Narnia Meta

[rthstewart]

There's an interesting article on Buzz Feed I spotted today -- maybe you've already seen it, but I hadn't until this AM.  I find, in particular, this paragraph illuminating:

 

But this is the Chronicles’ greatest, redeeming strength: that sowed within are the seeds of their own dogma’s destruction. The machinery, the logic, of Narnia itself resists its author’s heavy-handed lessons. Though Lewis pushes Susan out of heaven, he cannot take back the founding tenet of the series — that “once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia” — which is truer than her absence. The commonplace wisdom of “jolly decent” and “jolly rotten” ways of being in the world that transcend gender and culture and age and even species manages to overthrow, in a short aside, the very Christianity Lewis tries to spoonfeed his readers with. Goodness, not faith, rules. The mean-spirited, bigoted, and pedantic pieces of the books still exist, but in fundamental tension with Narnia itself. The Chronicles, I believe, have a will of their own.

This is so true.  As anyone who has struggled with Lewis' conflicting messages, with the details of the food but not the geography, the problem of Susan, no linguistic shifty, no technological advancement,  Aslan's occasional arbitrary cruelty, this is very reassuring.  Narnia, the best of Narnia, transcends the human limits of its creator and even its sometimes not so benevolent lion deity.

Comments

[branchandroot]

I'm constantly amazed that Lewis is considered any kind of theologian. As far as I can see, he didn't ever really understand belief fully. He was never an atheist, he was a theist having an extended crisis of faith, and the fact that he could imagine he /was/ an atheist (that he could aggressively take up that identity in order to proselytize against it) suggests to me that he didn't really understand theism itself. What is the meaning of 'yes' without 'no' is one of those really basic philosophical questions, and if he never really understood what it /means/ to say no how could he describe a meaningful yes?

[rthstewart]

Absolutely. The more time I spend in the Chronicles and this fandom, the more I really wonder at Lewis' so-called Christianity. I have seen by people who are way better at this than I am (like you) that in fact he really was a lousy theologian. He knew mythology, tumult, sensuality and grief, he found peace in a faith. I really understand more of how frustrated Tolkien would have been. I have a reader recently who took me to task over Morgan and whether it was right for someone to be angry at this manifestation of God for so long. And the more I think on it, the more time I spend in the verse, the less comfortable I am with Aslan = God/Jesus. Just no. Aslan as god, sure, and our mythologies are full of gods doing all sorts of nasty things to poor clueless humans.

I liked the piece because it really got at some of the fundamental inconsistencies that exist in the Chronicles, and that real joy that comes from a treasured piece of literature when you are a kid. I mean, I didn't dress up as Lucy Pevensie for Halloween, but I did for a book report. And when I was younger than that, I did make a point of wearing sensible shoes to and from school, just in case I got hauled into Narnia and had to trek across the country on some important quest.

[branchandroot]

That is the best reason /ever/ to wear sensible shoes to school.

And truly, I have no patience at all with people who project their particular brand of blind faith onto other people's struggles and questions. That's just the most appalling disrespect. Bad shit happens in life, and no one has any right to blame Morgan (or you for that matter) for being righteously pissed off over it, especially if the one demonstrably to blame has no better reason to offer than "well, because". Greater good and big causes are not a reason to not be righteously pissed off if you happen to be caught in the gears and paying the price for a lot of unrelated someone elses. I think the only thing that reconciles me at all to your reading of Aslan is that he /does/ accept being whacked repeatedly with a candlestick; I expect he knows he deserves it.

[cofax7]

Aslan as god, sure, and our mythologies are full of gods doing all sorts of nasty things to poor clueless humans.

Indeed. There's a reason I have an "Aslan is a sneaky bastard" tag somewhere.

I loved that essay: she really gets the joy and wonder that an early reading of the Chronicles so often embedded in us. To this day, if I turn a certain way down a wooded trail, if the trees & light are right, I think that this might be the way to Narnia.