December Talking Meme, Day 12: C. S. Lewis

[edenfalling]

December 12: C. S. Lewis (for selenak) [Tumblr crosspost]

I don't know all that much about C. S. Lewis as a person, nor am I especially interested in finding out more. I am interested in him mainly as a writer of fiction -- most specifically the Chronicles of Narnia, though I have also read a few of his other works: namely two and a half books of the Space Trilogy (before I threw That Hideous Strength across the room in a combination of frustration and disgust), Till We Have Faces (which I don't remember much about and may have been too young to properly grasp, but think I kind of liked?), and The Screwtape Letters (which I argued with out loud and at great length while reading, and am glad nobody was around to observe me acting crazy).

The problem with Lewis is that he was a Christian apologist, and has gotten a reputation in some circles -- one of which forms a significant portion of Narnia fandom, alas -- as a brilliant theologian.

He really wasn't.

I mean, the bit of theology I think he may be best known for -- the lunatic, liar, or Lord theory -- can be knocked apart by the simple observation that the Gospels were written over forty years after Jesus's death by people who didn't actually know him and were frantically reacting to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. They are not reliable historical documents. They are mythological propaganda.

(Whether any person believes in that mythology is of no more import to me than whether any person believes in any other religious mythology. As far as I'm concerned, all gods have precisely the same level of reality, and are largely irrelevant to my life.)

Anyway, Lewis infuriates me because I actually agree with him on a lot of points. The importance of mindfulness. That goodness is a great and terrible force. (So is mercy.) The importance of love and honor and truth. That humanity's great flaws are unthinking habit and rationalization.

And then he'll come out with stuff I just choke on, or make a statement that I consider a half-truth but which he uses as a whole truth to prop up a position I find abhorrent. It's immensely frustrating.

This is why I despise The Last Battle, for reference. Lewis spends six books expounding a theology of life and joy, and then tries to sell readers on the idea that the senseless destruction of all that beauty is somehow a good and necessary thing. No. No it wasn't. Yes, all things die in the end, but Narnia's death wasn't slipping gently into the night at the end of a long life, when death came as a welcome friend. Narnia's death was a cold-blooded assassination. I also despise the way Lewis tries to frame the problem of the good non-Christian, by saying that anyone who acts rightly was really worshipping Aslan (aka Jesus, aka the Christian god) all along. All other religions are therefore either devil-worship or shams. That egoistic, imperialistic denial of all other paths of faith and spiritual experience infuriates me beyond words.

...

The thing is, the parts of his writing I like, I like deeply and whole-heartedly. Lewis is far from perfect. He couldn't manage consistent world-building if his life depended on it. He has a bee in his bonnet about archaic proper grammar. He's terrible at writing adult women, whether as secondary characters or as protagonists.

But he's amazing at writing girls and letting them be the heroes of their own adventures. His lack of interest in consistency helps lend a certain 'aliveness' to his imagination -- whatever works in the moment, he's willing to throw in. And he has a knack for describing the numinous, which is damnably difficult to do -- the last few chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, for example, or nearly the entirety of Perelandra, are some of the best examples of how to convey the experience of grace that I've ever read. And even the terrible stuff is useful in its own way, by teaching me that it's possible to love and hate a person and their works at the same time, without either reaction overwriting or invalidating the other.

In summary, Lewis was a very formative writer for me, and I suspect I will continue wrestling with his influence on my imagination and ethics for many years to come.

-----

December Talking Meme: All Days

Comments

[transposable_element]

Till We Have Faces is my favorite of his books (that I've read, obviously). I highly recommend you reread it if you don't remember it well and/or were too young for it when you read it.

And I so agree with you about TLB. Does anybody like that book?

In fact, I agree with so much of what you've written here that I have very little to say...

[edenfalling]

*makes note to reread Till We Have Faces*

It's always interesting to me that some books really don't work until readers have a certain amount of life experience. For instance, I tried to read Pride and Prejudice when I was eight or nine, because it was my mom's favorite book. I got about five pages in and decided it was boring and pointless. I tried again when I was twelve or thirteen, got about fifteen pages in, and decided it wasn't pointless but still dreadfully boring. And then I tried a third time when I was eighteen-ish and LOVED it! It isn't boring at all! Jane Austen is, in fact, a master of sarcasm and pointed sociological observations. But I didn't have the context to appreciate her work when I was younger.

