3 things about Narnia
Feb. 9th, 2009 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingI have been reading a lot of Chronicles of Narnia fanfiction for the past few days, which has led me to three realizations that I am now sharing with the world. *grin*
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1. There is a very particular Narnia fanfic I want to read, and which nobody seems to have written (or perhaps even thought about). It is an AU of The Last Battle in which there is NOT a train accident. Jill and Eustace get to Narnia anyhow, they and Tirian manage to save the country without Aslan declaring Game Over, and then they're told that they're too old now and must go home to England forever.
And they and the Pevensies live. They grow up. They get jobs. They marry (this would be a Jill/Eustace story, most likely, because I do love their banter) and have children. Edmund goes into law. Lucy becomes a doctor. Peter joins some sort of armed forces, and then maybe goes into politics. Eustace goes into academia, probably in the sciences. Jill... I dunno about Jill; maybe a teacher? And without the train crash to jolt her, Susan continues to drift away from her family, though she may be reconciled at some point as she grows older and maybe has children and hopefully stops being so obsessed with fitting in.
And maybe twenty years later, when all the Friends of Narnia are together for a family reunion of sorts, some of the adults overhear some of their children talking about a peculiar adventure they've had, in a fantastical country where the animals talk, and there was a Lion...
The trouble is, this story has no plot. I think it would work best as a series of vaguely connected oneshots. But I never liked the ending of The Last Battle -- while it may work wonderfully as theology, it's utter rubbish as a novel, a complete cop-out instead of a brave facing of consequences -- and I always felt that if the point of going to Narnia was to learn to know Aslan there as practice for serving him in England, then by god, there ought to be some actual examples of how to live in mid-twentieth-century England as a good and noble person.
Otherwise what is the point?
(I am not going to write this story, btw. I do not have the time, nor do I know anything about everyday life in England during 1950-1980. But if you feel inspired to adopt the plot bunny, I promise to review every chapter and/or component fic!)
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2. I remember quite clearly the first time I realized Narnia was, among many other things, a Christian allegory. I was reading a collection of Elric of Melnibone stories written by people who weren't Michael Moorcock, and one of them (possibly by Neil Gaiman?) dealt with a young boy who read all sorts of fantasy, including Elric and Narnia, and who realized at one point that Narnia was Christian allegory, and who felt horribly betrayed by that realization.
I stopped reading the story for a moment, thought about Narnia, and said, "Oh. It is Christian allegory, isn't it? Aslan is Jesus; the Emperor-Over-Sea is God. Huh." And then I continued reading the story.
I didn't feel betrayed. I felt wrong-footed, certainly, but not really betrayed. I think this is because I had always viewed Aslan as a religious figure. He is very clearly a deity of some sort. It's just that he's so vividly drawn as a lion, and I was exposed to enough non-Christian mythology as a child, that I assumed he was a pagan deity. When I thought about it at all, I figured that the Pevensies were supposed to establish or revive his worship in England, or just live according to the values he taught them. And since those values seemed, to me, to be love, trust, faith in those you love and trust, and honor (which is basically treating other people with respect and trust and love), I was completely in favor of that. (They are fairly universal values, you see.)
I do look back and wonder how I could so easily identify one explicit Christian reference (Lucy's comment about a stable holding something bigger than the whole world, in The Last Battle) and miss others like the Lamb thing at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or the 'sacrifice his life to redeem others' motif in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but... it's not as if Christianity has a monopoly on lambs or redemptive self-sacrifice.
To be honest, to this day, even though I intellectually see the Christian elements in the series, my heart still reads them as pagan stories about a Lion-god. And there is nothing wrong with that.
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3. I don't care what Lewis says about centaurs having to eat to fill a Man stomach and a Horse stomach. Their internal anatomy cannot be literally like a human torso stuck onto a horse's body. I figure the stomach and most internal organs are in the horse part, and the human torso, instead of having duplicates of the kidneys and whatnot, is filled with nothing but giant lungs! (Which, obviously, have no duplicates in the horse part.) This is my theory, and I am sticking to it. *grin*
---------------
1. There is a very particular Narnia fanfic I want to read, and which nobody seems to have written (or perhaps even thought about). It is an AU of The Last Battle in which there is NOT a train accident. Jill and Eustace get to Narnia anyhow, they and Tirian manage to save the country without Aslan declaring Game Over, and then they're told that they're too old now and must go home to England forever.
And they and the Pevensies live. They grow up. They get jobs. They marry (this would be a Jill/Eustace story, most likely, because I do love their banter) and have children. Edmund goes into law. Lucy becomes a doctor. Peter joins some sort of armed forces, and then maybe goes into politics. Eustace goes into academia, probably in the sciences. Jill... I dunno about Jill; maybe a teacher? And without the train crash to jolt her, Susan continues to drift away from her family, though she may be reconciled at some point as she grows older and maybe has children and hopefully stops being so obsessed with fitting in.
