Madeleine L’Engle on the Four Layers

I have been reading and thinking about Lev Grossman’s new book, The Magicians, the last week or so (review coming!). Last night, while thinking about how the Neitherlands in Grossman’s book resemble Lewis’s ‘Wood Between the Worlds’ in The Chronicles of Narnia, I thought to read the relevant parts of William Morris‘ Wood Beyond the World to which Lewis was clearly referring in his Christian Platonist story trope. That search led me to Paul Ford’s Companion to Narnia to see what he had to say about Morris (nothing, alas).

While there, though, I noticed that Madeleine L’Engle, Duchess of Imaginative Literature, had written the foreward to Ford’s Companion. And, to my delight, I noticed that the whole thing turns on a discussion of C. S. Lewis as a writer of allegory — and the traditional Four Layers of Meaning. I think understanding these layers are key to appreciating both the artistry of better writing and the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the effect stories have on readers. My discussions of Harry Potter in The Deathly Hallows Lectures and Harry Potter’s Bookshelf are organized around this layered model and my upcoming book on the Twilight Saga, Spotlight, is also a layered discussion. (I explain the Four Layers at this Hogwarts Professor post.)

Here is Ms. L’Engle’s discussion of those layers or levels to explain Lewis’s thoughts on allegory:

When I took a course in the techniques of fiction with Dr. Caroline Gordon, she taught us that Dante’s great work of fantasy, The Divine Comedy, could be read on four levels,

and these four levels are to be found in all true fantasy. The literal level is the story itself. The moral level is what the story has to say. It is impossible for a writer of fantasy to say nothing, and if he manages to do so, that in itself says something. But the impulse behind the writing of fantasy is usually an attempt on the part of the writer to express something, a particular personal concern. It is very obvious in MacDonald and Kingsley; they tell us exactly what their concern is at the moment of writing. E. Nesbit is more subtle, perhaps because the world of intuition has, for many centuries, been more available to women than to me, who are taught from early childhood on to live in a restricted, rational world. If they delve into the realms of the intuition it must be apologized for, or explained.

For quite a while I struggled to understand the difference between the allegorical level and the anagogical level. Finally it came to me that allegory is simile; this is like this. But an anagoge is metaphor; this is this; it contains within it something of that which it is trying to express.

I do not believe that allegory is always conscious, and perhaps it is best when it is not; perhaps I’ve never much cared for Bunyan because I feel that he is beating me over the head with his allegory. And – despite the sermonizing – MacDonald and Kingsley do not. They are not objective teachers, but subjective ones; the sermon is as much for their own personal benefit as for the reader’s.

The anagogical level, I am convinced, is never conscious when it is there, it is sheer gift of grace; the writer cannot strive for it deliberately for that would be to ensure failure.

So I understand Lewis’s protestations that he is not writing allegory; of course he isn’t. Nevertheless, there is an allegorical level to his stories, and, when he is at this best, an anagogical level. A writer who has grown up on E. Nesbit and Beatrix Potter, who encounters MacDonald as a teenager, in one of the most senstive periods of life, cannot help having learned from these masters, even if the learning is intuitive and subconscious rather than the rational kind of learning that comes from a struggle with spelling or with the multiplication table or memorizing the imports and exports of Brazil. (Companion to Narnia, pp. xii-xiii)

I think Dante and Lewis would disagree with L’Engle about the ability to write allegorical and anagogically with conscious intent, if all would agree the intention amounts to only receptivity to inspiration and facility with the traditional tools of such artistry. (We deliberately strive to be receptive to grace but understand that grace is not produced by this striving.) For those, however, that think reading Harry Potter and Twilight beyond the surface and moral levels, Ms. L’Engle’s comments are nothing less than a rebuke, I think.

Even if we accept (and I do not) that Ms. Rowling and Ms. Meyer did not set out to write profound literature operating at multiple levels of meaning, Ms. L’Engle’s understanding of these layers allows that their works are still best interpreted and approached this way.

Your comments and corrections, as always, are coveted.