Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2009-04-30 01:52 am
edenfalling) wrote2009-04-30 01:52 am
[Fic] "Heart's Desire" -- Chronicles of Narnia
Jadis in the garden: separation from God is only a punishment if you believe in him.
[ETA: The AO3 crosspost and the ff.net crosspost are now up.]
---------------------------------------------
Heart's Desire
---------------------------------------------
"Come in by the gold gates or not at all," the garden's maker had written. And truly, there was no need to turn aside, walk a quarter-circle around the hilltop, and clamber over the wall, but Jadis was the Queen of Charn and she bowed to no one.
She would have the apple on her own terms, as she had earned everything else in her life.
The fruit was sharp and almost painfully sweet, with a metallic tang underneath that expanded to bitter and salt in the aftertaste. The juice was shockingly dark for such a fair-fleshed fruit. Jadis licked the red-brown stain from her hand and laughed.
Pure theatrics: the apple bled. Was that supposed to induce guilt or shame?
The Lion had made this world, she acknowledged, but she had been here at the making; her magic was thus woven deep into its earth and air, inseparable from its very fabric of being. Until this world died, the Lion must adjust his plans to account for her. And even after, she could continue -- if that simpering fool had learned to travel between the planes, surely so could she! And she would learn to cross directly, without the crutch of that horrible, drowning place between the worlds.
A breeze stirred the garden, swirling petals and scent from the tree. Jadis sneezed, and then nearly gagged on the rotting sweetness of the silvery perfume. Stumbling, she turned aside, holding her arms across her face as if to block the very air from attacking her.
The air stilled. The scent dissipated.
Jadis lowered her arms and clenched her free hand, seething. So. The Lion had fashioned a trap for those who defied him and ate the fruit unbidden. But even he could not stop the apple from performing its function; already she could feel new strength coursing through her blood and bones like a river of ice, scouring away her mortality.
She had forever, now. She had new magic to master, a new world to conquer, a new foe to destroy. If the Lion thought that a mere tree would defeat her or that length of days would lead her to despair, he was a fool, as her sister had been.
Jadis ran her tongue across her teeth, savoring the iron tang of immortality, and took another bite.
---------------------------------------------
Inspired by the 4/27/09![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
15_minute_fic word #108: hungry
---------------------------------------------
Near the end of The Magician's Nephew Aslan tells Digory and Polly that Jadis "has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want: they do not always like it."
I never believed him. First, people do not always get what they want; anyone who claims otherwise is engaging in sophistry or wishful thinking. Secondly, the sense I got of Jadis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was emphatically not of a woman mired in despair. Jadis is too practical to give in to despair or wallow in depressive introspection, and I am not at all sure she's even capable of misery; her emotional repertoire seems limited to anger, frustration, fear, hatred, pride, triumph, (self-)satisfaction, and sometimes a pure joy in skill and motion. Possibly also greed or covetousness, but I think even her ambition is more a surety that everything already does belong to her, and she just has to make people acknowledge that truth.
Jadis is evil, no two ways about it. She's selfish, cruel, and probably sociopathic -- other people are not real to her except as tools or obstacles. But length of days with an evil heart is only miserable if you know and care about your relative moral standing. If you don't -- and Jadis doesn't -- then length of days gives you time for everything you find pleasurable, like magic and conquest and fighting.
So with all due respect, I must disagree with Aslan (and therefore, more relevantly, with C. S. Lewis). :-)
---------------
NOTICE! There is an extensive discussion in the comments on the Livejournal version of this post, which happened after I imported my journal to Dreamwidth. I think it is worth checking out.
[ETA: The AO3 crosspost and the ff.net crosspost are now up.]
---------------------------------------------
Heart's Desire
---------------------------------------------
"Come in by the gold gates or not at all," the garden's maker had written. And truly, there was no need to turn aside, walk a quarter-circle around the hilltop, and clamber over the wall, but Jadis was the Queen of Charn and she bowed to no one.
She would have the apple on her own terms, as she had earned everything else in her life.
The fruit was sharp and almost painfully sweet, with a metallic tang underneath that expanded to bitter and salt in the aftertaste. The juice was shockingly dark for such a fair-fleshed fruit. Jadis licked the red-brown stain from her hand and laughed.
