SCIENCE FICTION UNIVERSITY:The Silver Chair and the Silver Screen: C. S. Lewis on Myth, Fairy-Tale and Film

hero realizes he is dead, the audience is presented a montage of fleeting images from throughout the film that causes us to remake its meaning in an instant. New knowledge arises with the clarity of thinking but the speed and intensity of direct experience. Those who have seen the film can likely describe their first viewing like I have: “When I first saw The Sixth Sense, I thought I was watching one kind of movie; when I got to this key point of revelation in the film, I reconstructed it in an instant—it happened so fast that I could not immediately put it in words, but I knew and knew it completely.” This is an experience of concrete thought. In myth and film, meaning is often communicated to the imagination with the clarity of reason and the intensity of experience but without abstract language. You might respond, “But language is used in the climactic Sixth Sense scene.” Yes, but in it the language does not have the same effect. It is more like sounds than words; the concepts recalled come back to us in an instant, in the same way solid objects come into view.
Now we can make sense of Lewis’s “Bluspels and Flalansferes” essay. When we receive myth as story, we are experiencing a principle concretely. Only when we put the experience into words does the principle become abstract. But if we can know a principle either concretely or by abstraction, then meaning can be either concrete or abstract. This agrees with the statement in “Bluspels” that meaning is the necessary antecedent to truth (157). Some meanings are abstract propositions—word statements like my explanation of the scene from Empire Strikes Back. Word statements that correspond to reality are statements of truth. But there are other kinds of meanings which can only be grasped in the experiential imagination. Such meanings, the kind we get in myth and film for example, come prior to abstraction and apart from language. From them we do not get truths about reality but tastes of reality itself.
Think of some of your favorite songs, the ones that blew you away the first time you heard them. They move you. They connect to you. They evoke feelings and thoughts you can’t quite describe. Then recall how a month or two (or six) later you actually bothered to pay attention to the lyrics, and you finally figured out what they were saying. “Oh, that’s what the song’s about!” In one sense you knew all along what the song was about. You understood meanings in it that couldn’t be put into words—meanings in the music itself, or in the way a certain phrase touched your heart or connected with a memory. The analysis of the lyrics was your reasoning self becoming aware of abstract, propositional meanings that your experiential self had not encountered. To use Lewis’s terminology, you first tasted the song, then you came to know it.
Fairy-tales are like that; they’re like the songs we hear that break our hearts with joy, the sunsets that make us cry happy tears, the mountains and canyons that fill us with wonder. One of Lewis’s greatest complaints about modernity was its rejection of wonder. Freud taught us to believe that our romantic longings were over-active libidos, that our love of the beautiful was only sexual desire, that our demand for our lives to have meaning and purpose was merely aggression, the fight to survive, and that our longing for heaven was mere wish-fulfillment to compensate for our fear of death.
Originals and Copies
Lewis questioned the logic of saying that a higher thing naturally had to come from a lesser thing, that our loftiest thoughts and desires were mere products of biological processes. Could it not be the other way around? Rather than love being a product of a procreation instinct, couldn’t sex be an expression in the physical plain of a love that permeates the universe, descending from spiritual reality above? Rather than humanity projecting its own personality on the universe in the search for purpose and meaning, couldn’t it be that personality and the desire for purpose and meaning exist in us because there is a Person behind the universe who created it with purpose? Rather than our belief in heaven being a product of our fear of death, couldn’t