Leo, Maleficent and Armoire.

What I'm doing here is reblogging something that was originally diddle-punked a few years back: and I'm taking the opportunity to revisit what I argued. The various, often perceptive comments to my original post started a process by which I rethought my perspective on this novel; time has continued that process. So this repost is after the manner (if you can bear the sublime-to-the-ridiculousness of the comparison) of Le Guin's 'Is Gender Necessary? Redux' (1976/87) essay. Following that lead, I'll gloss the paragraphs where my thinking has shifted.

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[2011] The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This is the best-made and most compelling of the Narnia books: four English schoolchildren, evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, find a magical wardrobe. Passing through it they move (in a splendidly realised, dream-like pun) from fur coats to fir trees: they have passed into the Fantasy realm of Narnia where the animals can talk. Here they find themselves in the battle between the White Witch -- whose malign magic is keeping the world always winter -- and Aslan, a magical talking-and-flying lion. Edmund, one of the four kids, seduced by the White Witch, betrays his brother and sisters for some Turkish Delight. To redeem him Aslan delivers himself willingly into her clutches. She kills him, but he comes back to life, and in a big conclusive battle the wintry evil is defeated and the White Witch killed. It's a book with genuine charm (impossible to fake, that); inventive, witty, well-plotted and immersive.

Now, alright. Let's talk turkey, and by turkey I mean: Christ and his wattle. I have seen this novel described as an allegory of Christ’s passion, but it’s not—this may seem like an unimportant quibble, but I'm going to insist upon it. Tolkien, Lewis’s friend, always expressed his ‘cordial dislike’ of allegory; and although Lewis was fonder of the mode, he isn’t writing it here. What The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe does is explore the logic of incarnation, something of central importance to Christians. Aslan doesn’t allegorically represent or symbolise Christ; he is the form Christ’s incarnation would take in a reality populated by talking animals. Similarly, Christ in this world (I mean our world, the one we're in now) was not a ‘symbol’ for God, he didn't 'stand in for' God; he actually was God, incarnated in human form. That's actually a pretty important part of Christian belief.

[2014] I stand by this, I think. If anything, I'm tempted to expatiate upon this last point further, because I so often see the book described as an 'allegory'. But the fit is poor. The lion 'allegorises' Christ; the Witch 'allegorises' Satan, and the wardrobe allegorises ... er? Narnia is kind-of an allegory of heaven, except that it would be a very peculiar theology that claimed Satan had defeated the forces of Good to the extent of ruling Heaven and covering it with ice for several centuries. But, actually, having said that: that's not really my problem. Lewis in his day probably knew more about 'proper' allegory than any man alive; and to read his several studies on the medieval manifestations of the mode is to see how rarely allegorists are able to think coherently through their worldbuilding. My problem, actually, is that selling the book as an allegory misses one of the things that makes it a great Christian novel; and even more that it misunderstands its deep grasp of the imaginative logic of childhood. When kids play they don't 'play', in inverted commas. They pretend to be pirates, superheroes and so on, but they do so immersively, full-throatedly. They do not symbolically stand-themselves-in for a pirate or a superhero; they incarnate those characters for the duration of the play. If this looks like a sideswipe at Christian doctrine, as if I'm suggesting that God was only 'playing' at being man when he incarnated as Christ ... well, I don't think it is. I think saying so dignifies the importance of childhood play rather than denigrating the divine manifestation.

[2011] Nevertheless, though not allegorical, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe clearly adumbrates a Christian story, and does so because Lewis considered that story true. Some find the way this religious proselytising is handled in the novel to be sneaky; and I know people who talk about how disappointed they were when they grew old enough to spot, or had people point out to them, the Christian burden. I don’t see that myself.

