{"id":247,"date":"2005-12-23T11:05:09","date_gmt":"2005-12-23T16:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=247"},"modified":"2005-12-24T21:36:35","modified_gmt":"2005-12-25T02:36:35","slug":"thoughts-on-the-prisoner-of-narnia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=247","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on the Prisoner of Narnia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since writing the essay <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=231'>C.S.  Lewis is morally<br \/>\nincoherent<\/a> I have finished rereading the entire Narnia series.  I<br \/>\ncould go on at length about how the writing deteriorates as Lewis&#8217;s<br \/>\nimaginative impulse is more and more smothered by the clanking and<br \/>\nwheezing of his allegory machine, but Adam Gopnik makes the point<br \/>\nbetter than I could in <a href='http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/critics\/atlarge\/articles\/051121crat_atlarge'>Prisoner<br \/>\nof Narnia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Gopnik is particularly spot-on when he describes Lewis&#8217;s enthusiasts:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nPraise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological<br \/>\nreasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to<br \/>\nyourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the<br \/>\nenthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws<br \/>\nanother right hook at the rationalist that they don&#8217;t notice that the<br \/>\nrationalist isn&#8217;t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends<br \/>\nhave long since left the building.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I could be the rationalist in this analogy.  I admire the<br \/>\n<cite>Screwtape Letters<\/cite> as a marvellous piece of writing,<br \/>\nprobably the most effective single Christian apologetic of the 20th<br \/>\ncentury, but as an argument it completely fails to affect me; Lewis<br \/>\ntreats as deep mysteries issues that I think are obvious, and glides<br \/>\nover or ignores entirely the questions I find most interesting.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve met a number of Christians who are convinced his arguments<br \/>\n<em>should<\/em> affect me, though, and seem genuinely puzzled when<br \/>\nthey don&#8217;t. The brutal truth is that Lewis was a primitive thinker, a<br \/>\nfabulist who substituted spiritual\/emotional passion for philosophical<br \/>\nanalysis and never clearly understood that he wasn&#8217;t achieving the<br \/>\nlatter.<\/p>\n<p>Here again, Gopnik is both sympathetic and mercilessly exact:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nHis works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell<br \/>\nof his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the<br \/>\nstars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held<br \/>\nthe key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Gopnik never unpacks this analogy, but its elements are plain.  The<br \/>\ncage was Lewis&#8217;s Christian religiosity; the key was the pagan<br \/>\nenthusiasm and wonder of his childhood; and the end was that last<br \/>\nportion of his life during which he wrote <cite>Til We Have<br \/>\nFaces<\/cite>, a re-paganized mythological examination of all the<br \/>\nquestions that most obsessed him.  No part of his journey ever took<br \/>\nplace at the level of philosophy; it was all fable, all spirit-quest,<br \/>\nall psychodrama occasionally dressed up in the language of intellectual<br \/>\nargument but never really at home there.<\/p>\n<p>Gopnik drops the ball only once:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nA bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into<br \/>\na warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert.  It sounds like the usual<br \/>\nstory. What was special about Lewis was that, throughout it all, he<br \/>\nkept an inner life.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Gopnik&#8217;s description of &#8220;the usual story&#8221; is more awfully truthful<br \/>\nthan most Americans can know; I actually went to a British day school<br \/>\nin the 1960s (it happened to be located outside Rome, but that&#8217;s a<br \/>\ndetail) and the decaying end of the same tradition that had warped<br \/>\nLewis fifty years before was still quite unpleasant enough.  But<br \/>\nGopnik is wrong in thinking Lewis was exceptional for maintaining an<br \/>\ninner life; most public-school boys did, even if only as a form of<br \/>\nescape. No; what was exceptional about Lewis came later, when he<br \/>\nconverted to Christianity in 1931 for reasons that were desperately<br \/>\nwrong from any Christian point of view.