This was the difficulty with mythopoeia as Lewis defined it, that is, by the profundity of a reader’s response: not everyone recognizes it in the same books. Lewis knew this all too well. He could hardly fail to notice how many of his peers turned up their noses at his favorites. “It is plain,” he wrote, “that … the same story may be a myth to one man and not another.” If so, then how can we be sure that it’s really a myth? He had a passing interest in anthropological and psychological theories about where the recurring motifs in the world’s religions and legends might have come from, and was intrigued enough by Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes to look into it. Ultimately, though, Lewis concluded that what Jung had to say was not so much a theory of myth as yet another myth. Jung’s description of the collective unconscious was magnificent, written in the quasi-mystical language of “good poetry,” but it wasn’t supported with sufficiently solid material evidence to merit the status of science. “Surely the analysis of water should not itself be wet?” Lewis quipped.
And, after all, Lewis didn’t need a theory of the collective unconscious — or of narrative “grammar” embedded in the neurological workings of the human brain. If he wanted to explain why we feel we recognize certain stories even when we’re encountering them for the first time, or why the same types of story seem to arise again and again in every culture, he had a perfectly adequate reason: they were facets of a truth that transcended the individual self. Myths were God’s way of calling us home.
But how can the skeptic understand such things? How to explain why certain stories exert a power that feels virtually biological over me, while leaving other readers cold? Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects. During the time I was working on this book, the information that I was writing about Narnia elicited very different responses in conversation. Some people would give me a look of politely blank puzzlement; if they’d read the Chronicles at all, they hadn’t especially liked them. Others would exclaim, “Oh, I loved those books!” and for a moment their gaze would drift off to some distant prospect, remembering. One woman, the proprietor of a bed and breakfast I stayed at in Ireland, came up to me holding seven frayed paperbacks, the old Puffin editions of the Chronicles published in Britain, pressed between her two flattened hands like sacred objects; she’d kept them safe for nearly forty years. I wasn’t sure she’d even let me touch them, and then hardly knew what to say about them when she did. These weren’t the editions I’d read, of course, but I’d seen similar ones before, so they weren’t a novelty to me. They were just paperback books, really. But I knew what they meant to her.
In his memoir of his own childhood reading, The Child That Books Built, Francis Spufford describes the effect that the Chronicles had on him when he first read them:
The book in my hand sent jolts and shimmers through my nerves. It affected me bodily. In Narnia, C. S. Lewis invented objects for my longing, gave forms to my longing, that I would never have thought of, and yet they seemed exactly right: he had anticipated what would delight me with an almost unearthly intimacy. Immediately I discovered them, they became the inevitable expressions of my longing. So from the moment I first encountered
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
to when I was eleven or twelve, the seven Chronicles of Narnia represented essence-of-book to me. They were the Platonic Book of which other books were more or less imperfect shadows.
Which is spookier: that Spufford has so perfectly articulated my own childhood feelings about Narnia, or that Lewis was able to achieve this “unearthly intimacy” with me, Spufford, my Irish hostess, and millions of other young readers? We have very little commentary directly from Lewis himself about what he thought he was doing when he first sat down to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Later in life, he could offer no more illumination than that he was in the grip of an old image (a faun walking through a snowy wood) cherished for decades, and that a “fairy tale” seemed the best form for what he wanted to say. But what exactly he meant by that image, or by any of the rest of it until, rather late in the process, he hit upon the idea of rewriting the Passion of Christ, he could never entirely explain. He wrote the Chronicles in a pell-mell rush, at a time in his life when he was distracted, emotionally taxed, and physically exhausted, in an effort that seems almost haphazard. But just as we sometimes dance best when we are not consciously thinking about the steps, it was in writing the Chronicles of Narnia that Lewis finally managed to do what he had admired for so long in others: create myths.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Further Up and Further In
Of all Lewis’s inventions in the Chronicles, the one that comes closest to his conception of myth is the Wood Between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew. Digory’s scheming, vainglorious uncle Andrew tricks Polly into picking up a magic yellow ring that transports her out of our universe, and Digory has no choice but to follow her, carrying the green rings that can bring them both back. The rings are made from the contents of an otherworldly box of dust Uncle Andrew inherited from his godmother (“one of the last mortals in this country who had fairy blood in her”), but he has always been too much of a coward to try them out himself. Uncle Andrew has no appetite for adventure, although he was willing to undergo “disagreeable” experiences with “devilishly queer people” in order to obtain his expertise in magic. He regards sorcery not as romance but as a kind of technology. Like all bad magicians, he is “dreadfully practical” (never a term of praise coming from Lewis).
The yellow ring takes Digory to the Wood Between the Worlds. In this quiet forest, there are small pools beneath the trees every few yards as far as the eye can see. It is warm and bright, although leaves obscure the sky. Digory steps out of one of the pools and finds Polly safe, lying on the grass “just between sleeping and waking.” Eventually, they discover that each pool is a passage to a different world. If you jump into any one of them while wearing a green ring, you will find yourself in another universe; touching the yellow rings takes you back to the Wood.
Before they figure this out, however, the children almost get lost forever. The Wood isn’t a dangerous place, exactly. (Digory and Polly come across one of Uncle Andrew’s previous experimental subjects, a guinea pig, and decide to leave it there, since the magician will only do “something horrid” to it if they bring it back.) But, once in the Wood, people find it easy to forget who they are and where they came from. The narrator speculates that Digory, if asked, would have replied that he had always been there. At first, he and Polly just barely recognize each other and can’t recall why. They are like people trying to remember a dream that is slipping away, but in this case, the dream is real life. The guinea pig is the trigger that brings it all back, but even after they recover themselves, Polly argues against lingering in the Wood, “or we shall just lie down and drowse forever and ever.”