Chapter 11: Rearranging Reality: The Creation of Narnia
Rearranging Reality: The Creation of Narnia
In 2008 the London publishers HarperCollins invited Diane Simpson, a professional graphologist, to examine some specimens of the handwriting of C. S. Lewis. Simpson had no idea whom she was investigating. She found the “small, neat script” suggestive of someone who was “guarded and careful,” with sharp critical faculties. Simpson also noticed something else. “I wonder whether he has a garden shed of sorts (or some other sort of world) in which to disappear when he chooses.”[557] Simpson was absolutely right. Lewis did indeed have “some other sort of world” into which he would disappear—an imagined world we now know as Narnia.
Let us pause at this point. Narnia is an imaginative, not an imaginary, world. Lewis was quite clear that a distinction had to be drawn between these ideas. The “imaginary” is something that has been falsely imagined, having no counterpart in reality. Lewis regards such an invented reality as opening the way to delusion. The “imaginative” is something produced by the human mind as it tries to respond to something greater than itself, struggling to find images adequate to the reality. The more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability to “communicate more Reality to us.”[558] For Lewis, the imaginative is to be seen as a legitimate and positive use of the human imagination, challenging the limits of reason and opening the door to a deeper apprehension of reality.
So how did Lewis invent this imaginative world? And why? Was it a retreat into the security of his childhood at a time of personal and professional stress? Was Lewis like Peter Pan, an emotionally retarded boy who never really grew up, and Narnia his version of “Never Never Land”? There may be a grain of truth in these suggestions. As we have already seen, Lewis turned to writing when he was stressed, finding relief in the exercise. Yet there is clearly another factor in play here: Lewis’s growing realisation that children’s stories offered him a marvellous way of exploring philosophical and theological questions—such as the origins of evil, the nature of faith, and the human desire for God. A good story could weave these themes together, using the imagination as the gateway to serious thinking.
The origins of the Narnia stories lay, Lewis tells us, in his imagination. It all began with an image of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood. Lewis’s celebrated description of the creative process depicts it as unfolding from mental images, which were then consciously connected to form a consistent plot. There are obvious and important parallels with the origins of Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit. In a letter to W. H. Auden (1907–1973), Tolkien recalled being bored to death during the early 1930s marking school certificate exam papers (he needed the extra money), when for some inexplicable reason, an idea came into his head. “On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why.”[559]
Yet Lewis did not really see himself as “creating” Narnia. As he once commented, “creation” is “an entirely misleading term.” Lewis preferred to think of human thought as “God-kindled,”[560] and the writing process as the rearrangement of elements that God has provided. The writer takes “things that lie to hand,” and puts them to new use. Like someone who plants a garden, the author is only one aspect of a “causal stream.”[561] As we shall see, Lewis drew extensively on “elements” he found in literature. His skill lay not in inventing these elements, but in the manner he wove them together to create the literary landmark that we know as the Chronicles of Narnia.
11.1 Mr. Tumnus, a faun, carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood, accompanied by Lucy. This is one of the best-known images provided by Pauline Baynes for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The Origins of Narnia
“I’m going to write a children’s book!” Mrs. Moore and Maureen greeted Lewis’s unexpected announcement one morning over breakfast, probably around the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939,[562] with good-natured derision.[563] Not only did Lewis have no children of his own; he had virtually no contact with any children other than sporadic meetings with his godchildren. Their laughter soon died down, but Lewis’s idea did not fade away. Narnia was taking shape in his mind, as ideas and images going back to his childhood began to crystallise.
The composition of the series was generally fluid and easy. Despite Lewis’s mounting personal and professional problems, he was able to write five of the seven novels between the summer of 1948 and the spring of 1951. A fallow period then followed, before Lewis began writing The Last Battle in the autumn of 1952, finishing it the following spring. The final volume to be completed was The Magician’s Nephew, which Lewis clearly found more problematic than other works in the series. Although Lewis began drafting this work shortly after he finished the text of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he did not complete it until March 1954.
Some would see this ease of composition as a mark of Lewis’s creative genius. Others—most notably, J. R. R. Tolkien—regarded the speed with which they were written as an indication of their shallowness. They lacked a strong and consistent backstory, and were mythological cross-breeds, lacking a sense of coherence. Why, Tolkien wondered, introduce Father Christmas into the story? He didn’t really belong there. Harbouring darker thoughts, Tolkien also suspected that Lewis had borrowed some of his own ideas and had woven them into the Narnia Chronicles without due acknowledgement.
