BY COLLIN MASSIE

Any time the ideas of Owen Barfield (1898-1997), “the first and last Inkling,” bleed into Hollywood, it’s a time to take note. It should be noted, it has happened a few times before. One sees a version of his beliefs regarding mythology and the evolution of consciousness embodied in M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000). One sees some of his thoughts on language expressed in Denis Villeneuve’s alien thriller, Arrival (2016), itself based on the short story titled “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. There has even been a recent (and very popular) video game fittingly called Metaphor (2024)—a Japanese role-playing game set in a fantasy world where our reality is viewed as the myth—which expresses elements of Barfield’s thought on the importance of language and imagination. That’s not to say that any of these works of fiction were directly inspired by the works of Owen Barfield, but that they suggest similar ideas. But not till now has Barfield been explicitly referenced in a popular Hollywood film that has nothing to do with the Inklings.

In Cord Jefferson’s film American Fiction (2023), based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, author Thelonius “Monk” Ellison decides to anonymously submit a book to publishers that professes to paint a gritty picture of “the authentic black experience in America.” He does this as a joke to make a point about the modern tendency to pigeonhole black Americans into street culture and historical plight. As a black professor who prefers writing on mythology and the classics, he finds himself increasingly annoyed at the portrayal of the black experience being defined solely by its contrast to a white overseer. He describes it at one point as “black trauma porn” created to “feed the basic desires of white publishers.” Despite his heavy-handed approach in the book to try and emphasize the joke, he’s in disbelief that publishers love it. They love it to the point that a popular movie producer makes a large bid for the film rights.

There’s a wonderfully concise scene early in the film that shows well his frustration. Monk is in a bookstore and finds his academic books moved from their sections in Mythology or Philosophy or Literary Criticism to African American Studies. He promptly (and aggressively) relocates them back to the correct section. The point is clear. He wants to be realized and identified by more than his race, stereotyped or not, and he wants the same for all black Americans. He’s tired of the oversimplicity of what “black” means to everyone, which is ultimately the “American fiction” the title is referring to.

The subtle reference to Barfield comes whenever Monk is in his agent’s office. In multiple scenes, the two are seen talking back and forth over a desk, on which rests a pile of books—or rather copies of one book in particular: A Barfield Reader.[1] In one of these scenes, as Monk is on the phone with publishers in his agent’s office, he amps up his personal joke by demanding a title change to a popular four-letter word (I’ll let the reader discern which one) that he thought would send them running. When they inevitably accept his suggestion, he bends down and touches his forehead to the pile of Barfield Readers in despair.

Whether the choice of A Barfield Reader was intentional to make a point for the few viewers who might know Barfield, or whether it was simply a convenient prop that was sitting first in alphabetical order in a warehouse, would be interesting to know, but it is largely unimportant. The question that was posed to me in response remains relevant: what might Barfield’s theory of meaning have to say when put in dialogue with the racial satire of American Fiction? An interesting question, and one which I hope to partially answer, but it appeared necessary to consider the question a bit more broadly to lay the necessary groundwork. Considered in this essay is the question, what does the underappreciated mental powerhouse of Owen Barfield have to say regarding race as a whole?

Barfield, perhaps surprisingly, gives one much to chew on in relation to the subject of race, if we’re willing to follow his theories to the end and apply them. He’s nowhere, as far as I can recall, wholly explicit in his thought on what we might call “the race question” today, but he does have plenty to say regarding the philosophical assumptions that we tend to bring to the table when discussing it. It’s my conviction that if we allow Barfield to peel away our ingrained materialistic assumptions about the world, primarily through his language theory and epistemology, this leads one to a radically re-worked view of, not only race but everything else as well. With that said, the reader should be warned. We are discussing Barfield, so the road (though perhaps it is as short as I can make it) will not be straight. Barfield’s gift was always taking the reader along the roundabout way, where you follow his thought like a humming bird this way and that until, at the end, you find your perspective somehow changed, though you may not yet be able to define how.

It appears by all evidence that the idea of race, as it is discussed in universities and popular political and social dialogue today, is itself a social phenomenon. Meaning it’s a convenient informal organizing method, but that it ultimately fails if applied universally like the scientific method. But we’ve got to be careful here. When we say that something is a social phenomenon, we’re often tempted to dismiss it as unimportant or arbitrary. Say what we will, race has become part of our joint mythology. But I do emphasize that Barfield would apply the term to a kind of mythology. As anchored as it is in the perception of physical trait differences like skin color, hair texture, and eye shape, and as tightly connected as it is to cultural affiliation, it will likely remain part of our mythology because of the felt “science” of it.

