On Stories

by C. S. Lewis

  Of a book’s meaning, in this sense, its author is not necessarily the best, and is never a perfect, judge. One of his intentions usually was that it should have a certain meaning: he cannot be sure that it has. He cannot even be sure that the meaning he intended it to have was in every way, or even at all, better than the meaning which readers find in it. Here, therefore, the critic has great freedom to range without fear of contradiction from the author’s superior knowledge.

  Where he seems to me most often to go wrong is in the hasty assumption of an allegorical sense; and as reviewers make this mistake about contemporary works, so, in my opinion, scholars now often make it about old ones. I would recommend to both, and I would try to observe in my own critical practise, these principles. First, that no story can be devised by the wit of man which cannot be interpreted allegorically by the wit of some other man. The Stoic interpretations of primitive mythology, the Christian interpretations of the Old Testament, the medieval interpretations of the classics, all prove this. Therefore (2) the mere fact that you can allegorise the work before you is of itself no proof that it is an allegory. Of course you can allegorise it. You can allegorise anything, whether in art or real life. I think we should here take a hint from the lawyers. A man is not tried at the assizes until there has been shown to be a prima-facie case against him. We ought not to proceed to allegorise any work until we have plainly set out the reasons for regarding it as an allegory at all.

  [Lewis, apparently, did not finish this essay for at the foot of the existing manuscript are the words:]

  As regards other attributions of intention

  One’s own pre-occupations

  Quellenforschung. Achtung—dates

  XX

  UNREAL ESTATES

  This informal conversation between Professor Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Brian Aldiss was recorded on tape in Professor Lewis’s rooms in Magdalene College a short while before illness forced him to retire. When drinks are poured, the discussion begins—

  ALDISS: One thing that the three of us have in common is that we have all had stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, some of them pretty far-flung stories. I take it we would all agree that one of the attractions of science fiction is that it takes us to unknown places.

  AMIS: Swift, if he were writing today, would have to take us out to the planets, wouldn’t he? Now that most of our terra incognita is—real estate.

  ALDISS: There is a lot of the eighteenth-century equivalent of science fiction which is placed in Australia or similar unreal estates.

  LEWIS: Exactly: Peter Wilkins and all that. By the way, is anyone ever going to do a translation of Kepler’s Somnium?

  AMIS: Groff Conklin told me he had read the book; I think it must exist in translation. But may we talk about the worlds you created? You chose the science-fiction medium because you wanted to go to strange places? I remember with respectful and amused admiration your account of the space drive in Out of the Silent Planet. When Ransom and his friend get into the space-ship he says, ‘How does this ship work?’ and the man says, ‘It operates by using some of the lesser known properties of—’ what was it?

  LEWIS: Solar radiation. Ransom was reporting words without a meaning to him, which is what a layman gets when he asks for a scientific explanation. Obviously it was vague, because I’m no scientist and not interested in the purely technical side of it.

  ALDISS: It’s almost a quarter of a century since you wrote that first novel of the trilogy.

  LEWIS: Have I been a prophet?

  ALDISS: You have to a certain extent; at least, the idea of vessels propelled by solar radiation is back in favour again. Cordwiner Smith used it poetically, James Blish tried to use it technically in The Star Dwellers.

  LEWIS: In my case it was pure mumbo-jumbo, and perhaps meant primarily to convince me.

  AMIS: Obviously when one deals with isolated planets or isolated islands one does this for a certain purpose. A setting in contemporary London or a London of the future couldn’t provide one with the same isolation and the heightening of consciousness it engenders.

  LEWIS: The starting point of the second novel, Perelandra, was my mental picture of the floating islands. The whole of the rest of my labours in a sense consisted of building up a world in which floating islands could exist. And then of course the story about an averted fall developed. This is because, as you know, having got your people to this exciting country, something must happen.

  AMIS: That frequently taxes people very much.

  ALDISS: But I am surprised that you put it this way round. I would have thought that you constructed Perelandra for the didactic purpose.

  LEWIS: Yes, everyone thinks that. They are quite wrong.

  AMIS: If I may say a word on Professor Lewis’s side, there was a didactic purpose of course; a lot of very interesting profound things were said, but—correct me if I’m wrong—I’d have thought a simple sense of wonder, extraordinary things going on, were the motive forces behind the creation.

  LEWIS: Quite, but something has got to happen. The story of this averted fall came in very conveniently. Of course it wouldn’t have been that particular story if I wasn’t interested in those particular ideas on other grounds. But that isn’t what I started from. I’ve never started from a message or a moral, have you?

  AMIS: No, never. You get interested in the situation.

