Chapter 1—

Reading with the Heart:

The Critical Approach

In beginning a chapter late in Mere Christianity Lewis wrote, “It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never ‘skip.’ All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they find is going to be no use to them. In this chapter I am going to talk about something which may be helpful to some readers, but which may seem to others merely an unnecessary complication. If you are one of the second sort of readers, then I advise you not to bother about this chapter at all but to turn to the next” (p. 145). Readers should approach the first chapter of this book, too, with that attitude. This chapter shows how an understanding of and attention to the form, archetypes, narrative category, and conventions of a work can make one a more skillful reader, able to respond more fully to a work of fiction. Readers who find this chapter uninteresting or bewildering should go on to the next one, and, perhaps, return to it after reading the chapters which follow.

In A Preface to Paradise Lost Lewis asserts that “the first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used.”¹ As we consider the question of how the Chronicles of Narnia [ß p. 1] should be read, we must begin by giving attention to their form, to the kind of literature they are. Lewis himself called them fairy tales and, more specifically, the type of fairy tales known as fantasies.² Fairy tales, by definition, are short stories, involving supernatural events and characters such as elves, fairy godmothers, and witches, set in whole or in part in a never-never land.³ Lewis’s friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, whose ideas influenced Lewis greatly, defines a “fairy-story” as “one which touches on or uses Faërie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.”⁴ “Faërie itself,” Tolkien goes on to say, “may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power,” the power of Enchantment.⁵ As fairy tales, then, the Chronicles, will be characterized by strangeness and wonder, usually produced by magic, but at the same time, as fantasies, they must be believable and have internal consistency. Such believability is attained, in fairy tales which are also fantasies, by creation of a separate, “enchanted” world into which characters and readers are taken.

A fantasy, in literary terms, is “a work which takes place in a non-existent and unreal world, such as fairy-land.”⁶ A fantasy world should be independent of our world and self-sufficient: all the information needed to understand actions and meanings should be available within that world. It is an imaginary world and may have natural laws different from those of our world, but once those laws are established, they must be adhered to—if they are ignored or violated, the magic spell of the story will be broken. Tolkien again provides a useful explanation: “What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘subcreator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”⁷ George MacDonald, the Scottish preacher and story writer whom Lewis called his [ß p. 2] “teacher,” offers a similar account: “Man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms—which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. . . . His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible.”⁸ It is such a “secondary” or “suppositional” world that Lewis creates in Narnia. As we enter Narnia we encounter an imaginary world in which animals can talk, in which creatures mythical in our world are real, and in which creatures unknown in our world have an important place. And as we pass through the wardrobe into that world, we must accept it as real, we must embrace it imaginatively and yield ourselves to it so long as the story lasts.

From the first, however, there has been a tendency to neglect the form of the Chronicles and to stress methods of reading which subvert the effects a fantasy seeks to attain. That has been the result many times when the Chronicles are treated as “allegories,” works whose events and characters must “stand for” or point to things outside their fictional world in order to be understood or appreciated fully. A review of The Last Battle in the Times Literary Supplement (11 May 1956) noted that “the conclusion is striking, and the allegory, for an adult at least, is clear.” In the first study of the series as a whole, an otherwise sensitive and helpful essay, Charles A. Brady wrote, “Allegory is strong in Narnia.”⁹ And more recently, John W. Montgomery held that “the Narnia Chronicles contain powerful and deep Christian allegory woven into their very fiber.”¹⁰ To take the Chronicles as allegory, however, raises the danger of breaking their spell, either by destroying the independence of the imaginary world, as we begin looking [ß p. 3] outside it for the completion of its meaning, or by leading us to use our heads rather than our hearts in responding to the stories, or both. There are passages in the Chronicles which allow allegorical readings: Aslan’s death in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Eustace’s transformation in Aslan’s well in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” and the final judgment and destruction of the world in The Last Battle, for example, have close parallels in Christianity and their meaning inevitably will be shaped to some extent by those parallels. But a brief comment by MacDonald puts them into proper perspective: “A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory.”¹¹ Unfortunately few such passages, especially in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, have exerted undue influence and have led some readers to look for parallels everywhere and to ask what every large or small detail is supposed to symbolize.