It is easy to understand Tolkien’s concerns. Yet it must be pointed out that recent Lewis scholarship has identified a deeper coherence to the Narnia stories, linked with Lewis’s subtle—indeed, one might say cryptic—use of medieval symbolism. We shall consider this point in the following chapter.
So where did the name Narnia come from? While studying classics under William Thompson Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham, between 1914 and 1917, Lewis acquired a copy of an atlas of the classical world, published in 1904. On one of its maps, Lewis underscored the name of an ancient Italian town because he liked the sound of its name.[564] The town was Narnia—now the modern Italian town of Narni in Umbria, located roughly in the centre of Italy. (Lewis never visited it.) One of the most famous inhabitants of Narni was Lucia Brocadelli (1476–1544), a renowned visionary and mystic who became its patron saint. Yet no particular significance can be attached to these facts as they relate to real history of Narnia, or its cultural role in the late classical or early medieval periods—or even the importance of this Lucy to this Narnia. It seems Lewis simply liked the sound of the Latin name, and it became fixed in his memory—despite the fact that it designated a city, not a region or land.
The discovery of Narnia has become one of the best-known scenes in children’s literature. Four children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—are evacuated from London during the Second World War to escape the bombing of England’s capital city.[565] Separated from their family, they are taken to an old house in the country, owned and occupied by a genial, well-meaning, yet slightly eccentric professor (whom many regard as a thinly disguised version of Lewis himself). Prevented from exploring the outside world by heavy rain, the children decide to explore the book-strewn corridors and rooms inside the house instead. (There is a clear parallel here with Lewis’s long-term fascination with the distinction between the “exterior world” and the “interior world.”) Finally, they stumble into a “room that was quite empty except for one big wardrobe.”[566]
Lucy, entering the wardrobe, finds herself in a cold, snowy land—a world in which it is “always winter and never Christmas.” In her encounters with its inhabitants—primarily with fauns and beavers—Lucy learns a story about Narnia: the true king of Narnia is a great lion named Aslan, who has been absent for many years but is now “on the move again.” Her brother Edmund hears a very different story from the White Witch, who presents herself as the true and lawful ruler of Narnia.
At one level, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is about the testing of these characters and their stories about Narnia. Who is to be trusted? Which story about Narnia is to be believed? To make the right judgements about what they should do, the children need to discover and trust the true master narrative of the mysterious world into which they have stumbled, and within which they seem destined to play a significant role.
11.2 The four children discover the mysterious wardrobe in an empty room in the Professor’s house. An illustration by Pauline Baynes from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The contrast with some earlier children’s stories is quite striking. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), for example, Dorothy is told which witches are wicked, and which are good. In Narnia, characters do not wear name tags declaring their moral character. The children (and readers) have to work these things out for themselves. The characters they encounter are complex and multifaceted. Their true moral character has to be discovered.
The Chronicles of Narnia illuminate how human beings understand themselves, face up to their weaknesses, and try to become the people they are meant to be. They are about a quest for meaning and virtue, not simply the quest for explanation and understanding. That is perhaps one reason why the Chronicles of Narnia have proved to have such a powerful appeal: they speak of choices to be made, of right and wrong, and of challenges that must be faced. Yet this vision of goodness and greatness is not set forth as a logical or reasoned argument, but is affirmed and explored through the telling of a story—a story that captures the imagination.
Through the influence of Charles Williams in the early 1940s, Lewis discovered the power of the imagination to make readers long for moral goodness. It was Williams, he declared, who taught him that “when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted.”[567] The key to moral improvement is thus the captivation of the imagination through powerful stories telling of “brave knights and heroic courage.”[568] Such stories inspire and ennoble, making us yearn to do the same in our own worlds.
The Threshold: A Key Narnian Theme
A central theme in the Chronicles of Narnia is that of a door into another world—a threshold that can be crossed, allowing us to enter a wonderful new realm and explore it. There are obvious religious overtones to the idea, which Lewis discussed in earlier works, such as the 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory.” For Lewis, human experience suggests that there is another and more wonderful world, in which our true destiny lies—but that we are at present on the “wrong side” of the door that leads into this world.
