Reading Narnia in My Late Twenties
A couple of years ago I reread the Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s fantasy novels by the British literary figure C.S. Lewis. The series was one that I devoured and greatly enjoyed as a preteen, although it was never as personally important to me as the work of Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien, and I became interested in seeing how it held up when I became aware of the sizeable, politically and intellectually fractious fandom that the books have online. Moreover, I’ve been reading a lot of Lewis’s non-Narnia writing over the past several years, mostly due to having fallen in with a number of people who greatly admired it when I was in graduate school.
The Narnia books are the only works that Lewis wrote for children; the rest of his literary output consists of academic writing on medieval and Renaissance literature, works of popular philosophy and theology of varying but mostly high quality, and a variety of science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories for adults, some of them excellent and some of them less so. Lewis had become an atheist in his youth and returned to the practice of Christianity in his early thirties, and much of his work assumes a culturally Anglican but philosophically skeptical audience. There is a lot to admire about his gentle, humane perspective and writing style; however, the man and the writing are far from perfect. Some of his work is gallingly sexist or racist; some is poorly-argued or about subject matter of dubious relevance or importance; some of his science fiction short stories in particular are much more amoral than the rest of his body of work. For the most part he is “to the left of” Tolkien politically and theologically, but he is still firmly right-of-center and he talks about current political and social issues a lot more than Tolkien does.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a cottage industry emerged, particularly in Britain, of criticizing the Narnia books on all sorts of grounds related to Lewis’s religious beliefs, political positions, and personal prejudices as expressed in the books’ writing style, thematic emphases, and plots. Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials series of young adult fantasy novels, emerged as a particularly fierce critic of the books’ Christian thematic content—one of the connecting threads of all seven novels is Aslan, the Great Lion, the creator of the Narnian world and a manifestation of Jesus Christ in a world populated by talking animals, as whose agent most of the protagonists act. I do not feel like addressing these criticisms in depth and checking their validity was not one of my reasons for rereading the books; however, I do acknowledge them and believe that some (but not all) of them are responding to genuine problems with the books and with Lewis’s worldview.
The Narnia books were published in one order but have a different internal chronology. I read them according to the internal chronology; this is apparently how Lewis preferred that they be read, but he did not have particularly strong feelings on the subject and many fans elect to ignore him. Personally I think that both orders have their strong points and weak points; first-time readers will better follow the overall narrative by reading the books in chronological order, but the order of publication carries on a more complete plotline for the first four books.
The first thing that struck me about the books is that their casual, conversational style is clearly intended for children—contrast the stark-yet-prolix style of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—but more literate children, or at least children more willing to consult a dictionary, than children’s authors today seem to assume exist. (I myself had to look up the word “apophthegm” and a slang use of the word “brick” that is dated now but might not have been at the time that the books were written.) The Magician’s Nephew, the book that I started with, involves human children from around the turn of the twentieth century being present at the Narnian world’s creation; travel between different universes was not the commonplace in science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s when the books were published that it is now, so Lewis spends some time explaining the concept in addition to showing instances of it. The setting’s earthly timeframe is introduced with observations like “schools were usually nastier than now. But meals were nicer.” Child readers are invited to imagine themselves in the days “when your grandfather was a child” via comparisons involving things with which they will be familiar.
The comparisons of various things in the stories to the British education system in particular persist throughout the books; one of the few good things Lewis has to say about the culture of Calormen, an Arabian Nightsistan-type country in the Narnian universe that figures prominently in two of the later books, is that “story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.” British educational culture in the 1940s, which was transitioning to more humane disciplinary methods and a more modern, science-oriented curriculum relative to the “nasty” schools of the 1890s and 1900s, also comes in for attack. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, which feature children transported to Narnia from around the end of or just slightly after World War II, involve a progressive boarding school called “Experiment House” with discipline so lax that it produces loathsome priggish brats at best and sadistic bullies at worst. Lewis’s depiction of Experiment House is part of a sustained satirical criticism of the social policies of the postwar Labour Party government, one in which he also ridicules as faddish the progressive convictions (vegetarianism, republicanism, pacifism, etc.) of one of the main characters’ parents and laments the decline and eventual demolition of a previously well-off character’s country house. One wonders what possible educational philosophy Lewis would have presented positively in the books. Perhaps he was simply mindful of his audience and aware that most children would rather not be in school than be there, unless they are abused or very lonely at home.
In addition to being better able to perceive the political content in Lewis’s depictions of the education system in the books now that I’ve done considerable time at every level of my own country’s education system myself, I’m also a lot more conscious of the books’ circumscription of sexuality. Obviously a children’s book series can’t and shouldn’t be sexually explicit, but it’s remarkable how little even implied sexuality figures into the lives of even the adult characters. This is something that Pullman criticized fiercely due to his inference of an attack on female sexuality in particular from the fact that one major character, Susan Pevensie, is absent in The Last Battle because she would rather focus on “nylons and lipstick and invitations” than on coming to Narnia’s aid in the world’s death throes. (Personally, I think that the idea that the only reason a twenty-one-year-old woman would be interested in looking put-together and getting invited to things is that she’s looking for sexual partners is itself profoundly sexist, although there are other things about Lewis’s decision to single out Susan in The Last Battle that I do take exception to.)
