Riley's Huge-ass Narnia Rant, Part One
Yeah, I got halfway through this and was over 11K, so iiiiit's gonna be in multiple parts over a week or so. Specifically:
-my personal disillusionment story
-why the Christian themes do an injustice to the story/world and are dishonestly presented (in this particular case) (plus, bonus Ayn Rand criticism!)
-the point where this becomes offensive on other levels, primarily re: atheism, Islam, and the Middle East in general
-C.S. Lewis and/or Aslan expects way too much of children
-and honestly the worldbuilding is just lazy (+ general writing critiques)
Tag is 'narnia rant' for blacklisting. (Also I tag things of this nature 'critiquicism'.)
So here's my personal story of how I fell out of love with The Chronicles of Narnia; or, How C.S. Lewis Slapped Me In The Face. It'll be by far the shortest part, despite scads of unnecessary detail about my childhood reading habits.
I loved Chronicles of Narnia as a kid. Not as much as Lord of the Rings, maybe, especially since Dad hawked Tolkien every chance he got (the hypocritical heretic Silmarillion forgetter!). I didn’t engage with them intellectually and emotionally as much as I did with Tamora Pierce’s books. I didn’t latch on to the plot and the world as much as I did with Harry Potter. I never made up OCs like I did for LotR or fantasized about going to Narnia the way I did Hogwarts, and I didn’t stay heavily invested in it the way I did with Tortall (and Emelan) as I became a teenager [LotR was actually something I grew slightly out of and then back into at fifteen or sixteen], but Narnia was a fundamental cornerstone of my childhood, and damn, I was enthusiastic about it in a way I wasn’t really about any of the others except maybe Harry Potter. Even then, HP was serious, and while I like that in my fiction, the main draw of Narnia was that it was fun. (There’s a reason my least favourite book alternated between The Last Battle and The Silver Chair.)
When I was twelve or thirteen, my family got the full Chronicles of Narnia, dramatized with a full voice cast (and introduced /possibly narrated, I’m not sure, by C.S. Lewis’s step-son) from ‘Santa’ and it was well-done and enjoyable, and I used to hang out in my room out at the property, eating giant organic chocolate chips and alternately listening to it or reading one of my mom’s old parenting books and RPing my favourite Artemis Fowl pairing to myself. (Your Baby And Child: From Birth To Five Years and Holly/Trouble, respectively. Did you really expect that I wasn’t a weird kid?) The CDs kept me interested and invested – they were fun, and well-done, and I’ve been a sucker for full-cast recordings since Mom and I listened to Redwall on tape during a car trip when I was ten. I wasn’t beyond criticizing them – literally every time Father Christmas said ‘Battles are ugly when women fight’ I snapped back with ‘Battles are always ugly!’ Every time. I was usually the only person in the room. It’s very embarrassing in retrospect. – but by and large I enjoyed them unquestioningly as exciting, comfortingly familiar entertainment.
Here’s some more relevant background: I’ve been an atheist for probably longer than I’ve known the Chronicles of Narnia. It’s something I still remember as one of my parents’ crowning parenting achievements: we had several Jim Weiss story CDs when I was a kid, and while most of them were secular, there was a Bible stories one. (I actually liked it way more than the ‘gentle, calming scenes’ one.) But eventually this sparked a brief discussion about God, which I don’t remember. What I do remember is that after hearing that some people believed in God and some didn’t, I asked, “Do we believe in God?” Because I was six, so my concern was mostly about getting the facts straight re: how my family did things.
And my mom glanced back at me from the front seat of the truck and said, “Well, what do you think about it?”
Whenever I think about telling that story, that line gets its own paragraph, because THAT. THAT is how you do things. THAT is how you do parenting. But in real time? I did not notice this fantastic feat of parenting – I just thought about it for thirty seconds, decided that the idea and presentation of God was kind of contrived, also considered the whole ‘God’s creator(‘s creator… etc.) problem, and said, “I don’t think it makes sense.”
