the Fox to teach fourteen young women to sing a Greek bridal hymn at his wedding; Orual recalls that they sang “very badly” (TWHF, 1.1). Temple music (drums, horns, rattles, and castanets) and singing are a part of the worship of Ungit and of its ceremonial rituals (TWHF, 1.8; 2.2). A voice “sweeter than any music” invites Psyche to enter her house, and music accompanies the banquet that is set for her (TWHF, 1.10). The voice of the god as it pronounces judgment on Orual is sweet, “like a bird singing on the branch above a hanged man” (TWHF, 1.15). 30. One such context is the use of music in figures of speech. A few examples: the sound of Susan’s horn is “loud as thunder but far longer, cool and sweet as music over water” (PC, 82). Aslan’s roar, “deep and throbbing at first like an organ beginning on a low note, rose and became louder . . . till the earth and air were shaking with it” (PC, 129). The giant cook’s snore in the House of Harfang is more welcome to Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum than any music (SC, 112–13). Once they get below the earth, they march across a mild, soft, sleepy place: “It was very sad, but with a quiet sort of sadness like soft music” (SC, 122).

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deeply: it makes her want to “cry and laugh and dance and go to sleep all at the same time” (LWW, 12–13). In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe music is also associated with Aslan. When Mr. Beaver first mentions the name Aslan, each of the children feels something jump inside: “Susan felt as if some . . . delightful strain of music had just floated by her” (LWW, 54). Later, as the two beavers and the three children approach the wonderful pavilion near the stone table, they hear music made on stringed instruments by a group of Dryads and Naiads; it is the music that leads them to turn and see “what they had come to see,” the great Lion (LWW, 101). Near the end of the story, as Narnia celebrates the coronation of the four Pevensie children with a great feast, the music inside the castle Cair Paravel is answered by “the voices of the mermen and mermaids swimming close to the castle steps and singing in honour of their new Kings and Queens” (LWW, 148). Music occurs throughout Prince Caspian, including poignant memories of the children’s previous visit, a year (or a thousand years) before. Susan recalls “the mer-people singing in the sea,” and Lucy remembers “when we had the musicians up in the rigging [of the Splendour Hyaline] playing flutes so that it sounded like music out of the sky” (PC, 15, 93). As six mice carry the battered body of Reepicheep toward Aslan on a litter, “their leader piped on his slender pipe a melancholy tune” (PC, 173). In The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” the sailors sing catches in the evenings, and Ramandu and his daughter greet the dawn with a high, almost shrill, very beautiful “early morning kind of song” (VDT, 21, 172). And Digory’s mother, in The Magician’s Nephew, after she was healed by the Narnian apple, had the old piano tuned and “took up her singing again” (MN, 164).31 Music is especially important in The Silver Chair, invoked or mentioned at least eighteen times. The music motif begins as Eustace 31. The importance of music is reinforced by its inclusion in the education of Prince Caspian and Prince Cor: Prince Caspian learns “sword-fighting and riding, swimming and diving, how to shoot with the bow and play on the recorder and the theorbo” (PC, 46), and Shasta as Prince Cor will have to learn “reading and writing and heraldry and dancing and history and music” (H&B, 178). Both are being given the Narnian version of the education of a Renaissance gentleman; music is one of the four subjects of the quadrivium because it teaches order and harmony. See H. R. Lyon, ed., The Middle Ages: A Concise Encyclopedia, 277; Donald Leman Clark, John Milton at St. Paul’s School, 3; and especially Paul A. Olson, The Journey to Wisdom, 194–99.

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and Jill, upon going through the door in the stone wall around Experiment House, see a blaze of sunshine and hear birds making a riotous noise: “but it was much more like music—rather advanced music which you don’t quite take in at the first hearing—than birds’ songs ever are in our world” (SC, 10). They are on Aslan’s mountain, we learn at the end of the story, which The Last Battle tells us is connected to, or is the outskirts of, heaven. The intricate (“advanced”) harmonies of the music—even, in the heavenly realm, of birds’ songs—captures the nature of that place, with its sense of order, harmony, and joy. But “advanced music” also takes us back to An Experiment in Criticism, where Lewis says that the best art is that which elicits and repays repeated readings or hearings. The phrase quietly, indirectly encourages readers to open themselves to serious music that is more difficult—and more rewarding—than tunes that can be taken in on first hearing. The music motif continues as Jill floats down from the mountains of Aslan’s Country toward Cair Paravel and hears “a sound of music” honoring the old, frail king as he boards the tall ship; then trumpets sound as the ship moves away from the quay (SC, 24, 30). The Green Witch plays a musical instrument rather like a mandolin, and her music has a hypnotic power (SC, 148). As the children, Puddleglum, and the prince escape, Rilian “whistled as he rode, and sang snatches of an old song about Corin Thunder-fist of Archenland” (SC, 166). The Gnomes recollect that they haven’t had song or a dance for a long time (SC, 171). As Jill emerges from the Underworld through the opening into Narnia, she hears “the music of four fiddles, three flutes, and a drum” accompanying the Great Snow Dance (SC, 185). And the final paragraph of the book tells how Narnians, on hot summer days, would go down through that opening with ships and lanterns and “sail to and fro, singing, on the cool, dark underground sea” (SC, 208). In all these references except for the Witch’s hypnotic strumming and “soft, musical laugh” (SC, 148), the presence of music signals freedom and well-being, while its absence accompanies bondage and disorder. Near the end of The Silver Chair, sustained background music creates a mood paralleling the events as they take place, like the background music in a movie. The return of Caspian’s ship to Narnia is greeted by hidden musicians playing “solemn, triumphal music,” which stopped as the king’s head fell in death, then “began again:

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this time, a tune to break your heart” (SC, 201, 202). The funeral music continued as Eustace and Jill returned to Aslan’s mountain, “though no one could tell where it came from,” music “so despairing” that it brought tears to Jill’s eyes (SC, 203). The music went on as they walked along a stream and found King Caspian’s body lying in it. As a drop of Aslan’s blood splashed into the stream over the dead body of the king, “the doleful music stopped” suddenly (SC, 204), and Caspian came back to life, not as a doddering old man but as a very young man or a boy, who now will live in the country from which the music in the opening chapter came, for ever and ever. Three themes are highlighted by Lewis’s uses of music throughout his works. Lewis often relies on music to convey occasions or atmospheres of festivity, celebration, and praise. Thus in Perelandra, following Tinidril’s first resistance of the Un-man’s advances, Ransom senses the triumphant celebration of the planet, or the universe, as “festal revelry and dance and splendour poured into him . . . in such fashion that it could not be . . . thought of except as music” (Per, chap. 8). In Prince Caspian music helps celebrate the victory over Miraz and the Telmarines: “Flutes were playing, cymbals clashing,” and there was “leaping and dancing and singing, with music and laughter and roaring and barking and neighing” (PC, 165, 170). When the schoolmistress in Beruna “looked out of the window and saw the divine revellers singing up the street, . . . a stab of joy went through her heart” (PC, 168–69). Similarly, in The Great Divorce, after the Angel kills the lizard and the formerly lustful ghost rides off toward the mountains as a new-made man, the whole plain shakes with a sound too large to hear in our world: “I knew it was not the Solid People who were singing. It was the voice of that earth, those woods and those waters,” singing a version of Psalm 110 adapted to this situation (GD, 94–95; chap. 11).32 As Sarah Smith approaches, she is accompanied by a band of singers and musicians: “If I could remember their singing and write down the notes,” says the narrator, “no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old” (GD, 97; chap. 12).33 And as she walks away, bright spirits come forward to receive her, singing a paraphrase of Psalm 91 (GD, 109–10; chap. 32. See Charles A. Huttar, “ ‘The Psalms,’ ” 342. 33. Charles Huttar has pointed out to me the similarity between this passage and Dante’s Paradiso 18:10–12; 20:10–12; 24:23ff; 33:55ff, 73, 94, 106ff, 121.

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13). Even the sound of the gigantic waterfall is musical, like the revelry of a whole college of giants singing and laughing together (GD, 45; chap. 6). Small wonder, then, that the tempter Screwtape warns Wormwood against “that detestable art which the humans call Music,” which expresses joy and is, therefore, “disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell” (SL, letter 11). “Music and silence—how I detest them both!” Screwtape fumes, and rejoices that great strides have been taken on earth toward replacing music with noise (SL, letter 22). A second major theme is Lewis’s use of music to convey imaginatively the order, unity, and harmony of the universe. The most important example of this theme, and one of the most dramatic uses of music anywhere in his writings, appears in the creation scene of The Magician’s Nephew. In the absolute darkness of the unknown place they fall into, Digory, Polly, Uncle Andrew, and Jadis hear a voice begin to sing, “the most beautiful noise [Digory] had ever heard, . . . so beautiful he could hardly bear it.” The voice is joined by other voices, more voices than one could count, singing “in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices.” A moment later the blackness overhead blazes with thousands and thousands of stars. Digory is quite certain “that it was the stars themselves who were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing” (MN, 87–88). Two things are striking about this passage in a book for children. One is the specific detail about music it employs. By assuming readers know about “harmony” and “scale,” it affirms music as something one should know about, something that can be experienced as almost unbearably beautiful. The other is the way Lewis’s use of music enables him to elaborate his creation story in ways that fire the imaginations of young readers, enabling them to hear the process as well as to visualize it step by step: “The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun rose” (MN, 90). Then the lion sang a new song, “softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass,” spreading out from the lion like a pool and running “up the sides of the little hills like a wave” (MN, 92). Then the song changed again: “It was more like what we should call a tune, but it

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was also far wilder. It made you want to run and jump and climb.” This song made the ground swell into humps of different sizes and from each hump burst an animal, with vivid detail describing their emergence: “Butterflies fluttered. Bees got to work on the flowers as if they hadn’t a second to lose. But the greatest moment of all was when the biggest hump broke like a small earthquake and out came the sloping back, the large, wise head, and the four baggy-trousered legs of an Elephant” (MN, 100, 101–2). By having the lion sing the song of creation, Lewis has quietly, unobtrusively put young readers in touch with an ancient tradition regarding the universe. In western culture music has long served as an image of the orderliness and harmony of the universe, particularly through the music of the spheres, which keeps the concentric hollow globes circling the earth in an orderly way. The image is grounded in Plato’s adaptation of Pythagorean notions about the beauty and proportion of numbers to the physical universe: “On the upper surface of each circle is a siren, who goes round with them, hymning a single tone or note. The eight together form one harmony.”34 By association with the myth of Amphion’s use of the lyre to erect a wall around Thebes, charming rocks and moving them into their proper places, music became also a symbol of creation, bringing order to what previously had been chaotic. Thus, in the divine creative act, the elements, scattered about “without form, and void” (Genesis 1:2), were drawn into order by the harmonizing power of music. The opening of John Dryden’s “A Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687” expresses this myth powerfully: From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony This universal Frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring Atomes lay, And cou’d not heave her Head, The tuneful Voice was heard from high, Arise ye more than dead.

34. Plato, The Republic, book 10 (617a), in The Dialogues of Plato, 3.334. The medieval world, wrote Lewis, was “resonant with music” (DI, 112). On traditional ideas about music, see John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1900.

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Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And Musick’s pow’r obey.35

In Dryden’s ode and Lewis’s creation account, the beauty, orderliness, and harmony of music are integrally related to the deepest structures of the universe—not that those structures are like music, but that they are formed of music and by music. Written in an era when order, harmony, and especially purposefulness are widely denied in the nature of things, Lewis’s story affirms them, not through philosophical argument or scientific demonstration, but through the imaginativeness of story and myth. A third thematic use of music involves its connection in Lewis’s mind with Sehnsucht, or intense longing, discussed above in chapter 1. In the preface added to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis distinguishes this from other longings in two ways: first, though the longing is acute and even painful, the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight; and second, there is mystery about the object of this desire—the things that stir the longings are not what we in fact are longing for.36 “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. . . . For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”37 Surprised by Joy tells the story of how Lewis slowly, step by step, learned that the longing is a desire for God implanted by God to draw us to him—a desire to be with God, in the presence of God, and thus a longing for heaven. In Lewis’s life and writings, recurring images are frequently associated with such longing. It “pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The 35. Dryden, Poems 1685–1692, 201. The ode, commissioned by the Musical Society for the annual celebration of the patroness of music on November 22, 1687, was set to music originally by G. B. Draghi, then more tellingly by Handel in 1739. The Draghi setting is available in a recording by the Playford Consort and Parlay of Instruments; many recorded versions of the Handel are available. 36. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1943), 7–8. 37. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 24.

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Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”38 Key images include autumn, “northernness,” distant hills, exotic gardens, the “Utter East” or the “Utter West,” and music,39 particularly the kind of music Samuel Pepys described as “so sweet that it ravished me and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick.”40 Lewis mentions several such musical experiences in letters to Arthur Greeves. In response to hearing Mrs. Kirkpatrick play some preludes of Chopin, he writes: “Aren’t they wonderful? . . . They are so passionate, so hopeless, I could almost cry over them: they are unbearable” (TST, 95). His next letter mentions how some combinations of words can give “a thrill like music” (TST, 96). On Christmas Eve, 1929, “the glorious windy noise of the bells overhead, the firelight & candlelight, and the beautiful music of unaccompanied boys’ voices, really carried me out of myself” (TST, 321). Music is frequently associated with heaven and the longing for heaven. In Mere Christianity, explaining the imagery used for heaven in the Bible, Lewis writes: “Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity” (MC, 3.10). In The Pilgrim’s Regress John hears “the sound of a musical instrument . . . very sweet and very short . . . so high and strange that he thought it was very far away, further than a star” and sees “a calm sea, and in the sea an island.” He experiences “a sweetness and a pang so piercing” that he longs to hear the music again and to go to that island (PR, 1.2). He undertakes a long journey in pursuit of his desire, but he learns that the island can be reached only through death. What John longs for is heaven. Such longings form an underlying theme in the Chronicles as well, and they are an important component of the imaginative experience in reading them. The most significant development of the theme appears in the character of Reepicheep in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” and it is closely associated with music. Reepicheep’s hope, in joining the voyage, is to reach the very eastern end of the world 38. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1943), 9–10. 39. See Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect, 87–91. 40. Lewis quotes this passage from Pepys’s Diary (entry for February 27, 1668) in his sermon entitled “Transposition,” 11.

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and there to find Aslan’s own country. When he was very young, a Dryad sang over him a song that epitomizes divine longing, or Sehnsucht, for Lewis: Where sky and water meet, Where the waves grow sweet, Doubt not, Reepicheep, To find all you seek, There is the utter East.

Although Reepicheep says he does not know what it means, “the spell of it has been on me all my life” (VDT, 17). Reepicheep’s life, like John’s, becomes a quest to reach the object of his desire. Because he feels the ship never gets on fast enough, he sits at its front, far forward on the bulwarks, “gazing out at the eastern horizon and singing softly in his little chirruping voice the song the Dryad had made for him” (VDT, 26). He keeps his goal constantly in mind, despite dangers, obstacles, and temptations along the way. When Lord Bern urges Caspian to abandon the search for the remaining lost lords and help solve the problems of the Lone Islands, Caspian declines: “I have an oath, my lord Duke. . . . And anyway, what could I say to Reepicheep?” (VDT, 53). At the Beginning of the End of the World, Reepicheep is told that, to break the spell that holds the sleeping lords, someone “must go on into the utter east and never return,” and he replies, “That is my heart’s desire” (VDT, 174). The description of the end of the world is one of the most dazzlingly imaginative and emotional passages in the Chronicles. As the Dawn Treader glides smoothly eastward through the lilies, the light becomes more brilliant, no one wants to eat or sleep, and everyone grows younger every day and is filled with joy and excitement. When the ship has gone as far as it can, the voyagers encounter things always associated for Lewis with Joy: “eastward, beyond the sun . . . a range of mountains . . . so high . . . they never saw the top of it”; and a breeze bringing both a smell and a sound, a musical sound they never forgot. “Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwards. Lucy could only say, ‘It would break your heart.’ ‘Why,’ said I, ‘was it so sad?’ ‘Sad! No,’ said Lucy” (VDT, 205–6). Reepicheep, quivering with happiness, glides away in his coracle

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up and over the wave that marks the world’s end, and the storyteller comments: “My belief is that he came safe to Aslan’s country and is alive there to this day” (VDT, 207). The account of Reepicheep’s longing for Aslan’s country is echoed by the longing of Edmund and Lucy in the final chapter to return to Narnia, which brings the story full circle. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” begins with Edmund and Lucy looking at a picture of a Narnian ship, talking about Narnia, and wondering when they will get back there—as they had been promised they would. At the end of the book, one of the most beautiful passages in the Chronicles expands that longing into their desire to follow Reepicheep into Aslan’s country. Lucy wants to know when she and Edmund will return to Narnia, and asks Aslan “oh, do, do, do make it soon,” but she is told they will never come back. Lucy begins sobbing and says, “It isn’t Narnia, you know. . . . It’s you. . . . How can we live, never meeting you?” She is reassured that they will meet him in their own world, though “there I have another name,” and that for them the way into Aslan’s country is from their world. They are not told how long or short their journey to his country will be, but for them, as for John in The Pilgrim’s Regress and for everyone, “it lies across a river” (VDT, 209). The theme of longing is carried one step further. As music serves as a vehicle of longing for Narnia and Aslan’s country for Reepicheep, Edmund, and Lucy, so the Narnia books themselves become vehicles of longing for many readers. For most young readers, that longing does not lead to chopping through the back wall of a wardrobe, as it did for the child whom Walter Hooper described (see above, p. 59n). It takes instead the form of reading the stories again and again and wanting to be in Narnia, imaginatively, as often as possible. But “this desire for our own far-off country,”41 in Lewisian terms, would not really be a longing for Narnia. Jill expresses the desire to have Narnia “go on for ever and ever and ever,” as young readers want it to for them, imaginatively. But Jewel cautions Jill, and the young readers, that “all worlds draw to an end; except Aslan’s own country” (LB, 84). As readers watch Narnia draw to an end in The Last Battle, they are carried by their imaginations beyond Narnia to the actual object of their desires, to the real Narnia, Lewis’s depiction of heaven and being in the presence of God. Jewel’s response 41. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 23.

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points the way for the reader to respond: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now” (LB, 162). Lewis’s words in Mere Christianity capture all this in terms Reepicheep and Jewel would readily recognize and accept: “I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must . . . make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same” (MC, 3.10). So too, Lewis hopes, will readers of the Chronicles, as expressed in the beautifully written paragraph culminating the series: “And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before” (LB, 173–74). It is significant that, despite the frequent association of music with imagings of longing and of heaven, music rarely is mentioned in The Last Battle. Although many people regard music as the thing “which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity” (MC, 3.10), this story depicts it instead through light, color, tastes, space, and freedom of movement. The only bits of music in The Last Battle are “the queer little marching song” of the dwarfs (LB, 71 and 82), the horrible sound of the Calormene war drum (LB, 113), the sound of Father Time’s horn (LB, 142), and the “great horn, wonderfully loud and sweet” that accompanies the opening of the great golden gates (LB, 167). The absence of music is noted once: “It was far too quiet. On an ordinary Narnian night there ought to have been noises . . . a flute in the distance to tell of Fauns dancing. . . . All that was silenced” (LB, 58). Although music characterizes the creation of Narnia, the absence of music characterizes its dissolution, and that perhaps is as it should be: the harmony and order established by music now crumble into dissonance and disorder. The crumbling is signaled by a final note, the sound of the last trumpet: “Then the great giant raised a horn to his mouth. . . . After that—quite a bit later, because sound travels so slowly—they heard the sound of the horn: high and terrible, yet of a strange, deadly beauty” (LB, 142). The absence of music from The Last Battle connects this story also to the creation myth Lewis

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drew upon in The Magician’s Nephew. As the opening section of “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687” illuminates Lewis’s handling of his creation story, so its concluding grand chorus, both Dryden’s words and Handel’s magnificent setting, illuminate his handling of Narnia’s return to chaos: As from the pow’r of sacred Lays The Spheres began to move, And sung the great Creator’s praise To all the bless’d above; So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling Pageant shall devour, The Trumpet shall be heard on high, The Dead shall live, the Living die, And Musick shall untune the Sky.

Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century writer whom Lewis loved and whom he resembles in several ways, found the image of music untuning the sky in the final lines “so awful in itself that it can owe little to poetry.”42 The account of night falling on Narnia is similarly powerful and disturbing. What makes it bearable, perhaps, especially for young readers, is that these are not the final words of the story. Night is followed by light, and the characters move further up and further in, to the real Narnia which is the true object of their desires. It would be hard to overstate the importance of music in Lewis’s life, thought, and works.43 It gave him great pleasure, informed his writing in a variety of ways, and as a source of longing helped lead to his return to acceptance of the Christian faith. He never talked of gaining spiritual enrichment from music, not even from the great choral or orchestral music of Bach or Handel. But music permeated his being, to the innermost part, and it permeates the Chronicles of Narnia, to their very core, shaping and directing the imaginative experience of young readers in the most crucial of ways.

42. Johnson, “Dryden,” 1.440. 43. For an approach slightly different from mine, but to which I am indebted, see Clyde S. Kilby and Linda J. Evans, “C. S. Lewis and Music.”


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“Notable Dances and Feasts” Lewis and Dance “ ‘I should like Balls infinitely better,’ said Caroline Bingley, ‘if they were carried on in a different manner. . . . It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.’ ‘Much more rational, I dare say,’ replied her brother, ‘but it would not be near so much like a Ball.’ ” Lewis quoted this passage from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice at least three times in essays and letters.1 Obviously he relished it, partly because he enjoyed Austen, whom he read throughout his life and spoke of as “our quiet, balanced & delicately humourous Jane Austen” (TST, 197). I suspect he was drawn to the passage also because of what it says about dance, an image that he used repeatedly in his works, usually to depict the nonrational (he would say supra-rational), the imaginative, even the mythical. The image of dance weaves through his thought and writings as a constant motif, particularly in the Chronicles of Narnia. It is intriguing that dance as an image had such appeal to someone who did not enjoy dancing. Lewis even had a persona closely resembling himself say he “can dance no better than a centipede with wooden legs.”2 In his late fifties, Lewis recounted with deep feeling 1. See Lewis’s 1948 contribution to Time and Tide, posthumously entitled “Priestesses in the Church?” 234; see also “Myth Became Fact,” 64, and Lewis to Arthur Greeves, August 13, 1930 (TST, 376). The quotation is from Pride and Prejudice, chap. 11. 2. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, letter 17. Lewis’s close friend Owen Barfield was “so gifted in the sphere of movement that at one time there was a serious question of his making a career in dancing” (A. C. Harwood, “Owen Barfield,” 32). In a diary entry for May 12, 1922, Lewis mentioned attending a music festival in Oxford, where he saw Barfield dance to music from orchestral suites by Bach and was struck by his “terrific, infectious gaiety” (AMR, 34). The following Saturday, May 20, Lewis “congratulated him on his dancing” (AMR, 37–38), and on January 26, 1923, he mentioned that Barfield stopped by after giving a dancing lesson (AMR, 185).

