The difficulty is that it's impossible to write a story set in Narnia, featuring Aslan, and staying true to canon characters -- without making Aslan infallibly good. If Aslan does a thing, that thing is the right thing to do, by definition.
One can step outside this, set up a story where Aslan is either fallible or not entirely good, and such a story might be readable... but it wouldn't stay true to Lewis's canon.
It's certainly harder to see this dampening of memory as a violation of self, if no one calls it that in the story, or objects to it -- even to Aslan's face. Especially to Aslan's face.
An alternative, in Peter's case, might be the same sort of magic by which visitors to Narnia from our world get stronger and faster. Narnian magic comes into the body, pushes out the frailty from the "other world"... and could do the same thing to mind and memory, perhaps. It would then be a natural phenomenon (if we may use that term for what happens in Narnia!), not something done by Aslan's direct will.
But that would have made a different story. I prefer this one.
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Date: 2010-03-08 07:00 am (UTC)One can step outside this, set up a story where Aslan is either fallible or not entirely good, and such a story might be readable... but it wouldn't stay true to Lewis's canon.
It's certainly harder to see this dampening of memory as a violation of self, if no one calls it that in the story, or objects to it -- even to Aslan's face. Especially to Aslan's face.
An alternative, in Peter's case, might be the same sort of magic by which visitors to Narnia from our world get stronger and faster. Narnian magic comes into the body, pushes out the frailty from the "other world"... and could do the same thing to mind and memory, perhaps. It would then be a natural phenomenon (if we may use that term for what happens in Narnia!), not something done by Aslan's direct will.
But that would have made a different story. I prefer this one.