Regan Flieg: Learning from Stories, a Recurring Theme in Lewis’s Writing

A theme I’ve seen across the board in reading Lewis’s writing this semester for class is that we learn from the stories we read.  He, of course, states this much more explicitly in his essay, “Myth Became Fact,” in which he explains that because  we cannot know something intellectually at the same time that we experience it, myth provides a means of making the objects of our abstract intellect concrete, making stories more real than truth (65-66).  This demonstrates the power of learning through story, and on a less philosophical level, this power is observable too.  I remember learning in English and creative writing classes throughout my life that a reader learns better when they derive something from the story for themselves, when it is shown to them concretely instead of told to them abstractly.  

Most recently, I read an example of Lewis’s characters learning through story in Till We Have Faces, in which Orual’s expectations of what her short-lived step-mother will be like is colored by “plenty of stories” and she is frightened (12).  However, this isn’t a new idea in Lewis’s fiction.  I remember reading something similar in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which Peter remarks, “Still—a robin, you know.  They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve ever read” (61).  More than just learning from stories, Lewis depicts his characters as building their perceptions of the real world around what they have read or heard in fiction.  

Furthermore, there is a line in Out of the Silent Planet, toward the beginning of the book, that has been sitting in my mind since I first read it: upon Ransom’s first look at Malacandra, when he is struggling to translate the “colours that refused to form themselves into things” in his mind, the narration reads, “you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are” (46).  I think this ties into the discussion of learning from stories because we can see in Lewis’s other tales that characters’ perceptions are colored by their experiences with stories.  We also discussed in class earlier in the semester that we always see through a lens.  In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom struggles to make sense of what he is seeing and to truly be able to observe it because he has not formed an adequate lens with which to view it through; his perception has not been adequately molded yet. 

Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 1950.  Scholastic, Inc., 1995.

Lewis, C. S. “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper, Eerdmans, 1970, pp. 63-67.  

Lewis, C. S. Out of the Silent Planet.  1938.  Pan Books, 1952.

Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces:  A Myth Retold. 1956. Harcourt Brace, 1985.