C.S.L. again

[steepholm]

I've been compiling a list of quotations for a sig. file. Maybe I'll never get around to using it, but it's made me very aware of the way that interesting turns of phrase slip through my butter (or low-cholestrol equivalent) fingers, never to be seen again. Then again, the luxuriant wastefulness of that has its own appeal.

Anyhow, I'm not doing so well with the file. I've only got about a dozen quotes, so far: I keep forgetting to write them down quickly enough. Luminous quotations are a bit like dreams - terribly vivid at the time, and you think you'll never forget them or the way you felt when you heard them - and then they're gone.

Still, here's one that I keep coming back to. It's from C. S. Lewis again, but from a fairly ephemeral source: his 1954 Time and Tide review of The Lord of the Rings. (Actually, it was reprinted in Of this and Other Worlds, but even that's not a very well-known book.) Put the collective unconscious to one side, and see what you think of it, because to me it's the most exquisitely succinct statement of a profound idea, sexist pronoun notwithstanding:

“A myth points, for each reader, to the realm he lives in most. It is a master key; use it on what door you like.”

Perhaps this shines particularly brightly at the moment, because the book I think I've just written has it as its underlying principle. But it's just so right!

Or maybe you think otherwise...?

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Hoo. I just love that.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm not sure I've ever read Lewis' review of LotR.

I like that very much, although I know that in my own case I'm not always ready to use the key I've been handed.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

I adore Of This and Other Worlds and re-read it every few years. I don't always agree with Lewis, but he has some magnificent turns of phrase.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure: I like it when myths point me to a place that is quite alien. I 've recently enjoyed Mary Renault's demythifications of the story of Theseus (The King Must Die &c.) and the appeal was to be projected into a world which is quite different, in which patriarchy is insecure, novel and vulnerable (she takes rather a White-Goddess-y view of the whole thing, which I'm not convinced by on the level of history, but quite happy to accept in a fiction).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Doors can be traversed from either direction, and I think the demythification experience (a word I shall adopt!) can be a great one as well - not least in The King Must Die, a book I loved when I read it aged around 14, and really ought to go back to.

The constant tension between the universal and the particular is something that's fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Myth seems universal, but for it to be doing more than floating in a disconnected Platonic realm it must be made to 'relate' to actual experience. Equally, experience will be nothing but data unless we can find some meaning immanent in it, or a context in which it can be shown to signify beyond itself. I love it when someone gives me a new way of thinking about that relationship, and CSL's formulation is illuminating in giving due place both to the particular situations (personal, cultural) that people find themselves in, and to the 'universal' quality of myth. The 'master key' metaphor is one I really like.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I suppose what I mean is that what excites me about myth is often the sense of something lost. When I see the Gundestrup Cauldron, for example, with its bulls and gods and goddesses and wheels, and its little warriors being dipped into the cauldron, I wonder in what society and culture could all this make sense, in the way that I am able to make sense (not rational sense, but cultural sense) of Marian grottos and Sacred Hearts. I suppose I am a great sentimentalist at heart: 'insisting on clinging to what he insists is gone', as MacNeice puts it. And yet oddly, the 'universal' in myth I often find quite repellent: Thammuz-Adonis-Christ-Odin parallels, for example leave me stony cold. I want to know about the differences.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about that sense of something lost being exciting. It was a Romantic sentiment, I suppose, before it was MacNeice’s; and archaeology is the most romantic of sciences, as well as the worst paid. (That’s not a coincidence. Oh, and how often did MacNeice walk the four miles from Marlborough College to Avebury, I wonder?)

But it would be a very strange human being who stopped at recognizing that something was alien and left it at that. As you say, we wonder about it, because these were after all people, kin to us, and we try to imagine the mind and society to which it would have made sense. Renault did this with archaic Greece in The King Must Die. And even I, in a small way, did the same thing (using the Gundestrup Cauldron as one of my major handholds) in Death of a Ghost. And there, I don’t blush to say, I made conscious use of Adonis and Thammuz parallels, albeit as mediated by Shakespeare and Ezekiel 8.14 respectively.

Of couse, that was fiction rather than history, and there different standards of proof apply, as you say; but it seems to me that if you’re trying to understand the unfamiliar then you can really only do it – cautiously and tentatively rather than recklessly, to be sure – in terms of the familiar, as a starting point. That doesn’t mean you have to go the whole way. I’ve no idea whether Christian missionaries to the Norsemen made the analogy between Odin hanging on the tree and Christ, for example, but if they didn’t a) they were missing a trick; and b) they’d have had to be careful not to push it.

Mythological syncretism – of which Graves of course was an arch exponent – is a heady brew, and many have got drunk on it. (I’m looking at a shelf of Wiccan writers here…) I can see why you might distrust the easy parallels you mention, because they can act like faux amis in languages, not only leading to misunderstanding but deceptively making all human experience appear blandly similar. But I think it’s a mistake to leave out the other side of that equation, and the ways in which different experiences can parallel or be understood in terms of each other. Whether this amounts to a defence of certain experiences and stories as universally meaningful, I don’t know. But I think the word ‘myth’, certainly as used by Lewis and others (including Jung), has some such implication. Perhaps I find it more plausible than you, though I certainly couldn’t present you with a knock-down argument in favour of it.

Incidentally I find Marian grottos at least as culturally opaque as, say, the worship of Isis in The Golden Ass, and would be equally likely to attempt to understand either in terms of the other. I’m a sad case, really.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I came up with MacNeice, I suppose, because I'm writing a paper on him at the moment. We only have a record of him going to Avebury once, in his last year there (cycling, as it happens) though I imagine he probably went before then. It seems like a likely field trip.

It's not so much that I don't see any value in personal resonance or syncretism when it comes to myth -- I think I'd be daft to try and argue that -- it's just that that's not, for me, where the frisson comes from.

Actually, Marian grottoes get odder the more you think about them (compared to which the theology of the Sacred Heart is a relative picnic) and I certainly wouldn't pretend to understand them. But I can be certain about some of their resonances: Lourdes, the Marian Year, the death of Anne Lovett in a way that I can't with other, lost mythologies.

[emmaco.livejournal.com]

That's a great quote. And I am impressed you have gathered a dozen quotes for a sig file; I think I managed to pin down two last time I tried! Wonderfully phrased ideas flit through my mind even quicker than dreams do.