What Bush and Batman Have in Common

Maybe I wasn’t alone among fans of C. S. Lewis when I feared that the modern concept of in-your-face girl power might make the trip through the wardrobe in the new Hollywood adaptation of the first novel in the Narnia series. Think The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Would Susan and Lucy join their brothers in combat, smiting the enemy hip and thigh? But luckily I had no need to fear. Somehow, Narnia proved invulnerable to politically correct notions of gender.

In the book, the possibility of the girls wading into the fray is raised and then dismissed. Father Christmas gives Peter a sword and shield and Susan a bow, a quiver of arrows, and a horn, but he makes it clear that the bow is no invitation to fight alongside her brother.. “You must use the bow only in great need, for I do not mean you to fight in the battle.” His gift for Lucy is a healing cordial and a dagger. He tells her, “If you or any of your friends are hurt, a few drops of this will restore you. And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle.”

Hesitantly, Lucy tells Father Christmas she may have what it takes. “I think—I don’t know—but I think I could be brave enough.” Father Christmas will have none of this: “That is not the point. . . . battles are ugly when women fight.” This line was too much for director Andrew Adamson. In fact, he thought it was—wait for it—sexist. Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson, tried to retain such lines, but to no avail. According to World Magazine, Adamson told Gresham: “C.S. Lewis may have had these dated ideals, but at the same time there’s no way I could put that in the film.”

Sexist? Dated ideals? The West is in big trouble if the ideal that boys become men by sacrificing for women is dated and sexist to boot. But here’s the funny thing. Gresham, who played a big role in shaping the book’s adaptation, lost the battle, but he must have won the war. One of Lewis’s more heterodox friends, Owen Barfield, spoke of “saving the appearances.” When institutions and ideas change, he argued, only the surface stays the same. Here, however, the opposite happened: The appearance wasn’t saved, but the underlying reality of the story remained intact.

Lucy and Susan do not take sword in hand and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Peter and Edmund. With a well-aimed arrow, Susan kills the White Witch’s right-hand dwarf, who is preparing to finish off a wounded Edmund. This scene isn’t in the book, but it isn’t outside of Lewis’s vision. The bow and quiver weren’t an invitation to a front row seat in battle, but they weren’t to hang on the wall as pretties either. In fact, this scene is very much in line with the Susan of the later novel Prince Caspian, wherein she demonstrates her prowess with the bow when she rescues a dwarf from two encroaching soldiers.

Likewise, in the movie, the female warriors all appear to be among the archers on the cliff. I haven’t run into many female centaurs, but those with bows look more feminine than the ones with swords. This upholds the distinction that Father Christmas and the rest of the Narnia books make explicit: hand-to-hand to combat is the work of men, but women can lend a hand if they’re needed (and if they keep from the fray).

On screen and on the page, the boys become men by risking themselves for the sake of Narnia and for their sisters. They must be prepared to sacrifice themselves if necessary. Peter first draws blood and makes an initial move from boyhood to manhood when he has to save his sister Susan from a wolf. There’s more to this scene than a simple rescue, however. Good creatures of the forest move to save the daughter of Eve, but Aslan waves them back. “Let the Prince win his spurs. . .” The boy must show what he’s made of.

Susan makes it to the second branch of a tree, barely out of reach of the wolf’s snapping jaw. “Peter wondered why she did not get higher or at least take a better grip; then he realized that she was just going to faint and that if she fainted she would fall off.” Fainting? Oh my, that will never do. And, no, the fainting doesn’t make it to the film.

This is no macho nonsense in the book, mind you. “Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.” Peter knows what he must do: He slays the attacking beast with his blade. The boy is becoming a warrior, a man, but he has a ways to go. He fails to wipe his sword. Aslan knights the boy Sir Peter Fenris-Bane for his achievement, but reminds him, like a father to a son, a man to a boy, “Whatever happens, never forget to wipe your sword.” With very few changes, this scene makes it to the screen.

