Conceptual Fiction is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on major works of fantasy, science fiction, magical realism and alternate history. These books are celebrated in recognition that literary experimentation with ways of conceptualizing reality has been as important as experimentation with language in creating fiction of lasting value. Dismissing these books as genre or escapist works has created a blind-spot in literary studies that this feature aims, in some small part, to rectify.
In his book The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis discusses the peculiar tendency of allegorical literature to externalize the inner life. As Lewis explains, people in the Middle Ages, who didn’t have access to Freud or Jung (perhaps a blessing?), were forced to “personify their passions.” Lacking a technical language for discussing psychological states, they explored them by means of stories.
This led to, in Lewis’s words, “the emergence of mental facts into allegory.” Two characters meet on the battlefield, one is named Avarice and the other is called Charity, or one is Wrath and the other Mercy. By presenting their confrontation in personified form, the medieval mind could describe inner conflicts that were difficult to circumscribe, at the time, in more abstract ways.
To some extent, a youngster’s mind is much like the medieval psyche. Children learn about their own characters and choices through stories, not concepts. For this reason, the externalization of inner conflicts in the form of action-oriented narratives is a perfect foundation for their tales - or, put more directly, for their journeys of self-discovery, which at a young age are made via stories of imagination. Don’t talk to kids about ego, id and super-ego. Don’t try to explain Jungian archetypes and synchronicity to them. Just tell them a tale.
And Lewis does just that, magnificently, in The Chronicles of Narnia. True, there are other stories for youngsters that have more action and sharper hooks in the plot. There are certainly more modern and progressive tales for children. Heaven knows, there are spectacles for the young with more dazzling special effects. But no writer does a better job of imparting mythic grandeur to his storytelling than Lewis, of creating an external world that mirrors the deepest conflicts of a child’s inner life.
Laura Miller describes her own adult conflict, trying to reconcile the appeal of the Narnia with the author’s didactic intentions. She describes feeling “tricked” and “horrified” when she learned about the “secret” meaning in a text that had so delighted her at age nine. Yet when given the assignment to describe a work of literature that changed her life, she returned to C.S. Lewis, and realized that her disagreements with the author didn’t destroy the radiance of the story. “When I finally came back to Narnia,” she writes, “I found that, for me, it had not lost its power or beauty, or at least not entirely... What I dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about it.”
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