Submerged memory: C.S. Lewis and the art of forgetting

When my children were little, they wanted me to make up a story for them. And so, first thing in the morning at the weekend they got into my bed and ate bagels while I spontaneously devised a tale of the old city of Ludabek and its quest to discover a dragon called Skindle. Telling tales is a great way to occupy a child. I added episodes to ‘Skindle’ on trains, during meals, and in moments of great boredom when we needed to avoid a slump. It grew in my mind into a trilogy, but a variety of factors meant we ran out of steam half-way through the second part. I hope one day soon to start telling them the story again, but life so often gets in the way of such endeavours. And I would rather read them Narnia.

Anyway, the point of telling you about ‘Skindle’ is to illustrate one of the ways in which literary memory works. Some time after I had made-up the story, I began to introduce the children to books like The Hobbit and Narnia. I only read The Hobbit when I was about fourteen, but I read Narnia when I was seven and it was a deep obsession. I remember vividly the day my father brought home a wooden box, with a latticed lid, that contained Turkish delight—real, authentic Turkish delight, not just the stuff you get in the supermarket. It was a gift from a client, which to childish ears sounded like it must be the real stuff from far away places.

At the sight of the box, and the revelation of its contents—I was allowed a piece as a treat, even though I had got out of bed to come and see the treasure—I truly felt that I was experiencing a part of Narnia. Standing there with the Turkish delight in my mouth was just like Edmund eating the sweets in the woods. There was no wardrobe I could walk through, no coats or snow or Lantern Waste, but there was Turkish delight. Narnia was real in that cube of sweetness.

This, along with most of what happens in The Magician’s Nephew (simply the best children’s book ever written), and a vague sense of the great excitement of The Last Battle (I can see the battle now, faintly, still), was how I remembered Narnia as an adult. My old copies had many crease marks that suggested many readings, and some scenes, like the sacrifice of Aslan, I could recall in great detail—the mice!; but a good deal of the books had left me. My children enjoyed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but were not, then, interested in going further. (Things have changed, thank goodness.) So I re-read some of the books on my own.

Prince Caspian came back to me all in a great whoosh! as I realised that I did of course remember the ruins of Cair Paravel, the old armour, the trees, the magic potion. How could I have thought I had forgotten all of this? With every page I got the feeling that I had known this all along, I had just not realised I knew it. And then I read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This time, I got much less of a sense that, yes, of course, I had always known this. Instead, I was shocked to find that some parts of ‘Skindle’ were obviously similar to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

The plot of ‘Skindle’ is simple. The city of Ludabek has been unbothered by dragons for many years. But now, in the distance, smoke is seen coming from the mountain. A ship is being prepared to undergo an expedition to keep Ludabek safe. Two children, Jenny and Marcus, wish to become stow-aways on this voyage. Their grandfather is a mage, the only one allowed to live in the city which is hostile to magic. They have discovered their innate abilities (which their mother wishes to deny or ignore). Their grandfather gives them a book of magic to help them on their journey. During the voyage, once they have been discovered and accommodated, Jenny realises her book has been stolen. Marcus’s powers are less in the line of casting spells and more trance-like. On one of his trance-walks he ends up in a mysterious corridor of the ship, at the end of which is a locked door. They both go back to this door and get inside and find their book.

As I told all this to my children, I could see it all very clearly. I didn’t do a very good job of describing it to them as I imagined it, but in my mind it was all quite particular. And when I turned to the passage in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Lucy goes upstairs to find the Magician’s book, although the details were not exactly the same (no bearded mirror in my story), this was what I had come up with in ‘Skindle’. I was not inventing that story so much as half-remembering and then repurposing another story, one I once knew very well. (Other elements of the story are like this. Some of it is reminiscent of The Hobbit, for example.)

This was a very different shock of recognition. I did not feel, when I read that section, that oh yes I had known this all along; instead, I felt a sort of alienated recognition—oh yes, this is the origin of my own story, though I would never have realised I’d known it without telling that tale first.

There are three forms of memory here: explicit (remembering specifics like Turkish delight in the snow; Polly and Digory in the wood between the worlds); implicit (reading Caspian and remembering it as I read it); and submerged (I only know I remember it, because it came out in a new, comparable form). Lewis gives a good critical account of the way fiction works like this in the passage of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we are discussing.

On the next page she came to a spell “for the refreshment of the spirit”. The pictures were fewer here but very beautiful. And what Lucy found herself reading was more like a story than a spell. It went on for three pages and before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real, and all the pictures were real too. When she had got to the third page and come to the end, she said, “That is the loveliest story I’ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years. At least I’ll read it over again.”

But here part of the magic of the Book came into play. You couldn’t turn back. The right-hand pages, the ones ahead, could be turned; the left-hand pages could not.

“Oh, what a shame!” said Lucy. “I did so want to read it again. Well, at least, I must remember it. Let’s see ... it was about ... about ... oh dear, it’s all fading away again. And even this last page is going blank. This is a very queer book. How can I have forgotten? It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill, I know that much. But I can’t remember and what shall I do?”

And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician’s Book.

