Laura Miller (37 page)

A Formula of Power over Living Men

S
tories leave themselves open to a much wider spectrum of interpretation than theology does. As the Iranian academic and writer Azar Nafisi, author of
Reading Lolita in Tehran,
once observed, “Stories are wayward. They never remain within the control even of their own creators.” This is a problem for the orthodox, but Lewis felt that certain important truths could be fully communicated only via stories. What was captured, or was meant to be captured, was ineffable. “To be stories at all,” Lewis wrote, “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.”

Everyone is available, is
susceptible,
to the spell of story. That is one reason critics have generally found it unworthy of study; Lewis observed that the more story predominates in a book, the less intellectuals think of it. The appetite for and appreciation of story requires no training or cultivation; it is a common denominator lower even than titillating descriptions of sex, because children are usually not very interested in those. But it is potent. The word “spell,” as Tolkien mentions in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” once meant “both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.” Where does this power come from and what is it made of? Tolkien thought that to ask this question was to speculate about the very origins of language and the mind.

Not long ago, I heard an ornithologist on the radio, explaining that for birds, singing is a learned behavior. Young larks, for example, listen to adult larks sing and then practice until they perfect the skill. The scientist then played recordings of two birds singing to illustrate his point. The mature lark ran confidently through a succession of repeating, fully developed motifs, while the youngster’s song skittered around, jumbling together fragments of different songs in patterns that didn’t resolve. The ornithologist called this “babbling,” and to illustrate his point further, he played a recording of his own eighteen-month-old daughter babbling in baby talk, that is, making sounds that approximated language without quite being language. Human children, it seems, learn to speak in much the same way that birds learn to sing. The ornithologist’s daughter rattled off a series of nonsense syllables, mimicking the inflections of adult speech, occasionally tossing in familiar phrases from nursery rhymes: “Wee, wee, wee, all the way home.”

When my friends Desmond and Corinne were learning to talk, they too went through a babbling phase. Corinne is a particularly canny impressionist, and before she could command many useful real words, she would fix a nearby adult with a confiding look and chatter in her pretend language, perfectly reproducing the cadences of real conversation. Eventually, after she acquired more words, she and her brother learned how to use and arrange them properly: “this” for an object close at hand; “that” for the thing on the other side of the room you want the grown-up to bring to you. For a while, they both stopped answering yes-or-no questions with a “yes” or a “no” and responded only in full sentences: “Did you like the circus?” “I did.” “Is the Cat in the Hat making a mess?” “He is!” It was as if, having finally sussed out a few of the occult powers of grammar, they wanted to exercise them as often as possible.

Now that the twins are three, they seem to be practicing another kind of grammar. Just as they absorb the words they hear every day and learn to make sense of the patterns they form, so they are soaking up stories. Corinne has begun to spin out what I think of as story babble, buttonholing sympathetic adults à la Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and treating them to endless, rambling narratives that all seem to run together into a single infinite saga. (Since Corinne’s nickname is Nini, her parents call this epic the Niniad.) Her characters are lifted from Beatrix Potter and Dr. Seuss, from the people and animals in her world and from the figures that populate the imaginary life she has built with her brother. At present, these characters don’t do much more than eat, hide, and throw things out the window, but every so often, a shard of fully formed story language pops into the narrative. A turtle and a tadpole will be engaged in a perpetual cycle of looking for food and dodging the predatory “big fish” when suddenly “the moon came up and shone on the quiet fields of snow and they got into their warm, soft beds and fell fast asleep.”

Whenever Corinne summons one of these fragments of story talk, she lowers her voice and slips into a hushed, singsong rhythm that is, of course, her imitation of the special voice that adults use when reading or telling a story to children. In my experience, there is no better way to seize the attention of distracted children than to start speaking in this voice. They will drop the fought-over stuffed animal or the annoying toy drum and drift over to your knee with the faces of the hypnotized — attentive and pliable as long as you keep it coming. It is the kind of power that can go to your head.

Adults don’t become immune to this power, either; they just learn to respond to different cues. Instead of “Once upon a time,” we latch onto “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” perhaps the most famous first sentence in the history of the English novel. Equally effective is the grand, sweeping, and old-fashioned “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” from Dickens’s
Tale of Two Cities.
Or we might acquire a taste for laconic leaps into the middle of the action, such as Mickey Spillane’s opener for
I, the Jury:
“I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room.” A simple, even mundane sentence, that one, but it does the trick; it makes you wonder what happens next. You’re hooked.

Who can catalog the myriad ways that human beings use to signal, “Now, I am telling you a story”? The speaker leaves off ordinary talk, the listener recalibrates her attention, and both enter into a relationship older than the memory of our race. A story takes us, for a while, out of time and the particularities of our own existence. The initiation into this ritual might come as a pause, a change of tone, or even as the apparition of a studio logo shining on the screen in a darkened movie theater. This tells us that a special kind of language, the language of story, has begun.

Human beings speak thousands of languages, but most linguists agree with the theory, first advanced by Noam Chomsky, that there is a “universal grammar,” a common structural basis underlying all human languages. Despite the great variety of tongues, they all work in the same fundamental way. Our brains, it is thought, have an innate response to languages that employ this structure and we are particularly attuned to it during childhood, when we learn languages quickly and easily. An infant’s babbling sounds like adorable nonsense, but it’s really the evidence of a powerful information processor assembling itself, rifling through sounds and sequences of sounds and figuring how all the pieces fit together to form meanings.