It is striking, mind you, how bourgeois the fantasy is—the extent to which, indeed, the fantasy is precisely of bourgeois life. A faun with an umbrella and a pile of department-store goods under his arm, good food (easy to overlook how intense the craving for good food was in Britain in the immediate aftermath amongst WWII), fine clothes, pets—all of which presumably means there are department stores in Narnia; and that tea—which Mr Tumnus has—is imported from somewhere. (Incidentally: Tumnus knows what tea and cakes are, wears a scarf and owns an umbrella; but he has no idea what a ‘spare room’ is? Pull the other one). Above all, this book prizes the sanctity of the family unit. The family unit in this novel is so important it even takes precedence over the life of God; for Edmund’s venal failings must be bought-back by Aslan’s death. The pets thing is crucial too; Lewis was, from an early age, fascinated and charmed by the notion of talking animals, and he wrote his fantasy in part to give himself an imaginative platform for the elaboration of this dream. But the talking animals of Lewis’s world are much more house-pet-like than they are (say) the numinous god-like talking animals of Norse or Egyptian religion, or the uncanny unsettling talking animals of folklore. To grow up with a loved pet is, surely, to enter, half knowingly, into the belief that your cat or dog or hamster is, in some sense, a person; that you talk to them and they look just like they can understand you. This is the mode of anthropomorphisation that informs Lewis’s vision. Even Aslan is, in effect, a housecat on a large scale: the book’s repeated stress on his ‘wildness’ notwithstanding. I could add that I’m not necessarily deprecating the book when I say this—religious observation may be no less heartfelt because it happens within a comfortable middle-class milieu, and the love people (and especially children) feel for their pets can be as genuine and as intense, or intenser, as that they feel for other people. It would be clumsy and insulting to sneer at this: love, after all, is love.

[2014]: There's more (much more, actually) to say about the mid-century bourgeoisification of Fantasy, of which this title is a prime example. See also: the 'burglar'/'bourgeois' stuff in The Hobbit (pace Tom Shippey) up to and including the triumph of nice middle-classitude against the forces both of dubious proles and haughty aristos in Harry Potter. No space to develop the argument here, though.

[2011] Nonetheless, I’ve always felt it is the metamorphosis of Lewis’s re-imagining of the Christian story that is the most interesting part of the novel. Gender-bending the traditional maleness of Satan, such that your cosmos’s principle of wickedness becomes a proud but sexually alluring woman is not ideologically neutral, of course; and there is a strain of sexism (in places it touches on active misogyny) running though the Narnia books—most egregiously where poor old Susan gets excluded from heaven at the end of the series because she starts wearing lipstick. A similar pressure of deformation elevates the Lion of Judah, an aspect of Christ only marginally adumbrated in the Bible, to the central expression of the messiah’s nature. The lamb pops up too, from time to time, in the later books; but you can’t help feeling that, subconsciously, Lewis just wants a more carnivorous Jesus than the one supplied by his actual Bible. A Christ with bigger teeth.

This is political too, of course; and for many (genuine, devout) Christians part of the struggle of their faith is precisely to find a way of decanting off all the hippy, Communist, wimpiness with which their saviour is characterised in the NT. There is a certain type of Conservative for whom, the cosier he is at home, the more he feels that Christian values of ‘love’, ‘mercy’, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘turning the other cheek’ are best manifested in the world via helicopter gunships, drone-strikes and the sanctioned torture of tan-skinned detainees. Lewis isn’t quite in this camp; but it is a striking thing that Aslan in Narnia neither (apparently) requires nor is offered worship by the other creatures. They speak highly of him, follow him as a warlord and leader (although it is the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve who, it seems, must actually rule)—but there are no churches or temples to Aslan, and he provokes no soul-shaking terror and wonder in the hearts of his people. It’s tempting to ascribe this to a littleness in the scale of Lewis’s imaginative conception (this is a kid’s book, after all); or to spin it more positively, a sort of modular simplification of the larger questions of belief.

