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April 25, 2006
Free Mythological Invention
[Loren Fisher wrote the following a few months ago and kindly gave me permission to post it here.]
Adam Gopnik has had two interesting essays in The New Yorker in two successive months. The first “Homer’s Wars, The Simple Epics of an American Artist,” The New Yorker (October, 31, 2005): 66-73, dealing with Winslow Homer. The second “Prisoner of Narnia, How C. S. Lewis Escaped,” The New Yorker (November, 21, 2005): 88-93. My comments relate to the second of these essays.
Adam Gopnik gives us an interesting comparison of the British view of C. S. Lewis and the American view. Then he says, “These two Lewises— the British bleeding don and the complacent American saint—do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a place to get away from it? … The hidden truth that his faith was really a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize.” This essay is also interesting for the way it compares Lewis and Tolkien. Gopnik writes, “Tolkien hated the Narnia books, despite Lewis’s avid sponsorship of Tolkien’s own mythology, because he hated to see an imagination constrained by the allegorical impulse.” Apparently Lewis wanted to insert his faith into the marvelous. “He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory.”
There are many interesting parts to this essay, but I would like to focus my last remarks on Gopnik’s statement that Lewis’s The Allegory of Love is his best book. It may be his best book, but from what Lewis says in a lengthy quote (I have not read the book) I am troubled. It seems that before the Renaissance a writer only had access to the actual world of experience and the world of religion. After the Renaissance a third world was added: free mythological invention in which you did not need to believe. Or to quote Lewis, “The probable, the marvelous-taken-as-fact, the marvelous-known-to-fiction—such is the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet … But this triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it.” My problem is that when I go back to the beginnings I do find it. The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor is a good example (and there are others). Lewis’s “third world” of “romantic imagination” has a dominant role to play in this story from 1800 B.C.E. It is a fantasy that is a free myth for the purpose of entertainment. There is indeed some fact: the Egyptians had ships; there are some religious concerns: the sailor desired to be buried in Egypt; but the island was pure fantasy and so was the story.
Loren Fisher
14 Dec 05
Posted by Duane Smith at April 25, 2006 7:44 PM | Read more on Religion |
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