Peter has passed a milestone on his way to manhood. His brother, Edmund, can be sullen and spiteful, and his treachery leads to Aslan’s sacrificial death. But Edmund is not beyond hope. Once rescued, he shows his courage and smarts in battle. The fight hasn’t been going well, after the White Witch has turned Peter’s forces who come near her into stone. But Edmund battles his way through the monsters to reach Narnia’s self-proclaimed Queen and, instead of trying to attack her directly, he smashes her wand and evens the odds.

In the melee, he is gravely wounded. It is here Lucy takes an important step to womanhood. She remembers for the first time her Christmas gift, the cordial of healing, and tends to her wounded brother.

Susan and Lucy are not bit characters; Lewis does not neglect their growth from girls to nurturing, caring women of strength. Throughout the movie, they prove that they do not lack courage. In the night before the battle between the good and evil creatures of Narnia, Aslan leaves in the dark to face what the Deep Magic demands. The girls worry something is wrong with Aslan, so they follow him. He is glad for their company and (in the novel) asks them, “I am sad and lonely. Lay your hands on my mane so that I can feel you are there and let us walk like that.” The girls do as they are asked and they bring great comfort to the mighty lion.

The last of the journey he has to walk alone. Susan and Lucy, staying out of sight, witness in horror as Aslan submits himself to mocking, humiliation, and death at the hands of the White Witch and her vile allies. The lion’s dead body is left atop the hill. But the girls do not leave him alone. They are becoming women. Remaining with the murdered Aslan through the night, they try the best they can to lessen the indignities the noble lord suffered at the hands of his tormenters.

It is important that Lewis doesn’t end the story with Aslan’s resurrection and the vanquishing of the White Witch. The brothers and sisters do not slip back into the world of men after the battle. They stay in Narnia until their physical selves catch up to their emotional and spiritual selves: “And Peter became a tall and deep chested man and a great warrior, and he was called King Peter the Magnificent. And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the Kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage. And she was called Queen Susan the Gentle. Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgment. He was called King Edmund the Just. But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden haired, and all Princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant.”

This passage is beautifully and convincingly shown on the screen, as we see the now-older Susan, Peter, Edmund, and Lucy on horseback. With this depiction, thankfully, Narnia’s real message of empowerment for both boys and girls made it to the screen.

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November 18, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | C.S. Lewis, Christian Films, Chronicles of Narnia, Movies | C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia | Leave a Comment

First Look at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Into The Wardrobe

A first look at the Narnia movie.

By John J. Miller

First impressions of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which reaches movie theaters this weekend:

Is it any good? Yes, the movie is very good—a solid piece of entertainment in its own right, and fans of C. S. Lewis will regard it as faithful to his book in every important respect. A few plot elements are dropped and several others are added, but each decision makes sense for a movie that’s trying to tell a story in two hours.

What’s new, pt. 1: In the book, Lewis says that the Pevensie kids “were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.” That’s why they wind up in a big house with a strange wardrobe. When Lewis wrote, the evacuations were fresh in many minds and he didn’t need to say much else. That’s not true today, and so the film adds some helpful historical context. The first image is of a German bomber as it flies over Britain.

What’s new, pt. 2: Edmund is the bad egg, of course, and in the book there are indications of this even before he becomes a Turkish Delight junkie. The movie relies far more on Edmund’s sibling rivalry with older brother Peter as a factor in his treachery, and far less on Turkish Delight.

What’s new, pt. 3: There’s a chase scene through a tunnel, an attempted crossing of an icy river, and an encounter with Father Christmas that initially reminded me of how the hobbits first came into contact with the ringwraiths in The Lord of the Rings—it’s a sleight of hand, of course, but an effective treatment and not in the book. Also, after Father Christmas gives presents to the Pevensies and sleds off, Lucy turns to Susan and says, “Told you he was real!” It’s a wonderful line—not in the book, but a clever addition that advances the book’s theme of faith. Another new line comes from Tumnus, imprisoned in the witch’s castle—he says something that recalls Braveheart.