The idea of a threshold to strange worlds is a familiar theme in children’s literature, past and present. Today’s readers are likely to think of J. K. Rowling’s “Platform 9¾” at King’s Cross Station in London. Readers of an earlier age—including Lewis himself—would think of the children’s stories of E. Nesbit (1858–1924), now remembered for her classic Edwardian novels The Railway Children (1906) and The Enchanted Castle (1907).
Lewis had read several of Nesbit’s works with great appreciation as a child, and recalled particularly being entranced by Nesbit’s trilogy Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Lewis singled out the last of these as being of especial importance to him, and notes that he could still “reread it with delight.”[569] All three stories centre on a family group of five children who have to leave home for various reasons, and discover exciting new things in the company of strange and wonderful people and creatures. It is through being distanced from their familiar context that the children encounter new and mysterious worlds and ideas—a theme that recurs in the Narnia novels.
One of Nesbit’s central themes is that there is a link or bridge between two worlds, which the wise are able to find and traverse. Like George MacDonald (1824–1905) before her, Nesbit wrote about a mysterious threshold between the ordinary and the magical, between the everyday world and an enchanted realm. As she explained this idea in The Enchanted Castle:
There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, almost anything may happen.[570]
Lewis’s debt to Nesbit goes beyond the idea of a general threshold to strange worlds. In her collection of stories The Magic World (1912), we find a series of plotlines which bear an uncanny resemblance to those found in Narnia. In “The Aunt and Amabel,” we read of Amabel, a young girl who unintentionally wrecks her aunt’s flowerbed, and is sent upstairs to a bedroom as punishment. There she finds a bed, a large wardrobe, and a railway timetable. The wardrobe turns out to contain a secret railway station, which can transport her to other worlds.[571]
The theme of crossing thresholds plays an important imaginative role in the Narnia series. It allows the reader to enter a strange world, which is explored through the actions and adventures of the chief characters. This process is significantly helped through the illustrations of Pauline Baynes (1922–2008), who had earlier provided the artwork for Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949). Baynes produced a series of line illustrations that seemed to Tolkien to capture the essence of his text perfectly. He wrote with delight to his publishers, declaring that they were even better than he had dared to hope. “They are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme.” For Tolkien, the illustrations were so good that his friends considered that they reduced his text “to a commentary on the drawings.”[572] So began a long and mutually respectful relationship between author and illustrator. There is little wonder that Tolkien should recommend her to Lewis when his publisher insisted on illustrations for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
In the end, Baynes’s relationship with Lewis turned out to be rather formal and distant. They appear to have met only twice. One of these two meetings was a highly perfunctory and brief discussion at London’s Waterloo Station, during which Lewis frequently consulted his watch, anxious not to miss his train. (Her diary entry for that day was rumoured to read: “Met C. S. Lewis. Came home. Made rock cakes.”) It was not an easy relationship, particularly when Baynes learned that Lewis, having been very positive about her illustrations to her face, was somewhat more critical of her artistic gifts behind her back—especially her ability to draw lions.
Lewis seems to have made a significant misjudgement here, failing to realise how Baynes’s illustrations would help his readers visualise Narnia, and especially the noble and magisterial Aslan. Wouldn’t Lewis’s childhood experience of coming to love Wagner through Arthur Rackham’s illustrations (pages 28–29) have made him alert to the importance of illustrations in helping captivate the imagination? Yet apparently without realising it, Lewis had found the perfect visualisation of his imaginative world—perhaps most evocatively depicted in the drawing of a little girl walking arm in arm with a faun beneath an umbrella in a snowy wood.
In February 2008, the British educational charity Booktrust—“dedicated to encouraging people of all ages and cultures to enjoy books”—voted The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the best children’s book of all time. Lewis’s winsome narrative may have laid the foundation for this award; many would say that Baynes’s illustrations clinched it. Perhaps in the end Lewis would have agreed. After all, he replied to Baynes’s letter of congratulation when The Last Battle won the Carnegie Medal for best children’s book of 1956 by including her in his achievement: “Is it not rather ‘our’ Medal? I’m sure the illustrations were taken into consideration as well as the text.”[573]
The Reading Order of the Narnia Series
Lewis originally envisaged The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a stand-alone, self-contained work—and it can still be read and appreciated as such. The other Narnia novels radiate outwards from this work, even in the case of The Magician’s Nephew, which is presented as chronologically prior to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. By allowing us to enter Narnia in the midst of its history, Lewis makes us want to know about its past, as well as its future. The Magician’s Nephew is a flashback, a way of illuminating the present by looking back to the past.
