Fine piece, Henry, thank you. Almost all stories recycle and reformulate older stories, and also tap into the mythic archetypes, which underlie because that is the nature of narrative and of Nature itself.
Great art is almost always the reinvention of the old adapted to present circumstances and ears.
To say that is not to devalue it as “derivative,” even if it is, inevitably, in part; originality is in the freshness of the new expression, of the rerendering of the old “to make it new,” as Ezra Pound said.
When someone falls in love, or marvels in the the beauty of a sunset, those feelings are authentic (even if they’ve been felt before billions of times before by others); and to write a freshly classic loves story, or to paint a stunning sunset, as to remind themselves and others of the perpetually reemergent beauty of the world.
What a beautiful and astute essay. Like so much of Lewis, I know I will read it again and again and get more from it each time. I, too, think The Magician's Nephew the best children's book ever written. I think there is an immense affinity between Huckleberry Finn's announcement, "All right then, I'll go to hell" and Puddleglum's statement “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” I need to think more about the difference between a critic and a scholar.
Wonderful, wonderful essay! Memory and story and criticism...so much here to chew on. I read Peter Hollindale's book "Signs of Childness in Children's Books" after it was cited in the recent Atlantic article by Anna Holmes about what adults lose when they stop reading children's books. His use of the word "childness" (taken from Shakespeare and "The Winter's Tale") - is marvelous and I think connected to your view. Susanna Clarke writes about realizing after the fact the influence of Jorge Luis Borges and the singer Kate Bush! on her stories. I can't wait to share your piece with the members of my Shared Reading group who meet weekly to read The Chronicles aloud together. :)
To quote a line that comes up (I seem to remember) in both The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle: "It's all in Plato. What do they teach them in these schools?"
Which is to say that Lucy's encounter with the Magician's Book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has (at least to my mind) very obvious roots in the famous scene in Plato's Meno, where Socrates "teaches" an uneducated slave boy geometry in a manner designed to demonstrate that the boy actually was not learning it as something new, but was simply being reminded of something that he always knew. This is Plato's basic idea: that we before birth have access to the perfect world of Knowledge, of the Forms, which are then occluded for us, or for most of us, as we live our lives, and we can only gain true knowledge through reasoning ourselves back to the Forms which we have forgotten but which are buried somewhere in our minds. Submerged memories, in your felicitous phrase.
And this is connected with Lewis's theology: that the children's entry into Narnia gives them an unmediated encounter with the true world of the divine that they can then bring back imperfect memories and images of to the everyday world.
None of which contradicts anything you say about the role of submerged memories in authorship and criticism, which is very perceptive. But with regard to that, I wonder if you have thought at all about Julia Kristeva's idea of "intertextuality" as something distinct from "allusion". "Allusion" implies intentionality on the part of the author - often creative, with interesting transformations into a new context, but still intentional - whereas "intertextuality" requires no intention, but arises from the shared participation in a common culture whose tropes and themes and ideas are unconsciously transferred from one text to another. (The division isn't always so neat, because "intention" itself can be a fuzzy thing, but the general idea is clear.)
Do you think that is along similar lines to your analysis, or do you see a distinction between them? (And if it is along similar lines, was that deliberate, or was it a submerged memory a la Shklovsky and Novalis?)
Thanks for this! You bring to mind Mary Carruthers, whose The Book of Memory and The Craft of Thought also treat memory not as a passive filing cabinet, but as an active, generative source of invention. C. S. Lewis gives the idea wonderful imaginative form.
Being both a novelist and a critic what you say about memory is very interesting. A lot of the battle to write creatively is a t entering a kind of dream state in which memories that you don’t recognise as memories well up. The critical mind which has to identify and pounce on memories of texts is at odds with this. Lewis and Tolkien are remarkable partly because both parts coexisted and cross fertilised each other. Of course all stories are to an extent recycled but it’s not just about those but about emotion and observation.
Fine piece, Henry, thank you. Almost all stories recycle and reformulate older stories, and also tap into the mythic archetypes, which underlie because that is the nature of narrative and of Nature itself.
