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The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Lewis, C.S. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. [1952]
Now with 100% more quotations!
I claimed earlier that HHB is a pivot in the series, but upon rereading this book, it's clear that I spoke too soon: it's VDT that is the crux.
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swan_tower pointed out to me Sarah Monette's thoughts on Narnia, and since I think Monette makes a lot of good points, I'm going to bring them in via quotation, because the posts are mostly from 2003. Bear with me; my structure here is going to be a little baroque.
Let me start by proposing, only partly for the sake of argument, that Caspian is actually not a very good king. To do this, though, I have to talk about Eustace a bit; Eustace's attitude towards Caspian makes a lot more sense to me in light of the fact that Caspian is only about 16 in this book, and Eustace, I'd say, is probably about 11 or 12 (note in the chronology he's 9, Edmund is 12, and Lucy 11; they all read older than that to me by about 2-3 years, probably partially in light of the movie).
The other thing about Eustace is that he's a snot and a nasty kid, but Lewis conflates the fact that he's a snot and a nasty kid with several other things about him that are, or should be, value-neutral: namely, his nascent feminism, his distrust of the chivalric ethos, and his vegetarianism. All of these things, and in particular Eustace's failure to be immediately on board with anti-feminism and pro-chivalry, are attributed to failures of education, and most especially to the fact that Eustace hasn't read the right books:
If you haven't read The Hobbit, you've got real problems.
Sarah Monette sees in this book in particular the full flowering of the chivalric ethos, in a way that the first two books (LLW and PC) don't ever quite achieve:
I agree with all of this, but for me the point is even more succinctly expressed earlier, when Duke Bern pleads with Caspian not to keep sailing East:
WHAT COULD YOU SAY TO REEPICHEEP? YOU COULD SAY, I'M YOUR KING, SUCK IT UP LIKE A VASSAL OF NARNIA, THAT'S WHAT. Who cares about potentially going to war with the oldest and largest power on the continent, never mind that I've only just reunified my country! I've got a quest, and policy be damned!
In retrospect the movie picked up on this rather subtle defect in Caspian's kingship and amplified it in a way that I respect a lot now that I understand it, just as I respect the movie's effacing chivalry (note also that the movie doesn't slavishly keep Lucy away from all the physical work of shipboard life like the book does; at the table on Ramandu's island, she even draws a sword) and substituting "the evil" so that Caspian's quest becomes a matter of policy as well. It makes him look better even as it foregrounds his uncertainties, and I think both of those are improvements.
Having mentioned Calormen in the preceding quotation, let me note here that what makes me claim that VDT is the real pivot of the series is the appearance of both Calormen and of apocalyptic language. First, the first description of Calormen:
I don't think I could come up with a more concentrated collection of Orientalist stereotypes if I tried. Moving along to Eustace on Dragon Island, the real symbol of his moral decay can be discerned when, having discovered the dragon's hoard, the first thing he thinks is to use it to get out of Narnia for more civilized climes: "With some of this stuff I could have quite a decent time here--perhaps in Calormen. It sounds the least phony of these countries" (87).
The temptation of the utility of wealth is fobbed in the movie off onto Edmund, but let's note here the association of Calormen with non-phoniness/progress, which will recur fatally in TLB, a little before this chilling passage:
The discovery of Calormen by the narrator, as it were, opens up new possibilities for the story; it also opens up the very real possibility of Narnia's end, unlike, significantly, the Telmarine conquest/colonization of Narnia. "Telmar" is fairly obviously a Greek/Latin (blech) portmanteau for "distant sea," and though the Telmarines have their origins in our world, and are sent back there rather peremptorily if they can't or won't adapt to Old Narnia reborn (actually, in passing, the Telmarines are clearly an inspiration for Sherwood Smith's epic fantasy), by the time of PC they have thoroughly forgotten even Telmar, wherever it was, whereas the Calormenes remain inextricably of Calormen, unless like Aravis and Shasta they don't really belong there, by character or by birth.
