Imaginative Versus Imaginary?

Narnia is an imaginative, not an imaginary, world. Lewis was quite clear that a distinction had to be drawn between these ideas. The “imaginary” is something that has been falsely imagined, having no counterpart in reality. Lewis regards such an invented reality as opening the way to delusion. The “imaginative” is something produced by the human mind as it tries to respond to something greater than itself, struggling to find images adequate to the reality. The more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability to “communicate more Reality to us.”[2] For Lewis, the imaginative is to be seen as a legitimate and positive use of the human imagination, challenging the limits of reason and opening the door to a deeper apprehension of reality. McGrath, Alister. C. S. Lewis -- A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (pp. 263-264). (Function). Kindle Edition.

In recent weeks I listened to the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia* by CS Lewis, and read his biography referenced above. I was intrigued by his Dedication of the Chronicles to a godchild, Lucy Barfield, which reads:

My dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather,

C. S. Lewis

"[S]ome day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." Happily, I can say I am now old enough.

Two events have affected my current interests and activities: (1) I had the audiobook of the Chronicles of Narnia hanging about in my Audible library gathering dust and decided I needed a break from political books (important as they are); (2) I felt an urge to explore narrative writing rather continuing to tread the apologetic essay form that in various guises had made up the whole of my professional life and Ricochet presence. By "narrative" I mean the branch of made-up stories, not the retelling of personal history. To attempt this transformation I joined a local writers group.

The group, which is currently small but we hope to expand, is made up primarily of published book authors. Two of those authors are currently working in the narrative space I would like to master. And I would argue, as the post's title asks, that greater impact lies in the imaginative and not the imaginary.

I read the McGrath biography of Lewis after listening to the Chronicles because I wanted greater insight into Lewis's intentions and thinking. Lewis is well-known as a popularizer of the Christian faith. He was not a theologian and had many critics amongst theologians. Lewis's personal religious journey involved becoming an atheist after his mother's death as he was still a boy and not returning to his earlier beliefs informed by the Church of Ireland until after his service in World War I and several years as an Oxford don. Part of his duties as a lecturer entailed periodic talks to the entire college assembly, and in the late 1930s he delivered some lectures on the Christian faith. When war broke out the BBC thought to have a periodic broadcast on Christianity as a morale boost in the "crusade" against Naziism. But the BBC did not want to embroil itself in sectarian debates. A producer who had heard Lewis's Christianity lectures at Oxford thought he would be perfect for the assignment. And so it was that Lewis came to national attention through his BBC broadcasts. These broadcasts were later compiled into a book entitled Mere Christianity.

Lewis's criticism amongst theologians was based primarily on two points: impiety and lack of doctrinal rigor. From their perspective Lewis certainly lacked piety. He was a (nearly) lifelong bachelor** who had a household with a close friend's mother, Mrs. Moore, and sister for many decades. (His friend died in World War I and Lewis assumed the son's role, but there was always something ambiguous in his relationship with Mrs. Moore.) Lewis frequented the pub, kept beer and spirits in his rooms, and sometimes drank to drunkenness. He enjoyed a variety of tobacco products as well. Overall, Lewis lived the life of an intellectually gifted frat boy. Lewis would readily plead "guilty" to a lack of doctrinal rigor, but would prefer to state his thinking thusly:

[Mere Christianity is] like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.[10] McGrath, Alister. C. S. Lewis -- A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (p. 220). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Whatever "room" to which his own faith took him was never the focus of his writing. He was a long-time member of the Church of England, and that is about as far as it goes doctrinally. His writings always focused on broader Christian themes and struggles, although one's own views on doctrine are easily projected into Lewis's symbolic works.

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Having concluded this side trip into Lewis's biography, let us return to the question: Imaginative versus Imaginary?

As an attempt to illustrate the difference, consider the story of Harvey, the tall puca (a mythical Celtic figure in the form of a rabbit). The story was authored as a play by Mary Chase and later turned into a movie starring Jimmy Stewart. Harvey is invisible to everyone except Elwood P. Dowd. The story follows the pair as they encounter people and situations that, naturally, risk Dowd's institutionalization. And Dowd is nearly given an injection that will supposedly eliminate his delusion. But in the end, the injection is stopped and Dowd and Harvey are able to continue their mild and pleasant relationship undisturbed.

Is this story imaginative or imaginary? Yes, Harvey is (the best we can determine) an imaginary creature. But children often create imaginary friends to ease social isolation. What makes Harvey distinct is that Dowd is an adult and not a child. We expect that an imaginary friend will be a phase of childhood development, not a permanent condition of a healthy adult. But is that true? The people we enjoy best, whose lives seem to have the most "life" in them, are highly imaginative. If the "imaginary friend" can be transformed into fictional characters presented in entertaining stories, the authors of these stories are the least socially isolated of us all. Their presence is welcome everywhere. Our lives, by contrast, seem relatively drab. The rabbit is not real, but the humanity of the imaginative story is real. If the adult simply remains in isolation because of the comfort and consolation of an imaginary friend, he/she is following a delusion rather than deepening their understanding of and connection with other humans. And I think that is what Lewis was getting at: Tethering imagination to the human experience -- using imaginary things as a device to explore reality rather than as a private form of avoiding living a fully human life.

We tend to think of mythology as something consigned to the past. But to believe that, one must see mythology solely as earlier ignorance now corrected through modern knowledge. George Orwell's Animal Farm is imaginative, but conveys an understanding -- a mythos -- about human economic systems. That mythos is so powerful that a recent retelling of the story in a new movie seeks to flip the critique from the original target -- Soviet communism -- to Western capitalism, instead. When it is read in 100, 200, or 300 years, it will be an object of scholarship requiring popular translation. Sitting without such scholarship does not make it ignorant, it simply deprives people of the future of the embedded wisdom in an imaginative story.

Lewis was not a theologian. He was a scholar of literature. He focused his studies on the elements of literature that remain true in all times. He did not see literature as divided into stories that were ignorant and stories that were better informed. His view was that man was created with all the powers necessary to live a successful life at all times in history -- and that the stories that survived did so precisely because they said something true, even if told symbolically. He resisted the shift in literary scholarship from the old to exclusively the new. Instead, he believed we should study the old with an appreciation of context that will better help us prize out the symbology and meaning that remains true in all times.

And so I seek to master the imaginative. To rethink reality in a way that conveys it symbolically. That symbolism is like an Ark that will withstand the tsunami of the daily trivia, the temporarily alarming and threatening, without being mere escapism of a child with an imaginary friend. I cannot imagine a more challenging and rewarding task. I have no idea whether I am up to it. But one thing I do know: the masters of the genre, both past and present, had a rare grip on reality -- even those we do not yet credit.

* The seven books are: The Magician’s Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle. This is a chronological ordering of the story. But as described in McGrath's biography of Lewis, for someone coming completely new to Narnia the most dramatic approach is to read them in the order in which Lewis penned them: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” The Horse and His Boy, The Silver Chair, The Last Battle, and The Magician’s Nephew.

** Late in life, Lewis (then 57) married a 41-year-old American divorcee, Helen Joy Davidman Gresham. That story was popularized in the movie Shadowlands (1993). It was a marriage of convenience for Gresham's benefit that at the last moment blossomed into love. Gresham died of cancer three years before Lewis himself succumbed to illness.