The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew

[starlady]

So I'm rereading the seven Chronicles of Narnia, in internal chronological order. It's been probably a dozen years since I read all of these books, and in the following entries my thoughts are a jumble of reactions on at least four levels: Watsonian, Doylist, and fannish of both a critical and laudatory variety. I loved these books as a child, and I still do; it's still possible for me to access, dimly, the spirit of following the author's lead in which I first read them in fourth grade, but that doesn't preclude criticism, not anymore at least; like so many other books of children's fantasy, I do find them in some ways flawed, or at least, they're not everything I want them to be on the page. So, you know, depending on your reaction to Narnia, you may just want to look at this cat macro instead. But I shall do my best to be honest about my own reactions, and the reasons behind them.

Lewis, C.S. The Magician's Nephew. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. [1955]

I used to think that this was my favorite of the Narnia books, and though I'm withholding judgment on that now until I've reread all seven, I can see why I liked this one so much; I think it still might be my favorite in the end. swan_tower asked me why I thought that, and what I told her at the time was what I liked about it this time too: I find Jadis' backstory, and Jadis herself, to be fascinating (I bet her sister was just as titanic), and the bits about the creation of Narnia, and Polly and Diggory wandering around in the Wood Between the Worlds (Polly names it that, incidentally), and Uncle Andrew being such an idiot, and most of all the fact that Diggory's mother is dying, and he makes the choice he does anyway, and is rewarded for it, beyond thought and hope--I still find that interesting and affecting.

This time around I also noticed how Polly Plummer is MADE OF AWESOME; I also noticed the, well, preachiness (and also classism) that Lewis indulges in at times, particularly via Aslan, to say nothing of Uncle Andrew's greedy, colonialist impulses, and the implication of the Kirke family in British imperialism via India and the Raj. Also too this time I noticed that the Narnia books canonically take place in Sherlock Holmes' world, which is just screaming for a well-done crossover fic, preferably with Holmes getting the better of Uncle Andrew, who I actually despise a lot more now. But this is clearly the most Tolkienic of the Narnia books, and as a kid I was fascinated with the worldbuilding of Middle-Earth; around the same time that I read the Narnia books (fourth grade) I devoured the books of Tolkien's published papers despite not really fully understanding what was going on in them ever, and there are some things in TMN that simply have to have come by way of conversations with Tolkien, particularly the Trees of Gold and Silver (and the guardian white Tree) that are briefly mentioned before Frank and Helen's coronation. I enjoy it when books link up to each other, and I've always enjoyed knowing the origins of things (is it surprising that I am now going for a history Ph.D.? No it is not), and this book was explicitly written to link up to the later ones and to provide an origin story for Narnia, and I love it for that. It's probably best not to peek too far behind the 'creation by the Lion in a day' curtain, but even on this side of that barrier, it's a memorable story.

I was talking with my roommate about Narnia, and she pointed out that Jadis and the White Witch aren't terribly similar characters, which I hadn't really considered before but which I think is definitely true to an extent. Jadis in TMN is, well, passionate in a way--darkly, cruelly passionate, but passionate all the same, whereas the Witch is so--frozen. You can see it in their coloring, even, and Lewis does a decent job of lampshading the differences between them by having Jadis eat the apple wrongfully, but the White Witch has swallowed Winter, to borrow Michelle West's phrasing, in a way that Jadis hasn't and the apple doesn't account for in-text. More than anything, it's interesting to consider that Lewis thought that Jadis was the alpha point for the Witch.

Comments

[ellen_fremedon]

You've seen this lolcat, I hope?

[recessional]

There's a lot that I'm deeply fond of in this book, but it mostly, for me, brings out all the potential the entire world-arc never quite achieved (I feel mostly because Lewis was trying to shoehorn it into being something it wasn't).

His is a very particular kind of classism, too. The lower classes of the city = bad/shallow/corrupted; the lower classes of the country = moral/good/fit to be elevated. It's interesting that for all people focus on Tolkien's fixation on the English countryside, Lewis is far more anti-city than Tolkien was.

