The Faun's Bookshelf

C. S. Lewis on Why Myth Matters

Charlie W. Starr

• Editorial: The Kent State University Press/Black Squirrel Books
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781631013294
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

While visiting with Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy Pevensie notices a bookshelf filled with such titles as Nymphs and Their Ways and Is Man a Myth? Be- ginning with these imaginary texts, Charlie W. Starr offers a comprehensive study of C. S. Lewis's theory of myth, including his views on Greek and Norse mythology, the origins of myth, and the implications of myth on thought, art, gender, theology, and literary and linguistic theory. For Lewis, myth represents an ancient mode of thought focused in the imagination—a mode that became the key that ultimately brought Lewis to his belief in Jesus Christ as the myth become fact.

Beginning with a f The Faun's Bookshelf goes on to discuss the many books Lewis imagined throughout his writings—books whose titles he made up but never wrote. It also presents the sylvan myths central to the first two book titles in Mr. Tumnus's library, including explorations of the relation- ship between myth and reality, the spiritual significance of natural conservation, and the spiritual and incarnational qualities of gender.

Starr then turns to the definition of myth, the literary qualities of myth, the mythic nature inherent in divine glory, humanity's destiny to embrace (or reject) that glory, and a deeper exploration of the epistemological ramifications of myth in relation to meaning, imagination, reason, and truth.

Part I

Folios and Fauns

CHAPTER ONE

Of the Making of Many (Fake) Books

Lewis and Mythopoeia

Fictitious Books of Fiction

The four nonexistent books in Tumnus’s library aren’t the only ones Lewis made up. He was fond of inventing imaginary book titles, book passages, and even authors. Doing so was part of a myth-oriented theory of writing Lewis shared with Tolkien, which we’ll consider after a look at Lewis’s fictional fictions.

Lewis once described himself as the product of “endless books.”¹ His father collected books and kept them all—they filled Lewis’s childhood home, and he was allowed to read whichever books he liked. As a result of this early enchantment with books, Lewis himself wrote almost four dozen books in his lifetime (with much more of his written material collected after his death) and even made up books he didn’t write.

Of these, first of all, there are books to which Lewis gave a title or an author or both, but that have no content. These include another Narnian book entitled Grammatical Garden or the Arbour of Accidence Pleasantlie Open’d to Tender Wits by Pulverulentus Siccus, one of the textbooks used by Dr. Cornelius to teach the young Prince Caspian.² The Latin of the author’s name is an invention and a joke. Pulver means “dust,” lentus means “slow,” and siccus means “dry.” For Caspian, who prefers to learn about Narnian history, the study of grammar is all of these things.³ Another book in this category, also of the literary teacher’s variety, is written by Lewis’s fictional philologist hero, Dr. Elwin Ransom; it’s called Dialect and Semantics⁴ and represents Ransom’s work as a university philologist.⁵

While on Mars, Ransom also gives thought to writing a book or two on the language he later learns is called “Old Solar” (properly called “Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi,” or the “Speech of the Field of Arbol”).⁶ Ransom considers such titles as An Introduction to the Malacandrian Language, The Lunar Verb, and A Concise Martian-English Dictionary.⁷ That the fictional Ransom might have fictionally written these books is a real fictional possibility. Though the fictional Lewis narrator (the Lewis who appears at the end of Out of the Silent Planet and at the beginning of Perelandra) claims Ransom did not write any books on the Martian language,⁸ Ransom might have needed them when he translated The Screwtape Letters.

My tongue-in-cheek reference here is to Lewis’s original introduction for The Screwtape Letters. While half or so of that text appears at the beginning of the book, several sentences were cut from final publication.⁹ In the missing text, Lewis, as fictional author, claims that he got Screwtape’s letters from Ransom, who had learned how to read the Old Solar language, which all creatures speak outside the realm of Earth. In the end, whether the decision was made by Lewis or his publisher, these imaginary connections with Silent Planet were removed from The Screwtape Letters. Still, they give us the opportunity to speculate that Ransom did write his Malacandrian grammar and made translating the demonic letters possible. A point not to be overlooked here is that Lewis didn’t just make up book titles, he also fictionalized himself and our world. He is a character in two of the Ransom books, in the published Screwtape introduction (where he pretends to have obtained the letters, but won’t say how nor why he can read them), and in The Great Divorce.

In the Space Trilogy, especially, Lewis is then able to reverse realities: At the end of Out of the Silent Planet, he talks as if the events of the book really happened by making himself a character in the story. In chapter 22, Lewis-the-narrator begins to write as if the story were real. He says it’s time to take off the mask and inform the reader of the real reason the book was written.¹⁰ Then he tells the reader that Ransom is a pseudonym (given to protect the real Ransom’s identity) and that Ransom has himself chosen not to tell of his marvelous adventures. Lewis-the-narrator claims that this is the point he enters the story.¹¹ He says he knows Dr. Ransom professionally, having consulted with him about literature and philology.¹² He then writes of how he first learned of Ransom’s story: After finding an obscure reference in a medieval text from the twelfth century by a writer named Bernardus Silvestris (who actually existed and is not a fictional author), a peculiar word piqued the Lewis-narrator’s interest. In describing a journey through the heavens, Silvestris uses the word Oyerses¹³ (which are the arch-angelic Oyarsas, or Oyéresu, appearing in all three books of the Space Trilogy); the fictional Lewis writes to consult with Ransom on any insights he might have into this obscure word. The result is that Ransom invites him to visit for a weekend, during which he tells Lewis the entire story. Lewis continues the ruse, even giving a reason for the work to appear to be fictional,¹⁴ and ends the book with a postscript of extracts out of letters written to Lewis by the real Ransom.¹⁵ Lewis was so convincing that at least one fan of Silent Planet actually wrote him, asking him to clarify whether the book was fact or fiction.¹⁶

