3 A Story-Shaped World: C.S. Lewis on Narnia and the Importance of Stories
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A Story-Shaped World: C.S. Lewis on Narnia and the Importance of Stories
‘Child,’ said the Voice [of Aslan], ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.’
C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy
It’s time for our meeting with Lewis, and it’s bound to be a lively discussion. We are going to talk about the Chronicles of Narnia, after all; the series that many consider C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece. Yet before we can get to the questions we’ve prepared – How was it written? What was its inspiration? – Lewis, unsurprisingly, has a question for us.
Which story are you in?
To our more modern ears, this seems an odd way to begin a chat about Narnia, a story for children, but Lewis is concerned with something deeper, something more fundamental than how his series came into being. He is addressing the questions at the core of our lives.
Each of us naturally lives within a story, a ‘metanarrative’ that shapes our lives, whether we are aware of this fact or not. Some of us live under the assumptions of the Western story of societal progress, that civilisation – technologically, socially, or morally – is continually improving. Others live under the story of individual progress of the sort peddled on daytime talk shows, that the self is the most important thing there is and that more or better information will organically produce better selves. Still others subscribe to the victim metanarrative, that their personal choices have little impact on the world they live in.
So again, Lewis asks us, Which story are you in? Have you chosen your story wisely? Have you challenged the story you tell yourself, if it doesn’t align with reality? These questions might not be the ones that come first to our minds, especially in a discussion of Narnia. But what Lewis is saying is that the questions that appear more pressing in our lives, such as ‘How do I make myself more successful?’ are built on shaky assumptions from a story that may be distorting reality.
Looking back on his time as an atheist, Lewis was appalled at how easily he had been unthinkingly captivated by the metanarrative of his day. How, he wondered, could he have been so blind? Why was he taken in by it? ‘I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences.’1 In the end, the power of this captivating metanarrative was broken only when he realised that there was a more powerful, more appealing and more realistic metanarrative – the compelling Christian ‘big story’ of creation and redemption.
What is the best story about the world? What is the most satisfying and realistic metanarrative? These may not seem like pressing questions, but Lewis would demand that we take them with the greatest seriousness. As we saw in chapter 1, which story we believe we are in has a huge impact on the way that we live.
It is so easy to be taken in – to be held captive, to be locked into a way of thinking which prevents us from seeing things as they really are and from becoming the people we are meant to be. We’ve got to get this right!
In his 1941 sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’, Lewis declares that our age is held captive. We are spellbound, caught up in a secular and secularising metanarrative that insists our destiny and good lie in this world. We are told – and come to believe – that the ideas of transcendent realms, of worlds to come, are simply illusions. Our educational system, Lewis notes with obvious sadness, has colluded with this modern myth – that the sources and goals of human good are ‘found on this earth’.2
Lewis declares that the time has come to break free from this ‘evil enchantment of worldliness’. Lewis has no doubt about what has to be done. So deeply has this ‘evil enchantment’ saturated our thinking that we need the ‘strongest spell’ to break its power. Lewis reminds his readers that ‘spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them’.3 Christianity has to show that it can tell a more compelling and engaging story that will capture the imagination of its culture. The imagined realm of Narnia is the spell that Lewis cast to help break the secular spell and open our imaginations and minds to another possibility.
The fabulous world of Narnia is now regarded as a classic in children’s literature. Although Lewis had no children of his own, he somehow managed to connect with them in a way that few others could manage. Lewis remembered the deep delight he experienced during his own childhood when reading classic children’s books of the Edwardian age. Yet the appeal of Lewis’s genius for writing fiction was not limited to children. Many still find his science fiction trilogy deeply satisfying, just as some feel his late novel Till We Have Faces is the best thing he wrote.
But for most of Lewis’s readers, his greatest achievement is the Chronicles of Narnia. The seven novels which make up the Chronicles of Narnia were published during the period of 1950 to 1956. The best known is the opening novel in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which introduces readers to the land of Narnia, the noble lion Aslan and the four Pevensie children – Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
Given the massive impact of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, it is important to appreciate that they were conceived when Lewis’s personal life had hit an all-time low. In the late 1940s, Lewis’s world was falling to pieces. England faced austerity measures – including food rationing – in the aftermath of the war. Lewis had been passed over for at least two major senior appointments at Oxford University. Tensions were building within the senior common room at Magdalen College. The Faculty of English was divided over its post-war direction. Lewis realised he was becoming dangerously isolated in his own college, among his faculty and in the university at large.
