Nick DeHoust: The Significance of Atmosphere in the Chronicles of Narnia

 In On Stories, C.S. Lewis tells us that he finds Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers to be personally uninspiring. “The total lack of atmosphere repels me,” he says (7). For Lewis, the novel’s perpetual adventurousness is an unwelcome alter that has been bloodied by the sacrifice of all deeper meaning. “There is not a moment’s rest from the ‘adventures’: one’s nose is kept ruthlessly to the grindstone. It all means nothing to me,” writes Lewis (7). Atmosphere, then, is crucial for Lewis in that it helps to open a setting in which deeper meaning can reveal itself. Without it, a novel such as The Three Musketeers is doomed to eternally convey excitement and nothing more. Lewis argues that “‘excitement’ is not the only kind of pleasure to be got out of Romance” (7). Rather, one of the most powerful and profound functions of art is “to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude” (10). Mere excitement is but a small piece of what narrative art has to offer. According to Lewis, “[g]ood stories often introduce the marvellous or supernatural,” and he seems to think that they must do so into a setting—an atmosphere (12). Otherwise, such introductions are simply abstract musings that fail to penetrate the substance of lived experience. It seems to me that Lewis is arguing that we read truths in mythopoetic settings in order to find similar truths in the concrete setting of our actual world. Thus, “the whole story,” he writes (my italics), “strengthens our relish for real life” (14). I take his use of the word “whole” here to indicate his emphasis on a complete story—one that includes not just excitement and action, but a vivid setting in which meaning is encouraged to shine brightly. 

Such settings abound in the Chronicles of Narnia. Evocative spaces like the Wood between the Worlds, new Narnia, and the Stone Table come to mind when considering Lewis’s emphasis on atmosphere. Over the course of the Narnia books, significant moments take place in all three settings (the discovery of Narnia, the advent of the new Narnia, Aslan’s death, etc.), but such events never seem to totally eclipse the importance of the settings in which they occur. The new Narnia in particular reminds me of Plato’s idea of khôra. Dr. Redick writes that “[i]n Plato’s Timaeus, khôra is that space out of which the created order emerged. The space, Plato writes, that ‘provides room for all things that have birth.’ Or, another translation reads, ‘providing a situation for all things that come into being’” (4). After entering into the new Narnia, Lucy remarks that “‘[t]his is still Narnia, and more real and more beautiful than the Narnia down below” (207). This setting opens the space in which new (and realer) reality comes into being. The significance of this connection to Plato is highlighted by Digory’s words: “It’s all in Plato” (195). Thus, Lewis talks the talk and walks the walk, so to speak. Look no further than the Chronicles of Narnia for confirmation.