<\/p>\n<p>Here again, Gopnik is clear-eyed:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThis was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for<br \/>\nmillennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between<br \/>\npagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the<br \/>\n<em>likeness<\/em> of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even<br \/>\nVictorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of<br \/>\nan overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating<br \/>\ntoo much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep<br \/>\nhimself from doing it again. Lewis didn&#8217;t embrace Christianity because<br \/>\nhe had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it<br \/>\nwould keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God&#8217;s own<br \/>\nbakery.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The mythological arc of Lewis&#8217;s work, the arc that ends with<br \/>\n<cite>Til We Have Faces<\/cite>, makes it clear that this account is<br \/>\ncorrect.  And from a pagan point of view (certainly a neopagan one<br \/>\nlike mine) cozying up to a god because that will keep the cake coming<br \/>\nis eminently reasonable.  The pagan bargain between god and human is<br \/>\nan exchange of value, adoration given for power returned.  But within<br \/>\nan Augustinian Christian point of view this is horribly backwards:<br \/>\nconversion is supposed to be all about submission to the will of God<br \/>\nand what I have elsewhere described as installing a <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=165'>sin\/guilt\/thoughtcrime<br \/>\nmonitor<\/a> in one&#8217;s own head.  There is no evidence that Lewis<br \/>\never did this; he doesn&#8217;t seem, for example, to have suffered the<br \/>\npangs of conscience one might have expected from a Christian<br \/>\nenthusiast over committing adultery.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, for all his enthusiasm, Lewis was a poor Christian, and an<br \/>\nuneven (and ultimately unsuccessful) evangelist.  J.R.R. Tolkien, who had<br \/>\nbeen reponsible for Lewis&#8217;s conversion, understood this and was much<br \/>\nbothered by it.  When Gopnik reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury<br \/>\nwas offended by Lewis&#8217;s &#8220;vulgar, bullying&#8221; religiosity there is no reason<br \/>\nat all for us to doubt that, either.<\/p>\n<p>As regards the quality of Lewis&#8217;s writing, it was his Christianity<br \/>\nthat damaged him, not his pagan instincts.  As Gopnik writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nLewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the<br \/>\nallegorical&mdash;his conscience as a writer lets him see<br \/>\nthat the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just<br \/>\nas imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the<br \/>\nmarvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with<br \/>\nbelief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or,<br \/>\nat least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just<br \/>\nwhat it&#8217;s supposed to say.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This describes with laser-beam precision what&#8217;s wrong with the<br \/>\nNarnia books.  It&#8217;s already a serious problem in <cite>The Lion, the<br \/>\nWitch, and the Wardrobe<\/cite> and it gets worse as the series<br \/>\nprogresses.  By <cite>The Last Battle<\/cite> all that&#8217;s left of<br \/>\nwhatever narrative coherence Narnia originally possessed is a series<br \/>\nof gorgeous imagistic set pieces. Lewis tries so obsessively to pump<br \/>\nthese full of allegorical meaning that, paradoxically, they lose all<br \/>\nmeaning.  The clanking of the allegory machine is just too<br \/>\naudible.<\/p>\n<p>Even children pick up on this; I did, though when I first read the<br \/>\nbooks I didn&#8217;t understand what I was feeling. As Gopnik puts it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThe emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known,<br \/>\ndiminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly<br \/>\nreligious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least<br \/>\nsuccessfully, allegorized.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I could dispute some of the pronouncements with which Gopnik<br \/>\nfinishes his essay; not being a neopagan himself, he crams pagan<br \/>\nmysticism into an implicitly dualist framework, and thus understands it<br \/>\nless well than he thinks he does.  But when he writes<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nFairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none<br \/>\nof their light because someone lit the candle.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>he is dead on target.  Tolkien understood this; Lewis never did.  That&#8217;s<br \/>\nwhy, at fifty years&#8217; remove, it is Lewis who stands in Tolkien&#8217;s shadow<br \/>\nas a fantasist and not the other way around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since writing the essay C.S. Lewis is morally incoherent I have finished rereading the entire Narnia series. I could go on at length about how the writing deteriorates as Lewis&#8217;s imaginative impulse is more and more smothered by the clanking and wheezing of his allegory machine, but Adam Gopnik makes the point better than I&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=247\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Thoughts on the Prisoner of Narnia<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}