The seven works can be read in three ways: according to their date of writing, their date of publication, or the internal chronology of the events the volumes describe. These three quite different approaches point to the following reading orders:
ORDER OF WRITING
ORDER OF PUBLICATION
INTERNAL CHRONOLOGY
1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
1. The Magician’s Nephew
2. Prince Caspian
2. Prince Caspian (1951)
2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
3. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
3. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (1952)
3. The Horse and His Boy
4. The Horse and His Boy
4. The Silver Chair (1953)
4. Prince Caspian
5. The Silver Chair
5. The Horse and His Boy (1954)
5. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
6. The Last Battle
6. The Magician’s Nephew (1955)
6. The Silver Chair
7. The Magician’s Nephew
7. The Last Battle (1956)
7. The Last Battle
The collected edition of the Chronicles of Narnia published by HarperCollins (2005) includes this statement: “Although The Magician’s Nephew was written several years after C. S. Lewis first began The Chronicles of Narnia, he wanted it to be read as the first book in the series. HarperCollins is happy to present these books in the order in which Professor Lewis preferred.” This seemingly straightforward assertion is actually a questionable interpretation, rather than a direct statement, of Lewis’s views.[574] Lewis made it clear that they could be read in any order, and was cautious about stipulating any prescribed order.
After all, Lewis’s late essay “On Criticism” emphasises the importance of establishing the chronology of composition in the interpretation of a series of works—noting, for example, some influential misreadings of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings that arise on account of confusion on this matter.[575] Furthermore, Lewis is adamant that the author of a book is “not necessarily the best, and is never a perfect, judge” of how it is to be read and interpreted.[576]
These points should be given due weight, as the chronological approach raises considerable difficulties for readers. For example, the events of The Horse and His Boy actually occur during, not after, those of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This makes the reading of the work quite problematic if strict internal chronology is used as the criterion for determining the correct order of reading.
The most significant difficulty concerns The Magician’s Nephew, the last in the series to be written, which describes the early history of Narnia. To read this work first completely destroys the literary integrity of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which emphasises the mysteriousness of Aslan. It introduces him slowly and carefully, building up a sense of expectation that is clearly based on the assumption that the readers know nothing of the name, identity, or significance of this magnificent creature. In his role as narrator within The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis declares, “None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do.”[577] But anyone who has read The Magician’s Nephew already knows a lot about Aslan. The gradual disclosure of the mysteries of Narnia—one of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s most impressive literary features—is spoiled and subverted by a prior reading of The Magician’s Nephew.
Equally important, the complex symbolic structure of the Chronicles of Narnia is best appreciated through a later reading of The Magician’s Nephew. This is most helpful when it is placed (following the order of publication) as the sixth of the seven volumes, with The Last Battle as the conclusion.
It is perfectly possible to read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings without needing to read its later prequel The Silmarillion; so it is with Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Having read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the reader naturally wants to move both forwards and backwards, exploring both what happens next and how Narnia came into being. Both options are open to readers; neither is to be imposed upon them.
Finally, there is a clear—and generally overlooked—literary clue to Lewis’s true intentions in the subtitles of three of its novels. These subtitles are generally omitted in recent printings of the works. One of these is Prince Caspian, the full title of which is Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia. Its illuminating subtitle clearly suggests that this work ought to be read immediately after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis provided only two of the remaining novels in the series with subtitles—the identical phrase A Story for Children. Significantly, these are The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle.
Why is this important? Lewis, who as a professional scholar of English literature was well versed in literary and rhetorical devices, uses this subtitle as an inclusio—a literary device widely used in biblical and secular literature. The inclusio allows a writer to “bracket” material to indicate that what is enclosed constitutes a single or coherent unit.[578] The opening and closing of the bracket (or envelope) are indicated by the repetition of the same memorable term or phrase. Lewis uses the subtitle A Story for Children for two, and only two, works of the Chronicles of Narnia—namely, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle. This phrase, “a story for children,” is Lewis’s inclusio. The remaining five novels are thus bracketed or enfolded within these two bookends, which define the start and end of the series. The decision not to reproduce these subtitles in recent editions of the Chronicles of Narnia has obscured Lewis’s use of this literary device, and thus somewhat concealed his purpose.
