Blog #4: Lewis's Layers of Myth? - Vickie GG
Blog #4 - Vickie Garton-Gundling
So far, I've read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and about half of Prince Caspian, as well as Out of the Silent Planet. I've noticed in these texts - especially the latter two - that Lewis repeatedly employs layers of myth - or stories within stories.
Prince Caspian is the most layered: we (from our Primary World) are drawn back into the Secondary World of the England in which the kids can go into Narnia, then drawn back into Narnia, then Chapters 4-7 are Trumpkin telling the story of Prince Caspian within the Narnia world, and then within that story, it talks about the myths and stories Prince Caspian and others heard and believed or didn't (which turned out to be true). That's a whole lot of myths within myths!
Likewise, I keep coming back to the end of Out of the Silent Planet, and the different layers of story, fiction vs. nonfiction etc. that Lewis plays with there - in the final chapter and the postscript. (But then, in the opening to Perelandra, Lewis claims it is all fiction again? Why?
I assume this repetition is intentional and thus important, but I'm still trying to figure out why or what Lewis means by it. While I have a few vague, not-fully-formed hypotheses in my mind as to why he might be doing this, I'm hoping maybe our next class will shed some light on this interesting technique Lewis seems to be using. (I've seen it before, of course, and even Tolkien is an example, but Tolkien usually only goes about two deep vs. Lewis doing, like, four or five layers in Prince Caspian.)
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Okay, now that I finished the last Narnia book, I think I have a better idea on what Lewis is doing here. Upon encountering the third layer of worlds (i.e. the "real" world / "real" Narnia), the Professor says, "It's all in Plato, all in Plato!" While someone could definitely interpret these layers (and Lewis's own story layers) a la The Allegory of the Cave (where the myth is as close as we can get to an explanation of an authentic thing that the reader can't ever entirely experience themselves, since they are stuck in "the cave," I think the use of the term "Shadowlands" suggests that each layer of Narnias is moving further along the line from Plato's Simile of the Line. In other words, Lewis uses layers of myth to symbolize 1) the difficulty of using language to represent ultimate truths / ultimate concerns / true experience but also 2) the power of recurring and layered myth to perhaps help us get closer to seeing "the thing in itself." In other words, perhaps - if the true Narnia at The Last Battle's end is one example of beings finally seeing what Kant would call a noumenon, having discarded layers of phenomena, then not only myth generally but layers of myth are necessary to take us far enough outside our own world and laws of science and even our own minds in order to come even close to understanding and communing with what I'll just call the divine.
So far, I've read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and about half of Prince Caspian, as well as Out of the Silent Planet. I've noticed in these texts - especially the latter two - that Lewis repeatedly employs layers of myth - or stories within stories.
Prince Caspian is the most layered: we (from our Primary World) are drawn back into the Secondary World of the England in which the kids can go into Narnia, then drawn back into Narnia, then Chapters 4-7 are Trumpkin telling the story of Prince Caspian within the Narnia world, and then within that story, it talks about the myths and stories Prince Caspian and others heard and believed or didn't (which turned out to be true). That's a whole lot of myths within myths!
Likewise, I keep coming back to the end of Out of the Silent Planet, and the different layers of story, fiction vs. nonfiction etc. that Lewis plays with there - in the final chapter and the postscript. (But then, in the opening to Perelandra, Lewis claims it is all fiction again? Why?
I assume this repetition is intentional and thus important, but I'm still trying to figure out why or what Lewis means by it. While I have a few vague, not-fully-formed hypotheses in my mind as to why he might be doing this, I'm hoping maybe our next class will shed some light on this interesting technique Lewis seems to be using. (I've seen it before, of course, and even Tolkien is an example, but Tolkien usually only goes about two deep vs. Lewis doing, like, four or five layers in Prince Caspian.)
**********************************************************************************
Okay, now that I finished the last Narnia book, I think I have a better idea on what Lewis is doing here. Upon encountering the third layer of worlds (i.e. the "real" world / "real" Narnia), the Professor says, "It's all in Plato, all in Plato!" While someone could definitely interpret these layers (and Lewis's own story layers) a la The Allegory of the Cave (where the myth is as close as we can get to an explanation of an authentic thing that the reader can't ever entirely experience themselves, since they are stuck in "the cave," I think the use of the term "Shadowlands" suggests that each layer of Narnias is moving further along the line from Plato's Simile of the Line. In other words, Lewis uses layers of myth to symbolize 1) the difficulty of using language to represent ultimate truths / ultimate concerns / true experience but also 2) the power of recurring and layered myth to perhaps help us get closer to seeing "the thing in itself." In other words, perhaps - if the true Narnia at The Last Battle's end is one example of beings finally seeing what Kant would call a noumenon, having discarded layers of phenomena, then not only myth generally but layers of myth are necessary to take us far enough outside our own world and laws of science and even our own minds in order to come even close to understanding and communing with what I'll just call the divine.
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