What’s new, pt. 4: J. R. R. Tolkien famously didn’t like The Chronicles of Narnia. “It really won’t do, you know,” he told a friend. One of his main objections was the way in which Lewis mixed different mythological traditions into a Narnian stew. The moviemakers revel in this, fleshing out creatures described only briefly in the book and adding new ones entirely. This may have required their greatest feat of imagination. Think of it as multiculturalism, in the best sense of the word. Personally, I liked it. When I watch the movie again, one of my priorities will be to notice more of these details. Also, the climactic battle scene includes griffins that drop boulders on the witch’s army—they are the mirror image of those German bombers at the start of the film.

What’s new, pt. 5: We get our first glimpse of Aslan early on, in the fireplace of Tumnus’s lair. In the book, we don’t hear about Aslan until the Pevensies get to the beaver dam (and we don’t see him until after that). The passage introducing him is one of the most memorable in the whole Chronicles (“None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do…”). It really can’t be rendered on film and our moviemakers don’t even attempt it here. That’s a wise decision.

It’s funny: The movie has a lot of humor—much more than the book, in fact. “You’re a Daughter of Eve?” asks Tumnus when he meets Lucy. “My mom’s name is Helen!” she replies. (Also new: In the books, we don’t see the mother, as we do in the film, and Lewis never names her.) And I can’t tell you how pleasant it was to sit through a film aimed largely at kids and not hear a single burp or fart joke.

The acting: The four actors who play the Pevensie kids are excellent, especially the girls. (But will they grow up too fast for Narnia sequels?) Tilda Swinton is brilliant as the White Witch; James McAvoy is outstanding as Tumnus. Kiran Shah, as the witch’s dwarf sidekick, kept reminding me of Deep Roy as the Oompa Loompa in the recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake.

Cool tribute: In Professor Kirke’s house, we overhear a news report on the radio. The voice belongs to Douglas Gresham, who is Lewis’s stepson. It is a fitting family tribute to Lewis, who delivered radio addresses over the BBC during the Second World War. These were later collected as one of his most popular books, Mere Christianity.

The music: Not immediately memorable. And did they have to include a song by Alanis Morrisette? The last time I heard what she liked to do in movie theaters, I wanted to turn off the radio.

The credits: When the credits start to roll at the end of the movie, stay in your seats. There’s a final scene worth watching.

Will your kids like it? The movie is rated PG, appropriately. A few scenes are meant to startle. There is combat and violence, much of it fast and loud. The film is by no means gory—we don’t see the witch actually kill Aslan, for instance, though we do know exactly what she did with her knife. I took my entire brood to a screening last weekend. My eight-year-old boy, who has had the book read to him three times, said the other day, “it was so good, I can’t stop thinking about it.” My six-year-old daughter, who has had the book read to her twice, called it “perfect” as we were walking out of the theater, although later she added that she didn’t like it when Aslan was killed. Of course, she’s not supposed to like that part. It may be worth noting that the scene is like a Star Wars cantina set in the netherworld—full of scary monsters and vicious animals up to no good. A susceptible kid might suffer nightmares. My four-year-old son, who is a budding monster-movie aficionado, squirmed a lot during the film and said he wanted to go home. Later, he said he liked it, especially “when the lion roared really, really loud.” In truth, he was probably too young for the movie, but only because he’s kind of young for movies generally. The biggest problem was keeping him quiet, as it was during last summer’s March of the Penguins.

The best part: We can hope, realistically, that the movie will inspire a whole new generation of children to devour The Chronicles of Narnia.

Want more? I’ve written previously about Narnia for NRO here and here.

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November 18, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | C.S. Lewis, Christian Films, Chronicles of Narnia, Movies | C.S. Lewis, Christian Films, Chronicles of Narnia, Movies, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe | Leave a Comment

Chronology of Chronicles of Narnia

Narnian Order

Which C. S. Lewis book comes first?

By John J. Miller

Florida governor Jeb Bush has chosen The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as the centerpiece of his “Just Read, Florida!” program, and he’s already coming under left-wing fire. “Some are concerned that the selection is an attempt to Christianize the students of Florida,” complains blogger Michael Schaub.

And so it begins: The controversy over whether impressionable schoolchildren should be exposed to the nefarious influence of C.S. Lewis. It will only grow louder as we approach December, when the big-budget movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe reaches theaters.