One of the most striking features of Narnia is the prominent role played in its narrative by animals. Some dismiss this as childish drivel, seeing it as a reversion to Lewis’s childhood world of Boxen, populated by dressed, speaking animals. But there is rather more to Lewis’s narrative than this.
The Chronicles of Narnia include criticisms of attitudes that were prevalent within the so-called “progressive” thought of Lewis’s age—such as its widespread acceptance of the practice of vivisection in laboratory experiments. Lewis had no hesitation in criticising fashionable ideas of the 1930s and 1940s—such as H. G. Wells’s enthusiastic advocation of eugenics and vivisection—which would today be rejected as dehumanizing and immoral. In Lewis’s 1947 essay “Vivisection,” he joined forces with the great Oxford children’s novelist of the nineteenth century, Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), in protesting the infliction of torture on animals. For Lewis, the practice of vivisection exposed an inner contradiction within Darwinian naturalism. At one and the same time, it emphasised the biological proximity of humans and animals, while asserting the ultimate authority of human beings to do what they please with animals.[579]
Furthermore, as we discussed earlier (pages 235–237), Lewis shrewdly noted how support for eugenics and vivisection leads to some morally uncomfortable conclusions. The eugenics theories of the 1930s—which found embarrassingly wide support in socially liberal circles in western Europe at this time—involve the assumption that certain human beings are inferior to others, and that the survival of the human race thus demands that only the “best” be allowed to reproduce. The liberal elite of Europe loved this idea in the period between the two world wars. But where, Lewis wonders, does this dangerous idea take us?
Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men.[580]
It is easy to depict the Narnia novels as an infantile attempt to pretend that animals speak and experience emotion. Yet Lewis’s narrative mounts a deceptively subtle critique of certain Darwinian ways of understanding the place of humanity within the natural order, and offers a corrective. Lewis’s portrayal of animal characters in Narnia is partly a protest against shallow assertions of humanity’s right to do what it pleases with nature.
The rich depictions of animals in the Chronicles of Narnia are partly informed by the “bestiaries” of the Middle Ages—classic accounts of animal life which emphasised their distinct identities and roles within the created order. Each was seen as witnessing to the complex interdependency of the natural world. Lewis adds to these by portraying animals as conscious moral agents.
Where vivisectionists saw animals—such as mice—simply as fodder for laboratory experiments, lacking any inner feelings or intrinsic value, Lewis portrays them as active, conscious agents in Narnia. The most obvious example of this is Reepicheep, a mouse of nobility and virtue, who ends up teaching Eustace Scrubb about honour, courage, and loyalty. This inversion of Darwinian hierarchies does not represent a lapse into irrational sentimentality, nor is it regression to the “Dressed Animals” of Lewis’s childhood world of Boxen. For Lewis, the true mark of the primacy of humans over animals is “acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us.”[581] Noblesse oblige, as the French say. Human dignity demands that humans show respect for animals. More than that, animals can enable human beings to develop compassion and care. Lewis’s theology of creation leads him to insist that human relationships with animals can be ennobling and fulfilling—both for animals and for humans. There is, of course, one animal in Narnia that stands out above all others—the mysterious and noble figure of Aslan, whom we shall consider in greater detail in the next chapter.
For Lewis, the narrative of Narnia has the capacity to re-enchant a disenchanted world. It helps us to imagine our world differently. This is not escapism, but is about discerning deeper levels of meaning and value in what we already know. As Lewis pointed out, the readers of such a children’s book do not “despise real woods” because they have “read of enchanted woods”; instead, their new way of seeing things “makes all real woods a little enchanted.”[582]
Lewis himself spoke about this process of “double seeing” at several points in his works—most notably, in concluding a lecture given at the Socratic Club in Oxford in 1945: “I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”[583] We can look at the sun itself; or we can look instead at what it illuminates—thus enlarging our intellectual, moral, and aesthetic vision. We see the true, the good, and the beautiful more clearly by being given a lens that brings them into focus. They are not invented by our reading of Narnia, but they are discerned, lit up, and brought into sharper focus. And more than that, we see more, and we see farther, by looking through the right lens.