More typical of Lewis’s technique in the Chronicles than those passages is a use of narrative which, as is common in fairy tales, borders on or passes completely into the realm of myth. Lewis, like most students of literature, rarely uses myth in its familiar sense of a “fictitious story, or unscientific account, theory, belief, etc.” Generally he uses it in a positive sense and it becomes a vital element in his thought. A myth, according to Lewis. is a narrative with a simple, satisfactory and inevitable shape which imparts to its readers’ imaginations a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth. ¹² A myth, in other words, is a story, a narrative; it depends for effect upon its shape, upon what happens to whom for what reasons, not upon the particular words or style in which it is told; it must communicate imaginatively, not intellectually; and at its heart must be a truth of universal significance or applicability. Lewis believed that allegory and myth can be placed on a sort of continuum: “When allegory is at its best, it approaches myth, which must be grasped with the imagination, not [ß p. 4] with the intellect.” ¹³ When allegory is at its best, at its most imaginative, and when myth is least effective, most nearly intellectual, they are close to each other. But from the meeting point at the center, they move by their natures in opposite directions, toward the imaginative and the intellectual, respectively. Here perhaps is the best resolution to the debate over “allegory” in the Chronicles. At their very best, as for example in the final pages of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” and the final chapter of The Last Battle, the Chronicles are high myth, communicating so directly to the imagination and emotions through powerful images and symbols that they cannot be translated fully into intellectual terms. Occasionally, where passages suggest a single meaning apprehended by the intellect through reference to the Bible or Christianity, they move into the allegorical half of the spectrum. Most of the time, however, they lie slightly to the myth side of the dividing line, so that their primary and most profitable appeal is to the imagination, not to the intellect.

So, apparently, Lewis himself thought it should be. He tried to set matters straight in his essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said”: “Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then . . . drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all” (Of Other Worlds, p. 36). Elsewhere he cites the use of a secondary world as evidence that Aslan is not to be taken as an allegorical figure:

In reality . . . he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?” This is not allegory at all. . . . The Incarnation of Christ in another world is mere supposal; but granted the [ß p. 5] supposition, He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine. ¹⁴

Lewis expected his readers to enter his supposed world fully, to accept it as real and self-contained, and not to be asking what details in Narnia stand for in our world or looking for meanings that can be abstracted from the story through allegory. Their primary appeal, he expected, would be to the heart, not the head. George MacDonald summarizes it all by comparing the fairy tale to music, and Lewis surely would agree with him: “The best way with music, I imagine, is not to bring the forces of our intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part of us for whose sake it exists. We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed. . . . If any strain of my ‘broken music’ make a child’s eyes flash, or his mother’s grow for a moment dim, my labor will not have been in vain.” ¹⁵

But there are echoes in the Chronicles; there are events and characters and phrases which remind one of the Bible, or the classics, or other fairy tales. Lewis would say, however, as a more recent literary theorist has also, that these are examples of archetype, not of allegory. And a second step towards answering the question “How should the Chronicles of Narnia be read?” involves coming to grips with the term “archetype.” Formidable as the word sounds, its dictionary meaning is simply a model, an example of a type or group. The literary scholar uses “archetype” more specifically as a symbol, character type, or plot motif that has recurred throughout literature.¹⁶ Writers in all ages have used gardens, calm, festivity, and harvest, for example, as symbols of desirable states of being and deserts, storm, discord, and drought as corresponding symbols of undesirable conditions; and they have used the hero, the benevolent king, and the wise older guide as good characters, while the villain, the tyrant, and the witch appear [ß p. 6] again and again as the corresponding evil figure. Throughout the centuries writer after writer, similarly, has invoked such motifs as the quest, the journey into experience, and the Cinderella pattern in developing the plot of his or her story. Each use of such a typical or recurring symbol, character type, or plot motif, in Northrop Frye’s words, “connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience.”¹⁷ The examples listed above, therefore, all taken from the Chronicles, connect Lewis’s tales with the long literary tradition that preceded them.