  LEWIS: The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

  AMIS: Exactly: I think that sort of thing is true of all kinds of fiction.

  ALDISS: But a lot of science fiction has been written from the other point of view: those dreary sociological dramas that appear from time to time, started with a didactic purpose—to make a preconceived point—and they’ve got no further.

  LEWIS: I suppose Gulliver started from a straight point of view? Or did it really start because he wanted to write about a lot of big and little men?

  AMIS: Possibly both, as Fielding’s parody of Richardson turned into Joseph Andrews. A lot of science fiction loses much of the impact it could have by saying, ‘Well, here we are on Mars, we all know where we are, and we’re living in these pressure domes or whatever it is, and life is really very much like it is on Earth, except there is a certain climatic difference. . . .’ They accept other men’s inventions rather than forge their own.

  LEWIS: It’s only the first journey to a new planet that is of any interest to imaginative people.

  AMIS: In your reading of science fiction have you ever come across a writer who’s done this properly?

  LEWIS: Well, the one you probably disapprove of because he’s so very unscientific is David Lindsay, in Voyage to Arcturus. It’s a remarkable thing, because scientifically it’s nonsense, the style is appalling, and yet this ghastly vision comes through.

  ALDISS: It didn’t come through to me.

  AMIS: Nor me. Still . . . Victor Gollancz told me a very interesting remark of Lindsay’s about Arcturus; he said, ‘I shall never appeal to a large public at all, but I think that as long as our civilisation lasts one person a year will read me.’ I respect that attitude.

  LEWIS: Quite so. Modest and becoming. I also agree with something you said in a preface, I believe it was, that some science fiction really does deal with issues far more serious than those realistic fiction deals with; real problems about human destiny and so on. Do you remember that story about the man who meets a female monster landed from another planet with all its cubs hanging round it? It’s obviously starving, and he offers them thing after thing to eat; they immediately vomit it up, until one of the young fastens on him, begins sucking his blood and immediately begins to revive. This female creature is utterly unhuman, horrible in form; there’s a long moment when it looks at the man—they’re in a lonely place—and then very sadly it packs up its young, and goes back into its space-ship and goes away. Well now, you could not have a more serious theme than that. What is a footling story abo
ut some pair of human lovers compared with that?

  AMIS: On the debit side, you often have these marvellous large themes tackled by people who haven’t got the mental or moral or stylistic equipment to take them on. A reading of more recent science fiction shows that writers are getting more capable of tackling them. Have you read Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz? Have you any comments on that?

  LEWIS: I thought it was pretty good. I only read it once; mind you, a book’s no good to me until I’ve read it two or three times—I’m going to read it again. It was a major work, certainly.

  AMIS: What did you think about its religious feeling?

  LEWIS: It came across very well. There were bits of the actual writing which one could quarrel with, but on the whole it was well imagined and well executed.

  AMIS: Have you seen James Blish’s novel A Case of Conscience? Would you agree that to write a religious novel that isn’t concerned with details of ecclesiastical practise and the numbing minutiae of history and so on, science fiction would be the natural outlet for this?

  LEWIS: If you have a religion it must be cosmic; therefore it seems to me odd that this genre was so late in arriving.

  ALDISS: It’s been around without attracting critical attention for a long time; the magazines themselves have been going since 1926, although in the beginning they appealed mainly to the technical side. As Amis says, people have come along who can write, as well as think up engineering ideas.

  LEWIS: We ought to have said earlier that that’s quite a different species of science fiction, about which I say nothing at all; those who were really interested in the technical side of it. It’s obviously perfectly legitimate if it’s well done.

  AMIS: The purely technical and the purely imaginative overlap, don’t they?

  ALDISS: There are certainly the two streams, and they often overlap, for instance in Arthur Clarke’s writings. It can be a rich mixture. Then there’s the type of story that’s not theological, but it makes a moral point. An example is the Sheckley story about Earth being blasted by radioactivity. The survivors of the human race have gone away to another planet for about a thousand years; they come back to reclaim Earth and find it full of all sorts of gaudy armour-plated creatures, vegetation, etc. One of the party says, ‘We’ll clear this lot out, make it habitable for man again.’ But in the end the decision is, ‘Well, we made a mess of the place when it was ours, let’s get out and leave it to them.’ This story was written about ’49, when most people hadn’t started thinking round the subject at all.

  LEWIS: Yes, most of the earlier stories start from the opposite assumption that we, the human race, are in the right, and everything else is ogres. I may have done a little towards altering that, but the new point of view has come very much in. We’ve lost our confidence, so to speak.

