Five Views of the Inklings

Influence among artists is a complex and poorly-understood phenomenon.  Diana Pavlac Glyer took an excellent shot at understanding influence among the Inklings in The Company They Keep. This post is a graphical expression of her work; no additional scholarship has been committed. I had grandiose plans for network analysis of the Inklings and their influence on each other, but I hit an insurmountable stumbling block: the Inklings didn’t write very much.  It’s folly to apply big-data analytical techniques to a small set of things, so I’m just drawing pictures here. 

As anyone would anticipate, C.S. Lewis is at the center of things, almost any way we choose to plot the graph.  Here, the size of the dot indicates the number of connections to other people. There is one link per mention in TCTK, so when there are lots of mentions, the links look like a fat blob, not a line.

All interactions among Inklings

This is a complicated network, but it can be analyzed into components. DPG cites Karen Burke LeFevre’s book Invention as a Social Act, which identifies four different types of influence that authors (or any creators, actually) can have on one another: Resonator, Opponent, Editor, and Collaborator. To these four, DPG adds a writer-specific category: dedications.

Resonators are not just cheerleaders; they can bring out the best in an author by insisting they produce nothing less.  C.S. Lewis was the champion resonator.

Resonators among the Inklings

Opponents are those who poke holes in the weak parts of a work before you finish it, so prospective publishers don’t do it.  These are not so common among such supportive friends as the Inklings, so the network is much smaller.  The line from HD to JRRT is a mathematical representation of the most famous quotation in all of Inklings scholarship.

Opponent relationships among the Inklings

Editors are editors. Again, C.S. Lewis is the nexus around which everyone else is arranged. Christopher Tolkien only has one line to his father, because DPG considers him more of a collaborator than an editor of the History of Middle-earth.  “All” is there in the bottom-right corner because J.R.R. Tolkien gave credit to the whole group for helping edit The Lord of the Rings. It’s not clear whom exactly he meant, so I didn’t resolve it into individuals.

Editorial relationships among the Inklings

Collaborators are collaborators. This is a dense network because I drew a line between any two Inklings whose names appeared as authors on a single work. For example, Essays Presented to Charles Williams had five Inkling authors which yields ten lines. C.S. Lewis is not so central, because he’s only one of a group of equals in these cases. Here also is the dense blob of links between the Tolkiens, one line for each of the posthumous volumes of the Legendarium. Various Festschriften are most of the other lines in this graph, so ironically it is dominated by books that were written after the Inklings had dissolved. 

Collaboration relationships among the Inklings

Dedications are another Lewicentric network. Each of the the three most-prolific authors dedicated a work to the Inklings as a group.  Without the node labelled “All”, this graph would almost look like a chain, mathematically trivial.

Dedication relationships between Inklings

Conclusion

The Inklings were a large and not-well-defined group. Writers’ groups tend to be much smaller.

“Collaborative circles usually consist of three to five members; only rarely do they consist of more than seven or eight.”

Michael P Farrell, Collaborative Circles (cited in TCTK)

Despite its size and fluidity, the group we know as the Inklings was among the most influential writers’ groups of the twentieth century. The graphs above give a hint how this could be. Resolving the network into LeFevre’s various types of artistic influence shows that the Inklings can profitably be thought of as a superposition of normal-sized collaborations, one for each type of influence.  The various graphs share C.S. Lewis as the most important member measured by degree centrality, and also by who furnished the meeting space. The other members of each sub-network vary according to type. Like a refracting crystal, the network representation of the Inklings presents a different shape according to the perspective from which we choose to look at it, but each shape shares the important features of the underlying form.

Caveat:  as DPG says, “The examples of encouragement conflict, editing, collaborating, and referencing described in this book are not intended to form a comprehensive or exhaustive list.” (TCTK, p.213) If she left it out, so did I. Apart from dedications, I have omitted the section about “referents”, where characters in one Inkling’s work are based on another Inkling. Referential relationships as DPG described them are so amorphous that indicating them with lines on a graph seemed incorrect.

Works Cited

Farrell, Michael P. Collaborative circles: Friendship dynamics and creative work. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007.
LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a social act. SIU Press, 1986.