But in the meantime, you may have a more basic question. Perhaps you’ve seen the super-cool trailer for the upcoming film, and you’ve decided to read the book beforehand. You go to the bookstore, look up C.S. Lewis titles, and locate the seven volumes in The Chronicles of Narnia. But the label on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe says it’s the second book in the series. The first one is called The Magician’s Nephew. That’s not how you remember it. Aslan moves in mysterious ways, but something doesn’t seem quite right.

So which comes first: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Magician’s Nephew?

The short answer is this: Jeb is right.

The long answer is this: Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe before any of the other Narnia books, and traditionally it has been considered the first in the series. For years, its publisher marketed it that way. Then, about a decade ago, Narnia became a piece of real estate in the HarperCollins empire. The renumbering took place “in compliance with the original wishes of the author,” as a small-print statement on the copyright page of the new editions says.

The decision was based in large part upon a 1957 comment in which Lewis expressed a mild preference for the books to be read not in the order of their publication, but based upon their internal chronology. It also involved the input from Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s son-in-law. “I don’t think people should feel enslaved by the numbers on the books,” he says. “But I recommend starting with The Magician’s Nephew and going from there.”

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the best advice. The irony is that Lewis himself probably would agree that readers shouldn’t look to him for much guidance on the subject. And I’m fairly certain that if Lewis were still around—he died on the day JFK was shot—I could buy him a drink at the pub and persuade him he was wrong.

Just for the record, here are the seven titles in The Chronicles of Narnia, listed in the order of their publication: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950); Prince Caspian (1951); The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (1952); The Silver Chair (1953); The Horse and His Boy (1954); The Magician’s Nephew (1955); and The Last Battle (1956).

Here’s the order HarperCollins now gives to the series (with their traditional numbering in parentheses): The Magician’s Nephew (6); The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1); The Horse and His Boy (5); Prince Caspian (2); The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (3); The Silver Chair (4); and The Last Battle (7).

Yet the case for reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first rather than second is overwhelming. Most important is the fact that the book introduces the world of Narnia to its readers far better than The Magician’s Nephew, or any of the other books in the Chronicles. Lucy’s initial encounter with Aslan’s domain is one of the great moments in whole series, as she passes through the wardrobe, hears the “crunch-crunch” of snow beneath her feet, and walks toward a light in the distance.

The device of the portal, which transports readers from our world to another, is crucial. For starters, it’s a traditional feature of fantasy literature for children—see, for instance, the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or that railroad platform in Harry Potter. The portal described in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is more detailed and compelling than the ones found in subsequent books, which employ portals but don’t dwell on their significance. (With the exception of The Horse and His Boy, each of the Narnia books has a portal.) The early chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe focus on the important question of whether there can even be portals. “But do you really mean, Sir,” asks Peter, “that there could be other worlds—all over the place, just around the corner—like that?” Replies the professor: “Nothing is more probable.” This is a meaningful conversation on many levels, and not least because it confirms the reality of Narnia in the space of the story.

What’s more, when Lewis began writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he did not even conceive of writing the other books at all. As a result, he presents Narnia with a freshness that won’t be found elsewhere in the series. You might compare it to the freshness of the crunching snow beneath Lucy’s feet. Not only does Lewis lead his readers into a new world, but he’s looking upon it for the first time himself, and it shows.

There’s no such freshness in The Magician’s Nephew, which begins this workmanlike way: “This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. It is a very important story because it shows how all the comings and goings between our own world and the land of Narnia first began.” These opening words assume readers will know there’s a place called Narnia and that there are comings and goings between it and our world. In other words, the passage takes for granted a familiarity with tales Lewis already has told.

Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead make the point well in their new book, A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe: “To read The Magician’s Nephew first would be to undercut the very fabric by which Lewis so carefully constructed his previous tale. Once readers know ‘all about’ Narnia, they can no longer experience the full strangeness of Lucy’s discovery of a mysterious world within the wardrobe,” they write. “If the reader first experiences Narnia by reading The Magician’s Nephew, all of this significant suspense is lost.”