We should read Narnia as Lewis asks us to read other works of literature—as something that is to be enjoyed on the one hand, and something with the capacity to enlarge our vision of reality on the other. What Lewis wrote of The Hobbit in 1939 applies with equal force to his own Narnia books: they allow us into “a world of its own” which, once it has been encountered, “becomes indispensable.” “You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone.”[584]
The seven Chronicles of Narnia are often referred to (though not, it should be noted, by Lewis himself) as a religious allegory. Lewis’s early work The Pilgrim’s Regress is rightly described as a religious allegory. Each of its elements has a representational quality—in other words, they are all disguised yet specific ways of referring to something else. But within a decade, Lewis had moved away from this form of writing. It is possible to read Narnia as an allegory; however, as Lewis once noted, “the mere fact that you can allegorise the work before you is of itself no proof that it is an allegory.”[585]
In 1958, Lewis made an important distinction between a “supposal” and an allegory. A supposal is an invitation to try seeing things in another way, and imagine how things would work out if this were true. To understand Lewis’s meaning at this point, we need to consider the way in which he expresses this notion:
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours?” This is not allegory at all.[586]
Lewis thus invites his readers to enter into a world of supposals. Suppose God did decide to become incarnate in a world like Narnia. How would this work out? What would it look like? Narnia is a narrative exploration of this theological assumption. Lewis’s own explanation of how the figure of Aslan is to be interpreted makes it clear that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a supposal—the imaginative exploration of an interesting possibility. “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 happen.”[587]
In The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis describes a forest full of entrances to other worlds. One of these entrances leads to Narnia, a new world soon to be populated with sentient creatures, both animal and human. Yet Lewis is quite clear that there are worlds beyond Narnia. Narnia is, so to speak, a theological case study, capable of illuminating our own situation. It provokes thought, rather than answering questions. It demands that we work out the answers for ourselves, rather than accept them predigested. Lewis uses Narnia to show us something without really arguing for it, relying on the power of his imagery and narrative style to allow our imaginations to supplement what reason merely suggests.
Narnia and the Retelling of the Grand Narrative
It is impossible to understand the deep appeal of Narnia without appreciating the place of stories in shaping our understanding of reality, and our own place within that reality. The Chronicles of Narnia resonate strongly with the basic human intuition that our own story is part of something grander—which, once grasped, allows us to see our situation in a new and more meaningful way. A veil is lifted, a door is opened, a curtain is drawn aside—and we are enabled to enter a new realm. Our own story is now seen to be part of a much bigger story, which helps us both understand how we fit into a greater scheme of things and discover and value the difference we can make.
Like Tolkien, Lewis was deeply aware of the imaginative power of “myths”—stories that tried to make sense of who we are, where we find ourselves, what has gone wrong with things, and what can be done about it. Tolkien was able to use myth to saturate The Lord of the Rings with a mysterious “otherness,” a sense of mystery and magic which hints at a reality beyond that which human reason can fathom. Lewis realized that good and evil, danger, anguish, and joy can all be seen more clearly when “dipped in a story.” Through their “presentational realism,” these narratives provide a way of grasping the deeper structures of our world at both the imaginative and rational levels.[588]
Lewis may also have come to realize the power of myth through reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, with its classic distinction between “imaginary” and “imaginative,” and deft analysis of how the imagination reaches beyond the limits of reason. “Every true artist,” Chesterton argues, feels “that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.”[589]
Steeped in the riches of medieval and Renaissance literature, and with a deep understanding of how myths work, Lewis managed to find the right voice and the right words to get past the suspicions of a “fully waking imagination of a logical mind.”[590] Somehow, Narnia seems to provide a deeper, brighter, more wonderful, and more meaningful world than anything we know from our own experience. Though its readers all know that the Chronicles of Narnia are fictional, the books nevertheless seem far more true to life than many supposedly factual works.[591]
Lewis always recognised that the same story might be a “myth” to one reader, and not to another.[592] The stories of Narnia seem childish nonsense to some. But to others, they are utterly transformative. For the latter group, these evocative stories affirm that it is possible for the weak and foolish to have a noble calling in a dark world; that our deepest intuitions point us to the true meaning of things; that there is indeed something beautiful and wonderful at the heart of the universe, and that this may be found, embraced, and adored.