Pure theatrics: the apple bled. Was that supposed to induce guilt or shame?
The Lion had made this world, she acknowledged, but she had been here at the making; her magic was thus woven deep into its earth and air, inseparable from its very fabric of being. Until this world died, the Lion must adjust his plans to account for her. And even after, she could continue -- if that simpering fool had learned to travel between the planes, surely so could she! And she would learn to cross directly, without the crutch of that horrible, drowning place between the worlds.
A breeze stirred the garden, swirling petals and scent from the tree. Jadis sneezed, and then nearly gagged on the rotting sweetness of the silvery perfume. Stumbling, she turned aside, holding her arms across her face as if to block the very air from attacking her.
The air stilled. The scent dissipated.
Jadis lowered her arms and clenched her free hand, seething. So. The Lion had fashioned a trap for those who defied him and ate the fruit unbidden. But even he could not stop the apple from performing its function; already she could feel new strength coursing through her blood and bones like a river of ice, scouring away her mortality.
She had forever, now. She had new magic to master, a new world to conquer, a new foe to destroy. If the Lion thought that a mere tree would defeat her or that length of days would lead her to despair, he was a fool, as her sister had been.
Jadis ran her tongue across her teeth, savoring the iron tang of immortality, and took another bite.
---------------------------------------------
Inspired by the 4/27/09
15_minute_fic word #108: hungry---------------------------------------------
Near the end of The Magician's Nephew Aslan tells Digory and Polly that Jadis "has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want: they do not always like it."
I never believed him. First, people do not always get what they want; anyone who claims otherwise is engaging in sophistry or wishful thinking. Secondly, the sense I got of Jadis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was emphatically not of a woman mired in despair. Jadis is too practical to give in to despair or wallow in depressive introspection, and I am not at all sure she's even capable of misery; her emotional repertoire seems limited to anger, frustration, fear, hatred, pride, triumph, (self-)satisfaction, and sometimes a pure joy in skill and motion. Possibly also greed or covetousness, but I think even her ambition is more a surety that everything already does belong to her, and she just has to make people acknowledge that truth.
Jadis is evil, no two ways about it. She's selfish, cruel, and probably sociopathic -- other people are not real to her except as tools or obstacles. But length of days with an evil heart is only miserable if you know and care about your relative moral standing. If you don't -- and Jadis doesn't -- then length of days gives you time for everything you find pleasurable, like magic and conquest and fighting.
So with all due respect, I must disagree with Aslan (and therefore, more relevantly, with C. S. Lewis). :-)
---------------
NOTICE! There is an extensive discussion in the comments on the Livejournal version of this post, which happened after I imported my journal to Dreamwidth. I think it is worth checking out.
on theology, ethics, and authorial intent, part 2
I don't think it's ever said that they have any power other than what Aslan allows them. On the other hand, it's never said that they don't have independent power, nor that Aslan has absolute power over them. It's true that Bacchus, Silenus, and the river god defer to Aslan, but that can be seen as respect for a more powerful deity just as easily as it can been seen as respect for someone who grants them their power. In the absence of hard evidence, both interpretations are valid.
I think my problem with understanding your relation of Aslan as a pagan deity stems from long years studying Greek, Roman, and Norse myths, combined with my understanding of them being 'real' in the sense that there were spiritual entities that took those 'forms' and were worshiped by many .... I saw the Zeus/father-god figure in Narnia as more along the lines of Tash: the most powerful god in the pantheon, but not all-powerful. After all, Zeus was subject to fate (hence he couldn't save his son Sarpedon), while the majority of the Norse pantheon actually die (and stay dead) .... Aslan just never fit my image of the pagan gods I've studied since I was a little kid.
Interesting! The idea of a deterministic plan for the universe is totally alien to my understanding of the world, so it never occurred to me as an issue. In any case, if there is such a thing as fate, I can't think of any action Aslan takes that breaks any such foretold events. In fact, the only foretellings I recall are the prophecy about four thrones at Cair Paravel and the defeat of the White Witch (fulfilled), the auspicious meeting of stars in PC (justified), and the inauspicious stars in TLB (also justified).
