[I feel like I always end up arguing with you in these responses: hope it's clear that I really like the posts and find them interesting - I just love a good literature debate.]
Because I cannot help repeating myself, I will say that I think perhaps it gives CS Lewis too little credit to say that he doesn't succeed in writing a Christian story (or it involves a rather narrow view of what Lewis would have felt was a successful Christian story). Perhaps he succeeds in writing a Christian story, but it's better and wilder and more interesting and less dogma-driven than what we think of as "Christian stories", and so it doesn't match our mental categories.
After all, Lewis explicitly says in LB that it's okay to know god and be moral under a different name, as long as you're knowing god and being moral. So if you feel that you derived some of your moral education from the Narnia books, and if you felt some sense of "deepness" from them, if they came alive for you and gave you some sense of the numinous, and that aliveness transformed your mental landscape in a way that helped you be a better person - then whether or not you ended up seeing that as a "Christian" thing per se, I think *Lewis*, at least, would think he succeeded at it. I do really think that in the end, Christianity to Lewis was more about actions than terminology.
On the other hand, I think you might be giving him too MUCH credit as a narrative architect. I tend to think he didn't really think a lot about the broader implications of the whole railway accident thing. I suspect he just wanted all the friends of Narnia together for the big finale and to show that they were totally going to heaven(!), and given the constraints he'd created for himself, the "rocks fall, everybody dies" solution was the easiest. I mean, one, he wants to write about going to heaven, and this is the problem of writing about heaven in a YA book where your main characters are kids: you've gotta kill of a bunch of kids. And two, having Peter use the rings wouldn't actually have solved this problem; it would just have made it weirder. Either the Pevensies would then just have to have been kicked out of Narnia and back to earth when Narnia ended (in which case the big heaven finale is robbed of a lot of emotional impact because it'd just be a bunch of characters you care less about) or they'd still have had to die, just in Narnia instead.
In sum: I suspect it's more fair to say that Lewis murdered the Pevensies (manslaughter by narrative requirement) than to say that Aslan did. Also, I think the "better" version of the LB story is maybe one in which Lewis didn't feel like he had to go back to the Pevensies to give the story emotional weight, but struck out on new waters entirely and made us care about the Narnian characters enough that their story had weight by itself [I think this would be a weird but cool AU fanfic]. But, I don't think he could do that, because:
Your comments on the unsatisfactory nature of a lot of Lewis' later Narnia characters really brought home to me that I'm not sure whether Lewis considered them REAL, in a meaningful way. I suspect he was inconsistent in his own mind about this, actually. I think sometimes he did and sometimes he didn't. But given that Narnia is sort of a sandbox reality, I think there's a sense in which people who are derived from the sandbox reality are sort of sandbox people - you can love them the way you love anything in Narnia, but they have fundamental limitations to their depth. Humans in Narnia are a bit realer than everyone else there, because they have a real-world heritage from the imports. But the longer they've been in Narnia (and particularly if they and their parents were born there) the more sandboxy they are.
Possibly that's the answer to why it's not a tragedy that the Pevensies have to go back to England after "growing up" in Narnia as kings and queens. Because I will say, when they get old in Narnia, they do start to display all those tell-tale signs of sandboxyness. The young, fresh-from-the-real-world Pevensies are sharply characterized and much more convincing than the King and Queen Pevensies, who sort of get compressed a bit into archetypes of chivalry. Growing up in Narnia is only sandbox growing up.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-29 21:42 (UTC)Because I cannot help repeating myself, I will say that I think perhaps it gives CS Lewis too little credit to say that he doesn't succeed in writing a Christian story (or it involves a rather narrow view of what Lewis would have felt was a successful Christian story). Perhaps he succeeds in writing a Christian story, but it's better and wilder and more interesting and less dogma-driven than what we think of as "Christian stories", and so it doesn't match our mental categories.
After all, Lewis explicitly says in LB that it's okay to know god and be moral under a different name, as long as you're knowing god and being moral. So if you feel that you derived some of your moral education from the Narnia books, and if you felt some sense of "deepness" from them, if they came alive for you and gave you some sense of the numinous, and that aliveness transformed your mental landscape in a way that helped you be a better person - then whether or not you ended up seeing that as a "Christian" thing per se, I think *Lewis*, at least, would think he succeeded at it. I do really think that in the end, Christianity to Lewis was more about actions than terminology.
On the other hand, I think you might be giving him too MUCH credit as a narrative architect. I tend to think he didn't really think a lot about the broader implications of the whole railway accident thing. I suspect he just wanted all the friends of Narnia together for the big finale and to show that they were totally going to heaven(!), and given the constraints he'd created for himself, the "rocks fall, everybody dies" solution was the easiest. I mean, one, he wants to write about going to heaven, and this is the problem of writing about heaven in a YA book where your main characters are kids: you've gotta kill of a bunch of kids. And two, having Peter use the rings wouldn't actually have solved this problem; it would just have made it weirder. Either the Pevensies would then just have to have been kicked out of Narnia and back to earth when Narnia ended (in which case the big heaven finale is robbed of a lot of emotional impact because it'd just be a bunch of characters you care less about) or they'd still have had to die, just in Narnia instead.
In sum: I suspect it's more fair to say that Lewis murdered the Pevensies (manslaughter by narrative requirement) than to say that Aslan did. Also, I think the "better" version of the LB story is maybe one in which Lewis didn't feel like he had to go back to the Pevensies to give the story emotional weight, but struck out on new waters entirely and made us care about the Narnian characters enough that their story had weight by itself [I think this would be a weird but cool AU fanfic]. But, I don't think he could do that, because:
Your comments on the unsatisfactory nature of a lot of Lewis' later Narnia characters really brought home to me that I'm not sure whether Lewis considered them REAL, in a meaningful way. I suspect he was inconsistent in his own mind about this, actually. I think sometimes he did and sometimes he didn't. But given that Narnia is sort of a sandbox reality, I think there's a sense in which people who are derived from the sandbox reality are sort of sandbox people - you can love them the way you love anything in Narnia, but they have fundamental limitations to their depth. Humans in Narnia are a bit realer than everyone else there, because they have a real-world heritage from the imports. But the longer they've been in Narnia (and particularly if they and their parents were born there) the more sandboxy they are.
Possibly that's the answer to why it's not a tragedy that the Pevensies have to go back to England after "growing up" in Narnia as kings and queens. Because I will say, when they get old in Narnia, they do start to display all those tell-tale signs of sandboxyness. The young, fresh-from-the-real-world Pevensies are sharply characterized and much more convincing than the King and Queen Pevensies, who sort of get compressed a bit into archetypes of chivalry. Growing up in Narnia is only sandbox growing up.