Then there’s Aslan. He is of course as important to The Chronicles of Narnia as Jesus is to the gospels. And once again, Lewis brings him into the story with enormous care. His name first appears in chapter seven, when the Pevensie kids hear Mr. Beaver speak it: “They say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed.” Next Lewis writes:

And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had enormous meaning—either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now.

This passage certainly belongs in the first book of the Chronicles. That’s especially true for the second sentence: “None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do.” This line could not be spoken to people who already have read other Narnia books. Moreover, the very final words of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe sound like the appropriate final words for the first book in a series: “It was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia.”

There is nothing comparable to any of this in The Magician’s Nephew. (Final words: “But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.”) No part of The Magician’s Nephew demands that it be read before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It is in fact a kind of prequel to the other six books in the series, but this is no more a problem in the overall narration of the Chronicles than a flashback scene is a problem on a television show.

The case for pushing The Magician’s Nephew to the forefront rests almost wholly on the apparent fact that Lewis himself believed it should be read first. He doesn’t seem to have held this opinion with great conviction. He expressed his view in a letter to a child in 1957, in a conversation with one of his biographers, and evidently nowhere else. He certainly didn’t order his publisher to take any special action. By the time HarperCollins rearranged the titles, Lewis had been dead for more than thirty years.

But even if Lewis had been a fervent believer in the primacy of The Magician’s Nephew—writing manifestos, screaming from rooftops, paying for TV ads during the Superbowl—his readers wouldn’t owe him any special consideration. And Lewis definitely was a fervent believer in this principle.

In the 1930s, when Lewis was a relatively unknown scholar at Oxford, he debated E.M.W. Tillyard over how to interpret John Milton. Tillyard maintained that it was important to understand what was on Milton’s mind as he wrote and that such an understanding would help reveal the true meaning of Paradise Lost. Lewis, by contrast, was frustrated to find many of his students more interested in authors’ lives than their works. And he thought Tillyard’s approach was pure balderdash. In an essay, he called it “The Personal Heresy.” He believed that readers should try to share a poet’s consciousness rather than study it. “I look with his eyes, not at him,” wrote Lewis. “The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him.” Lewis put the matter more succinctly in a letter toward the end of his life: “An author doesn’t necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else.”

Lewis of course understood the meaning of Narnia. But a wise expert is not the same thing as a final authority—and on the question of which Narnia book should come first, Lewis was utterly wrong. Thank goodness the people who are behind new movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—as well as Jeb Bush—got it right. You should, too, if you decide to explore Narnia not just on the silver screen but also on the printed page.

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November 18, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | C.S. Lewis, Christian Films, Chronicles of Narnia, Movies | C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, Movies | Leave a Comment

Narnia & Its Enemies

Sexist, racist, intolerant Lewis?

By Catherine Seipp

This weekend’s long-anticipated opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first film adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s fantasy novels, has brought in the past few weeks a torrent of Narnia commentary in the media—most of it intelligent and worth reading, but also, in many instances, absolutely wrong.

For those unfamiliar with the stories, (and given the power of the Hollywood publicity machine, I wonder how many remain?), Narnia is a magical country in a parallel universe created and ruled by a Christ-like lion deity named Aslan. Various English schoolchildren find themselves transported there by magical means; the wardrobe of the first book, for instance, leads to an snowy enchanted forest, which an evil White Witch has made “always winter and never Christmas.”

The series is generally called Christian allegory, but that’s simplistic as well as somewhat misleading. Lewis, whose theological writing for adults made him one the 20th-century’s great Christian apologists, coined the word “supposal” to describe Narnia—suppose the Son of God appeared as the King of Beasts in a land of talking animals? And suppose that humans, with all their sins, entered this world? What then?

To call the stories allegory also gives no hint of why readers return to them many times (as I have over the years, even past childhood), long after the page-turning adventures hold no more surprises. Lewis was a master stylist, and his children’s series are marked by the same dryly witty prose, comic characters, and shrewd insight into the human condition that distinguish The Screwtape Letters and his other books for adults. Yet Narnia has its enemies, and now they are out in force.