Sarah Monette observes at one point that Lucy is the hero of the first three books, and I think that's true, but I think it's also true that Edmund becomes a hero equal in stature to Lucy from the lowpoint of LWW through PC and VDT and even into HHB, in which of the Pevensies he takes the most active role--Lucy is fairly active too, however; they've come to share the status of hero in a way that for me is epitomized in the book version of the encounter at Gold/Deathwater Island. Particularly in light of what the movie did with this, it's truly striking: Caspian, rather than Edmund, is the one who is tempted by the potential wealth the pool offers (Edmund twigs to what it does when it turns the toes of his boots to gold, and orders everyone away), and when Edmund reminds him that he, Caspian, is still under allegiance to Edmund's brother the High King Peter and that he, Edmund, is a King of Narnia in his own right and under no obligation to follow Caspian's orders, Caspian clearly intends to challenge him to a duel. As in the movie, Lucy intervenes to tell them that they're being stupid (boys), but the entire conflict is cut short by the dramatic appearance of Aslan (note also that Lord #3 dies via the pool out of thirst in the book, rather than greed). On balance, I think I prefer the movie, but I dislike the way the movie has to undercut Edmund--though, asswan_tower and I were discussing, just like the LotR movies undercut both Faramir and Aragorn to build them back up in the name of character development, since the VDT movie has undercut Caspian, and both the movie and the book undercut Lucy (and in the movie this encounter takes place post-Dufflepuds' island), it makes a certain sense that Edmund would have to be undercut too--and on balance I'm on board with the movies' bringing the Pevensies' lives in England into Narnia, and allowing their lives in Narnia to complicate their lives in England, way more than Lewis cares to do. YMMV, of course.
That said, though, I finished the book and though the ending section was just as marvelous and beautiful as I remember it being--and influential; there are shades of Pullman and Rowling all over the last few chapters--my primary emotion was a sort of profound sadness, for Narnia and for the Pevensies and for Caspian and for us and for C.S. Lewis too. My roommate and I were wiki-diving into Lewis' biography last week, and I hadn't realized it before, but Lewis was of the generation of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, the generation that was turned into trench fodder, the generation whom all the stories betrayed, and it marks Narnia down to the marrow of the stories' bones. It's true enough to say, as someone wisely observed to me in these posts, that LWW is written in the shadow of the good World War II, but all of Narnia lies under the shadow of the Great War, which taught Lewis that there was nothing of equal value in adult life as being a child, which taught him that growing up was nothing but pain. And, here's the thing--I'll be the first to acknowledge that life sucks; it sucks a lot sometimes, it is painful as anything you can imagine, it is as much as or more than anyone can bear. People you love die, friends betray you, lovers will break your heart, and you can either go on or you can break and neither choice is fully voluntary or less than like eating glass. But--and neither Lewis nor Tolkien could ever, I think, fully bring himself to believe this--that is not all there is to life, that is not all there is to adulthood, and Narnia to me reads like Lewis never knew or never fully accepted the good things that growing up brings with it, and to me that is a tragedy for him, which he then wrote into the Narnia books. And I wonder what Narnia would have been like, if Lewis had been born in a different time; I wonder whether he'd have written Narnia at all. On balance I'd rather have Narnia than not, of course, but it's a vision that was bought with pain, and that continues to pain many of its most adoring fans, me included.
Other than that, I don't have too much to say. Lewis' inability or unwillingness to depict strong emotion robs the ending of much of its latent feeling; my heart would have broken for Caspian before this had I realized that he considers the Pevensies his only family--royalty customarily refer to each other as cousin, not as brother and sister--and I noted bitterly that Lucy, of all people, believes that Aslan would break his own rules, though he assures her otherwise. I also couldn't help but note, as Sarah Monette notes, the persistent themes of honor and of chivalry running through this book, and couldn't help but conclude, as she largely does, that chivalry looks a lot like a way of ducking responsibility, and honor a pretty cover for raw fear. I don't think Lewis thought of it that way, of course, and I was glad that in the end Edmund is the only one of the main characters (well, Reepicheep too) whom the journey doesn't undermine; he's earned it, and his reward is to be banished forever from Narnia. And no, I don't think that's fair. And while I don't think that all books, especially children's books, should depict a completely 'fair' world, I think it's important to see, at least intermittently, virtue and constancy rewarded with something other than pain.
Finally, I suspect, given that there are seven of the lords and seven islands, that each lord and island equate to one of the seven sins and the virtue required to surmount the same. Anyone? Bueller?
Now with 100% more quotations!
I claimed earlier that HHB is a pivot in the series, but upon rereading this book, it's clear that I spoke too soon: it's VDT that is the crux.
swan_tower pointed out to me Sarah Monette's thoughts on Narnia, and since I think Monette makes a lot of good points, I'm going to bring them in via quotation, because the posts are mostly from 2003. Bear with me; my structure here is going to be a little baroque. Let me start by proposing, only partly for the sake of argument, that Caspian is actually not a very good king. To do this, though, I have to talk about Eustace a bit; Eustace's attitude towards Caspian makes a lot more sense to me in light of the fact that Caspian is only about 16 in this book, and Eustace, I'd say, is probably about 11 or 12 (note in the chronology he's 9, Edmund is 12, and Lucy 11; they all read older than that to me by about 2-3 years, probably partially in light of the movie).
The other thing about Eustace is that he's a snot and a nasty kid, but Lewis conflates the fact that he's a snot and a nasty kid with several other things about him that are, or should be, value-neutral: namely, his nascent feminism, his distrust of the chivalric ethos, and his vegetarianism. All of these things, and in particular Eustace's failure to be immediately on board with anti-feminism and pro-chivalry, are attributed to failures of education, and most especially to the fact that Eustace hasn't read the right books:
Edmund or Lucy would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books. … Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon's lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons. (84; 87)
If you haven't read The Hobbit, you've got real problems.
Sarah Monette sees in this book in particular the full flowering of the chivalric ethos, in a way that the first two books (LLW and PC) don't ever quite achieve:
See, Eustace is right to complain about Lucy getting special treatment, even though he's complaining for entirely the wrong reasons, and I deeply dislike the way in which Lewis uses Eustace's selfish reasons to mock the idea he's articulating.
And I don't like the way "chivalry" puts Lucy into a position of constantly being used as justification for the male characters' behavior. Reepicheep says on the island of the Duffers that, if there were any chance they could save Lucy by laying down their lives, they would be obligated to fight. That's a horrible burden to put on Lucy's shoulders, frankly, as is the ghastly moment, when they're arguing about sailing into the darkness around the Dark Island and Reepicheep (prattling on about "honor" again) has blackmailed Caspian into doing something Caspian, Drinian, and the other men all know is stupid, that Caspian says, "Unless Lucy would rather not?" (TVotDT 153), which again places a burden on Lucy she shouldn't have to bear (Caspian's the freaking king--he should be able to make his own call) and also puts her in a bind--much as Reepicheep has just put Caspian in a bind, and it's particularly not-nice of Caspian to turn around and do the same thing to Lucy that's just been done to him.
I agree with all of this, but for me the point is even more succinctly expressed earlier, when Duke Bern pleads with Caspian not to keep sailing East:
"…And I've wondered about my friends and what there really is behind that horizon. Nothing, most likely, yet I am always half ashamed that I stayed behind. But I wish your Majesty wouldn't go. We may need your help here. This closing the slave market might make a new world; war with Calormen is what I foresee. My liege, think again."
"I have an oath, my lord Duke," said Caspian. "And anyway, what could I say to Reepicheep?" (65)
WHAT COULD YOU SAY TO REEPICHEEP? YOU COULD SAY, I'M YOUR KING, SUCK IT UP LIKE A VASSAL OF NARNIA, THAT'S WHAT. Who cares about potentially going to war with the oldest and largest power on the continent, never mind that I've only just reunified my country! I've got a quest, and policy be damned!
In retrospect the movie picked up on this rather subtle defect in Caspian's kingship and amplified it in a way that I respect a lot now that I understand it, just as I respect the movie's effacing chivalry (note also that the movie doesn't slavishly keep Lucy away from all the physical work of shipboard life like the book does; at the table on Ramandu's island, she even draws a sword) and substituting "the evil" so that Caspian's quest becomes a matter of policy as well. It makes him look better even as it foregrounds his uncertainties, and I think both of those are improvements.
Having mentioned Calormen in the preceding quotation, let me note here that what makes me claim that VDT is the real pivot of the series is the appearance of both Calormen and of apocalyptic language. First, the first description of Calormen:
Two merchants of Calormen at once approached. The Calormen [sic] have dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-colored turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people. They bowed most politely to Caspian and paid him long compliments, all about the fountains of prosperity irrigating the gardens of prudence and virtue--and things like that--but of course what they wanted was the money they had paid. (62)
I don't think I could come up with a more concentrated collection of Orientalist stereotypes if I tried. Moving along to Eustace on Dragon Island, the real symbol of his moral decay can be discerned when, having discovered the dragon's hoard, the first thing he thinks is to use it to get out of Narnia for more civilized climes: "With some of this stuff I could have quite a decent time here--perhaps in Calormen. It sounds the least phony of these countries" (87).
The temptation of the utility of wealth is fobbed in the movie off onto Edmund, but let's note here the association of Calormen with non-phoniness/progress, which will recur fatally in TLB, a little before this chilling passage:
Up went the ring, flashing in the sunlight, and caught, and hung, as neatly as a well-thrown quoit, on a little projection on the rock. No one could climb up to get it from below and no one could climb down to get it from above. And there, for all I know, it is hanging still and may hang till that world ends. (113)
The discovery of Calormen by the narrator, as it were, opens up new possibilities for the story; it also opens up the very real possibility of Narnia's end, unlike, significantly, the Telmarine conquest/colonization of Narnia. "Telmar" is fairly obviously a Greek/Latin (blech) portmanteau for "distant sea," and though the Telmarines have their origins in our world, and are sent back there rather peremptorily if they can't or won't adapt to Old Narnia reborn (actually, in passing, the Telmarines are clearly an inspiration for Sherwood Smith's epic fantasy), by the time of PC they have thoroughly forgotten even Telmar, wherever it was, whereas the Calormenes remain inextricably of Calormen, unless like Aravis and Shasta they don't really belong there, by character or by birth.
Sarah Monette observes at one point that Lucy is the hero of the first three books, and I think that's true, but I think it's also true that Edmund becomes a hero equal in stature to Lucy from the lowpoint of LWW through PC and VDT and even into HHB, in which of the Pevensies he takes the most active role--Lucy is fairly active too, however; they've come to share the status of hero in a way that for me is epitomized in the book version of the encounter at Gold/Deathwater Island. Particularly in light of what the movie did with this, it's truly striking: Caspian, rather than Edmund, is the one who is tempted by the potential wealth the pool offers (Edmund twigs to what it does when it turns the toes of his boots to gold, and orders everyone away), and when Edmund reminds him that he, Caspian, is still under allegiance to Edmund's brother the High King Peter and that he, Edmund, is a King of Narnia in his own right and under no obligation to follow Caspian's orders, Caspian clearly intends to challenge him to a duel. As in the movie, Lucy intervenes to tell them that they're being stupid (boys), but the entire conflict is cut short by the dramatic appearance of Aslan (note also that Lord #3 dies via the pool out of thirst in the book, rather than greed). On balance, I think I prefer the movie, but I dislike the way the movie has to undercut Edmund--though, as
swan_tower and I were discussing, just like the LotR movies undercut both Faramir and Aragorn to build them back up in the name of character development, since the VDT movie has undercut Caspian, and both the movie and the book undercut Lucy (and in the movie this encounter takes place post-Dufflepuds' island), it makes a certain sense that Edmund would have to be undercut too--and on balance I'm on board with the movies' bringing the Pevensies' lives in England into Narnia, and allowing their lives in Narnia to complicate their lives in England, way more than Lewis cares to do. YMMV, of course. That said, though, I finished the book and though the ending section was just as marvelous and beautiful as I remember it being--and influential; there are shades of Pullman and Rowling all over the last few chapters--my primary emotion was a sort of profound sadness, for Narnia and for the Pevensies and for Caspian and for us and for C.S. Lewis too. My roommate and I were wiki-diving into Lewis' biography last week, and I hadn't realized it before, but Lewis was of the generation of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, the generation that was turned into trench fodder, the generation whom all the stories betrayed, and it marks Narnia down to the marrow of the stories' bones. It's true enough to say, as someone wisely observed to me in these posts, that LWW is written in the shadow of the good World War II, but all of Narnia lies under the shadow of the Great War, which taught Lewis that there was nothing of equal value in adult life as being a child, which taught him that growing up was nothing but pain. And, here's the thing--I'll be the first to acknowledge that life sucks; it sucks a lot sometimes, it is painful as anything you can imagine, it is as much as or more than anyone can bear. People you love die, friends betray you, lovers will break your heart, and you can either go on or you can break and neither choice is fully voluntary or less than like eating glass. But--and neither Lewis nor Tolkien could ever, I think, fully bring himself to believe this--that is not all there is to life, that is not all there is to adulthood, and Narnia to me reads like Lewis never knew or never fully accepted the good things that growing up brings with it, and to me that is a tragedy for him, which he then wrote into the Narnia books. And I wonder what Narnia would have been like, if Lewis had been born in a different time; I wonder whether he'd have written Narnia at all. On balance I'd rather have Narnia than not, of course, but it's a vision that was bought with pain, and that continues to pain many of its most adoring fans, me included.
