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