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his unpleasant memories of childhood dances: It was the custom of the neighborhood to give parties which were really dances for adults but to which, none the less, mere schoolboys and schoolgirls were asked. . . . To me these dances were a torment . . . the discomfort of one’s Eton suit and stiff shirt, the aching feet and burning head, and the mere weariness of being kept up so many hours after one’s usual bedtime. Even adults, I fancy, would not find an evening party very endurable without the attraction of sex and the attraction of alcohol; and how a small boy who can neither flirt nor drink should be expected to enjoy prancing about on a polished floor till the small hours of the morning, is beyond my conception.3

The appeal of dance for Lewis, it would seem, did not arise from experience with it as a participatory activity, or from viewing it as a spectator: in 1923 Lewis turned down a free seat at a folk dance, because “I really [do] not understand that sort of thing: I could be said to like dancing only as a girl who picnicked in a ruin could be said to like architecture” (AMR, 240).4 Its appeal came rather from its aesthetic and imaginative impact as an idea, or archetype, for the 3. SbyJ, 46–47. A dance was held at Lewis’s Belfast home, Little Lea, during the Christmas holidays in 1912. On November 28, 1913, Lewis wrote to his father: Talking about social functions reminds me of some wild fantastic talk of another dance this year. Don’t let us spoil the Xmas holidays by a chore as colossal as it is disagreeable, and as disagreeable as it is unnecessary. No one else gives a dance on two consecutive years. Nip this matter in the bud. . . . It is quite bad enough having to attend the functions of others without adding to the nuisance ourselves. Please convey to Aunt Annie and the other conspirators that you are determined not to hear of it. (Lewis Papers, 4.108) A week later he reiterated, “there MUST be no dance FOR ME; nor for any other rational being I hope,” and told his father to quash it: “You have your orders” (4.111). A week later he asked why he had not heard that the dance had been quashed: “You have your orders” (4.115). Warren added his objections in a letter dated December 6 (4.114). Since nothing more was said about a dance, it seems likely Albert Lewis acceded to his sons’ wishes. Warren asked his father in a letter the following February, “Is Uncle Gussie still cadging for a dance at Easter?” (4.136). 4. He wrote a year earlier, when a young woman staying in the house he and Mrs. Moore were sharing danced for them, “She seemed good to me but I know nothing of dancing” (AMR, 88).

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meaning it had collected over hundreds of years as authors Lewis loved dearly used it to depict a physical and metaphysical universe Lewis emotionally longed for and spiritually lived in.5 In the Western cultural tradition, music is better known than dance as an image of the creation of order and harmony in the universe; but an analogous and closely related myth has the universe becoming orderly and regular by being made to dance. Andrew Marvell’s retelling of how Amphion constructed the walls of Thebes illustrates the easy transition from the one myth to the other: “The rougher Stones, unto his Measures hew’d, / Dans’d up in order from the Quarryes rude.” Such use of dance as a cosmological symbol, like the use of music, can be traced to Plato, who, in the Timaeus, describes how the Creator fashioned the world after its eternal pattern: When all things were in disorder God created in each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in relation to each other, all the measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive. . . . The fixed stars were created, to be divine and eternal animals, everabiding and revolving after the same manner and on the same spot; and the other stars which reverse their motion. . . . Vain would be the attempt to tell all the figures of them circling as in dance, . . . and to say which of these deities in their conjunctions meet, and which of them are in opposition, and in what order they get behind and before one another.6

Used recurrently in the Middle Ages, especially in Neoplatonic writers, the image received its finest articulation in Sir John Davies’s long poem Orchestra, published in 1596; Lewis wrote of it, “Davies’s Orchestra gives us the right picture of the Elizabethan or Henrican universe; tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.” Davies’s narrator, Antinous, urging Penelope to dance with him, gives this explanation of the origin of dancing: 5. On Lewis’s use of dance and the backgrounds he drew upon, I am indebted to Roland M. Kawano, “C. S. Lewis and the Great Dance,” and an unpublished paper, “The Celestial Dance,” by Sarah E. Thomson. 6. Marvell, “The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.,” lines 51– 52, in Poems and Letters, 1.104. Plato, Timaeus, 69 and 40, in The Dialogues of Plato, 3.491 and 3.459.

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It is to this tradition that Doctor Cornelius refers when he assures Caspian that the stars Tarva and Alambil are not going to collide: “Nay, dear Prince, . . . the great lords of the upper sky know the steps of their dance too well for that” (PC, 40).8 This tradition is invoked when Ramandu, the star “at rest” in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” anticipates his reentry into “the great dance” (VDT, 175). The important thing in this image, for Lewis, is the worldview it affirms. It assumes that the universe is a cosmos, a harmonious system, and that human life, as an integral part of that whole, also has order, unity, and meaning. The universe is not engaged in disco dancing—unpatterned, chaotic, individualistic; it echoes instead the stately movement of the chorus in a Greek tragedy or the stylized formality of the country dance in an Austen novel: “The ladies and gentlemen ranged as two long rows facing one another, whilst the couples at the extreme ends danced down the set.”9 Lewis accepted that worldview—he responded to such imagery with an empathy impossible for most of his colleagues at Oxford and for the modern world as a whole: dinosaurs can dance, though the curators of museums may not recognize or be able to enter the movements.10 7. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, 4. Davies, “Orchestra, Or a Poeme of Dauncing,” stanzas 17–18, in The Poems of Sir John Davies, 94–95. 8. See also the opening lines of “Le Roi S’amuse,” in Lewis, Poems, 23. 9. Constance Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends, 58. 10. Cf. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 13–14. An exception to the majority view is Lewis’s contemporary, and friend later in their lives, T. S. Eliot, who

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Examples of dance can be found scattered throughout Lewis’s works. Dance is a central image in the unfinished poem Walter Hooper entitled The Nameless Isle. As the dwarf plays upon a magical flute, he turns into an elf; then heroes and horses that had been turned to stone are disenchanted and begin to dance round him: dancing “in order” and dancing in love, they encircle the unmarbled lady and bring her to the narrator, “blushing as it were a bride mortal, / To hold to her heart my head as I kneeled.”11 In “Pindar Sang,” the chorus of beautiful young men “danced his ode.”12 In The Great Divorce, a group of bright spirits, “who danced and scattered flowers,” lead the procession that accompanies Sarah Smith (GD, 97; chap. 12). We see no dancing in Out of the Silent Planet, but we are told in the postscript of the “great crested hross—ten feet high, a dancer rather than a singer.” And in That Hideous Strength, the members of the company at St. Anne’s dance as a festive response to the approach of the Oyarsa of Jupiter: The chairs were pushed back, the floor cleared. They danced. . . . It seemed to each that the room was filled with kings and queens, that the wildness of their dance expressed heroic energy, and its quieter movements had seized the very spirit behind all noble ceremonies. (THS, 15.1)

On the other hand, no one dances in The Pilgrim’s Regress (though the Clevers like the music of the jazz age, Lewis does not show them in flapper-type dancing), or Perelandra (except the last chapter— perhaps because the entire world is engaged in a sort of spiritual ballet), or Till We Have Faces (reflecting the joyless and disordered affections of the narrator), or The Magician’s Nephew (although the used dance as a symbol in “Burnt Norton” (see note 20 below) and “East Coker,” where he borrowed language directly from his ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Governour: “In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie” (Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950, 124). 11. Lewis, Narrative Poems, 121–23. See Roland M. Kawano, “C. S. Lewis and ‘The Nameless Isle’: A Metaphor of a Major Change.” 12. Lewis, Poems, 15. Passing references to literal dance also appear in “The Magician and the Dryad” (line 2), “The Landing” (line 18), “The Small Man Orders His Wedding” (line 4), and “Infatuation” (stanza 7)—Poems, 8, 27, 31, 74. In Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis writes, “The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance” (chap. 5).

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creation scene includes the appearance of stars and a sun, the emphasis is on filling a world with natural life rather than on setting the universal dance in motion). Dancing appears frequently as a metaphor, though less frequently than music does. For example, in Till We Have Faces, as Orual reaches the top of the holy mountain, an inner voice seems to ask her, “Why should your heart not dance?” and the beauty of all that is around her makes her feel as if she had misjudged the world: “It seemed kind, and laughing, as if its heart also danced” (TWHF, 1.9); in the following chapter, Psyche asks her the same question (TWHF, 1.10). In The Great Divorce the sound of the gigantic waterfall is “like giants’ laughter: like the revelry of a whole college of giants together laughing, dancing, singing, roaring at their high works” (GD, 45; chap. 6). Inside the back cover of his copy of G. K. Chesterton’s Fancies versus Fads Lewis noted that page 14 discusses “Rhyme like swimming or dancing.” In The Allegory of Love he wrote, “In Montgomerie we seem to hear the scrape of the fiddle and the beat of dancing on the turf: in Googe, the ticking of a metronome” (AofL, 259). And, attempting to convey to Arthur Greeves the effect on him of reading the Paradiso, he described it in part as “like a slow dance, or like flying” (TST, 326).13 Dancing occurs or is mentioned at least thirty times in the Chronicles of Narnia. Tumnus tells Lucy, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, about midnight dances when the Nymphs and Dryads “came out to dance with the Fauns” (LWW, 12). Such a midnight 13. Other examples include, “ ‘What is it, Aslan?’ said Lucy, her eyes dancing and her feet wanting to dance” (PC, 165); “the reflections of the sunlit water dancing on the ceiling of her cabin” (VDT, 54–55); “The water danced brightly in the early sunlight” (H&B, 43); “The waterfall keeps the pool always dancing and bubbling and churning” (LB, 2). Also, “In Williams the two sides lived in a perpetual dance or lover’s quarrel of mutual mockery” (preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, xii). “And then one or other dies . . . like a dance stopped in mid career” (A Grief Observed, chap. 3). “Cast aloft by the fountains with their soft foam, / A tremor of light was dancing in the emerald dome” (“Solomon,” lines 3–4—Poems, 46). “I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz” (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” 24). See also Lewis, Poems, 36, 51; Narrative Poems, 91, 97, 146, and 165; and Spirits in Bondage, 16, 34, 55. Lewis’s copy of Fancies versus Fads is now in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

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dance takes place in Prince Caspian, with Fauns dancing and Caspian, and then even the dwarf Trumpkin, joining in (PC, 67). On a different night Lucy sees the trees move in and out through one another “as if in a complicated country dance” (PC, 114). Later, Bacchus and Silenus lead a romp across the countryside freeing those who have been held by the constraints of Miraz (PC, 165– 70). Still later, Bacchus, Silenus, and the Maenads join in “a magic dance of plenty” (PC, 177). Aravis in The Horse and His Boy dances before her father (H&B, 31), and Shasta, after he becomes Prince Cor, complains that he will have to be educated and learn “reading and writing and heraldry and dancing” (H&B, 178). And in The Last Battle, Jewel the Unicorn tells Jill about whole centuries in which “notable dances and feasts” were “the only things that could be remembered” (LB, 84). These allusions bring dance before readers repeatedly, but mostly unobtrusively, as a beautiful and meaningful artistic expression, suitable for boys and men as well as girls and women. By far the most beautiful and memorable dance in the Chronicles is the one Jill Pole sees when she emerges from the underworld in The Silver Chair. She finds Fauns and Dryads doing a dance—a dance with so many complicated steps and figures that it took you some time to understand it. . . . Circling round and round the dancers was a ring of Dwarfs. . . . As they circled round they were all diligently throwing snowballs, . . . throwing them through the dance in such perfect time with the music and with such perfect aim that if all the dancers were in exactly the right places at exactly the right moments, no one would be hit. This is called the Great Snow Dance and it is done every year in Narnia on the first moonlit night when there is snow on the ground. (SC, 185–86)

The placement and effect of the dance are striking: the Underworld from which Jill is emerging had been a totally repressive regime where a tyrant allowed no freedom and citizens (or slaves) forgot how to “make a joke or dance a jig” (SC, 172). There was order, but it was the mechanized orderliness of a march, not the interactive patternings of a dance. The first thing Jill sees as she emerges is a dance that epitomizes Narnian society, a perfect blending of order and freedom. One feels in the passage delight and eeriness, structure and wildness, harmony and festivity.

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Dance does not seem to be something Lewis thought of for himself or his characters as a planned activity done purely for pleasure, or as a performance he would want to attend.14 Rather, it is a spontaneous celebration or a ceremonial occasion, and it is valued for what it expresses or stands for, rather than for what it is. The numerous uses of dance in the Chronicles convey to readers the kind of metaphorical and symbolic meanings Lewis embodies when dance appears in other works. Although infrequent, these are important as thoughtful, deliberate ways to encapsulate traditional values, illustrated by the appearance of dance as a figure in four vital passages in That Hideous Strength, Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. In the first, near the end of Ransom’s initial meeting with Jane, as they discuss obedience and marriage, Ransom says, “But you see that obedience and rule are more like a dance than a drill—especially between man and woman where the roles are always changing” (THS, 7.2). The dance metaphor draws together a key theme of the novel. Mark and Jane’s marriage serves as a paradigm of the larger struggle of independence against authority throughout the novel: a struggle that involves the St. Anne’s group and the N.I.C.E. as well as Jane and Mark personally. Mark and Jane must learn that obedience is different from servility and that authority is different from arbitrary tyranny, and then learn that “equality is not the deepest thing” (THS, 7.2).15 Each must recognize that humility and obedience are rooted in love (which, in Davies, set the universe dancing), and that the source of love is Christ. “More like a dance than a drill” captures in one image issues central to the two levels of the plot: the contrast between St. Anne’s (like a dance) and the N.I.C.E. (like a drill) on one level, and the ideal for Mark and Jane’s marriage on the other. It claims as true for St. Anne’s, and for marriage, what Lewis said about the knights of Charles Williams’s Camelot: “There is, inside

14. I have found only one reference to Lewis attending a ballet or dance concert. In an undated letter from October 1914, he wrote to his father, “Last week I went up to town with Mrs. K[irkpatrick] . . . to the Coliseum to see the Russian ballet, which was very good” (Lewis Papers, 4.234). He told Arthur Greeves it was magnificent and he enjoyed it, but “I had sooner have gone to some musical thing” (TST, 58). 15. See John H. Timmerman, “Logres and Britain: The Dialectic of C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength.” Compare to the section on equality in chapter 4 above, pp. 65–66.

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the company, no real slavery or real superiority. Slavery there becomes freedom and dominion becomes service. As willed necessity is freedom, so willed hierarchy becomes equality.”16 Dance metaphors in Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain are closely related to those in That Hideous Strength. In his radio talks, Lewis, attempting to clarify the difficult and abstract doctrine of the Trinity, says that “the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons,” since love is an activity between different individuals. Then he continues: “In Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance” (MC, 4.4). Groping for a way to express the inexpressible, Lewis turns to an image which has divine associations for him because of its archetypal overtones and which readily unites his understanding of God with the Western cultural myth. That it should even occur to him to compare God to a dance can be understood from Plato. Plato emphasizes that the act of creation involves correspondences between the world and its pattern, and the creation and the Creator. If creation can be viewed as a dance, so too, by correspondence, can the Creator: Lewis simply follows through and concretizes what is implicit in the Timaeus.17 And in doing so he relates the nature of God to the attributes of the universe dance has traditionally imaged: dance is active, orderly, and hierarchical, and Lewis deliberately attaches those qualities to God. The metaphor also posits qualities about the human–divine encounter: it affirms that the human response to God must be active and involved—one can know God authentically only by entering into relation with him and participating in the activity that makes 16. Lewis, “Williams and the Arthuriad,” 142. Lewis uses “dance” to image the same idea in A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” where he refers to “the life of beatitude as one of order—an intricate dance, so intricate that it seems irregular precisely when its regularity is most elaborate” (78) and calls the paradox of discipline and freedom, in an unfallen world, a “pattern deep hidden in the dance, hidden so deep that shallow spectators cannot see it” (79–80). For Williams on slavery and dance, see Letters to Lalage: The Letters of Charles Williams to Lois Lang-Sims, especially 10; also, 36, 42, 47, 82. See also Williams’s “A Dialogue on Hierarchy,” where the dance runs all through, although the word is never mentioned. 17. Plato, Timaeus, 29–30, in The Dialogues of Plato, 3.450.

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him what he is. “The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this threePersonal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made” (MC, 4.4). Similarly, in Miracles Lewis writes, “The partner who bows to Man in one movement of the dance receives Man’s reverences in another.”18 And in The Problem of Pain, to explain the hellish quality of selfhood and the heavenly quality of self-giving, Lewis writes: “But when [the golden apple of selfhood] flies to and fro among the players too swift for eye to follow, and the great master Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance ‘makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.’ ”19 The Chronicles capture such creature–divine interaction most fully through the dancing in chapter 11 of Prince Caspian. Aslan’s roar, “deep and throbbing at first like an organ,” awakens the Dryads, who circle around Aslan in a dance, bowing and curtseying in adoration. As Bacchus and Silenus, with their retinue, join in, the dance becomes faster and more celebratory (PC, 129–33). Next morning, Aslan leads the divine revelry, liberating those who are willing to follow him and enter the dance: “And so at last, with leaping and dancing and singing, with music and laughter and roaring and barking and neighing, they all came to the place where Miraz’s army stood flinging down their swords and holding up their hands” (PC, 170). 18. Lewis, Miracles, chap. 14. The participatory nature of the human–divine encounter, as well as of the reading process, is conveyed also in A Preface to “Paradise Lost”: “We are summoned not to hear what one particular man thought and felt about the Fall, but to take part, under his leadership, in a great mimetic dance of all Christendom, ourselves soaring and ruining from Heaven, ourselves enacting Hell and Paradise, the Fall and the repentance” (chap. 8). 19. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, chap. 10. The quotation is from the fourth chapter of Anthony Trollope’s 1861 novel, Framley Parsonage: “When [ministers] speak [in the cabinet room], is the music of the spheres audible in their Olympian mansion, making heaven drowsy with its harmony?” Lewis also uses dance, in a metaphor closely related to this one, for the object of Joy, that is, the heavenly world and the presence of God: “For a few minutes [in an experience of Joy] we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. . . . We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance” (“The Weight of Glory,” 29).

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In Letters to Malcolm Lewis (or rather the persona he creates) halfapologizes for his use of such “frivolous” figures of speech for spiritual matters: “There! I’ve done it again. I know that my tendency to use images like play and dance for the highest things is a stumblingblock to you.” But he further explains and justifies them because no “serious” imagery from our world can convey at all adequately the utter beauty and blessedness of heaven. In particular it cannot possibly convey the reconciliation in heaven of what on earth are direct opposites, “of boundless freedom with order—with the most delicately adjusted, supple, intricate, and beautiful order” (LtoM, letter 17). “Dance” is Lewis’s best attempt to convey all of this, inadequate though he knows the attempt ultimately must be. So it is in the magnificent scene in the final chapter of Perelandra. Near the end of his stay on Perelandra, Ransom, confused by the complexity of all that he has experienced since his arrival on the planet, doubting for the moment the coherence of things, fearing that all is mere chance or chaos, is allowed a glimpse of the Great Dance to which Doctor Cornelius and Ramandu referred: What had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity—only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. (Per, chap. 17)

Ransom is shown, not what the universe looks like, but the Truth about what it actually is like. The details in Perelandra, particularly in the twenty sections of the closing litany, celebrate the Dance and the Lord of the Dance. Christ is the center of the Dance, but he is constantly moving so that the center is everywhere and everywhere is the center: Each grain is at the centre. The Dust is at the centre. The Worlds are at the centre. The beasts are at the centre. The ancient peoples are

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there. The race that sinned is there. Tor and Tinidril are there. The gods are there also. Blessed be He! Where Maleldil is, there is the centre. He is in every place. . . . Each thing was made for Him. He is the centre. Because we are with Him, each of us is at the centre.20

The dancing figures are used to emblematize hierarchy and wholeness: “In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed. Thus each is equally at the centre and none are there by being equals, but some by giving place and some by receiving it. . . . Blessed be He. . . .” They also emblematize correspondence, relation, and truth: All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. . . . Set your eyes on one movement and it will lead you through all patterns and it will seem to you the master movement. But the seeming will be true. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre. Blessed be He! (Per, chap. 17)

Lewis, in his fiction and other writings, took for granted the truth and relevance of the Old Western model he described in The Discarded Image, as discussed above in chapter 1. That model affirms a universe full of life sympathetic with and interacting with other levels of life—an elaborate cosmology with a hierarchy of created orders, physical and spiritual, all of it unified by a single supernatural reality whose Good and presence are sought by the immortal souls of people finding and accepting their place in the whole.21 The fullest image for capturing that model is “a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all these in one.”22 20. Compare T. S. Eliot’s lines in the second section of “Burnt Norton” (1936; the first of his Four Quartets): “At the still point of the turning world . . . there the dance is. . . . And do not call it fixity, / Where past and future are gathered. . . . Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” Helen Gardner has stated that Eliot borrowed from the dance of the Tarot figures in Charles Williams’s 1932 novel, The Greater Trumps (The Art of T. S. Eliot, 161), and Eliot acknowledged his indebtedness to Williams. Lewis surely had read all of Williams’s novels and is not likely to have forgotten Williams’s dance image. 21. See Robert Houston Smith, Patches of Godlight: The Pattern of Thought of C. S. Lewis, chaps. 2 and 4. 22. Lewis, “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” 60.

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If myth is a dance, it is participatory—one must enter the dance imaginatively. A wallflower doesn’t know the dance—only a visual image, a shadow of the real thing. To experience the dance one must step into it, yield to its rhythms, become involved imaginatively and emotionally. The Great Dance passage in Perelandra expresses all this in high literary and imaginative art: nearly pure poetry, but also nearly pure myth. Beyond imaging the Old Western myth, dance images myth itself. Myth is not nearly so rational as conversation, or as realistic fiction, but it is much more like a ball: it is imagination in motion, it reflects wholeness, unity, and harmonic pattern, it celebrates the richness and plurality of things. The last chapter of Perelandra and the best episodes in the Chronicles of Narnia provide ways to enter the dance, to extend our understanding of its manifold and intricate movements, to appreciate its influence upon the quality of our personal and spiritual lives. One enters the dance of myth by reading imaginatively: the Chronicles of Narnia and Lewis’s other mythical works are “a ball”; dancing, not conversation, is the order of the day.

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1. Early twentieth-century HMV gramophone. Courtesy of Joe Rieping.

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2. George Frederic Watts gallery, Compton, Surrey.

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3. The Priory Church of Great Malvern.

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4. The Priory Church of Great Malvern.

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5. St. Nicholas Church, Great Bookham.

6. St. Nicholas Church, Great Bookham.

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7. Wells Cathedral. Photo by Elliot Tanis.

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8. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Photo by Douglas Gilbert.

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9. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Photo by Douglas Gilbert.

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10. Salisbury Cathedral.

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11. All Souls College, Oxford.

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12. The Church of St. Mary the Virgin Oxford.

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13. C. S. Lewis, 1938.

8




“Glimpses of Heaven in the Earthly Landscape” Lewis and Art, Architecture, and Clothing “I can remember no time when we were not incessantly drawing,” Lewis wrote of himself and his brother as young boys (SbyJ, 6). Drawing is important to understanding Lewis because it is the only art form that he practiced actively—one he kept up through much of his life; but it is important also because it became his entry point to the visual arts as a whole. Whether his earliest attempts at drawing preceded or followed his first exposure to books, pictures in books definitely influenced his attention to art. He noted, late in his life, that “my earliest acquaintance with the draughtsman’s or the painter’s art was wholly through the illustrations to books. Those to Beatrix Potter’s Tales were the delight of my childhood; Arthur Rackham’s to The Ring, that of my schooldays” (EinC, 14).1 From schooldays on, his interest in the visual arts grew, though it never came to equal his love of music. The visual arts, like music and dance, appear regularly throughout Lewis’s writings, but they are especially prominent in the Narnia books. Like music and dance, the visual arts are used to convey deeper meanings in the Chronicles, 1. In Surprised by Joy Lewis mentions remembering among his early reading a “lavishly illustrated” copy of Gulliver’s Travels (SbyJ, 14). According to William Swetcharnik, “He was fascinated and delighted by the humanized animals of Lewis Carroll, and the Dalziel illustrations to Mother Goose, and the animal cartoons in Punch by Tenniel, Sambourne, and Partridge” (Swetcharnik, “C. S. Lewis and Visual Art,” 3). The strongest continuing influence was Rackham’s illustrations to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, which he encountered first as a single picture reproduced in a literary periodical he happened upon at Cherbourg House. Later, after seeing the volume itself at his cousin’s house, he, with the help of his brother, purchased a fifteen-shilling reprint of the book. He loved the wild fantasy of Rackham’s romantic style, which “seemed to me then to be the very music [of Wagner] made visible” (SbyJ, 75).

