Once upon a time, people used to label the kind of book I would come to crave — the kind “with magic,” as I usually thought of it — as escapist. Consequently, readers with this taste often have a chip on their shoulders. Lewis, who enjoyed the occasional H. Rider Haggard adventure or H. G. Wells novel in addition to Anglo-Saxon epics and medieval allegories, wrote several essays defending science fiction and “fairy tales” from the scornful advocates of stringent realism. I, on the other hand, came up in the age of metafiction, postmodernism, and magic realism; realism no longer commands all the prestige. Lewis’s arguments on behalf of fantastic literature feel a bit superfluous to me. Still, I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults — librarians, friends’ parents — suggest to me that I liked books “with magic” because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the gumption to face. Perhaps this still happens, say, to kids who obsess about Harry Potter. Or perhaps adults are now so thankful to see children reading that they don’t quibble with the books they choose.
Did I use storybooks to get away from my life? Of course I did, but probably no more so than the kids who chose Harriet the Spy instead of books about dragons and witches. (For the record, I read and liked Harriet the Spy, too.) Insofar as they are stories at all, all stories are escapes from life; all stories are unrealistic, or at least all of the good ones are. Life, unlike stories, has no theme, no formal unity, and (to unbelievers, at least) no readily apparent meaning. That’s why we want stories. No art form can hope to exactly reproduce the sensations that make up being alive, but that’s OK: life, after all, is what we already have. From art, we want something different, something with a shape and a purpose. Any departure a story might make from real-world laws against talking animals and flying carpets seems relatively inconsequential compared to this first, great leap away from reality. Perhaps that’s why humanity’s oldest stories are full of outlandish events and supernatural beings; the idea that a story must somehow mimic actual everyday experience would probably have seemed daft to the first tellers. Why even bother to tell a story about something so commonplace?
There were particular fantastic elements that drew me to Narnia at that age, and they were not always what people associate with fairy tales. I disliked princesses and any other female whose chief occupation was waiting around to be rescued, but I also had no great interest in knights, swords, and combat. The Chronicles, which are relatively free of such elements, spoke to me across a spectrum of yearning. The youngest part of my child self loved Narnia’s talking animals. The girl I was fast growing into fiercely seized upon the idea of possessing an entire, secret world of my own. And the seeds of the adult I would become reveled in the autonomy of Lewis’s child heroes and the adventures that awaited them once they escaped the wearying bonds of grown-up supervision.
Chapter Two
Animal-Land
One of the first stories I found both true and terribly sad is a chapter that comes in the middle of P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins, an interlude devoted to the infant twins, John and Barbara Banks, in their nursery. (Jane and Michael, the older and better-known Banks siblings, have gone off to a party.) The twins can understand the language of the sunlight, the wind, and a cheeky starling who perches on the windowsill, but they are horrified when the bird informs them that they will soon forget all of this. “There never was a human being that remembered after the age of one — at the very latest — except, of course, Her.” (This “Great Exception,” as the starling calls her, is Mary Poppins, of course.) “You’ll hear all right,” Mary Poppins tells John and Barbara, “but you won’t understand.”
This news makes the babies cry, which brings their mother bustling into the nursery; she blames the fuss on teething. When she tries to soothe John and Barbara by saying that everything will be all right after their teeth come in, they only cry harder. “It won’t be all right, it will be all wrong,” Barbara protests. “I don’t want teeth!” screams John. But, of course, their mother can’t understand them any better than she can understand the wind or the starling.
It’s at age one that we acquire our first words. This story, which made me so melancholy as a girl, is, among other things, about the price we pay for language, for the ability to tell our mothers that it’s not our teeth that are upsetting us but something else. It alludes to what we have given up to be understood by her and all the other adults, our lost brotherhood with the rest of creation. Words are what separate us from the animals, or as Travers would have it, from the elements themselves, from everything that can simply be without the scrim of consciousness intervening.
In an early, abandoned version of The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis experimented with a similar theme. He has the story’s boy hero, Digory, able to understand the language of animals and trees until Polly, the little girl who lives next door to him in London, persuades him to cut off a branch from the big oak in his garden. In Lewis’s tale, the separation is literal, physical, and violent, a sin against nature itself. Travers makes the more eloquent choice; to become ourselves, to be human, we must necessarily set ourselves apart.
In Narnia, this mournful rift is healed; there, people can talk to animals, to trees, and sometimes even to rivers (as happens in Prince Caspian). Human beings have longed to communicate with the universe since time immemorial — a profound, mystical longing. Tolkien described it as one of the two “primordial desires” behind fairy tales (after the desire to “survey the depths of space and time”); we want to “hold communion with other living things.” But since children are literalists and materialists, not mystics, their love for animals, and for stories about people who can talk to animals, is seldom understood as a manifestation of this desire.