As if all this weren’t enough, Lewis’s personal life was a mess. Mrs Moore had developed dementia and was becoming difficult to manage. Lewis’s brother, Warnie, who lived at The Kilns, was also becoming difficult – in his case because of alcoholism. Lewis was overworked, as the result of a rapid rise in student numbers at the end of the Second World War. His important wartime friendship with Charles Williams ended unexpectedly with Williams’s death in 1945. And his friendship with Tolkien was beginning to break down.
Yet in the midst of this hopeless situation, the magical world of Narnia was born. Was writing Narnia a form of escapism? Was Lewis using his imagined world as a way of distracting himself from the bleak situation he now faced, professionally and personally? It’s hard to rule out these possibilities. But it’s much more likely that Lewis saw the writing of Narnia as a creative project that would be fun to develop, presenting him with a way to examine how a good story might explore theological ideas.
In our next two encounters with Lewis, we’ll look at how the stories of Narnia open up some of the great questions of life. But today, we’ll focus on why Lewis thought that stories were so important. After all, he wrote many works of fiction. So let’s begin by talking about the importance of stories. Why write a story in the first place, instead of an essay on the meaning of life?
Breaking the Secular Spell: Lewis on Enchanting the Imagination
Lewis loved reading. Even in the early 1900s he found stories entrancing. His favourites included Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903), as well as some of Edith Nesbit’s classic children’s stories, including Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Wishing Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Later he encountered the ‘fairy stories’ of George MacDonald, which had a major impact on him. Although Lewis was quick to appreciate the imaginative appeal of stories, he seems to have been slower to realise how he could use them as ways of opening up deeper questions.
There seems to have been a number of aspects to Lewis’s growing realisation that telling stories was an effective way of commending and communicating a worldview. The first was a turning point in Lewis’s life – an extended conversation he had with his friends Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien in September 1931. By that time, Lewis had begun to believe in God; he had not, however, made the transition to Christianity. Lewis’s correspondence of the period makes it clear what his problem was. He did not see how the story of Jesus Christ could be of any relevance to us today.
Tolkien’s reply to this question changed Lewis’s outlook completely. Tolkien framed his reply using the word myth – a technical word which, unfortunately, is easily misunderstood. For most people, a ‘myth’ is a false story – maybe a story that was once thought to be true, or something that was invented to deceive people. Tolkien uses the term in a technical sense, to mean something like a ‘grand narrative’ or a ‘narrated worldview’.4 For Tolkien, the Gospels narrate ‘a story of a larger kind’ which embraces what is good, true and beautiful in the great myths of literature, expressing it as ‘a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world’.5
What does Tolkien mean by this? Myths, he argues, are stories that people tell to make sense of the world. For Tolkien, Christianity brings to fulfilment the echoes and shadows of the truth that result from human questing and yearning. Human ‘myths’ allow a glimpse of a fragment of that truth, not its totality. They are like splintered fragments of the true light. Yet when the full and true story is told, it is able to bring to fulfilment all that was right and wise in those fragmentary visions of things.
For Tolkien, Christianity provides this total picture, which both unifies and transcends these fragmentary and imperfect insights. Christianity is a ‘true myth’. It has the outward appearance of a ‘myth’ – a story about meaning. But this time, it really happened. And this story both makes sense of all the other stories that humans tell about themselves and their world, and provides their fulfilment.
Lewis found this insight to be life changing. First of all, it helped him to see how Christianity allowed him to view his beloved Norse myths in a new sense – not as something evil to be abandoned, but as an attempt to grasp something deeper, which ultimately proved to lie well beyond their reach. But more than this, it helped Lewis to realise the importance of stories.
A good story, Lewis realised, captivates the imagination. It can sneak past the ‘watchful dragons’ of a dogmatic rationalism. As Lewis himself discovered, fantasy works – such as the novels of George MacDonald – helped him realise the limits of his austere atheism. They showed him he was missing something in life, even though it would be some years before he worked out what it was. Could he help others do the same? After all, he was a professional teacher of literature. Why not write some literature, instead of just writing about it?