The contrast with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is important here. The complex and dark narrative of The Lord of the Rings is about finding a master ring that rules the other rings—and then destroying it, because it turns out to be so dangerous and destructive. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are about finding a master story that makes sense of all other stories—and then embracing that story with delight because of its power to give meaning and value to life. Yet Lewis’s narrative nevertheless subtly raises darker questions. Which story is the true story? Which stories are merely its shadows and echoes? And which are mere fabrications—tales spun to entrap and deceive?
At an early stage in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the four children begin to hear stories about the true origins and destiny of Narnia. Puzzled, they find they have to make decisions about which people and which stories are to be trusted. Is Narnia really the realm of the White Witch? Or is she a usurper, whose power will be broken when two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve sit on the four thrones at Cair Paravel? Is Narnia really the realm of the mysterious Aslan, whose return is expected at any time?
Gradually, one narrative emerges as supremely plausible—the story of Aslan. Each individual story of Narnia turns out to be part of this greater narrative. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe hints at (and partially discloses) the big picture, expanded in the remainder of the Narnia series. This “grand narrative” of interlocking stories makes sense of the riddles the children see and experience around them. It allows the children to understand their experiences with a new clarity and depth, like a camera lens bringing a landscape into sharp focus.
Yet Lewis did not invent this Narnian narrative. He borrowed and adapted one that he already knew well, and had found to be true and trustworthy—the Christian narrative of Creation, Fall, redemption, and final consummation. Following his late-evening conversation with Tolkien and Dyson about Christianity as the true myth in September 1931, Lewis began to grasp the explanatory and imaginative power of an incarnational faith. As we saw (page 134), Lewis came to believe in Christianity partly because of the quality of its literary vision—its ability to give a faithful and realistic account of life. Lewis was thus drawn to Christianity not so much by the arguments in its favour, but by its compelling vision of reality, which he could not ignore—and, as events proved, could not resist.
The Chronicles of Narnia are an imaginative retelling of the Christian grand narrative, fleshed out with ideas Lewis absorbed from the Christian literary tradition. The basic theological themes that Lewis set out in Mere Christianity are transposed to their original narrative forms in Narnia, allowing the deep structure of the world to be seen with clarity and brilliance: a good and beautiful creation is spoiled and ruined by a fall, in which the creator’s power is denied and usurped. The creator then enters into the creation to break the power of the usurper, and restore things through a redemptive sacrifice. Yet even after the coming of the redeemer, the struggle against sin and evil continues, and will not be ended until the final restoration and transformation of all things. This Christian metanarrative—which early Christian writers called the “economy of salvation”—provides both a narrative framework and a theological underpinning to the multiple stories woven together in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.
Lewis’s remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this metanarrative—to get inside the story, and feel what it is like to be part of it. Mere Christianity allows us to understand Christian ideas; the Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story, and to judge it by its ability to make sense of things, and “chime in” with our deepest intuitions about truth, beauty, and goodness. If the series is read in the order of publication, the reader enters this narrative in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which concerns the coming—technically the “advent”—of the redeemer. The Magician’s Nephew deals with the narrative of creation and fall, while The Last Battle concerns the ending of the old order, and the advent of a new creation.
The remaining four novels (Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” The Horse and His Boy, and The Silver Chair) deal with the period between these two advents. Lewis here explores the life of faith, lived in the tension between the past and future comings of Aslan. Aslan is now at one and the same time an object of memory and of hope. Lewis speaks of an exquisite longing for Aslan, when he cannot be seen clearly; of a robust yet gracious faith, able to withstand cynicism and skepticism; of people of character who walk trustingly through the shadowlands, seeing “in a mirror darkly” and learning to deal with a world in which they are assaulted by evil and doubt.
The Screwtape Letters brought a fresh perspective to the Christian’s struggles with temptation and doubt through its ingenious narrative framework of a master devil and his apprentice (page 217). The Chronicles of Narnia have a far greater scope and reach, using an imaginatively transposed version of the Christian narrative to enable its readers to understand and cope with the ambiguities and challenges of the life of faith. An imaginative engagement with Narnia prepares the way for, and helps give rise to, a more reasoned and mature internalization of the Christian grand narrative. Rarely has a work of literature combined such narrative power, spiritual discernment, and pedagogical wisdom.
In the following chapter, we shall both explore some rooms and open a few windows, focussing especially on the first and, in my estimation, best of the Narnia works—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.