Chief among them is the British fantasy writer Philip Pullman, whose popular His Dark Materials trilogy was conceived as an atheistic answer to Lewis’s vision. Pullman, as the Washington Post reminded readers Thursday, sees Narnia as “a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice.” In the British Guardian last week, Polly Toynbee wrote that “Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America—that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.”

Even critics generally appreciative of Lewis have come up with some strange notions. Last month, in The New York Times Magazine, Charles McGrath wrote that the Narnia stories “are not nearly as well written” as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. And writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik declared that a lion isn’t a very Christ-like animal—Aslan really should have been a humble donkey instead.

So let’s consider these complaints:

Narnia is sexist. “Girls always come second to boys,” Alison Lurie wrote last week in the Guardian. “They have fewer adventures.” Actually, Lewis typically makes his main protagonists in each story one boy and one girl, and the girl is usually more sympathetic. The English child who discovers Narnia in the first book is a girl, the brave and virtuous Lucy, who also has the closest relationship to Aslan.

Lewis clearly favors independent, free-thinking girls over those stuck in traditionally frivolous female roles. In The Horse and His Boy, Aravis, a girl escaping a forced marriage in an autocratic land south of Narnia called Calormen, runs into an old acquaintance who seems to be something of a Maureen Dowd in miniature: “The fuss she made over choosing the dresses nearly drove Aravis mad,” Lewis writes. “She remembered now that Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip. Aravis had always been more interested in bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming. You will guess that each thought the other silly.”

Narnia is racist. Speaking of those Calormenes, McGrath’s complaint in the New York Times that they “are oily cartoon Muslims” is typical, if not quite correct; actually, they are pre-Islamic Islamofascists who keep slaves, oppress women, and worship a Baal-like god named Tash. That they have dark complexions, which Lewis’s critics harp on more than Lewis did, really isn’t the problem. As it happens, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s evil White Witch, interpreted by Tilda Swinton as an Aryan goddess in the movie, is “not merely pale,” as the book describes her, “but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar…proud and cold and stern.”

The Calormenes speak in a flowery, Arabian Nights-style manner worthy of Osama bin Laden, but Lewis gives them their due for that. In Calormen, he explains in The Horse and His Boy, story-telling “is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”

Lewis is religiously intolerant. Critics are horrified that a bland, minor character named Susan doesn’t make it to heaven in The Last Battle, which depicts Narnia’s Armageddon. Susan had convinced herself that Narnia wasn’t real, and was “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Philip Pullman accuses Lewis of condemning Susan for reaching puberty, although since she was supposed to be about 21 during her nylons-and-lipstick phase, puberty would seem to be long past. The passage appears to be more about the danger of focusing only on material things—and denying the truth—than sexuality.

In any case, those upset by Susan’s exclusion from heaven in The Last Battle never mention that in its final chapter, an honorable (but Tash-worshipping) Calormene is surprised to find himself face to face with a welcoming Aslan. As Gregg Easterbrook noted in The Atlantic a few years ago, the message here is that “paradise awaits anyone of good will.” So it hardly seems fair to lump Lewis with Left Behind fans.

Aslan should have been a donkey. Adam Gopnik’s complaint in The New Yorker is interesting, but he forgets that Aslan exists in a post-Christian universe: Jesus has come and gone from earth centuries before two Victorian children travel from London to witness Aslan’s creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew. So, since he’s already risen as the King of Kings, there seems no reason that his new incarnation shouldn’t be the King of Beasts.

J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are better writers than C. S. Lewis. This is just jaw-droppingly wrong. Rowling and Pullman are writers of great accomplishment, and both the Harry Potter and His Dark Materials books are absorbing page-turners. But leaving religion entirely out of it, I can’t imagine reading anything in either series more than once. Pullman’s imagined worlds are fascinating and powerfully eerie, but his characters are flat, humorless, and generally annoying. Rowling, unlike Pullman, writes with sympathy and charm, but the Potter stories often descend into potboiler mode. Maybe in a generation or two Rowling and Pullman will prove to be as enduring as Lewis, but I doubt it. And until then, he stands head and shoulders above them.
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November 18, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Aslan, C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, Hollywood, liberal media, Movies | Aslan, C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, Hollywood, liberal media, Movies | Leave a Comment

Aslan as Christ

Xmas in Narnia

Have Yourself a Merry Little Aslanmas?

