[Fic] "Endurance" -- Chronicles of Narnia

[edenfalling]

This is my stab at the obligatory 'problem of Susan' story everyone who writes Narnia fanfiction seems to produce sooner or later. *sigh* Book canon.

(Cross-posted here on ff.net.)

ETA: furies has remixed this story for Remix Redux 9: Once a Queen (The Reality Bites Remix)!

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Endurance
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"The thing is," Susan tells Edmund once, "you have to live in the world you're given." No matter what you remember, no matter what you dream, the sky is above you, the earth below you, and people all around you, boxing you in, setting the limits of the possible and the permissible.

Maybe she's meant to be strong enough to shatter those limits. But Susan knows herself, and she knows with a quiet, cold certainty that sooner or later she'd break under the strain of that battle.

Yielding is better.

She wraps Narnia and Aslan deep inside, a warm ember to touch in her weakest moments, and gets on with living. Talking about magic lands inside wardrobes will make people call her mad. So she pretends not to remember. Behaving like a queen will make people think her over-proud, naïve, or mad again. So she watches her classmates and imitates them, scrupulously. Expecting equality will only bring heartache. So she learns to chatter and focus on trivialities in public, and bend all her intelligence to finding a job and saving money and making a place to call her own.

Maybe then, once she's established her sanity, once she's disguised herself with years of commonplace behavior, once she has mundane security, she can pull out that ember and blow it back to life. Or maybe not. Maybe Queen Susan the Gentle will always be her private heartbreak and exaltation.

And would that be wrong? Not everyone is called to glory. Not everyone is called to testify in flame and stars and trumpets. Not everyone is taken living into heaven. Most people simply live as best they can.

This is what Peter and Lucy won't ever understand. So Susan laughs through frozen smiles and slides into her chosen disguise and watches them blaze like comets, scorching through the limits of this world of their exile. She watches how they gather fear as much as admiration, how they walk in growing isolation, how they puzzle helplessly over England's petty cruelties and injustice. This is the world they're given, but they refuse to accept it.

"The thing is," Edmund tells Susan, "the world you're given may not be enough."

"So who changes: you or it?" she asks.

Edmund smiles. "Peter would change the world. Lucy would change the way she saw the world, and make the world change in return. You would change yourself."

"And you?" Susan asks.

Edmund shrugs. "I don't think one man can change a whole world alone. But I worked too hard to find myself to start living behind a false face again; there's too much danger I might forget it's only an act. So I fight what I can't endure and endure what I can't fight, and trust that Aslan will help me find the balance."

"I'm no use at battles," Susan tells him. "I'd go mad. Or I'd come to hate... well, you know. I'd rather become a stranger to myself than hate him. I'm not strong enough to stand alone against the world."

"Who says you'd be alone?" Edmund asks, and leaves Susan to stare at her careful shields of clothes and make-up in silence.

Now Susan counts the bodies at the morgue, picking her way gingerly over the frozen floor in her heels and nylons and pretty floral dress. She can survive even this, she knows. She can continue in her chosen path, her camouflage of ordinary life. But... what if Edmund was right? What if she risks a stand? She whispers Aslan's name, and the ember in her heart stirs with a swirl of gold.

She was never one for battles, always the first to compromise. And that's a virtue, too -- knowing when to yield -- but any virtue, carried to its logical extreme, becomes a vice, a trap, a smaller box within the prison of the world.

Susan reaches down with one hand to close Lucy's eyes.

England is the world she's given. One way or another, she will make it be enough.

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Inspired by the 4/15/09 15_minute_fic word #106: bear

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You know, writing Narnia fanfiction is odd for me. On the one hand, I want to be at least somewhat faithful to the series' internal mythology, which does involve a lot of Christianity. On the other hand, I'm not Christian and I find some of Lewis's particular theological views abhorrent. On the third hand, I was raised in a largely Christian culture, so Christian allusions and metaphors do come fairly easily to hand. On the fourth hand, I don't oppose all Christian theology. And on the fifth hand, I am an actively religious person myself, and I know I don't like my religion (Unitarian Universalism -- and no, just because the denomination started out Christian doesn't mean all or even most UUs today are Christian -- I myself am a vaguely agnostic semi-pagan secular humanist) being misrepresented, so I don't want to misrepresent Lewis...