Lewis began to develop this idea seriously in the late 1930s. He had noted how H.G. Wells and others used works of science fiction to advance their secular humanism and optimism about the future of humanity. Lewis admired Wells as a storyteller, while at the same time cordially loathing the worldview so forcefully advocated in his stories.
Lewis wondered if he could use the same medium to challenge some of the naive assumptions of this outlook. The three works that resulted are usually referred to as the ‘Space Trilogy’ or the ‘Ransom Trilogy’ (after the chief character). In a letter from December 1938 to his friend Roger Lancelyn Green, Lewis remarked that he liked the ‘whole interplanetary ideas as a mythology’, and wanted to see whether he could use the genre to defend his own Christian point of view, rather than to surrender it to ‘the opposite side’.6
So what did Lewis do? To put it simply, he wrote three works of science fiction which showed up secular evolutionary optimism as lightweight and naive, and highlighted the darker side of human nature.7 The ideas that Lewis develops in these three novels are, of course, interesting. But what is even more interesting is the medium he uses to develop them – not a sustained logical argument which tells why secularist humanism has problems, but a winsome story which shows the same thing.8
How Lewis Came to Write Narnia
Lewis was regularly asked how he came to write the Chronicles of Narnia. He gave a number of answers. Let’s try and weave them together.
Historically, the origins of Narnia seem to go back to the first phase of the Second World War. Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939. Widespread fear of destructive bombing raids on English cities led to children being evacuated to the relative safety of towns and cities in the countryside – such as Oxford. Mrs Moore welcomed four such ‘evacuees’ (as they were known) to The Kilns, who were duly followed by others. Lewis was astonished that the children had read so few books. They needed someone to read stories to them. Perhaps this gave Lewis the idea of writing some himself. Maureen Moore recalled Lewis’s mentioning the idea of writing children’s stories around this time.
Lewis realised that ‘stories of this kind’ could ‘steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood’.9 What did Lewis mean by this? As a child, Lewis loved stories and had little interest in Christianity. But what if the medium he loved could have helped him embrace a faith that he clearly neither understood nor appreciated? What if stories could have opened up the wonder and joy of a faith that he had to wait two decades to discover? Lewis may well have written the books that he would have liked to read as a boy – as something that both excited his imagination and helped him to offer what he later called an ‘imaginative welcome’ to the Christian faith.
But Lewis also stressed the importance of images in the process of creating and writing Narnia. What sort of images? He mentions a few examples – such as a ‘queen on a sledge’ and a ‘magnificent lion’ – which became woven into his narrative. Some of these, he tells us, had been with him since he was about sixteen; it was, however, only when he was ‘about 40’ that he began to think about turning them into a story.10
At least to begin with, Lewis does not seem to have had a ‘master plan’ for the Chronicles of Narnia. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – the first and best in the series – can easily be read as a free-standing novel, complete in itself. Did Lewis originally intend to end things there? Perhaps. But the story told in this brilliant opening novel opens up further questions: Where did Narnia come from? How did it come to be in this mess? What happened next?
Lewis realised that he had told only part of the story of Narnia. He moved to develop his characters, allowing their own distinct personalities to emerge in the course of the story and according to its logic.
To appreciate Narnia to the full, it’s important to respect it for what it is. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece of fine detail, with few loose ends left lying around. Narnia is rather different. Lewis wants to tell a story, and he leaves lots of issues unresolved. One of Lewis’s good friends, the poet Ruth Pitter, once challenged him about how the Beaver family in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe managed to serve up potatoes for their meal with the children. Surely the Narnian winter would have prevented these from growing! And what about the oranges and sugar that would be needed for the marmalade roll that followed the potatoes? Where did they come from?
Yes, there are inconsistencies within individual novels of the Chronicles of Narnia, as well as across the whole series. But so what? Lewis wasn’t writing a scholarly article; he was penning a story, designed to delight its readers and open up some deeper themes.
So what themes did Lewis open up with the Chronicles of Narnia? Let’s look at one of the most important – the issue of which story (and which storyteller) we can trust.
