© 1991 Don W. King

A version of this review first appeared in World (March 30, 1991): 14-15.

Word and Story in C. S. Lewis, edited by Peter Schakel and Charles Huttar. University of Missouri Press, 316 papges, $37.50.

In the twenty eight years since the death of C. S. Lewis there have been hundreds of books and articles published about his life and work. The vast majority have focused on Lewis as Christian apologist; only a handful have treated Lewis as artist. Happily, Word and Story in C. S. Lewis is a notable exception to this pattern. Peter Schakel and Charles Huttar, professors at Hope College, have done a fine job of gathering a collection of cogent, articulate essays concentrating on Lewis' ideas about language and narrative.

The thesis of the book is "that an awareness of Lewis's ideas about language and narrative is essential to a full understanding and appreciation of his thought and works, and that this awareness is essential for all readers of Lewis," regardless of whether they read him for his apologetics, his literary criticism, his children's stories, his essays, his science fiction, or his poetry.

Word and Story is conveniently divided into two parts. The first half of the book is devoted to how Lewis effectively and consciously uses language as an artist, and takes as its point of reference the final paragraph of the essay "Bluspels and Flalansferes," a passage the editors claim to be "near the heart of Lewis's theories regarding language." The essence of the paragraph is that poets use "old words" and "new metaphors" to create meaning "which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood." Lewis goes on to say that "reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning." Essays on Lewis' ideas about metaphor, semantics, the relationship between language and faith, philology, imagery, the relationship between language and consciousness, and poetry follow and provide the thematic focus of this part of the book.

Of special interest to many readers will be the essay on Lewis' poetry, a severely neglected part of Lewis' corpus. Although Charles Huttar notes that "barring a major revolution in taste" Lewis will never be regarded highly a poet, Huttar rightly points out that the poetry is an important source for Lewis' ideas about language, especially "its illusive and elusive nature." He also shares examples of Lewis' "sheer love of the sounds of words" as in the rhyme found in one poem, popinjays/stopping praise and the frequent appearance of alliteration in Lewis' poetry. Huttar briefly dicscusses as well Lewis' antipathy toward modern poetry, especially as practiced by T. S. Eliot and propounded by I. A Richards. The essay on poetry ends by examining poems that reveal Lewis' belief that language is "a fundamental human attribute, one that reveals both our greatness and our limitations." The limitation of language is most evident when it is directed to God: "To 'attempt the ineffable Name,' he wrote in the poem 'Footnote to All Prayers'. . . is to risk worshiping an 'idol' shaped by one's 'own unquiet thoughts'; the language of prayer references only 'frail images' in the speaker's mind, 'which cannot be the thing Thou art.'"

Like the first half of the book, the second half responds to a short passage from Lewis, this time "On Stories" where he suggests his theory of narrative:

To be stories at all they must be series of events: but it must be understood that this series--the plot, as we call it--is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality. . . . In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive.

Actually there are two groups of essays in this half of the book. The first group concentrates on how Lewis uses story to make abstract or theological notions concrete. Because "a gap always exists between experiencing a thing and thinking about that thing," Gilbert Meilander says that Lewis uses myth "to bring experience not of some isolated tidbit of life which passes away but of what has timeless, universal significance." Other essays in this section distinguish between Lewis' ideas about "story as Logos (something said) and story as Poiema (something made)" and what I call the "rhetoric" of stories; that is, the persuasive power of stories to communicate spiritual and moral truth.

The second group of essays turn to the literary narrative models Lewis relied upon (medieval prose romance, medieval allegory, eighteenth century "novel of ideas") as well as the structural devices he employs, particularly "juxtaposition of story against story" (as in Perelandra), the "dialectic of multiple worlds" (as in the Narnia stories), and the "linear and circular patterns of movement" (as in Til We Have Faces).

Although half of the book focuses on Lewis' ideas about language and the other half on his ideas about narrative, the two halves are not disjoint. Part of the reason for this is that the essayists in each section often refer to how Lewis' ideas about language and narrative were influenced by Owen Barfield, Lewis' great friend and critic (Barfield dedicated his own Poetic Diction to Lewis by writing "Opposition is true friendship"). Indeed, the editors wisely invited Barfield to write the afterword in which he comments on the achievements of the book.

Word and Story is a very valuable contribution to Lewis studies. Its thoughtful investigation of Lewis' ideas on language and narrative is long overdue and should help to open further exploration of Lewis as an artist and conscious craftsman. Although these essays may appear to focus on material too esoteric for the non-specialist reader of Lewis, most are very well-written and appealing. Schakel and Huttar deserve the thanks of both academic and general readers of Lewis for bringing together a volume of essays that avoid the pedantic and yet move us beyond the limits of the well-ploughed field of Lewis' apologetics.