The Chronicles of Narnia
I am terribly conflicted about the movie adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia. Having seen it over the weekend, it is impossible to deny that the acting and execution of Lewis’ story are superb; however, the story itself is an awful mess of contradictions and incomplete thoughts. Lewis was at his best less when creating new material, but more when he was smoothing out the wrinkles of old stories allowing new generations to appreciate their depth and richness. His classic The Great Divorce streamlines the much more complicated classic by Dante, The Divine Comedy. Similarly, Narnia makes the Christ-story approachable in ways the Gospel rendition may not, particularly for children. Narnia is a children’s book and many viewers, me included, would do well to appreciate this. However, Lewis meant for the book to become a part of Christian indoctrination – he made no secret of his desire that Narnia make the leap of faith inherent in Christianity easier for children as they grew older and encountered the cynicism of modern thinking. Perhaps Lewis shrewdly saw the increasing sweep of secularism in the England of the mid 20th century and set out to make a rendition of the Gospel story that would blend secular cultural mythology with what he held to be conventional Christian teaching. In doing this, Lewis anticipated that he could preserve the faith of Christianity in an increasingly rationalistic world.
In part, Narnia is complicated for some adults (this “sometimes” adult being one such person) because of the mishmash of symbology it incorporates. The best example of this involves Santa Claus in a high-speed reindeer chase with the children only to bless them with various weapons when he catches up with them. It is Lewis at his interpolative best: part accepted cultural myth and part Pauline weapons against evil (breastplate of righteousness and all). Lewis throws in just about every culture’s mythic masterpiece from the Nordic symbols he and Tolkein loved so much to the Greek mythology Lewis had grown up with, and whose departure from public education he sorely felt left children the poorer for. Any movie with talking animals, fawns, Santa Claus, a witch, gnomes and griffins is bound to be visually entertaining, but Lewis is aiming for something much more – he desires that children go from appreciating the lessons myth can teach, and story can tell, to belief in an outrageous myth he believes is very much true. Any serious investigation of Narnia must touch on the means by which Lewis wishes to teach a child to think: because Lewis ultimately wants to argue for his particular myth to be true, the prism we must bend the light of his story through is essential to the lasting message of Narnia.
I was troubled at the underlying argument within Narnia that rational thinking and reason have at best an unclear place in Lewis’ world. To use story-language, it is as if we ride off into battle on the noble horse of reason and then just before the clash of battle, when we most need our steed, we wheel it to a stop and thrust our gleaming sword into its innocent and still very much alive heart because we blame it for the battle it has taken us into. Most troubling to me still is that Narnia makes reason seem diminutive. Lewis was right to advocate the use of stories to teach children values. The world is not the better for children being banned from story telling; but the world is certainly the worse for teaching a particular story – even that of Christianity – at the expense of reason. Stories can be taught for the general lessons they teach a child in forms that are conceptual and not doctrinal.
After the youngest child returns from her first excursion into the wardrobe and its enjoined parallel universe, the children accidentally run into the aged professor back on their side of reality. Before his own experience in the wardrobe, the oldest brother tells the professor of their youngest sister’s escapades. The professor responds with two questions: first, do you trust your sister and second, if you do, then why would you not believe anything she says irregardless of how extraordinary it might be? The obvious implication Lewis is attempting to make is that Christianity’s proof of its historical claims should be similarly trusted because people who are trustworthy believed them – essentially, we believe because they did. A couple of points about the analysis Lewis is attempting: first, I have yet to meet even the most mystically inclined person who is willing to believe whole heartedly in every supernatural claim they hear about. Each of us has a level of incredulity we are unwilling to overlook, even if the underlying story comes from within a trusted part of our own culture or family. How we apply that incredulity varies significantly with the exception of one group of people – secular rationalists. For a secular rationalist, who I confess to being, no supernatural claim is to be accommodated based on what someone else said occurred. The evidence required proving something supernatural occurred rises to a level wholly above that of “so and so said”, but that standard is to be equally applied to each culture and its own great myth stories.