It was Lewis’s gift to combine the abilities of the fiction writer and the critic, and this is an exemplary passage of that combination. It charts the way we read immersively as children and then forget. Lucy is first “living in the story as if it were real” and then “she never could remember”, even though every good story she then reads reminds her of what she has forgotten.

What can “reminding” mean here? Clearly it is not explicit memory, but it seems like implicit memory. If Lucy were ever able to get back to the story and to read it again, she would say on every page I had known this all along, I had just not realised I knew it. But Lewis also implies that Lucy has submerged memory of that story. She is very often recognising it without realising she is realising. Just as I drew on my “memory” of this passage when I “invented” my story, so Lucy will draw on it when she finds something enjoyable in a generic, archetypal manner. All those stories later on that seem to have familiar elements also have roots—it is just that those roots are submerged too deep for Lucy ever to see them again or even to remember they are there.

Literature and language are forms of submerged memory. We do not need to write stories to be part of this history. It is part of all our writing and speaking. The whole job of a scholar like Lewis was to try to unsubmerge the literary past, knowing full well the job could never be fully done. It was a belief within the Inkling circle that language was its own form of submerged memory, as discussed in Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction.

What makes Lewis and his circle so continuously interesting today is that they recognised this conflict and worked within it. They discovered how to allow submerged memory to work undisturbed in fiction while they were working to discover it in criticism. Lewis’s genius was to do both in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader without letting one interfere with the other.

In fiction, submerged memory is highly productive. But it presents a dilemma for criticism.

Criticism, of course, wishes to be explicit. Critics are adept at finding parallels, however aware of them the writer may have been or professed to be. It is widely assumed that the work of criticism is to bring things into the light. The act of writing criticism often brings up some implicit memory—ah, this is just like that bit of Hamlet—which are made explicit. In general, submerged memory is to be avoided. Critics must recognise their sources and influences. Great artists steal, but critics are not (usually) great artists. Coleridge stole and he was a great critic, but that was not a case of submerged memory.

Submerged memory is impossible to avoid, but to replicate a previous work would be taboo. So often, what we write and read and admire in criticism will have its origin in some equivalent of Lucy and the Magician’s book. The impulse, and indeed the professional requirement, is often to flatten this—to strive to recognise it, to put it in familiar terms, to give a citation. (To make it dull.) And anyway, submerged memories cannot be cited. The critical task is then to find these echoes in other people’s work and call them a failing, or to use them as a recourse for further criticism, thus turning usually productive submerged memory into the imitative explicit memories that produce dull work. The Critical Dilemma is that submerged memory is essential to good writing, though critics must often live in denial of this fact.

One result of this Dilemma is the critical-scholarly divide. Scholarship is supposed to show its working and sources, to place itself clearly within the lineage of previous work, and to make the new and marginal contribution clear. Scholarship is a form of knowledge. Criticism is a form of argument. It might place itself against other criticism, but not to make a new contribution clear. Rather, criticism is a more personal, ideological, or impressionistic response. The critic is not obliged in the same way as the scholar, but they are supposed to observe some of the same rules.

But the best criticism, or at least the criticism that has been held to be canonical by common readers—a tradition that would include Lewis—doesn’t fuss about the submerged problem. The best critical writing is often the result of such memory. In ‘Art as Technique’, Shklovsky railed against “habitualisation”, the unthinking perception we have of the world that needs shocking awake so we can see afresh. But Shklovsky’s idea was not original. He later discovered that people like Novalis had written about it. (As had others like Browning, and, indeed, Samuel Johnson.) This is the perfect example of submerged memory. Shklovsky is unlikely to have made an independent discovery. The idea is so pervasive in different forms across the history of literature that he will have been working from forgotten memories. He was working from a Magician’s book. Had he realised this, gone to the sources, and cited them, his essay would have been smaller, less exciting, less original, less idiosyncratic. Submerged memories force invention whereas explicit ones incentivise copying or marginal contributions.

When I “wrote” ‘Skindle’, I had no conscious idea about its influences, just as Shklovsky had no conscious idea about Novalis. The submerged nature of the influence forced a newness to the story: we cannot go back and read the Magician’s book, we can only recreate it in new forms. In Shklovsky’s case it was very new indeed, as it was in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a book we have to assume is also subject to a forgotten story Lewis once read in his own Magician’s book. To make this explicit would be to risk fashionable imitation rather than to do something new.

The aim of this sort of criticism ought to be to write freely, directly, and in the understanding that some of what you produce—indeed, quite a lot of it—can only be inventive, original, or interesting because it is a half-remembered instance of something else, some long forgotten story you are always remembering without realising. As Johnson wrote in the Dictionary, invention not only means ‘producing something new’ but ‘discovery’. It is in this way, as Lewis showed in his passage above, that literature teaches us how to read it, even when we think we are inventing it in bed one morning while our children quietly chew their bagels.

By John S. Murray - Dust jacket of Lewis, C. S. (1957) Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. (1st ed.), Category:New York: Harcourt, Brace and CompanyImmediate source: raptisrarebooks.com/product/till-we-have-faces-c-s-lewis-first-edition-rare-fine-dust-jacket/. Higher quality version from Touchestonemag.com., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=178907368