So there's this constant internal tension where I look at the story and think, "You know, maybe I should put in a reference here," and then think, "Oh, this other bit over there, that's verging on actual Christian propaganda, and that makes me really twitchy," and I go back and forth and always wonder how the story comes off to Christians and non-Christians alike (and that's not even going into how very many, many ways there are to be religious that have nothing to do with Christianity, and how little they often have to do with each other).

Mneh. It's all a big mess.

Comments

[rianax.livejournal.com]

Of all the siblings, Susan is the only one that made a honest attempt to adapting back to England and building a life there. The others were only playing a waiting game; Narnia always was the center of the sphere of their lives.

Susan always struck me as the sensible and sensitive one. She went into exile willingly and worked to rebuild her life twice over. Narnia was closed to her so why constantly peel back the scabs on her heart again and again with her siblings' need for reminiscence.

Look to the past too much and you will be consumed by it and ultimately her family was.

Brilliant by the way, you have a true talent for converting theology to the laity without losing the story.

[edenfalling]

Thank you! I am especially relieved to hear that the theological and meta elements don't overwhelm the story, because my initial impulse when writing about Narnia is to go off into long rants about morals and literary analysis and stuff, and I am never sure I have managed to quash that so I can write a story instead of an essay. *grin*

[rianax.livejournal.com]

Narnia is an allegory and begs for analysis which you do in such an attractive way.

Have you heard of a book called the Magicians? It has been called a dark mirror to the Narnia series.

[firedawn.livejournal.com]

I am a Christian, just to preface my comment for you.

I really love the way you write Susan. I think it's great that you recognize, as so many non-Christians seem to fail to recognize, the why and how of Susan's falling into a pattern of party invitations and nylons and lipsticks.

Lewis's theology largely does involve the idea of living the Kingdom of Heaven while here on earth, and the problem of Susan is that she fails to recognize that the Kingdom of Heaven/Narnia/what have you is part of her, and not just external circumstances ("Once a King or Queen in Narnia, always a King or Queen in Narnia"). I love that this is written into your story as a hint that the reader can choose to pick up or not, and it's wonderfully and subtly done. It wasn't that because of nylons and lipstick she was living in sin... it was that she forgot her first loyalty to the place she truly belongs to. This is purely my opinion, of course, as to the analogy that Lewis is consciously or unconsciously making.

[edenfalling]

Thank you! I have a companion piece to this story -- Remembrance, which is written nominally in the form of a human interest article about Susan after her death -- that outlines one way in which she might have come back to her faith in both Aslan and herself.

Lewis's theology largely does involve the idea of living the Kingdom of Heaven while here on earth

I have issues with a lot of Lewis's theology, but that is one point on which I completely agree with him -- though I would use slightly different terminology and put the idea in a different framework, since insofar as I have a theological viewpoint, I am generally an agnostic secular humanist. I believe the world is an awesome place (in both the current and archaic senses of the word) and since this life is all we are guaranteed to live, it is all the more important to live right and do right by each other.

Anyway, the main point of the children's adventures in Narnia always seemed to me to be that they learned how to be good human beings -- honest, kind, generous, loyal, noble, etc. -- and they were meant to put those lessons into practice during their lives in England. They were meant to act as (or be, I suppose) the kings and queens they had grown to be inside, whether their outward social status reflected that or not. So as you say, Susan's failure was a failure to remain true to herself and Aslan -- she gave in to external pressures -- and the superficial vanity and interest in boys (i.e., sex) she displays are symptoms, not causes.

