The Wood Between the Worlds owes a little to the “wood where things have no names” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Wandering through that forest, Alice meets a fawn, and for a while they walk together, Alice with her arm around the fawn’s soft neck, until they reach an open field. Out of the wood, the fawn suddenly recalls that it is indeed a fawn, and runs away, leaving Alice on the verge of tears at losing “her dear little fellow-traveler,” but somewhat comforted at having regained her own name. This interlude, a sojourn through that preverbal land where child and beast are reunited, feels like an afterthought and takes less than a page. Perhaps for a writer as fond of wordplay as Carroll, the idea of a wood without words was uninteresting, merely empty.
Although Lewis’s wood has a similar effect on people’s memories, it represents a qualitatively different primeval state. Stories may not happen here, but this is where they are born. Looking around, Digory feels not only as if he “had always been in that place,” but also that he’d “never been bored although nothing had ever happened.” There are no animals or insects, yet the Wood seems charged with vitality: “When he tried to describe it afterward Digory always said, ‘It was a rich place; rich as plumcake.’” This becomes manifest after the children have made an exploratory visit to the world of Charn. Charn’s last empress, the sorceress Jadis, succeeds in hitching a ride back with them, only to find that the air in the Wood — “this horrible place,” as she calls it — suffocates her. If the Wood is dense with life, Jadis, who has killed every other living thing in her own world rather than submit to being conquered by her sister, is an avatar of death; she can’t survive there.
The Wood Between the Worlds shares some traits with other liminal spaces, way stations and thresholds like the bardo of Tibetan Buddhism or the door-lined hallway that Alice tries so hard to get out of in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But unlike other “between” places in myth and fiction, the Wood is both empty and full. It is a unitary moment, containing everything, the pause before a story is told, in which nothing has happened and so anything might. It is not the point of embarkation, but the embarkation itself, the feeling we all experience when we understand that a story is about to begin, the reading mind rendered geographical, like the allegorical medieval self. The pools open into entire worlds, and this, too, is what stories do. They build a world around us as they go along.
On a less abstract level, the Wood is also a library. For someone like Lewis, who lived so much through his reading, each book was potentially a portal to another world. This is one of the chief differences between a child’s experience of a favorite book and an educated adult’s. For the adult, a book may be a work of art, possibly a very great one, but for the child reader, certain books are universes. If we are lucky, we retain some of that capacity to be immersed in a story; Lewis seems to have held on to it better than most, and in this sense, those who describe him as a man who remained a “child at heart” are right. Nevertheless, the adult awareness that a book is a made thing — the work of a human being who, however talented he or she may be, is still only human, and flawed — always takes up some of the imaginative space formerly occupied by total belief. At seven, Neil Gaiman believed the events in the Chronicles to be “true”; now he knows they are “made up.”
The made-up-ness of Narnia has always seemed particularly glaring to certain well-read adults who never encountered the books as children. Lewis’s mythic syncretism — fauns and dragons and dwarves and Arabian Nights exoticism all jumbled together — undermines the Chronicle’s religious integrity for readers like John Goldthwaite, and the Christian subtext spoils the imaginative freedom for readers like my own teenage self. For Tolkien, these undigested borrowings and the lack of coherent, unified world-building make Narnia a flimsy, derivative concoction that spits in the eye of true sub-creation. The idea that the Chronicles are allegories — a supposedly crude, reductive, pedantic form of literature — as well as a collection of insufficiently original tidbits, offends against the premium that contemporary critics place on naturalism and novelty. “Narnia is all pieces of other fullnesses,” complains Goldthwaite, “hastily thrown together like stage props retrieved from a warehouse. The only law of consistency Lewis observed was the law of his own fancy.”
Perhaps children are just too ignorant to recognize this as a flaw, but I think not. Here at least is one case where the naive reader knows better. When Goldthwaite describes “his own fancy” as the “only law” Lewis obeys, he underestimates the potency of that fancy. The Chronicles are unified, not by anything resembling the exhaustive cultural stuff that Tolkien invented for Middle-earth, not by a single aesthetic or style, and not even, really, by a cogent religious vision, but by readerly desire. Lewis poured into his imaginary world everything that he had adored in the books he read as a child and in the handful of children’s books he’d enjoyed as an adult. And there is more, too: treasures collected from Dante, from Spenser, from Malory, from Austen, from old romances and ballads and fairy tales and pagan epics. Everything that Lewis had ever read and loved went into Narnia, and because he was a great reader, these things were as deeply felt by him as actual experiences. In his own way, Lewis, too, believed that everything in the Chronicles was true, and this conviction is what he communicates to his young readers.
The Chronicles resemble the Wood Between the Worlds in this way: they, too, are a portal to other worlds, literary worlds. I was probably the only undergraduate in my junior-year seminar on Edmund Spenser who felt perfectly at home with The Faerie Queene, although at the time I couldn’t have told you why. The “troupe of Faunes and Saytres … dauncing in a rownd / Whiles old Sylvanus slept in shady arber sound,” who come to the lady Una’s rescue when she is menaced by the knight Sansloy, were old friends of mine, people whose company I had missed. The marvel-filled woods that Spenser’s heroes roamed, Prospero’s Island, the lands Odysseus visited, and the Underworld traversed by Aeneas — all these were like old haunts to me. I would even catch flashes of a familiar figure like Uncle Andrew (“Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures”) in the characters of Raskolnikov and Dr. Frankenstein. For the rest of my life as a reader, I will no doubt be meeting again the characters, places, and events that I first encountered in Narnia.
Lewis not only provided my first introduction to these wonders, he also taught me how to understand them, by which I mean that he showed me how a story can work in several different registers at once. I learned to read ironically with the excerpts from Eustace’s diary in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; that meant looking past a character’s own descriptions of events to get to a more impartial version of what had actually happened. I learned to read morally by recognizing my own flaws in the ignoble impulses of Edmund Pevensie and Jill Pole. Both are styles of reading I would need once I became old enough for Lolita and Crime and Punishment. But Lewis also showed me how to read in another way: allegorically, or as he would later come to call it, symbolically.
Lewis traced a familial connection between allegory and literary myth in The Allegory of Love. Allegory, he thought, was a stage that religious stories passed through on their way to becoming the mythic elements used by poets, romancers, and novelists. It is a big leap from faith to art. As long as people believe in a god, they will most likely want something from him, regard him with what Lewis called an “urgent practical interest” and subject him to “selfish prayer.” But, given time, an unworshipped god can “come to light in the imagination” as a symbol pure and simple. Only when the last vestiges of belief have faded can he attain the full imaginative power of what Lewis called myth. This can take centuries. While those years pass, a god or a hero is always in danger of being simply forgotten. The idea of that god or hero, like the bottled juice of grapes fermenting into wine, “must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory.”