My assumption was always that - okay, my assumption WATSONIANLY was always that Jadis froze, slowly, over the centuries and centuries between when she ate the apple and when she conquered Narnia as the Witch: that without life, with only existence as the immortality of the apple gave it to her, she slowly lost all that passion and drive and pure (if warped) vitality, and was left only with that overwhelming drive for conquest. (In LWW, her passion starts to come back a bit as the world melts, if only in short tantrums and her joy at Aslan's killing).

My assumption Dolyistically was that, as this was written after LWW even if he wanted it to be read first when it was all done, that was a bit of retcon OOPS.

This is also one of the two books (the other being LWW) that show an interesting influence by Paradise Lost; the description of the garden, and of Jadis' way of getting into the garden and a number of other things, is right out of PL, and part of why I see PL, Narnia and HDM in a long literary conversation.

[lnhammer]

reactions on at least four levels: Watsonian, Doylist, and fannish of both a critical and laudatory variety

I'm now trying to map those to Dante's four levels of interpretation -- literal, allegorical, moral, and analogical (better understood in modern terms as literal, historical, psychological, and spiritual). It's not quite working, though, in part because I don't really understand what Watsonian and Doylist mean.

I confess, when I was a wee one, TMN was my least-favorite and least-reread. IIRC, I found it both dry and unnecessary.

---L.

[lnhammer]

Urk: for "interpretation" read "meaning" (razzlefrazzle incomplete edit posting before finishing).

[starlady]

Watsonian and Doylist are terms the Sherlockians use--Watsonian refers to explanations for things in the text that are derived in-text (i.e. on the level of John Watson M.D., who narrates the stories), while Doylist explanations are ones that go outside the text to the author to explain things. :) I'm not sure how to map those on to Dante's categories, though I think allegorical may be Doylist in this case, given Lewis' purpose, and literal would be Watsonian. I think psychological is my critical fannish, and spiritual can go under laudatory fannish.

[starlady]

LOL now I have! That is awesome!

[starlady]

I may or may not have said something about someone jossing the canon when I read the "I give to you forever this land of Narnia" line. And, yeah--I agree with you that Lewis didn't quite grok the shape of his own story to an extent. I don't know that I could come up with a citation for it, but there's all these little details that just don't go in the direction he wants, throughout the books.

I never thought of connecting this book or these books with PL, but I'm contemplating an HDM reread (as well as The Dark Is Rising sequence); I should reread that one too. I ♥ PL. I talk about this in my comments for one of the other books, but it's fascinating to read Narnia and to virtually be able to see where Pullman made his notes of things to engage with.

Yeah, Lewis & Tolkien, they're so obviously so similar, and their differences are so fascinating.

Your Watsonian explanation for Jadis makes a lot of sense to me. Even in this backstory book, there's so much that gets left off the page.

[recessional]

I'm not terribly fond of PL, to be honest, but it still interests me where it twines in and out of literary discourse.

Interestingly, re: Jadis - I'm in the middle of relistening to the BBC radio-play of LotR (which is my favourite) and just after I posted this comment we got across the part wherein Gandalf explains to Frodo that a mortal who possesses a ring of power does not die, but does not grow or obtain more life, merely continuing ("until at last every moment is weariness.") As a thought on similarities and differences.

[starlady]

I don't give a fig for PL in any other than a purely literary sense, but Milton's poetry is just amazing.

I was talking with my roommate about Galadriel, Jadis/the Witch, and Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton, and I could see Cate Blanchett playing Jadis but not so much Tilda Swinton (though I have no doubt that if they make this movie, she'll be brilliant in a way I can't envision). I think you're right about that similarity with the rings of power, though I think we're right to stick with the seasonal metaphor for Jadis.

[recessional]

though I think we're right to stick with the seasonal metaphor for Jadis.

Oh definitely - I think you can even interpret "always Winter and never Christmas" in a seasonal way, because Christmas is historically tied to the Solstice which is, hilariously (considering we call it both "Midwinter" and also consider it the "formal" start of winter) the beginning of the end of winter: the moment wherein the days start to lengthen, a process which inevitably leads to the melt. Ergo the White Witch could never permit Christmas: Christmas was her deathknell even just in the Santa Claus sort of way.

Mostly, I was interested in the shared context of an idea of "living" vs "continuing without dying", and the fact that as an idea, though much further developed in Middle-Earth, it was central to both of them.

