While [C.S.] Lewis could remain within orthodox, or at least “mere” Christianity in writing his books, the Jewish writer leaves the realm of the normative in order to develop the mythologies that are the fantasy writer’s natural materials. Put another way, Tolkien and Lewis both referred to Christianity as the sole true fairytale. Jewish thinkers are far less likely to consider this praise.
To put it bluntly, there is no way that a Jewish writer working in the early decades of the twentieth century could have produced The Lord of the Rings, a work steeped in a yearning for a lost pastoral world that Jews, who have for various reasons tended to congregate in urban and commercial centers, would have had little or no experience of.seems to ignore the whole history of pastoral Zionism, which was quite a big strain of Zionism indeed. Getting back to the (fantastic) land, and the good that would do for "urban" Jews, was a primary constituent of Zionist arguments in the first part of the 20th century. It's a strange thing to overlook.
It [a story, a myth] doesn't MEAN anything, in the sense of abstracting a meaning from it. [One] may regard it fundamentally as "about" the Fall and Mortality and the Machine, but that may not be how I read it. Indeed it seems to me (with due respect) a great mistake to try and attach any kind of abstract meaning to a story like his. Story -- or at least a great Story of the mythical type -- gives us an experience of something not as an abstraction but as a concrete reality. We don't "understand the meaning" when we read a myth, we actually encounter the thing iteself. Once we try to grasp it with the discursive reason, it fades.So they didn't see themselves as writing isomorphic narratives per se, but taking meaningful mythic elements and real experience and re-weaving them into their work in the service of telling a certain kind of story.
Let me give you an example. Here I am trying to explain the fading, the vanishing of tasted reality when the reasoning part of the mind is applied to it. Probably I'm making heavy weather of it.... Let me remind you instead of Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was supposed to lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared. Now what was merely a principle should become imaginable to you....
... you weren't looking for an abstract "meaning" in it at all. You weren't knowing, but tasting. But what you were tasting turns out to be a universal principle. Of course, the moment we state the principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abtractions. It's only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience a principle concretely....
Aldiss: ...But I am surprised that you put it this way round. I would have thought that you constructed Perelandra for the didactic purpose.The Christian elements are very obvious in Lewis, but, well, so what, he's just one writer. Weingrad really seems to be inflating his argument out of this single case, and a near-case that seems to fit in but really doesn't.
Lewis: Yes, everyone thinks that. They are quite wrong.
...Something has got to happen [plotwise]. The story of the averted fall came in very conveniently. Of course it wouldn't have been that particular story if I wasn't interested in those particular ideas on other grounds. But that isn't what I started from. I've never started from a message or a moral.
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posted by Artw at 8:07 AM on March 3, 2010