I know there are people who like TLB. I know a bunch of other people who like parts of it -- heck, I like some parts of it, like the little history tidbits Jewel tells to Jill. But it does seem to rouse very widespread discontent among readers, which I can't account for merely by its place as the series finale.

[heliopausa]

I think there's stacks in TLB which is brilliant! I love that it admits the reality of defeat, the end of the absolute last echoes of Golden-Age Camelot, Narnia does Gotterdammerung. The slow creeping realisation that it's ending, that they won't win, is beautifully done - very real, very moving. It's one of the most real battle-scenes, too - the last stand at Stable Hill. I'm writing from memory here, but isn't it Tirian who sees Jill being dragged away by her hair, and can hardly even respond to it emotionally, because there is no time to think, it's all just about survive the next instant and the next and the next. (And all the time being driven back by a strategically much cleverer enemy.) And the politics is so grim and true. The damage that always-nice people like Puzzle can allow (as well as the damage which is in the end done to them.)
Yes, it flubs in the ending, and where exactly it does hits so many theological buttons as well as litcrit ones that I'll leave it alone, I think, but the book as a whole has some really great strengths. Also... Jill and Eustace.

[edenfalling]

The thing is, while the disintegration of Narnian society and the ugly reality of the battle are well done, within the limits of children's fantasy, the scale of cause to effect is completely wrong. Could the events of the story result in the end of Narnia as a small independent country? Sure! In the end of an entire world? Not remotely. And you know, I wouldn't have been happy about Calormen conquering Narnia, but it would have made literary sense -- an on-page echo off the off-page Telmarine conquest. Armageddon is just out of nowhere, and Lewis's attempt to handwave it with the ominous stars business does not paper over the problem that there is no justification for that level of catastrophe. I mean, obviously there were still some Narnians who were keeping faith, so what made that disaster different from Caspian I's invasion?

...

As you can see, I get upset about TLB for all kinds of reasons. *sigh*

[heliopausa]

Good heavens! I do indeed see about the all sorts of reasons --- and one of them would have upset me, too, but it was never (and still isn't) in my head-canon. I have never thought till this very minute, that is, till I read your reply, of that possibility - that the Calormene invasion was the cause or trigger of the Gotterdammerunging. I completely agree that that would be an insufficient cause, and just Wrong.

I had always thought (as a child reading, I mean) that it was just that time was up, all worlds draw to an end, etc, and it was just a bit of ironic bad luck for the Calormenes that they'd gone to all that trouble, conquered but still didn't get to enjoy the fruits of their labour. i.e. if they hadn't bothered, Tirian would still have been the last king of Narnia.
More recently, I have been mulling over triggers, for the sake of the story possibilities, but the Calormenes weren't one of them.

One of these days, when life is a little more leisurely (and congratulations on finishing the essay) we maybe can return to this? :)

[edenfalling]

Mmm. I think the invasion is meant as a symptom rather than an ultimate cause of Armageddon. Probably even the "loss of faith in Aslan" subplot is also meant as a symptom. But the thing is, those are not symptoms anywhere near dire enough to serve as warning signs for the end of an entire world, particularly not when similar things have happened before without horrific existential results. The Narnian world, to all appearances, is getting along just fine -- sure, Narnia-the-country is having a really bad year, but that's nothing new or different -- and then boom, lights out, the end. Lewis puts significant effort into creating an ominous, defeated, helpless atmosphere, but he never does overcome the scale mismatch. (At least for me, anyway.)

[transposable_element]

This is actually one of the reasons that I am so bothered by the conflation of Narnia the country with Narnia the world. Because in the end that conflation means that the end of Narnia is the end of the world.

[edenfalling]

Exactly. And that is untenable as a moral proposition, no matter how Lewis tried to handwave the issue.

[transposable_element]

The most shocking reread for me was Jane Eyre. I first read it at 13, and when I reread it in my early 20s it seemed like a completely different book. Somehow on my first reading I had not absorbed how rebellious and passionate Jane is. I think that her attempts to make herself into a good, meek, self-effacing woman must have overshadowed everything else. It's hard for a modern reader, especially a naive reader with very little knowledge of social history, to understand how shocking that book was at the time it was published. I wouldn't exactly say that I wasn't ready for it at 13, but I certainly missed a lot.

I probably didn't get to Jane Austen until I was 15 or 16, which is just as well.