Similar little back-handed comments are folded into Narnia, including the scene with the fawn’s library and the prominent book interjected into the screen titled Man: Does He Exist? Lewis is no-doubt poking at Jesus scholars coming into prominence in his mid-20th century England and at agnostics in the contemporary audience, but his analysis is inherently and deeply flawed. Surprisingly, it is equally lacking in its gracious accommodation of people of other faiths or of no faith at all. Lewis’s writing for adults embraces complicated questions with a graciousness in its openness to God and questions of systematic theology that are sorely missing in Narnia. I am troubled by why Lewis’ version of Christianity for children was so lacking in that which his adult works so easily and magnificently incorporated. The movie version of Narnia is simply but profoundly missing the uplifting and embracing spirit embodied in a Lewis’ poem where he said:
The one to whom I bow only knows to whom I bow,
When I attempt the ineffable name, murmuring “thou”,
And dream of Phaedian fancies and embrace in part,
Symbols, I know, which cannot be the thing thou art.
Narnia is strangely the poorer for Lewis’ oversimplification, something a writer of his skill and stature was certainly capable of remedying.
As disquieting as I found the lack of Lewis’ normal depth, I was more troubled by his commentary on belief. In Narnia no one needs to just believe – they have all the tangible proof they could ever want – by the closet full! But in our world – in all that we know of as reality – we must believe in that which is not reasonable, rational or explainable if we take Lewis to his logical conclusion. If Narnia conclusively fails at any level, it is at the level of encouraging children to appreciate the complexity and reasonableness of those who are not in the fold of the faithful. The comparisons Lewis makes are incomplete and ultimately caricatures of the points he is attempting to make: the doubters in Lucy’s story are each enabled to go to the other side of the wardrobe and actually experience the wonder-filled reality she spoke of. Doubters in religious truth – specifically the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus – are afforded no such latitude. We get no special experience and nothing tangible. Lewis affords himself the richness of being able to interject those who do not believe (whether the other children before they cross into Narnia or the fawn before he meets his first “daughter of Adam”) into an alternative reality, thereby forcing them to acknowledge the supernatural was the real. This is an insincere comparison, and its impact on the thinking of children is not to be overlooked. It should be deeply troubling that for all of Lewis’ profound thoughts about the nature of God and eternal punishment, he ultimately sends Susan to his version of hell for her love of “lipstick and stockings” in the last of the Narnia books. This is Lewis at his inconsistent worst: his story has people who actually experience the supernatural and choose to reject it be somehow literally compatible with people who desire truth but reject the supernatural on the basis of reason, consistency and their very natural experience.
J.R.R. Tolkein, author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, disliked Lewis’ Narnia for a number of reasons, its overt morality plays, mish-mash of mythical figures and too-obvious symbolism being his most predominant dislikes. Tolkein appreciated stories that were complex both in their construction and in their lessons, primarily because he believed people benefited most from stories that helped them appreciate the complications of life and did not encouraged reduced trivializations of thorny questions. Yes, Narnia is a children’s story and it must be measured against the standard of children’s literature. The story has survived because it is well-written, as all of Lewis’ material is, but the points he attempts to make are at best incomplete and at worst advocate children being taught that belief and critical thinking can be divorced from each other without either sacrificing anything.
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2 Responses to “The Chronicles of Narnia”
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“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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December 13th, 2005 at 2:08 pm
As always, you offer a unique perspective, and for that, I am grateful. However, the statement “no one need to just believe” is not completely accurate within the story. Aslan had not been physically present in Narnia for 100 years. During that time the denizens continued to believe - in spite of immediate, tangible evidence. In fact, the unending wintry curse of Narnia would seem to undermine this. And yet, Beaver still believes, “He’s the King.” Have a holly jolly Christmas! Peace!
December 13th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
First, Rich has his usually excellent analysis of the movie posted at his site. In thinking about your comment, my first response would be that the story is designed to attach the idea of faith to the children in the story, and as I said in my essay, they have a “closet-full” of evidence. Of the creatures in the story, they could - if they so wished - travel to Aslan’s camp which is an essential means of testing the validity of their beliefs. Yes, Beaver still believes, but of note is that Beaver guides the children directly to Aslan’s camp w/o any permutations in his reality. The construction is nonsymmetrical - Beaver can believe within the constraints of his reality, and the children, who are not from his reality, are given the proverbial “closet-full” of belief. It’s an important distinction that is lost in the guise of story.