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pointing toward divine beauty and greatness, and they are central to the imaginative experience of reading them, for all readers, both children and adults. Drawing was an activity Lewis engaged in first on his own and later in school. He observes in his autobiography, “From a very early age I could draw movement—figures that looked as if they were really running or fighting—and the perspective is good” (SbyJ, 6). Early in his life, Lewis, Warren, and their father all drew pictures of ships.2 Between the ages of eight and fourteen, Lewis wrote and illustrated stories about “Animal-Land,” which later was combined with Warren’s “India” to form Boxen. Examples of illustrations in black and white can be found on almost every page of Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis; three ink and watercolor illustrations and several others in black and white are reprinted in C. S. Lewis: Images of His World.3 In addition to the drawing Lewis did at home, it was also part of the curriculum at Cherbourg House and Malvern College, two of the schools he and his brother attended (perhaps at Wynyard School as well, though neither Lewis nor Warren mentions it). Warren’s school report for his final term at Malvern, spring 1913, includes “DRAWING. Has some ability” (Lewis Papers, 4.55). That fall, in Lewis’s first term at Malvern, he wrote to his father that he did not have time to keep up both drawing and Shakespeare, though he would like to continue both (Lewis Papers, 4.77), and a week later he wrote, “I think it would be best if you were to write to the Old Boy [S. R. James, headmaster at Malvern] about my giving up drawing” (Lewis Papers, 4.80). Meanwhile, an “exciting thing” happened, as described to his father: “One of the questions in our weekly exam was to draw a picture illustrating an incident in the book of Cicero which we’re reading. My picture was marked top and pinned up on the form room door for several days. The James came down and said it was ‘spirited’—which may mean anything” (Lewis Papers, 4.85).4 Lewis

2. George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times, 16. 3. Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S. Kilby, C. S. Lewis: Images of His World, 98–103. 4. A letter reporting this incident to his brother appears in the Lewis Papers, 4.78–79. Warren mentions it in a letter to their father, adding plaintively, “That was one of the few distinctions I used to get in that form” (4.89).

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told his father in December about a chance meeting with Mr. Taylor, his former drawing master at Cherbourg House, who “was very distressed because he had heard that I had given up my drawing at the Coll., but was consoled by my assurance that it was only a temporary fixture so long as it clashed with English” (Lewis Papers, 4.115). Lewis’s interest in drawing continued in later years. In June 1915, Lewis told Arthur Greeves, “I scribble at pen and ink sketches a bit, and have begun to practise female faces which have always been my difficulty. I am improving a very little I think, and the margins of my old Greek lexicon as well as my pocket book now swarm with ‘studies’ ” (TST, 79; see also 85). A month later he asked Arthur “to help me to improve my drawing next hols. Figures I can do tolerably, but from you I must learn the technique of the game—shading, curves, how to do a background without swamping the figures etc. Of course this will all be in pen and ink which is the best medium for my kind of work—I can imagine your smile at my calling such scribbles ‘work,’ but no matter” (TST, 80). In 1922 he drew pictures for a school sale, including “an Indian ink drawing of which Arthur approved parts” (AMR, 64). In 1932 he had great fun sketching the maps for the end leaves of The Pilgrim’s Regress (TST, 452). The letters to Arthur frequently include drawings to illustrate scenes from books (such as Grendel stalking up from his “fen and fastness” or the mist scene from Scott’s Guy Mannering), or to clarify his descriptions such as that of a dovecote he saw in a French village, of the Castle of Dunster as it stands on a little wooded hill just at the mouth of a long valley, and of the incredible sunset he saw when he sailed out of Waterford in August 1933 (TST, 144, 210, 272, 457).5 Drawings are sprinkled throughout his letters to children, along with comments on pictures and drawings children sent to him and discussions of the drawing process:

5. For other examples, see TST, 154, 156, 163, 277, 279, 288, and 390.

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6

He drew two sketches of Dufflepuds, to show Pauline Baynes how they should look.7 None of the characters in the Chronicles engage in drawing. On endless rainy afternoons, the Pevensie children explore and play hide-and-seek, rather than—like the Lewis brothers—read, write, and draw. Perhaps Polly drew illustrations for the “story she was writing” and kept in the dark place behind the cistern (MN, 6), but that is not stated specifically. Lewis’s lifelong interest in drawing does help explain his choice of Pauline Baynes as illustrator of the Chronicles. If “pen and ink . . . is the best medium for my kind of work” as an amateur artist, it follows that a classic pen and ink style would fit his image of the best medium for his kind of fairy tales for children. Beyond that, the classic pen and ink style would fit a motif the last two chapters have developed, of subtly educating and encouraging young readers toward openness to and participation in the arts. Upon seeing pen and ink illustrations, children might begin themselves to draw sketches, using the pictures they see in 6. Lewis, letter to his godchild Sarah Neylan, February 11, 1945. First published in Letters to Children, 22–24 and endpapers. 7. The drawings are reproduced in Charles A. Huttar, ed., Imagination and the Spirit: Essays in Literature and the Christian Faith presented to Clyde S. Kilby, 313. Lewis had undoubtedly seen drawings of monopods in medieval manuscripts. For a late example, see the drawing of a Skiapod in Malcolm Letts, Sir John Mandeville: The Man and his Book, illustration no. 8, opposite page 80. Mandeville describes the Skiapods as a cheerful race who, like the Dufflepuds (VDT, 138– 39), lie on their backs, each using its single foot as an umbrella for protection from the sun.

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their books as models and inspiration.8 Good as the more elaborate and colorful illustrations by Michael Hague (see above, page 32n) may be, they play a different role in affecting young readers’ imaginations: children can admire and enjoy them but are less likely to be inspired by them to draw or to use them as models for their own art.9 Looking back on his early drawings from more than forty years later, Lewis comments that he strove for action, comedy, and invention, but did not achieve beauty. There was, he says, no sense of design or natural form. In fact, the absence of beauty was characteristic of his childhood: “No picture on the walls of my father’s house ever attracted—and indeed none deserved—our attention” (SbyJ, 6).10 Perhaps that reflected Belfast as a whole: in a 1914 letter to Arthur Greeves, he inquired about Arthur’s progress in art, and joshingly supposed that it was already being exhibited, then paused: “Where? Here the sentence comes to a stop: for I have suddenly realized that there is no picture gallery in Belfast. It never occurred to me before what a disgrace that was” (TST, 60). 8. In his letters to children Lewis comments on Narnia pictures sent to him by children (Letters to Children, 31–32, 38, 39, 40, 67) and suggests to other children drawing a map (104) or writing Narnia tales of their own (99, 101, 104), presumably with illustrations. 9. The Chronicles have evoked some excellent artwork, in addition to Hague’s. See, for example, several drawings on covers of Mythlore: Stephen Peregrine’s of Aslan and Eustace as dragon (8.3 [Autumn 1981]); Sarah Beach’s of the Great Snow Dance (14.2 [Winter 1987]); and Tim Callahan’s “Edmund and the White Witch” (14.4 [Summer 1988]). See also the fine depiction of Lucy and Tumnus by Kathleen Chaney Fritz on the cover of my book Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia and the striking painting of Aslan by Robert Cording in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. 10. After the sale of the contents of Little Lea in 1930 following Albert Lewis’s death, Warren wrote in his diary, “The pictures were, as I suspected, worthless, but I’m surprised that the frames were not worth more: here are some of the prices: the old lady reading the newspaper, £1.0.0: large painting of a girl in the dining room, 19/-: and the old woman with the child 15/-.” He then reminisced about “that fisher girl who has watched over so many hundreds of family meals in the dining room” (Lewis Papers, 11.87). Albert Lewis, in his diary, Christmas 1925, noted: “The boys arrived on Sunday 20th December, both looking well and in great spirits. Previous to their arrival they had sent on from London as my Xmas present a Medici print—an excellent picture and one which I am glad to have” (W. H. Lewis, “C. S. Lewis: A Biography” [see above p. 92, note 7], 173– 74; on Medici prints, see below, note 13). This picture is not referred to again; presumably the brothers shipped it to Oxford, rather than including it in the auction.

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By his mid-teens he had acquired some knowledge of and appreciation for art and beauty. He wrote to Arthur in May 1915 of a visit to the little village of Compton in Surrey where George Frederic Watts, the painter, lived: “There is a little gallery, a lovely building, designed by himself, containing some of his quite famous pictures . . . which I always thought were in the Louvre or the Tate or some such place” (see photo 2, p. 126). With all the bravado of a highly intelligent adolescent, he continued: “Of course I don’t really quite understand good painting, but I did my best, and succeeded in really enjoying some myself, & persuading the other people that I knew a tremendous lot about them all” (TST 73).11 A. C. Harwood notes that when Lewis stayed with him in London, “there were many visits to theatres and picture galleries. I remember especially walking with him to the charming little gallery in Dulwich and his delight in the classical landscapes of Poussin.”12 Subsequent references to art are not frequent, but they are sufficient to indicate Lewis’s continuing involvement. He told Arthur in 1917 that the “chief event in things of art this week” had been his discovery of Albrecht Dürer, the sixteenth-century German painter and engraver (TST, 184). He came across some postcard reproductions of Dürer’s pictures, bought some, and liked them greatly, partly because they were precursors to Rackham’s style. After the war, in 1919, he bought copies of two drawings by Dürer, S. Jerome and The Prodigal Son, which he described at length for Arthur (TST, 246). He had them framed and, three months later, mentioned that his attempt at distempering the walls of his new rooms had turned out excellently and “suits the two Dürers very well and also the Venus” (TST, 251). In 1923 he described cutting reproductions of works by Leyden, Van Dyck, and Vecchio out of a magazine and framing them (AMR, 273). The following year he wrote that his Aunt Lily had given him three prints, including one of Giotto’s Francis before Honorius, which later hung in his rooms at Magdalen

11. Nine years later he wrote in his diary, “I am only partially able to appreciate [prints and paintings]—I can get the satisfying, unwearying decorative effect and the sentimental pleasure and a little of the naïf pleasure in the mere seeing things wh. the people for whom they were painted had in them” (AMR, 303). 12. Harwood, “A Toast to the Memory of C. S. Lewis, Proposed at Magdalen College, July 4th, 1975,” 4.

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College (AMR, 303 and note). Warren’s diary in 1930 makes reference to inspecting Jack’s “two new Medici prints”;13 later that year, Warren and Lewis took one of the prints to the Kilns, soon after Lewis and Mrs. Moore moved there (“J sitting perched on the seat [of the sidecar on Warren’s motorbike] with his knees up to his chin, clutching one of the Medicis, which completely obscured his view”).14 No one, as far as I can discover, knows what the two Medici prints were. Perhaps one was The Origin of the Milky Way by Tintoretto. Peter Bayley says it was the only picture on the walls of the New Buildings room at Magdalen where Lewis gave his tutorials. A picture of which Lewis was very fond was Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, a copy of which, according to Walter Hooper, Lewis had possessed since he was an undergraduate. It hung in his rooms at Magdalen— visible in a 1947 photo by A. P. Strong of Lewis standing with legs crossed, leaning against some cupboards. Lewis apparently moved it with him to Cambridge in 1955—Hooper reports having brought it back to Oxford when he emptied Lewis’s Magdalene College rooms after Lewis retired in 1963. A copy of the Wilton Diptych sat on Lewis’s desk in his college rooms and later in the common room of the Kilns, and a detail of the Turin shroud, a gift from Sister Penelope, hung in his bedroom, across from his bed. A photo of the Kilns 13. W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, 36. The Medici Society was founded in 1908 for the purpose of producing high-quality photographic reproductions of Old Master prints using a recently improved collotype process. A contemporary magazine affirmed that “nothing of the kind so good and so cheap has ever been issued before” (Sophie Dickins, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 21:32). 14. W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 36, 71. In his diary for June 18, 1930, Warren mentioned sending for a Medici catalogue, “having resolved that the first result of my altered finances [money from his father’s estate] will be three or four really good pictures, things which I have always wanted” (Lewis Papers, 11.78). On July 28, 1930, he recorded the arrival of one print: “At last my Claude [picture by Claude Lorraine] has arrived and is now hung over the fire place [in his room at Bulford military base]” (Lewis Papers, 11.95). The diary reports, with obvious satisfaction, that Lewis admired the Claude when he visited Warren in August (Lewis Papers, 11.103; W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 62). On August 6 Warren anticipated receipt of another picture: “Began the day well with a letter from the Medici people to say that my Breughel is being sent off by goods train today” (Lewis Papers, 11.100). Warren recorded a visit to the National Gallery in 1930, where “I renewed my acquaintance with a lot of old favourites” (Lewis Papers, 11.21; W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 45).

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sitting room shows an unidentifiable picture over the fireplace, but photos show that most walls in the Kilns and in Lewis’s rooms, if not lined with books, were unadorned.15 As to paintings, Lewis in 1922, having time on his hands in London, “took the desperate resolve of entering the National Gallery, where I finally came to the conclusion that I have no taste for painting” (AMR, 95). Perhaps; but a deep and continuing interest in art is revealed in a letter late in Lewis’s life to Christopher Derrick: “Yes, I jolly well have read Gombrich and give him alpha with as many plusses as you please. The writers on art have hopelessly outstripped the writers on literature in our period. Seznec, Wind, and Gombrich are a very big three indeed” (Letters, August 10, 1962).16 This might, however, represent more of an academic interest in the contribution of art to cultural history than an interest in the aesthetic pleasures art can afford. Paintings appear occasionally in Lewis’s stories. Ransom sees some stone carvings made by the pfifltriggi, but he misses Malacandra’s finest art because he does not visit the homes of the pfifltriggi, splendid buildings with “all the world painted on the walls” (OSP, chap. 17). There are, as yet, no paintings on Perelandra. There must have been paintings decorating the walls at Belbury, but they are not mentioned. The only ones referred to are the surrealistic paintings in the Objective Room: “There was a portrait of a young woman who held her mouth wide open to reveal the fact that the inside of it was thickly overgrown with hair” and “a man with corkscrews instead of arms” (THS, 14.1). No visual arts are mentioned at St. Anne’s: the one room described is called “austere and conventual” (THS, 3.3). The only paintings in Till We Have Faces are those in the cool chamber to which the Fox takes Orual in one of her visions: “I 15. Bayley, “From Master to Colleague,” 77. Information from Walter Hooper is from a conversation with the author on July 11, 2001. The Strong photo can be found in the photo section of Sayer, Jack, and in Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C. S. Lewis, 91. Sayer notes that this is the photo chosen to represent Lewis in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The photo of the Kilns sitting room can be found in Gilbert and Kilby, C. S. Lewis, 68. 16. E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art is one of the most highly respected art history books in English; first published in 1950, it went into its sixteenth edition in 1995. Lewis’s Spenser’s Images of Life cites Jean Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods (8 n, 10) and Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (9 n, 12, 129 n).

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now saw that the walls of the place were all painted with stories. We have little skill with painting in Glome, so that it’s small praise to say they seemed wonderful to me. But I think all mortals would have wondered at these” (TWHF, 2.4).17 Art plays a minor role in the Chronicles of Narnia, but a more significant one than in Lewis’s other fiction. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, there is a long room full of pictures in the professor’s old and famous house—“the sort of house that is mentioned in guide books and even in histories”; Mrs. Macready gives tours of the house to visitors and tells them about the paintings (LWW, 3, 40, 41). The Pevensie children, unfortunately, don’t seem to pay much attention to the works of art. Tumnus has a picture of his father over the mantelpiece; it was cut to shreds when Tumnus’s cave was sacked (LWW, 11, 14, 46). The Beavers’ less sophisticated house has “no books or pictures” (LWW, 59). It is different, however, at the Narnian court, where tapestries once adorned the walls of Cair Paravel (PC, 15). The most important uses of art in the Chronicles occur in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” In the opening chapter Lucy and Edmund are sitting in Lucy’s room looking at “a picture of a ship—a ship sailing nearly straight towards you. Her prow was gilded and shaped like the head of a dragon with wide open mouth. She had only one mast and one large, square sail which was a rich purple” (VDT, 4). It is a realistic work that their Aunt Alberta, with her up-to-date and advanced ideas, does not like at all, but can’t get rid of because it was given to her as a wedding present by someone she does not want to offend (VDT, 3–4). Her son Eustace calls it a “rotten picture” (VDT, 5) because its romantic aura does not fit with his mundane materialistic ideas. But Lucy and Edmund like it, partly because of its realism— “I like it because the ship looks as if it was really moving. And the water looks as if it was really wet. And the waves look as if they were really going up and down”—and partly because it reminds them of

17. For another use of visual arts, see Lewis, “On a Picture by Chirico,” Poems, 69. Painting is used occasionally, though less frequently than music, in figures of speech: for example, trying to be like Christ “is more like painting a portrait than like obeying a set of rules” (MC, 4.7); “The scene would have been pretty in a picture but was rather oppressive in real life” (VDT, 62). Still another use of the visual arts is the examination of iconography in Spenser’s Images of Life.

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Narnia: “The question is . . . whether it doesn’t make things worse, looking at a Narnian ship when you can’t get there” (VDT, 5, 4). As they look at the picture, Lucy and Edmund experience a longing for Narnia, a fictionalized version of the desire Lewis felt upon viewing Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. They are plunged into their past, as Lewis said he was by Rackham, and are reminded “that [they] had once had what [they] had now lacked for years” (SbyJ, 73). One of the things Lewis believed art is supposed to do is to arouse Sehnsucht. Music had that effect for Lewis more often than visual art, as when he saw Wagner’s Valkyrie at Drury Lane Theatre in 1918 and “had thrills and delights of the real old sort” (TST, 221). The picture in Aunt Alberta’s back bedroom calls the attention of young readers to art and conveys at least a glimpse of a positive effect art can convey. Paired with this passage is one later in the story. Lucy encounters pictures again in the illuminated manuscript of the Magician’s Book: “Round the big coloured capital letters at the beginning of each spell, there were pictures” (VDT, 125–26). These also are realistic: “The picture of the man with toothache was so lifelike that it would have set your own teeth aching if you looked at it too long” (VDT, 126), and some of them are moving pictures, creating the effect of watching events on a color television set. Some pages contain “a blaze of pictures” (VDT, 127). Lucy is not supposed to use them, in the terminology of An Experiment in Criticism: unless they are appreciated disinterestedly, for their line, color, composition, and artistry, they become temptations to misuse, temptations to become beautiful beyond the lot of mortals or to learn “what your friends [think] about you” (VDT, 127, 129). The correct response is to surrender and receive, as she does with the page promising “refreshment of the spirit,” which has very beautiful pictures and is more like a story than a spell. She surrenders so fully that soon she has forgotten that she was reading at all, and her reward is “the loveliest story I’ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life” (VDT, 130). She gets herself out of the way, empties herself, and receives the story as art. It is striking that nowhere in the examples of art in the Chronicles or in the other stories is there suggestion of its potential to achieve what Lewis believed it could be at its best. He indicates that potential in another story, the section involving the famous painter in The Great Divorce (73–76; chap. 9). Upon emerging from the bus and look-

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ing at the landscape, the artist wants to paint it. The spirit who comes to meet him tells him to look first and gives a theory of painting that would seem to be Lewis’s: “When you painted on earth—at least in your earlier days—it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came” (GD, 73). He urges the artist to look at the countryside for its own sake, as he did when he began painting, rather than for the sake of painting it: “Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light,” to which the artist ghost replies: “One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.”18 His guide warns him that such an attitude is a snare: “Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling” (GD, 74).19 All artists—musicians, dancers, architects, clothing designers, poets, storywriters—can catch glimpses of heaven and attempt to convey them imaginatively. Lewis’s own experiences enabled him to receive those glimpses of heaven, in greater and lesser degrees, from all the arts. Lewis’s stories give glimpses of heaven through writing, but they also, especially the Chronicles of Narnia—by their constant attention to music, dance, and the visual arts—convey to readers that the other arts are important and that glimpses of heaven are available through them as well. As dance requires participation, so do the 18. Compare this with a letter to his brother in 1921: “Of landscapes, as of people, one becomes more tolerant after one’s twentieth year. . . . It is not merely a question of lines and colours but of smells, sounds and tastes as well: I often wonder if professional artists don’t lose something of the real love of earth by seeing it in eye sensations exclusively?” (Letters, July 1, [1921]). 19. There are interesting parallels here to Tolkien’s story “Leaf by Niggle.” It was not published during Lewis’s lifetime, but it was written in the mid-1940s when Lewis was encouraging Tolkien to resume work on The Lord of the Rings, so it seems very likely that he heard the story from Tolkien, or at least was told about it (see Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, 5.2). For other contributions to Lewis’s unsystematized theory of art, see “Christianity and Literature,” 5–7, and Lewis’s sermon “Transposition,” which Barfield believes is the fullest statement of Lewis’s theory of imagination (“Lewis, Truth, and Imagination,” 103). Because of its discussion of music and art as well as language, I believe “Transposition” also gives insight into his ideas about the arts.

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other arts: if books on a shelf are only potential literature (EinC, 104), then paintings in a gallery are only potential art, and notes played in an auditorium are only potential music. For each art imaginative involvement is required, a willingness to receive the work, not just use it in a self-interested way. Appreciation of architecture was something Lewis acquired slowly. Of his childhood, he writes, “We never saw a beautiful building nor imagined that a building could be beautiful” (SbyJ, 6). That realization came only when he entered Cherbourg House in January 1911, at age thirteen: “Wyvern [Malvern] Priory was the first building that I ever perceived to be beautiful” (SbyJ, 58—see photos 3 and 4, pp. 127–28). A few years later, in a letter to his father (September 30, 1914) he mentioned the church at Great Bookham, where he was studying with William Kirkpatrick: “It is of pre-Norman structure, and is, like all these old churches, no particular shape. . . . It is, in its own way, very, very, beautiful” (Lewis Papers, 4.225–26—see photos 5 and 6, p. 129). Informed appreciation came only later. In 1921 he described to Warren a visit to Wells Cathedral while on a motor tour with his father and uncle: I . . . am no architect and not much more of an antiquarian. Strangely enough it was Uncle H. with his engineering more than the O.A.B. [their father] with his churchmanship that helped me to appreciate [its features]; he taught me to look at the single endless line of the aisle, with every pillar showing at once the strain and the meeting of the strain (like a ships frame work inverted): it certainly is wonderfully satisfying to look at. The pleasure one gets is like that from rhyme— a need, and the answer of it following so quickly, that they make a single sensation. (Letters, August 7, 1921—see photo 7, p. 130)

Lewis seems never to have overcome the disadvantages of this late introduction to the beauties of architecture. Perhaps he was less drawn to develop his knowledge in this area because architecture never stirred pangs of longing, as music and art did for him. There are fewer references to architecture in his writings than to the other arts, and other indications of a lack of interest as well. Lewis mentioned in 1924 that he “agreed with [Warren’s] view that King’s Chapel, Cambridge, is the perfect building” (AMR, 316—see photos 8 and 9, pp. 131–32). Warren recorded in 1930 that he and Lewis

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visited Salisbury Cathedral (see photo 10, p. 133), “J[ack] pointing out that the symmetry for which it is praised would have existed in all our Cathedrals had the money been available to finish them in the style in which they were begun.”20 On the other hand, Lewis was nearly thirty-six before he visited St. Paul’s Cathedral: “We decided on going to St. Paul’s, which J had never seen.”21 He did, however, appreciate the beauty of Oxford and its rich architecture. In a 1919 letter to Arthur Greeves, he wrote, “As you come out of our college gate you see All Souls and just beyond it the grey spire of St. Mary’s Church: you know what real Gothic is like: all little pinaccles [sic] with every kind of ornament on them and in the snow they look like a wintry forest hung up against the dark sky, and always associated in ones mind with the sound of bells” (TST, 243—see photos 11 and 12, pp. 134–35).22 Architecture plays a minor role in the written texts of the Chronicles. This is to be expected in a mainly rural setting where most buildings are simple and functional. When architecture does appear in Narnia, it is often in the gothic style of Narnian castles. The White Witch’s house “was really a small castle. It seemed to be all towers; little towers with long pointed spires on them, sharp as needles” (LWW, 74). Cair Paravel, as Peter looks at it from the Hill of the Stone 20. W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 61. “We should approach [Malory’s Morte Darthur] not as we approach Liverpool Cathedral, but as we approach Wells Cathedral. At Liverpool we see what a particular artist invented. At Wells we see something on which many generations laboured, which no man foresaw or intended as it now is, and which occupies a position half-way between works of art and those of nature” (C. S. Lewis, “The ‘Morte Darthur,’ ” 110). 21. W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 149. Lewis described a previous visit to Salisbury Cathedral in a letter to his father, when his response seems initially to have been one of “use,” which changed later to one of “reception”: in daylight he considered it “very good in its own way but not in my favourite way,” but seeing it by moonlight on a perfect spring night, he “was completely conquered” (Letters, April 1925). 22. Compare those comments on Oxford with Lewis’s first impressions of Cambridge a year later: “It was very interesting . . . to see Cambridge. . . . Some things—such as King’s College Chapel, in which I was prepared to be disappointed—are indeed beautiful beyond hope or belief: several little quadrangles I remember, with tiled gables, sun dials and tall chimnies like Tudor houses, were charming. . . . Oxford is more magnificent, Cambridge perhaps more intriguing” (Letters, December 8, 1920). Cambridge is the setting of The Dark Tower; the tower replicates the university library, completed in 1934. Architectural images are scattered through the fragment.

