“The world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off again on the other side.” Thus Martin Luther in his Table Talk. His words would serve well as a description of the history of Inklings scholarship. The earliest such scholarly studies argued that the Inklings (Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, et al.) were possessed of “a corporate mind” and that their works had a “similar orientation,” “essentially uniform,” “clearly defined.” So claimed John Wain, a junior member of the Inklings, and various others. But this consensus was toppled from the saddle by Humphrey Carpenter, who maintained, by way of contrast, that the Inklings showed “scant resemblance” to one another and “that on nearly every issue they stand far apart.” Carpenter’s view, which he bolstered with evidence from senior Inklings who themselves claimed not to have influenced one another at all, has sat lumpenly in place since he published his study in 1979.
The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community
Kent State University Press
288 pages
$29.40
Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis (Culture Of The Land)
University Press of Kentucky
320 pages
$35.00
Diana Pavlac Glyer has now toppled the Carpenter view. But rather than allowing the cycle of drunken saddlings and re-saddlings to repeat itself, she has thoughtfully poured buckets of clear cold water over the entire subject. Fully sobered up at last, Inklings scholarship is for the first time able to sit straight, inclining neither to the view that the group was reliably homogeneous, nor to the view that its members were utterly immiscible. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. It’s a typical scholarly progression. But how long it has taken!
Glyer’s study brings together in an admirably balanced way all previous work on this hugely significant circle of writers and establishes itself as an indispensable and refreshingly commonsensical guide to the group’s internal workings. She analyses the Inklings using a five-fold grid, assessing how the members of the group served as resonators, opponents, editors, collaborators, and referents.
Superbly researched and crystal clear, this work does the difficult job of assessing just how much the Inklings owed to one another. It demonstrates convincingly that some of the 20th century’s most powerful cultural artifacts would have been significantly different without the input of the group. For instance, Glyer shows that The Lord of the Rings would have been much more like The Silmarillion in structure and style “if it had not been so strongly influenced by the ‘humanizing’ effect of the Inklings.” Given that The Lord of the Rings has repeatedly been voted Book of the Century in public polls, and given the extensive reach of the Peter Jackson film adaptation, this is a much more important point than at first it might seem. How many people have read The Silmarillion? Who can imagine a successful screen version of it? Without the Inklings, Glyer argues, The Lord of the Rings would have lingered in similar obscurity.
Glyer herself recognizes that there are some areas of enquiry that she is leaving unaddressed. For instance, the massively important question of allegory is intentionally left out of account. Certain other large-scale issues, such as myth, sehnsucht, and “semantic unity,” are only handled briefly, and Glyer frankly admits that “a full discussion” of such topics “would require chapters in their own right.” Still, if this study doesn’t explore these big issues of mutual influence, it does explore the big issue of influence itself. This is one of the reasons why the book is so satisfying. After two hundred pages of close analysis and detailed argument, the final chapter swells to a grander theme, one which is treated judiciously and carefully, but now allargando with theological echoes.
Glyer finishes her work with an examination of our whole understanding of interpersonal indebtedness. She points out how, “in many cases, influence is viewed as a watered-down form of plagiarism, and the writer or artist who has ‘succumbed to influence’ is seen as somehow weak, wicked, or wanting.” She traces this valorizing of the “lone genius” to the characteristically Romantic sensibility of the egotistical sublime, highlighting Edward Young’s 1759 work, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” as the strongest critical statement to privilege originality and unfettered, traditionless, spontaneous creativity. Young is the most probable source for our common contemporary association between indebtedness and unimaginativeness.
It would have been helpful here to have had a little more historical consideration of just how innovative this Romantic view was and how opposed to the perspective of earlier times, when artists’ identities were often deliberately hidden under anonymity or pseudonymity or “pious frauds” so as to suppress individuality within a school of artistic tradition. A discussion of the development of professionalism among artists and the legalization of intellectual property with trademarks, copyright, and the like would also have been pertinent here.
But, again, one cannot do everything, and what Glyer does she does very well. Indeed, her steady dissection of the Inklings as a case-study in mutual support and service works beautifully as a sounding-board for her wider observations in this final chapter. I found myself moved as she unemotionally made inescapable the truth that in all walks of life, not just in literary composition, we are endlessly involved with one another. We know, of course, that no man is an island, but rarely is an entire work of nonfiction devoted to demonstrating that fact so subtly. Glyer concludes by pointing out that individuality is itself in part a product of community: “the individual and society are not in a zero-sum situation … a strong group that respects individual differences will strengthen autonomy as well as solidarity.” Her final footnote is a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. In an early reflection upon what we would now call “globalization,” King remarked:
When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom and reach for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a European. Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world.
The little literary community of the Inklings is a microcosm of a macrocosmic truth. We are all members one of another, and Glyer’s book brings out that truth skilfully and powerfully. It is a fine work and, like the Inklings itself, greater than the sum of its parts.
The interconnectedness of human endeavor provides a suitable segue to the major theme of Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C.S. Lewis, by Matthew Dickerson and David O’Hara. Lewis once wrote that we “who live on a standardized international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine today) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.” Lewis’ point, though he would not have put it like this, is that global trade has spiritual, and therefore ecological, ramifications: before the advent of truly international travel and trade, local communities had to be much more knowledgeable about and respectful of their immediate environment. It was in them and they in it and they knew this. Only in the last few decades has it become evident that our immediate environment is, in fact, the whole earth and not just our little corner of it.
In this useful and interesting, if somewhat labored study, the authors attempt to build “bridges” between the “many active environmentalists [who] view Christians as ‘the enemy'” and the “many Christians [who] are therefore wary of ‘environmentalists,’ ” taking Lewis’ fiction as a model of what they wish to promote. They write: “Although ecology is generally not understood as the primary focus of his fantasy novels, Lewis shows a remarkable, consistent, complex, and healthy ecological vision in his numerous fictional worlds.” They concede that “there is some degree to which we are using Lewis’ writing as a defense of a certain Christian view of ecology,” but on the whole they use it fairly.
Their book is not so careful as Glyer’s. They make a number of factual errors, including dating Lewis’ Christian conversion to his late twenties rather than his early thirties (p. 22; cf. p. 26), having him be tutored by Kirkpatrick in Ireland rather than England (p. 24), and awarding him three degrees, rather than two (pp. 3, 19, 25). But their basic argument is sound, namely that from Lewis’ fiction a number of helpful environmental principles may be deduced, including the importance of story itself in ecological education: stories show that true environmentalism needs to be lived out as part of the totality of life and not just analyzed as an external anthropic problem with regrettable economic costs or divisive political consequences.
This realization is really the whole raison d’etre of the book. The authors say: “Interrelatedness or interdependence is one of the most important ecological principles, but one that is extremely difficult to conceptualize.” Having assessed Narnia and the Ransom Trilogy, they conclude: “Lewis’ stories offer us a vision of the world brimming with life and goodness, full of purpose, rich with value, every part enmeshed in deep and ethical relations with every other part.” In other words, Lewis shows what Dickerson and O’Hara tell.
Michael Ward is the author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford Univ. Press) and the co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis. His website is planetnarnia.com.
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