Another medieval author to appear in the Ransom books is Natvilcius, but, while Silvestrus was real, this individual is completely made up.¹⁷ In a footnote for chapter 1 of Perelandra, Lewis references Natvilcius’s De Aethereo et aerio Corpore, Basel, a nonexistent book.¹⁸ The joke being played, though, is that the name Natvilcius is a Latin version of a favorite Lewis pseudonym, the Old English Nat Whilk, which means “I know not whom.” Lewis often used Nat Whilk and N. W. as pseudonyms when he published poems;¹⁹ likewise, when he felt that his book A Grief Observed might be too controversial, he asked that it be published under the name N. W. Clerk, which essentially translates as “an unknown writer.”

In his essay, “Fern-seed and Elephants,” Lewis sarcastically critiques one author’s work by using an invented book title. In this talk on the trend in biblical criticism to demythologize the Bible, Lewis questions a number of contemporary theologians, not for being bad biblical scholars, but for being bad literary critics—doubting their ability, for example, to recognize a myth or fable when they see one. In one instance, he questions the famous New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann for saying that the personality of Christ does not appear in the Gospels.²⁰ After offering counterpoints to this claim, Lewis writes that he is beginning to think that Bultmann’s idea of personality is something Lewis would refer to as quite impersonal, the kind of description we’d get from an obituary, an article out of Oxford’s Dictionary of National Biography, or a “Victorian Life and Letters of Yeshua-Bar Yosef in three volumes with photographs.”²¹

Other made-up books get brief reference without titles throughout Lewis’s fiction. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we read of Eustace and his love for books of facts and figures, filled with farming structures and plump foreign children exercising in modern educational facilities.²² These get referred to as the wrong kinds of books,²³ but Eustace’s nemesis and eventual friend, Reepicheep, appears to have a good library back in Narnia.²⁴ Also in Dawn Treader, Lucy reads through the magician’s book (in his vast library filled from floor to ceiling with books²⁵), discovering all manner of wonderful and dangerous spells and stories.²⁶

In The Silver Chair, the giants have a cookbook with recipes for cooking both humans and marsh-wiggles.²⁷ The Calormenes of The Horse and His Boy write proverbs,²⁸ the hrossa of Silent Planet make poetry,²⁹ and the sorns in the same novel have books in the form of scrolls³⁰—though not many because, as the wise sorn Augray notes, it’s better to remember than to write down. That Hideous Strength refers to a book written by an ancestor of Jane’s regarding a famous historical battle at Worcester.³¹ This imaginary book was supposedly written by a man who wasn’t at the battle, but had dreamed the events with complete accuracy and recorded them. Additionally, the Episcopal ghost in The Great Divorce wrote several books of liberal theology that earned him fame in certain circles.³²

The library of Glome in Till We Have Faces contains classical books that actually existed (some of which have been lost to history—we only know them by name today).³³ We could even add Till We Have Faces itself as an imaginary work in the sense that we get from it another narrator who claims that it is based on real events. At the beginning of the novel, the main character, Orual, tells us that she is writing this book as an argument against the gods. In her world, the book is historical, autobiographical, not a work of fiction. Lewis also fictionalizes an actual classical work in the form of his essay, “Xmas and Christmas,” which he claims to be a lost chapter from the Histories of Herodotus.³⁴

Then there is the story of Ezekiel Bulver.³⁵ He is the imaginary inventor of Bulverism, a technique for argument that Lewis found common in the twentieth century. In this technique, an opponent doesn’t argue that a person’s ideas are wrong, but argues that the person is wrong (like when someone calls you a bigot for having a politically incorrect moral stance). The fictional Bulver first notices this when he is only five years old: his parents are arguing a problem in math, and his mother claims her husband believes what he does only because he is a man.³⁶ Bulver immediately realizes that you don’t have to refute an argument, just attack the person for whatever is the cause of his narrow-mindedness. Bulver then (fictionally speaking) becomes one of the great movers of the century; Lewis plans on eventually writing the biography of this imaginary man.

Besides fictional books and authors and pseudonyms, there is also an instance of Lewis’s renaming an actual book used in English education—a book that Lewis critiqued heavily in The Abolition of Man. Because he made such an extended attack on this book and its authors, he gave them anonymous names: for the book, The Green Book, and for the authors, Titius and Gaius.³⁷ Lewis also gives a pseudonym to (or else completely invents) his friend Corineus, with whom he has a disagreement in the essay “Myth Became Fact.”³⁸

Next, there are Lewis’s fake letters. The Screwtape Letters are, of course, an invention, but so are the Letters to Malcolm. Malcolm wasn’t a real person; Lewis used the method of writing letters to a fictional friend in order to talk about prayer—his attempts to deal with prayer in more formal or philosophical ways (as with The Problem of Pain or Miracles) had ended with incomplete manuscripts.³⁹

Finally, we get Lewis’s fake commentaries. As a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, Lewis wrote numerous actual works of literary criticism, including The Allegory of Love; A Preface to Paradise Lost; and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding ...