![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingOn Monday I wrote a fic about Peter and Aslan, which attempts to explain why the Pevensies seem to have forgotten England during the fifteen years of their reign in Narnia. On Tuesday I posted it on ff.net. (It's called Out of Sight, Out of Mind, if you are interested in reading it.)
I often telegraph my themes rather broadly -- in other words, I beat them into the ground with a sledgehammer -- but I do that because I know from long and frustrating experience that things I think are blindingly obvious are often so subtle or reliant on idiosyncratic/personal associations and thought processes that if I don't haul out the sledgehammer, nobody will understand a damn thing I am trying to say.
Clearly, I should have worked harder to bring down the sledgehammer in "Out of Sight, Out of Mind," because so far, every single reviewer (well, okay, every reviewer who has mentioned the issue in question) has missed the point I was trying to make. In fact, they have come away with the opposite message of the one I thought I wrote.
*headdesk*
See, I was trying to do two things: first, explain the Pevensies' weird memory loss while remaining as true as possible to the characters and the canon themes, and second, to say that what I think Aslan did (bluntly, a fifteen-year-long mind wipe) was wrong. Understandable, yes. Justifiable in many points of view, also yes. Something that Peter (and, presumably, C. S. Lewis himself) might accept as a good and right thing under the circumstances, yet again yes.
It's still wrong.
The problem is that within the story, unless I drastically broke character or brought a random outsider into a private conversation, I had no way to signal that I disagree except by pointing out the facts of the situation... which are then explained away by Aslan, in the way I think Lewis would have resolved the issue. And if you agree with Lewis's general theology, the issue is resolved. There is no problem. I have been congratulated for showing so clearly how there is no problem.
Except, of course, there is still a problem. Changing memories is a violation of free will and mental integrity. It is a wound to the self (and, if you will, the soul -- since souls exist in Lewis's world, whether or not they exist in ours).
So I resorted to quotes -- one at the start, and one at the end -- to hopefully provide a slightly contrasting point of view. I opened with "Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose," by Kevin Arnold, and closed with "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," by Milan Kundera. To me, the first says that a loss of memory is a loss of self, and the second implies that for Aslan to take or alter or veil memories is an act comparable to totalitarian dictatorship.
...
And I just got a review saying, essentially, that the quotes supported the point of view expressed by Peter in the story.
I give up.
[ETA: Do go read the comments on the LJ mirror of this post. They raise some interesting points!]
I often telegraph my themes rather broadly -- in other words, I beat them into the ground with a sledgehammer -- but I do that because I know from long and frustrating experience that things I think are blindingly obvious are often so subtle or reliant on idiosyncratic/personal associations and thought processes that if I don't haul out the sledgehammer, nobody will understand a damn thing I am trying to say.
Clearly, I should have worked harder to bring down the sledgehammer in "Out of Sight, Out of Mind," because so far, every single reviewer (well, okay, every reviewer who has mentioned the issue in question) has missed the point I was trying to make. In fact, they have come away with the opposite message of the one I thought I wrote.
*headdesk*
See, I was trying to do two things: first, explain the Pevensies' weird memory loss while remaining as true as possible to the characters and the canon themes, and second, to say that what I think Aslan did (bluntly, a fifteen-year-long mind wipe) was wrong. Understandable, yes. Justifiable in many points of view, also yes. Something that Peter (and, presumably, C. S. Lewis himself) might accept as a good and right thing under the circumstances, yet again yes.
It's still wrong.
The problem is that within the story, unless I drastically broke character or brought a random outsider into a private conversation, I had no way to signal that I disagree except by pointing out the facts of the situation... which are then explained away by Aslan, in the way I think Lewis would have resolved the issue. And if you agree with Lewis's general theology, the issue is resolved. There is no problem. I have been congratulated for showing so clearly how there is no problem.
Except, of course, there is still a problem. Changing memories is a violation of free will and mental integrity. It is a wound to the self (and, if you will, the soul -- since souls exist in Lewis's world, whether or not they exist in ours).
So I resorted to quotes -- one at the start, and one at the end -- to hopefully provide a slightly contrasting point of view. I opened with "Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose," by Kevin Arnold, and closed with "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," by Milan Kundera. To me, the first says that a loss of memory is a loss of self, and the second implies that for Aslan to take or alter or veil memories is an act comparable to totalitarian dictatorship.
...
And I just got a review saying, essentially, that the quotes supported the point of view expressed by Peter in the story.
I give up.
[ETA: Do go read the comments on the LJ mirror of this post. They raise some interesting points!]
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-31 04:20 am (UTC)