On+Stories

Lewis’s essay On Stories is a classic for writers and readers alike. He brings to our attention the neglect visited on Story itself by most critics in all ages. Lewis mentions three exceptions: “ Aristotle in the Poetics constructed a theory of Greek tragedy which puts Story in the centre and relegates character to a strictly subordinate place. In the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, Boccaccio and others developed an allegorical theory of Story to explain the ancient myths. And in our own time Jung and his followers have produced their doctrine of Archetypes. Apart from these three examples the subject has been left almost untouched....”

He then goes on to say that the kind of pleasure Story as the chief object gives has been misunderstood; and in a similar way to his treatment of literary Criticism in An Experiment in Criticism, he divides both kinds of books and kinds of readers. He uses a film version of King Solomon’s Mines as an illustration of the misconception that “excitement” is the only reason for reading or watching a story of this kind. Lewis says that in the film he lost the whole “sense of the deathly” and that thus the story was completely spoiled for him. The excitement was secondary to that atmosphere; which I have found myself calling “weather” in response to his later critique of The Three Musketeers in the same essay. He says, “ There is no country in the book; save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather...... There is not a moment’s rest from the ‘adventures’; one’s nose is kept ruthlessly to the grindstone.” He concludes that “excitement” is not the only kind of pleasure to be got out of Romance.

This seems to me quite important to our times, with such emphasis on ‘action’ in modern novels. The art of engendering atmosphere needs to be kept alive; as Lewis points out, the moment of action when one is involved in it, does not always give such atmosphere, since one is engaged in keeping oneself alive or out of danger; but “That is one of the functions of art; to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.”

A key passage for me is the one where Lewis speaks of the “idea of otherness” in a story about voyaging through space. “To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw on the only real ‘other world’ we know: that of the spirit.” And in an intriguing corollary, he says, “ If some fatal progress of applied science ever enables us in fact to reach the Moon, that real journey will not at all satisfy the impulse which we now seek to gratify by writing such stories. The real Moon, if you could reach it and survive, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else. You would find cold, hunger, hardship and danger; and after the first few hours they would be //simply// cold, hunger, hardship and danger as you might have met them on Earth. And death would be simply death among those bleached craters as it is simply death in a nursing home in Sheffield. No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden. ‘ He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.’