[edenfalling]

I keep meaning to read Jane Eyre and then never getting around to it. From what I've heard, I suspect I'd enjoy it, albeit with some reservations about Rochester. (The only work of any of the Brontë sisters I've read is Wuthering Heights, which I liked well enough though I have no idea why people insist it's a romance. It's a sociological study of families in isolated circumstances turning in on themselves, and also a meditation on the nature of evil. It has nothing remotely to do with romantic love.)

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

I have also read a few of his other works: namely two and a half books of the Space Trilogy (before I threw That Hideous Strength across the room in a combination of frustration and disgust), Till We Have Faces (which I don't remember much about and may have been too young to properly grasp, but think I kind of liked?), and The Screwtape Letters (which I argued with out loud and at great length while reading, and am glad nobody was around to observe me acting crazy).

What annoyed you so much about That Hideous Strength? I haven't read it, but I've heard generally good things about it.

I enjoyed The Screwtape Letters when I read it, largely because I was impressed by how relevant it was despite having been written 40-50 years ago. There's one part where Wormwood advises Screwtape not to let his target think too much--to keep him occupied with frivolities and trivialities so he never has time to think about the deeper implications of his actions. I thought that was a remarkably apt jab at the aspect of modern media that packages everything in simplistic soundbites and floods us with information about what celebrity broke up with who or wore what to which awards show.

This is why I despise The Last Battle, for reference.

Have you read "The Problem of Susan" by Neil Gaiman? It's one of the short stories in his collection Fragile Things. It's his response to aspects of The Last Battle that he found problematic upon rereading the Narnia series as an adult. The collection as a whole is awesome (which is basically the same as saying "it was written by Neil Gaiman"), so it's well worth checking out.

[edenfalling]

It's been over fifteen years, so I can't remember anything remotely specific about That Hideous Strength, just the visceral sensation of dislike and frustration. I think it was partly that the book was so relentlessly... grimy? In a grindingly pedestrian way. And I didn't like a single character, nor did I think the position Ransom apparently wound up in after Perelandra seemed plausible. And it just kept going on and on and bloody on without ever seeming to get anywhere. I hear that Merlin turns up later on, so presumably it arrives somewhere eventually... but obviously I got sick of the journey before that point.

I should probably try reading the book again in case it works better for me as an adult than it did when I was a teenager. *sigh*

I own Fragile Things and have indeed read "The Problem of Susan." However, while it's a well-written and layered story, Gaiman's reading of Susan's fate is not my own reading of Susan's fate, so for me the story is more of an interesting intellectual exercise than the satisfying "ha, take that!" which I think is how a lot of people react to it.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

I quite liked 'That Hideous Strength'. The one of the trilogy I hated was 'Perelandra', which I found tedious, preachy, and of course completely incompatible with actual cosmology. Not really Lewis' fault, as he wrote it before the Mariner 2 probe discovered that there was no water vapour in the atmosphere of Venus and its surface temperature was 428°C, but the trouble is that I read the book *after* that mission.

Of course the one of his fictional works that I hate most is 'The Last Battle'; it exposes Aslan as a complete bastard and from then on when I re-read the other books I'm cheering for Jadis.

And Susan, of course, one of the greatest heroines in fiction; which makes the treatment of her in 'The Last Battle' all the worse.

And the Armageddon aspect is just... lame. The forces engaged in that final battle were minute. If they'd joined Peter's army in TLTWATW, or Caspian's in PC, it would have been the equivalent of an extra motor-launch joining the US Sixth Fleet. And on the basis of that tiny little skirmish Aslan decided to destroy all of Narnia. If that idiotic lion is Lewis' idea of God I'm glad I'm an atheist.

[edenfalling]

I came to the Space Trilogy at a point where it had long been obvious that they weren't scientifically accurate at all, so I read them more as fantasy from the word go. And given how Ransom gets to Venus in the first place, I think fantasy -- and specifically archetypal high fantasy rather than realistic low fantasy -- is a reading approach less likely to lead to a mismatch of expectation to text. I suspect I had some text-to-expectation mismatch with That Hideous Strength, which may be another reason I disliked it so strongly.

Perelandra isn't remotely my own religion, but it does convey the sense of... a brush with the vastness and wonder of the universe, perhaps? Anyway, I was able to extract that sensation despite the mismatch of religious specifics.

I agree that the setup for TLB does not justify Armageddon. The end of Narnia as an independent country, sure! TLB paints a decent picture of a society falling apart, and the ugly reality of small-scale warfare. But that's not the same thing as the end of an entire world.