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Table, “looked like a great star resting on the seashore” (LWW, 105). The gothic style fits the medieval romance setting, and it reflects the images Lewis internalized through years in Oxford, with its gothic and neo-gothic beauty. The only building in Narnia resembling “a great English house” is on the Island of the Voices in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” The Magician’s house is “very long and grey and quiet-looking, . . . two stories high—made of a beautiful mellow stone, many windowed, and partially covered with ivy” (VDT, 108, 110). The most important use of architecture in the Chronicles occurs as a way of contrasting Calormen and Narnia in The Horse and His Boy. Shasta, on his journey to reach Narnia and the North, must go through the magnificent city of Tashbaan, with its architectural splendors: “Inside the walls the island rose in a hill and every bit of that hill, up to the Tisroc’s palace and the great temple of Tash at the top, was completely covered with buildings—terrace above terrace, street above street, zigzag roads or huge flights of steps bordered with orange trees and lemon trees, roof-gardens, balconies, deep archways, pillared colonades, spires, battlements, minarets, pinnacles” (H&B, 41). Despite its architectural splendor, Tashbaan is busy, dirty, and oppressive: “crowded partly by the peasants (on their way to market) . . . but also with water-sellers, sweetmeat sellers, porters, soldiers, beggars, ragged children, hens, stray dogs, and bare-footed slaves” and reeking with the smells of “unwashed people, unwashed dogs, scent, garlic, onions, and the piles of refuse which lay everywhere” (H&B, 44–45). Aravis—like Shasta and the Narnians—had “always lived in the country and had hated every minute of her time in Tashbaan” (H&B, 105). The rural life and simple buildings of Archenland and Narnia come as a welcome contrast to Tashbaan. After Shasta is helped across the mountains by Aslan, he is found by talking animals and by a Dwarf who takes him home to “a little house with a smoking chimney and an open door. . . . The roof was very low, and everything was made of wood and there was a cuckoo-clock and a red-and-white checked table-cloth and a bowl of wild flowers and little white curtains on the thick-paned windows” (H&B, 146–47). The contrasting architectural and decorating styles—ornateness and splendor vs. simplicity and homeyness— parallel the contrast between slavery (of humans and talking horses) and freedom. The natural beauty of Narnia reflects its way of life:

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“Oh the sweet air of Narnia!” Bree sighs. “An hour’s life there is better than a thousand years in Calormen” (H&B, 8). The written descriptions of buildings and cities in the Chronicles are less successful in conveying the beauty of architecture than are Pauline Baynes’s illustrations. Her drawings place before the reader’s eyes the numerous, rather ominous spires of the White Witch’s castle (LWW, 75), the graceful towers, turrets, and arches of Cair Paravel (LWW, 147; SC, 27), the enormous, multitowered house of the giants of Harfang (SC, 87), the crowded island city of Tashbaan with its minarets and domes rising above flat rooftops (H&B, 42), and the ruins of magnificent, multistoried buildings and arches of the palace in Charn (MN, 37). The words, reinforced by the drawings, place before the young reader a fact not conveyed to the young Lewis, that buildings can be beautiful and should be looked at closely and attentively for that which makes them beautiful. Architecture is used frequently in other stories to convey or reinforce values. Among the most memorable references to buildings are those of the gray city in The Great Divorce, the pragmatic, featureless sections (“dingy lodging houses, small tobacconists, hoardings from which posters hung in rags, windowless warehouses,” with residential areas beyond: roofs spreading without a break as far as the eye can reach—13, 16; chap. 1), contrasting with the spectacular design of Napoleon’s home: “He’d built himself a huge house all in the Empire style—rows of windows flaming with light” (GD, 20; chap. 2). That few of the buildings are impressive architecturally reflects the poor aesthetic tastes and self-centeredness of the inhabitants, since “you’ve only got to think a house and there it is” (GD, 19; chap. 2). The inhabitants of the gray town can’t get far enough outside or beyond themselves even to imagine fine architecture. Likewise, Screwtape notes that “the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate” is what humans see when they think of the Church: not “the Church as we [devils] see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity” (SL, letter 2). In Till We Have Faces architecture is used to add realism to the depiction of Glome, a “little barbarous state on the borders of the Hellenistic world with Greek culture just beginning to affect it” (Letters, February 10, 1957) and to help set Glome apart from the countries around it. The royal palace is, for Glome, a large, impressive structure, built at various times. The newer part is of painted brick; the

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oldest part, the attached barn at the back, has wooden walls (TWHF, 1.1).23 Orual notes, “We have upper rooms and even galleries in the palace; it is not like a Greek house” (TWHF, 1.6). Realistic detail appears in the temple of Ungit, fashioned of “great, ancient stones, twice the height of a man and four times the thickness of a man,” with brick filling the spaces between the stones and the roof thatched with rushes. It has the shape of an egg, which is “a holy shape, and the priests say it resembles, or (in a mystery) that it really is, the egg from which the whole world was hatched” (TWHF, 1.9). The god’s house to which Psyche is taken as a bride is not like any house in Glome or like the Greek houses the Fox has described, but “something new, never conceived of” (TWHF, 1.10). When Orual catches a glimpse of it at night, across the river, it is “solid and motionless, wall within wall, pillar and arch and architrave, acres of it, a labyrinthine beauty. . . . Pinnacles and buttresses leaped up . . . unbelievably tall and slender, pointed and prickly as if stone were shooting out into branch and flower” (TWHF, 1.12). And the temple Orual happens upon in Essur is “no bigger than a peasant’s hut but built of pure white stone, with fluted pillars in the Greek style” (TWHF, 1.21). The Ransom trilogy conveys the spiritual dimensions of architecture—that it can be used to God’s glory and that its beauties can draw viewers closer to him. Architecture appears in both literal structures and figurative references in Out of the Silent Planet. In the stone-age world of Malacandra, the hrossa live in beehive-shaped huts made of stiff leaves and the sorns in mountain caves (OSP, chaps. 11, 15), but the pfifltriggi live in buildings that are spectacular in architectural design: “I could show you houses with a hundred pillars, one of suns’ blood [gold] and the next of stars’ milk [silver]” (OSP, chap. 17); however, Ransom has no opportunity to see them. Architectural detail is also suggested, broadly, in the description of Meldilorn, the holiest site on Malacandra, with its low buildings of stone and its broad avenue of monoliths leading to the hilltop on which Ransom meets Oyarsa (OSP, chap. 17). The most significant references to architecture in Out of the Silent Planet occur as figures of speech. Ransom understands that the tall, 23. Nancy-Lou Patterson, “The Holy House of Ungit,” 7. Patterson examines the various structures and buildings of Till We Have Faces in this illuminating study of Ungit as a central character of the story.

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thin shapes he sees on Malacandra are a result of this world having a lighter gravitational pull than Earth. More important than the scientific explanation, however, is the spiritual realization which he slowly reaches about this “theme of perpendicularity,” this “skyward impulse.” As Ransom looks at the trees, he notes, “vast as they were, air was sufficient to support them so that the long aisles of the forest all rose to a kind of fan tracery” (OSP, chap. 8). The whole of Malacandra, such imagery implies, is a cathedral, with thousands of Gothic arches and spires pointing Godward and directing attention toward the heavens.24 They were enormously high, so that Ransom had to throw back his head to see the top of them. Some ended in points that looked from where he stood as sharp as needles. When Ransom learns, later, that the Malacandrians live in constant touch with spiritual beings who pervade the planet’s atmosphere, it comes as no surprise. That this planet is a holy place is conveyed long before Ransom learns about eldils, Oyarsa, and the Old One. Architecture, like painting, can afford glimpses of heaven. In the Chronicles, however, although Lewis affirms the value of both arts for young readers, such glimpses are missing. Painting and architecture are present, but they are limited mostly to aesthetic, not eternal, effects. Only one reference to architecture occurs in Perelandra (the floating islands, of course, cannot sustain constructed buildings), but that one reference reflects the need sentient created beings seem to have of erecting buildings with images, to honor and glorify their creator. After Tinidril has withstood the Un-man’s temptations and the Fixed Land is no longer forbidden, Tor proclaims that they will build on the fixed island “a great place to the splendour of Maleldil. Our sons shall bend the pillars of rock into arches . . . pillars of stone [throwing] out branches like trees and knit[ting] their branches together and bear[ing] up a great dome as of leafage, but the leaves shall be shaped stones. And there our sons will make images” (Per, chap. 17). The “cathedrals” on Malacandra are metaphorical, but those on Perelandra will be literal, and will invert the imagery of Malacandra: on the older planet, trees are like cathedrals, while on the newer one cathedrals will be like trees. 24. Rudolf Otto, whose book Das Heilige (1924) influenced Lewis deeply, wrote that for Western cultures, the Gothic cathedral is the best spatial expression of the numinous (see Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the NonRational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, chap. 9).

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In That Hideous Strength architecture reinforces the contrast in values between the N.I.C.E. and the company at St. Anne’s. The N.I.C.E. headquarters are at Belbury, which is described as a modern building: “a florid Edwardian mansion which had been built for a millionaire who admired Versailles” with a “widespread outgrowth of newer and lower buildings in cement” sprouting from its sides (THS, 2.4). In contrast, the Manor House at St. Anne’s, home of Ransom and his followers, is an older building, reminding one of the professor’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: it is “a large house,” featuring “a fine Georgian staircase” and long passages, with landings at different levels and “a large hall where daylight mixed with firelight” (THS, 3.3, 7.1, 8.2). The most important use of architecture in any of Lewis’s works is the careful description of the varied styles of the buildings of Bracton College. The style of each college fits the values reflected in its name and leads the viewer (or reader) deeper into the moral qualities of academic, public, private, and spiritual life: the Newton quadrangle contains “florid, but beautiful, Georgian buildings”; in the Republic quadrangle, the medieval college, the “stone of the buttresses that rise from [the grass] gives the impression of being soft and alive”; in the Lady Alice quadrangle, “the buildings to your left and right were seventeenth-century work: humble, almost domestic in character, with dormer windows, mossy and grey-tiled”; and the gate to Bragdon Wood, the innermost sanctum, “was by Inigo Jones” (THS, 1.3).25 The N.I.C.E. cares nothing about architectural aesthetics—their gigantic building plan destroys the integrity of the college—or about rural beauty of the Narnian sort: they intend to destroy Cure Hardy (“a beauty spot, . . . [with] sixteenth-century almshouses, and a Norman church”) and replace it with “a new model village.” When Mark says, “We’ll have to be careful that whatever we’re building up in its place will really be able to beat it on all levels—not merely in efficiency,” Cosser dismisses his concern in a telling phrase: “Oh, architecture and all that. . . . Well, that’s hardly my line, you know” (THS, 4.6). The most important kind of visual art in the Chronicles is one that sometimes is not even thought of as art—the designing and mak25. The significance of the architecture of Bracton College is examined in detail by Nancy-Lou Patterson in “The Unfathomable Feminine Principle: Images of Wholeness in That Hideous Strength,” and by Doris Myers in “Law and Disorder: Two Settings in That Hideous Strength.”

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ing of clothes. Clothing is often regarded in pragmatic rather than artistic terms, but the garments displayed in museums, and designer clothes today, should be sufficient reminders of the artistry involved. It is the most domestic and widely practiced of the arts, for the fashioning of attractive, practical clothing is carried out in the homes of the lower classes as well as the shops patronized by the rich. Clothing is used in the Chronicles, That Hideous Strength, and The Great Divorce to bring out character, to clarify cultural setting, and to develop theme and meaning. Such an emphasis on clothing is intriguing for someone whose own clothes “were a matter of complete indifference to him.” He had, his brother writes, “an extraordinary knack of making a new suit look shabby the second time he wore it.”26 Lewis described himself as “one of those on whom Nature has laid the doom that whatever they buy and whatever they wear they will always look as if they had come out of an old clothes shop” (SbyJ, 67—see photo 13, p. 136). Lewis’s central concern about his own clothing was almost always comfort, not appearance. Consider, for example, Lewis’s memories of the first time he left for boarding school in England: The most important fact at the moment is the horrible clothes I have been made to put on. Only this morning—only two hours ago—I was running wild in shorts and blazer and sand shoes. Now I am choking and sweating, itching too, in thick dark stuff, throttled by an Eton collar, my feet already aching with unaccustomed boots. I am wearing knickerbockers that button at the knee. Every night for some forty weeks of every year and for many a year I am to see the red, smarting imprint of those buttons in my flesh when I undress. Worst of all is the bowler hat, apparently made of iron, which grasps my head.” (SbyJ, 22)27

The Chronicles repeatedly contrast such “queer, dingy” confining clothes of the twentieth-century world (LB, 44) with the colorful vibrancy of Narnian dress. That contrast happens particularly when 26. W. H. Lewis, “Memoir of C. S. Lewis,” in Letters, 36. 27. The only time he cared about appearance was the brief period at Cherbourg House in which, under the influence of “Pogo”—a dressy, sophisticated new instructor fresh from university—Lewis learned “knuttery”: he became “dressy,” wearing “spread” ties with pins in them, low-cut coats, trousers worn high to show startling socks, and brogue shoes with immensely wide laces. “A more pitiful ambition for a lout of an overgrown fourteen-year-old with a shilling a week pocket money could hardly be imagined” (SbyJ, 67).

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the children leave Narnia and return to our world: “They were no longer Kings and Queens in their hunting array but just Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy in their old clothes” (LWW, 153), and “it was odd, and not very nice, to take off their royal clothes and to come back in their school things” (PC, 185). At other times the contrast is implied, as in the following parenthetical comment when Tirian, after being thrown through the stable door, finds that he was dressed “in such clothes as he would have worn for a great feast at Cair Paravel. (But in Narnia your good clothes were never your uncomfortable ones. They knew how to make things that felt beautiful as well as looking beautiful in Narnia: and there was no such thing as starch or flannel or elastic to be found from one end of the country to the other)” (LB, 125–26).28 Of course the clothes contrasted to our world’s are royal dress, but that is just the point. In egalitarian, twenty-first-century Western society, everyone dresses pretty much the same. Even those who cannot afford them spend money on designer jeans and footwear endorsed by star athletes in an effort to equate themselves with the rich and famous. In the monarchical, hierarchical world of Narnia, the royal wardrobe contains “silk and cloth of gold, with snowy linen glancing through slashed sleeves, with silver mail-shirts and jewelled sword-hilts, with gilt helmets and feathered bonnets . . . almost too bright to look at” (PC, 180). The same was true of the royal rooms in Charn: “the blaze of their colours” was “rich and majestic” (MN, 42). Lewis uses the roomful of monarchs to suggest to readers that clothing is something they might well pay attention to: “All the figures were wearing magnificent clothes. If you were interested in clothes at all, you could hardly help going in to see them closer. . . . I can hardly describe the clothes. The figures were all robed and had crowns on their heads. Their robes were of crimson and silvery grey and deep purple and vivid green: and there were patterns, and pictures of flowers and strange beasts, in needlework all over them” (MN, 42). 28. The one exception to clothes being comfortable in Narnia occurs in the grim school run by Miss Prizzle, in which “a lot of Narnian girls, with their hair done very tight and ugly tight collars round their necks and thick tickly stockings on their legs, were having a history lesson” (PC, 166). Aslan frees Gwendolen from the school and Maenads help her take off “some of the unnecessary and uncomfortable clothes that she was wearing” (PC, 168). Note, however, that this school is run by the Telmarines, not true Narnians.

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The splendor of Narnian clothing is very different from the effect fancy clothes have in our world: in a vain attempt to impress Jadis, Uncle Andrew changed into the formal attire of the turn of the century, clothes that young readers never will have seen and that the narrator barely can remember: “He put on a very high, shiny, stiff collar of the sort that made you hold your chin up all the time. He put on a white waistcoat with a pattern on it and arranged his gold watch chain across the front. He put on his best frockcoat, the one he kept for weddings and funerals. He got out his best tall hat and polished it up” (MN, 67). From this elegance, Uncle Andrew descends to being “a miserable object in muddy clothes” after being planted, watered, caged, and fed thistles, worms, and honey—for of course the animals “knew nothing about clothes” (MN, 151, 115). Similarly, Helen, the Cabby’s wife, would have looked dreadful “if she had had time to put on her good clothes (her best hat had imitation cherries on it),” but in an everyday dress and apron, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, “she looked rather nice” (MN, 123). As she and Frank leave behind their clothing from our world, their expressions and attitudes change as well: “All the sharpness and cunning and quarrelsomeness . . . seemed to have been washed away.” And their transformation into King Frank and Queen Helen of Narnia is signaled by new clothing: “The children now noticed these two for the first time. They were dressed in strange and beautiful clothes, and from their shoulders rich robes flowed out behind them” (MN, 150). Clothes convey an even deeper personal transformation when Aslan tells Eustace, the dragon, in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” to undress. Because he doesn’t have clothes on, he peels off his dragon skin three times before Aslan finally pulls it off for him and then dresses him in new clothes (VDT, 88–92). Clothes are emphasized frequently in The Horse and His Boy as well, here to comment on the values held by individual characters and by cultures. The clothes of the Narnians visiting Tashbaan (“of fine, bright, hardy colours”—46) contrast with the clothes of the Calormenes. Lasaraleen’s preoccupation with expensive, showy garments is satirized repeatedly and highlights the contrast between her and Aravis: “Lasaraleen had always been . . . interested in clothes and parties and gossip. Aravis had always been more interested in bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming” (H&B, 82–83). Royalty are expected to wear clothing befitting their

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status; note particularly King Lune’s explanation of what it means to be a king in lean years: “to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land” (H&B, 173, 180, 190). Clothes are used for disguises (H&B, 38–39 and 87), and clothes are used for humorous effects: not only do they find Rabadash hanging from a hook by his chain-shirt, but he is described as looking “just as a man looks if you catch him in the very act of getting into a stiff shirt that is a little too small for him,” or “like a piece of washing hung up to dry” (H&B, 162–63, 164). Clothing is described in detail throughout The Silver Chair as a sustained motif to establish the tone and setting of the story. The quest to find a prince, naturally, involves mingling with royalty and courts, and one encounters dress appropriate to that echelon of society. Entering it from an ordinary prep school in our world can be uncomfortable or disconcerting. When Jill lands near Cair Paravel after being blown down from Aslan’s mountain, she is struck by the beauty of the castle and the tall ship, and then by the clothes. She sees the king wearing a rich mantle of scarlet and a silver mail shirt, leaning on the arm of a richly (but not magnificently) dressed lord. A dwarf nearby is as richly dressed as the King, with fur and silk and velvet. The courtiers “were well worth looking at for their clothes and armour alone” (SC, 28). In such a setting, the clothes Jill is wearing (“a blazer and sweater and shorts and stockings and pretty thick shoes”) look grubby and inappropriate: Trumpkin issues instructions that she and Eustace be given “suitable clothes,” and soon they are “splendidly dressed in Narnian clothes,” the kind that “not only felt nice, but looked nice and smelled nice and made nice sounds when you moved as well” (SC, 23–24, 34, 35). In the rest of the story, clothes bring out contrasts between good guys and bad guys, particularly by means of irony—often a lack of correspondence between outward appearance and inward character—or dress inappropriate for a particular situation. Jill and Eustace undertake a journey to find Prince Rilian, having changed back into sweaters and shorts as being better for travel than fancy court clothes (SC, 40). Along the way they meet a beautiful lady wearing “a long, fluttering dress of dazzling green,” a “scrumptious dress” Jill thought (SC, 73, 75). They (and readers as well) should have been wary of her, however, because the temptress whom Drinian saw earlier had worn, not clothes of Narnian beauty, but “a thin garment as

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green as poison” (SC, 48). They are deceived by her appearance and follow her suggestion that they go to the castle at Harfang for the Autumn Feast. The king, queen, and members of the court at Harfang are all dressed “in magnificent robes” (SC, 91), more ostentatious than Narnian finery, but again appearances are deceiving. As with the lady, the clothing is beautiful, but the people inwardly are not. Jill, after a warm bath, is given “very splendid clothes” that make her feel content and well suited for court life (SC, 97). The clothes, however, are not appropriate for travel—and travel is their duty. Thus, when they try to escape, they must deal with clothes not conducive to speedy, inconspicuous movement: “Jill wore a vivid green robe, rather too long for her, and over that a scarlet mantle fringed with white fur. Scrubb had scarlet stockings, blue tunic and cloak, a goldhilted sword, and a feathered bonnet” (SC, 113). Jill has to gather up her long skirts—“horrible things for running in”—when the hounds begin to chase them (SC, 114). In these clothes, progressively more dirty and torn, they move through the underworld and eventually rescue Prince Rilian. As Jill emerges from the underworld, she sees “a ring of Dwarfs, all dressed in their finest clothes; mostly scarlet with furlined hoods and golden tassles and big furry top-boots” (SC, 186)— appropriate Narnian garb. When Rilian comes out, he is “dressed in black,” not in clothing fitting for royalty. The Narnians, clearer-eyed than the children on their journey, look beyond outward appearance to inner reality and recognize him by his look and air (SC, 192). When he is next seen, he has “changed his black clothes” and is “now dressed in a scarlet cloak over silver mail” (SC, 200). Clothing also contributes to the humor and the gentle ironies that mark the concluding episode. When Jill and Eustace return to our world, the gang of bullies at Experiment are terrified to see, “rushing down upon them,” “figures in glittering clothes with weapons in their hands.” “After putting the gang to flight, Jill and Eustace slip quietly indoors and change “out of their bright clothes into ordinary things.” Later, “Eustace buried his fine clothes secretly one night in the school grounds, but Jill smuggled hers home and wore them at a fancy dress ball next holidays” (SC, 206, 207). The point being made about clothing in the Chronicles is reinforced by two passages in That Hideous Strength. The first is when

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Ransom, for his conference with Merlin, dons sweepy garments of blue and explains to his comrades, “I have for once put on the dress of my office to do him honour. . . . He mistook MacPhee and me for scullions or stable-boys. In his days . . . men did not, except for necessity, go about in shapeless sacks of cloth, and drab was not a favourite colour” (THS, 13.3).29 The second passage occurs before the dinner celebrating the defeat of the N.I.C.E., when the members of the company lay aside their everyday clothes and wear robes of state. The women choose clothes from a wardrobe which looks like “a tropical forest glowing with bright colours, . . . [a] background of purple and gold and scarlet and soft snow and elusive opal, of fur, silk, velvet, taffeta, and brocade.” The clothing brings out the inner beauty and nobility in each woman. As Ivy puts on a sumptuous robe, for example, “the commonplace had not exactly gone from her form and face: the robe had taken it up, as a great composer takes up a folk-tune and tosses it like a ball through his symphony and makes of it a marvel, yet leaves it still itself.” And Mrs. Dimble is transformed from the provincial wife of a rather obscure scholar, a respectable and barren woman with gray hair and double chin, into “a kind of priestess or sybil, the servant of some prehistoric goddess of fertility—an old tribal matriarch, mother of mothers, grave, formidable, and august” (THS, 17.2). The men’s clothing is not described in detail, but they too are wearing “festal garments” (THS, 17.4). The clothes of two women in The Great Divorce bring out the contrast between an unhealthy, self-oriented inner condition and a healthy, other-oriented one. On the one hand is the well-dressed woman whose finery looked ghastly in the light of heaven and who tries to stay hidden because she doesn’t have a real solid body and doesn’t want to have “everyone staring through me” (GD, 56; chap. 8). On the other hand is Sarah Smith: “I cannot now remember,” says the narrator, “whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity 29. Clothing as an external indicator of high office appears also in Till We Have Faces when Orual, after freeing the Fox and declaring him “the Queen’s Lantern,” wants him to be “splendidly dressed” (TWHF, 1.19).