  AMIS: It’s all terribly self-critical and self-contemplatory nowadays.

  LEWIS: This is surely an enormous gain—a human gain, that people should be thinking that way.

  AMIS: The prejudice of supposedly educated persons towards this type of fiction is fantastic. If you pick up a science-fiction magazine, particularly Fantasy and Science Fiction, the range of interests appealed to and I.Q.s employed, is pretty amazing. It’s time more people caught on. We’ve been telling them about it for some while.

  LEWIS: Quite true. The world of serious fiction is very narrow.

  AMIS: Too narrow if you want to deal with a broad theme. For instance, Philip Wylie in The Disappearance wants to deal with the difference between men and women in a general way, in twentieth-century society, unencumbered by local and temporary considerations; his point, as I understand it, is that men and women, shorn of their social roles, are really very much the same. Science fiction, which can presuppose a major change in our environment, is the natural medium for discussing a subject of that kind. Look at the job of dissecting human nastiness carried out in Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

  LEWIS: That can’t be science fiction.

  AMIS: I would dissent from that. It starts off with a characteristic bit of science-fiction situation: that World War III has begun, bombs dropped and all that. . . .

  LEWIS: Ah, well, you’re now taking the German view that any romance about the future is science fiction. I’m not sure that this is a useful classification.

  AMIS: ‘Science fiction’ is such a hopelessly vague label.

  LEWIS: And of course a great deal of it isn’t science fiction. Really it’s only a negative criterion: anything which is not naturalistic, which is not about what we call the real world.

  ALDISS: I think we oughtn’t to try to define it, because it’s a self-defining thing in a way. We know where we are. You’re right, though, about Lord of the Flies. The atmosphere is a science-fiction atmosphere.

  LEWIS: It was a very terrestrial island; the best island, almost, in fiction. Its actual sensuous effect on you is terrific.

  ALDISS: Indeed. But it’s a laboratory case—

  AMIS: —isolating certain human characteristics, to see how they would work out—

  LEWIS: The only trouble is that Golding writes so well. In one of his other novels, The Inheritors, the detail of every sensuous impression, the light on the leaves and so on, was so good that you couldn’t find out what was happening. I’d say it was almost too well done. All these little details you only notice in real life if you’ve got a high temperature. You couldn’t see the wood for the leaves.

  ALDISS: You had this in Pincher Martin; every feeling in the rocks, when he’s washed ashore, is done with a hallucinatory vividness.

  AMIS: It is, that’s exactly the phrase. I think thirty years ago if you wanted to discuss a general theme you would go to the historical novel; now you would go to what I might describe in a prejudiced way as science fiction. In science fiction you can isolate the factors you want to examine. If you wanted to deal with the theme of colonialism, for instance, as Poul Anderson has done, you don’t do it by writing a novel about Ghana or Pakistan—

  LEWIS: Which involves you in such a mass of detail that you don’t want to go into—

  AMIS: You set up worlds in space which incorporate the characteristics you need.

  LEWIS: Would you describe Abbott’s Flatland as science fiction? There’s so little effort to bring it into any sensuous—well, you couldn’t do it, and it remains an intellectual theorem. Are you looking for an ashtray? Use the carpet.

  AMIS: I was looking for the Scotch, actually.

  LEWIS: Oh, yes, do, I beg your pardon. . . . But probably the great work in science fiction is still to come. Futile books about the next world came before Dante, Fanny Burney came before Jane Austen, Marlowe came before Shakespeare.

  AMIS: We’re getting the prolegomena.

  LEWIS: If only the modern high-brow critics could be induced to take it seriously . . .

  AMIS: Do you think they ever can?

  LEWIS: No, the whole present dynasty has got to die and rot before anything can be done at all.

  ALDISS: Splendid!

  AMIS: What’s holding them up, do you think?

  LEWIS: Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it’s taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. A sacred text is always exposed to the most monstrous exegesis; hence we have the spectacle of some wretched scholar taking a pure divertissement written in the seventeenth century and getting the most profound ambiguities and social criticisms out of it, which of course aren’t there at all. . . . It’s the discovery of the mare’s nest by the pursuit of the red herring. [Laughter.] This is going to go on long after my lifetime; you may be able to see the end of it, I shan’t.

  AMIS: You think this is so integral a part of the Establishment that people can’t overcome—

  LEWIS: It’s an industry, you see. What would all the people be writing D. Phil. theses on if this prop were removed?

  AMI
S: An instance of this mentality the other day: somebody referred to ‘Mr Amis’s I suspect rather affected enthusiasm for science fiction. . . .’