Adults don’t become immune to this power, either; they just learn to respond to different cues. Instead of “Once upon a time,” we latch onto “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” perhaps the most famous first sentence in the history of the English novel. Equally effective is the grand, sweeping, and old-fashioned “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” from Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities. Or we might acquire a taste for laconic leaps into the middle of the action, such as Mickey Spillane’s opener for I, the Jury: “I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room.” A simple, even mundane sentence, that one, but it does the trick; it makes you wonder what happens next. You’re hooked.
Who can catalog the myriad ways that human beings use to signal, “Now, I am telling you a story”? The speaker leaves off ordinary talk, the listener recalibrates her attention, and both enter into a relationship older than the memory of our race. A story takes us, for a while, out of time and the particularities of our own existence. The initiation into this ritual might come as a pause, a change of tone, or even as the apparition of a studio logo shining on the screen in a darkened movie theater. This tells us that a special kind of language, the language of story, has begun.
Human beings speak thousands of languages, but most linguists agree with the theory, first advanced by Noam Chomsky, that there is a “universal grammar,” a common structural basis underlying all human languages. Despite the great variety of tongues, they all work in the same fundamental way. Our brains, it is thought, have an innate response to languages that employ this structure and we are particularly attuned to it during childhood, when we learn languages quickly and easily. An infant’s babbling sounds like adorable nonsense, but it’s really the evidence of a powerful information processor assembling itself, rifling through sounds and sequences of sounds and figuring how all the pieces fit together to form meanings.
Could stories work the same way? Could Corinne, when she corners me and launches into yet another installment of the Niniad, be practicing the grammar of storytelling, arranging and rearranging the components, trying out different kinds of voices, experimenting with repetitions, with dramatic conflict and its resolution, if not yet, alas, with endings? I think so. But while everyone learns to speak, not everyone learns how to tell stories, or at least not how to tell them successfully.
Most of us recognize a fully formed story when we hear or read or see it; this, to me, seems almost as universal as our ability to distinguish, in our own language, between a grammatically correct sentence — “John watched the dog chase the ball” — and a grammatically broken one — “The chase John ball watched the dog.” But, as Chomsky famously pointed out, a sentence can be grammatically correct but still nonsensicaclass="underline" his example was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Even a story with the requisite components of beginning, middle, and end can seem essentially meaningless.
Lewis suspected that, at base, story is difficult to analyze because it really can’t be taken apart, and myth was the prime example of story’s deep roots in the human mind. To Lewis, the word “myth” meant something more than just a tale from an obsolete religion; it was a unit of meaning. Sometimes it was only a sketch of a narrative; a myth might be no more than the image of a beautiful youth falling in love with his own reflection in a pond. Not all old stories qualified as myth in his opinion, and some new ones did. You could identify them not so much by their common characteristics as by how people responded to them.
Lewis considered Franz Kafka to be one modern genius in the creation of myth; reading The Trial and The Castle, he felt “a profound significance, but it emanates from the whole story and is not built up by understanding the parts, nor could I state it except by retelling the story.” There was something irreducible in the kind of story he called myth. We might come up with a thousand explanations for what it “stands for,” but none of them will ever be complete or sufficient. It’s impossible to say what the myth of Orpheus is about; it is exactly itself. The only way to convey its significance fully is to tell the story one more time. We might claim that the ordeals of Kafka’s K. symbolize the individual’s struggle against the modern state or some such theme, but we know that’s only one facet of its significance. When hassling with some red-tape nightmare, we call it Kafkaesque, not because Kafka wrote about bureaucracy but because bureaucracy often seems to be about Kafka’s myth.
Myth troubles critics, Lewis believed, because its value is “extra-literary.” The power of a myth doesn’t arise from the particular words used to convey it; it can be felt even when no words at all are used. A myth might be told in pantomime, silent film, or a “pictorial series” (such as a comic book) and still impress its audience with the sensation that “something of great moment has been communicated to us.” There is only one version of, say, Madame Bovary or Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”; it would make no sense to talk of an equally legitimate version of either work that used different words. But what is the definitive version of the Orpheus myth? Aren’t each of the renditions — Ovid’s verse, Monteverdi’s opera, the film Black Orpheus, Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending — equally valid and recognizably Orpheus? Although lyric poetry sometimes avails itself of mythic material, it is in a sense the opposite of myth, because “in poetry the words are the body and the ‘theme’ or ‘content’ is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul; the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes.”
This conception of myth comes in part from Owen Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends and a fellow Inkling; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is dedicated to Barfield’s daughter, Lucy, and The Allegory of Love is dedicated to Barfield himself. In 1928, Barfield published a book, Poetic Diction, based on his Oxford B.Litt. thesis, and it had an influence on both Lewis and Tolkien. Barfield suggested that myth is a remnant of an early stage of both language and understanding or consciousness, a time of “unitary, concrete meanings.” At this stage, for example, the story of Demeter and Persephone was not just associated with the experience of winter, it contained the very idea of winter — along with the concepts of waking and sleeping and life and death, among other things — in a single, dense unit of meaning. Such meanings, according to Barfield, “could not be known, but only experienced or lived.”
Very small children often think in this way, Barfield believed. When Desmond was just beginning to learn the names of people, I asked him to tell me who I was. He studied me for a while, and replied tentatively, “Mommy?” He knew I was not his mother, but because I sometimes cared for him, I was subsumed in the concept of Mommy-ness, along with the mother animals pictured in his board books and, possibly, physical warmth and food — the experience of being cared for itself. All of this was “Mommy.” Perhaps he regarded me as a minor manifestation of his own mother in the way the Romans considered the Celtic goddess Sulis to be one of the lesser faces that their goddess Minerva presented to the backward provincials of the world.