Among the most used and most important of such archetypal images are the seasonal cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, the daily cycle of dawn, zenith, sunset, and night, and the life cycle of youth, adulthood, old age, and death. Throughout history poets have seen analogies among these natural cycles; the relations between them might be illustrated on a simple diagram:

Each time we speak of the “sunset” and “golden” years of life in referring to old age, or describe death as being “sleep,” we are, consciously or unconsciously, invoking those archetypes. And the Chronicles, as fairy tales dealing with basic stories and themes, use those cycles in several ways. The seasonal cycle is used, for example, in The Lion, the Witch [ß p. 7] and the Wardrobe as the children “saw the winter vanishing and the whole wood passing in a few hours or so from January to May” (p. 120). The daily cycle of the sun becomes an important element in The Horse and His Boy as the two children and the two horses undertake a journey into experience across the desert. Even Narnia comes full circle, from its origin in The Magician’s Nephew to its ending—and continuation in another world—in The Last Battle.

Beyond the meaning of the individual cycles is the significance of the patterns as a whole. “In the solar cycle of the day,” Frye explains, “the seasonal cycle of the year, and the organic cycle of human life, there is a single pattern of significance”; elsewhere he calls that pattern the “story of the loss and regaining of identity,” which is “the framework of all literature,” the single story or “monomyth” underlying it all.¹⁸ The story of Prince Rilian, as he loses and regains his identity in The Silver Chair, illustrates that theme nicely, as does the trilogy of books—Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” and The Silver Chair—which follows Caspian through youth, maturing, old age, death, and resurrection. But one could go further and show quite readily that the problem of identity—of learning who one is and maturing in that knowledge—is present in each of the Chronicles. Here once again we see the interconnectedness of literature, and the close relationship between literature and life. “Putting works of literature in such a context gives them an immense reverberating dimension of significance . . . , in which every literary work catches the echoes of all other works of its type in literature, and so ripples out into the rest of literature and thence into life” (Frye, Fables of Identity, p. 37).

The Chronicles have their roots in many other stories, in the fairy tales and myths of the past. Recognition and consideration of several features as archetypes drawn from those roots is very helpful in reading the Chronicles. It allows a reader, for example, to see the death and return [ß p. 8] to life of Aslan in the first book as an archetypal motif, part of the pattern Lewis refers to in Mere Christianity as the “good dreams” God sent the human race: “I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men” (p. 54). The death of Aslan in Narnia has additional vibrations, a deeper and fuller meaning, because it fits into a pattern in nature and in literature (or mythology) that preceded it, including, of course, the death of Christ in our world, which was the greatest example of the archetype because it was historical fact as well as myth.¹⁹

Recognition of archetypes can also help avoid misreadings. The White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, has often been allegorized as the Devil of our world.²⁰ But the Witch is not the Devil. The details of the story make that clear. She is of human ancestry—a descendent of Adam’s first wife, Lilith²¹—and she is mortal: the story says definitely that she dies at the end of the battle.²² She is, of course, the evil force in the traditional fairy-tale separation of good from evil; but to conclude that she is, therefore, the Devil is to read with the head rather than the heart. She is simply the archetypal figure of the temptress witch, whom we respond to quite directly as “bad.” And that is how Lewis himself viewed her: “The Witch,” he wrote in a letter, “is of course Circe, . . . because she is . . . the same Archetype we find in so many fairy tales. No good asking where any individual author got that. We are born knowing the Witch, aren’t we?”²³ Circe, in the Odyssey, tempted men with magical food and turned them into animals. The Witch, by her affinities with Circe, fits the same pattern, or archetype, as the witch who caught Hansel and Gretel, the old witch in Grimm’s “Sweetheart Roland,” and the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz: each tempts its prey, hates human beings, and epitomizes selfishness, cruelty, and [ß p. 9] desire for control. Each suggests to children the nature of evil, but is not herself an embodiment or symbol of the Devil. Lewis seems to have intended that the White Witch be paired (since “every typical character in romance tends to have his moral opposite confronting him”—Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 195) with Father Christmas, rather than with Aslan. The Witch is white, cold, greedy, and cruel, in contrast to the red colors, warmth, generosity, and kindliness of the traditional patron figure of Christmas.²⁴ In his use of archetypes, too, Lewis expects his readers to remain, for the most part, within the work. Archetypes are not allegories, pointing outside themselves to the meaning that completes them. Rather they embody within themselves the tradition they represent and the significance they have accumulated over the years. They also are to be approached not with the acumen of the head but with the sensitivity and receptivity of the heart.

