C. S. Lewis

[maeve66]

And no, I haven't read The Screwtape Letters. But this semi-rant comes out of the general floating cultural reactions to the Narnia movie, as well as to many people who've counterposed it to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. As such, it's in part a reaction to mistersmearcase's recent discussion of trying to read Pullman and his general distaste for fantasy novels, YA or otherwise, and in part a reaction to flowerlane's post about the Narnia movie. A lot of it is directly the comment I tried to make to flowerlane's post, but couldn't because of my mother's clunky old computer (no more -- now, she'll have DSL and a shiny new itty-bitty iBook).

So, for background: I like fantasy. I don't mind allegory, as long as I understand the allegory I'm being presented. I don't mind not understanding how everything in a fantasy works (this is to mistersmearcase, because it just seems like an extension of the "willing suspension of disbelief" notion. I do love Diana Wynne Jones, and loved most classic YA fantasy, from fairytales (Grimm Bros., Hans Christian Anderson*, the Fill-in-the-blank Color Fairytale books, to multicultural anthologies of same -- to mythologies from Greek to Norse. As an atheist child, I didn't distinguish between mythology, fairy stories, and religion. Seriously.

But C. S. Lewis is a special case, because to me, his work is only a slightly more polished version of exactly the sort of brainwashing he decries in his sci fi books, and to an extent in the Narnia books. Judging only from his young adult fiction and sci-fi work, he was very concerned that the secular humanists and commies and, secondarily, fascists, were taking over the world and destroying both the simple faith in a not-so-simple religion, and the irrational pleasure in "magic" that is the birthright of children. His is propaganda work, in other words, and it is propaganda work that is working really hard in exactly the areas that flowerlane identified in the movie, which (not having seen it yet) does seem to be pretty faithful to the book. His specific targets were: create a sense of wonder in children in the central tenets of Christianity, through surrogate figures; reinforce a basic system of Western "morals" and "ethics"; and reinforce standard Western gender roles for women.

Now, I will type the above (and the below) knowing full well that I liked the Narnia books AND his sci fi, as a child, though always with a twitching sense of unease. I could at one and the same time enjoy the stories and shudder at them slightly, knowing what I felt I was also seeing in them.

flowerlane's entry is a reaction to the movie, which she walked out of. And this was my response:

The worst thing I've read here (not having seen it yet, and somewhat dubious about doing so) is the change in the faun Tumnus. That's gross. For the rest of it, it's exactly the subtext and surface, too, of the book. Lewis was going (I think) for the pretty highly sadistic and sexualized Passion of the Christ with Aslan's sacrifice, and the shaving is just the Crown of Thorns, the binding is the scourging, etc. The first time I read it as a child, I cried and cried, and it was a pretty reliable weeper until my most recent rereading, which was last week. But I got the Christian allegory I think even the first time through it, when I was ten or whatever, and it made me very ambivalent and conflicted. The whole series did.

If you dislike this one, you should (well, should not, I guess) read The Last Battle, which is the final book in the series and an allegory of death and the hereafter, featuring the contrasting fates of faithful believers in Aslan, faithful believers (not their charlatan priests) in Pagan gods (in this case, a thinly disguised Islam), and atheists -- the grossly and curmudgeonly materialist dwarves. Guess who gets the worst of it? There's a scene at the end of the book when the rest of the (dead) characters are locked in a stable, but escape out the back into a purer, more "real", deeper Narnia. The dwarves refuse to leave the filthy stable and muck, because that's all they can perceive. NICE. C. S. Lewis was nothing if not theologically consistent.

For his adult version, see the sci fi trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, all of which feature bonus anti-Communist plots, identification of Communism with Totalitarianism, and the worst, most awful essentialist gender stereotyping imaginable. Yes, I've been known to read stuff that horrifes and angers me. More than once. If I'm not mistaken, That Hideous Strength (which features a reawakened Merlin defending the Real Britain against modern scientific totalitarianism) has a nod to Louis Althusser in its arch-villain, a head-in-a-box who is a famous scientist who went mad after murdering his wife. I don't know. Maybe I'm making that bit up, in part. I know I read the book not long after learning that about Althusser (that he'd murdered his wife and gone mad)... he of the "base and superstructure is right ... in the final analysis", a construction I've always been fond of.

* and speaking of insinuating Christian ethics and morals in fairy tales; Hans Christian Anderson is the originator of that trope, I swear to god. His stories are horrific in their guilt-steeped and sadistically fitted punishments for failing one or other of the commandments. "The Red Shoes"? "The Little Girl Who Trod on a Loaf"? YIKES.

Comments

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

This icon is Rosa Luxemburg as a teenager. I wonder whether she ever read escapist young adult fiction? I wonder whether there were any books that could have been described as that, in German (or Polish) when she was a teen, in the 1870s or 1880s?

Don't know about Polish, but in German the answer is easy: E.T.A. Hoffmann. He practically invented that genre for the entire continent of Europe.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Is that the dude who did Struwwelpeter? AKA "Shockheaded Peter"? No, upon googling, I find that it is a different Hoffman. Man, E. T. A. Hoffman definitely invented the genre... she could have been reading that, or as I suspect she learned French, she could have been reading Dumas and Verne. It would be interesting (to me) to know such a thing, actually. What was the furniture of her mind before economics and theory, basically?

Also -- have YOU read any of the C. S. Lewis sci fi I cite above, and particularly, That Hideous Strength? Because I wonder about that Althusser thing.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

Probably the way to get hints of it would be her early correspondence, particularly with her family. But who even knows if that's still extant? It's the sort of thing the Stalinists meticulously, cultishly collected and preserved for Lenin (if only to redact it), but Luxemburg never got that kind of treatment, for better and worse.

As for Lewis, I was made to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 4th grade, and since I was hip to the Christian subtext, and vehemently, almost bigotedly Jewish at the time, I didn't enjoy it in the least. So I never felt the urge to examine any of his other writings.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Her adult personal correspondence has been collected; I've written about it before, on LJ, I think. But I haven't seen anything (certainly, anything translated) from when she was younger.

When I was a young teenager -- especially eighth grade through say, sophomore year -- arguing about religion (belief versus atheism, atheism versus Catholicism, Zionists' desire for a state versus a secular state, Vatican City as a state) was all fuel for my most enjoyable polemicizing. And I was rude, and baiting, back then. I would LOOK for biblical literalists in order to argue viciously with them. God, I'm glad I'm past that.