Ending of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the saddest thing ever and I'll tell you why
I just rewatched the movie and may or may not be sobbing really ugly. Before we get to my point tho, let me quickly run over the first two parts.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Warderobe the war is going on. Bombs are being dropped on London, so the Pevensies, like other children have to go into hiding. They are far away, with strangers, probably very homesick and very afraid. We will get back to them later.
Prince Caspian is lonely. His parents are dead and his nanny was sent away. He just met his new teacher who will teach him true history of Narnia. And now his uncle has new kid, so he wants to murder him. Caspian has to run away. He’s frighten and even more lonely.
The siblings find Narnia. Aslan is back, the Witch is dead. They are Kings and Queens now. They get to grow up safe and happy.
Caspian isn’t lonely anymore. Kings and Queens of Old are here. He grew up listening to stories about them and now they are here to help him. He reclaims his crown and finds brothers and sisters in Pevensies.
They have to come back. One second they are kings and queens and another they are scared children again. And nothing has changed, the war isn’t over and they still have to hide. But there is hope. Maybe one day they could return to Narnia. They can’t avoid saying goodbye. Caspian watches as they go back to their world. He will never see Peter and Susan again. Edmund and Lucy will eventually come back, even if none knows when and how.
And now to misery. The war is still on, but they are older. They understand what’s happening better and that only makes everything worse. Peter and Susan start to cope with the fact that they’ll never return to Narnia. Each of them on their own way. Peter studies, Susan parties and slowly starts to forget that the other world in the old warderobe was actually real. Edmund and Lucy go to Narnia once again. Over the weeks of journey they learn to like their annoying cousin and grow even closer with Caspian. And soon, too soon it’s over too. They are being told that they grown up, but they are being sent back to the place where to everyone they are just children, and to the worst time of being alive. Seriously, how cruel is telling someone to come from safe place back to World War II? And Caspian, who just got to meet his brother and sister again now has to watch as they go away forever. He will see Eustace once again, yes. On his deathbed, as an old man. And don’t even get me started on the last book.
That scene in Narnia where Jadis silences everyone jeering at Aslan and they slowly start back up to the same beat getting faster and faster as he gets nearer to death
The camera panning over the map and it slowly turning into the battlefield
The fucking silence and heartbeats before the two sides clash
“LOOK TO THE SKY” followed by the perspective of the Griffyns and the best fucking soundtrack ever
Incredible animal cgi where they’re able to emote without looking cartoonish and still exhibiting normal animal behavior- the beavers look worried and happy, the wolves look mean and cruel, the Fox looks sly and guilty, we can’t even get started on Aslan and how much of a masterpiece he is
That rhino and centaur FUCKING IT UP to protect peter
(If you couldn’t tell I’m watching the battle scene of narnia super late and I’m getting very passionate about it)
Anytime aslan roars tbh
Gryffins in the sky going to attack Jadis
Mr. Beaver in chainmail isn’t really cinematic history but it’s fucking cute and i felt the need to mention it
Did I mention the fucking soundtrack?
Edmund breaking Jadis’s wand
The silence after she stabs him
Peter going ape shit after she stabs him
That moment when she tries to slit his throat with two swords and he leans back and there’s that shot of him looking up with swords on either side of his head
Aslan looking at Jadis before he fucking EATS her
That giant appearing out of nowhere to fuck shit up
Mr. Tumnus literally just pushing people over
Anyways the lion the witch and the wardrobe was great
Ugh, I'm sorry this took so long, but at least RL is genuinely kicking my ass, job-wise, so there's a real excuse and all that. My audience is probably completely gone, but I promised you a whole rant, and that's what I'm going to deliver.
Anyway
So now I’m going to step away from the Christian aspect of things (that’s a relief) and talk about… Islam.
Okay, less of a relief.
Of course, the good news is that I don’t actual have to know anything about Islam to talk about why C.S. Lewis’s portrayal of Calormen is the most offensive thing to ever offensive, because he pulled his Islam-expy religion out of his ass anyway.
(Barring the first section, this one’s less painful and less of a minefield, so expect saltiness herein.)
So I’m going to focus on offensiveness in three main areas – atheism, Islam, and the Middle East in general.
Let’s start with how C.S. Lewis treats atheists, since I am one.
The best (and I use that word gingerly) portrayal of a (pseudo-)atheist in The Chronicles of Narnia is Trumpkin. Now, I loved Trumpkin as a child and I still like him now – he’s a good character, a stand-up guy, and just ornery enough to be great fun. He’s also clearly supposed to be one of the good guys, which is why it’s so mystifying to me in retrospect how he gets absolutely chewed on by the narrative.
Like, Trumpkin’s position at the beginning of Prince Caspian is basically cheerful pessimism – the Horn doesn’t work, Aslan probably doesn’t exist or he’s dead, and we’re probably all screwed – and yet he’s willing to fight anyway, even to go all the way down to the ruins of Cair Paravel, just on the off-chance he’s wrong, instead of sending an over-excitable squirrel who would just get lost. (Which would make him more of a doubtful agnostic than an atheist, but let’s be real: the sort of Christians who create condescending and insulting atheist allegory characters do not care about those distinctions.) Not only that, but Trumpkin is able and willing to admit that he’s wrong when he’s proven to be. He’s pretty gracious about it, too – when Susan beats him at archery, she goes, ‘Oh, no, your shot was as good as mine, there was just a wind’ and he says, ‘No, you beat me fair and square and we both know it, good shooting’.
So the way that he gets slammed, again and again, by the narrative, for doubting, for wondering, for simple ignorance – not wilful ignorance, but ignorance of things he couldn’t possibly know – is unpleasant and disconcerting. Like, the Pevensies have met Aslan. Trumpkin hasn’t. Aslan hasn’t been in Narnia for hundreds of years, the asshole. It is very reasonable for Trumpkin to wonder if he wasn’t just an ordinary, if impressive, talking lion who died. It is perfectly understandable for him to suggest that maybe Aslan’s gone wild and that’s why he hasn’t shown up (and it is, in my opinion, a far more charitable theory than the truth – that he just couldn’t be arsed to step in, or even encourage them). I understand why something like that would be laughable at best to the Pevensies, but the narration spells it out like he’s committed blasphemy. And then, when Aslan finally does show up, he deliberately terrorizes Trumpkin. FOR A JOKE. He growls at him, and grabs him by the shirt with his teeth, and throws him in the air – for… being wrong. And this is supposed to be funny. We’re supposed to think it’s funny.
First of all, it’s not, and Aslan is horrible for doing that (you see what I mean about C.S. Lewis having Aslan do things that he personally thinks are right and then saying, ‘Well, it must be right, because Jesus is doing it’).
But also, now that I’m older, I’ve seen this trope elsewhere. I’ve seen it in arguments. I’ve seen it in TVTropes examples and descriptions for things like Left Behind or Touched By An Angel. I’ve seen it in tone-deaf Christian fiction. I’ve seen it in Chick Tracts. (That should tell you plenty.)
I know all about the arrogant atheist, who is convinced he (usually he) knows everything but is wrongwrongwrong. Not just about Aslan Jesus, but about everything even remotely and tangentially related to religion, like whether children could possibly be the kings and queens how to prioritize your life or whatnot. And said atheist is proved wrong, again and again outshot by Susan and outfought by Edmund, but stubbornly keeps insisting that those things don’t mean he’s wrong about God even though they typically have no relation to religion like how there’s no reason Edmund’s fighting skill, or even the Horn’s magic, since it was a gift from Father Christmas and not Aslan, would necessarily mean Aslan was real/alive/still able to talk or coming, even if all those things were true. And then at the end there’s a miracle, or a direct intervention from God, and the arrogant atheist sees the error of his ways, and begs forgiveness, and believes, and is humbled, and then is magnanimously forgiven and accepted into the fold, and can you maybe understand why this trope makes me angry?????
