Narnian continuity, WW2, and the Pevensies' trip to America

[edenfalling]

Thought: here is the setup for VDT. Father had got a job lecturing in America for sixteen weeks that summer, and Mother was to go with him because she hadn't had a real holiday for ten years. Peter was working very hard for an exam and he was to spend the holidays being coached by old Professor Kirke in whose house these four children had had wonderful adventures long ago in the war years.

This seems to place the book after the end of WWII, in which case half the Pevensie family haring off to America makes perfect sense. While Britain's major organized evacuations of children seem to have occurred in 1939 and 1940, there were others -- of varying degrees of spontaneity -- up through 1944, so it's not completely implausible for the Pevensies to have left London in June 1944 in response to the V-1 rocket attacks. Since PC is set one year after LWW, and VDT, according to Edmund, one year after PC, that would place VDT in 1946 -- after the "war years."

On the other hand, one could read the "long ago in the war years" line as relating not to the characters' experience of time but rather to the people reading the book, which was published in 1952. In support of that, Lewis's own (extracanonical) timeline says that LWW is set in 1940, which does make more sense in terms of organized evacuation efforts, and also perhaps in terms of characterization -- the Pevensies don't act like children who have been bombed for years on end. However, if LWW is set in 1940, VDT is consequently set in 1942... with the war still on and very much undecided. Whoops.

If we take Lewis's timeline over a statement in the book, what the devil was Mr. Pevensie doing in America?

I have read some wonderful fanfiction based on the premise that he was part of the British diplomatic effort to neutralize many Americans' continuing isolationist sentiments, but while I can believe that enough for reading, I can't quite believe in it enough for writing. (The first trick of selling a theory is to convince oneself, you see.) It also seems odd to assign that sort of job to a man who -- given the premise of a lecture tour or series -- sounds like an academic rather someone who has been fighting in the war and/or is part of the professional diplomatic corps.

Therefore, I propose a different theory.

Mr. Pevensie did not go to Washington. Dr. Pevensie went to Chicago.

He was working on what became the Manhattan Project. :-)

Comments

[branchandroot]

*whistles* Isn't that the trip Susan goes along on? Bets on whether she'd find out some of what it was? The distance-weapons woman, after all.

[edenfalling]

Yes, that is the trip. Here is the reference: It would have cost too much money to take the other three all to America, and Susan had gone. Grown-ups thought her the pretty one of the family and she was no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age) and Mother said she "would get far more out of the trip to American than the youngsters."

(Those lines are the source of my belief that Susan may be dyslexic, incidentally.)

I doubt she has the background in physics to understand the inner workings of a chain reaction unless somebody specifically explains it to her, but you don't need to be a physicist to understand that people are testing a theory that might lead to a new kind of bomb. So yeah, depending on how interested she was, and how well she snooped and sweet-talked information out of people, Susan quite likely could have learned the general outline of the project.

[autumnia]

I like your theory! It's definitely an interesting one and offers another great alternative idea (besides rthstewart's) about what the Pevensies were actually doing in America.

So many people hand-wave a lot of the parts of the official timeline but my preferences in relation to canon is to have LWW set in 1940, PC in 1941 and VDT and SC in 1942. In order to make Lewis' writing more plausible I do think there could be any other reason for the trip to America and the narrator of the story may not know everything, especially if s/he is hearing things secondhanded (I was under the assumption that Lucy was the source and as a child, she may not have known entirely what was going on with her parents during the war).

[edenfalling]

IIRC Lewis does imply that he heard the stories from Lucy -- or at least the first three plus, presumably, HHB. I'm not nearly as clear on his "source" for SC and MN, to say nothing of TLB. *wry* It makes perfect sense for Lucy to not know the details of her parents' trip, since I doubt they would have told their children any classified information, in which case the Lewis-as-narrator wouldn't know either.

I like rth's theory a LOT as a reader. It fits nicely with historical events and lends itself to fascinating stories. But my writing-brain is a lot pickier about meta theories than my reading-brain, and I haven't been able to use rth's theory as a basis for my own writing. I'm not sure exactly why Mr. Pevensie working against American isolationism doesn't click for me as a writer, but a summer working with Enrico Fermi does. It may simply be that I know more about university scientists and the Manhattan Project than about wartime diplomacy in Washtington!

I actually just edited the post to say that perhaps the "long ago in the war years" line might be aimed at the readers rather than intended as a description of where the characters were in the timeline, since VDT wasn't published until 1952. And in that case, the timeline takes precedence since the book is suddenly unmoored from any real-world reference point beyond the Pevensies' evacuation two years prior. :-)

[azarias.livejournal.com]

This. This is what fandom is for. :D I love this theory and am imprinting it in my head.

[edenfalling]

Meta theories are delicious, aren't they? :-) And it's always nice to be able to talk about them with other people in a shared fandom.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

I was thinking 'Manhattan Project' even before I read the end of the post. Or an alternative would be something to do with Ultra, the Allied project to break the Enigma code, with Mr (or perhaps Preofessor) Pevensie passing information and techniques from Bletchley Park on to the Americans.

[edenfalling]

Ooh, code-breaking! I hadn't thought of that. I think I will stick with the Manhattan Project, since I already do know some things about that, whereas I know only a very little more than absolutely nothing about code-breaking in general, to say nothing of WWII code-breaking in particular. But it's definitely a neat idea. :-)

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

Oh! I've never heard of this theory before (I've read some of the spy!Dad ones though.)

Hope you write some of it :)

[edenfalling]

Aside from rthstewart and burntcopper, I don't know anybody in Narnia fandom who focuses in depth on the Pevensies' lives in England between PC/VDT and TLB. There's a genre of "the siblings adapt badly to being children again" angst and another of schooldays stories (these can easily overlap), and of course there is always the Problem of Susan... but I have not encountered many stories that incorporate events from the wider world. Of course, I am not reading much Narnia fanfic these days -- my fandom reading focus and my fandom writing focus rarely match -- but I am still relatively confident in that assessment.

Which is a long lead-in to saying, I'm not surprised you haven't heard of this theory, because aside from the evacuation pretext for LWW, WWII politics/logistics/whatever doesn't come up as an area of interest for the majority of Narnia fandom. *wry*

I am using this theory in a Cotton Candy Bingo ficlet I'm writing. I don't know if I'll return to it any time soon, since I am more interested in writing (relatively unfantastical) fantasy than modernish historical fiction, but the future is filled with possibilities. :-)