But it feels scientific to the average person precisely because we base it on physical perception. It feels concrete. But any pursuit of pre-historical origins of race will lead one to the conclusion that it is far less defined than we imagine. But more than that, Barfield will never let us rest in a purely materialistic explanation for anything, and this includes history. It is too simple. It’s here, with this “felt science,” and with its association with a vague kind of evolutionary history, that Barfield picks up his sledgehammer and gets to work.

Barfield’s view of evolution can perhaps be said to be the opposite of Darwin’s, no matter what re-worked version of Darwin’s theory we use. Any time someone mentions the theory of evolution, we think of matter moving from inorganic to organic, upward from the bare physical to the higher nuances of thought and life. C. S. Lewis calls this popular concept “scientism,” and he classifies it as a mythology, based, not on science, but on a certain poetical perspective, its seed having germinated decades before Darwin, taking form in the poetry of Keats and the music of Wagner. It uses bits of Darwin to add credibility to it, but it cannot be said to be based on him, considering it was there before him. Darwin’s scientific theory is much humbler by comparison, but even beyond that, Barfield says instead that we should see history as an evolution of consciousness, not as an evolution of matter. Admittedly, his evolutionary philosophy would take a book to expound, but it is enough for our purposes to show that Barfield will not agree with our school theories of evolution.

Thus, the first idol that Barfield would have us smash to gain a right perspective of race is “scientism.” The second is correlated to it on the linguistic front: literalism.

Barfield’s bread and butter was language, and it is through language that he arrives at his philosophy of consciousness and meaning. This ultimately leads him to something of a radical perspective on the unity of humanity, which has direct bearing on what he believes about race. His theory on language provided the foundation for much of his philosophy, influencing both Lewis and Tolkien in their own theories of language. But, between all the major Inklings, there was a joint recognition that literalism was not only overly simplistic but was false by implication.

The theory of language popularized by I. A. Richards was that almost all language could be boiled down into two classes: the emotive, which arouses a feeling as its sole aim, and the referential, which references the “real” to provide concrete or direct or “scientific” understanding. This theory was one which the Inklings at large often criticized. In trying to divide language into emotive words and descriptive words, we end by turning all language into emotive terms. Thought of another way, it’s an attempt to divide all words into subjective and objective. But once you do this, there is nothing that you cannot define as subjective fancy. This is one popular application of Barfield’s belief that the very distinction between subjective and objective is illusory and something of an historical accident.

Barfield argues in his monumental work titled Saving the Appearances that materialism, and in turn literalism, has burrowed its way so deep into the modern western psyche that, as of two or three centuries ago, we began to view the universe as something completely and wholly independent from us—as something that is not made up of “representations” to the mind or something we intimately “participate” in, but as something that is completely self-sustaining with its own inherent meaning and function. He finds this to be a great blunder, explicitly calling any object an “idol” that is perceived as being completely independent of us:

A representation [a thing presented to the senses as an object], which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate—ought not to be called a representation. It is an idol. Thus, the phenomena themselves are idols, when they are imagined as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in fact only pertain to the unrepresented.[2]

Barfield bases this argument largely on the findings of physics, combining it with his linguistic philosophy.

When he refers to a “representation,” Barfield is just talking about a “thing.” He believes that imagination works in the mind to perform figuration, which is how we see a table, for instance, as a single object rather than a mess of particles. We “figurate” it into a thing and we do this unconsciously via memory and imagination. It is the method by which we perceive the world as made up of objects. Nothing, even on the purely scientific level, is as simple as it appears, especially those things which we take for granted in their very simplicity. Race is no different in this capacity. The only difference is that it is a concept rather than a physical thing. But obviously a concept, no less than a concrete object, can be an idol if it represents something false. American Fiction, on this front of race being something of an idol, is trying to say something similar, though perhaps not with the same broad application or philosophical intent.

For Barfield, language reveals how the mind works and this, in turn, reveals a form of epistemology. It is his theory of epistemology that essentially leads him to the radical unifying perspective of humanity mentioned above. Where the average person says that we gain knowledge through scientific verification, Barfield instead argues that our way of knowing anything is through “participation,” and this goes for how we perceive during the process of said verification or when reading poetry or when sitting in nature or through anything else. We might say instead that we interact with the world purely through participation founded upon a more primal participation of metaphor—through an intricate process of the mind deriving and applying meaning through associative similarities and differences. Though one might not use words like imagination or metaphor in defining it, anyone who studies the nature of consciousness inevitably seems to come to this conclusion. Thus, literalism turns out to be something of a dead, lifeless thing.

And here comes the crux of it all. For Barfield, words are not referent symbols related to isolated objects “out there,” but are instead “symbols of consciousness.”[3] If we define “real” by how literal something is, then “race” is not real at all, let alone anything else. But if we define “real” by correct associative meaning with the world around us so that it’s meaning is true rather than false—all of this done through the imagination—then we’re still left with our sanity.