[2014] OK: this was where the commenters on the original blogpost made a number of very thought-provoking interventions. I concede that the version of NT theology I touch on in this paragraph is just that: a version. Now, it does seem to me that Jesus in the gospels goes out of his way to stress non-violence as the way; turn the other cheek; miraculously sealing back on the Roman soldier’s ear that rashly belligerent Peter had chopped off with his sword; the lamb, not the lion, blessing the peacemakers. This, I suggested, was at odds with a midrash of the gospel story in which ‘Aslan rides into battle with a big fuck-off army that slaughters thousands of bad guys, before Aslan himself, personally, kills the White Witch. That’s not in the New Testament.’ But Mike Taylor pointed out it is indeed in the NT: in the book of Revelation. And where I might quibble that Lion, Witch & Wardrobe is not Lewis’s ‘Revelation’ book (that’s The Last Battle), there are other places in the gospels (Mike T. points to e.g. Luke 12:46, and 19:27 as places where Christ talks about having His enemies brought before Him and killed). So, yes, it would be ridiculous of me to insist that the hippy, Communist, peacenik ‘turn the other cheek’ Christ that I see when I read the Gospels is the only one. And another point occurs to me: elsewhere I am tacitly arguing that the most fertile way of reading these novels is as articulations of childhood; and one thing we have to concede where kids are concerned is that they are not peaceniks. They are closer to their anger than the more repressed adults around them; quicker with the ‘I hate you!; and the tantrum and the little fists pummelling your chest. They’re perfectly comfortable playing at war and killing, and, if denied toy-guns by their well-meaning liberal parents (ahem!) will pick up sticks to use, or bite pop-tarts into gun-shapes, and carry on from there. The only leaven to the grimness of this play-acting of mass killing is that kids’ play believes it possible to die and then stand up alive again. But, if it comes to that, this is also what Christian doctrine believes.

The other point had to do with poor old Susan. Philip Pullman is the most prominent figure (followed by J K Rowling) who has deprecated the Narnia books because, in a nutshell, everyone gets to go to heaven except Susan, and she is excluded because she has discovered lipstick and nylons and boys—that is, sex. Mike T. said ‘I do wish that critics with the wit to know better would stop perpetuating this pernicious myth. You don't need to read Rilstone's (brilliant) essay Lipstick on my Scholar to recognise that the plain text of The Last Battle simply does not support Pullman's reading of it. That someone as widely influential as J. K. Rowling uncritically parrots it is distressing; that someone as insightful as you would do the same is merely mystifying.’ Farah Mendelsohn agreed: ‘Susan really, really isn't banished from Real/Final Narnia. I've re-read this several times because Pullman so infuriated me. No one can be banished until they look on the face of Him (Aslan/Jesus) and reject him for the final time. Susan hasn't done this. At the end of the Last Battle several dwarves who have denied Aslan look on his face for the last time, and their faces light up and they are admitted through the door into Aslan's world. The message is very clear (and is there in the Screwtape letters as well), there is always the opportunity for redemption.’

Mike T. then elaborated his point: ‘When asked why Susan was excluded from Narnia, Peter's response is not because she now uses lipstick, etc. Rather it is because she "is no longer a friend of Narnia". As the discussion continues, we're first told that she denies Narnia exists, and then that she cares for nothing else except lipstick, etc. It's fairly clear that the main issue here is her rejection of Narnia, a symptom of which is her preoccupation with her appearance. This fits well with Lewis' repeating theme of wanting to become part of the "Inner Circle". That is, rejecting goodness in order to obtain the acceptance of those around you. His treatment of erotic love in "The Four Loves" is a pretty good indication he had nothing against sex in itself.’ This is what I said:

I do not claim that Susan is forever banished from heaven; I say that at the end of the Narnia books she is excluded, and so she is. Rilstone makes a lot of play with the (he claims, wrong) view that Susan is excluded for liking lipstick. He insists that Susan is not excluded for wearing lipstick; she is excluded for "interested in consumer beauty products to the exclusion of everything else" (and also ‘for talking about Narnia as a childhood game’, and for preferring being 21 to being 11 or 71). I do agree that, in Lewis's larger theology, being interested in anything to exclusion of being interested in heaven is the root of all sin. It's also true that in a letter of 1957 Lewis says: 'the books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there's plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan's country in the end... in her own way.' And maybe she does. But that's not what the books say: the books say that the other Pevensie children get to go to heaven, but that Susan is excluded from that because 'she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations.' Two things occur to me. One is that if we're going to bring in extra-textual material, such as the non-Narnia stuff Lewis wrote, then we're going to want not to cherry pick; and I'd suggest the conclusion we'd come to is that, even for his day and class and religious views, Lewis's attitude to women was pretty messed-up. The thread to Rilstone's essay has some examples of this: but there is a very unpleasant mixture of condescension and irrational fear in the way he viewed femaledom; women were simultaneous patently inferior to men (the whole 'slaves go back to your masters, wives go back to your husbands' thing) and alarming, destructive, dangerous. In the Narnia Satan is a sexually alluring woman: that's more extreme even than most Fundamentalist theologies.

