‘The more doors you go out of, the farther you go in’ is almost certainly what Lewis also means us to understand: an exit from the narrowness of selfhood which paradoxically leads to an expansion and enrichment of apprehension. This imagery of an ‘endless’ house isn’t restricted to Narnia. It comes from somewhere deep, turning up in Lewis’s Christian apologetics as well, and even in his literary criticism. ‘In my Father’s house there are many rooms,’ said Jesus (John, 14:2). In the preface to Mere Christianity, Lewis describes the basic Christian faith as a hallway, out of which doors open into different rooms representing different denominations: ‘The hall is a place to wait, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.’ In its function, this hall sounds surprisingly like the Wood Between the Worlds – another ‘in-between’ place that opens into many dimensions: a place of potential, not a place to stay.
In his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung
records a personal dream of exploring an ancient house. It began somewhere on an upper floor, in a richly furnished rococo-style salon hung with fine old pictures. Going downstairs, he found the ground floor furnished in an older, medieval style with a red brick floor. Everything seemed ‘rather dark.’ Exploring room after room, he came across a heavy old door and behind it, a stone staircase leading further down into an even more ancient, vaulted room:
My interest was now intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted and again I saw a doorway of narrow stone steps. These too, I descended and entered a low cave cut into the rock [where] I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old…
The story that follows this is worth repeating. Jung recounts how he took the dream to Freud and asked for his opinion of its meaning. Focussing almost entirely on the two skulls, Freud decided they must represent a death-wish – an interpretation which the newly and happily married Jung felt was quite wrong. He had his own ideas about the meaning of the dream, but fearing to offend Freud and damage their friendship he pretended to agree and told Freud the death-wish must be directed at his new wife and sister-in-law. Freud seemed ‘greatly relieved’ by this admission, Jung comments with a twinkle.
Jung’s own interpretation was that the house was ‘a kind of image of the psyche’, and that in descending through the various levels he was descending from the conscious mind into the unconscious.
The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became. In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself – a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness.
Building upon this reading, Jung later came to form his theories of the collective unconscious and of ‘archetypes’ or symbols common to the human mind.
Writing with a touch of humour, Lewis acknowledged the emotional and poetic power of Jung’s theory of archetypes. Even if it should turn out to be poor science, he commented, it was still ‘excellent poetry’ of a mythic character. The concept of the archetype as something old, meaningful, hidden, deeply buried but gradually coming to light made him feel like ‘Schliemann digging up what he believed to be the very bones of Agamemnon, king of men’ – or ‘my own self, hoping, as a child, for that forgotten, that undiscovered room.’
Maybe most children hope to find a hidden room: still, in expressing this desire, here is Lewis returning again to the same potent image. If Jung and Freud could disagree over the interpretation of Jung’s dream, perhaps there’s a chance for me to speculate that for Lewis the archetypal house symbolised the security of his childhood before his mother’s death. After that event, Little Lea became gradually intolerable to him. While his father was dying he described it in a letter as a place where he had never experienced freedom – yet he added, ‘I have never been able to resist the retrogressive influence of this house which always plunges me back into the pleasures and pains of a boy.’
‘Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows…’
The house which sheltered the happiness of Lewis’s early childhood had long vanished into that land of lost content, the far country of the past: but in imagination he was a constant visitor, exploring passages and tiptoing into rooms, searching for the doorway through which he might pass into joy.
From Spare Oom to War Drobe by Katherine Langrish is published by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 978-1913657079, £16.99 hbk.
Books for Keeps No.248 May 2021 19
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32