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with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs” (GD, 97; chap. 12).30 That Hideous Strength and the Chronicles use clothing as an important vehicle for creating a sense of what Thomas Howard calls heraldry. The struggle of the artist, Howard contends, is “to speak about what poets and artists have always extolled—beauty, perfection, felicity—to a generation whose eyes and ears are so diseased [they] . . . are now incapable of receiving such news.”31 The modern, Western world in general desires simplicity, not nobility, but that, Lewis says, “is a late and sophisticated [desire]. We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not. They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes” (PPL, chap. 4). Nobility, and the way clothing symbolizes it, point Lewis’s readers toward a higher mode of existence for which they are destined: thus Jane, after her first encounter with Ransom, feels lifted to “the sphere of Jove, amid light and music and festal pomp, brimmed with life and . . . clothed in shining garments” (THS, 7.3). A sense of cosmological hierarchy is essential, Lewis believed, for a right understanding of God: “In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all” (MC, 3.8).32 In earlier 30. The absence of clothes becomes significant several times: Ransom, while on Perelandra and his journey to it and back, is naked, as are Tor and Tinidril, except when Weston dresses Tinidril in robes of colorful feathers in an attempt to teach her vanity (Per, chap. 10). So are some of the spirits in The Great Divorce: “Some were naked, some robed. But the naked ones did not seem less adorned, and the robes did not disguise in those who wore them the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh” (GD, 29; chap. 3). Orual must stand naked before herself as judge (TWHF, 2.3), and John in The Pilgrim’s Regress must take off his clothes, which by then “hung in shreds, plastered with blood and with the grime of every shire from Puritania to the canyon” before he dives into the baptismal waters that will purify and save him (PR, 9.4). 31. Howard, The Achievement of C. S. Lewis: A Reading of His Fiction, 29. 32. In That Hideous Strength Ransom uses clothing to remind Jane that humans are fallen creatures: “We must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer” (179).

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cultures, that sense of superiority was conveyed through social and ecclesiastical hierarchies, but it has been lost in the egalitarianism of the twenty-first century. In Narnia, that sense of superiority is imaged in the nobility, with the clothing that sets them apart, and in the still greater nobility of Aslan, as king over all. But it is also crucial to remember that it is only in comparison to God that humans are “nothing.” The transformative effect of clothing in That Hideous Strength and in the Chronicles emphasizes the inherent nobility and value of each individual human being. The passage quoted above from That Hideous Strength conveys in story what Lewis expressed directly in his sermon “The Weight of Glory”: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. . . . It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.”33 When characters in the Chronicles are transformed by putting on Narnian clothes, it becomes in the imaginative reading experience of young readers an image of transformation for themselves. They can identify with Eustace, who, after he is undragoned, is dressed “in new clothes” and begins to be “a different boy” (VDT, 90, 92).34 All of the arts—story, music, dance, the visual arts, and architecture as well as the design and crafting of clothes—celebrate the nobility and value of humanity. Lewis held that all artists, whether Christians or non-Christians, as they use their imaginations to create works of beauty, reflect the beauty God embodied in the created universe and the sense of beauty God implanted in human beings. Lewis appreciated the arts and affirmed the imagination for its importance in producing and enjoying works of art, and he used the Chronicles of Narnia to convey his regard for imagination and the arts to children and to adult readers. The Chronicles, through their stories and through their invocation of the arts, appeal to and help develop the imaginativeness of readers young and old and foster their openness and sensitivity to the creative arts. 33. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 33. 34. Lewis uses clothing metaphorically to clarify the implications of addressing God as “Our Father” in the Lord’s Prayer: “Do you now see what those words mean? They mean . . . that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ” (MC, 4.7; emphasis in the original).

9




“Let the Pictures Tell Their Own Moral” Lewis and Moral Imagination In That Hideous Strength Mark Studdock suffers from an undernourished artistic imagination, not unlike that of the child Michael discussed above in chapter 1. He is “not as a rule very sensitive to beauty.” His wife, Jane, listens to Bach chorales, cares about “old buildings and all that sort of thing,” and reads novels by Jane Austen, George MacDonald’s Curdie books, and Shakespeare’s sonnets for pleasure (THS, 4.6, 7.3, 8.2); Mark does nothing of the kind. More serious than his insensitivity to the arts and literature, however, is his moral obtuseness. He lacks ethical standards and alert judgment, allows himself to be seduced into joining an organization that seeks absolute social and political control over England, and slides without noticing into writing fraudulent news stories as part of its propaganda campaign. “In Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely ‘Modern.’ The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by” (THS, 9.2). Mark lacks what many thinkers in recent years have begun referring to as “moral imagination.”1 Lewis did not use the term, and writers on moral imagination rarely cite or draw upon him, but he 1. The term originated with Edmund Burke, though recent studies rarely cite or acknowledge him (or each other). It was the central theme of Russell Kirk’s Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. See also, among many examples, Philip S. Keane, S.J., Christian Ethics and Imagination; Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics; Susan E. Babbitt, Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity, and Moral Imagination; and Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination. One indication of current interest is that entering “Moral Imagination” into the Google search engine recently produced nearly 5,000 hits on the Internet.

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presented a clear, accessible, and powerful delineation of the concept long before it became popularized in the 1980s and 1990s. Intellect can know principles of morality, but until these become meaningful and internalized, they have no practical effect. Imagination, according to Lewis, is the organ of meaning. Imagination is needed in the moral realm, therefore, to give meaning to morality, to connect its principles to life, to bridge the gap between theory and practice. The subjects treated in the previous eight chapters are so important because Lewis believed that the artistic imagination could be used in the service of the moral imagination. That does not mean that he advocated reading only works with overt moral themes or that he believed in censoring works that did not support his Christian beliefs or moral principles. As he put it in An Experiment in Criticism, when we read, “we . . . delight to enter into other men’s beliefs (those, say, of Lucretius or Lawrence) even though we think them untrue” (EinC, 138). The writer (and to some extent the artist or composer) using his or her imagination depicts characters, events, and feelings vividly so that the reader, through his or her imagination, experiences the reality of the implicit or explicit moral issues involved. As part of his initiation into the inner ring of the N.I.C.E., Mark Studdock needs to undergo a “process whereby all specifically human reactions [are] killed” (THS, 14.1). He spends repeated sessions in what Lewis ironically labeled the “Objective Room,” where everything is slightly irregular: the room is ill proportioned, a bit too high and too narrow—not enough to be obviously “wrong,” but enough to throw off one’s sense of proper balance. The arch of the door is barely off-center, spots on the ceiling almost but not quite form a pattern, spots on the table perhaps reflect those of the ceiling or perhaps don’t, paintings on the walls have one or two details that clash with one’s expectations. The intent is to frustrate and then kill off the sense of order and proportion that Lewis believed is part of the human imagination as right and wrong are part of the human soul. Training in the Objective Room would presumably be followed by “the eating of abominable food, the dabbling in dirt and blood, the ritual performances of calculated obscenities,” all working counter to “natural” human tastes and impulses and, by familiarity, making the “wrong” seem “right.” The names of those initiating Mark into this inner circle, Wither and Frost, reflect what is happening:

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the withering of natural human impulses and the replacing of them with cold, unfeeling lust for power. In order to undermine Mark’s values, Wither and Frost must alter his imagination. The undermining process, however, does not succeed. Mark’s imagination rebels against it. Against the background of the distorted and crooked arises in him “some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else—something he vaguely called the ‘Normal’—apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was—solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with.” Lewis here uses imagination to give “concrete” substance to the abstract concept of the Objective, which Lewis accepted and adhered to from at least his mid-twenties on, as discussed in chapter 1 above. He depicts it as something implanted in Mark’s imagination. Mark, who had “seldom made a moral resolution” (THS, 12.7), was “not thinking in moral terms at all,” but “he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal” (THS, 14.1). He reached it not through reflection on moral principles, but through a decision based on moral imagination. Lewis notes in his preface that That Hideous Strength embodies in story form the serious point he tried to make in The Abolition of Man. This work, the publication of the Riddell Memorial Lectures delivered at the University of Durham on the evenings of February 24, 25, and 26, 1943, has been termed Lewis’s most important book.2 Although the word imagination does not appear in it, this is Lewis’s fullest articulation of the importance of moral imagination. Addressing educators (but also by implication parents, who are a child’s first educators), he raises again the problem of imaginative impoverishment. The educational system has misread the need of the moment: fearing that young people will be swept away by emotional propa2. “It is generally seen as his most important pamphlet and the best existing defense of objective values and the natural law” (George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times, 183). Owen Barfield regarded it as Lewis’s greatest philosophical achievement (Barfield, “Conversations on C. S. Lewis,” 146; see also 134). See also Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium: Six Essays on “The Abolition of Man,” 48–51; Dabney Adams Hart, Through the Open Door: A New Look at C. S. Lewis, 87; Thomas C. Peters, Simply C. S. Lewis: A Beginner’s Guide to the Life and Works of C. S. Lewis, 145.

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ganda, educators have decided the best thing they can do for children is to fortify their minds against imagination and emotion by teaching them to dissect all things by rigorous intellectual analysis. Lewis says in reply, “My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts” (AofM, 9). Children’s and adolescents’ imaginations need to be fed. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man as a philosopher, dealing with abstract concepts that many readers today find difficult to grasp. The central argument of the book propounds “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are” (AofM, 11). This, of course, connects directly to Mark’s experience in the “Objective Room,” where when Frost attempts to train Mark in impersonal “objectivity,” an objective sense of the Normal arises from Mark’s subconscious to defeat the effort. Objective standards of proportion and “correctness,” in the aesthetic and moral realms (the Objective Room connects the two), are present for Mark because they exist as part of the fabric of the universe. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe refers to them as “Deep Magic from Before the Dawn of Time” (LWW, 127) and Mere Christianity as “the Law of Human Nature” (MC, 1.3). That law, Lewis believes, is like language, both innate (as emphasized in Mere Christianity, 1.1) and something that has to be learned, absorbed from parents and society, nurtured by example and precept.3 Such nurturing is the central theme of The Abolition of Man. The role and approach of education are totally different for parents and educators who accept objective norms and values and for those who do not. For those who accept objectivity, “the task is to train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists.” The child must be guided “to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful.” Those who do not accept objectivity must decide either “to remove all sentiments, 3. Doris T. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, 80–81.

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as far as possible, from the pupil’s mind: or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic ‘justness’ or ‘ordinacy’ ” (AofM, 12, 10, 12). Crucial to such nurturing is the child’s internalization of the standards and the appropriate response. Intellectual apprehension of abstract principles is not enough. When a child is tempted to steal a sweater that appeals to him or her greatly, the goal is not to have the child intellectually weigh the moral issues at stake; the child must “feel” that stealing is not only wrong but repugnant, feel it through “trained emotions”: “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism” (AofM, 13). Elsewhere, Lewis refers to trained emotions as “practical reason”4— not the abstract reflections of the head, but the properly nurtured judgments of the heart: “The Chest—Magnanimity—Sentiment— these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man” (AofM, 14). Lewis goes even further, to call this the defining quality of the human species: “It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal” (AofM, 14). Education, whether at home or school, aimed only at developing knowledge and intellect produces “Men without Chests” (the title of the first lecture) and children who are emotionally and imaginatively impoverished. The loss of belief in moral law and its implementation through practical reason will ultimately, inevitably lead to the abolition of man, the loss of the qualities that define the human species. In The Abolition of Man Lewis makes a powerful case for the existence of objective values and the importance of nurturing in children awareness of those values and appropriate responses to them. But he does not bring the matter down to earth and illustrate in practical ways how parents and educators can carry out such nurturing. For that we must return to That Hideous Strength. Perhaps through the remaining memory of some childhood training not specified in the story, perhaps through innate impulses not totally squelched by his modern education, Mark is able to escape the clutches of the N.I.C.E. But his moral imagination is badly undernourished and in need of sustenance. After fleeing the holocaust in which Belbury, the headquarters of the N.I.C.E., is destroyed, he stops in a small, country4. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” 72–73.

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side hotel, the kind Lewis always wanted to find in the late afternoon when he was on a walking tour with a friend or two. As Mark has tea, he notices in the cozy sitting room two shelves of books, “bound volumes of The Strand. In one of these he found a serial children’s story which he had begun to read as a child, but abandoned because his tenth birthday came when he was half-way through it and he was ashamed to read it after that.” He begins reading and chases the story “from volume to volume till he had finished it. It was good. The grown-up stories to which, after his tenth birthday, he had turned instead of it, now seemed to him, except for Sherlock Holmes, to be rubbish” (THS, 17.1).5 The nourishing of his imagination has begun. Even this much food for the imagination is sufficient to lead him to some serious moral reflection, perhaps the first he has undertaken as an adult. He realizes that, in marrying Jane, he was using her rather than really loving her. Sensing a vitality in her from her openness to the imagination, he had hoped to be enriched by association with her: “When she had first crossed the dry and dusty world which his mind inhabited she had been like a spring shower; in opening himself to it he had not been mistaken. He had gone wrong only in assuming that marriage, by itself, gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness.” He reaches another moral decision: “He must give her her 5. Mark’s former attitude presents an interesting parallel to Susan Pevensie’s ideas about being “grown-up” in The Last Battle, 126–27. Through Mark’s experience Lewis embodies in story what he states elsewhere as a literary principle: Where the children’s story is simply the right form for what the author has to say, then of course readers who want to hear that, will read the story or re-read it, at any age. I never met The Wind in the Willows or the Bastable books till I was in my late twenties, and I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on that account. I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” 24; see also 25–26) Further, “a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then” (“Sometimes Fairy Stories,” 38). The point is restated in “On Juvenile Tastes,” 39–41. Compare with Mark’s experience what Lewis wrote to Lucy Barfield in the dedication to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: “You are already too old for fairy tales. . . . But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.”

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freedom,” “he would release her.” As he decides to release her, his arrogance and self-centered desire die and he becomes able to love selflessly: he encounters Venus, who opens the door to the bridal suite, and he finds himself “in some place of sweet smells and bright fires, with food and wine and a rich bed” (THS, 17.1, 17.7). Here is the practical advice Lewis did not include in The Abolition of Man. In addition to the direct moral guidance of parents, teachers, and society through instruction and rules, practical reason can be nurtured in children through reading and engagement with the other arts. The term practical reason refers to a union of abstract universals with everyday meaningfulness; meaning, for Lewis, is conveyed by the imagination. Thus “practical reason” and “moral imagination” are closely related, if not virtually synonymous. Through stories, music, dance, painting, and drawing, children learn the discipline that art involves, and the rules they are taught become more meaningful and emotionally accessible. The imaginativeness of stories enables children to form and internalize “sentiments,” those complex combinations of feelings and opinions that provide a basis for action or judgment. They are helped to learn and live out “magnanimity,” the nobleness of mind and generosity that enable one to overlook injury and rise above meanness. And children’s experience with the other arts cultivates an emotional sensitivity and openness that enable the imagination to achieve such results.6 In “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” Lewis affirms that a writer should not impose a moral lesson upon a story: “Let the pictures [i.e., images] tell you their own story. . . . The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author’s mind.”7 Here, in sum, is Lewis on the moral imagination: images are seen through imagination, and the moral of the story must be embodied in the images. 6. It is not just children whose imaginations become undernourished. Adults too need constant nourishment through the moral imagination. Robert Coles has used literature in graduate classes in education, medicine, law, business, and theology to confront students with social and moral issues they will encounter in their careers; he urges all adults to read, and then reread, the authors his parents read aloud to each other as a way of drinking from the “reservoirs of wisdom” they contain—George Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy (Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, xi–xx). 7. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” 33.

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Upon reflection it should be evident that the preceding eight chapters have anticipated this one, each laying groundwork for understanding the moral imagination in Lewis. Those chapters have dealt with story and the imaginative reading experience, for stories and reading are central to the nurturing of the moral imagination. They have also examined the degree to which the order of reading the Chronicles affects the reading experience, for both the artistic and the moral imagination. And they have explained the way Lewis’s storytellers become vital aspects of the effect of his stories on the moral imagination, and how Lewis viewed music, dance, and the other arts as symbols for an orderly, unified, harmonious cosmos, which underlies the moral truths that the arts make accessible to the moral imagination. Nurturing of the moral imagination is an effect of all his poems and stories. Readers often concentrate on the Christian dimension of his works, but equally or more important to him was the moral dimension. This seems especially true for the Chronicles of Narnia. They definitely contain Christian motifs, as discussed in chapter 4 above, and Lewis says explicitly that he used the imagination to restore the emotional impact of events that had become commonplace: “Suppose that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them . . . appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” But that was the second stage in the process, according to the essay. Prior to that came the impulse, even the need, to write a story about some mental images circling through his mind, a story which it turned out needed to be a fairy tale: “I wrote fairy stories because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.”8 Fairy stories do not always, or often, deal with Christianity, but they almost always, by their nature, deal with moral issues—good vs. evil, loyalty, courage, etc. Fairy stories are fundamental nurturers of moral imagination. Before Lewis knew his stories would be Christian, he suggests, he knew they would involve moral issues, such as Edmund’s nastiness, untruthfulness, and disloyalty; Lucy’s honesty, integrity, and courage; the valor and sense of justice displayed by Peter; the hypocrisy, cruelty, and vindictiveness of the White Witch; 8. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories,” 37.

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and the utter goodness, lovingness, and bravery of Aslan. By weaving references to the arts into the fabric of the Chronicles, Lewis sought to stimulate the readers’ artistic imaginations,9 but equally important to him was the nurturing of their moral imaginations. Lewis’s interest in the moral imagination as well as the artistic imagination corresponds to what Doris T. Myers sees as dual approaches to art in Lewis. On the one hand, she notes, Lewis is a critic of the twentieth century who believes in art for art’s sake and denigrates “literary puritanism.” On the other hand, he adheres to the traditions of critics from Horace through at least the eighteenth century who believe art must be useful as well as entertaining. “He knows that art lacking a strong moral commitment, a strong component of transcendence, simply hasn’t survived because the scribes didn’t bother to recopy it.”10 Thus, the approach of The Experiment in Criticism must be balanced with that of the discussion of Spenser in Lewis’s volume of the Oxford History of English Literature. Lewis in the Chronicles, like Spenser in The Faerie Queene, embodied “in moving images the common wisdom,” with both exemplifying the moral imagination. Lewis, like Spenser, “assumed from the outset that the truth about the universe was knowable and in fact known.”11 Lewis, like Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, did not write to express “his” moral ideas, but what all “would have called common knowledge.” The Lewis of the moral imagination is in one sense the dinosaur Lewis, speaking as a specimen of assumptions and values from an earlier age, passing on and attempting to preserve something of a traditional heritage to a modern world.12 9. In the letters he wrote to children, one also finds efforts to feed children’s imaginations and affirm their imaginative pursuits of every kind. He comments on their stories and poems and encourages them to write: “Why don’t you try writing some Narnian tales? I began to write when I was about your age, and it was the greatest fun. Do try!” (Letters to Children, 99; similarly, 101–2. For other comments on stories children sent him, see 40, 80, 88; on their poems, see 76, 81, 103). He praises their work in the drawings, paintings, and art objects they sent him: “Reepicheep in your coloured picture has just the right perky, cheeky expression” (Letters to Children, 32; see also 21, 31, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 65, and 67). He discusses music and opera with another: “How lucky you have been to have such a season of Opera. It must have been lovely” (Letters to Children, 55–56; also 48, 50, 69). 10. Myers, letter to the author, June 23, 1999. Quoted by permission. 11. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, 386–87. 12. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 14.

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Although Lewis was a strong advocate for both the artistic and the moral imagination, his endorsement was not unqualified. He was concerned about propensities that could render the imagination dangerous and immoral. First is the danger of placing too high a value on the imagination, of affording it spiritual status. Lewis himself had raised imagination to such a position before his conversion, as discussed in chapter 1 above. After his conversion, he came to a balanced vision of imagination’s role: although imagination is a good, it must not be viewed as the highest good.13 A second danger is misuse of the imagination. In addition to positive uses of imagination Lewis talks of another, inwardly centered imagination, a kind that creates illusions and seeks escape, that renders one unable to see or recognize reality. Mark Studdock falls briefly into such imaginings: The approval of one’s own conscience is a very heady draught; and specially for those who are not accustomed to it. Within two minutes Mark had passed from that first involuntary sense of liberation to a conscious attitude of courage, and thence into unrestrained heroics. The picture of himself as hero and martyr, as Jack the Giant-Killer still coolly playing his hand even in the giant’s kitchen, rose up before him, promising that it could blot out forever those other, and unendurable pictures of himself which had haunted him for the last few hours. (THS, 12.7)

This imagination Lewis describes as “the world of reverie, daydream, wish-fulfilling fantasy” (SbyJ, 15; see also EinC, 51–53), which was mentioned above in chapter 1—now we see it is not just delusive, but can be morally harmful. In the world of wish-fulfilling fantasy lie two dangers: of an undisciplined imagination, creating a lack of faith when there is no rational ground for disbelief, and of a disobedient imagination, whose self-absorption leads to self-indulgence: “Sensuality really arises more from the imagination than from the appetites; which, if left merely to their own animal strength, and not elaborated by our imagination, would be fairly easily managed.”14 Thus, imagination 13. For discussions of imagination as a secondary good, see Lewis, “Christianity and Literature” and “Christianity and Culture.” 14. On “undisciplined,” see Lewis, “Religion: Reality or Substitute?” 43; on “disobedient,” see Lewis, Letters to an American Lady, November 26, 1962.

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needs not just to be nourished, but also to be nurtured in positive directions, and Lewis believed that the reading and writing of fantasy are among the best vehicles for such nurturing. Lewis’s short story “The Shoddy Lands” illustrates the result if imagination is not nourished and nurtured—the impoverished imagination of an adult. The narrator’s dream shows him the world as it exists for Peggy: “At the centre of that world is a swollen image of herself, remodelled to be as like the girls in the advertisements as possible.”15 Lewis did not share a concern some parents and religious leaders have about what they regard as a dangerous misuse of imagination—that is, the use of witches and magic in his Chronicles of Narnia. In my community parents have withdrawn children from participating in classroom readings of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because of the word witch in the title. “Why,” asked someone writing to an organization dealing with Lewis materials, “would a Christian [Lewis] use ‘magic’ or possibly mislead a child to believe in something else to get across a point about good vs. bad?” An article on the “Balaam’s Ass Speaks” website calls Lewis “the single most useful tool of Satan since his appearance in the Christian community sometime around World War II” and the Chronicles of Narnia an “indoctrinating tool of witchcraft,” “one of the most powerful tools of Satan that Lewis ever produced.”16 Lewis used witches and magic in the Chronicles because they are an integral characteristic of the genre in which he was writing, the fairy tale. This in itself is not an adequate defense, of course, to those who would object to reading all fairy tales on the same grounds, as

15. Lewis, “The Shoddy Lands,” 106. 16. Mary Van Nattan, “C. S. Lewis: The Devil’s Wisest Fool.” The Chronicles “glorify and promote many occult ideas”; in them Lewis “was introducing children to witchcraft through esoteric (hidden meanings) writings.” The concerns expressed by such critics arise out of strong biblical injunctions against witches and magic, especially when the texts are interpreted literally. See, for example, Exodus 22:18, 1 Samuel 15:23, Micah 5:12, Nahum 3:4 in the King James Version of the Bible. Problems of translation and cultural differences complicate the issue. The Revised Standard Version, for example, uses “sorcerer” and “divination” where the KJV uses “witch” and “witchcraft.” Such concerns would not be as great, presumably, if it were not for the rise of Wicca and Witchcraft movements in recent years. See Doug Beyer, “What’s the Mutter with Magic? Its Use in the Writings of C. S. Lewis,” for a thorough survey and sensible analysis of Lewis’s handling of magic in his fiction and nonfiction writings.

