The Uncertain Legacy of Owen Barfield
Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning
Documentary video (VHS) produced by G. B. Tennyson for OwenArts Productions
Approx. 40 min., 1996. Available from OwenArts, P. O. Box 260038, Encino, CA
91426. $43.00. (Includes transcript booklet.)
reviewed by Dale Nelson
Many people who look into the writings of Owen Barfield, who died last December at the age of 99, are C. S. Lewis admirers who are curious about this man who was Lewis’s close friend throughout his adult life, from 1919 until Lewis’s death in 1963. Barfield was Lewis’s legal and financial advisor, and he became an executor of his estate. Lewis dedicated his first scholarly book, The Allegory of Love (1936) to this “wisest and best of my unofficial teachers,” stating in its preface that he asked no more than to disseminate Barfield’s literary theory and practice. He also dedicated the first Narnian chronicle to his friend’s adopted daughter Lucy. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis portrayed Arthur Greeves as the First Friend, who reveals that one is not alone in the world in one’s imaginative outlook, and Barfield as the Second Friend, the one who never fails to challenge and to prod one to new understanding. In the thirteenth and fourteenth of the Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Lewis draws on a recent book of Barfield’s to elucidate the “ontological continuity between Creator and creature” versus the “union of wills which, under Grace, is reached by a life of sanctity.”
Several unacknowledged traces of Barfield’s ideas may be found in Lewis’s writings; their Barfieldian quality will be evident to anyone who has read him. In 1930, writing a pseudo-scholarly commentary on J. R. R. Tolkien’s draft poem “The Lay of Leithian,” Lewis offered a supposed poetic fragment dealing with the same tale as Tolkien’s; but Lewis imports into this fragment an imaginative version of Barfield’s speculation about the primordial relationship of man and nature. Dreams “had bodies then,” and “were not cooped within. / Thought cast a shadow— / For spirit then / Kneaded a fluid world and dreamed it new each moment.” (See the Appendix to Tolkien’s The Lay of Leithian, edited by Christopher Tolkien, 1985.) Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light discusses the Barfieldian traces in Tolkien.
Another sign of Barfield’s thought in Lewis appears in the third lecture of The Abolition of Man (1947), where Lewis suggests that “Dr. Steiner”—meaning Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, which Barfield embraced as a young man—may have found the way to a redeemed scientific method that does not omit the qualities of the observed object. And when Barfield in a 1992 interview says that dryads, naiads, and such beings really existed, though they may have been “driven out” in recent history, this may remind one of Dr. Dimble in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945), who discusses with his wife “the gods, elves, dwarfs, water-people” and long-livers of myth and folklore—beings with whom the revived Merlin has had much traffic, traffic that may have been permissible once, but not now (with a hint of Galatians 4:3,9).
More importantly for Lewis, Barfield taught him not to view earlier ages with disdain from the vantage point of our supposedly more knowing and more humane era. He learned from Barfield that our time is “a period” with its own limitations and errors. It may be hard for some of us to conceive of this insight as something Lewis had to learn, rather than as something he was born knowing, so integral a part of his thought it is! Where Lewis and Barfield could not agree, as in their “Great War” debate on the imagination (1925–1927), their disputations at least provided Lewis with an opponent worthy of his mettle.
Owen Barfield is associated in readers’ minds with Lewis also because he wrote about Lewis in many places. The 1989 compilation by G. B. Tennyson, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, makes this information more accesible. Furthermore, many scholars and other inquirers seeking information about Lewis found Barfield a patient and helpful source, as a glance at the acknowledgments in various books and papers will show.
Integration of Imagination and Intellect
Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning does not pass over the Lewis friendship, but reminds us that there was more to Barfield’s long life. The video and accompanying booklet provide a general chronology, from a North London childhood, service in Belgium during the First World War, and the dull years in the law office, to the late burst of activity as writer and lecturer at an age when many people have retired. The solicitor’s office years are memorialized with wry humor in This Ever Diverse Pair, the pair being the two halves of Barfield himself embodied as the prosaic Burden and the imaginative Burgeon. Lewis called the book a “high and sharp philosophic comedy,” though it is one of Barfield’s least-known works. The years of lecturing at Brandeis, Drew, SUNY-Stony Brook and other North American universities were the occasion of some incisive essays. Still photographs from family albums complement the footage of Barfield being interviewed for the camera. It is no criticism of Barfield or the video’s producers to say that we are given little about his marriage; there is a hint that it may, like Charles Williams’s or Tolkien’s, have had its difficulties.
Barfield’s thought is always characterized by the conviction that the humanities matter very much indeed, for all of us—not only for professional academics. Poetic Diction, along with Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism and Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” will reward anyone needing assurance of the value of literary experience. Poetry, Barfield shows, can provide a “felt change of consciousness”—experiencing a single line of poetry, one may from that moment know more, though what is known is not a matter of “fact.” Poetic Diction (1928), dedicated to Lewis, is Barfield’s most extended treatment of this insight. In Speaker’s Meaning (1967), he expounds the “polarity” in language, with expression—a speaker’s unique meaning—as one pole, the other being communication, the lexical meaning. The first is expansive, the second contractive, and metaphor comes into being in the tension between the two poles. Speaker’s Meaning presents a favorite theme of Barfield’s, the evolution of consciousness. Barfield finds evidence of it in the change from the earlier experience of poetic inspiration as something that is visited upon a passive poet from without, as the work of a Muse or other agency, to the experience of poetic inspiration characteristic of the present, as proceeding from within oneself, from one’s own “shaping spirit of imagination.” Poetic Diction and Speaker’s Meaning complement each other by dealing with the nature of literary experience for the reader and for the poet. History in English Words (1926) early showed what U. Milo Kaufmann called Barfield’s unusual combination of idealism and empiricism.
Barfield’s major work on the evolution of consciousness, Saving the Appearances (1957), is the one of all his books that he most hoped would continue to be read. In the video, Barfield says that his lifework has basically been “thinking about thinking,” and this is the book where he endeavors to show the conclusion that he has drawn: that the relationship between consciousness and nature itself—a correlative relationship—has changed from the most ancient times to our own. Declining to affirm this idea as sober truth, Lewis was, at least, fascinated by it as an imaginative conceit, as suggested above.
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