I’m serious, though, from the time he leaves Aslan’s Howe Trumpkin is not allowed to be right about anything. Even things he would realistically be right about, like what route to take in a country he knows better than the others in this century, he’s made wrong about by a coincidence or bad luck or anything, basically. And this is frequently presented as him being arrogant even when it’s perfectly reasonable. Like, you showed up looking for four powerful rulers and got schoolkids instead? God forbid you express dismay, or suggest the fourteen-year-old in front of you isn’t a match for the king’s highly trained army!
And the fact that being deliberately terrorized by Aslan is supposed to be fitting, is supposed to be a deserved punishment for the heinous crime of doubting Aslan (not denying him, not mocking him, not even being unwilling to plan for the possibility he’ll show up, simply thinking it was possible he wouldn’t and that their plans should reflect that as well), that it’s supposed to be playful, that makes me furious. TRUMPKIN WAS GOOD, HE WAS KIND, HE WAS BRAVE, AND HE DESERVED BETTER. HE ADMITTED IT WHEN HE WAS WRONG AND HE FORGAVE PEOPLE FOR WRONGING HIM AND HIS ONLY CRIME WAS BEING PRAGMATIC AND OUTSPOKEN.
And you know what, Clive?
JESUS WOULD NEVER HAVE DONE THAT TO HIM.
Not the real Jesus. Whether you think real Jesus was a Jewish rabbi or the actual son of God – he wouldn’t have done that. And I mean – as an atheist, I try to stay away from things like ‘Jesus wouldn’t have done X’, just out of respect, but you know what, Clive? You made me do it.
Being wrong, being mistaken, or being atheist – none of them, separately or all together, merit that kind of treatment, not from anyone, not Aslan or Jesus or God, no one. So yes, I’m furious on Trumpkin’s behalf, but also on my own, because as much as I really believe that C.S. Lewis didn’t realize just how justified he made Trumpkin in a lot of ways – well, actually, no. Because of how clear it is that he didn’t realize that, because it’s clear that Trumpkin was supposed to be ornery and stubborn and arrogant and unjustified in his opinions, it’s also clear what he thinks of mine, what he thinks of me. At best I’m Trumpkin – not just Trumpkin, but what he intended Trumpkin to be: a stubborn, arrogant, unjustified strawman, who must be proven wrong and only then can be redeemed through humiliation.
Well, guess what, Clive? Fuck you.
Okay. Now we move on to the dwarfs. Well, Trumpkin’s a dwarf, but you know who I mean. The dwarfs.
The stubborn, arrogant, unredeemable dwarfs. The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs. The dwarfs who are so stubbornly, blindly convinced of their own superiority that token Good Dwarf Poggin has to sneak away from them to join the heroes. The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs. The dwarfs who stubbornly scorn every clear proof of magic they see as a ridiculous contrivance. The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs. The dwarfs who treat the battle between good and evil as entertainment.
The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs.
The dwarfs who are for no one else but themselves. The dwarfs who murder eighty sentient beings out of spite. The dwarfs who sit blindly in the dark despite the light around them. The dwarfs who would rather spend the rest of their lives cramped and damp and cold and starving than admit to seeing the beauty around them. The dwarfs who see right through the malicious hoax and yet still won’t join forces to end it. The dwarfs who are content to sit around praising themselves for not being taken in instead of taking action. The dwarfs who act however they see fit, with no moral compass whatsoever.
The dwarfs who are so pleased with their intellectual superiority that they can’t see that they’ve been taken in by themselves.
Yes, Clive, you’ve made your point very clear indeed. Very, very clear, to the teenage girl who loved your world, until you threw her out of it. Very, very clear to everyone like her. Very, very clear indeed, to her now, only now it hurts a little less, because she can see that you are, in fact, not even very good at what you do, and while that’s not relevant it is satisfying to know that the person who spent all that rhetoric on crushing her isn’t even a good writer. It hurts less, too, because she’s older now and has the skills necessary to eviscerate you, to decry what you tried to do and announce all the ways that if failed, and it hurts less because she knows now, oh, do I know now, that everything I ever loved that you made, everything good you ever made you made by accident.
(You want me to be nicer? Maybe when my eyes stop hurting from trying not to cry.)
I talked about the dwarfs in The Last Battle already in my disillusionment story, so I’m done with them here. Moving on.
It hurt, obviously, to grow up with those books and that world and then to grow up and realize that I was… that. But if it hurt, to realize that, I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to be Muslim (or Hindu or even just Middle Eastern or non-white) and go through that same thing. And not just because it’s so much worse, but because the insulting and offensive parallels are much clearer and therefor accessible to much younger children.
My knowledge of Islam is not nearly as extensive as my (patchy) knowledge of Christianity, but what I said before is true: I don’t really need to know a lot about Islam here. All I need to know about Islam to see how offensive these books are is on this list:
1. Muslims don’t worship the devil.
WOW, ISN’T THAT A REALLY SHORT FUCKING LIST!! HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO FUCK UP SO FUCKING MUCH, CLIVE?? HUH?
I mean, the presentation of Tash is… it’s like he couldn’t decide what he wanted to do, so he covered all his bases and offended everybody. Tash is clearly set up, at least in The Last Battle, as Aslan’s opposite, or his nemesis, or both, which makes him, say it with me, SATAN.
But Tash is also the patron God of Calormen, worshipped by Calormenes, which means that Lewis’s pseudo-Arabic/pseudo-Islamic culture worships the fucking devil. Like, the capital city of Calormen is named Tashbaan, okay, this is not something you can wiggle out of, Clive.
And honestly, I could stop there. That’s more than damning enough. But there’s so much more, and I’m going to dig up every single bit of it I can reach, because somebody fucking has to. The thing is, Tash isn’t, say, a serpent (that would be the Lady of the Green Kirtle – how many freaking Satan metaphors are you going to have, Clive? That’s three! Stick to one!), or even some traditional enemy of a lion like a serpent like a… I don’t know, a jackal or something (bonus points for scavenger imagery). Oh, no. He’s a terrifying Babylonian-esque bird-headed thing with extra arms, because it wasn’t enough to mush the entire Middle East into one giant confused stereotype and just pick out the bits you thought were cool, or scary, or anti-Christian, or decadent enough, no, you had to throw in a shout-out to Kali just to get in a dig at Hinduism too.
To make matters worse, worshippers of Tash do give him human sacrifices. COULD YOU SLAM THE STEREOTYPICAL DEVIL WORSHIP EVEN HARDER, CLIVE? HAVE YOU TRIED? I DON’T THINK YOU’VE TRIED!!
(And even then, it’s not consistent. Aravis says she planned her suicide attempt by telling her father she was going to make sacrifices (non-human, presumably) to “Zardeenah, lady of the night and of maidens” who is… a goddess, because this is also paganism? Except for how every other time religion is mentioned, Tash is treated like the sole deity of Calormen. So maybe she’s a saint? But there aren’t saints in that world at all, and there aren’t saints in Islam anyway, I’m pretty sure. [ETA: This was incorrect! Mea culpa. However, Lewis’s fake Tashligion doesn’t really make sense as one which incorporates saints, tbh, so the basic point still stands.] Besides, it’s not consistent with Calormen culture for Tash to have saints. Somehow, the fact that he wasn’t even trying just makes the whole thing more insulting.)
