As a result, medieval intellectuals devoted themselves not only to compiling, but also to reconciling the whole, diverse panoply of known printed information, pagan and Christian, much of it seemingly incompatible. This task called for great feats of imaginative metaphysics. The medievals’ conception of astronomy may be the most eloquent example of their ability, à la Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, to believe several impossible things before breakfast. They regarded the stars as physical objects and as supernatural intelligent beings bearing the names of pagan gods (although ultimately emanations of, and subordinate to, the Supreme God) and as disembodied forces, exerting great influence over human affairs — all at the same time. It’s easy to see why allegory became the signature literary form of the period.
It was to help readers grasp this convoluted system that Lewis wrote The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. He conceived of this long essay (or short book) as a Baedeker to the past, intended for readers who, like cultivated travelers, prefer to visit a foreign country with some sense of what “those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives.” Ideally, reading is a kind of collaboration: the more a reader brings to the book, the more he has to contribute to the experience and the richer it will be. In another text with similar ambitions, A Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis remarked that while Milton’s poetry is often compared to organ music, “it might be more helpful to regard the reader as the organ and Milton as the organist. It is on us he plays, if we will let him.” No musician can play well on a faulty or inadequate instrument; the ideal reader responds to the work on every octave it sounds.
It’s difficult for moderns like ourselves, steeped in the Romantic veneration of individuality, to think of the closed, structured medieval universe and the period’s slavish veneration of “authorities” as anything but conformist and oppressive. But, as the writers of sonnets often claim, artistic constraints can be paradoxically liberating. In this case, Lewis argued, they steered writers away from pretense and hot air. When you choose from a list of presanctioned subjects and themes, you need not justify the material as important or worthy; it supplies all the required weight on its own. As a result, the best authors of the Middle Ages wrote humbly, clearly, gracefully, unself-consciously. “The glory of the best medieval work,” Lewis wrote, “often consists precisely in the fact that we see through it; it is a pure transparency.”
Not coincidentally, this sounds very much like Neil Gaiman’s description of what he likes about Lewis’s prose: “It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it makes sense,” he told me. “It doesn’t do anything but what it’s meant to do.” When I finally found my way to Lewis’s criticism, I discovered that it had the same clarity as his children’s fiction (a genre in which lucid writing is required). Even Lewis’s great detractor, Philip Pullman, aspires to the same, very English, ideal of a transparent style: novelists like James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov, he told me, write books in which “a lot of the interest and sometimes all the interest, is in the surface of the prose [but] my main interest is in the things that you can see through the window of the prose.”
The great beauty Lewis found in medieval literature lies in its effortless integration of precise, modest detail — the “homely,” as he and Arthur Greeves called it — with the vast, comprehensive grandeur of the medieval cosmos. In such a scheme, every small thing — the fall of a sparrow, as Hamlet put it — plays its own, essential part. To demonstrate this, Lewis liked to pluck plainspoken, endearing little touches of realism out of old poems and hold them up to the light for his readers’ admiration. One of his favorites was the moment in Chaucer’s “Summoner’s Tale” when the itinerant Friar John pauses to “droof awey the cat” before sitting down on a patron’s bench. Lewis was also fond of the passage in Layamon’s Brut, a Middle English poem about the history of Britain, in which the fifteen-year-old Arthur is told by a party of Britons first that his father is dead and then that he must assume the throne; they observe the prince sitting “full still; / one while he was wan, and in hue exceeding pale; one while he was red.”
To this list, he might also have added, from the famous scene of the Redcrosse Knight’s battle with the dragon in The Faerie Queene, the poor grass “bruised” by the monster’s huge, hot body and the startlingly bourgeois observation that the blood gushing from its wound was forceful enough to “drive a water-mill.” This sort of “vividness,” as Lewis called it, the deployment of the telling, concrete detail, has in our time become “every novelist’s stock-in-trade.” The medievals, however, more or less invented it, and “it was long before they had many successors.”
Lewis himself embraced the same technique, and it served him particularly well in the writing of the most medieval of the Chronicles, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace Scrubb, blundering into the dying dragon’s valley, finds the floor “grassy though strewn with rocks, and here and there Eustace saw black burnt patches like those you see on the side of a railway embankment in a dry summer.” It is an image that any child of Lewis’s time would have instantly recognized, and an observation particularly well suited to Eustace, who knows so much more about modern machinery than he does about dragons. (Like steam engines, dragons have flaming innards.) The story is about to move toward a mystical transformation, but those black, burnt patches keep its feet on the ground, rooted in the idle perceptions of a schoolboy waiting for a train.
Of all the Chronicles, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader most resembles a traditional medieval romance. It tells the story of a journey, specifically the quest by Prince Caspian to find the seven lost lords of Narnia, friends of his father’s who were sent off on an exploratory mission by the usurper Miraz. In this book, the visitors from our world — Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace — have mostly just come along for the ride. Like Lancelot or Gawain, the Narnian voyagers are motivated by worldly honor and a thirst for adventure, but there is a spiritual aspect to their quest, too, for at least one member of the party; he is out to fulfill a prophecy uttered over his cradle and intends to present himself on God’s doorstep.
In Reepicheep, the talking mouse who is, ironically, a “parfait knight” to rival Galahad himself, Lewis manages to tweak the tradition of the chivalric paragon and to celebrate it at the same time. The mouse is both comical and admirable, his gallantry and unfailing physical courage (“no one had ever known Reepicheep to be afraid of anything”) all the more impressive in someone so smalclass="underline"
“While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise and Peepiceek will be the head of the talking mice in Narnia.”
Perhaps the most obvious literary ancestor of the third Chronicle is The Voyage of St. Brendan the Navigator, the story of a semi-legendary Irish monk who, with a crew of sixty pilgrims, set sail across the Atlantic in search of the Land of Delight. This fabled paradise of eternal life, perpetual summer, and bountiful food and drink is in turn derived from the old Celtic legend of the Isle of the Blessed or Tír na nÓg. Brendan was an actual sixth-century Christian churchman, but his adventures were imaginary and they carried him into territory that is essentially pre-Christian. So, too, the Dawn Treader arrives at last at the rim of the earth (Narnia’s world is flat) and partakes of pagan allegory. The sweet seawater that Caspian drinks, tasting of “light more than anything else,” is an echo of the liquid light drunk by the soul of Pompey when he reaches the outermost layer of the cosmos, the realm of pure aether, in the first-century epic of Lucan, Pharsalia.