[starlady]

I think you can even interpret "always Winter and never Christmas" in a seasonal way, because Christmas is historically tied to the Solstice

Oh yeah, oh brilliant! See, I tend to associate seasonality in epic fantasy with Michelle West, and in her books the winter solstice is Scarran, the dark conjunction, and it is a Very Bad Time in some specific circumstances and Winter magic is Very Not Good. I'm actually fairly certain that West is writing out of a Narnia influence to some extent.

It's kind of ironic that Jadis spent who knows how long in stasis in Charn, but that preserved her far better than being immortal.

[recessional]

I think the "always Winter, never Christmas" thing is, in part, a way of saying that it's not the winter in-and-of-itself that's the problem: it's the unnatural winter. Winter is supposed to have a cycle: you have winter and the winter dances (I'm thinking here of the Silver Chair, when Eustace and Jill climb out into one of the fauns' celebrations) and all that stuff, but THEN, you have Christmas and winter starts its long slide into Spring, and so on. (I also seasonally associate the Pevensies [Lucy for Spring, Susan for Summer, Peter for Autumn and Edmund for Winter] for various reasons, but I am a gigantic dork.)

I may very well have spent way, way too much time thinking about this, for serious.

[epershand]

Hmm, I like this post. It's been a long time since I read it, but even as a kid I tended to take a Doylist perspective on a lot of the world building that exists only in TMN and TLB--it always felt to me like the main goal of TMN was retconning the universe to make TLB fit into it. There was this fantasy world I knew and loved and then the last two books in the series sandwiched it in Genesis and Revelations? Even in the fourth grade, I didn't trust that as a narrative technique, although at least Lewis's retcon worldbuilding wasn't as egregious as Baum's.

I resent TLM way out of proportion with what it does. For the most part the book just raised more questions than it answered. For instance, if the population of Calormen and Archenland are descended from the cabbie and his wife, who are a son of Adam and a daughter of Eve, why they children of Adam and Eve themselves?

I particularly resent TLM because of the way it was retconned into being the first book in the series when that is clearly not where it belongs in the narrative.

On the other hand, I adore so much of the setting. I love the connected rowhouses--I get excited whenever I see that style of house in the UK because of TLM. And I adore all the visuals of the Jadis backstory. They're just breathtaking. And the wood between the worlds also makes me happy, although again it feels a bit too much like a setup for TLB. While I can come up with Watsonian reasons for Digory to have neglected mentioning the rings to the Pevensies, none of them are particularly satisfying. I actually found the way they handled the buttons and the Neitherlands in The Magicians a lot more satisfying.

[starlady]

I think the seasonal associations are totally legitimate. I'd agree that Edmund is Winter and Lucy is Spring, but I sort of think Peter would be Summer and Susan Autumn. I'd be interested in your reasoning. ^^

It's been eons since I read TSC.

Between this and rewatching the extended LotR movies, I'm sort of starting to try to block out an epic children's fantasy of my own.

[epershand]

The retconned book order also means that my younger cousins have a drastically different reading of this book and Narnia in general than I do. My cousin reports that, having read it, he was really annoyed when he got to the second book and suddenly there were these PEVENSIES everywhere instead of a continuing set of characters from the first book.

But it also established the Christian frame around the series from the get-go in a way that you dont get if you start with LWW.

[recessional]

Because Susan, when she's in Narnia and living there, is gentleness, love, growth, grace and comfort. Peter is magnificence and war (beating up giants, sorting out the Lone Islands, etc), all hopes come true in the harvest, but with the hard edge that slides into Winter (which is Edmund, and Justice, which is not always kind.

Lucy is all gushing possibility, the floods of first melt, the rain-squalls of April. Susan is the kind days of warmth, as the promise of Spring becomes the mature reality of Summer, with things nourished and things grown - and the languidity of summer.

Part of what goes wrong with Susan, I think, is that she's thrown out of Narnia, and out of that perfect summer, adult and in the full of everything she's supposed to be, Aslan's promise for peace and plenty fulfilled, and into WWII England as an adolescent girl.