I mean, the parallels are clear. The speech in Calormen in The Horse And His Boy is obviously modelled after the stylistically formal speech in Arabian Nights – while I’m sure Lewis didn’t read the same translation I did, there are enough similarities that it’s definitely not an accident. Even people like Arsheesh, a poor fisherman who’s been poor all his life and almost certainly never had any need for formalities like that (not to mention almost certainly being poorly educated), speaks the same way. Meanwhile, Shasta, who grew up in Calormen, lived there his whole life, thought he was Calormene, and believed himself to be Arsheesh’s son, has no discernable Calormen-isms in his speech with the exception of saying ‘may he live forever’ when he talks about the Tisroc. This makes no sense from an in-universe perspective, but it makes perfect sense if you remember that Shasta is Narnian, which is to say white and Christian, and therefore he simply doesn’t pick up all those oily, unnecessarily formal Muslim brown Calormene ways of speaking, because otherwise the audience might not know that he’s naturally righteous.
*shivers* UGH. I think I need a shower.
And it’s clearly shown that Calormene society is more decadent than Narnian/Arkenland society, and that this is a bad thing. There’s the description of the Tisroc’s palace, the way the marketplace is portrayed (with spices and so on), the litters that all the nobles ride on (blatantly contrasted with the Narnian Lords, who are walking, like decent, civilized, Christian non-decadent people), and particularly the portrayal of Lasaraleen.
Now, I won’t get into too much detail, since Lasaraleen’s treatment comes with a pretty heavy helping of misogyny, and I need to dissect that too, but she’s clearly played up as an example of high-class Calormene life – married (to… someone, who’s never around), surrounded by luxury (exotic luxury – silks and divans and a pet monkey), living a glittering, superficial life at the Tisroc’s court… not like how nobles live in Narnia and Arkenland. They do manly things like hunting, and useful things like governing, and they fight when needed, and they never arrange marriages like in Calormen…
Calormen, where women wear veils. Calormen, where women are forced into marriages. Calormen, where people have dark skin, and are frequently described as looking ‘cruel’, not of expression, but of features. Calormen, where they have slaves. Calormen, with its desert. Calormen, with countless evil, antagonistic, greedy, or downright Satanic people, and exactly two who are pretty decent. Calormen, where institutionalized brutality is shown multiple times to be the general order of business.
Not to mention the disgusting way Rabadash goes after Susan, and the way it’s racialized; overbearing, arrogant brown man wants to possess beautiful pure white woman who swoons in disgust and horror and must be rescued by strong white men… The Tisroc’s cold, pragmatic Lawful Evil outlook feels like a similarly unfortunate trope, but I can’t put my finger on it; I just feel like I’ve seen it before.
And the thing is, you don’t even have to be Muslim to be hurt or offended by this – I’ve pointed out that C.S. Lewis just grabbed bits and pieces from any culture that seemed ‘other’ enough, so he’s casting a pretty wide net at, at the very least, the Middle East, India, Egypt, and anyone who’s Muslim or Hindu – oh, yes, and if you’re one of the latter, you’re not just cruel, decadent savages – you also worship the fucking devil.
I’m going to pause here for a minute and do a comparison, again, with another, much better, famous fantasy author of the same period. Now, Tolkien’s not exactly blameless in his treatment of non-white, non-Christian people, but even leaving aside the Silmarillion (which includes at least two canonically non-white protagonist cultures), the way the subject of the ‘mysterious semi-antagonistic Middle East surrogate culture’ is handled in Lord of the Rings is far more palatable than Chronicles of Narnia. This is because:
-Tolkien didn’t make the non-white cultures monolithic. At the very least we have Rhun, Harad, and Far Harad, not to mention Umbar and Khand, which are in a different direction and have an entirely different culture, probably pseudo-Asia to Rhun etc.’s pseudo-Africa.
-Tolkien borrowed from non-white real life cultures to influence the cultures of his protagonists, not just his antagonists. (Numenor and Gondor, notably)
-Tolkien makes it clear that some if not all of these people who are antagonists have been tricked, forced, or otherwise coerced into serving evil.
-Tolkien didn’t have them worshipping said evil. (In fact, the only culture in Tolkien’s world that ever worshipped his devil analogue was protagonist-aligned, white-coded Numenor.)
-Tolkien used words in his own language or in English for the countries in question and for things like Oliphaunts, instead of making up words that sort of sounded stereotypically Muslim or Arabic, like Lewis did.
-Tolkien doesn’t use those cultures as primary antagonists, or even as primary mooks, and
-We don’t see many details of those cultures, which means that they aren’t bastardized and stereotyped like Calormen was (although they may not have been anyway, we can’t really say how he would have handled that)
Like, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but the difference to me comes down to two things:
1 - Tolkien was developing a world. Lewis was shoehorning in parallels to ours.
2 - As far as respect, inoffensiveness, etc., goes, whatever his flaws, Tolkien tried. Lewis didn’t bother.
But as much as that sucks –and it sucks, and it’s inexcusable, nothing sets my teeth on edge more than C.S. Lewis’s one attempt at being conciliatory.
You know, the bit in The Last Battle where he says that well-intentioned Muslims actually are just worshipping Jesus but don’t know it, and also conveniently disowns every bad thing done by a Christian in the name of God ever.
Because when Emeth, after meeting Aslan, apologizes for all his time believing in and serving Tash (and doesn’t that just make you cringe, when he’s a pseudo-Muslim talking to actually-canon-at-this-point!Jesus), Aslan literally says that if you serve Tash with a good heart, you’re actually serving him, and you serve Aslan with a bad heart, you’re serving Tash.
So it’s okay, because Emeth has been serving Aslan his whole life, he just didn’t know it!
If that isn’t the most cloyingly patronizing, paternalistic thing you’ve ever heard I don’t know what to say to you.
I mean, let’s dissect it.
-good Muslims (and Hindus, and Jews, and Zoroastrians, and Buddhists, and pagans, ad nauseum) are just misguided! But their good acts are still inspired by Jesus. (*gag*)
-no non-Christian religion could ever inspire good works, or worthy acts, or admirable feelings! No, it doesn’t count, because it’s actually God doing it – our God, the right one (*gag again*)
-conversely, Christianity isn’t answerable for any of the bad things that might be done because of it! The Crusades? That was the Devil, it wasn’t for God. The Westboro Baptist Church? It’s the Devil, they don’t serve the real God. Someone bombed an abortion clinic and killed a bunch of people, while yelling things about Jesus? Jesus had nothing to do with it, it was the Devil’s work. This one is especially infuriating because people say this kind of thing in real life all the time, usually as an excuse to not take responsibility for their rhetoric. Real Christians don’t do that, blah blah. It’s some sort of hybrid No True Scotsman thing.
-and it makes things really convenient for Lewis, doesn’t it, since all the good Calormenes will have been serving Aslan unknowingly, and so they’ll get to go heaven Aslan’s country, and there won’t be any hard questions about good people being locked out. (I do know that not all Christian traditions, and not all individuals within those traditions, hold that you have to believe in God to get into heaven if you’re already a good person – but I am already at negative slack with this guy, and that’s about what I’m willing to cut him.)
-IT’S SO PATRONIZING AND PATERNALISTIC AND DISRESPECTFUL!!!
