Myth-Making As An Art Form
In C.S. Lewis’ introduction to George MacDonald, he draws a distinction between a story and a myth: the story serves as a vehicle or channel for delivering the myth, but the myth is the essential piece. In this passage, Lewis is discussing whether MacDonald should be considered a great literary figure. Lewis concludes that MacDonald’s skill is in creating excellent myths, rather than in communicating these myths in excellent literary writing.
What George MacDonald does best is fantasy — fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art — the art of myth-making — is a species of literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version — whose words — are we thinking when we say this?
For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone’s words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all — say by a mime, or a film. And I find this to be true of all such stories. When I think of the story of the Argonauts and praise it, I am not praising Apollonious Rhodius (whom I never finished) nor Kingsley (whom I have forgotten) nor even Morris, though I consider his version a pleasant poem. In this respect stories of the mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to take the “theme” of Keats’s Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a false abstraction.
But in a myth — in a story where the pattern of events is all that matters — this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, “done the trick.” After that you can throw the means of communication away. To be sure, if the means of communication are words, it is desirable that [they] be fairly written. But this is only a minor convenience … the words are going to be forgotten as soon as you have mastered the Myth. In poetry the words are the body and the “theme” or “content” is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes — they are not much more than a telephone. Of this I had evidence some years ago when I first heard the story of Kafka’s Castle related in conversation and afterwards read the book myself. The reading added nothing. I had already received the myth, which was all that mattered.
Most myths were made in prehistoric time, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius — a Kafka or a Novalis — who can make such a story. MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind I know. But I do not know how to classify such a genius. To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words — nay, since its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a sense, accidental. Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts. It begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has largely ignored. It may even be one of the greatest arts; for it produces works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest poets. It is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry — or at least most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and “possessed joys not promised to our birth.” It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives.
–C.S. Lewis, Introduction to Phantastes by George MacDonald