There is one notable exception to this feature of the books, also involving Susan. In The Horse and His Boy, which is the first (and less racist) of the two books to feature Calormen, Susan and her three siblings have been living in Narnia ruling it as kings and queens for fourteen years and have grown to adulthood there (which will subsequently be reversed when they finally return to England). Susan is contemplating a political marriage to Prince Rabadash, the eldest son and heir of the Tisroc (may he live forever!) of Calormen. At first, when Rabadash visits her in the capital of Narnia, she’s charmed and more than willing to go through with the marriage; however, when she visits him in the Calormene capital, she finds that at home he is a petty, capricious tyrant, and tries to call the marriage off. At this point Rabadash attempts to imprison her in Calormen and she and her brother Edmund have to escape via subterfuge. Rabadash then spends the rest of the book attempting to invade Narnia to abduct her. He insists that Susan is obliged to become his wife because he wants her to and because he perceives it as good for Narnia to be allied to Calormen; when discussing the fact that she sees things very differently, he calls Susan a “false jade.” Most readers will take this term to mean something like “liar” or “deceiver” but in fact it is an archaic euphemism for a prostitute—shades of self-ordained “nice guys” today who call women “sluts” and “whores” for not wanting to have sex with them. Rabadash, naturally, is resoundingly defeated by the book’s heroes and heroines. The Horse and His Boy’s perceptiveness about this particular type of male sexual mentality, to my mind, covers a multitude of the series’ sociopolitical sins.
I was surprised by how much I liked The Horse and His Boy in general. It is an atypical Narnia book in a number of different respects. A good friend of mine says it feels the most like a “typical fantasy novel” in that it is set entirely in the Narnian world, has relatively scanty religious content, and has protagonists who take their quest on themselves rather than having it handed down to them as a mission from God. It’s a story about freedom and slavery, and a story about knowing that the place where you are or the place where you are from is not really “home.” Our male protagonist Shasta is fleeing being sold into slavery by his cruel foster-father in Calormen; our female protagonist Aravis, a Calormene noblewoman, is fleeing a forced marriage to a powerful man several times her age. Through coincidence (which does not actually exist in Narnia and is instead the will of Aslan), both Shasta and Aravis have horses in their lives who are in fact Narnian Talking Horses enslaved in Calormen, and the four of them set out for freedom in Narnia together.
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The Horse and His Boy represents Narnia as Anglo to the point of overt cultural chauvinism against the generically Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Calormen, a representation that becomes explicitly racialized in the second book to feature Calormen, the series finale The Last Battle. However, the themes in this book resonated strongly with me, as someone who has had a hard time making a “home”—family and friends and gainful and meaningful work and a rich religious life—in any of the various places I have lived. Although I have never been enslaved, I have definitely felt unfree in other ways and believe that there is something inimical to true freedom in the society in which I live. Calormen is, of course, a symbol appropriately overt and unmistakable for young readers—slavery and rigid hierarchies in general pervade every element of the empire’s society. “For in [the Calormene capital] Tashbaan there is only one traffic regulation,” says Lewis, “which is that everyone who is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is more important; unless you want a cut from a whip or a punch from the butt end of a spear.” Even a generally sympathetic Calormene character at one point casually threatens to beat her slaves to death, and Shasta is not initially appalled by the idea of his foster-father selling him into slavery because for all he knows his buyer might be less abusive. C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to a fan that The Horse and His Boy is about “the calling and conversion of the heathen”; I prefer Lewis’s still-living stepson Douglas Gresham’s belief that it is about the experience of longing and the desire to be Someplace Else.
The Last Battle involves a Calormene invasion of Narnia under the aegis of a Narnian Talking Ape who sets up a phony Aslan to encourage Narnian collaboration with the invaders. The heresy that ultimately leads to the end of the Narnian world is the idea that Aslan and the Calormene god Tash are the same being. Many people have a difficult time understanding the book’s interfaith stance, largely because Lewis was writing before today’s main positions on interfaith issues were fully developed. Muslim readers have seen something sinister in the book’s depiction of Tash and Aslan as not only separate but antithetical; since Calormene society is generically “Middle Eastern,” could this not be taken as an allegorical repudiation of the idea (accepted in most circles but rejected by many Evangelicals and some very conservative Catholics) that the Abrahamic religions are worshipping the same God? But the Calormenes are not monotheists, and Tash has no real symbolic affinities with Allah; he’s described as a monstrous four-armed vulture-man, more akin to something out of pre-Abrahamic Semitic paganism or the Rigvedic pantheon than to the bodiless, appearance-less deity that Muslims confess. A devout worshipper of Tash is invited into Aslan’s paradise at the end of the book, because he sincerely and with a good heart sought the divine. But the book has absolutely nothing good to say about the worship of Tash as a religion, only about this particular devotee as an individual. The conventional interfaith stance that the book is closest to is probably inclusivism, which holds that members of religions other than that of the inclusivist can be saved, but not saved because their own religions are in themselves true. In online forums and social media sites there is much misunderstanding among Narnia fans of what exactly inclusivism entails and how it is different from other interfaith stances.
