Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
In C.
S. Lewis: A Life, Alister McGrath points out the distinction
that Lewis makes between imaginary and imaginative worlds. For Lewis,
the former, McGrath says, depicts a landscape having “no
counterpart in reality,” whereas the latter seeks to convey “images
adequate to” the depiction of a transcendent “reality.” The
worlds of mythology are examples of imaginative worlds, and “the
more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability, Lewis says, to
“communicate more reality to us.”
McGrath makes it clear
that, in discussing imaginative worlds, Lewis does not mean that such
worlds—or the works devoted to them—are allegories. They may be
interpreted allegorically, but that does not mean that they
themselves are allegories. As Lewis explains, his own Chronicles
of Narnia can be
allegorized, but that “of itself is no proof that it is an
allegory.” Instead, his Narnia
series, which presents an imaginative world, is a “supposal,” by
which he means fiction that supplies possible answers to questions of
a transcendent nature. Using Narnia
as an example, Lewis writes:
If
Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant
Despair [in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress] represents
Despair, he [Aslan] would be an allegorical figure. In reality
however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the
question, “What might Christ become if there really were a world
like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in
that world as he
actually has done in ours? This is not allegory at all.”
Lewis
makes several points:
- The writer's work asks or implies a question.
- Although the question is posed in or by a work of fiction, the question relates to an actual event or events in the real world.
- In the context of its imaginative world, the work poses an answer to the question.
Frank
Baum's The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz fails these
tests and is, indeed, McGrath states, a work about an imaginary,
rather than an imaginative, world. The world of Oz has no referent
beyond itself. Narnia,
by contrast, is shadow of another world which is itself the shadow of
yet another world, just as, in Plato's thought, our sense perceptions
of phenomena are shadows of the objects in the world and the world is
itself a shadow of the transcendent world of perfect Forms.
An
illustration of Plato's “Allegory
of the Cave” pictures a man chained against a wall behind which
men carry clay figures. The men hold the figures over their heads,
and the upper portions of the figures are higher than the top of the
wall against which the man on the other side is chained. A fire
burning on a stone shelf of the cave, on the other side of the men,
casts the shadows of the objects onto the wall in front of the
chained man. Rather than seeing the actual objects—clay figures of
a horse, a bull, and a pot—the chained man sees only their shadows.
High on one of the cave's walls, a ladder ascends to the world above,
where the sun shines in the sky. The objects the men carry are mere
copies of the things in the world above—representations of the
animals—and the shadows are copies, as it were, of these copies.
Only in the unseen world above are the unseen, actual animals
(representing, in the allegory, the Forms themselves).
Lewis's
Narnia is somewhat like Plato's allegorical cave. The real world is
Narnia, where Aslan dwells. Its copy is The
Chronicles of Narnia, which
recount the events in Narnia. The copy of the copy is our own world,
a dim reflection of the imaginative world of the novels, which is, in
turn, itself a faint likeness of Aslan's real world. The images that
depict the world of the novels are the clay pots in Jung's cave,
which represent, but do not truly reflect, the true objects
themselves, any more than the objects truly reflect their
transcendent Forms. As Lord Digory says, in The
Last Battle, “It's all
there in Plato.”
In
attempting to envision Forms (i. e., in a Christian context, divine
realities), Lewis depicts Christ as the lion Aslan, Satan as the
White Witch, the fallen, unredeemed world as a frozen wasteland in
which Christmas never arrives (until Aslan appears), and the Pevensie
children are disciples. As McGrath points out,
Lewis's
remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his
readers to inhabit this metanarrative—to get inside the story and
feel what it was like to be part of it . . . . The Narnia stories
allow us to step inside and experience
the Christian story.
Do any horror stories
accomplish something similar, creating imaginative worlds wherein the
writer's work asks or implies and answers a question related to an
actual event or events in the real world? Do any works of horror
fiction shadow the true horrors of the real world in such a way that
readers can enter their imaginative worlds and “experience” the
stories depicting these landscapes? Do any of them give rise to
myths? Are any horror stories mythopoeic?
The
icons of horror that continue to resonate with readers and moviegoers
may indicate which images have particular force in conveying feelings
of terror and disgust (probably the two chief elements of horror).
Often, these icons appear in literary works, but they are also
present in the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. Such
icons include demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies, all of
which have appeared in novels, short stories, or movies that meet
Lewis's criteria, asking or implying a question related to what is
(or is, at least, believed by some to be) related to an actual event
or events in the real world, and pose answers to the question they
pose.
To
get just an intimation of the power these images of horror originally
held for their audiences, we must try, to the best of our abilities,
to envision the world as it was to them and to see, in this context,
the supernatural beings they imagined as their enemies.
The
world in which such creatures existed was a pre-scientific world
wherein there was no well-established association of objective cause
and effect. Demons, rather than bacteria, birth defects, viruses,
radiation, or the like afflicted people with disease, blindness, or
mental illness. They also animated human corpses, using dead bodies,
as “vampires,” to drink blood. Demons also empowered witches to
perform spectacular feats and wonders. The soul's survival of death
enabled the existence of ghosts and zombies.
Today,
we might call such a view of “reality” superstitious, but, for
the ancients, it was simply the truth, the way things were, reality
itself. Against such evils, such remedies as prayers, rituals,
incantations were the only recourse which might prevail, and, only
then, because God ruled over even the supernatural entities that
afflicted humanity.
Horror
is, like poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and many other human
enterprises, of religious, not secular, origin, and, despite the
scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the
Enlightenment, horror continues to tap the primeval aspects of our
existence as human beings that religion once addressed and, indeed,
continues, for many, to address.
Just
as adults retain vestiges of their childhood experience, humanity
retains traces of its primordial heritage. In our fiction and in the
dark, dim recesses of our ancient selves, demons, ghosts, vampires,
witches, and zombies continue to horrify us, just as, in times past,
they possessed, haunted, stalked, hexed, and vexed our ancestors in
the “real world” in which they lived. If you doubt this, spend a
few minutes alone in a cemetery by yourself after dark or imagine
spending a night alone in the catacombs, among centuries-old corpses
and skeletons of the dead.
Then,
you will begin to fathom the terrible terror felt by those who
believed in things that go bump in the night, and reading Edgar Allan
Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King will take on a new intensity.
In Platonic and mythopoeic terms, their works are, after all, shadows
of the shadows of the Real Horrors awaiting us beyond this world.