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rfmcdonaldLast Friday's post on the troubles with Narnia prompted a busy discussion. I wasn't surprised by this, since I care about the Chronicles and can only imagine how other people care about that series. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heraclitus argued that one might as well use Lewis' deployment of talking animals to argue that he would be in favour of animal rights. I know that he raised this is jest, and yet. Why were humans needed to save Narnia from the White Witch when that land was already populated by sentient beings? Why was Tumnus? The later Reepicheep was so void? One must never challenge that character's honour, or his capabilities. Edmund found that out.
The problem with the Chronicles, for me, lie in their necessary parochialism and their simultaneous claims to universal relevance. Take Kyrie O'Connor's article in the Houston Chronicle, "The Lion, The Witch, and The Racist", which tackled the very problematic The Horse and His Boy.
Kevin Whited at blogHouston argued that O'Connor is being silly, that she is being politically correct, that she isn't considering how children would read the book without necessarily noticing deeper themes which (he goes on to argue) aren't really there.
Disregarding Whited's presumption that people--liberal media elites, anyone?--have no right to voice their opinions on things which matter to them, and passing over his dismissal of the possibility that perhaps close reading of a text might reveal unexpected background themes like (say) the author's assumptions about the universal, he is likely right to argue that whatever racism might exist in The Horse and His Boy isn't essential to the plot. Certainly Alison Lurie was likely right to conclude of Lewis in The Guardian that as badly as "his dislike and suspicion of southern countries, his preference for all things northern (as a boy he fell in love with Norse myth and with Wagner's operas), and the fact that his good characters tend to be fair and fair-haired" might appear to modern-day readers, these prejudices were "typical of conservative writers of his generation."
These prejudices do bother me, at least inasmuch as if they were put forward today they'd be taken, correctly, as a mark against Lewis' character. They don't bother me that me, though, not enough to keep me from enjoying the series. If we're to require creative types to be politically correct, in our present and in the vaster past, we'll sadly reduce the global cultural corpus. Wagner's music is still good despite his anti-Semitism, after all.
Apart from the incidental bigotry, Neil Gaiman's criticism that the sub rosa theologization of the Narnia narrative undermines the reader's trust in the author, that in Gaiman's words "an author, whom I had trusted, had had a hidden agenda[, . . . making less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place" resonates more profoundly with me. (Incidentally, Neil Gaiman's 2004 short story "The Problem of Susan" reportedly provides an interesting take on the theology at hand.) I approached the Chronicles of Narnia completely ignorant of Lewis' intentions. When I found them out later, I did feel as if I wascheated a bit, that someone had tried to pull a fast one on me, holding my faculties of reason in contempt and hoping to make me take a pretty story as somehow real. Keri Wyatt Kent is one of many people who have argued (in her case, at Christian Woman) that the Chronicles of Narnia can work as a conversion narrative. I'll limit myself in my criticism of this position, simply concluding that almost all of the cases of reconversion cited involve not people entirely new to Christianity but rather backsliders, lapsed Christians. The Chronicles of Narnia don't work in the way Lewis intended. This, I submit, is testimony to human beings' critical intelligence.
Charles McGrath wrote last month in The New York Times that the Chronicles of Narnia are "not really concerned with explaining or defending this or that orthodoxy. They're interested in mostly the same thing Hollywood is: escape." This is true. It's best not to take the Chronicles of Narnia as representing anything particularly profound, or as anything more universal than a series of related enthralling stories. For people who already Christians, this might work. For people like myself, and Polly Toynbee, and the others not brought up convincingly into Christianity, the Chronicles work only--but what a only!--as a purely escapist narrative. I still remember how thrilled I was to read of the imagined warm furs of the sleigh of the White Witch, and how I was desperately curious to discover just what Turkish Delight actually tasted like. The Chronicles of Narnia are a wonderful series of stories. It's best not to make them be anything more.
heraclitus argued that one might as well use Lewis' deployment of talking animals to argue that he would be in favour of animal rights. I know that he raised this is jest, and yet. Why were humans needed to save Narnia from the White Witch when that land was already populated by sentient beings? Why was Tumnus? The later Reepicheep was so void? One must never challenge that character's honour, or his capabilities. Edmund found that out.The problem with the Chronicles, for me, lie in their necessary parochialism and their simultaneous claims to universal relevance. Take Kyrie O'Connor's article in the Houston Chronicle, "The Lion, The Witch, and The Racist", which tackled the very problematic The Horse and His Boy.
In its simplest form, the plot seems mild enough. A boy named Shasta, raised in the southern land of Calormen and sold into slavery by a simple fisherman who claims to be his father, runs off with a talking horse from the free northern kingdom of "Narnia."
