Regan Flieg: Enchanting the Ordinary

In class this week, we discussed Lewis’s “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” and hearing a particular quote from the essay reminded me of a thought I had while reading “On Stories.”  The quote reads: “He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted” (Lewis, “Writing for Children” 38).  This idea of bringing a sense of wonder from a fantastical story back into the real world of ordinary things is one I find particularly appealing, and this is not the only instance in which Lewis makes note of this experience.  In “On Stories,” Lewis wrote, “...the whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life.  This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual” (14).  This further compliments Chesterton’s testimony that “fairy-tale sentiment also sank into [him] and became [his] sentiment towards the whole world” (101). 

When I first read Lewis’s words in “On Stories,” they reminded me of the charming and whimsical films created by Studio Ghibli.  The way these films incorporate nature, food, and everyday items indeed leaves viewers with a sense of enchantment for those items within their own lives.  Not only is this something I’ve experienced myself after watching these films, but this is a sentiment I’ve heard from my friends as well as from strangers online regarding this set of films.  In my childhood favorite, Kiki’s Delivery Service, a witch helps an old woman bake a pot pie, and for me, this enchanted the cookware of the real world: the weight of pots and pans became meaningful and beautiful.  The same witch’s dress flowing out around her as she took off in flight made my own skirts billowing in ordinary wind a little bit magical.   

When I look back more intentionally, I can remember reading Also Known as Harper as a child, and although I can remember very little of the characters or the plot, I do remember having an uncommon sense of fascination for the utterly common item of a cardboard box because of the importance one held in the book.  I remember keeping that cardboard box in my room and carefully folding the flaps over one another to keep in whatever treasures I was using it to store.  That sense of wonder for the actual that the book left me with has been more lasting in my memory than the story itself, and it’s this that I find the most interesting about the whole experience.  It makes me wonder if Lewis and Chesterton ever experienced stories whose plot’s remained less permanently in their minds than the sense of enchantment they produced for them as well, and applying my own experience to their ideas reinforced their relevance in my mind.

Chesterton, Gilbert K. “The Ethics of Elfland.”  Orthodoxy, John Lane Company, 1908, pp. 81-118. 

Lewis, C. S.  “On Stories.” On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, edited by Walter Hooper, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982, pp. 3-20. 

Lewis, C. S.  “On Three Ways of Writing for Children.” On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, edited by Walter Hooper, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982, pp. 31-43.