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<\/p>\nArticle by S. Dorman<\/p>\n
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Is there a right\u2014or wrong\u2014way to fictionalize C.S. Lewis? I cannot say the question was considered when I began tearing into the materials for Fantastic<\/em> Travelogue<\/em><\/a>, a speculative fiction in which C.S. Lewis and Mark Twain talk things over in the hereafter.<\/span><\/p>\n Fictionalizing questions that I came to later\u2014in order to write this piece\u2014included, 1) Should mere dialogue be considered\u2014conversations, arguments without concrete setting or activity? 2) Should Lewis’s most recognized aspect be neglected, namely that of the astute and determined debater so marked in person and in his apologetics and criticism? \u00a0 3) Does a creative writer’s liberty include <\/span>license to use the names, likenesses, and settings from the real world to sub-create characters that may be somewhat unlike <\/em>the real people and places? And 4) is fictionalizing Lewis, or any real person, a form of fan fiction?<\/span><\/p>\n We may have a dialogue <\/em>in the formal sense of the word, but do we have a story if what we are given is a CSL arguing with disembodied others in a nether-world of mist \u2014 or even in a world of light? Should vindication through argument be the sole purpose of both the work and the sub-creation of CSL’s character? A narrative whose purpose is argument and debate is not the story of The Great Divorce<\/em> <\/a>\u2014 where rhetoric is but a part of the whole. TGD<\/em> gives a solid land with <\/span>solid glowing description, enhancing our imaginations as we read. Forming a character who but debates in a debatable “land” may not be the right setting in which to fictionalize C.S. Lewis.<\/span><\/p>\n Another possible wrong way? Be careless with the content of a man’s moral or religious character. There must be leeway for the writer’s own imagination in his or her making, but to change appreciably the beliefs of the character would be to subvert it. Some authors, scholars <\/span>and critics, would feel that to convert a dead author is not good characterization. Is this what CSL did with his fictionalized George MacDonald (as William Gray suggests)? \u00a0 Universalist that GMD was, would he have left one soul outside the Kingdom of Heaven? (The Great Divorce <\/em><\/a>118.) A discerning knowledgeable reader will judge if I transgress my rule about <\/span>conversion of characters in Fantastic Travelogue<\/em><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Is the chief characteristic of Lewis’s <\/span>self fictions wonderment? Bemused and troublous confusion in life’s events and circumstance? He points toward a subject <\/em>of wonder, of consideration and awe. Consider the opening sentence of Perelandra<\/em><\/a>. Immediately the first-person narrator deflects from himself, toward both his readers (perhaps figured as those on the platform) and to Ransom, who, it turns out, is at center stage in the story.<\/span><\/p>\n So Lewis writes himself. But is it fair for us would-be fictionalizers to do likewise? And is fictionalizing Lewis a form of fan fiction? Ethically, can we permit ourselves to boil this worthy poor man down to one element of character, leaving all his other considerable charms and attributes out of it \u2014 or perhaps merely suggesting them from time to time?<\/span><\/p>\n After all, isn’t <\/span>he best known in this life as a wise man, a soaring intellect of incisive insight; rational; harmonizing his great qualities in a variegated multitude of books? Why then choose the one quality that makes him seem so unlike all this? The quality that makes him something of a child.<\/span><\/p>\n If it is so done, it must be because it is worthy<\/em> to be <\/span>child, to wonder, suffer confusion, long for both adventure and the fantastic. He must be the childlike Lewis because that may be the closest this maker can come to sub-creating the “ordinary” Lewis. \u00a0 It’s right to give him a fantastic setting, and it is also right to give him an anchoring setting. Because <\/span>his was an imagination ready for phantasmagoria, ready for historic Western literary culture, ready for theological concerns, it is right to give him fictionalized companions also anchored in this Western cultural paradigm. But all must be plausibly crafted within the given “world” of the story.<\/span><\/p>\n I’m discussing right and wrong ways to fictionalize C.S. Lewis. Assumptions of craft have been considered, and the dialog-in-isolation form rejected. \u00a0 Ideas do not a story make, nor do they make an imaginative character. In this piece, C.S. Lewis’s self-subcreation points the right way to fictionalize him \u2014as an every-soul who is visiting in a strange land. We considered falsification, discovering that, in order to be believed, Lewis’s own beliefs and moral content would best be preserved.