The question of how to read the Chronicles leads next to two characteristics which further shape our imaginative and emotional reaction to the stories, their mythoi and their use of conventions. First, as one reads a work of fiction, Frye emphasizes, one must be sensitive to its narrative type, what he calls its mythos (Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 158-162). The mythos, for Frye, is a broad “narrative category,” not the embodiment of that category in a specific form or genre; it is the general model which clarifies to us how we are to react to the plot of a work, whatever its genre, or class, may be. “If we are told that what we are about to read is tragic or comic, we expect a certain kind of structure and mood, but not necessarily a certain genre” (Anatomy of Criticism, p. 162). The combination of structure and mood is its mythos, and one must give attention to it as one reads in order to know how to respond—whether to take difficulties seriously (in a tragic work) or lightly (in a comic work). If we not notice the cues, or if we [ß p. 10] encounter a work (such as dark comedy) where the signals are not typical, we can find ourselves confused and uncertain as we read. There are four mythoi—tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony—and, in a major critical innovation, Frye aligns each with the segment of the natural cycles whose imagery usually appears in, or characterizes, that mythos. Thus he links spring with comedy, summer with romance, autumn with tragedy, and winter with irony or antiromance. The common structures of myths, he concludes, which were based on the cycles of nature, became in due course the structural principles of literature:

The absorption of the natural cycle into mythology provides myth with two of these structures; the rising movement that we find in myths of spring or the dawn, of birth, marriage and resurrection, and the falling movement in myths of death, metamorphosis, or sacrifice. These movements reappear as the structural principles of comedy and tragedy in literature. Again, the dialectic in myth that projects a paradise or heaven above our world and a hell or place of shades below it reappears in literature as the idealized world of pastoral and romance and the absurd, suffering, or frustrated world of irony and satire. (Fables of Identity, pp. 33-34)

In the case of the Chronicles of Narnia, one must begin with the understanding that, within their form as fairy tales, they employ the narrative pattern, or mythos, of romance. The romance is characterized by a standard plot, one of quest or adventure, often undertaken by a single knight; it is set in a courtly and chivalric age, often one of highly developed manners and chivalry; it stresses knightly ideals of courage, honor, mercifulness to an opponent; it usually introduces a heroine, and frequently its central interest is romantic love, together with tournaments fought and dragons slain for a damsel’s sake; and it delights in wonders and marvels, making much of the mysterious effect of magic, spells, and enchantments.²⁵ “The mode of romance,” as Frye sums it up, “presents an idealized world: [ß p. 11]. . . heroes are brave, heroines beautiful, villains villainous, and the frustrations, ambiguities, and embarrassments of ordinary life are made little of” (Anatomy of Criticism, p. 151).

By combining the narrative pattern of romance with the structural form of the fairy tale, Lewis was able to adapt the latter to his specific needs in the Chronicles. The fairy-tale form, he wrote in “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said,” allowed him to eliminate the traditional love interest of the romance and to avoid its tendency towards elevated language: “As these images sorted themselves into events (i.e., became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the Form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the Form itself: its brevity, its severe restraints on description. . . . Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction” (Of Other Worlds, pp. 36-37). And it allowed him to give to exciting action, even to violence—removed from the real world by the double cushions of the fairy tale and the romance mode—the positive values of the chivalric age Lewis loved. There is no use hiding from children, Lewis asserted in “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” that they are “born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil.” For that reason Lewis does not share the reservations some feel about having such matters in children’s stories: “I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book” (Of Other Worlds, p. 31). Combining the fairy tale with the romance joins the primitive perspectives of the former with the positive, idealistic outlook of the latter to create an appeal for children and adults alike.