Which Story Can We Trust?
Lewis wanted us to understand that we live in a world that is shaped by stories – by narratives which tell us who we are and what really matters. But which story can we trust? One of the dominant narratives of Western culture goes something like this: ‘We are here by accident, meaningless products of a random process. We can only invent meaning and purpose in life, and do our best to stay alive – even though there is no point to life.’ This is the narrative favoured by writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Dawkins. But is it right? And should we trust those who tell this story?
There is another narrative, which takes a very different approach. ‘We are precious creatures of a loving God, who has created us for something special that we are asked to do. We have the privilege of being able to do something good and useful for God in this world, and need to work out what it is.’ This is the story we find in the Bible and echoed in great Christian writers down the ages.
These two stories are totally incompatible. They can’t both be right. So which do we trust? One of Lewis’s great achievements in Narnia is to help us understand that we live in a world of competing narratives. In the end, we have to decide for ourselves which is right. And having made that decision, we then need to inhabit the story we trust. Lewis helps us deal with both questions.
The first is very straightforward and easy to grasp. When the four children enter the world of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they hear stories being told about this mysterious land. But which of them is right? 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 story about Narnia emerges as supremely plausible – the story of the great and noble lion, 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.
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.
At the core of the Chronicles of Narnia lies Lewis’s imaginative retelling of the Christian ‘big story’ or ‘grand narrative’ of creation, the fall, redemption and final consummation. 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 brings us to the second point that Lewis makes so convincingly in the Chronicles of Narnia. The story of Aslan is not just something we hear about. We are invited to enter this story and become part of it. It’s not an easy point to understand. Lewis wants us to see that our own story is given meaning, direction and purpose by the greater story of God. Let’s try to unpack what Lewis means.
We each have our own unique story. But our own story needs to be brought into connection with a ‘grand narrative’, a ‘big story’ which gives our story a new importance and significance. Why? Because we realise that our story is part of something bigger. Our own story is framed by something greater, which gives us value and purpose. In one sense, faith is about embracing this bigger story and allowing our own story to become part of it.
Lewis’s remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this ‘big story’ – to get inside it 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 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 – the ‘advent’ – of the Redeemer. The Magician’s Nephew deals with the narrative of creation and the 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 scepticism; of people of character who walk trustingly through the shadowlands, seeing them ‘in a mirror darkly’, and learning to deal with a world in which they are assaulted by evil and doubt.
Lewis deftly shows how the stories of the individual children – particularly Lucy, who is in many ways the central human character of the series – become shaped by the story of Aslan. Lucy’s love for Aslan is expressed in her commitment to him. She wants to do what he wants; she wants her story to reflect who he is. As a result, Lewis speaks of Lucy feeling ‘lion-strength’ flowing within her. She has become part of the story of Aslan. But – and this is a hugely important ‘but’ – she has not lost her own identity. Her story remains her own. However, her story now makes more sense because Lucy has gained a sense of value and meaning. By embracing the story of Aslan as central to her story, she has gained a new sense of identity and purpose.
Lewis here develops a New Testament theme which has a long history of exploration within the Christian faith. It is stated with particular clarity in Paul’s letter to the Galatians: ‘I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Galatians 2:19–20). Faith involves putting to death the old self and rising to a new life. We do not lose our individuality; rather, we gain a new identity while still remaining individuals who are loved by God. In other words, we become new individuals without ceasing to be individuals.
Lewis reworks this theme in his Chronicles of Narnia. We stop defining our own frames of reference. We come to see that our individual stories can become traps, in which we become our own prisoners. We can get locked into ways of thinking and acting that are purely self-serving. Lucy and the other children realise that there is a ‘bigger story’ and long to become part of it. And they die to themselves, in that they relocate and recontextualise their own stories within this ‘grand narrative’. They die to themselves, and live for Aslan. They surrender a self-centred story and replace it with an Aslan-centred story. Not only does this make more sense of things, it also gives them purpose, value and meaning.
There’s much wisdom here, and we shall come back to these themes in our next meeting. But as this one comes to an end, Lewis might give us an example of how telling a story makes a theological idea more ‘real’ and intelligible than if we read about it in some introduction to Christian theology. With a twinkle in his eye, Lewis might tell us about the ‘undragoning’ of Eustace.
