Volume 17 Number 1 Article 3 Fall 10-15-1990 Joy and Memory: Wordsworth as Illuminated by C.S. Lewis Margaret Carter Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Carter, Margaret (1990) "Joy and Memory: Wordsworth as Illuminated by C.S. Lewis," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 17 : No. 1 , Article 3. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol17/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Relates Lewis’s concept of “Joy” to the poetry of Wordsworth, particularly the poet’s concept of “Imagination.” While Lewis connected Joy with Christianity, Wordsworth tried to locate it “in the natural phenomena that are only its vehicles.” Additional Keywords Lewis, C.S.—Concept of Joy; Wordsworth, William—Concept of imagination; Wordsworth, William—Poetry This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol17/iss1/3 CDyTHLORe 63 Autumn 1990 Page 9 Joy and 0JoRd8iuoRrh as Illuminated 6y C.S. Louis G O axg aR cr Corccr Of vanished knowledge pleasure. Lewis' 1943 introduction to his early work The Was their intemperate song, Pilgrim's Regress points out that "this sweet desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and A music that resembled having" (Pilgrim's Regress, 8). An instant of longing for a Some earlier music past moment of Joy is itself a new experience of Joy. That men are bom remembering. All supposed objects of this desire — for example, the his echo of William Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" past, female, occultism, natural beauty, sexual love — is part of a poem, "Vowels and Sirens," by C.S. Lewis T prove themselves inadequate to it. If we locate the object (Poems, 76). Lewis' concept of Joy, involving desire, of desire in the natural landscape, for instance, "experi­ memory, the numinous, and intuitive contact with a ment will show that by going to the far hillside you will transcendent reality, provides, I believe, a fruitful model get either nothing, or else a recurrence of the same desire for reading certain aspects of Wordsworth's poetry. which sent you thither" (Ibid., 9). The same displacement Though for Lewis Joy carries an explicitly theistic mean­ occurs when attemptiing to locate the object in one's own ing, my aim is not apologetic or biographical. It does not past; the remembered moments of Joy "owe all their seem relevant whether Wordsworth was a Christian at the enchantment to memory" (Ibid., 9)— a discovery that does time of writing most of the particular poems we shall notinvalidate the Joy, as we shall see. Lewis concludes that discuss, for there is no evidence that he ever connected his the "dialectic of Desire" demonstrates experientially that experiences of Joy (in the Lewisian sense) with Chris­ "the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is tianity. (J.R. Christopher, whose article on this topic will never fully given... in our present mode of subjective and be dted below, addresses this point.) Besides, according to spatio-temporal experience" (Ibid., 10). Lewis, Joy "works" whether or not we recognize its source. The experience is a universal human one, independent of The Christian Lewis, of course, ultimately identifies the our theories about it. Lewis' demon Screwtape complains, Object of Desire as God. The allegorical Pilgrim's Regress "Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit (Chapter Nine) describes how the Landlord (God) sends religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and "pictures" to lure His misled tenants back to Him. The poetry — the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the Romantic movement came about when the Landlord sent sight of a horizon — are always blowing our whole struc­ pictures of the very landscape His people were living in. ture away" (Screwtape Letters, 133). Before attempting to "Even the stupidest tenant could see that you [the tenant] link this kind of experience with Wordsworth's poetry, we had the landscape, in the only sense in which it could be must define Lewis' Joy and warn against confusing it with had, already: and still you wanted" (Ibid., 159). The same the usual notion of Romantic joy. (I distinguish the two by point is expressed more directly in The Problem of Pain: spelling Lewis' Joy with a capital J.) There have been times when I think we do not desire So central is Joy to Lewis' system of thought that he heaven but often I find myself wondering whether... we entitled his autobiography Surprised by Joy (a phrase, of have desired anything else.... Even in your hobbies, has course, borrowed from Wordsworth). In the first chapter there not always been some secret attraction ... not to be of this spiritual memoir Lewis describes three childhood identified with, but always on the verge of breaking experiences that illustrate what his life story is really through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? ... You have about. They are a memory (not the original perception never had it. All the things that have ever deeply pos­ itself) of a toy garden his brother had made of moss and sessed our souls have been but hints of it. pebbles, the autumnal atmosphere of Beatrix Potter's (Problem of Pain, 146) Squirrel N utkin, and a passage from Longfellow's "Saga of King Olaf." What all three instances have in common is a For Lewis in his youth, these "hints" most often came peculiar kind of desire. What is the object of this desire? through natural beauty and tales of faerie; he therefore Not Lewis' own past, or a biscuit tin full of moss, or autumn called it Romanticism in The Pilgrim's Regress (1933). In his (how can one "posses" a season?), or even the northern retrospective introduction (1943) he retracts that termin­ skies of Longfellow's poem. The common quality is "an ology, noting that "Romantic" has become a word of unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any unmanageably diverse meanings, including adventure other satisfaction" (Surprised by Joy, 18). Whoever has tasted stories, the supernatural, Titanic emotions, macabre and this pang of longing finds it preferable to any ordinary anti-natural moods, egoism and subjectivism, revolt Page 10 Autumn 1990 CDyTHLORe 63 against the existing order, and response to external nature. completely identified with Romantic joy, though of course Despite this disclaimer, R.J. Reilly's Romantic Religion dis­ the two have affinities. According to M.H. Abrams, closes good reasons for considering Lewis a latter-day Coleridge's philosophy conceives joy as a "state of Romantic. Reilly calls Lewis a Romantic partly because of abounding vitality" that "relates the self both to other the importance of Sehnsucht or "romantic longing," but human selves and to an outer nature which it has in- largely because he sees Lewis as carrying on the Romantic animated" (Abrams, 276). The second part of this sentence "sense of the meaning of things coming from within the suggests Lewisian Joy, the common factor being objective human mind — and from something greater with which contact with a reality transcending the individual self. the human mind is in touch" (Reilly, 7). Other commen­ Abrams further describes this joy (still with reference to tators have linked Lewis with the Romantic movement, for Coleridge) as "the inner power which unites the living self instance, Robert C. Rice, Corbin Scott Camell, and J.R. to a living outer world" (Ibid., 277). Coleridge's lines, "Joy, Christopher. This connection lends credibility to the Lady! is the spirit and the power, / Which wedding Nature enterprise of reading Wordsworth in Lewisian terms. It is to us gives in dower / A new Earth and new Heaven" also worth noting that at least twice — in Surprised by Joy ("Dejection: An Ode," lines 67-69), express this union as and Letters to M alcolm — Lewis places his treatment of Joy well as the freshness of vision bestowed by joy (like Lewis' and memory in a line of descent from Traherne and Joy, transfiguring the commonplace). This Romantic joy, Wordsworth. however, seems to be more of a sustained state of vitality than the nearly instantaneous experience described by Turning to our experiment in reading Wordsworth, we Lewis. The latter phenomenon resembles what Abrams note that the function of memory holds a central place in characterizes, in the Romantics, as "illuminated moments" both Lewis' system and Wordsworth's poetry. The trans­ (Ibid., 80). This experience in which "an instant of con­ figuring power of "affective memory" is familiar to all sciousness, or else an ordinary object or event, suddenly students of Wordsworth. Stuart M. Sperry shows how this blazes into revelation," often involving "an intersection of faculty in "Tintem Abbey" brings about a coalescence eternity with time," is a function of imagination (Ibid., 385).