By John J. Miller

If ever there were a case for taking Christ out of Christmas, it’s arguably in Narnia.

There is no Christ in Narnia—there is only Aslan, the lion who dies for the sins of others and returns in glorious triumph. So instead of Christmas, shouldn’t the Narnians celebrate Aslanmas? And shouldn’t Lewis have left Father Christmas out of his books entirely?

This is more than just a rose-by-any-other-name semantic dispute, because it goes to the heart of a fundamental criticism that many people level at The Chronicles of Narnia: The books are full of maddening inconsistencies.

When we first encounter Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example, we learn that a permanent winter has descended upon the land. This creates a problem later in the story, as Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead describe in their new book, A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe:

Another friend [of Lewis's], poet Ruth Pitter, recalled with pleasure her good-natured “win” over Lewis, when she caught him in a textual error in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: where did the beavers obtain certain foodstuffs (e.g., potatoes, flour, sugar, oranges, milk) for the dinner they provided for the Pevensie children, given that it was winter and (by Lewis’s own setup of the story) no foreign trade was allowed? According to Pitter’s memory of the conversation, Lewis had no answer and was “stumped.”

Maybe the food was smuggled into Narnia from Calormen, a country to the south. But that’s pure speculation. And even if this were the case, it is a flaw on the part of Lewis: A good story doesn’t create puzzles for readers; it answers questions before they’re even asked. Lewis is perhaps under a special obligation to explain the food, given that the feast with the beavers is one of the most sensual passages in the book. Where did those big rodents get their chow?

The beavers create other problems as well. “There’s never been any of your race here before,” says Mr. Beaver to the Pevensie kids. As we learn later in the series, however, this isn’t true. Perhaps this can be chalked up to Mr. Beaver not knowing any better. Yet his statement is actually the result of Lewis not knowing any better. When he started writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he did not plan to compose six sequels. Later books suffer from some near-sightedness that found its way into the first one.

Gee, Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Middle Earth

Narnia simply wasn’t prepared with the meticulous attention to detail that J. R. R. Tolkien lavished upon to Middle Earth. And Tolkien famously criticized Narnia as an awkward mishmash of a world. It must have pained him to do so: He and Lewis were not only colleagues at Oxford, but also personal friends. Tolkien played a key role in Lewis’s decision to become a Christian, in what is probably one of the most significant conversions of the 20th century. The author of The Lord of the Rings might not have finished his own masterpiece but for Lewis’s unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement. So he probably would have liked to return the favor and cheer on Lewis in the writing of Narnia. Yet Tolkien was a relentlessly honest man and he could not hide his antipathy for the Narnian project: “I hear you’ve been reading Jack’s children’s story,” he told a mutual friend. “It really won’t do, you know!” (To his buddies, Lewis was known as “Jack.”)

Perhaps Tolkien was jealous that Lewis could whip out seven books in seven years—the man wrote at a delirious speed, and Tolkien couldn’t have kept pace even if he had tried. Yet his critique of Narnia contains both substance and merit. Tolkien believed that Lewis veered too close to Christian allegory. Lewis denied this, calling his tales suppositions: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.”

Maybe you have to be an English major to care about the difference between an allegory and a supposition. Tolkien’s primary objection to Narnia, however, raised another issue entirely. He thought that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was an irritating blend of different cultural traditions: centaurs and fauns from the Greeks, dwarves from the Norse, and so on. And that’s even before we get to this strange business about Jesus, Aslan, and Father Christmas.