Images of Reality: The ‘Undragoning’ of Eustace Scrubb
Everyone has his or her own favourite novel in the Chronicles of Narnia. For me, it’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Perhaps it’s because this was the first of the novels I read. Or maybe it’s the power of its narrative. But whatever the reasons may be, it’s the Narnia novel I most enjoy reading. Yet many prefer The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Why? Often it’s because of one single episode: the ‘undragoning’ of Eustace Scrubb.
Lewis’s opening line in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is seen by many as one of its most memorable features: ‘There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.’ Eustace Scrubb is portrayed as a thoroughly unsympathetic character, whom Lewis develops as an example of selfishness. It’s difficult to like him to begin with, and it’s just as difficult to feel sorry for him when he changes into a dragon as a result of his ‘greedy, dragonish thoughts’.
The thoroughly obnoxious Eustace encounters some enchanted gold. This will make him master of all! But instead, it masters him. Eustace is completely selfish and greedy in his thoughts and behaviour. His personal story is self-centred and self-absorbed. Lewis depicts him as becoming what he already is. But what has a dragon got to do with this narrative of greed?
Lewis loved old Norse mythology, and borrowed the image of a dragon from the Norse story about the greedy giant Fáfnir, who turned himself into a dragon to protect his ill-won gain. Lewis wants us to understand that the story of Eustace was one of self-centredness and self-absorption. In the end, he becomes trapped within his own story. And he cannot break free from it.
This is the point Lewis really wants to make. Having become a dragon, how does Eustace stop being one? Lewis presents Eustace’s initial transformation into a dragon and his subsequent ‘undragoning’ as a double transformation that reveals both Eustace’s selfish, fallen nature and the transforming power of divine grace.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader provides a brilliant description of Eustace’s realising, to his horror, that he has become a dragon. He doesn’t like this at all and he frantically tries to scratch off his dragon’s skin. However, each layer he removes merely reveals yet another layer of scales beneath it. He simply cannot break free from his prison. He is trapped within a dragon’s skin because he has become a dragon.
But salvation lies at hand. Aslan appears, and tears away at the dragon flesh with his claws. The lion’s claws cut so deeply that Eustace is in real pain – ‘worse than anything I’ve ever felt’. And when the scales are finally removed, Aslan plunges the raw and bleeding Eustace into a well from which he emerges purified and renewed, with his humanity restored. The storyline is dramatic, realistic and shocking. But the power of the narrative brings home the Christian themes that Lewis believed could not be described as effectively through a series of well-intentioned theological lectures. And while Lewis drew his dragon imagery from Norse mythology, the story of the ‘undragoning’ draws on the rich ideas and imagery of the New Testament.
So what are we to learn from this powerful and shocking story, so realistically depicted? As the raw imagery of Aslan tearing at Eustace’s flesh makes clear, Eustace has been trapped by forces over which he has no control. The one who would be master has instead been mastered. The dragon is a symbol, not so much of sin itself, as of the power of sin to entrap, captivate and imprison. It can be broken and mastered only by the Redeemer. Aslan is the one who heals and renews Eustace, restoring him to what he was intended to be.
The immersion in the water of the well is immediately familiar, picking up on the New Testament’s language about baptism as dying to self and rising to Christ (see Romans 6). (The omission of this aspect of the ‘undragoning’ of Eustace in the recent film version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was one of the more irritating and unnecessary of its many weaknesses.) Eustace is tossed into the well by Aslan, and emerges renewed and restored.
Reverting to the language of story, Lewis’s point is that Eustace has become trapped in a web of falsehood and self-deceit. The story that promised riches and freedom has entrapped him. Eustace is so deeply enmeshed in this story that he cannot break free from its tissue of deception. Only Aslan can break the power of this story and enable Eustace to enter another story – where he really belongs.
And that answers the question of why stories are so important. The story we believe we are in determines what we think about ourselves and consequently how we live. For Lewis, Christianity doesn’t just make sense of things. It changes our stories. It invites us to enter into, and be part of, a new story. And as Lewis has a lot more to say about this, we’ll make sure we take this further next time we meet.