A term to describe a story’s unique essence or atmosphere.

Discussing the appeal of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, in The Telegraph, Daniel Hannan cited a dissertation by Michael Ward which argues that each of the Narnia books corresponds with one of the spheres of Ptolemaic astrology, and observed:

Almost every adult critic, from Tolkien onwards, has complained about the appearance of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It looks like a category error, a mixing of mythological milieus. But a young reader doesn’t stop to wonder why a Christianised Norse figure is mingling with fauns, dryads and talking beavers. What strikes the child is the jolliness, the redness, the kingliness – in a word, the joviality – of the scene. For Ward’s argument is that Jupiter exerts his princely pull on the first Narnia book, as Mars influences Prince Caspian, the Sun The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and so on.

Of course, no young child will be conscious of such symbolism. Nor will any adult unfamiliar with Ward’s treatise: the link eluded critics for 50 years. But Lewis was being deliberately subtle. He aimed to work on his readers between the lines, as it were: to establish in each book a particular taste or Gestalt quality. Michael Ward has an impressive word-hoard, but can find nothing in it apt to this concept. So he invents a new word: “donegality.”

Fine writing is difficult to précis, and it’s impossible, in a 500-word blog, to do justice to 200 pages of intense prose. My purpose, in any case, isn’t to rehearse Ward’s argument, simply to observe the way in which the “donegality” of a book affects a young reader. Children are not carried away by Lewis’s plots, still less by his Christian allegories. What stays with them, rather, is the imagery: a faun carrying his umbrella through the snow, a lantern in the wilderness, a statue coming to life.

In an October 2009 article for The Times of London, Tom Wright explained how Ward borrowed the term donegality from C.S. Lewis:

Lewis the critic referred to the “atmosphere” of a story as the “kappa element,” taking the term from the initial Greek letter of krypton (hidden). Ward, developing this, picks up a further coinage. Speaking of the “taste” or “atmosphere” of a particular place, Lewis says that we go back “to Donegal [a favourite of his] for its Donegality and London for its Londonness.” Ward boldly gives the word “donegality” a new metonymic meaning: not now the flavour of Donegal itself, but the idea of a particular flavour, atmosphere or mood, imparted to or expressed through a story. Lewis, he suggests, was attempting something quite new, calling for new terminology:

For the quality or atmosphere which arises out of a novel or a romance we may conveniently go on using such terms as “quality” and “atmosphere”, but for the deliberate encapsulation . . . of a pre-existing quality along with the presentation of an individual, Christological incarnation of that quality, it will be useful to have a new term.