I'm going to try and get my ass in gear and get the next part out soon, but no promises. :)
This is the one where I talk about the lion elephant in the room: Christian allegory. As such, I'm prefacing it with this:
Note: I am writing about Narnia, and obviously touch frequently and centrally on Christianity. I am also an atheist. This isn’t about me being an atheist, but that is probably one of the reasons why the issues with the Christian allegory, in particular, in the books are so clear and/or annoying to me, and it also informs my perspective, so it’s probably worth being aware that this does contain blunt statements like “Christianity contradicts itself a lot”. I don’t usually critique people’s religion except at request in debates or if they’re being unconscionably hateful, but it’s unfortunately somewhat relevant here. (It’s only relevant because C.S. Lewis made it relevant, the jerk, so it’s his fault really.)
I have endeavoured to be respectful (tell me if I failed and I’ll fix it if I can) but be aware, basically, and be aware that my personal beliefs and thoughts about, say, contradictions in the Bible are in no way an indictment of people who believe differently.
*
So: Christian themes in the Chronicles of Narnia. They are there.
You can’t argue with this fact, and I doubt anyone has tried. Boy, are they there. Wow, are they there. Heck, are they there.
This drives me up the wall for several reasons:
1. I agree with Tolkien that applicability is great and allegory is trash.
2. It negatively impacts logic and story-line choices.
3. I personally feel it’s way too on the nose and thereby removes depth and breadth from both the story and the world.
4. I really hate it when people use fiction as a vehicle for their personal views, because it reduces fiction to a tool or trick, as if it’s not important or valid in and of itself.
5. It’s presented in a dishonest manner.
6. It’s presented in a dishonest, indoctrinating manner to children.
There isn’t much point delving into point one, other than to say that parallels and even the occasional (or less occasional, if you’re a crime show) Shout Out to real life are one thing, and blatant allegory is… annoying, and usually presents as either really reaching, or thinking that the audience is a bunch of idiots. (Some really fantastic authors manage to do both at the same time.) C.S. Lewis spends more time in Idiot Audience territory generally – it’s less obvious than it might be, because he’s writing for children, but it’s there, and it annoys me as I get older in a way that, say, the Redwall series doesn’t. (Neither does Peter Pan, even, so it’s clearly not that it’s an artifact of Lewis’s time.)
But point two! I have a lot to say there.
It’s probably possible to write a good Christian allegorical fantasy, although I don’t know that I’d enjoy it. It’s definitely possible to write a good Christian-themed fantasy, or Christian-influenced fantasy, or just a plain old Christian fantasy, and I probably would enjoy it. (I’ve certainly enjoyed Christian fiction, even sometimes when it was objectively rather badly written.) The Chronicles of Narnia, even purely from a writing perspective, is not any of those.
I think part of the problem is that C.S. Lewis is recycling parts of his beliefs wholesale into the story without critically examining them. And while no one is obligated to turn the Literary Criticism Lens on their religion (… that would probably be weird, actually), when you’re turning it into literature, it has to make sense as literature and not just as allegory.
(And to be honest? I kind of resent C.S. Lewis for putting me in a position where it’s difficult to criticize his writing without also seeming to be criticizing his religion. I mean, in fairness that probably wasn’t a deliberate attempt to fend off criticism, but I don’t really feel like being fair. For the record, all vitriol and ‘this doesn’t make sense’ is directed straight at Narnia and not at Christianity, etc., etc.)
It’s not my problem, or, really, my business, how one particular person/group explains or understands something about their religion that doesn’t make sense to me. I might have opinions on how much sense something does or doesn’t make, but I keep it to myself unless they’re interested in a friendly debate or an atheist’s perspective, and criticizing someone’s religion, unless it is actively oppressing you, is really shitty.
Books are different. (No points for the smartass who says, ‘The Bible’s a book!’) Novels demand justification for things. They demand consistent logic. They demand that the author look critically at the plot and the rules of the universe. And if they don’t have these things, then they can and probably should be torn the hell apart.
Actual scenario: I am eight. I’m fairly familiar with the Chronicles of Narnia, not yet particularly invested in my atheism (because I’m eight), and, oh yes, have no idea about any of the allegory. I like the books, but I always get annoyed during The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe because ‘but if Aslan knew about the Deeper Magic, then he wasn’t really a willing victim being killed in a traitor’s stead, so he shouldn’t have come back, because it doesn’t count if he knew so the Deeper Magic shouldn’t have worked!’
Well, now I know that Aslan is Jesus, but you know what? All that is still true. All of that still bothers me. All of that still yanks me out of the story for the entire climax of the book, which sucks, by the way, because that part is kind of awesome. When it’s removed from the context of Christianity, Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection loses a certain amount of justification, and C.S. Lewis’s half-assed attempt at re-justifying it is just that – half-assed. Besides, Christianity can get away with stuff like that, because
-there’s a certain amount of mysticism in religion that makes perfect sense there but immediately becomes handwaving if used in fiction outside the context of an in-universe religion
-Christianity contradicts itself a lot. Some people find a way to reconcile this, some people ignore the parts they don’t like, some people decide that it’s a mystery of God, and some people can’t reconcile it and don’t believe. This is fine in a religion. It does not work in a novel because it is not the reader’s job to reconcile contradictions, but the author’s; it is not the reader’s job to throw out half the novel so they can make sense of it, but the author’s to make sense of it for them; a ‘mystery of God’ in a novel translates to the author pulling a deus ex machina; and if the readers walk away from a novel because they can’t believe it, you have failed as an author.
-Partly due to the above and partly due to people being people, there are a lot of different versions of Christianity, differing about things like who can get married; whether God has a representative on Earth; who’s getting into Heaven; what language the Bible should be in, which translation thereof is correct, and what books should be in it… This doesn’t work for a novel. There is (generally speaking) only one version of it, and anyway, if you have to rewrite it for every different group who might read it, that is a huge failure as an author. If a work is only accessible to people with the exact same religious background (or any background) as its author, that is an epic fail.
The most direct allegory, and the one I’m going to tackle head-on, is clearly when Aslan (Jesus) sacrifices himself for Edmund (humanity) and then is humiliated and killed by Jadis (Pontius Pilate I guess) and resurrected by dint of the Deeper Magics and possibly the Emperor over the Sea (God).
This is dumb for several reasons.
1. Jadis was already The Serpent in the not!Garden of Eden in The Magician’s Nephew. It seems sloppy to give her two utterly unrelated parts like that, especially when everything else is so painfully on the nose. (Yes, TMN was written after TLTWTW, but I didn’t make C.S. Lewis write a prequel. It’s sloppy in either direction.)
2. C.S. Lewis seems to be trying so hard to get the surface details right (sacrifice, humiliation, resurrection, JESUS) that the actual messages are… scrambled. Here is where I have to lean on my tentative theology, so please jump in and correct me if I’m wrong, but… Jesus died for all humans. All humanity. For our sins. Aslan died for one preteen boy who fucked up. Like… ???? Isn’t that kind of… not it, really? (Also, since Edmund is from our world… and Jesus died for everyone’s sins … doesn’t that mean that Aslan has already died for Edmund? I mean, it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the second sacrifice the way the poor execution of the Deep Magics does but it’s just bizarre when you think about it.)