Also, my reading of LWW is that if Jadis had managed to kill Aslan in some other fashion, he would have stayed dead; he was only resurrected because his sacrifice met the terms of the Deeper Magic. So despite his power, I never saw Aslan as inherently indestructible. In fact, I figured that if he hadn't been resurrected, while he might have still been alive in other worlds (as Caspian was able to be alive in England for five minutes though he was dead in Narnia) he would have been either barred from Narnia altogether or reduced to a ghost. If you work from the assumption that Aslan is Christ, a lack of a physical body might not have reduced his power, but if you don't start from that assumption, you're left with a dead god, just like what happens to the Norse pantheon at Ragnarok.
-----
Aslan's deference to the Emperor still fits with Christianity. The Trinity is a complicated thing to go into, but I'll try as best I can. In the Trinity, Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are one and the same, and yet three and separate. In the Bible, Christ defers to God's command: he doesn't want to be crucified, but he says "Your will be done". It's part of what makes him fully human as well as fully God. I can't really explain it better: of course, Christian theologians have been arguing about specifics for donkey's years, so I can hardly do it justice. I will say that I thought the triple succession of "Myselfs" in HHB when Shasta is alone with Aslan points to a Trinitarian idea, though.
So far as I can tell -- and I admit my knowledge on this subject is shallow -- every way to rationalize the essential nonsensicality of the Trinity has been declared a heresy; the only correct way to see it is to say that yes, it makes no sense, but it's beyond our comprehension and we must take it on faith. This, I confess, I flat-out can't do. From a Christian perspective, that's a failure on my part. From my perspective, that just means I have a different approach to religion. *shrug* You are probably right that Lewis meant the three 'Myselfs' as a nod to the Trinity. That had never occurred to me; I simply thought Aslan was expressing different parts of his personality, which is not a totally dissimilar idea, but which does not require one to see him as three separate people.
Re: on theology, ethics, and authorial intent, part 2
Yup, guess we'll have to agree to disagree. =D
if there is such a thing as fate, I can't think of any action Aslan takes that breaks any such foretold events.
And here we would get into the argument of who controls fate. In Zeus's case, he was subject to the Fates. Aslan, though, as Creator is also the creator of 'fate', so to speak. Therefore, it isn't so much that he is subject to what fate has determined, but that he created fate to determine such a thing happening. Of course, I'm not a complete determinist myself. I believe God/Christ wills for certain things to happen, but that we as humans determine how we reach those points. Bad explanation, I know. Believe me, this is yet another debate that hasn't been solved, even within the Christian community.
Also, my reading of LWW is that if Jadis had managed to kill Aslan in some other fashion, he would have stayed dead; he was only resurrected because his sacrifice met the terms of the Deeper Magic. So despite his power, I never saw Aslan as inherently indestructible.
Interesting. I always read it as Aslan was only able to be killed because he allowed himself to be killed. The White Witch was always portrayed as afraid of Aslan, and I felt that it was only his submission to Death that allowed the Witch to kill him.
So far as I can tell -- and I admit my knowledge on this subject is shallow -- every way to rationalize the essential nonsensicality of the Trinity has been declared a heresy; the only correct way to see it is to say that yes, it makes no sense, but it's beyond our comprehension and we must take it on faith. This, I confess, I flat-out can't do. From a Christian perspective, that's a failure on my part. From my perspective, that just means I have a different approach to religion.
I don't think it's a failure. I have a hard time taking things just on faith as well. But, if you think about it, we take a lot of things on faith in life. I have absolutely no idea how gravity works, despite years of schooling, but I have faith that it'll keep me on the ground and that it equals 9.8 m/s^2, because people smarter than me have it figured out. Faith in the trinity is having faith that God (who's a lot smarter than me) has it figured out.
And I don't think every way of explaining the Trinity has been declared a heresy, though it depends on who's saying which theory is a heresy. Probably everything in the history of the world has been declared a heresy by someone at sometime. But each denomination, I believe, has at least some sort of understanding on the Trinity, and Catholics and Orthodoxs have probably the fullest explanations (not that I can explain, or understand, some of it. That would involve more research than I have time to do during finals week).