On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

by C.S. Lewis

certain criticisms on the stories of Charles Williams are not equally wide of the mark. The complaint often made against them is that they mix what some people call the realistic and the fantastic. I would rather fall back on an older critical terminology and say that they mix the Probable and the Marvellous. We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs: on the other hand, we also meet the supernatural—ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts. The first thing to grasp is that this is not a mixture of two literary kinds. That is what some readers suspect and resent. They acknowledge, on the one hand, ‘straight’ fiction, the classical novel as we know it from Fielding to Galsworthy. They acknowledge, on the other, the pure fantasy which creates a world of its own, cut off in a kind of ring fence, from reality; books like The Wind in the Willows or Vathek or The Princess of Babylon, and they complain that Williams is asking them to skip to and fro from the one to the other in the same work. But Williams is really writing a third kind of book which belongs to neither class and has a different value from either. He is writing that sort of book in which we begin by saying ‘Let us suppose that this everyday world were, at some one point, invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.’