Discovering donegality

Over the past year, I’ve been pon­dering C. S. Lewis, rereading some (not all) of his Chron­i­cles of Narnia, learning more about his influences. I read:

• The Narnian by Alan Jacobs, along with

• parts of The Fellowship by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski (with its imposing subtitle, The Lit­erary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams) and finally

• Planet Narnia by Michael Ward.

In that last book, I encoun­tered a new-to-me line of thinking from Lewis that both mir­rored and deep­ened a feeling that has haunted my own reading and writing as far back as I can remember.

It has to do with vibes.

C. S. Lewis could never quite explain it himself; here’s Ward describing his attempts:

[Lewis] uses a variety of words in his efforts to catch his meaning. They include: “the ipseitas, the pecu­liar unity of effect pro­duced by a spe­cial bal­ancing and pat­terning of thoughts and classes of thoughts”; “a state or quality”; “flavour or atmosphere”; “smell or taste”; “mood”; “quiddity.” [ … ]

The phrase “bal­ancing and pat­terning” made me gasp, at least inwardly. It sounds exactly right; I believe it is what I have felt myself doing when I have been hap­piest and most excited about my writing.

A few lines later:

Again and again, in defending works of romance [in the chivalric sense], Lewis argues that it is the quality or tone of the whole story that is its main attraction. The invented world of romance is con­ceived with this kind of qual­i­ta­tive rich­ness because romancers feel the real world itself to be “cryptic, significant, full of voices and the mys­tery of life.” Lovers of romances go back and back to such sto­ries in the same way that we go “back to a fruit for its taste; to an air for … what? for itself; to a region for its whole atmosphere — to Donegal for its Done­gality and London for its Londonness. It is noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to put these tastes into words.”

“Done­gality” becomes a key term in Planet Narnia, which, for all its aca­d­emic sobriety, is hon­estly a sort of gonzo puzzle adventure — very Umberto Eco, almost Dan Brown.

Here’s more from Ward on C. S. Lewis and his vibes:

That this atmos­pheric quality is vir­tu­ally inex­press­ible leads Lewis to speak of it at times as a spir­i­tual thing. For instance, it is “the vast, empty vision” of Hamlet that is, in his view, Shakespeare’s chief accomplishment — the sense that “a cer­tain spir­i­tual region” has somehow been cap­tured by the use of images such as night, ghosts, a sea cliff, a graveyard, and a pale man in black clothes. Within the mesh of these images the mys­te­rious epiphe­nom­enal flavour of Hamlet is caught and com­mu­ni­cated to the atten­tive reader or theatregoer. Likewise, in David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, the planet Tor­mance is so described that it amounts to an encap­su­la­tion of “a region of the spirit.” The net of the story — the events, the characters, the back­ground descriptions — has tem­porarily ensnared, as if it were an elu­sive bird, a sheer state of being; and for the dura­tion of the read, this bird’s plumage may be “enjoyed.”

I like Ward’s use of the words “mesh” and “net” there; I might add “web” and “network”, even “game”—the sense of pieces arranged on a pat­terned board.

Here, perhaps, is lan­guage for my own most pow­erful responses.

An example: William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy in the 2000s was pro­foundly impor­tant to me — electrifying, the dis­covery that novels can feel like this—but/and I have always strug­gled to explain what about the books was so appealing. It wasn’t their prose, exactly, even though it’s terrific, or their plots, which I cannot recount, or their characters, who were gnomic slabs of style; yet there was in those novels some­thing that I found nowhere else.

Per­haps it WAS the “spir­i­tual region” they mapped out, the “spe­cial bal­ancing and pat­terning of thoughts and classes of thoughts” they achieved. Per­haps they DID catch some­thing in their “net”: a “sheer state of being” that had to do with sub­limely cool jackets and was clearly (it was the 2000s) some kind of zeitgeist.

William Gibson prob­ably thinks this is stupid, but I don’t care.

It’s impor­tant to say these “regions” are not genres — way too coarse — and they are not authors, either. I have enjoyed William Gibson’s recent novels, but they do not possess, for me, the flavor of the Blue Ant trilogy. That elu­sive bird has slipped the net.

Reading about Lewis, learning that he floun­dered in this par­tic­ular bucket, has made me feel more con­fi­dent about my own compulsions. Tolkien called the inven­tion of lan­guages his “secret vice”. It’s clear that Lewis’s was the con­tem­pla­tion of sym­bols and symmetries. It is mine, too — one of them, anyway.

The good stuff can’t be named, only sensed; we are like deer des­per­ately licking our snouts, straining after faint molecules. Even so, it’s helpful to have some lan­guage to throw around. Bal­ancing and pat­terning. Meshes and nets. Done­gality!

I wish I could go back in time and offer C. S. Lewis the lan­guage of “vibes” in return.

First published:  October 2023
Last updated: December 2024