One must be alert to a work’s mythos in order to know [ß p. 12] how to respond to it, but also in order to be aware of its use of, and departures from, the conventions of its type. Each mythos has over the centuries developed a set of conventions, the “rules” by which the “game” of that type is played. Like the rules of a game, the conventions of a genre must be accepted if one is to enjoy a story as it is written. “The king’s rash promise, the cuckold’s jealousy, the ‘lived happily ever after’ tag to a concluding marriage, the manipulated happy endings of comedy in general . . . all exist solely as story-telling devices” (Fables of Identity, p. 36). To understand an author’s work well, one must recognize where the work is following conventions and where it is departing from conventions. Departure from convention (Frye calls it “displacement”—adaptation or modification of narrative or thematic patterns to fit some standard of plausibility or morality) is particularly important because in it an author often reveals his or her individual intent or emphasis. The Chronicles of Narnia rely heavily on conventions: their importance is suggested in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Edmund asks Peter if the robin they are following might be leading them into a trap. “That’s a nasty idea,” Peter replies. “Still—a robin you know. They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve ever read. I’m sure a robin wouldn’t be on the wrong side” (p. 59).

Recognizing conventions, particularly conventions borrowed from the romance tradition, can help prevent misreading or misunderstanding of the Chronicles. The Chronicles have been criticized, for example, as being racist, sexist, and overly violent.²⁶ To criticize Lewis fairly, however, one must consider the conventions of the mythos within which he was writing. One may well regret the emphasis on the dark skins and garlicy breath of the Calormenes and the dwarfs’ references to the Calormenes as “Darkies.” But the Calormenes are not simply “dark persons”—they are Moors: they are identified by their dress, weapons, and manners as the traditional enemy in [ß p. 13] medieval romances. More important, however, than Lewis’s use of this convention are his frequent departures from and adaptations of it. The enemies in most of the books are not dark: the Telmarines in Prince Caspian are light-skinned and the Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew is white. Even more significantly, not all Calormenes are evil—a notable exception is Emeth in The Last Battle—and one even becomes queen of Archenland, when she marries the fair-skinned hero of The Horse and His Boy.

The stories do limit males and females to traditional roles more than today’s consciousness-raised society prefers, particularly in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Such stereotyping is conventional in romances, as women are routinely placed on pedestals, helpless in the face of dangers from which the dauntless heroes must rescue them; and such stereotyping, therefore, should be expected to some extent in the Chronicles. More important than the stereotypes, however, are the places where Lewis departs from convention. He frequently, and increasingly as the series proceeds, gives positions of leadership to girls: Lucy, for example, undertakes a challenging task in The Voyage of the “Dawn Trader.” And Jill Pole, in The Last Battle, leads Tirian and Eustace through a dark forest to Stable Hill and participates in combat as an equal.

And there is violence in the Chronicles: it is part of the romance tradition Lewis was using. But there is less violence than one would expect if Lewis were closely following the romance convention, with its tendency toward sudden, barely motivated violence: three books, The Voyage of the “Dawn Trader,” The Silver Chair, and The Magician’s Nephew, contain very little violence at all. When violence does appear in the other books, it is used as a metaphor, as battles against evil, which is strong and aggressive and must be resisted actively. It is an old metaphor: “The idea of the knight—the Christian in arms for the defence of a [ß p. 14] good cause—is one of the great Christian ideas” (Mere Christianity, p. 107). But it is most significant that the Chronicles do not follow the typical romance in presenting strength as the way to solve problems. The good side in Narnia is always the weaker side, physically: Narnia itself is a tiny country, “not the fourth size of one of [the] least provinces” of the powerful nation of Calormen (The Horse and His Boy, p. 108). The Narnian forces usually consist, as they do in Prince Caspian, of “a handful of Dwarfs and woodland creatures” who wonder how they can “defeat an army of grown-up humans” (pp. 109-10). Victory for the Narnians comes only through Aslan: that, perhaps, is the central theme of the series. Awareness of the forms and conventions that lie behind the Chronicles, then, and of Lewis’s departures from those conventions, is important to a full and accurate understanding of what the Chronicles are about.