<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, is it ethical <\/em>to fictionalize a person made by God in primary creation \u2014 does an artist have any such right? Is fictionalizing any real famous person, a form of fan fiction? Perhaps: \u00a0 if his or her crafting is good enough to coordinate the elements of story inclusive of such characterization. But there is no license to defame, distort, or otherwise abuse a real person. \u00a0 One who would carefully make a portrait does well to have access to public domain primary verbal materials and personal history. In this <\/span>way Mark Twain might be more easily drawn than Lewis. On the other hand, even with such materials, George <\/span>MacDonald, would be nearly impossible to fictionalize well\u2014though his books, verbal thoughts, and the reminiscence of him pile high. I’m not certain his person was as harsh, nay stern, as his narrative voice. I will not argue it here, but George MacDonald simply cannot be successfully done. Not by me surely, and perhaps not by C.S. Lewis.<\/span><\/p>\n Or maybe you<\/em> can?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n (This piece is adapted from an essay appearing in Mythprint<\/em>, No. 341, <\/span>bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society.<\/em> It serves as the intro to one edition of Fantastic<\/em> Travelogue<\/em><\/a><\/span>, and is also published in a nonfiction companion book of related essays. One of its essays, “The Cosmology of Error,” was published in Extrapolation<\/em>, Spring 2007. I hope to fictionalize GK Chesterton and Christopher Hitchens in dialogue and adventures. Will one of these convert the other, I wonder?.)<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Visit S. Dorman’s Author Page<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Works cited or consulted:<\/span><\/p>\n Gray, William. “Pullman, Lewis, MacDonald, and the Anxiety of Influence.” Mythlore<\/em> 25.3\/4.<\/span><\/p>\n Lewis, C. S<\/span>.. The Great Divorce<\/em><\/a>. New York: Macmillan, Touchstone Edition, 1996.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014. On Stories: and Other Essays on Literature<\/em><\/a>. New York: \u00a0 Harcourt Brace & Co., 1982.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014. Perelandra<\/a>: A Novel<\/em>. New York: \u00a0 Macmillan, 1965.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/402px-Mark_Twain_DLitt-202x300.jpeg\")
How can a writer with no legal access to quotation synthesize a fictional Lewis? \u00a0 If the would-be re-creator is no debater of any confidence, wit, acumen, and depth of knowledge, \u2014how would he or she make a good C.S. Lewis? There are authors with works in the public domain that might reasonably fit into the scheme of such fictionalizing. Mark Twain and George MacDonald being two examples used in Fantastic<\/em> Travelogue<\/em><\/a>. One might not scruple to quote them verbatim. \u00a0 Lewis might legally have paraphrased for his storybook portrait of George MacDonald in The Great Divorce<\/em><\/a>. He chose to sub-create dialogue between himself and his imagined mentor. With one objection, there can be no doubt that Lewis knew George MacDonald, from his works, well enough to do this.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Fantastic-Travelogue-300x219.jpg\")
<\/a>Two ways perhaps <\/em>not “wrong” but not strictly “right” might be to depict a Lewis who was not as astute and argumentative as the original, or a Lewis willing to forego debate for a better purpose. \u00a0 Lewis has written, about Gulliver and Alice, that a too realistic presentation would have destroyed their stories. Being untrue in characterization can destroy the illusion, but <\/span>character can be simplified with satisfaction. \u00a0 (On Stories <\/em>61.) This is the way CSL fictionalized himself in Perelandra <\/em><\/a>and The Great Divorce<\/em><\/a>. Peter Schakel, in Reason and Imagination in CS Lewis<\/em><\/a>, suggests that we may read Orual the Queen of Glome as self-fictionalizing in Till We Have Faces<\/em><\/a>. Here we see the character disliking the view of herself in the mirror. The suppression of self-contemplation is a theme of the story, and the mirror is symbolic of this. There a mirror is part of the nightmare scenario. The bus driver’s rearview mirror in Divorce<\/em>, in which the character Lewis views himself, is not used as a realist would use it: to access psychological portraiture. <\/span>Instead Lewis, the first-person narrator, sees his <\/span>reflection, and allows that moment to echo in our imaginations producing its nonverbal <\/span>insight, before the narrative moves on.<\/span><\/p>\n