So the thing about “worldbuilding threads picked up and never touched again” in Narnia…
…is that “worldbuilding”, as understood and judged by that intersection of “fantasy nerds” and “consistency diehards” that so many of us inhabit, didn’t exist in C. S. Lewis’s philosophy of literature.
It kind of existed in Tolkien’s. More accurately, it has grown, beanstalk-fashion, out of one element in Tolkien’s writing methodology.
What Tolkien actually said, in his famous essay On Fairy-Stories (1947), was
Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough — though it may already be a more potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that receives literary praise.
To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.
The phrase story-making in its primary and most potent mode should be a clue that Tolkien is not talking about getting your plate tectonics and your ecological zones and your geopolitical socioeconomics correct before you sit down to write a story about two mermaids falling in love whilst saving a baby otter from a sea-serpent. He’s talking about worldbuilding as part of the story, worldbuilding to make the events of the story feel like things that could really happen.
And that’s Tolkien. Lewis observed and admired what Tolkien did with Middle-Earth, but he didn’t emulate him. In his own essay An Experiment in Criticism (1961) he too discusses fantasy vs. realism, and indeed he distinguishes a couple of different senses in which a story can be “realistic” – but he doesn’t mention, even briefly, any consideration of what we would now call “consistent worldbuilding”.
(It’s worth noting that both On Fairy-Stories and An Experiment in Criticism, both of which I highly recommend to anyone interested in fantasy and literary theory, were written during the mid-twentieth century when realism was considered by many critics to be the prime, perhaps the only, literary virtue. That’s presumably why both essays seem oddly combative about it. That this view didn’t survive the century is very largely thanks to the efforts of Tolkien and Lewis.)
Sorry, getting sidetracked there. Lewis didn’t emulate Tolkien’s method of immersive, consistent worldbuilding. You can’t go through the Narnia books and construct a history or a culture the way you can with Tolkien. If you try, you run into absurdities or even outright contradictions.
Lewis knew Tolkien and knew Tolkien’s work. Not following Tolkien’s model and method has to have been a choice on his part. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there is only one character who appears in all seven Narnia novels. Just as he is the only common character, Aslan is the only consistent narrative element – the only through-line that you can follow to its end. To appreciate Narnia for what it is, you have to come to terms with who Aslan is and what he means. And I am quite certain that this was intentional.
Which is not to endorse Tolkien’s opinion and call the Narnia Chronicles a “hodgepodge”. At least twice, Lewis put into the novels a fictional elaboration of an idea which also turns up in his literary nonfiction. Much of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader relates to the chapter on the words “free” and “liberal” in Studies in Words. Much of The Silver Chair is recognisable in the chapter on natural hierarchy in A Preface to Paradise Lost. I’d be surprised if there weren’t more such examples.
One theory, which I find surprisingly compelling, is that the seven Chronicles are written to reflect the Seven Planets of Ptolemaic cosmology, a subject Lewis returned to again and again in every genre he wrote in, including passing illustrative remarks in both the chapters I just mentioned. This was originally thought of by a guy called Michael Ward, who wrote a whole book about it (called Planet Narnia); not all of his arguments are convincing but, to my mind, when you skim off the unsound stuff there’s still a solid core left behind. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe represents Jupiter; Prince Caspian, Mars; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Sun; The Silver Chair, the Moon; and so on.
So yeah. Judged as Tolkienian or post-Tolkienian secondary-world fantasy, Narnia falls short of the ideal. But I think that’s because we’re judging it as something it’s not meant to be.
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