More on What Jack Says...

Following the last thread on Lewis's views of mythology and literature, I dug out a correspondence from a few years ago. It came from Perry Bramlett (a Lewis scholar), who visited Houghton and gave a seminar on Lewis. When I asked him about Lewis's views on myth, he promised to email me; the following was his response. Perhaps it will help focus anyone who wants to read up on Lewis--especially for those who have his woks handy. (Consider the rest of this post quoted from Bramlett's email.)

Walter Hooper's "C S Lewis: Companion & Guide" (if you can find it in the library or order it) has several discussions of Lewis and mythology. And "The C S Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia" (which I wrote for) has a good article (by Wayne Martindale of Wheaton College) on "Lewis and myth."

Lewis mentioned mythology several times in his writings, and some of these are:

1) In "The Weight of Glory" (chap 5) he mentioned mythology and paganism...

2) In the same book (chap 1) he had a quote about mythology and poetry...

3) In "God in the Dock" (pp 57-58, 66-67, 83-84, 132) he mentions mythology as the precursor to Biblical religion...

4) In "Surprised By Joy" (chap 7) he refers to Christianity as the Christian mythology... In the same book (chap 5) he mentions that in mythology he was almost sent back to the false gods to acquire some capacity for worship...

5) In "Reflections on the Psalms" (chap 10) he mentions the death and rebirth pattern in mythology as not accidental and that it teaches the truth that humans must undergo some sort of death in order to truly live...

6) In his "Letters" (24 Oct 1931) he mentions that the desire for a "vague something" as seen in pagan mythology shows a first and rudimentary form of the "idea of God"

7) In "The Weight of Glory" (chap 5) he says that if Christianity is a mythology it is not the one he likes the best... (This was before he became a Christian; he said he liked Greek, Irish and Norse mythology better)

Jack says this...

Conversation with someone (probably one of the R47 group) led me to pick up Gordon MacDonald's Phantastes this weekend. The edition we had on the shelf includes an adaptation of Lewis's introduction to an earlier (1946) anthology of MacDonald's work. The intro is interesting; Lewis pulls no punches in pointing out MacD's limitations:

• The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid ornament...

Yet for all this, Lewis avers that MacDonald writes fantasy better than anyone else--but that creates a problem for the critic: what is fantasy, after all? Is what MacDonald accomplishes properly a literary art? Lewis' reason for asking this introduces a take on the relationship between myth and literature--indeed, between myth and language--that I would love to discuss with R47-ers and their ilk. Lewis again:

• The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art--the art of myth-making--is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version -- whose words -- are we thinking when we say this? ... For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of any one's words. No poet...has told this story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which could equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all.

Lewis goes on to say that this independence from the words distinguishes myth from poetry. Again, he says it best:

• 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 the clothes--they are not much more than a telephone.

He goes on to say that myths get under our skin, 'shock us more fully awake,' cause us to question all that we hold certain. They give us delight, wisdom, and strength that we never anticipated. So herewith a few questions:

1. Are you with Jack on this one? (And how does this work with J Campbell's and others' takes on myth?
2. Where do you draw the line around what is and isn't myth, what's primary and what derivative (and where does JRRT fit on that scale?)?
3. Thinking about part of the BABEL project discussion, can he be right in saying that words themselves might not even be needed? (I myself am skeptical on that one -- but I am admittedly logocentric.)

Be well, and post!