3. Why does Jadis get traitors? Why is she even written into the Deep Magic? She’s not from Narnia, and she’s not a magical spirit being of the world like Aslan – she’s a sorceress-queen from freaking Charn who stumbled into the world when it was starting. Why would she be written into the Deep Magic? It’s clearly her and not just evil beings in general, because the Deep Magic is never mentioned again in the next five books which fall chronologically after this, nor in The Magician’s Nephew which comes before but was written later and which, oh yes, is directly concerned with the creation of the world which is when the Deep(er) Magic(s) were set. And Aslan doesn’t talk about them like he set them himself, which means it’s incredibly likely they were made by the Emperor Over the Sea… you know, God. So why would God put in a Jadis-gets-the-traitors clause on the world? Is she supposed to be Satan? Because she’s kind of Satan-esque in a lot of ways, but dammit, Clive, make up your mind, is she the Serpent or Satan or Pilate? Not to mention that all the direct religious figures, like Aslan and his father, aren’t tethered to or of one particular world, and Jadis is, so it doesn’t make sense for her to be Satan or the Serpent (yes, I know they’re sometimes considered to be one and the same) since she’s just a sorceress-queen from Charn with a corporeal body and human(ish) parents and a sister. And the final nail in the coffin of Jadis-as-Satan – C.S. Lewis wrote a literal Satan into later books. Tash makes a direct freaking appearance in the last book, damn it!
4. Why is Aslan so terribly depressed on the walk up to Jadis’s camp with Lucy and Susan when he knows he’s not going to stay dead? It’s not even a show he’s putting on for them; they can tell he’s depressed way before they actually meet him. Like, he hasn’t been personally betrayed (like Jesus was), he knows he’s coming back, and Edmund has mostly learned his lesson by this point, so what is there to be sad about? Does he know they’re going to shave his mane? Well, it doesn’t really matter, because he also knows it’s going to grow back when he comes back to life.
5. Why does his sacrifice count when he knew he’d be resurrected???? It shouldn’t freaking count. It has to be a ‘willing victim’ being killed ‘in the traitor’s stead’. Aslan was never a victim willing to be killed instead of Edmund, because he knew he wasn’t going to really die.
6. No one who doesn’t know he’s coming back (aka everyone) calls Aslan out on the fact that leaving them and dying for Edmund? Is actually a really shitty thing to do. Yeah, he gets resurrected – but nobody knows that’s going to happen. As far as they know, literally their only hope just went and got himself killed, and how are the Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve going to get to Cair Paravel to fulfil the prophecy without Aslan to protect them from Jadis. She can just swoop in and kill everyone now, which means, wait for it, Edmund will die anyway. Yes, it would be terrible to just sit around and wait for Jadis to murder a ten-year-old boy (or however old he was. Ten-twelvish.). But the call Aslan made was only acceptable because he got brought back. No one else knew that would happen, so they should have been angry. But not one person points that out. No one mentions that they’ll all get slaughtered (which they almost do, until he shows up with Lucy and Susan and all the unpetrifieds for back-up). No one suggests he’s being selfish, or short-sighted. I mean, yes, these people basically worship Aslan, but it’s not like no one ever criticizes him. The freaking plot of The Last Battle is based on Narnians criticizing Aslan, even if they’re wrong. URG. Lewis has a seriously bad case of protagonist-centered morality. Or, well, let’s be honest, Jesus-centered morality. The only problem is that Aslan isn’t real-life Jesus – he’s Jesus as interpreted by C.S. Lewis, which means that he is subject to criticism in a way that Jesus usually shouldn’t be, both in- and out- of universe.
So there’s that.
Ultimately, it weakens the story, instead of making it more powerful, which is probably the ultimate failure of a theme, let alone an entire allegory.
And here’s the thing – it’s an easy fix from a story perspective, if not an allegorical one.
Weaker option, still better than canon: Aslan doesn’t know about the Deeper Magic, so the Emperor tells him when he’s sending him back. Keeps the allegory (and the problem of ‘sending your only hope to die is a bad call’), but doesn’t break the entire logic of the universe.
Better option: Peter sacrifices himself for his brother, Aslan lets him (because he knows about the Deeper Magic), at cost to his own reputation/the army’s faith in him. When Peter returns to life, Aslan takes him (and maybe Susan and Lucy if they stuck around) to wake the statues and rescue the army. (Or, alter the Deeper Magic just slightly and have Edmund sacrifice himself in atonement.)
Anyway, on to the more general themes – here are some Aslan problems:
-he’s a Gary Stu. It makes me really uncomfortable, calling Lion Jesus a Gary Stu, but this doesn’t apply to real Jesus, I swear. Aslan is always right. I don’t mean because he’s Narnia Jesus, or because he’s usually factually right or usually morally right, but that disagreeing with him is always bad, even if you’ve got a good reason. Like I pointed out, no one calls him out on (what should seem to them) the utter illogic and selfishness of trading himself for Edmund. Not believing Lucy (not even Aslan, but Lucy) when she said she saw him for one second and just ~knows~ that means they should go down a dangerous cliff where there are no signs of a path instead of a route that appears to be much safer is wrong in this universe. Susan convincing herself she didn’t see Aslan because she didn’t want to die falling off a cliff is presented as a horrible sin instead of a momentary error in judgement. I mean, the scene where Edmund supports Lucy because he didn’t believe her and then lied about seeing Narnia in TLTWTW and learned from it and wants to make up for it is heartwarming, it really is, but it doesn’t justify all that… mediocre weak milk of a moralistic subplot. It is universally condemnable to disagree with Aslan, even if you obey him anyway, or even if it looks like he wants you to walk off a cliff. People are condemned by the narrative for being annoyed with Aslan, even if they have cause. At best, the narrative treats them condescendingly, like Trumpkin. At worst, they get shit on like Susan did. And that’s if they’re protagonists. The villains who criticize him are evil, greedy, utterly unlikeable, and always have an agenda to do so. Look at Shift and Ginger. No one ever criticizes him for real reasons. No one ever criticizes him for utterly delusional reasons that they nevertheless believe. They only ever do it as a complete lie to manipulate people. When they do make a valid point (like Shift saying he’s been gone for hundreds of years and why would he vanish like that if he cares about them) it’s clearly completely an accident on C.S. Lewis’s part.
-his symbolism is way too on-the-nose. In The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, he shows up as an albatross. Really? An albatross? Also, I really hated that poem, so you are not winning points with me, Clive. And then, at the end, they meet him as a lamb, before he turns back into his true self as a lion. The lamb turned into the lion. Groan. Aside from the fact that that’s actually basically the plot of Breaking Dawn… *ba dum tish* Anyway, as a kid I just thought both those things were weird (and I couldn’t figure out what the albatross was supposed to mean, let alone be), but as an adult? It’s like one of my dad’s bad jokes, except the point is Christian symbolism instead of humour. I don’t… what am I supposed to do with that, C.S. Lewis?
-Aslan expects way too much of children. I’ll get into this later because it’s probably more C.S. Lewis’s fault than Aslan’s, but oh my God. There’s a very effective and very moving quote from Criminal Minds that I’ve debated about putting in – I wasn’t sure it would be appropriate, but it's been going around in my head ever since I started writing this rant.“Your God expects way too much of thirteen-year-old boys.” The delivery is… everything I wish I could slam in Lewis’s face. Because it's true of him as well. (I also like that quote because it differentiates between the God of a specific religion and that God as interpreted by an individual, which is what I am trying to do here. He's not exactly making it easy for me, Jesus.)