To say that, as a child, I — and my brothers and sisters and most of our friends — loved animals would be an understatement; much of the time we wanted to be animals. Take us to a park or some place with a rambling yard, and we’d immediately begin mapping out the territory for one of our elaborate games of make-believe. At first, we pretended to be various woodland fauna, inspired by the Old Mother West Wind books by Thornton Burgess, a series our mother read to us. At home, one of us would clamber up onto the roof of our ranch house (via the top bar of the swing set) to play the eagle who came swooping down to pounce on the squirrels and chipmunks below. Later, after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe introduced me to classical mythology, we invented a game we called “mythical creatures,” and played at being griffins, unicorns, and winged horses.
This preoccupation with animals starts early. Two friends of mine, toddler twins named Corinne and Desmond, began pointing at themselves and saying “This is a puppy” almost as soon as they learned to talk. As time goes by and the impossibility of such imaginings becomes obvious, the ache for contact with the animal world grows more desperate. By age seven, when I first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I longed for some better rapport with the family cats and the neighborhood dogs, with any kind of beast, really. Animals seemed like relatives left behind in the Old Country, except that the growing expanse that separated us wasn’t a physical ocean but a cognitive one. They stood on the dock, getting ever smaller, while we children watched from the deck, on the way to a new, supposedly better way of being in the world, haunted by the image of what we were losing.
Animals, like infants, belong to the vast nation of those who communicate without words, through gesture, expression, scent, sound, and touch. Children are immigrants from that nation and, like most recent immigrants, still have a mental foothold on the abandoned shore. I believed, probably correctly, that I understood animals better and cared about them more than the adults around me. I could still faintly remember what it was to be like a beast, before language complicated things. But I didn’t appreciate the inverse relationship between the individual self I was building out of the new words I acquired every day and the inarticulate world that moved away from me as my identity gained definition.
Watching Corinne and D
esmond grow up, I have noticed another drawback to learning to talk: speaking also ushers in the stage at which grown-ups stop doing anything you want just to make you stop crying. It’s only when you can ask for something with words that people expect you to understand “no.” So age one also marks the beginning of our entry into human society proper, where compromise is the price of admission. Many adults — and especially the authors of great children’s books — view growing up as a kind of tragedy whose casualties include innocence and the capacity for wholehearted make-believe. But kissing Puff the Magic Dragon good-bye happens later, on the brink of prepubescence. Travers, in her chapter on poor John and Barbara Banks, seems to be saying that even the smallest children have already suffered a heartbreaking separation, before they leave their cribs.
When I first read William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” with its lines about birth as the beginning of an exile from heaven, I thought of John and Barbara:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy …
Wordsworth surely didn’t mean to include language among the shades of the “prison-house” that close in upon “the growing Boy”; poetry, after all, was a kind of religion to the Romantics. Yet incarceration was also the metaphor that occurred to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche when he called words and grammar a “prison-house of language.” Some poststructuralist philosophers would go on to insist that our thought is so shaped by language that the only reality we can ever know is entirely constructed of it. We live in a hall of mirrors, and the mirrors are made of words.
Words, furthermore, introduce us to our most implacable enemy: time. Developmental psychologists believe that memory begins with the learning of language; to speak (or more accurately, to understand speech, since most children can comprehend before they can articulate) is to remember. With memory comes the capacity to dwell on the past and to anticipate the future; without memory, how could we know our lives and our selves? And without knowing these things, how could we own them? But as Travers’s mournful little parable would have it, to speak is also to forget — to forget what it is not to remember, to forget what it feels like to live the way animals do, in a perpetual now, unaware of death and outside of time.
I can’t shake the feeling that even if children don’t cognitively grasp the miraculous tragedy of consciousness, they nevertheless feel the aftershocks of the journey they’ve made. Animals inhabit the world of raw experience we’ve left behind; animals are the people of our lost homeland. To a child, an animal seems like a compatriot. The attachments that I had to the animals I knew were every bit as powerful as my feelings toward, say, my siblings (and less ambivalent, too, since I wasn’t competing with the family cats for my parents’ attention or a bigger share of the french fries). It’s true that some adults still feel this way about their pets, and if you ask them why, the explanation often has to do with the transparency of animals’ affection, their sincerity, which also turns out to be connected to their lack of language. Animals can’t speak, ergo, they can’t lie.