Throughout this chapter we have been concerned with the question of how the Chronicles of Narnia should be read. We have given attention to several characteristics which can prevent misreading or misunderstanding them. In doing so, however, we have actually been answering a broader question, that of how stories in general should be read. All fiction creates an imaginary world, draws upon archetypes, and employs a mythos and conventions, and as we become alert to their importance and uses, we become equipped to read stories of various sorts. The question of how stories should be read is one that interested Lewis greatly. He dealt with it at some length in his essay “On Stories.” All of what we have discussed here, along with such standard story-telling methods as contrast, foreshadowing, climax, and characterization, must come together into what Lewis calls the flavor or “quality” of the story, which must be tasted by the imagination and emotions of the reader. In “On Stories” Lewis complains that critics [ß p. 15] have paid too little attention to “Story considered in itself” (Of Other Worlds, p. 3). Critics seem to have assumed that books read merely “for the story” are read for the excitement they convey. Lewis tries to show that story can give another sort of pleasure, absorption into the “whole world” created by the story. Each story develops a distinctive image, or quality, or environment which determines the unique nature of the imaginative response it calls forth. “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” (Of Other Worlds, p. 18). A story about danger from giants has a different quality from a story about danger from Indians, a story of isolation on the moon has a different quality from one about isolation in Siberia. Each has its own “idea,” its own unique imaginative quality. That quality, which is not a fact, like death, but a state, like the sense of the deathly, gives books deeper and more lasting appeal than just excitement: it give an imaginative and emotional pleasure which makes romances “a sort of poetry” for the uneducated reader (Of Other Worlds, p. 17). And that quality becomes, in a well-written work, the unifying factor of the work: “Every episode, every speech, helps to incarnate what the author is imagining. You could spare none of them. It takes the whole story to build [it] up” (Of Other Worlds, p. 19). Such a sense of unifying theme or “total design” should come through for each of the Chronicles of Narnia in the essays which follow.

An inevitable part of that “total design” for a person like Lewis is his religion. For someone with a Christian commitment as deep as Lewis’s, faith has to affect the nature and quality of the stories he or she writes. Lewis said as much in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for [ß p. 16] Children,” although he uses the broader word “moral” in the essay. As you write, “let the pictures tell you their own moral. For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life” (Of Other Worlds, p. 33). That perhaps clarifies Lewis’s own comments about the origins of the Chronicles in “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said.” “Everything began with images,” he wrote; “a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them.” As he worked with those images, the qualities inherent in them asserted themselves: the Christian element “pushed itself in of its own accord” (Of Other Worlds, p. 36). To assert that the Chronicles are not allegories is not to play down the importance of Christianity in them. Rather, it is to suggest that the Christian meaning is deeper and more subtle than the term allegory permits, that, when the Chronicles are at their best, they do not just convey Christian meanings intellectually, by “representations,” but they communicate directly to the imagination and the emotions a sizable share of the central elements of the Christian faith. But the meaning is not limited to the Christian aspects, as it would be in a representational method. The use of myth allows other meanings to ray out from the stories, enables the stories to say what the author “does not yet know and cd. not come by in any other way” (Letters of C. S. Lewis, p. 271).

In An Experiment in Criticism Lewis mentions that people read literature, as they approach the other arts, either to “use” it or to “receive” it. “A work of (whatever) art,” he wrote, “can be either ‘received’ or ‘used.’ When we ‘receive’ it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities” (p 88). There has been a tendency, or at least a temptation, among some readers to “use” the [ß p. 17] Chronicles of Narnia, by considering them narrowly as devotional literature or by searching them for religious meanings of a limited and obvious sort. So long as the user avoids the danger of distortion, of imposing his or her own pattern on the work and thus finding what is not really there, “use” is a legitimate even if, as Lewis would say, an “inferior” activity (An Experiment in Criticism, p. 88). Better one should “use” literature, music, or art than not read, listen, or look at all. Better still, however, learn to “receive” the full pleasure and meaning that the work, through its shape and texture, can provide. That, in sum, is the intention of this book, to help people read the Chronicles first with their hearts, then with their heads, and always according to the pattern Lewis invented. [ß p. 18]