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unedifying and non-Christian. Within the tradition Lewis was drawing on, however, witches are the evil characters in stories depicting good and evil in black and white terms. In stories like “Hansel and Gretel,” they are ugly, scary old creatures who may do things that endanger children’s bodies, like eating them, but they do not engage in occult practices. Calling the characters in these stories “witches” may be questionable socially, as it attaches a pejorative label on a marginalized group (old women without husbands or families), but it does not have religious overtones and specifically is not antiChristian. Lewis pushes a step beyond this. His witches—the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Queen of Underland in The Silver Chair—do have magical powers and he does present them as characters who are evil and represent evil. But they are beautiful and superficially appealing, not old and ugly. Lewis conveys through his descriptions the allurement and deceptiveness of evil. They may (or may not) symbolize diabolical powers, but there is never any suggestion of them engaging in or representing devilish deeds or Satanic worship. There is hardly any danger of young readers being misled by these witches, always portrayed negatively, into sympathetic leanings toward witchcraft today. In Lewis’s Chronicles good and evil are presented in starkly obvious contrasts. The evil characters are sometimes human, like King Miraz in Prince Caspian or Prince Rabadash in The Horse and His Boy; sometimes they are wicked animals, like Shift the ape and Ginger the cat in The Last Battle. But they are always clearly bad and to be avoided. When witches do appear, they are used the same way as Miraz, Rabadash, Shift, or Ginger, as the evil force that must be opposed by the good and that will ultimately be defeated by the good. Lewis intends the evil witches as vehicles of the moral imagination. Lewis also includes magic and magicians in the Chronicles. His use reflects the traditional division of magic into “white” magic and “black” magic. White magic involves superhuman control over the processes of nature. Coriakin, the disobedient star assigned as punishment to oversee the Dufflepuds on the Island of Voices in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” has magical powers. He owns a magical book and can make food appear on a table, transform Duffers into Monopods, turn descriptions of places into maps, and mend a damaged ship (VDT, 136, 139, 145, 146). The Hermit of the Southern

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March in The Horse and His Boy is a contemplative, not a magician; he can look into a magic pool and see what is going on in the world outside his secluded hermitage, but he does not try—or lacks the power—to control what is happening (H&B, 158). White magic has traditionally been regarded as benign and fairly harmless, conveying a sense that there are mysteries in our world that go beyond the materialistic forms the everyday world presents to the senses. The magic of the Chronicles is fairy-tale magic, which Lewis defines not as magic that attempts to control nature, but as “objective efficacy which cannot be further analysed”: “When I say ‘Magic’ I am not thinking of the paltry and pathetic techniques by which fools attempt and quacks pretend to control Nature. I mean rather what is suggested by fairy-tale sentences like: ‘This is a magic flower, and if you carry it the seven gates will open to you of their own accord’ ” (LtoM, letter 19). The Pevensie children enter Narnia the first time through a magic wardrobe. At that point, the efficacy of the wardrobe cannot be further explained than calling it “magic.” A later book allows the efficacy of the wardrobe to be further analyzed—the tree from which it was made grew from the seeds of an apple from Narnia. But the efficacy of that apple, and the tree that grew from it, cannot be analyzed further—we are not told whether Aslan endowed the tree with special powers. It is simply a tree with fairy-tale magic. Magic of this sort, Lewis says, “will always win a response from a normal imagination because it is in principle so ‘true to nature’ ” (LtoM, letter 19): things that occur around us seem like magic until they can be explained (mix certain liquids together and there’s an explosion—it’s magic, until a chemist analyzes and explains it). The borders of what can be explained keep getting pushed further back, but most scientists agree the process of explanation will never be concluded: ultimate reality is unexplainable, except as what in fairy tales is called magic. The importance of this sense of magic for Lewis is that it relates to the divine mysteries of Christianity—and of most religions. His discussion in Letters to Malcolm is specifically on the mystery of the eucharist: the mystery of bread and wine becoming flesh and blood is an example of “objective efficacy which cannot be further analysed,” any more than the power of creation can be analyzed. God’s breath bringing dust to life is divine magic, echoed in the divine magic of Aslan breathing on the statues in The Lion, the Witch and

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the Wardrobe and bringing them to life (LWW, 136–38). Lewis claims that the magical elements of Christianity ground it in a realm of hard, determinate facts; those elements resist the impulse to allow Christianity to become a totally spiritual and abstract religion, and they resist attempts to explain away the “magic” by demythologizing Christianity. It is in this sense that Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe uses magic to give concrete embodiment to divine mysteries. He uses the phrase “Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time” to describe the “Law of Human Nature,” the “magic” of proper values and behavior that, the story says, God implanted in the universe to show how people are supposed to behave and to enable society to function in an orderly way, but which ultimately cannot be fully explained: it is an objective efficacy which cannot be further analyzed. So it is also with the use of “Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time” to describe God’s grace and love, which existed before the law was given and which is greater and stronger than law. It is “magic” in the sense of something beyond analysis, beyond human understanding and expectation, almost beyond belief. Lewis would have been surprised and perplexed at the objections raised against his inclusion of magic in the Chronicles. Magic is deeply imbedded in the imaginative stories Lewis loved and is never used there for an un-Christian or anti-Christian effect. He was sufficiently comfortable with the motif to carry it further and use it in ways consistent with his view of the moral imagination. Black magic, on the other hand, is the assumption of diabolical power to gain control over the forces of nature. The magician yields himself or herself to the devil and accepts damnation (“sells his or her soul”) to obtain not just superhuman but supernatural powers. Black magic appears in the Chronicles, but it is always and clearly depicted as an evil of the deepest kind. Nikabrik, in Prince Caspian, engages in “black sorcery,” drawing a circle and preparing a blue fire to call up an accursed spirit (PC, 142). This clearly involves horrible, fearsome evil, represented by a hag and a werewolf, and Lewis clearly is reinforcing the Old Testament injunctions against witchcraft. The evil Queen in The Silver Chair has black magic powers and uses them to enchant Prince Rilian and all the creatures of Underland. Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew studies for years and gets to know “devilish queer people” (his use of Victorian

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slang is unconsciously ironic) in order to learn how to use some dust from the lost world of Atlantis to gain control over this world and other worlds. He pays a great price: “One doesn’t become a magician for nothing”; he is marked, though faintly, with “the look that all wicked Magicians have” (MN, 18, 62). The most interesting embodiment of black magic involves Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew. Although she is called a Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, here she is termed a magician, dealing in the darkest of black magic. To defeat her sister in a civil war, she had used the Deplorable Word, which “if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it” (MN, 54), thus killing all the armies, ordinary people, women, children, and animals of Charn. She cast strong spells so she could be preserved among the statues of her ancestors until someone came and struck the bell to wake her. She now wants to use her magic powers to gain control over England and the Earth, or over the new land of Narnia—but she finds that, in Aslan, she has encountered someone with far greater power than hers. Ultimately, the power of love, the strength of the Good, proves to be a “magic deeper still” than hers, a magic that overcomes and destroys her (LWW, 132). Is the use of evil witches and black magic, and the violent destruction of them by good forces, a desirable thing in books for children? The issue is certainly debatable. Lewis, however, thought it was acceptable. He acknowledged the terrible creatures in fairy tales, presumably like the White Witch, the Hag, the werewolf, and Jadis in his own stories. But, he pointed out, “in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones.” There is no use, he says, trying to hide from children the fact that they are born into a world of death, violence, . . . good and evil. . . . Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. . . . Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.17 17. Lewis, “On Three Ways,” 32, 31.

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The Narnia stories are works of moral imagination in part because they present good and evil as stark opposites, which children have no difficulty in differentiating, and because they present witches consistently as on the evil side. Defending Lewis’s books against such charges may be too easy, overt Christian and defender of the faith that he was. What about a story that treats witches not as evil characters to be avoided but as the heroes, as characters the readers identify with? What might Lewis think about the Harry Potter stories, if he were still here to read them? Would he have approved of their imaginative artistry? Would he have regarded them as fostering the moral imagination? The Harry Potter stories, a series by J. K. Rowling, have proved controversial among some groups, especially conservative Christian groups, because of their apparent endorsement of magic and wizardry.18 Harry Potter is a very ordinary-seeming young orphan boy who discovers he is special: he is a wizard, even a famous wizard. He grew up with his non-wizard uncle and aunt who have hidden from him the fact that his parents were magicians who were murdered by a powerful evil wizard, Voldemort, and that he has inherited magical powers from them. At age eleven he learns that he is eligible to attend Hogwarts, the best school of witchcraft and 18. See the Focus on the Family website (search for “Harry Potter” on http://www.family.org) and the website for Kjos Ministries, http://www. crossroad.to. The extensive notes in Richard Abanes, Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace behind the Magick, cover thoroughly both favorable and unfavorable critiques of the series. Abanes’s thesis is that the activities Rowling describes in the books are not “magic” (sleight-of-hand tricks) but “magick” (a term popularized by Aleister Crowley, by which he meant “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” that is, occult practice—96). Much of Abanes’s book is devoted to demonstrating that “not everything in the Potter series is imaginary” (23). Rowling, he shows, “has pulled a great deal of material from actual occult legends, beliefs and history” (96): the Philosopher’s Stone, for example, was an object, or formula, actually pursued by medieval alchemists (who Abanes says were involved in occult practices); Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel really existed—he was a French alchemist who allegedly did succeed in producing the Philosopher’s Stone; the names of other historical figures with occult associations are used or echoed in the books; and the titles of imaginary books in the stories often resemble the titles of actual books on magic. But what Abanes is objecting to is a standard writing technique for adding “realism” to an imaginary story. For a balanced, well-informed approach to the series from a conservative Christian perspective, one sensitive to literary traditions and techniques, see Connie Neal, What’s a Christian to Do with Harry Potter?

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wizardry in the land. On Harry’s eleventh birthday, the realm of wizardry (which exists alongside the ordinary world) establishes contact with him and assists him to enter Hogwarts. Each of the projected seven books treats one year of Harry’s seven-year educational program at Hogwarts, and each, it appears, will involve an attempt by Voldemort to destroy Harry or to persuade him to join the forces of evil. The stories are fantasy stories of the kind Lewis delighted in, despite the presence of details from our world in them. They are examples of what Brian Attebery has called “indigenous fantasy”—that is, stories that take place in the ordinary world accessible to our senses but that include, contrary to all sensory evidence and experience, “magical beings, supernatural forces, and a balancing principle that makes fairy tale endings not only possible but obligatory.”19 As the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe enter Narnia through a wardrobe, so characters in the Potter books enter another realm by going into a pub other people cannot see, or by walking straight at the barrier between platforms nine and ten of King’s Cross station in order to reach platform nine and three-quarters, which is invisible and inaccessible to everyone else. A scarlet steam engine pulls a line of carriages into the countryside beyond neat fields and farms through woods, twisting rivers, and dark mountains until they reach the school, a vast castle atop a high mountain across a great black lake. These are staples of imaginative fantasy—a world separate from ours with its own inhabitants and natural laws. It, like Narnia, is a pretend world: as Narnia is based on the pretense that animals have intelligence and speech (what child hasn’t wished animals could talk or pretended that they could?), the Potter books pretend that magical powers are real and that wizards and witches possessing those powers really exist. As Lewis, building on his pretense, fills out details about what life in Narnia would be like, so Rowling depicts what Hogwarts and its environs are like—a world where pictures are alive and move, where mail is delivered by owls, where stairs lead to different places on Fridays, where one encounters ghosts, dragons, unicorns, and centaurs. It is a place where, as in Alice in Wonderland, chessmen are alive and chess is played by directing one’s troops in battle. 19. Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy, 129.

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The books are so popular because they tell skillfully constructed, exciting, fast-moving stories, and they include a great deal of adolescent wit and humor. They are popular also because the central characters are ones readers can identify with closely. Only a few preadolescents and adolescents think of themselves as good-looking, popular, and successful. Most children think of themselves as unpopular, not very good-looking, not successful, always bungling things—in other words, a great deal like Harry and his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Most children suffer from or fear bullies and can relate appreciatively to lines like, “Piers . . . was usually the one who held people’s arms behind their backs while Dudley hit them” (Stone, chap. 2).20 Like the Chronicles of Narnia, the Potter books are fairy tale as well as fantasy: they are extended developments of two fairy-story archetypes, Cinderella and the Ugly Duckling. Like Cinderella, Harry is disliked and mistreated by his stepparents (in his case, uncle and aunt) and highly favored stepbrother (cousin). As Cinderella sits in the ashes, Harry lives in a spider-filled cupboard under the stairs. As Cinderella wears rags while her stepsisters are dressed in finery, skinny Harry wears handme-downs from fat Dudley, and though Dudley will attend Smeltings and get a brand new uniform, Harry is to attend Stonewall wearing some old things Aunt Petunia dyes gray for him. As Cinderella is forced to scrub and clean, Harry has to finish frying the bacon so Dudley can have a nice birthday. The Potter books also follow, in form and details, the conventions of traditional British school stories, a very popular and extensive genre in Britain past and present.21 They contain the typical boarding school experiences: start of term notices; buying a school 20. I have quoted from the British editions of the Potter books. In the editions published in the United States, of the first three books especially, terms which might be unfamiliar to American readers were changed to ones Americans would recognize. For scholarly purposes, therefore, the American editions offer less authentic texts. For a discussion of the practice of “translating” British children’s books for American audiences, see Jane Whitehead, “ ‘This is NOT what I wrote!’: The Americanization of British Children’s Books.” For a discussion focused on the Potter books, see Philip Nel, “You Say ‘Jelly,’ I Say ‘Jell-o’?: Harry Potter and the Transfiguration of Language.” 21. See David Steege, “J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels and the British School Story: Lost in Transit?” For background on the school story genre, see Robert J. Kirkpatrick, The Encyclopedia of Boys’ School Stories, and Sue Sims, The Encyclopedia of Girls’ School Stories.

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uniform (robes and a pointed hat), textbooks (such as The Standard Book of Spells [Grade 1] and A History of Magic), and school accessories (including a wand and a cauldron); the journey to school by train; assignment to a school house; playing for one’s house in athletic contests; boring lecturers, bullies, and good friends; banquets, homework, and exams. Traditional school stories usually draw upon the Ugly Duckling archetype: an unpromising boy succeeds despite all the odds against him. In this case, the small, skinny, thin-faced boy with broken glasses and hair that sticks out all over the place— someone young readers can identify with closely—turns out to be the hero, widely admired and praised. The stories are built on things every kid wants—to do something spectacular and unexpected (like Harry, the first time he mounts a broomstick, turning out to be a natural at it and being able to catch Neville’s glass Remembrall ball when Malfoy drops it from a great height), to be the only first-year student ever to be chosen for his house team, to be the hero of the big match, and to save his school from destruction. Lewis refers to this genre, in its traditional form, as “twaddling school stories” (SbyJ, 35) and criticizes them for indulging psychological fantasy—satisfying the desire for escapism—instead of the desire for the more positive imaginative experience literary fantasy provides. The problem is the realistic setting of school stories, and thus the seeming realism of the adventures. “We . . . long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who . . . rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage.” When directed at something as close as school life, such longing can prove “ravenous and deadly serious. Its fulfillment on the level of imagination is in very truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery to the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration.”22 These stories are examples for Lewis of the dangerous and immoral misuses of the imagination discussed above: “The story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed [the reader’s] real ambitions” (SbyJ, 35).

22. Lewis, “On Three Ways,” 29. Cf. “This is not . . . a school story” (SC, 1).

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In a brilliant move, Rowling retains the appeal of the traditional “school stories for boys and girls”23 while avoiding the pitfalls Lewis pointed out by moving them from the realistic school in the next town to a fantasy setting—a school for wizards that the reader knows is like his or her school, but can never be his or her school. One can no more get to Hogwarts by going to King’s Cross Station than one can get to Narnia by bashing through the back of a wardrobe. Thus the fascination of reading stories about the kinds of things that happen to oneself at school can still be present, but instead of provoking daydreams and wish-fulfillment focused on the self, the stories take readers to a world outside themselves. Thus the Potter books satisfy not the longing for psychological escape, but the longing for fairy land, which is very different: In a sense the child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale?— really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. . . . The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story.24

From descriptions of the way children read and reread the Potter books, it seems very possible that the stories have the kind of romantic and mythic power Lewis describes here. Only time, and completion of the series, will tell for sure.25 One could object that the fantasy world which readers of the Potter books are encountering is a world containing wizardry, witches, 23. Ibid., 30. 24. Ibid., 29–30. 25. The Potter books capture a sense of wonder, which Attebery cites as a defining response to fantasy (Strategies of Fantasy, 16–17, 128), but not, thus far, a sense of the numinous, which is an important ingredient of myth, according to Lewis. Numinous is Rudolf Otto’s term, defined in the second chapter of The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Lewis discusses it in The Problem of Pain, chap. 1.

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and magic. But this too deserves considering. Rowling has said that “the book is really about the power of the imagination,” not magic.26 That seems to me an accurate description. Much of what is called “magic” there is simply the kind of things children imagine doing in our world: what kid hasn’t dreamed of being made invisible (the way Harry’s “invisibility cloak” does for him) and being able to observe without being observed? What kid hasn’t dreamed of being able to fly, to soar through the air, the way Harry can on a broomstick in the first book, or the way the Weasleys do in a car in the second? What kid hasn’t watched a magic show by David Copperfield on television and not wanted to pull rabbits out of hats or make things disappear? The stories depend on characters being able to do things kids fantasize about doing; the witches aren’t essential— Martians taking human form and infiltrating our world might have been used instead, though the imaginative effect would been quite different. Concerns have been expressed by some of Rowling’s critics that exposure to magic in the Potter books will desensitize children to the evils of magic and induce them to think it harmless, even beneficent. I think the books could have quite the opposite effect: to undermine the basis for any belief in the efficacy of magic. There is a tonguein-cheek quality in the handling of magic in the books: they come close to ridiculing magic, partly by treating it as a wholly mechanical process, partly by the examples of what such processes achieve: in Transfiguration class, Professor McGonagall changes her desk into a pig and students practice turning a match into a needle or converting a beetle into a button (Chamber, chap. 6). A student accidentally turns his friend into a badger. In Potions class a Swelling Solution splashes onto Malfoy’s face and causes his nose to swell like a balloon; charms the students learn include a Tickling Charm (Chamber, chap. 11). The efficacy of magic is turned into a joke. The undermining of anything magic or occult is especially evident in the handling of divination in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Sybill Trelawney is a comic figure—dreamy, delicate, oddly dressed. The title of the textbook in her course, Unfogging the Future, undercuts the subject she teaches. Ron and Harry mock the very idea of reading tea leaves, crystal balls, and palmistry, and even 26. Rowling, Interview with Judy O’Malley, Book Links 8 (July 1999): 33.

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other professors ridicule the class. Professor McGonagall dismisses the professor and the subject: “Sybill Trelawney has predicted the death of one student a year since she arrived at this school. None of them has died yet. . . . Divination is one of the most imprecise branches of magic. I shall not conceal from you that I have very little patience with it” (Prisoner, chap. 6). The handling of magic and wizardry as a whole undermines them as a subject for serious consideration and moves away from occult practice. The occult deals with hidden knowledge and supernatural powers. There is nothing “hidden” about the magic in these stories: this is what Lewis called fairy-tale magic—objective efficacy that cannot be further analyzed. The source of the magic is perfectly clear. It is imaginary, and young readers realize this and enjoy it. Broomsticks and cars fly. These are characteristics of Saturday morning cartoons; they work against considering magic as something real or serious. There is never a suggestion that any kind of power lies behind the mechanical process the characters engage in: even the ghosts have no feel of being spirits; they are just another variety of character in a fantasy world, much like elves in J. R. R. Tolkien’s world or dwarfs in Narnia. Young readers realize that what is happening in the stories is make-believe: their parents may buy them a “Harry Potter Wand” that shoots sparks out its end, but they know it takes three AA batteries to make it work. A “Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak” won’t really make them invisible, but they can pretend it does. Young readers sense that magic in the stories is a narrative prop and tool. If they begin investigating witchcraft and the practice of magic in our world, they will quickly find that this is not what they are looking for: they want the power of imaginative experience, not the power of occultish experience. The stories may well have the effect of making children less susceptible to “magick” and the occult in our world, not more susceptible. Concerned adults, reading the books gravely and suspiciously, may miss the effect of tone, with its exaggeration and subtle mockery, as, for example, broken bones mended instantly—or removed and regrown by taking doses of Skele-Gro (Chamber, chap. 10), but for children this tone is familiar from books and television, and they are therefore less likely to be taken in than adults. Will reading about Harry Potter incline young readers to buy

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pointed hats, pretend to be wizards or witches, and draw a bolt of lightning on their foreheads? Certainly. Pretense and imitation are the nature of childhood imagination. Children also pretend to go through the backs of wardrobes and live in Narnia. Should parents be concerned that children will believe that such things are really possible? Lewis didn’t think so: a child “does not want to be a rabbit, though he may like pretending to be a rabbit as he may later like acting Hamlet” (SbyJ, 35); “It is a great mistake to suppose that children believe the things they imagine” (SbyJ, 59–60). The “white magic” of the Potter books is largely the stuff of imagination, much of it contemporary adaptation of details from the fantasy story tradition, like the flying carpets and amulets of the Edith Nesbit stories Lewis loved and was influenced by. The Potter books, like the Chronicles of Narnia, include dark magic, the “Dark Arts,” the “Dark Side” (Stone, chap. 16), and always treat it, like the Chronicles, as a representation of evil, of “going bad,” of making self and power the center of one’s life. Professor Quirrell in book one illustrates the results of an overweening greed and desire for power, a willingness to pay any price to acquire it, even a willingness to align himself with—and surrender his soul to—the “Dark Side,” a diabolically evil force. The effects of such surrender are depicted vividly in the story, in the adventure of the Forbidden Forest and particularly in the description of Quirrell in the final episode; and students at Hogwarts are constantly warned away from experimenting with, or even showing interest in, that kind of magic. In the second book, Tom Riddel is transformed from being a model student, Head Boy at Hogwarts, to an evil force— Voldemort—by allowing the dark arts to take over his life. And the third and fourth books, as Voldemort gathers his earlier followers around him and intensifies his efforts to destroy Harry, provide increasingly vivid imaginative representations of the power and unambiguous evil of dark magic. Do the Potter books illustrate “moral imagination”? Many people think they do. Catherine M. Wallace calls Rowling “a master storyteller and a narrative moralist with something important to say.” Emily Grierson goes further, believing that the Potter series “can be interpreted as a creative narrative fantasy grounded in Christian

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ethics and a Christian theology of hope.”27 The books are not explicitly Christian, the way the Narnia books are. But the stories do affirm the virtues of courage, courtesy, and friendship, as Lewis’s Chronicles do. The Potter books are partly fairy tales, as mentioned above, and fairy tales are important vehicles for moral imagination. Abanes criticizes the books because characters do not always follow the rules and do not always tell the truth—and do not show remorse or suffer consequences for what they do. Breaking the rules and telling fibs are a central part of the tradition of school stories—much of the tension generated in the stories comes from whether the characters will get away with what they have done. This may not reinforce the kind of behavior some parents expect, but it is realistic, true to the life many children actually lead. And the stories do show consequences, though they do not moralize about them; many of the difficulties characters encounter are created by, or complicated by, untruths or law breaking.28 The Potter stories do not try to teach meticulous obedience to a school’s rules and the rules of an ethical code, but they do provide models who affirm the desirability of telling the truth and adhering to rules and codes of behavior. Their moral imagination comes into play in providing readers with appealing models of characters whose overall character is brave, true, reliable, caring, and courageous. And they demonstrate that good and evil exist—though the lines between them, in the books and in real life, are not as clear and tidy as Abanes would wish them—and that one must choose to side with one or the other. The theme of the second book is summed up by a powerful sentence near the end: “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities” (Chamber, chap. 18). The way the books present such choices is not incompatible with Christianity, despite the fears of many critics of the series. A central 27. Wallace, “Rowling as Moralist,” 18; Grierson, “Harry Potter and the ‘Deeper Magic.’ ” 28. See Neal, What’s a Christian to Do with Harry Potter? chapter 9, for a critique of the books’ potential for positive moral instruction: “If one is looking for a simple message of ‘Don’t break the rules!’ forget the Harry Potter books. But if one is looking for deeper lessons in moral decision making based on principles and a growing discernment of good and evil, these books provide a rare opportunity for such instruction” (179).