Thinking again about this, I’m minded to suggest that there is a caricature of Lewis as a misogynist and sexual puritan that’s fairly widely current, and a concomitant misreading of the novels that infuriates some fans. And with good cause. I don’t actually think Lewis was a sexual puritan; and whilst I don’t share his conservative views on woman’s role I’d stop short of suggesting they were informed by simple misogyny. If I were writing the 2011 blogpost from scratch today I think I’d raise the Susan question differently. I tend to think, nowadays, that this is better contextualised in terms of the problematic of time-passing in children’s literature more generally. I discuss this a little in my Blyton posts, in another place: the famous five start pre-pubescent in 1942 and are still precisely the same age, and moving through pretty much exactly the same world in the late 1950s. Neither they nor their world grow or develop. I suggest a second version of this (very common) trope in Bart Simpson: he stands, Tin Drum-ishly, outside individual growth and development, he is still the same naughty 10-year-old boy he was when the series started last century; but the world he occupies slides chronologically on around him. Bill Clinton is no longer President; Obama is; everyone at Springfield Elementary has smart phones and so on, yet Bart is still the same age. Rowling composed her series as a deliberate rebut to this; and one of the things fans love are the ways her characters grow and develop. Of course this means that they must pass through puberty, and there’s all that snogging and pairing off in the later books. This is all the stuff that makes my 6-year-old lad stick his tongue out and go ‘yeuch!’; and there is at least some point in noting that such a strategy—although satisfying to those readers who are following the series in, as it were, real time; growing and changing as the characters are doing—is by definition the dissolution of ‘children’s literature’ as such. We move into adult territory. Maybe it’s right we do; although one need not be a head-in-the-sand social conservative to wish that kids could do with being a little less saturated in images of adult sexuality than they presently are. Which is a roundabout way of saying that maybe all that’s happening is that Lewis is taking seriously the Gospel injunction to become again as little children.

Another way of saying this is to revisit the question, posed by Peter Coveney in his Image of Childhood book. It is a matter that seems to me more and more important the more children’s lit I read. So: Coveney distinguishes between (as he sees it) ‘good’ representations of childhood, that take it as a process of growth, on its way somewhere important—his chief model of this is Wordsworth’s Prelude—and ‘bad’ representations (he cites: Alice, Peter Pan) of childhood as stuck forever at a certain age, arrested like the figures on the side of Keats’s Grecian urn, which he sees as morbid and regressive and deplorable. I sort of take his point; but it occurs to me that Lewis is, tacitly, proposing a third model. Not that childhood is stuck forever at a certain chronological term, but rather that the (spiritually) healthy trajectory is from adulthood to childhood and not the other way around. Susan’s problem isn't sex as such; it’s that she’s moving in the wrong direction. She ought to strive to become again as a little child. So should we all. Hence: writing children’s fiction in the first place. Hence: Lewis putting himself, imaginatively, into that space.

If that looks like a fairly regressive thing to believe, all I can say is: I suppose it is, but I also suppose that Lewis wouldn't think that a bad thing. The Pilgrim's Regress, and all that. As he puts in it the preface to The Great Divorce (1946): 'a sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never simply by going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop" into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, "with backward mutters of dissevering power" -- or else not.' This, it occurs to me, is Lewis's understanding of the 'become again as a little child' injunction. It is not that Christ wants us to be evermore childish, to live in a Peter Pan afterlife of infinite immaturity. It is that Christ wants us to go back, so that we can grow again better. This, at any rate, might be Lewis's posthumous reply to Coveney's point.

Crom! Reading great slabs of italicised font is hard going, though, isn’t it? .

[2011] It’s Lewis’s fantasy, and he can do what he likes, of course (I can go further: the fact that so many scores of millions of people have bought his fantasy suggests that he was in tune with very widespread views). But I always used to wonder—what does Aslan eat? In this world the animals are all of them more than sentient: they are intelligent. They have, in a word, souls. Eating beings with souls is called cannibalism. Is that what we’re dealing with here? It moves our thought in a rather startling direction; because, I suppose, the answer to the question what does God eat? is liable to be—us. The good shepherd looks after his flock, of course; but he doesn’t do so just for the sake of it. On the contrary; he does it because the sheep are valuable comestibles. The good shepherd enjoys roast lamb as much as any of us.

