Thoughts on the Prisoner of Narnia
<p>Since writing the essay <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=231'>C.S.  Lewis is morally<br />
incoherent</a> I have finished rereading the entire Narnia series.  I<br />
could go on at length about how the writing deteriorates as Lewis&#8217;s<br />
imaginative impulse is more and more smothered by the clanking and<br />
wheezing of his allegory machine, but Adam Gopnik makes the point<br />
better than I could in <a href='http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/051121crat_atlarge'>Prisoner<br />
of Narnia</a>.</p>
<p><span id="more-247"></span></p>
<p>Gopnik is particularly spot-on when he describes Lewis&#8217;s enthusiasts:</p>
<blockquote><p>
Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological<br />
reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to<br />
yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the<br />
enthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws<br />
another right hook at the rationalist that they don&#8217;t notice that the<br />
rationalist isn&#8217;t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends<br />
have long since left the building.
</p></blockquote>
<p>I could be the rationalist in this analogy.  I admire the<br />
<cite>Screwtape Letters</cite> as a marvellous piece of writing,<br />
probably the most effective single Christian apologetic of the 20th<br />
century, but as an argument it completely fails to affect me; Lewis<br />
treats as deep mysteries issues that I think are obvious, and glides<br />
over or ignores entirely the questions I find most interesting.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve met a number of Christians who are convinced his arguments<br />
<em>should</em> affect me, though, and seem genuinely puzzled when<br />
they don&#8217;t. The brutal truth is that Lewis was a primitive thinker, a<br />
fabulist who substituted spiritual/emotional passion for philosophical<br />
analysis and never clearly understood that he wasn&#8217;t achieving the<br />
latter.</p>
<p>Here again, Gopnik is both sympathetic and mercilessly exact:</p>
<blockquote><p>
His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell<br />
of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the<br />
stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held<br />
the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Gopnik never unpacks this analogy, but its elements are plain.  The<br />
cage was Lewis&#8217;s Christian religiosity; the key was the pagan<br />
enthusiasm and wonder of his childhood; and the end was that last<br />
portion of his life during which he wrote <cite>Til We Have<br />
Faces</cite>, a re-paganized mythological examination of all the<br />
questions that most obsessed him.  No part of his journey ever took<br />
place at the level of philosophy; it was all fable, all spirit-quest,<br />
all psychodrama occasionally dressed up in the language of intellectual<br />
argument but never really at home there.</p>
<p>Gopnik drops the ball only once:</p>
<blockquote><p>
A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into<br />
a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert.  It sounds like the usual<br />
story. What was special about Lewis was that, throughout it all, he<br />
kept an inner life.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Gopnik&#8217;s description of &#8220;the usual story&#8221; is more awfully truthful<br />
than most Americans can know; I actually went to a British day school<br />
in the 1960s (it happened to be located outside Rome, but that&#8217;s a<br />
detail) and the decaying end of the same tradition that had warped<br />
Lewis fifty years before was still quite unpleasant enough.  But<br />
Gopnik is wrong in thinking Lewis was exceptional for maintaining an<br />
inner life; most public-school boys did, even if only as a form of<br />
escape. No; what was exceptional about Lewis came later, when he<br />
converted to Christianity in 1931 for reasons that were desperately<br />
wrong from any Christian point of view.</p>
<p>Here again, Gopnik is clear-eyed:</p>
<blockquote><p>
This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for<br />
millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between<br />
pagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the<br />
<em>likeness</em> of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even<br />
Victorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of<br />
an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating<br />
too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep<br />
himself from doing it again. Lewis didn&#8217;t embrace Christianity because<br />
he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it<br />
would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God&#8217;s own<br />
bakery.
</p></blockquote>
<p>The mythological arc of Lewis&#8217;s work, the arc that ends with<br />
<cite>Til We Have Faces</cite>, makes it clear that this account is<br />
correct.  And from a pagan point of view (certainly a neopagan one<br />
like mine) cozying up to a god because that will keep the cake coming<br />
is eminently reasonable.  The pagan bargain between god and human is<br />
an exchange of value, adoration given for power returned.  But within<br />
an Augustinian Christian point of view this is horribly backwards:<br />
conversion is supposed to be all about submission to the will of God<br />
and what I have elsewhere described as installing a <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=165'>sin/guilt/thoughtcrime<br />
monitor</a> in one&#8217;s own head.  There is no evidence that Lewis<br />
ever did this; he doesn&#8217;t seem, for example, to have suffered the<br />
pangs of conscience one might have expected from a Christian<br />
enthusiast over committing adultery.</p>
<p>Thus, for all his enthusiasm, Lewis was a poor Christian, and an<br />
uneven (and ultimately unsuccessful) evangelist.  J.R.R. Tolkien, who had<br />
been reponsible for Lewis&#8217;s conversion, understood this and was much<br />
bothered by it.  When Gopnik reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury<br />
was offended by Lewis&#8217;s &#8220;vulgar, bullying&#8221; religiosity there is no reason<br />
at all for us to doubt that, either.</p>
<p>As regards the quality of Lewis&#8217;s writing, it was his Christianity<br />
that damaged him, not his pagan instincts.  As Gopnik writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>
Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the<br />
allegorical&mdash;his conscience as a writer lets him see<br />
that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just<br />
as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the<br />
marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with<br />
belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or,<br />
at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just<br />
what it&#8217;s supposed to say.
</p></blockquote>
<p>This describes with laser-beam precision what&#8217;s wrong with the<br />
Narnia books.  It&#8217;s already a serious problem in <cite>The Lion, the<br />
Witch, and the Wardrobe</cite> and it gets worse as the series<br />
progresses.  By <cite>The Last Battle</cite> all that&#8217;s left of<br />
whatever narrative coherence Narnia originally possessed is a series<br />
of gorgeous imagistic set pieces. Lewis tries so obsessively to pump<br />
these full of allegorical meaning that, paradoxically, they lose all<br />
meaning.  The clanking of the allegory machine is just too<br />
audible.</p>
<p>Even children pick up on this; I did, though when I first read the<br />
books I didn&#8217;t understand what I was feeling. As Gopnik puts it:</p>
<blockquote><p>
The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known,<br />
diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly<br />
religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least<br />
successfully, allegorized.
</p></blockquote>
<p>I could dispute some of the pronouncements with which Gopnik<br />
finishes his essay; not being a neopagan himself, he crams pagan<br />
mysticism into an implicitly dualist framework, and thus understands it<br />
less well than he thinks he does.  But when he writes</p>
<blockquote><p>
Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none<br />
of their light because someone lit the candle.
</p></blockquote>
<p>he is dead on target.  Tolkien understood this; Lewis never did.  That&#8217;s<br />
why, at fifty years&#8217; remove, it is Lewis who stands in Tolkien&#8217;s shadow<br />
as a fantasist and not the other way around.</p>
