“Again and again, in defending works of romance, Lewis argues that it is the quality of tone of the whole story that is its main attraction…”
Michael Ward – Planet Narnia
It’s more than likely you have a favorite book; and without a doubt you’ve read that book more than once. If you’re like me, you probably read and reread the same story like you wear your favorite shirt. It’s well-worn, familiar, comfortable. Stories like these have an atmosphere you can escape into. But what is it that makes us return to these books again and again?
For me, the book I constantly return to is “That Hideous Strength” by C.S. Lewis. I love the tension of modern-day rationalism versus the ancient European mythos. But a short explanation like this cannot satisfactorily explain why I love the book, or why I return to it over and over again. There is an element to all good stories which, as Lewis put it, “…have no vocabulary”.
When I first began to explore Lewis’ fictional writings as a kid, I couldn’t help but feel like he was tapping into something immeasurably deep and uncharted. Reading his stories felt (and still feel today after at least a dozen reads) like an easter egg hunt. Lewis stashed wealths of implicit truth beneath riches of explicit meaning.
Living, Breathing Story…
Today most fiction is written back to front. Popular notions of storytelling follow a critical foundation set forth by experts who have dissected ‘good stories’. Certainly, the critical evaluation of stories is an important study, but it was Lewis’ conviction that story was never meant to be told from a formula. Stories built from the critical formula upward often appear two-dimensional and grey. They show too much and leave little for the imagination.
Lewis elaborates on this idea in a 1940 address given to the Martlets literary society at Oxford University, Lewis tackles this problem by bringing up a concept which transformed the way I look at storytelling. He begins by saying,
“It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself. Granted the story, the style in which it should be told, the order in which it should be disposed, and (above all) the delineation of the characters, have been abundantly discussed. But the Story itself, the series of imagined events, is nearly always passed over in silence.”
C.S. Lewis – On Stories
Lewis’ approach to writing (or even appreciating) a story, was not to dissect it, like most literary critics in his field, but to experience it. Stories were not made to be rigid statues but dynamic personalities. A good story, according to Lewis’ theory, was not one which followed a foolproof plot or had steady pacing, but was one which sprang to life out of the passion and enjoyment of the writer.
Following Lewis’ train of thought, I would venture to argue a good story is not written for the reader at all, but is written for the sake of the story itself.
“…It is because a man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing it.”
Michael Ward – Planet Narnia
If you ever wrote anything as a child, you’ll understand what Lewis was getting at. That giggling torrent of words shaping worlds, completely unconcerned with any sphere of readers. But why would anyone write a story for its own sake? I would propose they do it for the same reason you return to that one book over and over again. Lewis coined this invisible force behind all great stories as the, “Kappa Element”.
What is the Kappa Element? Enjoyment and Contemplation…
Before Lewis’ essay was renamed “On Stories”, it was originally called “The Kappa Element in Romance”. The Kappa element is always there in the stories you love. Hidden, though it cannot be called undetectable. It gives stories their flavor. But, like spirit in man, it cannot be found by dissection.
In fact, the Kappa element cannot be described as an ‘element’, as much as a method (when it comes to storytelling). It is, as Michael Ward puts it, “more like seeing than it is like something seen”. The Kappa element can be easily understood through an illustration Lewis gives in an essay entitled, “Meditation in a Toolshed”.
In the essay, Lewis recounts for us a revelation he had in his toolshed, where one beam of sunlight cracked the darkness. From where he stood, all he could see was the sunbeam, while everything else around it was pitch black. Looking at the sunbeam from a distance he could contemplate it without assimilating with it. He was “seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.” (Mediation in a Toolshed)
He goes on to explain his complete change in perspective once he stepped into the sunbeam. From within the beam, he could see “no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun.” He concludes this paragraph by saying, “Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”
Looking from Within, Rather Than At…
Basically, what Lewis is saying is that the perspective of the observer from ‘outside the beam’ cannot be compared with the perspective of an observer looking out from ‘inside the beam’, and visa versa. Each method of seeing the beam presents the observer with separate visions. One is explicitly the beam and nothing else. The other shows the observer sights he/she could only see by being completely immersed in the beam.
It is clear from his essay that, what Lewis calls the “Kappa Element”, directly connects with viewing the toolshed ‘from within the sunbeam’. He goes on later in the essay to label these two experiences. The viewing of the beam from the outside he calls, “Contemplation”, whereas the viewing of the beam from within he calls, “Enjoyment”.
Applications to Storytelling…
Now, what does this mean for us writers? Besides Lewis’ illustration having monumental implications upon thought and consciousness in general, I believe this method of ‘seeing’ can be applied to storytelling. When Lewis wrote “Meditation in a Toolshed”, he was mainly focusing on contemplation and enjoyment as means of reading and critiquing stories, not directly as means of writing them.
But in one of his most famous works, Lewis hides more than one secret meaning under the surface of his story. (Any readers of Michael Ward will already know,) that when Lewis wrote the seven books of the Narniad, he intricately wove the personalities of the seven planets of the medieval solar system into the backcloth of each book. (For more references on this topic, click here)
Now, going off of Lewis’ hidden references to the medieval cosmos, it would be easy to assume that this mysterious “Kappa Element” is really just code for ‘hidden references’. I don’t believe this is true, strictly because Lewis left no implication that he intended anyone really to find it out. Instead, he was simply using a hidden medium to recreate an atmosphere he profoundly enjoyed in stories from the middle ages. This resulted in a series which beautifully synthesized the paradoxically grandiose and humble atmosphere of great medieval stories.
Lewis achieved this by first intimately understanding his secret medium (1954 Chairman of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University), and secondly by intricately weaving it into the fabric of his stories. This would mean, for us modern storytellers, not simply hoping for a Kappa element to appear, but actually, consciously building one into our story. Thankfully we don’t have to build one from scratch, but we can follow Lewis’ example by choosing a secret theme (separate from genre or aesthetic), which conveys an underlying, subconscious significance to the story landscape. This could be as simple as (in the case of a fantasy novel) choosing an ancient mythology to research and modeling your imaginary cosmology off of that. The point of this Kappa element exercise is to, not just check the critical storytelling boxes, but to genuinely enjoy the story you’re writing by giving it tremendous, hidden depth.
