Aristotle and Lewis on what stories are actually for.
The wolves still get me
One of my absolute favourite books is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Of course, I come preloaded with all sorts of thoughts and images about the book, Transylvania, and the fanged avenger himself, but the action and characters aren’t really why I enjoy it. My enjoyment, and the reason I have read it multiple times, starts in the opening chapters. As the story begins, young Jonathan Harker is making his way up a very precarious path to the castle in the mountains of Transylvania. During his haunted carriage ride up the winding road, Harker starts to see flickering blue flames throughout the forest. And as he begins to pay attention to the flames, he notices the howling. The howling of the wolves grows closer, until they are upon the carriage as it whips around the corners of the path towards the looming castle. Then, all of a sudden, the wolves are driven off by a strange figure in the road. When the carriage arrives at the castle doors, Harker believes he can finally take sanctuary inside. Of course, he is sorely mistaken.
What I love about this scene, and what hooked me from the very first read, isn’t necessarily the action, and it isn’t just the imagery, but the mood Stoker creates (and sustains). There is something about the book that curdles my blood just a little bit every time I read it. I know what’s coming. I’ve read it three times now. The wolves still get me.
The Cleveland problem
In one of C.S. Lewis’s more popular essays, “On Stories,” Lewis writes about this exact experience. One kind of writing, he says, “lays a hushing spell on the imagination.” That’s the spell Stoker lays on me, and he never quite lifts it. Even though Dracula is such an iconic character, and Transylvania is such an iconic setting, there is something more happening in the story that makes me keep returning to it.
In short, Lewis’s claim is this: if you can swap the setting in a story and nothing breaks, the story was never really about anything. Dracula is an amazing villain, but without Transylvania, he’s just some guy with a cape. I seriously doubt the story flies (pun intended) if it takes place in Cleveland, Ohio.
There is a lot of adventure in Stoker’s story, but adventure is the vehicle, not necessarily the destination. Great stories transport you into a world so you can live in it for a while. This is one of the reasons kids demand the same story again and again. It isn’t about finding out what happens, which means the setting of a story isn’t just a backdrop; it’s the point. This is Lewis’s “idea” of a story: the pattern or atmosphere the incidents are hung on. Lewis proves it with a memory from his own boyhood reading. What he wanted from Fenimore Cooper, he says, was “not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged: the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, war-paths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names.” Take away the world and only the suspense survives, but it seems unnatural and out of place.
All of this got me thinking
All of this got me thinking about Aristotle’s Poetics. Would Aristotle and Lewis agree on the purpose of story? Both writers have a lot to say about what stories are actually for, and they agree more than you’d expect… just not where you’d expect. So let’s turn our attention back to the Poetics for a moment.
Not surprisingly, Lewis begins his essay by bringing his readers’ attention to Aristotle:
“Aristotle in the Poetics constructed a theory of Greek tragedy which puts Story in the centre and relegates character to a strictly subordinate place.”
For Aristotle, plot is the soul of tragedy, and by plot he means the arrangement of incidents. Lewis, on the other hand, says that a story is a place you go and stay a while. He suggests that one kind of writing “lays a spell” while the other just “excites a rapid flutter of the nerves.” If these are the only two options, then I’ll gladly take the spell, but I suspect there are more than two.
Both after enchantment
On the surface, Aristotle appears to be plot-maxing while Lewis is all about atmosphere, but if we look a bit deeper, both authors are after enchantment. Tragedy isn’t a timeline of events — it’s built to produce pity and fear; in other words, to move the audience. Reversal, discovery, and suffering aren’t just plot mechanics but the machinery of being transported. Aristotle describes poetry as one complete action, unified and focused on a single event. Story in Lewis’s sense is one world, with a series of events happening inside it. Different centers, but the same aim: to take the audience somewhere they couldn’t go otherwise. Neither is “just” telling you what happened.
In Poetics 24, Aristotle writes about how much better a convincing impossibility is than an unconvincing possibility, and this is exactly where Lewis is situated. Narnia is impossible and utterly convincing; plenty of realistic novels are possible and dead on arrival. Enchantment doesn’t come from plausibility — it comes from inner coherence, the world holding together on its own terms. Dracula’s Transylvania works the same way.
Aristotle goes on in Poetics 25 to talk about the three ways of imagining: the poet imitates things as they were, as they are said or thought to be, or as they ought to be. Both Aristotle and Lewis live in that third category. Tragedy shows people “better than the ordinary” (life as it ought to be), heightened so we can see it. Lewis’s worlds do the same thing through setting rather than character. Different wardrobes into the same forest.
The reason Transylvania can’t be swapped out for Cleveland isn’t that the taxes on a castle within city limits would be outrageous — it’s that great stories are their worlds the way tragedies are their actions.
So would Aristotle agree?
So, would Aristotle agree with Lewis? Mostly, yes. They just keep the enchantment in different places. For Aristotle, it lives in the action; for Lewis, it lives in the world. But both would tell you the same thing: if a story still works after you strip out everything that made it feel like somewhere, it was only ever a summary.
Telling someone “what happens” in a book is never the same as reading it. That’s why I can know exactly how the carriage ride ends and still hold my breath every single time. The wolves aren’t a surprise anymore. The place is what gets me, and a place doesn’t wear out the way a plot twist does. The test of enchantment is whether you’d go back again and again, to the world in Lewis’s case, or to the tragedy in Aristotle’s.
So no, I will not be reading Dracula in Cleveland. Not because the plot would change, but because the world would, and the world is the whole reason I keep going back. (Besides, nothing ruins a good brooding count like a parking permit.)
Which book do you keep going back to?
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