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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In essence, Goldthwaite argues that Lewis uses Narnia as a sheltered preserve for his own prejudices -- which, it must be admitted, were many and far from pretty. But closer to the heart of this critique lies Goldthwaite's assertion that "whenever a professed Christian feels he must create some wholly other world to explore the meaning of his religion, he is flirting with bad faith. When he fills that world with the make-believes of other religions, he is playing at polytheism. When he further sets sorceresses to rule over it, and werewolves, incubuses and wraiths, he is dabbling in Manichaean dualism, the idea that standing opposed to God's good creation is another, separate and equal, or nearly equal, creation given over to evil."
This argument is theological. If Christians choose to believe that evil is an independent entity (like Satan or the White Witch of Narnia), instead of understanding, as Goldthwaite puts it, that "the darkness that is in this world we are quite adept at casting ourselves, by eclipsing God's will with our own," they are lapsing into heresy. The true belief of Christianity is that God created everything and that because God is good, all creation is good. Evil arises when human beings exercise their free will by turning away from God and putting their own pride first. For purely evil creatures to exist, God would have had to create them, and God does not create evil.
As Goldthwaite sees it, whatever Lewis and his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien may have claimed about their work, it is not compatible with true Christian theology. These two men disliked and withdrew from God's creation -- the world as it is -- considering it corrupt, fallen away from an earlier period of grace that, strangely, they associated with various pagan religions. Both Lewis and Tolkien had theories about how pre-Christian myth prefigured the gospels, but Goldthwaite dismisses this as sophistry. Tolkien had an elaborate justification for the Christian value in creating "secondary worlds," but Goldthwaite finds it lacking in any "explanation for why renouncing the world for places lost in the abyss of time should be thought anything but a rejection of God's plan for the world ... Creating a Secondary World, after all, is in effect a declaration that God's creation is deficient." It would be easier to shrug off this claim as excessive if there weren't so much evidence that Lewis and Tolkien considered this world to be just that: deficient -- compared to the fantasy worlds of their own invention.
Fortunately, this is not a distinction that the non-Christian Narnia- (or Middle-earth-) lover has to parse. Rather, such paradoxes remind us that the work an artist professes to make is often quite different from the work he actually does make. Even Lewis would agree that art springs from sources that the artist never fully understands. In fact, Lewis himself wrote a famous essay that undermines the notion that "The Chronicles of Narnia" are merely a way to acquaint us with Jesus under another name.
Lewis is one of the great writers about reading -- most of the lazy and troublesome biases that afflict his fiction seemed to fall away in the sympathetic act of meeting another writer on the page. In the essay "On Stories" he describes a conversation he had with one of his students at Oxford, about "the books which had delighted our boyhood." The student had loved James Fenimore Cooper, and vividly remembered a scene in which an Indian with a tomahawk crept toward the book's hero as he slept by a campfire.
What the student remembered about the scene was its "agonized suspense," but Lewis thought there must be more to it. Although Lewis had never read the book himself, he knew what he would have thrilled to in reading the same passage: "Take away the feathers, the high cheek-bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk, and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged -- the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, warpaths and wigwams."
The student begged to differ, and in explaining this, showed Lewis "how totally his imaginative life differed from mine ... He would, if anything, have preferred to the Redskin some more ordinary danger such as a crook with a revolver." But for Lewis, the trappings were more than half the story: They were the premise of its attraction. Make the essential situation the same but swap a stubbly-faced hoodlum with a gat for the stealthy Indian in the woods, and all the appeal would be drained from the tale. It would, in truth, be a different story entirely.
Years later, Lewis wrote that he wanted "The Chronicles of Narnia" to take the parables of the New Testament and cast them "into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations," hoping that this would make them "appear in their real potency." Perhaps this statement implies -- as per Goldthwaite -- that Lewis thought he could do a better job of conveying Jesus' message than the gospels do. But it certainly contradicts what Lewis himself once wrote about the centrality of "associations" to the art of story making.
Lewis didn't just subtract "stained-glass and Sunday School" from the lessons of the New Testament: He added fauns, centaurs, talking animals, witches, dwarves, Turkish delight and four English schoolchildren. By his own calculation (as applied to James Fenimore Cooper), he changed the very identity of the story. Even if the "Chronicles" didn't violate Christian doctrine by Goldthwaite's exacting standards, they would elude it in another way, a way that Lewis himself described and believed in.
So when the film of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" opens, and if it's good, and if millions of children see it and fall in love with it, what they will love about the film, and the books if they seek them out, will be Narnia's equivalent of "the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, warpaths and wigwams." If they don't realize that all this supposedly conceals a Christian message like a drop of monotheistic medicine concealed in a spoonful of pagan sugar, we'll be foolish to think they've been duped. If they're like the generations of children before them, they won't see or learn the lesson Lewis was trying to teach. Instead they'll see battles and adventure and magic -- and who's to say that's not what really counts?
