Genteel Paradoxes: Poetic Diction and Saving the Appearances, by Owen Barfield

C.S. Lewis called Owen Barfield the "wisest and best of my unofficial teachers," and Barfield's Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning is dedicated to Lewis (or, in the original publication of 1928, to Lewis' then-pseudonym, Clive Hamilton). The accompanying inscription, 'opposition is true friendship,' Barfield quotes from Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a work Lewis would later counter with his Great Divorce. Further epigraphs hail from Aristotle's De Anima and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. As the one is left in Greek, and the other comes from somewhere in the middle of a long philosophical memoir, we might have an idea of what we're in for reading Poetic Diction. Barfield writes for an audience of people, like his friend-opponent Lewis, who are versed in language and literature, history and philosophy, and for whom controversies of logic and metaphysics rooted in the theories of the Greeks and Romantics but also in Locke, Hume, and Kant are live and urgent. Presumably, whatever might have motivated his early readers, most of us who come to read Barfield today do so by way of Lewis and Tolkien, rather than by passing through the rich intellectual tradition in which the Inklings themselves were steeped. Thus, my main impression reading Barfield's work is of a sort of super-grown-up talking over my head--and this is not meant so much as a criticism of it as a recognition of my own insufficiency. Though I can count myself lucky for having avoided some of the prejudices and pomposity of Barfield, Lewis, et al., which I fancy I can detect here and there, I'm sure I am full of my own updated ones, as well as being just generally much more ignorant and uneducated.

It seems like there are two ways to approach Barfield, then. Either we read him mainly for the light he can shed on Tolkien and Lewis--and this seems to be the trail blazed by Flieger in Splintered Light--or we strive, by reading many more and still wiser authors he draws upon and puts himself in conversation with, to understand his contributions to the much larger currents of thought he saw himself and his circle engaged in. For the former, a summary of his thought probably suffices, and all these allusions and foreign languages can be dispensed with. But the latter is clearly preferable, if we can work up the time and effort to undertake it; indeed, the former probably ought to lead into the latter, as Flieger seems to argue: "Barfield is not a fantasist (though he is the author of a deftly humorous retelling of 'The Frog Prince,' The Silver Trumpet. Primarily, however, Barfield is a speculative thinker and philosopher whose interest lies chiefly in the relationship between language, myth, and cultural reality" (xxi).

Making it our goal to find the way back to myth and truth through fantasy makes sense, too, given Barfield's association with and influence on these luminary authors, better known for their fantasies but also possessed in their turn of a wealth of scholarship and religious insight speaking powerfully to our time if we can manage to hear, to learn the language in which to understand them. Another don of Tolkien scholarship, Tom Shippey, makes the argument at some length in works like Tolkien: Author of the Century, that the writer of The Hobbit  and The Lord of the Rings, but also of The Silmarillion and On Fairy-stories, eminently deserves serious study alongside (or indeed slightly above) the giants of modern and post-modern literature. The likes of Woolf, Eliot, and Joyce, after all, for all their brilliance, seem to have sadly hollowed out the rolls of English departments, whereas the popularity of Tolkien and Lewis has been the impetus not just for major films leading new generations to their fantasy books, but also for scholarship delving into to the full range of their work and into the sources they draw upon.

Barfield, then, is an essential guide in this adventurous "Study in Meaning," of which there seems to be a revival perennially in the works. Whether in the focused Poetic Diction or in the sweeping Saving the Appearances, his erudite explications of exemplary passages of text, his logical refutations of counter-arguments we'd likely not dreamt of making in the first place, and his impassioned calls for ever more nuanced and subtle attention to the workings of imagination and consciousness are quite the experience. Numerous shorter works freely accessible on the page of his literary estate, which calls him, a little apocalyptically, "the first and last Inkling," will give you a taste of his style (oratorical, elliptical, sententious) and a sense of his driving concerns (philology, cultural history, mystical participation).

(Hereabouts is where I would give a more detailed analysis of a few of Barfield's books, and maybe someday I will, buckling down to study Greek and Coleridge and all that before re-reading them, but I just don't think I understand them well enough to be much help at this point. Still, I would love to hear from anyone out there who does!)

Intriguingly, while Barfield had such a tremendous impact on Lewis and Tolkien, and thus on anyone who's been led by them to try to read Beowulf in Old English or to see in Chaucer or in a church window a tenth of what a medieval might have seen there, he also cites some surprisingly esoteric "'friends'" in his afterword to Poetic Diction. Chief among Barfield's enthusiasms are the founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner; Goethe, the unacknowledged scientist; and numerous thinkers he recognizes as partaking, along with Barfield himself, of "Neo-Platonism, an underground stream, and philosophically no longer quite respectable" (223). The inexhaustible reading list Barfield bequeaths  also includes Spengler's Decline of the West (featured prominently in Conroy's Lords of Discipline, it took me a while to realize this was a real book); Jung, Freud and other students of "the so-called 'psychology of the unconscious'"; Giambattista Vico; Susanne Langer; and many others one would hope to see courses about on Mythgard or Signum University someday. But we should hasten to browse among them in the meantime, to talk about them with other intrepid readers, and so to continue to pass along the thrill of discovery caught from the venerable Barfield.