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The actual theology of the Narnia series is a little offbeat in general, and generates controversy even among conservative Christians who share most of Lewis’s sociopolitical hobbyhorses. Tolkien nominally disliked the books because of their magpieish mishmash of different real-world mythologies (as opposed to Tolkien’s attempt at self-consistency with his primarily Norse and Celtic influences), but I have read articles suggesting that he objected to their implied theology too. Some Evangelicals today object to the inclusivism in The Last Battle, which tends not to bother mainline Protestants or Catholics. Some Catholics object to the books’ fundamental premise that Jesus might take a nature other than humanity upon Himself in another world, which tends not to bother Protestants. Some mainline Protestants object to the gutless caricatures of philosophical liberalism in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, which tends not to bother Evangelicals or Catholics.
If I were asked to list three main theological concepts or premises present in The Chronicles of Narnia, here is what I would list:
1. An integral, organic connection between humanity and the natural world. Humans, when present in Narnia, rule over the various Talking Beasts and mythological creatures as kings and queens, but there is nevertheless a certain ontological equality between human and Talking Beast nature, and indeed between Aslan the Great Lion and Jesus the Son of Man. Talking Beasts can and in some cases do lose the ability to speak and reason and revert to being normal animals; at the beginning of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, certain normal animals are chosen to become the first Talking Beasts. This is also implicit in the books’ inclusion of Classical figures such as Bacchus, Silenus, and various nymphs and dryads; the “natural” paganisms of Classical Antiquity coexist with and operate under the umbrella of the “supernatural” truths of Christianity.
2. An emphasis on truth and reality. The Last Battle features a heavenly “real” version of Narnia in its final chapters, the phony Aslan is set up against the true Aslan, and the name of the Calormene who sought to serve Tash honestly and righteously is Emeth, Hebrew for “truth.” The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has “real water” that obviates the need for any other sustenance and enables its drinkers to look directly into the rising sun. In The Silver Chair Aslan is “The Real Lion.” Lewis wasn’t an empiricist and the series’ quasi-Platonism doesn’t have much of what people today would understand to be evidence to support it, but the books have no room or patience for postmodernity, relativism, or irony.
3. A portrayal of God as a partner, protector, and friend before He is a father or king. Lewis would of course never deny the majesty or transcendence of God, but Aslan is primarily someone to be friendly with rather than someone to obey. The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy are to a certain extent exceptions to this since the characters are less personally close to Aslan than the extended Pevensie family and friends who are the protagonists of the other five books.
Of course, there are numerous other theological ideas present and asserted within the books. The first core concept that I mention here is itself part of a wider celebration and affirmation of the goodness of creation and the real comforts of the world that extends throughout Lewis’s body of work. Michael Moorcock called Lewis and Tolkien’s writings “Epic Pooh” that had a lulling and complacency-inducing effect on the reader; this may have some merit, but Lewis genuinely believed that there was much about the world worth celebrating rather than simply buckling under and submitting to. He doesn’t see the world “sacramentally” in the way that a Catholic like Tolkien would—Lewis likes Pilgrim’s Progress too much for that, and there doesn’t even seem to be any equivalent to the Eucharist in Narnia—but he doesn’t have the occasional Protestant distaste for the phenomenal world either. In The Four Loves, not one of his best nonfiction writings, he speaks highly of St. Francis’s denomination of his body as “brother donkey,” because donkeys are next to impossible either to hate or to revere.
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The first-published and best-known Narnia novels are The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, about which I have not said much, less because they do not interest me and more because they will already be so familiar to most people with any interest in the series. They got pretty good movie adaptations in the late 2000s; they’re the only books to feature the “original” core human cast of the four Pevensie siblings (although each Pevensie has at least one further appearance). The movie adaptations have led to some odd interpretations of the characters among the series’ fans. Most notably, Susan, who in the books is a pragmatic and convention-minded person of average intelligence and slightly above-average drive, in the movies stays pragmatic but is also more book-smart and willful than Lewis wrote her. I do not want to pass judgment on whether the Narnia fandom’s adoption of Susan’s movie characterization has made most fans too inclined or not inclined enough to see the sexism in The Last Battle’s treatment of her. It certainly makes her relatively passive behavior in The Horse and His Boy (not appearing at the climactic battle nor interacting with Rabadash when he is finally punished for his misdeeds) harder to take into account.
There is a great deal more to be said about the Narnia books but these are the main impressions that come to mind at the time that I am writing this. In particular, there were several moments in The Horse and His Boy and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in particular that were deeply meaningful to me as I read them but that I don’t really wish to discuss at any length in an essay like this. The two that come to mind right now are Aslan’s declaration of his steadfast presence in main male protagonist Shasta’s life in the former book and Lucy Pevensie’s ships-in-the-night instant feeling of kinship with a “fish-herdess” in an underwater kingdom in the latter. Maybe someday I will be more willing to address my feelings about these scenes logically and discursively. In that case I will have taken a great step towards fully understanding my own feelings on this touchstone series in the history of children’s fantasy literature.