Great art is almost always the reinvention of the old adapted to present circumstances and ears.
To say that is not to devalue it as “derivative,” even if it is, inevitably, in part; originality is in the freshness of the new expression, of the rerendering of the old “to make it new,” as Ezra Pound said.
When someone falls in love, or marvels in the the beauty of a sunset, those feelings are authentic (even if they’ve been felt before billions of times before by others); and to write a freshly classic loves story, or to paint a stunning sunset, as to remind themselves and others of the perpetually reemergent beauty of the world.
What a beautiful and astute essay. Like so much of Lewis, I know I will read it again and again and get more from it each time. I, too, think The Magician's Nephew the best children's book ever written. I think there is an immense affinity between Huckleberry Finn's announcement, "All right then, I'll go to hell" and Puddleglum's statement “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” I need to think more about the difference between a critic and a scholar.
Wonderful, wonderful essay! Memory and story and criticism...so much here to chew on. I read Peter Hollindale's book "Signs of Childness in Children's Books" after it was cited in the recent Atlantic article by Anna Holmes about what adults lose when they stop reading children's books. His use of the word "childness" (taken from Shakespeare and "The Winter's Tale") - is marvelous and I think connected to your view. Susanna Clarke writes about realizing after the fact the influence of Jorge Luis Borges and the singer Kate Bush! on her stories. I can't wait to share your piece with the members of my Shared Reading group who meet weekly to read The Chronicles aloud together. :)
To quote a line that comes up (I seem to remember) in both The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle: "It's all in Plato. What do they teach them in these schools?"
Which is to say that Lucy's encounter with the Magician's Book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has (at least to my mind) very obvious roots in the famous scene in Plato's Meno, where Socrates "teaches" an uneducated slave boy geometry in a manner designed to demonstrate that the boy actually was not learning it as something new, but was simply being reminded of something that he always knew. This is Plato's basic idea: that we before birth have access to the perfect world of Knowledge, of the Forms, which are then occluded for us, or for most of us, as we live our lives, and we can only gain true knowledge through reasoning ourselves back to the Forms which we have forgotten but which are buried somewhere in our minds. Submerged memories, in your felicitous phrase.
And this is connected with Lewis's theology: that the children's entry into Narnia gives them an unmediated encounter with the true world of the divine that they can then bring back imperfect memories and images of to the everyday world.
None of which contradicts anything you say about the role of submerged memories in authorship and criticism, which is very perceptive. But with regard to that, I wonder if you have thought at all about Julia Kristeva's idea of "intertextuality" as something distinct from "allusion". "Allusion" implies intentionality on the part of the author - often creative, with interesting transformations into a new context, but still intentional - whereas "intertextuality" requires no intention, but arises from the shared participation in a common culture whose tropes and themes and ideas are unconsciously transferred from one text to another. (The division isn't always so neat, because "intention" itself can be a fuzzy thing, but the general idea is clear.)
Do you think that is along similar lines to your analysis, or do you see a distinction between them? (And if it is along similar lines, was that deliberate, or was it a submerged memory a la Shklovsky and Novalis?)
Thanks for this! You bring to mind Mary Carruthers, whose The Book of Memory and The Craft of Thought also treat memory not as a passive filing cabinet, but as an active, generative source of invention. C. S. Lewis gives the idea wonderful imaginative form.
Completely agree re The Magician’s Nephew.
Being both a novelist and a critic what you say about memory is very interesting. A lot of the battle to write creatively is a t entering a kind of dream state in which memories that you don’t recognise as memories well up. The critical mind which has to identify and pounce on memories of texts is at odds with this. Lewis and Tolkien are remarkable partly because both parts coexisted and cross fertilised each other. Of course all stories are to an extent recycled but it’s not just about those but about emotion and observation.
Yes, Magician's Nephew is definitely the best one.
This story of Lewis telling stories, though, raises the question: Have you read Planet Narnia? And do you agree with its thesis?