But there’s no denying that the type of universe we’re left with at that point, so drenched in the life of consciousness itself, is one which is a great deal more spiritual than the alternative. It’s a world infused and dependent upon Thought or Mind. That is not to say, “purely subjective.” Barfield was not an Idealist. He says (following the words of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz) that matter is ultimately “a kind of coagulation or concentration of spirit.”[4] And Barfield would say that the house of Thought—immanent; reality itself—is where Christ, the Divine Logos, has His throne. It is from there that the world of archetypes flows, and it is the center from which Man (differentiated from men) operates.

I wish to linger on the last few words, because that last point on mankind as a unity is what we have been working toward throughout this essay. Indeed, Barfield believed there was a profound unity of spirit in mankind that united us not only with each other (he even believed that our personal thoughts could help orient other peoples’ thoughts through that spiritual connectedness) but also with the world around us. This is based on what he calls the “principle of living unity.”[5] His philosophy, obsessed as it was with unity and “participation,” comes across almost Eastern by comparison to the other Inklings. This implies that it is the similarities between tribes that are of the greatest importance to him. Though we should study the differences between cultures and tribes and times, it is the “human race” rather than a collection of “races” that deserves our greatest attention. For Barfield believed in a very real connection between minds, not unlike Jung’s collective unconscious.

But to return to American Fiction, we might say that its satirical argument is that we have set up a false image of “Black America” (and, by a necessary contrast, “White America”) and that we, in different ways, make offerings to it, keeping its image alive, whatever the motive. The apparent remedy ascribed by both it and Barfield is that we’ve got to smash the idols. This is quite plainly the central premise of the film. My argument is that Barfield would say we’ve got to smash the idol because “race” amounts to far less than we imagine, and we ascribe it power it does not really have.

An argument could be made that American Fiction ends up questioning the protagonist’s annoyance at constantly being defined exclusively by his race and the related stereotypes. There’s a particular conversation later in the film that he has with another author that might suggest this when he’s essentially told that he should be accepting rather than critical of the situation, but the ending of the film steers directly into the broader joke that the whole movie has been telling throughout. The joke (or at least one of them) being that racial stereotypes, and what might be called racial pigeonholing, are not themselves based on any real semblance of truth and often are most evident in people trying hardest to fight them. They’re convenient if also impossibly simplistic handicaps many use to organize the world around them. It cannot really be said that the film makes the argument that race as a concept is thus inconsequential or even false, but both it and Barfield are reaching for a unity beyond racial groups, or for an allowance to be defined by the human scale rather than the “racial” scale. Where the former seems to be saying, “stop resorting to this scheme to explain the world,” the latter is saying, “here’s a hammer to smash it.” But more than that, Barfield is saying, “not only is your neighbor your brother; he is part of your very being in a deeper and profounder sense than you’ll likely ever understand.”

There is not room to expound on Barfield’s anthroposophical view of reincarnation, which really ought to be mentioned, considering its implications in finding a fuller unity of the human experience in history; or to take a deeper plunge into what he means when he refers to Man rather than men. A passing reference here will have to suffice. I will simply end by saying that, though I don’t always align with Barfield’s philosophy (reincarnation being one such divergence), I’ve found in myself a growing sense that an emphasis on the common experience of humanity, beyond tribe and creed, is what’s needed most of all in our ongoing dialogue about race. That’s not to say there aren’t differences between cultures, based geographically or historically, but that we should be willing to give up some of our own unconscious affiliations to more fully see, participate in, and appreciate the human race as a whole. To say there is a connectedness between all humanity is not to say everyone is like us. (Barfield had a lot to say about this perceptual failure. He called it “logomorphism.”)[6] It is instead to say that humanity is bigger than any one single group at any one single time. According to Barfield, it transcends not only culture but time itself. For myself, I find that worth thinking about, if only for the humility it instills.

Collin Massie is a lover of all things Lewis and Tolkien. An English graduate of Western Kentucky University, working to pursue an MA through Northwind Seminary, he has published a variety of poetry and essays. One such essay on Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis is scheduled to be published in the Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society.

The Editor would like to thank Sorina Higgins and Owen A. Barfield for recommending American Fiction as a Barfield study topic.

Post-publication Note: For the Lamp-Post piece, see Collin Massie, “Paradox and Polarity: Shrinking the Gaps Between C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield on the Subject of the Imagination.” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society 42, no. 2 (2024): 25–39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48827297. A link to the full issue has been added the byline above.

[1] A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield edited by G.B. Tennyson, Wesleyan University Press, 1999.

[2] Saving the Appearances, Wesleyan University Press, 1988, p. 62.

[3] Poetic Diction, Wesleyan University Press, 1973, 182.

[4] The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays, Wesleyan University Press, 145.

[5] Poetic Diction, 87.

[6] Poetic Diction, 204.