-a lot of it boils down to this: C.S. Lewis wrote a Jesus Expy into his books, but he was not Jesus himself, nor did he have Jesus as a consultant on his books, and therefore his Jesus Expy behaves not in ways that Actual Potential Real Life Jesus would have, nor ways that Actual Christianity Jesus would have, nor even in ways that are universally moral, but in ways the C.S. Lewis perceives to be moral or saintly, and this is a problem, because those actions are portrayed as the actions of Actual Christianity Jesus, and as universally moral, and, pardon my language, THEY ARE FUCKING NOT. See, Aslan expects way too much of children, Aslan disappears for hundreds of years because it’s plot convenient, Aslan lets imperfect humans fumble around without helping them and then shows up and judges them for failing.
-Actually, let’s talk about that. More specifically, how about let’s talk about Prince Caspian, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle. Aslan is gone, here. In Caspian and The Last Battle, he’s been gone a long time. Yes, he probably does need time off from time to time, and, yes, iirc he does mention having other worlds that need his attention. But non-stop for hundreds of years? This gets uncomfortable again, because it’s something I would never say about Actual Christianity Jesus, or about any god(s), whether I thought so or not, because it’s really rude. But this is C.S. Lewis’s fault. Maybe Actual Christianity Jesus/God has been absent from the world for a while (bar minor stuff like talking to the Pope or sending people visions, etc., depending on your denomination, etc.) because he does have other worlds that need his attention, or maybe he doesn’t exist and that’s why, or maybe God’s just mysterious, or maybe *dozens of other possibilities which I don’t really know about because I’ve never been a practicing Christian*. But that’s fine, because that’s a religion. Clive, this is a book. You have to explain why your all-powerful character vanished and let his world go all to shit and then blamed, not whoever wrecked it, but the people trying to fix it because they didn’t do a good enough job. Like, why, exactly, did he just bugger off when the Telmarines moved in and subjugated all his people? It’s not even enough to say that it has to be a human triumphing because World Reasons (that bit doesn’t make sense and is uncomfortably reminiscent of British Colonization – ‘Narnia was never right unless a Son of Adam was king’ over all the sentient animals and the semi-humanoid beings and really? – but at least it’s established as a Rule of the World that Narnia’s part of.) But that still doesn’t sell, because 1.) Caspian, and 2.) when the Pevensies get back to Narnia, instead of helping them (or just going to the Howe and helping Caspian’s army, since Caspian’s like twelve and can’t run a campaign), he puts them through ridiculous tests of their faith (which is ridiculous, since Aslan-as-Aslan has never required faith; he’s tangible and active in the world and they’ve met him before, so why is faith so important) (Answer: it’s important to him because C.S. Lewis didn’t think about how the changes he made would impact that kind of thing, he just pasted on yey some Lion on top of Jesus and thought that was good enough) – tests which, honestly, in retrospect seem more like tests of their unthinking obedience to him, which is frankly a little frightening. Every single one of those kids would drop everything and follow Aslan and obey him if he just revealed himself and he knows that because they did it before. If he can muster up the whatever to appear to Lucy for ten seconds and turn up to talk to her and wake up the trees a day or two later with no difficulty, then there’s no reason he can’t just appear to them all, or better yet, just show up corporeally and help them out. In The Silver Chair, he sends Eustance and Jill to save Rilian instead of… doing it himself? Helping them? Going with them? Anything that would be remotely helpful? And when they fuck up – because they are kids with no context for the needlessly cryptic clues he gave them – he appears to Jill in dreams to scare her into doing better instead of, I don’t know, giving her some help? Like, clearly he’s not too busy to show up and be hard on her, so I don’t see how he’s too busy to show up personally, or just tell her something helpful in the dream (like ‘Green Kirtle bad’ maybe, that’s three words). The story wouldn’t have suffered if he’d been a little more specific in his instructions; they still could have had trouble in most of the same places. Besides, if he was so okay with them getting help from Caspian, why didn’t he blow them, oh, I don’t know, onto the deck of Caspian’s ship, where Caspian could see and recognize Eustace. I mean, I love Puddleglum, and all, but I would be fine with drastic revisions to the plot of that book as long as we still got a cheesy scene with Trumpkin mishearing everything through his ear-trumpet. But the sad thing is that the book doesn’t even need a total rehaul – all it needs is someone to say, somewhere, that the Lady of the Green Kirtle cast some sort of spell, or something, to keep Aslan from actually intervening himself. It’s implied Jadis did – it didn’t last forever, he's too powerful, but LoGK could have made it last long enough that Caspian would have died before seeing his son again, and Aslan didn’t want that. One freaking line somewhere, Clive! Then there’s The Last Battle, where Aslan literally can’t be arsed to do anything until literally everyone is dead. This is where the Christian imagery just becomes blatantly stated Christianity and switches from allegory to… parable? Moral story? I don’t know, whatever. But you still have to justify Aslan’s actions within the context of the book, and honestly in The Last Battle he’s just a negligent douchebag. Like, ever since I was a kid, I always felt like it was less that the world of Narnia faded because it was its time and that’s why Aslan was absent, and more that Narnia faded before its time, because Aslan was absent. I mean, we don’t even hear about it having a red sun. Old worlds have big red suns, younger worlds have smaller yellow suns, just-born worlds have very small, very powerful yellow suns, this is CANON from The Magician’s Nephew. (And that doesn’t even touch on why, say, Aslan needed to scare Bree and Hwin to death to get them to the hermit instead of just appearing personally to King Lune in THaHB or something.)
-Actually, let’s do some math about Narnia’s age. Generously we’ve got, say, a thousand years between TMN and TLTWTW; The Horse And His Boy takes place during TLTWTW; then probably about five hundred years is long enough for Cair Paravel to fall into ruin, but with other kings and queens (maybe?) before that, Prince Caspian is probably roughly another thousand years later, then maybe seventy-five before TSC, and then it’s like, what? Four or five hundred years before Tirian’s time in TLB? So a grand total of… it rounds up to 2600 years. Our world is way older than that. Our world is way older than that even according to creationists. It’s bullshit that Narnia was dying naturally. It wasn’t old, it wasn’t messed up anyway outside of the country of Narnia – Calormen, as I recall, was doing just fine, and we hadn’t heard anything bad going on in the Lone Islands. Archenland maybe, I can’t remember. (It is my least favourite book.) Besides, I am sure there are more countries in the world, we just didn’t see them. Like whatever Telmar is now, for instance. The real-world equivalent would be God throwing a shitfit when the Romans invaded Britain and blowing up the whole world. Or, to borrow from a much better devoutly Christian fantasy author, if when the kingship of Arnor failed Iluvatar had just drowned the whole entire world just like Numenor, but this time 1.) with no actual benefit (he only drowned Numenor as a side-effect of making Valinor unaccessible) 2.) with much less provocation, and 3.) THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD. Like. Seriously.
-lastly, this might be a minor personal thing, but when I found out that Aslan was Jesus? The one thing that really disappointed me was that all the mystery and excitement goes out of the Emperor Over the Sea. When I was a kid he was Aslan’s mysterious, exciting father – but what was he? Emperor, not king, that’s exotic, it implies a lot of power… and colonialism, for that matter. Is he human, Aslan’s father, or humanoid, rather? Is he a Lion who’s Emperor? Does he have a physical form at all? What kind of mysterious, enigmatic politics happen Over the Sea, and where is Over the Sea, and is it a physical or metaphysical place or both somehow? What kind of parent is he to Aslan – does Aslan even have a mother? What’s his relationship to his father – was he born/created fully aware, and what effect did that have on their dynamics? When I found out Aslan was Jesus, I was like ‘Meh, that’s weird, whatever.’ A few months later, when I thought to apply this fact to the Emperor, my literal reaction was this: *exasperated tone of disgust* “Oh, he’s God? That’s boring. DAMN it.” (I was about thirteen at the time, for reference.)