Other than that, I don't have too much to say. Lewis' inability or unwillingness to depict strong emotion robs the ending of much of its latent feeling; my heart would have broken for Caspian before this had I realized that he considers the Pevensies his only family--royalty customarily refer to each other as cousin, not as brother and sister--and I noted bitterly that Lucy, of all people, believes that Aslan would break his own rules, though he assures her otherwise. I also couldn't help but note, as Sarah Monette notes, the persistent themes of honor and of chivalry running through this book, and couldn't help but conclude, as she largely does, that chivalry looks a lot like a way of ducking responsibility, and honor a pretty cover for raw fear. I don't think Lewis thought of it that way, of course, and I was glad that in the end Edmund is the only one of the main characters (well, Reepicheep too) whom the journey doesn't undermine; he's earned it, and his reward is to be banished forever from Narnia. And no, I don't think that's fair. And while I don't think that all books, especially children's books, should depict a completely 'fair' world, I think it's important to see, at least intermittently, virtue and constancy rewarded with something other than pain.
Finally, I suspect, given that there are seven of the lords and seven islands, that each lord and island equate to one of the seven sins and the virtue required to surmount the same. Anyone? Bueller?
no subject
Lewis did grow up (mostly) eventually, if you look at Till We Have Faces and parts of the Space Trilogy and most especially at A Grief Observed, which book breaks my heart but shows something of what his marriage did for him. Joy Gresham seems to have spent a great deal of time arguing with him about chivalry and adulthood and what he thought about women, and I remain sad that he didn't write more fiction after those conversations; but of course he was dealing first with her death and then with his own last illness.
no subject
I suspect the Lone Islands are Lust & Chastity, obviously not in the sexual but in the spiritual sense. I would buy Coriakin's island as Envy & Kindness. That leaves Gluttony & Temperance.
I wish he'd written more, too. Have you ever seen Shadowlands?
no subject
The chronology of how he wrote his fiction basically goes Narnia, Space Trilogy, Till We Have Faces, and while I do think Perelandra is worth a retry just because the setting is gorgeous, I highly recommend Till We Have Faces because it is the book where Joy came through and told him to fix all the women. It's not perfect but he grew in interesting directions. It's also just a really good book, it's a retelling of Cupid and Psyche which is not from the usual viewpoint and does not go the usual directions and is not, to my memory, in any way overtly Christian.
no subject
Well, but though that's how it seems to them, and to us who have fallen in love with the wonders of Narnia, I think that's not how Aslan saw it: didn't he say that they had to learn to know him in this world, too? Extrapolating a bit, admittedly boosted by my personal philosophy, perhaps Aslan and Lewis are saying that our world is just as wonderful and worthy of adventures, though they seem more mundane to us. Their experiences in Narnia give them the confidence to face our world, just as Jill and Eustace's experiences of Aslan and the sun give them the confidence to face the Green Witch.
(And then that would tie in with my theory about Susan, that her real problem was that she couldn't believe in more than one world at a time; she was too inherently pragmatic. When she was in Narnia she forgot about our world more thoroughly than the others, and when she was in our world she (forgot about/refused to remember) Narnia. Which means she couldn't apply the lessons from one to the other. On the allegorical level, she's like someone who has a profound religious experience, but then gets caught up in “the real world" and forgets all about it – which makes The Last Battle make a lot more sense than if it were all about lipstick, though I'm still only resigned to it because I believe there's always time for her to remember.)
no subject
I'd never quite thought of it that way, but I really like your spin on it--Aslan does say in VDT that the point of Narnia is so that the Pevensies can know him in England, which sort of makes me go o_O. That said, though, I'm willing to buy that interpretation right up until TLB, which obviates it, to my mind, and I'm not sure I agree that it's what Lewis was saying, either. My estimation of him has dropped somewhat on this reread, I admit, as has my willingness to have any regard for his authorial intentions.
And then that would tie in with my theory about Susan, that her real problem was that she couldn't believe in more than one world at a time; she was too inherently pragmatic. When she was in Narnia she forgot about our world more thoroughly than the others, and when she was in our world she (forgot about/refused to remember) Narnia. Which means she couldn't apply the lessons from one to the other.
Oh, interesting! And yes, that totally makes sense to me. As my roommate has pointed out to me multiple times, she's not actually excluded in TLB because of the lipstick & nylons, though everyone immediately forgets that after it's said and conflates her disregarding Narnia with the nylons and lipstick.