Hiding fandom in the underwear drawer since 1977

 

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.