Could stories work the same way? Could Corinne, when she corners me and launches into yet another installment of the Niniad, be practicing the grammar of storytelling, arranging and rearranging the components, trying out different kinds of voices, experimenting with repetitions, with dramatic conflict and its resolution, if not yet, alas, with endings? I think so. But while everyone learns to speak, not everyone learns how to tell stories, or at least not how to tell them successfully.

Most of us recognize a fully formed story when we hear or read or see it; this, to me, seems almost as universal as our ability to distinguish, in our own language, between a grammatically correct sentence — “John watched the dog chase the ball” — and a grammatically broken one — “The chase John ball watched the dog.” But, as Chomsky famously pointed out, a sentence can be grammatically correct but still nonsensical: his example was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Even a story with the requisite components of beginning, middle, and end can seem essentially meaningless.

Lewis suspected that, at base, story is difficult to analyze because it really can’t be taken apart, and myth was the prime example of story’s deep roots in the human mind. To Lewis, the word “myth” meant something more than just a tale from an obsolete religion; it was a unit of meaning. Sometimes it was only a sketch of a narrative; a myth might be no more than the image of a beautiful youth falling in love with his own reflection in a pond. Not all old stories qualified as myth in his opinion, and some new ones did. You could identify them not so much by their common characteristics as by how people responded to them.

Lewis considered Franz Kafka to be one modern genius in the creation of myth; reading
The Trial
and
The Castle,
he felt “a profound significance, but it emanates from the whole story and is not built up by understanding the parts, nor could I state it except by retelling the story.” There was something irreducible in the kind of story he called myth. We might come up with a thousand explanations for what it “stands for,” but none of them will ever be complete or sufficient. It’s impossible to say what the myth of Orpheus is
about;
it is exactly itself. The only way to convey its significance fully is to tell the story one more time. We might claim that the ordeals of Kafka’s K. symbolize the individual’s struggle against the modern state or some such theme, but we know that’s only one facet of its significance. When hassling with some red-tape nightmare, we call it Kafkaesque, not because Kafka wrote about bureaucracy but because bureaucracy often seems to be
about
Kafka’s myth.

Myth troubles critics, Lewis believed, because its value is “extra-literary.” The power of a myth doesn’t arise from the particular words used to convey it; it can be felt even when no words at all are used. A myth might be told in pantomime, silent film, or a “pictorial series” (such as a comic book) and still impress its audience with the sensation that “something of great moment has been communicated to us.” There is only one version of, say,
Madame Bovary
or Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”; it would make no sense to talk of an equally legitimate version of either work that used different words. But what is the definitive version of the Orpheus myth? Aren’t each of the renditions — Ovid’s verse, Monteverdi’s opera, the film
Black Orpheus,
Tennessee Williams’s play
Orpheus Descending
— equally valid and recognizably Orpheus? Although lyric poetry sometimes avails itself of mythic material, it is in a sense the opposite of myth, because “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.”

This conception of myth comes in part from Owen Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends and a fellow Inkling;
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
is dedicated to Barfield’s daughter, Lucy, and
The Allegory of Love
is dedicated to Barfield himself. In 1928, Barfield published a book,
Poetic Diction,
based on his Oxford B.Litt. thesis, and it had an influence on both Lewis and Tolkien. Barfield suggested that myth is a remnant of an early stage of both language and understanding or consciousness, a time of “unitary, concrete meanings.” At this stage, for example, the story of Demeter and Persephone was not just associated with the experience of winter, it
contained
the very idea of winter — along with the concepts of waking and sleeping and life and death, among other things — in a single, dense unit of meaning. Such meanings, according to Barfield, “could not be
known,
but only experienced or lived.”

Very small children often think in this way, Barfield believed. When Desmond was just beginning to learn the names of people, I asked him to tell me who I was. He studied me for a while, and replied tentatively, “Mommy?” He knew I was not his mother, but because I sometimes cared for him, I was subsumed in the concept of Mommy-ness, along with the mother animals pictured in his board books and, possibly, physical warmth and food — the experience of being cared for itself. All of this was “Mommy.” Perhaps he regarded me as a minor manifestation of his own mother in the way the Romans considered the Celtic goddess Sulis to be one of the lesser faces that their goddess Minerva presented to the backward provincials of the world.

As languages develop, Barfield speculated, they begin to divide these larger units of meaning into smaller parts. This makes language more modular, and therefore easier to manipulate and more useful, but it also saps the intensity out of individual words and concepts. When, for Desmond, I became Laura, I was easier to think about as a distinct person who looked and behaved differently from the distinct person who is his mother, Leslie. But in becoming an individual, I also lost my place as part of the wondrous continuum of nurturing presence that was “Mommy.” Desmond knows that I am like his mother because we’re both female grown-ups, but that category does not have the potency it once did; it is disenchanted. Now I am my own woman, but I used to be a goddess.

When human beings learn to generalize and abstract, to label oaks, elms, and birches as “trees,” for example, they arrive at a new type of unity that is practical and sterile, in Barfield’s eyes — very different from the kind of consciousness that understood the world to be an ash tree or an oak to be a god. Barfield believed that in metaphor in particular and in poetry in general, we recover a little of the old, lost unity; metaphor rejoins what has been split apart. This is the source of the sensation of illumination, of recognition that a powerful metaphor delivers. For, as much as our minds like to
analyze,
to break things down into their constituent parts in order to examine and manipulate them, we also long for
synthesis,
the sensation that our words and our world are connected and infused with “intrinsic life.” It is in myths that we find that life, that meaning, in its most intact form (although even here it is “mummified,” according to Barfield). Myth defies intellect — if by “intellect” we mean analytical, logical thought — because it predates it. An echo of this old, preanalytical unity is the “something inexpressible” that Lewis felt myth imparts.