As languages develop, Barfield speculated, they begin to divide these larger units of meaning into smaller parts. This makes language more modular, and therefore easier to manipulate and more useful, but it also saps the intensity out of individual words and concepts. When, for Desmond, I became Laura, I was easier to think about as a distinct person who looked and behaved differently from the distinct person who is his mother, Leslie. But in becoming an individual, I also lost my place as part of the wondrous continuum of nurturing presence that was “Mommy.” Desmond knows that I am like his mother because we’re both female grown-ups, but that category does not have the potency it once did; it is disenchanted. Now I am my own woman, but I used to be a goddess.
When human beings learn to generalize and abstract, to label oaks, elms, and birches as “trees,” for example, they arrive at a new type of unity that is practical and sterile, in Barfield’s eyes — very different from the kind of consciousness that understood the world to be an ash tree or an oak to be a god. Barfield believed that in metaphor in particular and in poetry in general, we recover a little of the old, lost unity; metaphor rejoins what has been split apart. This is the source of the sensation of illumination, of recognition that a powerful metaphor delivers. For, as much as our minds like to analyze, to break things down into their constituent parts in order to examine and manipulate them, we also long for synthesis, the sensation that our words and our world are connected and infused with “intrinsic life.” It is in myths that we find that life, that meaning, in its most intact form (although even here it is “mummified,” according to Barfield). Myth defies intellect — if by “intellect” we mean analytical, logical thought — because it predates it. An echo of this old, preanalytical unity is the “something inexpressible” that Lewis felt myth imparts.
Lewis read omnivorously and had ecumenical tastes, but fiction that conveyed this “something” had always been and always would be his favorite. A pulp novelist like H. Rider Haggard, he thought, exemplified the “mythopoetic” (mythmaking) art in isolation from all other literary gifts. A book didn’t always have to be good in any sense that matters to literary critics — in its prose, its construction of believable characters, its ideas, or its originality — to pack a mythopoetic wallop. Lewis knew that Haggard wasn’t a very good writer, but he also knew that he felt strangely swayed and captivated by books like She and King Solomon’s Mines. In Haggard, it was made apparent how the “daemon,” or mythopoetic genius, “triumphs over all obstacles and makes us tolerate all faults. It is quite unaffected by any foolish notions which the author himself, after the daemon has left him, may entertain about his own myths. He knows no more about them than any other man.”
To Lewis’s mind, no writer channeled this “daemon” better than his “master,” the Victorian novelist George MacDonald. Lewis had bought a copy of MacDonald’s Phantastes in a railway station bookstall when he was sixteen years old and far from home, boarding with his tutor in Surrey. Reading it, he was transported. The book somehow bridged a gulf within him, between his imagination, that “many-islanded sea of poetry and myth,” and the banal stuff of everyday life. He felt that MacDonald had shown him how Joy, an aura he once attached only to grand and distant things, to faraway mountains and Nordic heroes, might also be found in the nearby and the humble. “Up till now,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, “each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert.” In Phantastes, he saw “the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged.” His imagination had been, “in a certain sense, baptized.”
Phantastes, like The Prelude, would remain a touchstone book for Lewis, perhaps the single most powerful literary experience of his life — his Magician’s Book, you could say. Nevertheless, Lewis was a literary critic, and his critical judgment told him that MacDonald, like Haggard, was not a technically good writer. “If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words,” he wrote in the introduction to a 1946 collection of MacDonald’s writings, “then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank — perhaps not even in its second.”
It seems impossible to define literature as anything but an art whose medium is words. The term “literature,” from the French littera, for “letter,” seems to dictate that it can be nothing else. Phantastes itself was, of course, written in words, and not particularly felicitous ones. But there was something else in it, too, some other property that transcended words, a quality of story and image that Lewis would, years later, come to call by a name that Tolkien had invented, mythopoeia. As far as Lewis was concerned, MacDonald was “the greatest genius” at mythopoeia he had ever encountered.
Phantastes is, like Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, a very strange book. A young man, Anodos — a name signifying “the way up” in Greek — describes the events following his twenty-first birthday, when he inherits an old desk with a secret compartment. A tiny, beautiful lady emerges from that compartment, and before vanishing, she zooms up to normal size, claims to be his great-grandmother, and promises him a trip to “Fairy Land.” He awakens the next morning to find a brook flowing through his bedroom and all the floral patterns on his carpet, furniture, and curtains turned to living plants and flowers. He then follows a footpath into a dense forest, where, during twenty-one days of wandering, he encounters flower fairies, evil and benevolent tree spirits, a fabulous book-filled castle whose inhabitants he can’t quite see, a statue of a woman that he brings to life, a penitent knight, a cottage whose several doors open onto entirely different regions of Fairy Land as well as into his own past, and more. In the course of this “faerie romance for men and women” (as MacDonald subtitled the book), the hero progresses from a selfish desire to be loved to a redeemed state of self-sacrificing altruism.
Like William Morris’s romances, Phantastes, first published in 1858, was innovative. Anodos, despite his allegorical name, is more or less a contemporary person, and no one else had yet hit upon the idea of setting a Victorian gentleman loose in the land customarily roamed by the Redcrosse Knight or Snow-White. (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland hadn’t appeared yet; MacDonald, who later became a friend of Lewis Carroll’s and whose children read and loved an early draft of Alice’s story, played a significant role in getting Alice published.) In letters he wrote to Arthur Greeves upon first reading Phantastes, Lewis enthused about the book’s phantasmagorical and uncanny elements — the magnificent fairy palace and an eerie tale that Anodos recounts of a young man who falls in love with a lady imprisoned in a mirror. It was only later that Lewis decided that the story was not merely a parade of marvels, that the “quality which had enchanted me in [MacDonald’s] imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live.”
This statement bewilders me. I know that how Lewis felt about Phantastes resembles how I feel about the Chronicles. True, I admire Lewis’s prose as he could never admire MacDonald’s, but that’s not the fundamental source of his books’ appeal. It was exactly the mythopoeic quality in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that caused me to hand it back to Mrs. Belden, effectively speechless. By all rights, the book that had had the same effect on Lewis ought to move me deeply, but it doesn’t. I have friends who feel differently, about MacDonald’s children’s fiction (The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind, for example), and I’ve come to appreciate the sweetness (it is never cloying) that pervades his books. Nevertheless, Phantastes seemed little more to me than an interesting, even trippy curiosity; the tremors that shot through Lewis when he first read it did not electrify me.