But the land of Calormen is not simply a bad place to be from. Worse, the people are bad -- or most of them, anyway -- and they're bad in pretty predictable ways. Calormen is ruled by a despotic Tisroc and a band of swarthy lords with pointy beards, turbaned heads, long robes and nasty dispositions. Calormen is dirty, hot, dull, superstitious. In truth, it's more Ali Baba than Osama, but it's still pretty unsettling.
Here's Lewis' description of ordinary Calormenes: "men with long, dirty robes, and wooden shoes turned up at the toe, and turbans on their heads, and beards, and talking to one another very slowly about things that sounded dull."
And here's the city: "What you would chiefly have noticed if you had been there were the smells, which came from unwashed people, unwashed dogs, scent, garlic, onions, and the piles of refuse which lay everywhere."
The North, on the other hand, is where the "fair and white" people live. Shasta (no surprise) resembles those jaunty freedom-loving, Aslan-fearing Narnians. This is his first impression of some Narnians walking through the marketplace. "(T)hey were all as fair-skinned as himself, and most of them had fair hair. Their tunics were of fine, bright, hardy colors. Instead of turbans they wore steel or silver caps, some of them set with jewels, and the swords at their sides were long and straight. ... (T)hey walked with a swing and let their arms and shoulders go free, and chatted and laughed. One was whistling."
Kevin Whited at blogHouston argued that O'Connor is being silly, that she is being politically correct, that she isn't considering how children would read the book without necessarily noticing deeper themes which (he goes on to argue) aren't really there.
Are those young readers likely to bring O'Connor's preconceptions and political correctness to the text, and read it as racist and xenophobic? My own childhood reading of those great books of good/evil and dark/light and heroes and such suggests otherwise. Children, after all, have to focus on matters like the author's intent and the text and the plot and such. They haven't yet been taught to deconstruct the text in the manner of academic literary critics and newspaper editors who would dare lecture parents on how to share the racist Chronicles with their children.
Disregarding Whited's presumption that people--liberal media elites, anyone?--have no right to voice their opinions on things which matter to them, and passing over his dismissal of the possibility that perhaps close reading of a text might reveal unexpected background themes like (say) the author's assumptions about the universal, he is likely right to argue that whatever racism might exist in The Horse and His Boy isn't essential to the plot. Certainly Alison Lurie was likely right to conclude of Lewis in The Guardian that as badly as "his dislike and suspicion of southern countries, his preference for all things northern (as a boy he fell in love with Norse myth and with Wagner's operas), and the fact that his good characters tend to be fair and fair-haired" might appear to modern-day readers, these prejudices were "typical of conservative writers of his generation."
These prejudices do bother me, at least inasmuch as if they were put forward today they'd be taken, correctly, as a mark against Lewis' character. They don't bother me that me, though, not enough to keep me from enjoying the series. If we're to require creative types to be politically correct, in our present and in the vaster past, we'll sadly reduce the global cultural corpus. Wagner's music is still good despite his anti-Semitism, after all.
Apart from the incidental bigotry, Neil Gaiman's criticism that the sub rosa theologization of the Narnia narrative undermines the reader's trust in the author, that in Gaiman's words "an author, whom I had trusted, had had a hidden agenda[, . . . making less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place" resonates more profoundly with me. (Incidentally, Neil Gaiman's 2004 short story "The Problem of Susan" reportedly provides an interesting take on the theology at hand.) I approached the Chronicles of Narnia completely ignorant of Lewis' intentions. When I found them out later, I did feel as if I wascheated a bit, that someone had tried to pull a fast one on me, holding my faculties of reason in contempt and hoping to make me take a pretty story as somehow real. Keri Wyatt Kent is one of many people who have argued (in her case, at Christian Woman) that the Chronicles of Narnia can work as a conversion narrative. I'll limit myself in my criticism of this position, simply concluding that almost all of the cases of reconversion cited involve not people entirely new to Christianity but rather backsliders, lapsed Christians. The Chronicles of Narnia don't work in the way Lewis intended. This, I submit, is testimony to human beings' critical intelligence.
Charles McGrath wrote last month in The New York Times that the Chronicles of Narnia are "not really concerned with explaining or defending this or that orthodoxy. They're interested in mostly the same thing Hollywood is: escape." This is true. It's best not to take the Chronicles of Narnia as representing anything particularly profound, or as anything more universal than a series of related enthralling stories. For people who already Christians, this might work. For people like myself, and Polly Toynbee, and the others not brought up convincingly into Christianity, the Chronicles work only--but what a only!--as a purely escapist narrative. I still remember how thrilled I was to read of the imagined warm furs of the sleigh of the White Witch, and how I was desperately curious to discover just what Turkish Delight actually tasted like. The Chronicles of Narnia are a wonderful series of stories. It's best not to make them be anything more.