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theme, love and sacrifice, is very similar to the heart of the Narnia books. Harry learns that Voldemort was not able to kill him because of his mother’s love. His mother sacrificed her life for Harry’s: “Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realise that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. . . . To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection for ever” (Stone, chap. 17). Similarly, Ron sacrifices himself in the chess game (“That’s chess! . . . You’ve got to make some sacrifices!”—Stone, chap. 16) to save the friends he loves, and Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel sacrifice their lives so that the Philosopher’s Stone can be destroyed and never again endanger the world. A person who wants to read Christianity into this will have no difficulty in doing so, but it invites—as the Chronicles do also—a moral nonreligious reading first.29 Rowling names the Chronicles of Narnia among books that have influenced her strongly.30 I think Lewis would have enjoyed and commended the Potter books, for their creativity in conceiving of a unique fantasy world, for their skill in adapting the traditional school story to a new and more positive use, and for the way in which they nurture the moral imagination by having characters and events affirm virtues that Lewis valued highly. In his 1938 postconversion essay “Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century,” Lewis chided critics of the time for the seriousness with which they regard the literary enterprise. They look for seriousness not as wisdom or virtue, but as a “stern and tough” outlook on life. They dislike “peace and pleasure and heartsease simply as such.” They “distrust the pleasures of imagination, however hotly and unmerrily [they] preach the pleasures of the body.”31 Lewis, both before and after his conversion, derived enormous pleasures, probably daily pleasures, from the imagination, in addition to what it contributed to his finding faith and moral development. “You must be enjoying yourself no end,” he wrote to Greeves in 1931 about 29. See, for example, ibid., chaps. 10–11. 30. Rowling, Interview with “Stories from the Web”—http://www.stories fromtheweb.org/stories/stories/rowling/interview.htm. 31. Lewis, “Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century,” 13.

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reading Plato’s Phaedrus; “I don’t know any greater pleasure than returning to a world of the imagination which one has long forsaken” (TST, 430). Without the imagination, Lewis’s life would have been diminished in many ways—dimmer, more constricted, less rich and rewarding. It is in that light that he worried about five-year-old Michael’s “poor imagination ha[ving] been left without any natural food at all” (see chapter 1 above). Because a starved imagination leads to an impoverished life, Lewis was concerned about all the Michaels of the world, and he did all he could to advocate a diet of imagination and to provide rich imaginative materials for them to feast on. The aim of this book has been to illustrate that concern, to show how important imagination and the arts were to Lewis; how they filled a vital and valuable place throughout his life and contributed in important ways to his character and to his work as writer, thinker, critic, and apologist; and how they are pleasures to be relished and pursued as part of the feast God has set before his world.

Appendix Table for Converting Page References to Chapter Numbers Quotations from the Chronicles of Narnia are from the Macmillan hardbound editions published in the United States (1950–1956); the page references are to those editions. The table below will enable readers using other editions to find the references by chapter and approximate location within the chapter. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe pp. 1–7: ch. 1 pp. 8–17: ch. 2 pp. 18–25: ch. 3 pp. 26–34: ch. 4 pp. 35–42: ch. 5 pp. 43–50: ch. 6 pp. 51–61: ch. 7 pp. 62–70: ch. 8 pp. 71–80: ch. 9

pp. 81–89: ch. 10 pp. 90–98: ch. 11 pp. 99–107: ch. 12 pp. 108–16: ch. 13 pp. 117–26: ch. 14 pp. 127–35: ch. 15 pp. 136–44: ch. 16 pp. 145–54: ch. 17

Prince Caspian pp. 1–9: ch. 1 pp. 11–23: ch. 2 pp. 24–32: ch. 3 pp. 33–45: ch. 4 pp. 46–58: ch. 5 pp. 59–68: ch. 6 pp. 69–81: ch. 7 pp. 82–93: ch. 8

pp. 94–106: ch. 9 pp. 107–21: ch. 10 pp. 122–33: ch. 11 pp. 134–45: ch. 12 pp. 146–56: ch. 13 pp. 157–71: ch. 14 pp. 172–86: ch. 15

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Appendix




The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” pp. 1–14: ch. 1 pp. 15–28: ch. 2 pp. 29–40: ch. 3 pp. 41–53: ch. 4 pp. 54–66: ch. 5 pp. 67–80: ch. 6 pp. 81–92: ch. 7 pp. 93–106: ch. 8

pp. 107–19: ch. 9 pp. 120–33: ch. 10 pp. 134–46: ch. 11 pp. 147–58: ch. 12 pp. 159–70: ch. 13 pp. 171–83: ch. 14 pp. 184–95: ch. 15 pp. 196–210: ch. 16

The Silver Chair pp. 1–13: ch. 1 pp. 14–25: ch. 2 pp. 26–38: ch. 3 pp. 39–51: ch. 4 pp. 52–64: ch. 5 pp. 65–79: ch. 6 pp. 80–92: ch. 7 pp. 93–106: ch. 8

pp. 107–18: ch. 9 pp. 119–32: ch. 10 pp. 133–45: ch. 11 pp. 146–58: ch. 12 pp. 159–70: ch. 13 pp. 171–82: ch. 14 pp. 183–94: ch. 15 pp. 195–208: ch. 16

The Horse and His Boy pp. 1–14: ch. 1 pp. 15–28: ch. 2 pp. 29–40: ch. 3 pp. 41–53: ch. 4 pp. 54–66: ch. 5 pp. 67–77: ch. 6 pp. 78–90: ch. 7 pp. 91–102: ch. 8

pp. 103–15: ch. 9 pp. 116–28: ch. 10 pp. 129–140: ch. 11 pp. 141–53: ch. 12 pp. 154–66: ch. 13 pp. 167–79: ch. 14 pp. 180–91: ch. 15

The Magician’s Nephew pp. 1–13: ch. 1 pp. 14–24: ch. 2 pp. 25–35: ch. 3

pp. 36–47: ch. 4 pp. 48–58: ch. 5 pp. 59–69: ch. 6


pp. 70–81: ch. 7 pp. 82–91: ch. 8 pp. 92–103: ch. 9 pp. 104–14: ch. 10 pp. 115–25: ch. 11

Appendix

pp. 126–37: ch. 12 pp. 138–48: ch. 13 pp. 149–58: ch. 14 pp. 159–67: ch. 15

The Last Battle pp. 1–11: ch. 1 pp. 12–23: ch. 2 pp. 24–33: ch. 3 pp. 34–43: ch. 4 pp. 44–54: ch. 5 pp. 55–65: ch. 6 pp. 66–76: ch. 7 pp. 77–86: ch. 8

pp. 87–96: ch. 9 pp. 97–106: ch. 10 pp. 107–16: ch. 11 pp. 117–27: ch. 12 pp. 128–40: ch. 13 pp. 141–52: ch. 14 pp. 153–62: ch. 15 pp. 163–74: ch. 16

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Index Abanes, Richard, 178n, 186 Adey, Lionel, 9n Alexander, Samuel, 10 Alford, Henry, 93 Allegory. See Chronicles of Narnia: not allegorical Amphion, 104, 113 Analogies, 20, 38, 79–80 Antichrist, 64n Apocalypse. See Time: end of Aporia. See Gaps Arac, Jonathan, 9n Archetypes, 112, 119, 180, 181 Architecture: in Chronicles, 149–51, 153; as an expression of cultural values, 150–51, 153, 154, 156; Lewis’s appreciation of, 148–49; as metaphor, 65, 152–53; in other works by Lewis, 151–54; spiritual effect of, 152–53. See also Objective Room Aristotle, 27 Arnold, Matthew, 12, 40 Art: “receiving” vs. “using,” 13–14; as therapy, 12. See also Ecstasy; Emotional response; Visual art Aslan, 1, 33n, 46–47, 48–49, 50, 55, 63, 66–67, 76, 77, 80, 85n, 88, 99n, 100, 101, 102, 103–4, 105n, 108, 110, 116n, 120, 141n, 150, 156n, 157, 162, 171, 175, 177 Atlantis, 177 Attebery, Brian, 179, 182n Austen, Jane, 28, 29n, 111, 114, 163 Author: as judge of own work, 40–41, 43, 51 Authorial intention: importance of, 96; relation to meaning of a work, 40–41, 43 Babbitt, Susan E., 163n Bach, J. S., 91n, 98, 110, 111n, 163 Barbour, Brian, 12

Barfield, Lucy, 75, 168n Barfield, Owen, 4n, 20; as dancer, 111–12n; on imagination, 9; on Lewis, ix, x, 6n, 8, 147n, 165n; on meaning, 5n. See also “Great War” Barrington-Ward, Simon, 73n Bayley, Peter, 143 Baynes, Pauline, 30–32, 33, 58, 140, 151 Beach, Sarah, 141n Beauty, 3, 4, 12, 16, 62, 65, 103, 104, 105, 109, 116, 121, 138, 141, 148–61 passim, 162, 163, 174; personal, temptation to, 146 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 90, 91n, 92n, 96n Belfast, 4n, 141. See also Little Lea Beowulf, 139 Beyer, Doug, 173n Bible, 20, 22n, 25, 27, 36, 66, 68, 83, 104, 106, 176, 178n; Psalms, 102, 115n, 173n. See also Eden Books: contribution to well-being, 14; effect on creative imagination, 19; fictitious titles of, 26, 28, 58, 85n, 178n, 181, 183; illustrations in, 27, 31, 137, 138, 140–41, 146; as physical objects, 23–26, 27, 29–33, 39. See also Chronicles of Narnia Bookstores, 23, 24, 30 Brady, Charles A., 41n Breughel (painter), 143n Bronowski, Jacob, 5n Bunyan, John, 26n Burke, Edmund, 163n Callahan, Tim, 141n Cambridge University, 11, 12, 15, 72, 73–74n, 131–32, 143, 148, 149n Capron, Robert. See Wynyard School Carnell, Corbin S., 106n Carpenter, Humphrey, 147n Carroll, Lewis, 137n, 179

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Index




Castle-building. See Fantasy: wishfulfilling Censorship, 173, 178, 184 Chaliapin, Fyodor Ivanovich, 98 Charity, 29n, 94 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 24, 86, 96 Chekhov, Anton, 169n Cherbourg House, 90, 95, 137n, 138, 139, 148, 155n Chesterton, G. K., 116 Children: attitudes of, toward adults, 61, 76, 83, 112; as readers, 1, 26–27; religious experience of, 51; tendency of to identify with characters in books, 74, 162, 180. See also Education; Imagination: deprivation of; Lewis, C. S.: writings: Letters to Children; Story: taste for —encouraging them: to draw, 140, 141n; to read, 26–27, 39; to write, 141n, 171n —normal experiences of: asking questions, 62–63; exposure to harsh realities, 37, 177; pretending, 179, 185 —responses of, to Narnia, 74, 184; actual accounts, 34–35, 59, 73n, 108, 182 Chirico, Giorgio de, 145n Chopin, Frederic, 91, 92, 106 Christ, 64n, 66, 121–22, 145n, 162n Chronicles of Narnia, ix–x, 6, 26, 39, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 123, 137, 147, 162, 173, 178, 179, 184, 186, 187; not allegorical, 51, 68; characters in editions of, 29–30, 32–33, 35–38, 41–43, 51–52, 189–91; events in Narnia omitted from, 81n, 83–84, 101; illustrations of, 30–32, 33n, 58, 140, 141n, 151, 171n; moral imagination nurtured by, 169–71; music in, 89, 99–102, 103–5, 106–7, 109; order in which to read, 41–52, 61, 80, 85, 170; readers’ experience of, 34–35, 44–51, 67, 108; religious dimension of, 49–51, 64–68, 170, 176; revision and nonrevision of, 35–38, 44n, 47n, 52, 54n; time in, 56, 60–61. See also Aslan; Didacticism; Jadis; Pevensie children; Lewis, C. S.; Plot; Reepicheep; Story; Storyteller(s) in Lewis’s fiction

Cicero, 138 Clark, Donald L., 100n Claude Lorraine, 143n Clothing, 83; absence of, 160–61; as art form, 154–55; in Chronicles, 155–59, 161, 162; deception through, 158–59, 161; in Harry Potter stories, 180, 183; as metaphor, 162n; in other works, 159–61, 162; as reflection of culture, 155–58, 161–62; transformative effect of, 157, 160, 162; as worn by Lewis, 6, 73n, 112, 136, 155 Coghill, Nevill, 89n Coleridge, S. T., 4, 7n, 10, 106 Coles, Robert, 169n Conversion: vs. gradual growth, 50, 51. See also Lewis, C. S.: conversion of Cording, Robert, 141n Creation: divine, 19, 63–64, 113–14, 119, 143, 162, 175, 176; of Narnia, 48–49, 62–64, 103–5, 116. See also Imagination: kinds of Crowley, Aleister, 178n Dalziel, Edward and George (illustrators), 137n Dance: as art form, 13, 112, 117, 118; in Chronicles, 114, 116–17, 147; in education, 100n, 169; in Lewis’s life, 111–12; as metaphor, 17, 39, 65, 102, 111, 112–14, 115n, 116, 118–23, 170; participation in, required, 119–20, 123, 147 —as activity: festive or ritual, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121–22; social, 98, 100, 101, 102, 109, 111–12, 114, 115, 116–17, 118, 161. See also Great Snow Dance Dante, 17, 22n, 67n, 102n, 116 David, King, 115n Davidman, Joy. See Lewis, Joy Davidman Davies, Sir John, 113–14, 118 Debussy, Claude, 90, 91n Derrick, Christopher, 144 Dialogue, 74 Dickens, Charles, 169n Dickins, Sophie, 143n Didacticism: question of, in Chronicles, 74, 82, 87, 88, 170–71; Lewis’s rejection of, 164, 169, 170. See also Moral imagination


Dillon, Diane, 33 Dillon, Leo, 33 Donne, John, 29n Donoghue, Denis, 4n, 12n Dostoevsky, Fyodor M., 169n Downing, David C., 15n Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 168 Draghi, G. B., 105n Dragons, 27, 54, 56n, 75, 99, 141n, 145, 177, 179, 182. See also Lewis, C. S.: writings: The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” Drawing(s), 169, 171n; Lewis’s advice on, 139–40; Lewis’s practice of, 137, 138–40, 141, 171n. See also Dürer, Albrecht; Visual art Dreams, 37–38, 46, 78; as literary genre, 53n. See also Fantasy: wish-fulfilling Druids, 36 Dryden, John, 104–5, 110 Dürer, Albrecht, 142 Dumas, Alexander, 57 Dunbar, Lady. See Moore, Maureen Dutton, Denis, 5n Ecstasy: conveyed in music, 106, 109; produced by art, 7n, 8, 16, 17–18, 89–90, 106 Eden, 28, 65 Edmonds, E. L., 91n Education: fine arts in, 100n; Lewis’s critique of, 1–3, 54, 88n, 163, 167; task of, 166–67; use of Chronicles of Narnia in, 33, 173; in world of Narnia, 1–2, 77n, 83, 85n, 100n, 117, 156n. See also Cherbourg House; Experiment House; Lewis, C. S.: writings: Abolition of Man; Malvern College; Reductionism; Wynyard School Edwards, Bruce L., Jr., 21n, 41n Elgar, Edward, 90 Eliot, George, 169n Eliot, T. S., 114–15n, 122n, 163n Elyot, Sir Thomas, 115n Emotional response to art: an aspect of meaning, 40n; engagement, 38, 48; excitement, 47, 54–55, 85, 107, 123, 169; involves ambient circumstances, 34; relation to religious experience, 51, 67; sense of satisfaction, 18–19; as “use,” 13, 14, 16, 17. See also Ecstasy

Index

207

Empathy, 82, 114 Epistemology, 20, 81–82; Lewis’s, 9–11; Barfield’s, 9, 10, 20 Equality, 76, 161n. See also Hierarchy Escapism. See Fantasy: wish-fulfilling Euripides, 27 Evans, Linda J., 110n Evil. See Good vs. evil Evolution, 9n, 10, 97 Experiment House (in Silver Chair), 83, 86, 87, 101, 158, 159 Fairy tales, 1, 6n, 53–54, 56n, 168n, 170, 173–74, 175, 177, 180, 181, 182, 184, 186 Faith, 47n, 50–51, 172 Fantasy: as literary genre, 53–54, 65, 70, 96, 98n, 179, 182, 184, 185; as a mental faculty, 2, 3, 22, 183; relation to reality, 68–69; in visual art, 137n; wish-fulfilling, 5–6, 172–73, 181. See also Imaginatio; Story Faulkner, William, 169n Fielding, Henry, 73–74 Film, 33n; Lewis’s critique of, 56 Fish, Stanley E., 21 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 169n Flamel, Nicholas, 178n, 187 Flashback. See Plot Ford, Paul, 35–37, 52n France: Lewis in, 139 Freedom: vs. slavery, 101, 117, 119, 150. See also Paradox Freud, Jill, 91n Fritz, Kathleen, 141n Gaps: as a device in narration, 38; in the Chronicles, 45–48 Gardens, 64–65, 106, 150. See also Eden; Pastoral Gardner, Helen, 122n Giants, 26, 56n, 64, 83, 85, 96, 97, 99n, 103, 116, 151, 172, 177 Gibson, Evan K., 52n Gilbert, Douglas, 58n, 131–32, 138, 144n Giotto, 142 God, 29, 50, 65–67, 94, 105, 115n, 152, 162, 188; conceptions of, 5n, 66, 119, 161; desire for, 105, 120n, 122; divine-human encounter, 119–20; presence of, 105, 108, 120n; union with, 8; vision of, 22. See also Christ; Creation: divine; Love: God’s; Trinity

208

Index




Gombrich, E. H., 144 Good vs. evil, 64n, 67, 170, 173, 174, 177–78, 179, 185, 186 Googe, Barnabe, 116 Grace, 147; vs. law, 50, 176. See also Law Grahame, Kenneth: The Wind in the Willows, 60, 61, 66, 168n Gramophones, 90–92, 94, 125; recordings for, 92–93, 105n Great Bookham, 129, 148 Great Malvern, 127–28, 148. See also Cherbourg House; Malvern College Great Snow Dance (in VDT), 83, 101, 117, 141n “Great War” (Lewis vs. Barfield), 9–11 Green, Roger Lancelyn, 44n, 58n, 67 Greeves, Arthur, 24, 89, 94, 139. See also Lewis, C. S.: writings: They Stand Together Grierson, Emily, 185–86 Guroian, Vigen, 163n Haggard, H. Rider, 56, 67 Hague, Michael, 32n, 141 Hamilton, Annie (Lewis’s aunt), 112n Hamilton, Augustus (Lewis’s uncle), 112n, 148 Hammond, Wayne G., 31n Handel, G. F., 95, 105n, 110 Hannay, Margaret, 52n Happiness, 68, 120 Hardy, Thomas, 169n Harrison, John, 95 Hart, Dabney A., 165n Harwood, A. C., 111n, 142 Havard, R. E., 71, 91n Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 169n Heaven, 64–65, 69, 97, 101, 102, 105, 106–9, 110, 120n, 121, 147, 153, 161n Hemingway, Ernest, 169n Heraclitus, 27 Heraldry, 100n, 117. See also Howard, Thomas Hierarchy, 122, 161; vs. equality, 65– 66, 118, 156, 162; figured as dance, 65, 118–19, 121–22; monarchy, 65–66, 157–58 Hill, Constance, 114 History, 1, 18, 100n, 156n, 178n Hollander, John, 104n Holst, Gustav, 90 Homer, 27, 44

Hooper, Walter, 31n, 32, 42, 43, 44, 51n, 53n, 58n, 59n, 60n, 108, 143, 144n Horace, 171 Howard, Thomas, 161 Human beings: inherent value of, 162; nature of, 10, 11, 122, 167; spiritual dimension of, 66, 67. See also Nature; Selfhood Humor, 16, 85–87, 93, 111, 117, 141, 158, 159, 180, 183, 184 Huttar, Charles, 22n, 68n, 97n, 102n, 140n Hymns: cited in MN, 93; Lewis’s dislike of, 89, 93–94, 99n; Latin, 93n; parodied by Lewis, 97 Illustrations. See Books: illustrations in Imaginatio (image-making faculty), 3, 4–5, 6, 8, 13, 64 Imagination: “baptized,” 17– 18; dangers in, 172–73, 181; definitions of, 3–8, 14, 19, 32n; and fancy/fantasy, 3–4, 6, 7n; history of term, 3–4, 7n; importance of, to Lewis, ix, x, 2, 8, 11, 22, 188; Lewis’s analysis of, 3, 4–22, 147n; pleasures of, 187–88; power of (Rowling), 183, 184; relegated to a secondary place, 10–11, 22, 172. See also God: vision of; Moral imagination; Reading; Rowling, J. K.; Science; Selfhood; Temptation —deprivation of: in children, 1–2, 22, 27, 53, 163, 165–66, 167; in adults, 163, 169n, 173 —kinds of: artistic, ix, 3, 5, 6–7, 28, 32, 147, 162, 171; creative, 3, 5, 11, 19, 51; penetrative, 19n; poetic, 7, 8, 11; realizing, 19n; receptive, 3, 11, 12, 13, 14–20, 21, 41n; romantic, 3, 4, 8, 11; transformative, 19n —relation to: belief, 18–19, 185; reason, x, 4, 8, 11, 21n, 49, 67; spiritual experience, 10, 11, 17–18, 66, 67; truth and meaning, 10–11, 164, 169 Internet, 163n, 173, 178n, 187n, 199 Interpretation. See Authorial intention Invention, 3, 5, 6, 15, 19, 32n Ireland, 58, 139. See also Belfast Irony, 70, 71, 82n, 87, 158, 159, 164, 177


