I had the single thought of Lewis as a 60s writer, or perhaps a mid 1900s writer. The Ransom Trilogy is sci-fi, a new genre at the time, however much Lewis inserted his medieval "Discarded Image" into it. Camus, Brecht, Kafka, In Till We Have Faces you have to bring yourself to the text and interact with it or you just aren't going to understand its unusual features. A woman veiling herself permanently and humans coinhering with shifting goddesses seems more like Kafka's Metamorphose, or something out of Brecht or Camus. It is turning into Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Reenacting the actions of gods and goddesses, which is unusual in modernist literature, yet has the same mythic quality as say, some of Vonnegut or Borges. The Owl Service by Alan Garner has 20th C people reenacting a pagan Welsh myth, rather helpless to change it, rather like Stoppard's hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unable to escape their fate because they are stuck in script of "Hamlet" no matter what they do, illustrated immediately by the coin flip never changing no matter how many times it is repeated.
It is more modern, or especially postmodern, to retell (or reinscribe as the more postmodern term is) a myth paying attention to the motivations of the gods and goddesses. Ancient writers would give only the barest description - "Venus was jealous" and let the story unfold in ways that would leave the audience wondering "but why then did she not simply banish/kill/make the mortal ugly?" It was not unknown in the past. We see behind the characters' emotional curtains a bit in "The Trojan Women," and Paradise Lost pays significant attention to motives of divine, diabolical, or mythic characters. But it is rare. It is much more common to focus on a villain's or minor character's* POV in our day than it had been before. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was subtitled "A Modern Prometheus" and initiated the popularity of the idea, but it has become even common now. Garner's Grendel, ** or the entire premise of "Wicked."
We want to force Lewis, and probably Tolkien, into a mold of nonmodern writers, forcing themselves back into older forms, or a mold of ancient or medieval writers updating them themselves for the present, but not really see them as 20th century writers.Yet their characters are seldom simply evil or good. They are mixed, with good motives barely surviving but not fully extinguished, and even the heroes bent or needing redemption in some way. Even before he was a Christian, Lewis had wanted to tell the story of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of the jealous sisters. He even shows the improvement of Redival, the less-mentioned sister because she turns outward to care for others, her husband and children.But Orual judges her by other criteria than caring, and still finds her wanting. These are perspectives that would have been impossible for writers in most of history.
Crystal Downing of the Wade Center calls Lewis the first postmodernist writer. Jack would likely point to GK Chesterton and Owen Barfield as his influences that all artists and thinkers are products of their eras - including especially our own, which is the one most frequently neglected. We view a subject through every prism on the table; but not the mirror on the wall directly across from us.
So that's it. Don't limit Lewis's categories, or Tolkien's. They contain many eras.
*The New Testament way be the first work to focus consistently on the actions of minor or low-status persons as having importance.
**I was in a student-written production based loosely on Grendel, and got to beg for mercy but be killed anyway on stage. Never die out in the open in the theater. Find some way to land behind a sofa or rock, because otherwise you will have to lie absolutely still until the scene ends. "Grendel" was notable for its cast of seven male students with a rather bawdy female director, leading to a series of cast parties that were unrivalled, about once a month, last for a year. Drunken actors can get rather graphic in charades. I missed the enactment of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," but apparently it took the entire three minutes even though everyone knew the answer immediately.
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