Now to talk about using fiction as a vehicle for other things. I’m going to give Lewis a break and chew up Ayn Rand for a while instead.
Fiction is wonderful and powerful and one of its many uses and values is to shine a light on various issues or truths. It’s risky using I book I confess I haven’t actually read but oh well: look at the cultural impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or, hey, try Jaws – which the author regrets, because it had a devastating real-life impact on the world’s (largely non-threatening) shark population. (Did you know you’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine falling on you than a shark? And you’re more likely to die in a lawn-mower accident than a terrorist attack.) People have used fiction to great effect in good causes (and bad ones), and, usually, I have no issue with this… as long as I agree with them. :) Like, I’d really love to stab the author of Melanie’s Marvelous Measles in the eye with a fork. Although that’s more in the Rand/Lewis category tbh.
But the story – the story is important. If the story gets short shrift because of the message that is a crime. Fiction can be a powerful tool, yes, but it should never be reduced to only that. Storytime: when I was fourteen, my family went to St. Lucia with friends who had a timeshare there. While we were there, my friend Alex lent me one of her books she thought I’d like. It was Anthem, by Ayn Rand. I read it. I loved it. And then I got to the end. (Spoilers!)
The main character, Equality, finds an empty house full of books (God knows how they’re not completely rotted when the world’s been a heavily-regulated Communist dystopia for hundreds of years.) and discovers the word I (since the world’s so communist that they don’t have singular pronouns anymore) and also some Greek mythology. This completely changes his entire personality and voice (the book’s in the first person), something which falling in forbidden love, becoming disillusioned with his culture, recreating the entire concept of marriage with his lover/wife, and running away from the only society he’s ever known as an enemy of the state failed to do. He pontificates for most of the last three pages about how the word I has changed his life and how he thinks about things and how evil Communism is, names himself ~~Prometheus~~ and gives his wife a similarly symbolic name I can’t remember (dude, maybe she wants to choose her own?) and swears that their future children will know the power of the one true pronoun, I.
I’d never been more jarred in my life. I don’t think I have been since. It was very unpleasant. And it made me angry. Not just because Rand thought I was too stupid to get the point that Communism = bad. Not just because she didn’t care enough to make the final rant even consistent with the tone of the rest of the book. Not because the symbolism of Prometheus is terrible (again with the on-the-nose symbolism; Equality actually reinvents the lightbulb during the story and tries to give it to Mankind). No, I was angry primarily because Ayn Rand lied to me. She said, here, come read this dystopian story I wrote. It has plot and characters and worldbuilding because it’s a novel. And I did. I got invested in her characters and a cared about her plot and I paid attention to her worldbuilding. And then three pages from the end she said, “Actually… you’re here for a lecture.” And gave it. Through the unwilling mouth of one of those characters I’d gotten attached to.
That experience, along with the value I’ve always placed on art in general and fiction in particular, gave me a life-long loathing of the particular fiction-coming-second-to-the-message type of author tract, and a wariness of author tracts in general. Not only does it almost always compromise the quality of the work (if you want to hear about this from someone more organized and less shouty than me, read any of Limyaael’s Rants where she talks about message fantasy and why it sucks), but it’s always seemed to me to also be disrespectful to the art form. And I know that sounds super pretentious, but I can’t articulate it any better than that. Use fiction to tell a story, to build a world, to have fun, to work out your issues, to correct something you think was badly done, to illustrate a point, even – but if you want to lecture people, write a goddamn essay.
But the thing is, as much as I hate Ayn Rand (for any number of reasons), she’s two points up on C.S. Lewis.
1.) She was honest about what she was doing. When she decided to stop the story and tell everyone what to think, she stopped the story and told everyone what to think. From what I understand of her other books (I haven’t read them because I’m not that much of a masochist), even when the whole book is an author tract, it’s made abundantly clear that it’s a lecture disguised as a novel. Not to mention the fact that she makes it even clearer by stopping the story anyway in order to tell everyone what to think. (It’s not who is John Galt, it’s when will John Galt shut up?) This makes for uneven, hack-y writing, but no one’s getting conned, except into laying down money for an Objectivism Rant when they thought they were getting a novel.
2.) AYN RAND WROTE FOR ADULTS
Here’s the thing – it is shitty and dishonest to disguise propaganda as literature. It is appalling to disguise propaganda as literature and direct it towards young children who don’t have the experience or analytical skill to know what you’re doing or to make up their own minds. EVEN AYN RAND DIDN’T DO THAT.
Hell, forget Ayn Rand. Even Jack Chick didn’t do that. I mean, he has tracts for kids, which is appalling, but like Rand, he always makes it abundantly clear that you’re getting thinly veiled ideology, not a real story.
Lewis hides it. He sneaks it in under the radar, with parallels and shout-outs that kids probably won’t catch and certainly won’t understand, gets them invested in six and a half books worth of adventures and magical creatures and fantasy, and then at the end of the seventh literally confirms that Aslan is 100% Real World Jesus – and if kids have parents who are disinterested or areligious or don’t follow their kids’ reading habits or just don’t see the harm – whether because they’re Christian or because, like mine, they think the books are harmless because why wouldn’t you, you’re meant to think that – they just buy the whole thing.
And I mean, if you’re Christian and the books were meaningful to you, that’s great, especially if you knew what you were getting from the start. But I was lied to. Even ignoring the painful and offensive depictions of atheism and pseudo-Islam and the plot holes... even before I spotted any of that, I still felt lied to. C.S. Lewis promised me a magical lighthearted fantasy romp and then he took that back, and it's not irrelevant that those books hurt me as I grew up because of the hidden things. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would have been if I was, say, Muslim instead of an atheist.
Maybe I can’t really articulate why the dishonesty of it bothers me so much, why it tips it over the line from poorly-thought-out allegory into actual propaganda, but…
It does. And it’s wrong. It will always make me angry.
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
-the misogyny, holy shit
-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.
Here we go.
*
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.
Meh, the answer is a bit twofold. My mom actually enjoyed the series somewhat, and had the box set of all of them. Growing up, she wanted to make sure that I read all of the classics, (which is why I detest Wuthering Heights as well, although I adore the Picture of Dorian Grey,) so whenever we could afford to buy them at Half Price, she’d ban any other books read until I finished whichever classic it was, and wrote at least a three page essay per book on it.
Mind you, by the time she got the box set, the fifth Harry Potter book had JUST come out. She got it for me, put it on the shelf, along with some other ‘fun’ books from Half Price, and handed me, of all things, a set of books with historical and biblical commentary to read.
I sighed, but went to start the Magician’s Nephew.
You have no idea how much cringing went on at the description of Diggery’s dad being a career soldier in India. I had Kippling flashbacks…
[later on…] Hmmm, she was on some dead planet with a dying star, was a daughter of Lilith (later the editors change it to Cain, I believe,) and destroyed everything to spite her sister. seemingly she freaking said the Name of God to murder everyone on her world. Okay, that sounded pretty cool. I liked it. Then I read the commentary on each chapter.
Turns out C. S. Lewis, like many people of his time, was a rampant racist and Anti-Semite. For a while he was an atheist, but when he returned to Christianity, and specifically made these stories, he was using them as a way to show how backwards the Jewish faith was.
