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 love story, or to paint a stunning sunset, is to remind themselves and others of the perpetually reemergent beauty of the world.
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. :)
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.
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?)
My daughter is 7 and we're on Prince Caspian in our re-read of Narnia (having first read them aloud to her when she was 4). I've read them well over a dozen times through child- and adulthood but it's a delight to watch her memory of them return.
Thank you for another lovely essay. I read the Narnia books with my son when he was 7 or 8 years old. He just became a parent and named his new little daughter Lucy. Not a coincidence, I'm sure.
Such a helpful, useful essay. It's good to catch a glimpse of the circles of memory, re-imagining, re-interpreting - like a Venn diagram with A Good Read in the overlapped middle.
Gosh, that brought back some Narnia memories – I was always a big Reepicheep fan, because what's cooler than a big mouse with a sword and an attitude?
It also feels timely to consider how we can draw on submerged memories without realising it; and for it not to be any kind of intentional plagiarism. If you read widely and deeply, and do it for a lifetime, you inevitably end up with a ton of material sloshing around in your subconscious. Some of it informs how you write (and how you read); some of it may seep through more overtly but without conscious intent. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, so it was really fascinating to read your take on it. (I kind of want to re-read the Narnia books now, too.)
And for what it's worth, I also had an ongoing fantasy partwork that got told to my kids on buses, trains, while walking to school etc; but it had elements of "Choose Your Own Adventure", in that they could suggest plot turns at given intervals, and I had to go with whatever was presented to me 😁.
Nice article on art and how it can be reinvented and expressed freshly. This idea reminds me of the work of Karl Mannheim a pioneer in the sociology of knowledge who maintained that the past is never dead or separate from us rather it continues to perpetuate itself with the way its embodied in our current reality.
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 love story, or to paint a stunning sunset, is to remind themselves and others of the perpetually reemergent beauty of the world.
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. :)
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.
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?)
Your beautiful piece is forcing me to regurgitate the lines of Julian Barnes.
“- bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.
The last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed."
forgetting is (a) bliss, I guess. i appreciate you.
My daughter is 7 and we're on Prince Caspian in our re-read of Narnia (having first read them aloud to her when she was 4). I've read them well over a dozen times through child- and adulthood but it's a delight to watch her memory of them return.
Caspian!
Thank you for another lovely essay. I read the Narnia books with my son when he was 7 or 8 years old. He just became a parent and named his new little daughter Lucy. Not a coincidence, I'm sure.
Delightful name
Such a helpful, useful essay. It's good to catch a glimpse of the circles of memory, re-imagining, re-interpreting - like a Venn diagram with A Good Read in the overlapped middle.
:)
Gosh, that brought back some Narnia memories – I was always a big Reepicheep fan, because what's cooler than a big mouse with a sword and an attitude?
It also feels timely to consider how we can draw on submerged memories without realising it; and for it not to be any kind of intentional plagiarism. If you read widely and deeply, and do it for a lifetime, you inevitably end up with a ton of material sloshing around in your subconscious. Some of it informs how you write (and how you read); some of it may seep through more overtly but without conscious intent. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, so it was really fascinating to read your take on it. (I kind of want to re-read the Narnia books now, too.)
And for what it's worth, I also had an ongoing fantasy partwork that got told to my kids on buses, trains, while walking to school etc; but it had elements of "Choose Your Own Adventure", in that they could suggest plot turns at given intervals, and I had to go with whatever was presented to me 😁.
haha there’s no democracy in my storytelling
That's the way. Rule with an iron fist.
I'm just reading A la recherche du temps perdu and your article has been very welcome.
Thank you for these summer texts.
By the way, Arnold's one was delicious and I shared it with some of my friends.
Oh splendid!
What a lovely essay - thank you.
Thank you!
Nice article on art and how it can be reinvented and expressed freshly. This idea reminds me of the work of Karl Mannheim a pioneer in the sociology of knowledge who maintained that the past is never dead or separate from us rather it continues to perpetuate itself with the way its embodied in our current reality.
This is lovely, and what good timing…I’m reading this chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to my kids tonight!
yay!
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?