[2014] Several comments on the original post pointed out that Lewis addresses this matter of eating in the later Narnia books. Lots of Narnian animals can't speak; it's legitimate to hunt and eat them. Bad news for Helen Keller, but also (not to be sarcastic) for the conceptual gnarliness that gives the first book its distinctive potency. So I still think my point here holds, to a degree. Viz: ...]

[2011] You might feel that this is to miss the point of the book, and I might (almost) agree with you—Lewis’s worldbuilding is not predicated upon a logic of internal consistency. To ask ‘what does Aslan eat?’ is no more to unpick the world described in the novel than to wonder, as I do above, how a fundamentally medieval world supports a trade in tea or the manufacture of umbrellas. To be a little more precise: as the series goes on, Lewis becomes patently more concerned with internal consistency: the Narnia of Prince Caspian or The Horse and his Boy is much less interpenetrated by marks of bourgeois prosperity, and The Magician’s Nephew goes so far as to explain away the most egregiously anachronistic feature of Lewis’s medievalised realm, the cast-iron lamp-post. But by doing so the books lose something, too; a sense of the way fantasy exists not as a locus of radical otherness, but on the contrary as a holey-space that precisely intersects our world of middle-class comforts, restrictions and anxieties. Tolkien does something similar in Lord of the Rings, except that he separates out his bourgeois eighteenth-century hobbits geographically from his medieval Gondorians and tenth-century Rohan riders. Lewis, by jumbling it all in together, Cair Paravel next to the department store that Mr Tumnus has just visited, makes a bolder imaginative alloy,

My real criticism of this novel relates to a different matter. It is that it ends just when it is getting interesting. The Pevensie kids become the kings and queens of Narnia: King Peter the Magnificent, Queen Susan the Gentle, King Edmund the Just and Queen Lucy the Valiant. They grow to adulthood in this world, until, many years later, they chance upon the lamppost again, and tumble back into our world, no longer adults, now children. Only a few hours have passed on Earth, for all the year (decades?) they spent in Narnia. Then Lewis stops; but this is where the story starts, surely—what would it be like to have an adult consciousness inside the body of a child? To have passed through puberty, and then suddenly to have the hormone tap switched off? You could hardly go back to you former existence; but neither could you expect to live as an adult. Would you go mad, or use your beyond-your-seeming-years wisdom to some purpose? How would you cope? Would you try to explain? Would you betray yourself, and reveal the Narnia portal to the world—would governments attempt to exploit it? The psychological interest in the story begins at the end; but that's exactly the place where Lewis drops the bar down and ends things. Grrr!

[2014]: Yes, rather unfair point to end on: to twit Lewis for not writing a book he never set out to write in the first place. So instead let me mention something else; or more specifically quote someone else. Susan Ang [in Victor Watson (ed), The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English (CUP 2001), 150-1] notes how like Edith Nesbit Lewis's children's writing is, The Magician's Nephew most especially. But there are differences: 'David Holbrook has criticised the inherent sadism, the infliction of pain, that is permitted within the [Narnia] series, and also the fear which the works are capable of evoking. The visit of the Babylonian Queen to London in Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906) is treated comically, and the magic that (temporarily) transforms London is benign. The episode is “reworked” in The Magician’s Nephew, when the Witch-Empress Jadis follows Digory and Polly to London; but the scenes that follow are anything but humorous; they are in fact violent and frightening. The witch throws Aunt Letty across the room; later she wrenches the top off a lamp post which she uses as a weapon. This is rough magic compared to that which operates in Nesbit’s fiction … ' There's something in that , I think. Ang thinks its Lewis's way of saying 'there's a cosmic war going on you know, between Good and Evil, and we mustn't trivialise that.' Which may be right. But I wonder if, again, the way to read this isn't, actually, to do so in terms of childhood. Precisely because they don't really understand what violence entails, kids are often play-violent. See also this old post of mine on Christianity, Maturity and Bombs.