Obviously, in the last fourteen years I’ve thought about it more than that, but I’ve only ever encountered ideas and facts that make my atheism stronger or simply don’t affect it at all. And as much justified bad press as atheism gets occasionally nowadays – Richard Dawkins and the euphedora atheist crowd, for instance – that wasn’t around when I was growing up, not in places where I could see it. What I saw instead was the unjustified criticism, and that, coupled with the fact that as you become a teenager the parts of your identity that you chose for yourself take on huge significance, made atheism a really important part of my identity growing up. And while I had it relatively easy, I remember getting incredulous ‘Really??’s from friends when I told them I didn’t believe in God, hearing a teacher in my (public!) middle school chastise a student for ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’ because he said ‘oh my God’, having a good friend who knew my religious views suggest I could attend the same Christian academy as her next year because it was ‘also for people who are learning to be Christian’, and having the school show a movie adapted from a Bible story to the entire student body instead of just picking freaking Aladdin or something – and when I protested, my only other option was to sit it out in the math classroom alone, working on my homework, and when I finished, having nothing to do but stare at thirty-year-old yearbooks, bored and hurt almost to the point of tears. All this before the end of seventh grade.
But I was fine, in the long run. We shuffled around a lot of things in the process of finishing our house; I stopped listening to the CDs as much. Also, Artemis Fowl! And ***HARRY POTTER***!!! And oooh, the founders in Harry Potter! And Lord of the Rings – wow, I should have come back to this years ago, Tolkien forever. Tamora Pierce came out with two whole new series. I was too busy for Narnia.
But you’re never too grown up for your childhood favourites (…I should get back into Redwall, actually), so at some point, when I was about eighteen, I went back to Narnia, casually. I’d known for a while now about the Christian themes and the Aslan-is-Jesus, and my reaction was mostly Meh. I can’t remember if I was reading the book or listening to the CDs, but I think it was the CDs. Anyway, I got to The Last Battle, and I got to a part I’d always disliked – the dwarves (minus Poggin) shooting the horses. I’d always hated it because it was such pointless destruction, and because I love horses, not because I thought it was bad writing… and it certainly had always achieved very well the intended effect of making me hate those dwarves with everything I had. They’ve not just unpleasant, they’re staunchly and irrationally isolationist, they murder all those (sentient!) horses, despite seeing through Shift and Puzzle they don’t ally with the others trying to defeat them, and that’s not even getting into their wilful, stupid, self-chosen blindness in the stable. Even now, the memory of the words, ‘The dwarves are for the dwarves!’ makes me cringe a little inside.
I got to that part and I was right back to hating the dwarves. And the story moved on, and we were inside the stable. And the dwarves were being the dwarves. They wouldn’t admit they weren’t in a stable. They couldn’t see the light and trees all around them. They didn’t see Aslan. And I became uncomfortable. They insisted his growling was some kind of machine. They insisted the magical food Aslan gave them was horrible stable leavings. The chief dwarf insisted even when Edmund swung him around in the air that he was in a cramped stable, and, also, Edmund had bashed his nose against the wall.
I’m pretty sure I stopped the CD at that point.
I knew what was going on – I was older, and I understood allegory (even if I did and do share Tolkien’s opinion of it), and I knew a hell of a lot more about Christianity than I had when I was a kid. It’s difficult to convey how upsetting it was, to go back to a childhood story, something that I’d cared about, that was supposed to be familiar, safe, and friendly, and have the author point to the characters I’d always hated, the ones who’d done something that made me almost cry, the ones who, with the possible exception of Shift, I’d hated the most out of the entire book, maybe even the series – the characters that he had worked very hard to make me feel that way about – to see him point to them and say “This is you.”
I’m upset now, typing this. Even when I’m not delving into the deeper emotions it still stings. I think it might always sting. I know that I will always resent C.S. Lewis for it, always. Because the truth is that the only reason I didn’t have the revelation as an actual child, as a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old teenager who wasn’t remotely emotionally prepared for it, was because I was distracted by Harry Potter and wasn’t rereading Narnia.
As upset and angry as I am about how I felt (and still feel) about that section, I am furious on behalf of the other people it surely happened to, the other children it surely happened to. It taints the whole series for me emotionally, and nowhere more than in areas where I already had criticisms.