And maybe twenty years later, when all the Friends of Narnia are together for a family reunion of sorts, some of the adults overhear some of their children talking about a peculiar adventure they've had, in a fantastical country where the animals talk, and there was a Lion...
The trouble is, this story has no plot. I think it would work best as a series of vaguely connected oneshots. But I never liked the ending of The Last Battle -- while it may work wonderfully as theology, it's utter rubbish as a novel, a complete cop-out instead of a brave facing of consequences -- and I always felt that if the point of going to Narnia was to learn to know Aslan there as practice for serving him in England, then by god, there ought to be some actual examples of how to live in mid-twentieth-century England as a good and noble person.
Otherwise what is the point?
(I am not going to write this story, btw. I do not have the time, nor do I know anything about everyday life in England during 1950-1980. But if you feel inspired to adopt the plot bunny, I promise to review every chapter and/or component fic!)
---------------
2. I remember quite clearly the first time I realized Narnia was, among many other things, a Christian allegory. I was reading a collection of Elric of Melnibone stories written by people who weren't Michael Moorcock, and one of them (possibly by Neil Gaiman?) dealt with a young boy who read all sorts of fantasy, including Elric and Narnia, and who realized at one point that Narnia was Christian allegory, and who felt horribly betrayed by that realization.
I stopped reading the story for a moment, thought about Narnia, and said, "Oh. It is Christian allegory, isn't it? Aslan is Jesus; the Emperor-Over-Sea is God. Huh." And then I continued reading the story.
I didn't feel betrayed. I felt wrong-footed, certainly, but not really betrayed. I think this is because I had always viewed Aslan as a religious figure. He is very clearly a deity of some sort. It's just that he's so vividly drawn as a lion, and I was exposed to enough non-Christian mythology as a child, that I assumed he was a pagan deity. When I thought about it at all, I figured that the Pevensies were supposed to establish or revive his worship in England, or just live according to the values he taught them. And since those values seemed, to me, to be love, trust, faith in those you love and trust, and honor (which is basically treating other people with respect and trust and love), I was completely in favor of that. (They are fairly universal values, you see.)
I do look back and wonder how I could so easily identify one explicit Christian reference (Lucy's comment about a stable holding something bigger than the whole world, in The Last Battle) and miss others like the Lamb thing at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or the 'sacrifice his life to redeem others' motif in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but... it's not as if Christianity has a monopoly on lambs or redemptive self-sacrifice.
To be honest, to this day, even though I intellectually see the Christian elements in the series, my heart still reads them as pagan stories about a Lion-god. And there is nothing wrong with that.
---------------
3. I don't care what Lewis says about centaurs having to eat to fill a Man stomach and a Horse stomach. Their internal anatomy cannot be literally like a human torso stuck onto a horse's body. I figure the stomach and most internal organs are in the horse part, and the human torso, instead of having duplicates of the kidneys and whatnot, is filled with nothing but giant lungs! (Which, obviously, have no duplicates in the horse part.) This is my theory, and I am sticking to it. *grin*
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 05:41 am (UTC)I think I actually read a little of the Screwtape Letters! Except I thought Dickens wrote them for some bizarre reason, and I haven't the foggiest why I'd wanted to read it anyway (not remembering what little I read at all). XD;;
...I think I know more about Lewis from reading about Tolkien than anything else. ^^;;
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 06:44 am (UTC)It reminded me of the time I ran across one of his "Of course Christianity is correct!" arguments, which I think is called the 'lunatic, liar, or Lord' theory. It goes like this: In the New Testament Gospels, Jesus claims to be the son of God. If you disbelieve this, you're saying that Jesus was either a liar [and by implication, not to be trusted on any other subject, which renders all his moral guidance useless] or completely mad [which also renders his teachings useless]. Since his teachings are evidently true in other respects, and his actions don't seem mad, he must have been telling the truth and therefore he is the Lord. (The stuff in brackets is my translation of Lewis's implied stance.)
This argument depends on two things. First, you must believe that the Gospels are accurate history (which is a very dicey assumption, since all four disagree with each other, and were all clearly designed as evangelical propaganda), and second, you must assume that being a liar or delusion about one particular aspect of life automatically renders all the other portions of your life false and untrustworthy (which is not necessarily true at all; people are amazingly talented at compartmentalizing our lives and being only selectively nuts). But Lewis doesn't admit that he's working from those assumptions, and since many people raised in a nominally Christian culture have a knee-jerk negative emotional reaction to calling Jesus a liar or a lunatic (even if they aren't Christian believers themselves), it can be a tricky argument to answer... so long as you accept the playing field Lewis defines.