In fact, one of my main quarrels with The Last Battle is that it cuts short those (presumably) good lives before the Pevensies could do much good in England, either directly or by example, which always struck me as wasteful on Aslan's part. (Also tragic, of course, but I find tragedy less literarily irritating than futility, so the waste eats at me more.) But that is a different discussion, so I will leave off rambling at you. :-)

[firedawn.livejournal.com]

I did always think it was so wasted, but I think he kind of wanted to skip and get to their heavenly reward and happy ending. To me, however, the best ending would've been to see all four original Pevensie children live useful lives spreading the Gospel (since this seems to be the point anyway, religiously) by the way they live, loving others, and generally making the world a better, more heaven-like place.

Alas, it is not to be!

[philippos42.livejournal.com]

This is a good explanation of what is so wrong with TLB.

[edenfalling]

I'm glad to hear my thoughts make sense. :-)

here from remix

[weisquared.livejournal.com]

This is such a lovely story. I like how Susan's choice to live in the real world isn't presented as a wrong choice, just a different one from her siblings because of their differences in personalities. And thus, it makes her survival a positive thing, as a way for her to live as best she can in the world she's given.

As far as a take on "the problem of Susan," it might be the one I like best. It's hopeful and doesn't villainize either her choices or the book canon, which is a hard line to walk.

Re: here from remix

[edenfalling]

Thank you! If you like stories that don't villainize Susan, you might also enjoy Pausing To Smell the Roses by Marbleglove, and autumnia's not-a-story Susan-centric AU of TLB. (The second is sadly unfinished and apparently likely to remain so, but the existing four chapters are lovely!)

Re: here from remix

[weisquared.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the recs!

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

I came over here from Remix, and I'm glad I did. This is marvelous. I love the perspectives on how each of the 4 will deal with things -- it's appropriate that Susan and Edmund, the middle and more ambiguous children -- are here and Lucy and Peter are at a distance.

I love the sense of Susan moving on with her life here:

Maybe then, once she's established her sanity, once she's disguised herself with years of commonplace behavior, once she has mundane security, she can pull out that ember and blow it back to life. Or maybe not. Maybe Queen Susan the Gentle will always be her private heartbreak and exaltation.

And the point the story ends is heartbreaking, yet she still has that resilience.

[edenfalling]

Thank you very much! I have kind of a thing for writing Susan and Edmund in conversation with each other -- I think because they are, as you say, more ambiguous than Lucy and Peter, and thus useful for working out my meta and theological issues with canon. *wry*

Susan is moving on with her life. It may not be in a direction her siblings approve of, but by gum, she has a plan. And you know, I have always (subconsciously as a child, consciously as an adult) read TLB in light of Hwin's advice to Aravis, that a living person has many options but all the dead are dead alike -- it's a tragedy that Susan loses her family, but it's NOT a tragedy that she doesn't go to Aslan's country right then. Because she's still alive. She has her whole life and her whole world open ahead of her.

And she's strong enough to carry on.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

That's lovely. I never thought of Susan's ending that way, but it makes perfect sense.

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

Rereading this after reading the remix of it. I didn't realize you were UU. I knew you were very active in your religious community because of the classes you teach though. I must say, that you do a wonderful and very- how to put it- conscientious job of trying to remain true to the series internal mythology and themes. You comment on them sometimes, might change them sometimes ( Lewis does definitely have very strong views sometimes) but you never ignore or strip the story of that. THat seems to happen in a lot of Narnia fic, so its very interesting to see someone thinking about it and keeping aware of it but not making the Christian-themes too much either.

[edenfalling]

I feel that Lewis's particular version of Christianity is woven inextricably into Narnia, both in the way he set up the world and in the ways his characters act. If I ignored it, I wouldn't really be writing Narnia. I might be writing a world more congenial to me in some ways, but... well, I write fanfiction as much for the worlds as for the characters, so if I am writing alt!Narnia instead of proper Narnia, why not go off and write original fiction instead? Which, you know, I do sometimes!

But with fanfiction, I am trying to play by someone else's rules without losing sight of my own convictions. It's an interesting balancing act, and I think the process of having a conversation with Lewis's work (and with other fans of his work) is worth the effort of taking his rules seriously.