THE ROMANCES of CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS. The
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This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 7 0 -4 4 6 2 CHRISTOPHER, Joe Randell, 1935- THE ROMANCES OF CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS. The University of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 1969 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan 0 Copyright by JOE BAKDELL CHRISTOPHER 1970 All quotations from copyrighted material are reproduced under the fair quotation provision of the copyright law. THE UNIVERSITY OP OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE THE ROMANCES OP CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO TSE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OP PHILOSOPHY BY JOE RANDELL CHRISTOPHER Norman, Oklahoma 1969 TEE ROMANCES OF CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS APPROVED BY ~A O^^IO'wQ, DISSERTATION COMMITTE: This dissertation Is dedicated to Dr. Paul George Ruggiers, who directed It; to Dr. John Marlin Raines, who first encouraged my professional Interest in G. S. Lewis; to Drs, Victor A. Elconln, Rudolph Charles Bambas, David P. French, and Alphonese Joseph Fritz, who served on my committee; and to my wife, who typed the whole thing twice. Ill \ \ TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter . Page I, Of Confessions, Anatomies, Romances 1 II. ]%rmer .... 1? III. 'Hie Pilgrim's Regress 26 IV. The Hansom Trilogy 57 V. A Note on Screwtape 1^3 VI. The Great Divorce 155 VII. The Chronicles of Namia 185 VIII, Till We Have Paces 290 EC. Of Romances 328 Bibliography: Part One Works by Lewis ............. 338 Blbllograp)tiy: Part Two Works about Lewis (annotated) ............ 3^5 Bibliography: Part Three Other Works Consulted 404 Appendix One ^11 Appendix Two •,,,..,.,.o...... 4l6 Appendix Three 425 Appendix Four .......... 430 iv THE ROMANCES OP CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS CHAPTER ONE OF CONFESSIONS. ANATOMIES, ROMANCES I In his autobiography, C. 8. Lewis records a moment which James Joyce would have called an epiphany: a revelation of meaning through the mundane. My first taste of Oxford was comical enou^. I had made no arrangements about quarters and, having no more luggage than I could carry in my hand, I sallied out of the railway station on foot to find either a lodging-house or a cheap hotel; all agog for "dreaming spires" and "last enchantments". My first disappoint ment at what I saw could be dealt with. Towns always show their worst face to the railway. But as I walked on smd on I became more bewildered. Could this succes sion of mean shops really be Oxford? But I still went on, always expecting the next turn to reveal the beau ties, and reflecting that it was a much larger town than I had been led to suppose. Only when it became obvious that there was very little town left ahead of me, that it was, in fact, getting to open country, did I turn round and look. There, behind me, far away, never more beautiful since, was the fabled cluster of spires and towers. I had come out of the station on the wrong side and been all this time walking into what was even then the mean and sprawling suburb of Botley. I did not see to what extent.this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life. This is an allegory because it sums up Lewis's movement away ^C, S. Lewis, Surprised bv Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd., 1955). PP. 174-175. 2 from faith in Christ and his ultimate realization that he had to retrace his way, W, R, Lewis, In his memoir of his brother, has suggested that "his decision to rejoin the Church • • • seemed to me no sudden plunge Into a new life, but rather a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual Illness • • • that had Its origin in our child- O hood"; but to C. S, Lewis it was a moment of a sudden re-turn. And in this way he described his conversion three times; first, in an allegory. The Pilgrim*s Regress. 1933; second, in his autobiography. Surprised by Joy. 1955; and finally, under the symbols of fiction, in Till We Have Faces. 1956» But our approach to these works will be made easier if we begin with less complex autobiographical elements in these and other works, The first of these elements, which in part make up the compound of Lewis's personality, is what 3 Lewis calls Joy in his autobiography. To illustrate this feeling (as well as other terms for it): In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find In ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the Inconsolable secret in each one of you— the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia 2 C. s. Lewis, Letters of Cj. Lewis, ed., with a memoir, by W. H. Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd., 1966), P. 19. 3 ^One wonders if Lewis picked Joy as a term here as an oblique reference to his wife, Joy— Joy surprising his early life, as Joy surprised his later life; for he uses other terms often enough— "Romanticism" in Pilgrim's Regress and "longing" and Sehnsucht as doublets for Joy In the autobiog raphy. and Romanticism and Adolescence; the Secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to lau^ at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually Appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat, if Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust tb them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things— the beauty, the memory of our own past— are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.* The examples of this romantic longing almost overwhelm any critic trying to discuss their function in Lewis's writings, there are so many. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this Sehnsucht is to pick one image— for example, distant hills— and show how it is used in a variety of books.^ The origin ^C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory", in Transposi tion and Other Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd., I949), pp. 23-24. ^^he fullest discussion of Joy is in Scott Camell's dissertation. The Dialectic of Desire: C. S. Lewis ' Interpretation of Sehnsucht Tunlversity of Florida, I96O); on pp. I03-I09 he establishes four dominant images of longing in Lewis's works : Far-away hills, the exotic garden, islands of the East (or West), and special music. I am dealing only with the first of these, although my treatment of this one is slightly fuller than that by Dr. Camell. of the Image of the distant hills as that which creates longing is explained by Lewis in his autobiography as being produced by the Castlereagh Hills which he could see from his nursery windows,^ Naturally, mountain-imagery plays an important part in the other two autobiographical books. In The Pilgrim*s Hegress. the hero looks back after he starts his journey toward a beautiful island of which he has had a vision: He turned and looked back on the road he had come by: and when he did so he gasped with Joy. For there in the East, under the morning light, he saw the mountains heaped up to the sky like clouds, green and violet and dark red; shadows were passing over the big rounded slopes, and water shone in the mountain pools, and up at the highest of all the sun was smiling steadily on the ultimate crags. , . and now it came into John's head that he had never looked at the mountains before, because, as long as he thought that the Landlord [God] lived there, he had been afraid of them. But now that there was no Landlord he perceived that they were beautiful. For a moment he almost doubted whether the Island could be more beautiful, and whether he would not be wiser to to East instead of West. But it did not seem to him to matter, for he said, 'If the world has the mountains at one end and the Island at the other, then every road leads to beauty, and the world is a glory among glories.'7 In Till ye Have Faces the heroine is Orual but her sister, Psyche, is the one who feels the longing for the mountain: "It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us [the two sisters and their tutor], with the wind and the sunshine .