[starlady]

Oh yeah, Genesis! As I mentioned above, the Christianity of any of this didn't really register with me. And clearly it still doesn't, since my first thought here was "Tolkien!" And this, it strikes me now, is probably some form of sort of-Christian privilege. (Sort of in that I was sort of Christian, not sort of privilege.)

The retconning here makes some other things stick out really awkwardly in the later books, particularly Caspian's right to kingship in PC. I don't think Lewis really conceived of other countries with humans in them until after writing that book, and that leads to some really unpleasant, racist stuff with the Calormenes in particular (which of course culminates in TLB). It's been eons since I've read TLB, since I'm going in order, but they definitely don't fit with the other five in some really crucial ways--though you could probably construct a sort of meta-narrative starring Digory and Polly using them.

Oh, Digory and the Pevensies, I'm not even going there mentally unless I absolutely must. But yeah, so much of the story in TMN prior to the creation is just so awesome, and that's what I like best, except for the subplot with Digory and Jadis and the apples, but that's partly one of my favorite things because of my personal history.

[starlady]

Yeah, my roommate read them in publication order, and talking with her about them is really interesting.

The Christianity of some things in LWW and PC in particular stands out to me now that I've understood the elements of the allegory, but in many ways it's much subtler than TMN and TLB.

Yeah, I was indifferent to the Pevensies too, definitely as a reaction to them being completely unfamiliar to me after TMN.

[recessional]

who are a son of Adam and a daughter of Eve, why they children of Adam and Eve themselves?

Because they intermarried with naiads and river-gods, as they couldn't marry each other (incest). So much like Jadis is not a Daughter of Eve (being descended from Lilith), the "humans" of Narnia aren't Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve because they're descended from non-humans as well.

Conversely, the Telmarines fell into Narnia as a whole society, men and women both, and then stayed isolated and insular, so their stock remained solely human.

[starlady]

Ah, that makes a lot of sense.

Part of what goes wrong with Susan, I think, is that she's thrown out of Narnia, and out of that perfect summer, adult and in the full of everything she's supposed to be, Aslan's promise for peace and plenty fulfilled, and into WWII England as an adolescent girl.

Oh, definitely. I mean, I think it was a shock for all of them (and that's the understatement of the year right there), but the gender roles and societal expectations were so different for Susan in England than in Narnia, there's just very few ways to cope with that change, particularly after she's told she's never going back to Narnia.

bedlamsbard calls the Golden Age the Great Summer in her fic, and I think it fits brilliantly.

[starlady]

Oh yeah, good point. Though of course there aren't any humans left in Narnia at the end of the Winter.

[recessional]

Yeah, here "Narnia" is referring to the whole world rather than merely the country. It's always frustrated me that there aren't separate world-and-country names for that one. :|

This of course begs the slight question as to how Frank and Helen's grandchildren were allowed to reign in Narnia before the Winter, but you could handwave that one as, there being no threat, it wasn't quite such a Big Deal. Or even as part of why the Witch could invade: with no true Son of Adam or Daughter of Eve on the throne, she had as much claim as any.

[starlady]

Ah, okay, right. I think that explanation does make sense in-world, but I think my fanon explanation for it is that as well as being human (Sons & Daughters) there's also a blood-right aspect, the same as any monarchy, and that when Frank & Helen's line fails, there's no one in Archenland who fits the four thrones requirement--in other words, possible intermarriage with non-humans doesn't obviate the Sons & Daughters thing. The Calormenes are excluded in TLB since they don't have that blood-right of Caspian's line, but Caspian can reign because he is a Son and because he's been bestowed the blood-right by Aslan, under Peter.

I mean, we're basically on completely fanon ground here, but I think the Witch probably killed the Tree and then went after the realm. Basically, cofax7's The Last Defense of Cair Paravel is my default assumptions about how the Winter started.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I really like that seasonal association.

And now that you have put it into my head, one day, far in the future, when I've forgotten where I even got the idea from, I will probably have a story where you can secretly (or not-so-secretly) map four characters to the seasons. (I did something similar once in a game, only it was the four alchemical elements instead.)

[starlady]

One of my favorite things about Michelle West's books is that she has seasons (though only Summer and Winter have magics associated with them) and elements. It's pretty cool.