Lewis was a great borrower, and it drove Tolkien bonkers. In Perelandra, a science-fiction book published in 1943, Lewis makes a reference to “Numinor.” This was meant as a kind of tribute to Tolkien, who wrote of the “Numenor,” which was a kingdom of Middle Earth. Note the slightly different spelling, which may be the result of Lewis being sloppy or thinking the word’s root was “numinous.” Whatever the case, it was not in keeping with Tolkien the philologist’s carefully crafted linguistics. It was a dabbler’s error, the sort of dumb blunder that Tolkien strove to banish from Middle Earth.

The Numenor-Numinor controversy is of course an exceedingly small thing for casual readers of Tolkien and Lewis. The introduction of Father Christmas into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on the other hand, is obvious and jarring, even if you don’t compose elaborate letters from Father Christmas every year (as Tolkien did). Shouldn’t St. Nick just stay on our side of the wardrobe?

Kids!

Perhaps. But he does play an important role in Narnia. Lewis has a wonderful line early in the book about how the White Witch has made it “always winter but never Christmas.” If we cross out the Christmas half of it, the line doesn’t carry nearly half the punch: the witch doesn’t seem nearly so terrible, nor does the plight of the Narnians seem quite so grave. That’s especially true for children, for whom Christmas is a time of magical importance. And the arrival of Father Christmas presents the first clear evidence that the tables have turned against the witch. “I’ve come at last,” he says to the Pevensie kids. “She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The witch’s magic is weakening.” With that, the spell over Narnia begins to break.

It is of course possible that Lewis might have accomplished the same trick, from a narrative standpoint, without importing Father Christmas. It is also perfectly legitimate to stand with Tolkien and declare that Father Christmas has absolutely no business sledding around a fantasy world in which there is an Aslan but not a Christ. But perhaps this misses the point. The Chronicles of Narnia, after all, are written for children. My own kids love the Father Christmas scene, and I suspect that on some level they grasp its real meaning. To say that it doesn’t belong in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is to argue against the actual experience of countless readers who also have enjoyed it and grasped it. In the end, it may in fact be a very grown-up kind of critique—sober and logical, but blind to the imaginative sensibilities of kids. Can you picture an 8-year-old who would care about the spelling of Numenor/Numinor? That’s a discussion for adults—and even then, only for adults of a very certain type. Narnia, by contrast, is a great big fantasy playground—and as Lewis makes clear throughout the Chronicles, grown ups can’t go there. So maybe Father Christmas is a kid thing, and you just wouldn’t understand.

So is it Christmas or Aslanmas in Narnia? Maybe we should just leave it a mystery, like the beaver’s food. Or we could call it Xmas, using “X” in the algebraic sense of “solve for X.” But let’s remember that most kids don’t like algebra either.

If you’ve made it this far, it probably means that you haven’t yet suffered from Narnia fatigue. Here are three other pieces I’ve written for NRO on C.S. Lewis and Narnia: a general appreciation, an argument on the order in which the Narnian books ought to be read, and first impressions of the new movie.

—John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America..

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmQ1NDBlMjUwOTUzODk1NWFiODZkNDIyNjNiZmQ4OTY=

November 18, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Aslan, C.S. Lewis, Christian Films, Christianity, Chronicles of Narnia, Movies, National Review | Aslan, C.S. Lewis, Christian Films, Chronicles of Narnia, Movies | Leave a Comment

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Albert Jay Nock defined the Remnant this way:

They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up, because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society, and meanwhile your preaching will assure them and keep them hanging on.

…

You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you.

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The Remnant Library

Bush as the Dark Knight

What Bush and Batman Have in Common

By ANDREW KLAVAN

The Narnia of Lewis

Gentleman Lewis

First Look at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Into The Wardrobe

Chronology of Chronicles of Narnia

Narnian Order

Narnia & Its Enemies

Narnia & Its Enemies

Aslan as Christ

Xmas in Narnia

Gee, Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Middle Earth

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The Remnant Library

Bush as the Dark Knight

What Bush and Batman Have in Common

By ANDREW KLAVAN

The Narnia of Lewis

Gentleman Lewis

First Look at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Into The Wardrobe

Chronology of Chronicles of Narnia

Narnian Order

Narnia & Its Enemies

Narnia & Its Enemies

Aslan as Christ

Xmas in Narnia

Gee, Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Middle Earth

Kids!

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