In this, he describes the ‘Word’ as being a token of great and dark power. I didn’t even notice until rereading it, just how many times he describes the people there as living in extravagant wealth, how Aslan claims they had too much self import, greed, and all the way in book eight, outright claims that they followed the bird monster god, who is the Narnian version of the Devil, and a stigma against Muslims as well. Rereading that book, I was bombarded with all the things I’d been called growing up, as a Jew, describing what would become the evil queen later.
But I figured, if I could get through Rudyard Kippling, and even enjoy some of his short stories, likely I could get through Narnia too, right?
So I wrote my three page essay, which turned into five, and moved on to the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe proper.
Here were yet more descriptions of Santa, Christmas not being allowed to come, the normal things that I grew up with because in my day, the only thing on movies or games were Christian based anyway, so it didn’t bother me. I simply went ‘lalala random once-pagan god turned saint is handing out daggers in the woods, yay’ and moved on.
The fact that aslan is Turkish for ‘lion’ though, I always enjoyed.
Of course, the kids all find comfort in the naming of Aslan, save for Edmund, who has been tainted by the White Witch’s Turkish Delights (there is irony here, which bears humour,) and the commentary for that was surprisingly long. seemingly nearly four paragraphs had been dropped from the book because of the Magician’s Nephew later being published to explain away the back history, (he published all out of order, which is why the timeline often gets confused,) and they were a brief synopsis of the dying world, etc. In it, they describe, yet again, the Terrible Word, that feels tempting to say, and yet horrible to hear by all those with good hearts. Only evil souls ever wish to say this dreaded Word aloud.
As this word was once spoken by the High Priest every Yom Kippur in ancient times, this kiiiind of doesn’t make a Jew comfortable to hear… Yeah, we’re commanded not to say the Name aloud, but it’s for entirely different reasons. *anyway*
Another thing that always bothered me, and I know it’s silly, as the books were a token of their time, was the portrayal of women in battle.
"War is a nasty thing, for which good ladies need not see."
Peter gets a sword, Edmund gets a weapon, Lucy gets to have a dagger for self defense and become the team’s Cleric, and Susan gets a bow, but is told to wait to use it until even her magic horn, which summons aid, doesn’t work. Women are stressed as non-fighting material. Yes, this was WW1 era, but by God, the Inklings, Tolkein, Lewis and so forth, all read up on old legends, histories that they wanted to add to their worlds to explain how our world came into being, and when you have that much Norse mythos bouncing around, the idea that women were too delicate to fight was more than stupid. Yeah, leave Lucy with the horn, that’d make sense; she’s so useless she leaves the group when she gets a pebble in her shoe on an unknown island in the middle of freaky ass seas, but Susan? The bitch can fight just as much as fucking useless Edmund can.
skipping along, we have more imagery of Jesus rising from the dead. Got it. Yup. Now we… just finished the entire battle in less than a chapter. The entire build up and Aslan noms the White Witch in less than a sentence. Literally. It’s like a footnote in the description of Peter’s army moving across the marshes. Edmund slash, aslan nom. done.
…Okay, it’s a kid’s book, I think. Deal with the lack of interesting endings. Next. (The essay this time was three pages, and most of it was barely understandable, because the commentary at this point were just quotes from the Greek Testament, which I had no idea at the time about, save that Christians read it. I read the Quran long before I decided to see what was in the Christian Bible, just because I really had little interest in such young religions anyway. I decided it was best to do so to understand the Crusades better. It didn’t help. Only gave me a headache reading the usual thing Tumblr likes to use when they want to say that they agree with Gay Rights, and so quote Mathew, I believe, in saying that nothing of the ‘Old testament’ matters. yeah. Ouch. Thanks for making us Jews that also support basic human rights and dignity feel so good by saying our entire ancient system of Law ‘doesn’t matter anymore’.
The Horse and His Boy.
This book.
This book had problems.
Briefly it cheerfully reminded me of a much better book I Rode a Horse of Milk White Jade, (based on the actual stories of three women that rode in the Mongolian races,) and I thought Bree was a funny horse that sounded like cheese and… wait. Did they just seriously use every stereotypical Arabian thing that ever could exist… yes, they did.
The entire book is full of jabs at Islam, at Arabs as a whole, and basically every North African and Semitic culture you can name. If you can think it, the book did it, and bloody ends with a magical CRUSADE. The Camorlan people are all shown as evil, fat merchants (oh, hey, more hating on Jews there,) or dastardly plotters, or slavers, and often called by the noble (and decidedly white+British,) people of Narnia, as backwards, greedy, self-important (THE GOD AWFUL NAMES,) and uncivilized. OMG THE WOMEN COVER THEIR HAIR. Worse yet? SOME GO INTO BATTLE. Holy shit, someone call Santa Claus, he’ll give them all magic horns for protecting their delicate feminine graces!
Throughout the book, they are periodically sent on their way by seemingly random desert lions. These later turn out to be Aslan, who explains that he was the one to guard and protect them, not their bird god, and Bree is shown as a Doubting Thomas, right up until Aslan appears behind him and growls. Then he decided that aslan is the true lord and master of beasts.
Yes, it ends with the MCs converting to Aslanity.
The commentary here included several letters between Lewis and his colleagues on the ‘savage races in the East’, as he called them, and in the ‘noble Crusades for the Holy Land’ that he outright claims the book was about. He even liked to think that Shasta ‘would have made a stout little warrior of Aslan were it needed’.
Normally, I don’t care too much if random conversions happen in books. Again, I’m used to it. It’s only very recently that anyone has taken the chance to write serious novels on people with gods other than the Christ, and even then, you are twenty times more likely to find a book on Pagan gods than you are to find an interesting YA novel on Judaism. People just don’t write Jewish fiction very often, and when they do, it’s purely ‘set in the real world’, with no fun folklore to behold. The Bartimaeus Trilogy at least MENTIONS these things, and makes Solomon out to be hilarious. Also a worthy read.
I can go into depth on each book, and maybe someday I will, but this is already a long enough answer for now. The Reader’s Digest version is basically ‘my mom refused to let me read any other books until I was done, I found myself reading instead horribly racist, bigoted and downright stupid morality tales that had nothing to do with real life, degraded women, degraded my faith, and told me that only the British were worthy to rule shit’.
And don’t get me started on the fucking Silver Chair. Insulting women (YOU HAD ONE FUCKING JOB, GIRL, REMEMBERING SHIT,) since 1916! :D Lose a debate with a female in real life and get mocked by your colleagues because your skills at defending your argument aren’t sound and she ripped you politely to pieces? Well then! Just make that same argument on faith in your book, but have your whiny bitch of a character win it instead, purely because you think all women are harpies that shouldn’t be allowed in Oxford’s halls anyway. Yep.
And I’m pretty sure that was also the book my Asatru pagan friend tossed out the window for all the stereotypes…
Nonetheleast that Susan is denied heaven for FUCKING SHAVING HER LEGS AND LIKING BOYS. The only character I don’t want to brutally murder gets left alive of her entire family’s death and heavenward/Narniaward movement after that great battle (Oh God, the endless Revelations notes in the margins…) with the bird monster/Devil/Allah and the monkey and ass that symbolized a pair of black gentlemen he saw on the street one day, and all this is finished with her being ‘too adult’ because she fucking grew up, even though their parents are there too and obviously had sex to create the little bastards, yet are nice and innocent I guess because they must have no sexual desire for one another or something BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY LIKING BOYS DENIES YOU HEAVEN, SUSAN. DIDN’T YOU KNOW?