Iser, Wolfgang, 21 Jadis (the White Witch), 33, 36, 49, 55, 81n, 103, 141n, 149, 151, 157, 170, 174, 177 James, Henry, 70, 73 James, S. R., 138 Jenkins, Jerry B., 64n John, Saint, 68n Johnson, Mark, 163n Johnson, Samuel, 87, 110 Jones, Inigo, 154 “Joy.” See Longing Judas, 68n Kant, Immanuel, 20 Karkainen, Paul, 68 Kawano, Roland M., 113n, 115n Keane, Philip S., 163n Kenosis, 67, 120 Kilby, Clyde S., 58, 110n, 138, 144n Kilns, 1, 90, 91n, 143–44 Kirk, Russell, 163n Kirkpatrick, Louise, 106, 118n Kirkpatrick, Robert J., 180n Kirkpatrick, William, 6, 25–26. See also Great Bookham Krausz, Michael, 5n Kreeft, Peter, 165n Krieg, Lawrence, 43–44 Kuhn, Thomas S., 18n LaHaye, Tim, 64n Law (rules), 145n, 169, 186. See also Grace; Morality Lawrence, D. H., 164 Lawson, Penelope, 143 Leavis, F. R., 11–12 Letts, Malcolm, 140n Lewis, Albert (father), 6, 16, 21, 23, 24, 91, 94–95, 112n, 118n, 138, 139, 141, 148, 149n Lewis, C. S.: advice on writing, 79; attacks on, 173; appreciation of books, 23–26; as character in his fiction, 70–72, 84, 121; childhood and youth of, 2, 4–5, 6, 7, 23–24, 89, 90, 91–93, 94–95, 111–12, 137– 39, 141–42, 148, 151, 155, 171n; compared to Samuel Johnson, 87n, 110; as conversationalist, 73, 79; conversion of, 8, 9, 10, 12, 17, 22, 110, 172, 187; illness of, 28; interest in art history of, 144, 145n; and

Index

209

literary theory, 11–12, 21, 34, 53, 187; opposition to modernity, 15, 20, 29, 63, 99, 114, 115, 154, 161, 171; personal appearance of, 73n; pictures of, 136, 143, 144n; place of the arts in life of, ix, 13, 28; as poet, 8; prose style, 79–80; reading, 15, 23–24, 28, 39, 144; rhetoric of self-deprecation, 13n; on science fiction, 57, 97; as teacher, ix, 1, 166; troubled by dreams, 37. See also Architecture; Clothing: as worn by Lewis; Dance; Drawing(s); Education; Music; Imagination; Reductionism —writings: The Abolition of Man, 11, 165–67; All My Road before Me, 25n, 89n, 91, 94, 111–12n, 139, 142–43, 148; The Allegory of Love, 25, 96, 116; “Animal-Land” stories, 6, 7, 138; “Answers to Questions on Christianity,” 93; apologetic works, 3; Beyond Personality, 79n; “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” 11; Broadcast Talks, 79n; Christian Behaviour, 79n; “Christianity and Culture,” 93, 172n; “Christianity and Literature,” 93, 172n; The Dark Tower, 149n; “De Audiendis Poetis,” 41n; “De Descriptione Temporum,” 114n, 171; The Discarded Image, 11, 14n, 18–20, 104n, 122; “Donne and Love Poetry . . . ,” 187; Dymer, 97, 116n; “Edmund Spenser,” 96; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 16n, 29n, 79, 113, 114n, 171; “Equality,” 65–66; essay on Wagner, 90; Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 116n; An Experiment in Criticism, 6, 11–15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 39, 40, 82, 94, 96, 101, 137, 146, 148, 164, 171, 172; “First and Second Things,” 90n; “The Funeral of a Great Myth,” 90n; George Macdonald: An Anthology, 29n; The Great Divorce, 29, 53n, 65, 70, 102–3, 115, 116, 146–47, 151, 155, 160–61; A Grief Observed, x, 116n; “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” 14n; The Horse and His Boy, 27, 30, 41, 42, 55, 61, 77n, 81, 82, 83, 86–87, 100n, 116n, 117, 150–51, 157–58, 174–75, 190;

210

Index




“Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” 95–96, 122; “It All Began with a Picture,” 6n; Lancelot, 97n, 116n; The Last Battle, 31, 41, 42, 43, 45, 64–65, 67, 75, 77n, 83–84, 85, 87, 101, 108–10, 116n, 117, 155, 156, 168n, 174, 191; The Leeborough Review, 92; letters, 31n, 93, 94n, 95, 112n, 118n, 138, 139, 148; Letters, 28n, 41n, 71n, 79, 94, 144, 147n, 148, 149n, 151; Letters to an American Lady, 172n; Letters to Children, 43–44, 90n, 95, 140, 141n, 171n; Letters to Malcolm, x, 111, 121, 175; “Lilies That Fester,” 2n; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 6, 26, 30, 32, 33, 35–36, 41–51 passim, 55, 58–61, 67, 73, 74, 75–76, 77–80, 84, 85, 99–100, 116, 141n, 145, 149, 151, 154, 156, 166, 168n, 173–79 passim, 189; Loki Bound, 90; The Magician’s Nephew, 26, 33, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47–49, 50, 57, 61, 62–64, 76, 81–82, 83, 84–85, 87, 88n, 93, 100, 103–4, 109–10, 115–16, 151, 156–57, 175, 176–77, 190–91; marginalia, 26, 116, 139; Mere Christianity, 49, 50, 67, 79, 80n, 87n, 106, 109, 118, 119–20, 145n, 161, 162n, 166; “Metre,” 96n; Miracles, 49, 67, 118, 119, 120; “The ‘Morte Darthur,’ ” 149n; “Myth Became Fact,” 11, 111n; The Nameless Isle, 97, 115; “A Note on Jane Austen,” 29n; “On Church Music,” 94; “On Criticism,” 40n; “On Juvenile Tastes,” 168n; “On Science Fiction,” 57n, 62; “On Stories,” 14, 53–54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 96; “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” 6n, 76, 116n, 168n, 169, 177, 181–82; Out of the Silent Planet, 28, 54, 57, 62, 70–71, 72, 95, 98, 115, 144, 152–53; Perelandra, 28, 44, 54, 57–58, 59n, 62, 71–72, 74, 97–98, 102, 115, 121–22, 123, 144, 153, 161n; The Personal Heresy, 34, 67n; The Pilgrim’s Regress, 8, 22, 99, 105, 106, 108, 115, 139, 161n; Poems, 3, 80n, 97, 114n, 115, 116n, 145n; A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” 96–97, 119n, 120n, 161; “Priestesses in the Church?” 111n; Prince Caspian, 1–2, 26, 30, 41, 42, 44–45, 55, 60–61, 75, 76, 77n, 80, 83, 84–85, 99n, 100,

102, 114, 116n, 117, 120, 121, 145, 156, 174, 176, 189; The Problem of Pain, 118, 119, 120, 182n; The Queen of Drum, 97n, 116n; Reflections on the Psalms, 115n; “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger,” 66; “Religion: Reality or Substitute?” 172n; The Screwtape Letters, 29, 93, 103, 151; “Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot,” 7n; “The Shoddy Lands,” 95, 173; The Silver Chair, 26, 30, 33, 41, 42, 55, 75, 77n, 80, 83, 85n, 86, 87, 99n, 100–2, 151, 158–59, 174, 176, 190; “Sometimes Fairy Stories . . . ,” 6n, 41n, 168n, 170; Spenser’s Images of Life, 96, 144n, 145n; Spirits in Bondage, 25, 97, 116n; Summa Metaphysices contra Anthroposophos, 10n; Surprised by Joy, 2, 4n, 5–7, 8, 11, 15–18, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28n, 89, 90n, 92, 93, 94n, 105, 112, 137, 141, 155, 172, 181, 185; That Hideous Strength, 28, 55, 57, 72, 74, 98–99, 115, 118–19, 144, 154, 155, 159–60, 161, 162, 163, 164–65, 166, 167–69, 172; They Stand Together, 1, 7, 8, 13, 17, 21, 24–26, 28n, 29n, 56n, 57, 89–91, 92–93, 95, 106, 111, 116, 118n, 139, 141, 142, 149, 187–88; Till We Have Faces, x, 27–28, 44, 53n, 70, 95, 99n, 115, 116, 144–45, 151–52, 160n, 161n; “Transposition,” 106n, 147n; “Unreal Estates,” 6n; The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” 1, 26–27, 30, 37–38, 41, 42, 54, 55, 56–57, 63, 66, 68, 75, 77n, 80–81, 82n, 83, 85, 86, 87, 100, 106–8, 114, 116n, 121, 140, 141n, 145, 150, 157, 162, 174, 190; “The Weight of Glory,” 8n, 105, 108, 120n, 162; “Williams and the Arthuriad,” 118–19. See also Chronicles of Narnia Lewis, Flora Hamilton (mother), 94 Lewis, Joy Davidman, 25 Lewis, W. H., 90–92, 93n, 94–95, 112n, 137, 138, 141n, 143, 147n, 148–49; Brothers and Friends, 25n, 91n, 92n, 143, 149; “C. S. Lewis: A Biography,” 92, 141n; diary, 24n, 143n; Lewis Papers, 24n, 90, 92, 93n, 95n, 112n, 118n, 138–39, 141n, 143, 148; “Memoir of C. S. Lewis,” 155 Lindskoog, Kathryn, 59n Liszt, Franz: Hungarian Rhapsody, 95


Little Lea, 91–92, 112n, 141n Liturgy, 98, 99 Liverpool Cathedral, 149n Lobdell, Jared C., 71n London, 57, 58, 142, 179; art galleries in, 142, 143n, 144; St. Paul’s Cathedral, 149 Longing, 5, 8, 16, 17, 18, 22, 61, 65, 67, 97, 102, 105–9, 113, 120n, 146–47, 148, 182; relation to memory, 8. See also Fantasy: wish-fulfilling Love, x, 17, 29n, 114, 115, 118, 169, 187; charity, 29n, 94; as a creative power, 114; God’s, 19, 50, 118, 119, 176. See also Marriage Lowes, J. L., 4n Lucas van Leyden, 142 Lucretius, 164 Lyon, H. R., 100n MacDonald, George, 5n, 17–18, 28–29, 163 Magic, 5n, 115n, 173, 178, 179, 183–84; black, 174, 176–77, 178n, 185; Deep and Deeper Magic (in LWW ), 36, 50, 166, 176, 177; as feeling experienced by readers, 48; Magician and Magic Book (in VDT), 27, 55, 56, 146, 150, 174; as term for the unexplained, 175–76, 184; white, 174–76, 185 Malory, Sir Thomas, 149n Malvern College, 89, 90, 138–39. See also Great Malvern Mandeville, Sir John, 140n Manlove, Colin, 52n Marginalization, 174 Marion E. Wade Center, 116n, 141n Marriage, 29n, 115n, 118–19, 168–69 Marsh, David, 97n Marvell, Andrew, 113 Mary, Virgin, 21n Medici Society: prints, 141n, 143 Memory, 8, 58n, 68, 78, 100, 160, 167; aroused by encounters with art, 145–46; as psychological faculty, 6n, 8, 22n; of reading experiences, 34, 48, 49, 56; of first encounter with Chronicles, 34–35. See also Imaginatio; Reading: rereading Metaphor, 7, 11. See also Architecture; Clothing; Dance; Music Metaphysics: Lewis’s, 9–11

Index

211

Michael (boy living at Lewises’), 1, 163, 188 Michelangelo, 143 Milton, John, 96, 120n Milward, Peter, 21n Models of reality, 18–20, 104–5, 113, 114, 122 Monarchy. See Hierarchy Montgomerie, Alexander, 116 Moore, Janie King, 1, 3, 25n, 90, 91n, 112n, 143 Moore, Maureen, 94 Mop, Mrs. (charwoman), 92 Moral imagination, ix, 28, 163–71, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 185–87 Morality, 12, 17–18, 29n, 37, 50–51, 54, 80n, 88, 163, 165; moral law, 36, 50, 80n, 163, 164–65, 166–67, 168, 170, 176. See also Didacticism; Good vs. evil; Moral imagination Morris, William, 105–6 Moses, 22n Mother Goose, 137n Mozart, W. A., 96; The Magic Flute, 90, 97 Music: absence of, associated with dissolution, 109–10; associated with celebration and praise, 102–3; associated with longing, 8, 97, 105–9, 146; in creation of Narnia, 63, 103–5, 109–10; in education, 100n, 103; vs. noise, 103; “receiving” vs. “using,” 8, 13, 14; relation to other arts, 5, 7, 13, 89, 96, 97, 147n; taste in, 93, 94; as temptation, 99, 101, 147. See also Bach, J. S.; Ecstasy; Gramophones; Hymns; Opera; Songs; Worship —in Lewis: his life, 8, 13, 16, 89, 94n, 97–98n, 106, 110, 137; Chronicles, 80–81, 89, 99–102, 103–5, 106–10, 147; other writings, 95–99, 102–3 —as metaphor: harmony, 20, 65, 97, 100n, 103–5, 113, 117, 120n, 122, 170; symbol of creation, 104, 113; other images, 95–98, 116, 120, 122 Myers, Doris T., 12n, 47n, 51, 52n, 60n, 85, 87n, 154n, 166n, 171 Mystery, 47, 48, 175. See also Gaps; Numinous, the; Paradox Mysticism, 17 Myth, 2, 7, 11, 17, 22, 53n, 59, 62–65, 67, 104–5, 109–10, 123, 152, 182;

212

Index




demythologizing, 176; Greek, 58–59, 117, 120, 152, 156n, 169; Norse, 16, 36, 58, 90, 137n. See also Amphion; Atlantis; Paganism; Story: mythopoesis Mythlore, 141n Napoleon, 151 Narration. See Dialogue; Plot; Story; Storyteller(s) Nature: our kinship to, 63; Lewis’s descriptions of, 4n, 60, 63, 83, 85; receptivity to, 14n, 16, 20, 147n Neal, Connie, 178n, 186n Nel, Philip, 180n Neoplatonism, 113 Nesbit, E., 168n, 185 New Criticism, 21, 40–41 Newhouser, David L., 5n Neylan, Sarah, 140 Novels, 6, 8, 53, 71n, 73, 96 Numinous, the, 48–49, 66–67, 153n, 182n Nursery rhymes, 1. See also Mother Goose Obedience: to authority, 118; disobedience, 96, 172. See also Reading: submission in Objective Room (in THS), 144, 164–65, 166 Objectivity, 14, 16–17, 18, 20, 21, 40, 41n, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 87, 165, 166–67, 175–76, 184 Occult: defined, 178n, 184. See also Magic; Witchcraft Olson, Paul A., 100n Opera, 16, 90, 95, 96, 97, 171n. See also Wagner, Richard Oral tradition, 28, 77n. See also Songs Other: relation of self to, 15–16, 17, 20, 82, 160, 163 Otto, Rudolf, 153n, 182n Oxford, 59n, 70, 71, 72, 111n, 114, 135, 141n, 149, 150; Magdalen College, 93n, 142–43; other colleges, 53, 94, 134, 149. See also Kilns Paganism, 22, 116–17, 144n, 160. See also Druids Painting(s), 13, 14, 142–44, 164, 169, 171n; in Lewis’s fiction, 144–46, 153, 164; Lewis’s theory of, 146–47

Palma Vecchio, Jacopo, 142 Papworth (Lewis’s dog), 90 Paradox, 67, 122; of order and freedom, 96–97, 117, 119, 121 Partridge, J. Bernard, 137n Pastoral, 59–60, 150, 154. See also Gardens Patterson, Nancy-Lou, 31n, 152n, 154n Paul, Saint, 68n Penelope, Sister, CSVM. See Lawson, Penelope Pepys, Samuel, 106 Peregrine, Stephen, 141n Perspective, 72, 74–75; of a bear, 72; in drawing, 138; female, 74–75; importance of, 81–82. See also Viewpoint Peter, Saint, 68n Peters, Thomas C., 165n Pevensie children, 26, 35–36, 45, 46–47, 55, 59, 60, 68n, 76, 100, 140, 145, 156, 170, 175 Phemister, William, 98n Pindar, 25, 97 Pitter, Ruth, 60n Planets, 19, 71, 72, 98–99, 113, 161, 169 Plato, 27, 104, 113, 119, 188 Platonism, 71. See also Neoplatonism Pleasure: God’s invention, 29. See also Imagination: pleasures of; Reading: for pleasure Plot: nonchronological sequence in, 44–46, 48, 49, 76. See also Gaps Poetry, 2, 5, 7, 8, 12, 116, 161; as a substitute for religion, 12, 13 Point of view. See Viewpoint Potter, Beatrix, 1, 137 Poussin, Nicolas, 142 Prayer: childish, 5n; Lord’s Prayer, 162n Prints. See Painting(s) Pythagoras, 104 Rackham, Arthur, 90n, 137, 142, 146 Ransom novels, 6, 15n; storytellers in, 70–72. See also Lewis, C. S.: writings: specific titles Rawson, Claude, 87n Reading: aloud, and being read to, 1, 3, 31, 33, 34–35, 55, 74, 169n; “holistic,” extraverbal aspects of, 23, 30–35, 38–39; for pleasure, 28,


29, 39, 55; relation to religious experience, 67; submission in, 14, 17, 146; two ways of, 12–14, 21, 23, 29, 39 —as imaginative activity, 11, 15, 35, 44, 45, 46–49, 54, 59, 61–62, 67, 74, 77, 84–85, 103, 138, 164, 184; role of imagination in full reading experience, 18, 21, 33, 34, 40, 78, 89, 96, 148; as stimulus to imagination, 8, 12, 35, 36, 38–39, 68, 106, 110, 162, 163n, 164, 168–69, 182 —Lewis’s analysis of reading process: appreciation, 12, 15; evaluation, 12; “receiving” vs. “use,” 12, 13–18, 146, 148, 149n; understanding, 12, 14, 20 —rereading, 57, 108, 168n, 182; value of, 14, 49, 55, 72, 101, 169n; in Lewis’s practice, 15, 28n Reader-response criticism, 21, 34. See also Gaps Realism, 2, 19n, 53, 54, 103, 181, 182; devices of, 178n; failures in, 26; Lewis’s cultivation of, in OSP, 70–71; in TWHF, 151; in painting, 145, 146; realism of Hell, 103; rejection of, 60, 61, 64, 70, 73, 123 Reason, ix, x, 2, 3, 21n, 111, 123; dangers and limits of, 29, 54, 63, 65, 122, 167, 172; practical, 169. See also Imagination: relation: to reason Recordings, musical. See Gramophones Reductionism: Lewis’s opposition to, 63, 176 Reepicheep, 26, 86, 100, 107–9, 171n Reynolds, Barbara, 73–74n Richards, I. A., 4n, 9, 11, 12 Romance, 53, 67, 70, 96, 150 Rosenblatt, Louise M., 21 Routley, Eric, 93n, 94n Rowling, J. K.: influenced by Lewis, 187 —Harry Potter stories, 178–87; attacks on, 178; defenses of, 185–86; changes in U.S. editions, 180n; imagination, not magic, as theme in, 183; magic belittled in, 183–84; relation to Christianity, 185–87; witchcraft and wizardry in, 178–79,

Index

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181, 182, 184. See also Archetypes; Fantasy; School stories Ruskin, John, 3 Salisbury Cathedral, 133, 149 Salvation, 2, 12, 50, 94 Sambourne, Edward Linley, 137n Sassoon, Siegfried, 25 Satire, 87, 154, 157, 184 Sayer, George, 31n, 91, 92n, 94, 138n, 144n, 165n Schakel, Peter: Reading with the Heart, 50, 52n, 59n, 68n, 141n; Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis, x, 21n School. See Education School stories: genre, 6, 180–82, 186, 187; Lewis’s attitude toward, 181, 182 Science, 1, 18n, 20, 62, 63, 65, 105, 175; role of imagination in, 5 Scott, Sir Walter, 28n, 139 Sculpture: on Malacandra, 144 Sehnsucht. See Longing Selfhood: egocentric, 10, 14, 15–16, 120, 151, 160, 169, 172, 173, 181, 182, 185; enlarged through imagination, 2, 12, 15, 16–17, 54, 62–63, 82, 164. See also Ecstasy; Objectivity; Subjectivism Seznec, Jean, 144 Shakespeare, William, 3, 19n, 28, 29n, 138, 163, 171, 185 Shelley, Percy B., 7n Sibelius, Jan, 90 Sidney, Sir Philip, 171 Similes, 79–80, 85, 95–96, 99n, 111 Sims, Sue, 180n Skiapods, 140n Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 9n Smith, Robert Houston, 122n Socrates, 27 Songs: in Narnia, 80–81, 97, 100, 101, 107, 109; in Pilgrim’s Regress, 99 Sorcery. See Magic: black Sophocles, 27 Spenser, Edmund, 16n, 47n, 87n, 96, 171 Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers, 94 Steege, David, 180n Stewart, Ian, 5n Story: the “Great Story,” 109; taste for, in children and adults, 53–54, 62, 68, 116n, 168; value of, 169

214

Index




—aspects of: atmosphere, 55, 57–61, 68, 102; blending of childhood and adult experience, 61; blending of familiar and unfamiliar, 59; mythopoesis, 62–68, 182; suspense and excitement, 54–55, 68; suspensefulness, 56–57, 68 —as genre: vs. argument, 49, 67; vs. realistic narrative, 53, 70, 146, 168; truth to life, 68, 175, 186 Storyteller(s) in Lewis’s fiction, 27, 70–88; addressing readers directly, 27, 38, 70–72, 73, 75, 77–79, 83, 84–85, 87, 108; art of, 77n; authority of, 71, 72, 75–76, 78–79, 88; control of how story is told, 75, 76–77, 81–82; omniscient or not? 76, 81n; perceived personality of, 72–74, 75–76, 77, 78–79, 82–83, 87–88; sources of his information, 76–77, 80–81, 83–84; voice, oral quality of, 74, 79; ways of relating to readers, 76, 78–79, 83, 88. See also Humor; Lewis, C. S.: as a character in his fiction; Viewpoint Strong, A. P., 143, 144n Subjectivism, 18, 20; in evaluation of literature, 11; in responding to art, 13, 16, 21, 40. See also Selfhood Suffern, Lily (Lewis’s aunt), 142 Surprise, 16, 49, 54, 55, 57 Swann, Donald, 97–98n Swetcharnik, William, 137n Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels, 137n Symbol, 4, 11, 53. See also Metaphor Tanis, Elliot, 130 Taylor, Mr. (schoolmaster), 139 Teisias Stesichorus, 27, 28 Television, 2–3, 183, 184 Temptation, 95, 98, 105, 107, 146, 147, 153, 167. See also Imagination: dangers in; Music: as temptation Tenniel, Sir John, 137n Thomson, Sarah E., 113n Thorson, Stephen, 9–11, 12 Time, 122n; end of, 64, 109–10; Father Time, 109. See also Chronicles of Narnia: handling of time in Timmerman, John H., 118n Tintoretto, Jacopo, 143

Tolkien, J. R. R., 30–31, 32n, 98n, 147n, 184 Tolstoy, Count Leo, 169n Trinity, 119, 120 Trollope, Anthony, 28n, 120 Truth, 4, 9–10, 11, 20, 65, 121, 122, 171. See also Paradox; Story: truth to life Turin, Shroud of, 143 Valkenburg, Patti M., 3n Van Allsburg, Chris, 33 van der Voort, T. H. A., 3n Van Dyck, Sir Anthony, 142 Van Nattan, Mary, 173 Viewpoint: first-person, 70–72, 74; omniscient, 72; third-person, 70, 71, 72, 74, 82n. See also Perspective; Storyteller(s) Virgil, 96n Visual art, 5, 14, 137–38, 162; Lewis’s theory of, 146–47; “reception” of, 148, 149n; tapestries, in Cair Paravel, 145; works of, owned by Lewis, 141n, 142–44. See also Architecture; Clothing; Drawing(s); Film; Painting(s); Sculpture Wagner, Richard, 16, 89, 90, 94, 96n, 137, 146 Wallace, Catherine M., 185, 186n Watts, George Frederic, 126, 142 Webb, Kaye, 44n Wells Cathedral, 130, 148, 149n Weyland, Margaret, 91n Whitehead, Jane, 180n White Witch. See Jadis Wicca, 173n Williams, Charles, 116n, 118–19, 122n Wilton Diptych, 143 Wind, Edgar, 144 Witchcraft, 56n, 101, 173, 178–79, 181. See also Jadis; Lewis, C. S.: writings: Silver Chair; Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter stories Wordsworth, William, 8n, 14n, 17, 19n, 96n Worship, 17; music in, 89, 94, 99n. See also Hymns; Liturgy Wynyard School, 6, 138, 155 Xenophon, 27