Yet the most cherished creatures in children’s fantasy are talking animals. If we have mixed feelings about the gifts of language and consciousness, we have no intention of surrendering them. Instead, we want to bring animals along with us, into the solitude of self-knowledge, perhaps hoping that they’ll make it a less lonely place for us. Children are more likely than adults to fantasize about talking beasts because kids don’t have the logical faculties to see that giving animals the power of speech would surely spoil everything we like about them. Children still think they can finesse the difference, that the breach between the one animal who speaks and all the others who cannot will at last be closed, or at least bridged.
Talking animals were one of the things I loved most about the Chronicles as a child, but over the years that aspect of the books has lost its old allure. Once I would have given anything to join the Pevensie siblings at the round dinner table in Mr. and Mrs. Beaver’s snug little house, trading stories about Aslan and eating potatoes and freshly caught trout. What I now like about animals — their lack of self-consciousness — I know to be intimately bound up in their speechlessness. As a little girl, I suspected them of having inner lives much like my own, if only they could (or would) tell me about it; now, I recognize that their charm lies in their lack of such secret thoughts. If my neighbor’s cat, my friend’s dog, the squirrel who sometimes treks along my fire escape, peering in on me while I’m reading on my sofa, could speak, would they really have anything to say that they can’t already communicate well enough in their usual way: by purring, snuffling, wagging, chittering?
The denizens of Narnia were not the first talking beasts C. S. Lewis invented. As a little boy, growing up in Belfast at the beginning of the twentieth century, he dreamed up an imaginary kingdom he called “Animal-Land,” where he could “combine my two chief literary pleasures — ‘dressed animals’ and ‘knights in armor.’” His older brother, Warren (nicknamed Warnie), wanted to join in but preferred such modern paraphernalia as trains and steamships. So Animal-Land grew to encompass both a semilegendary past full of contests between armored mice and ferocious cats, and a present linked to Warnie’s own fantasyland, called “India,” in which the same sorts of creatures — frogs and rabbits — stood around in waistcoats, puffing on pipes and discussing parliamentary politics. Warnie and Jack (as Clive Staples Lewis was nicknamed) called this amalgamation “Boxen.” Jack immediately set about writing a history of the place to cover the years intervening between his stories and Warnie’s, and this in turn entailed drawing up maps of trade routes and railway lines, as well as sketching pictures of all the principal characters.
Lewis regarded the elaboration of Boxen to be his earliest training as a novelist. However, in Surprised by Joy, he warned readers that these boyhood writings were “astonishingly prosaic.” Animal-Land, he wrote, had no similarities to Narnia “except for the anthropomorphic beasts.” It was a place, he insisted, entirely lacking in “wonder.” The publication in 1986 of Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis, a collection of these maps, drawings, histories, and stories, shows this to be an accurate assessment; the book is deadly dull. Its characters — irresponsible kings and concerned prime ministers — behave much like Lewis’s father, Albert, a prominent solicitor, and his politically active friends, the only adults Jack and Warnie had had a chance to observe. There’s something absurd about inventing an elaborate fantasy world in which you merely replicate the tedium of the world around you, but Boxen stands as a case in point: it’s a lot harder than it looks to tap into the enchantments of childhood. Even an actual child, it seems, isn’t necessarily up to the job.
Stories about talking animals are not, of course, solely the province of children’s literature. Folklore — which is made by and for adults — has its share of them, too, but it always uses talking beasts didactically, to personify a particular principle or trait: the wily fox, the fearsome wolf, the methodical tortoise. The animals of fable and fairy tale are used to signify an identity that is simple and unchanging. Take the scorpion who breaks his promise by stinging the frog who has agreed to carry him across a river; when asked how he could betray his rescuer, he replies, “It’s my nature.” People repeat this parable as a way of asserting that a thief is always a thief, and a liar is always a liar, so it’s best not to trust either one. A leopard never changes his spots, goes the saying, but it’s meant as a knock on a certain kind of human being, not on leopards themselves. (Why
should they change their spots?) When it comes to people who behave badly, who indulge their lowest impulses, character is animalistic: inborn, inherent, and fixed.
Adults rarely tell each other real stories (as opposed to fables and parables) about animal characters because the adult notion of a good story — especially now, a few hundred years into the history of the novel — demands psychological change, enlightenment, growth. When a contemporary novel with animal characters appears — Richard Adams’s Watership Down, for example — even if in most ways it meets the criteria of adult fiction, its moorings there are never secure. Chances are it will drift, sooner or later, to the children’s bookshelves. Stories that expect us to invest ourselves in the thoughts and fates and personalities of animals, stories like The Wind in the Willows, are obviously for kids.
Children freely and delightedly identify with the characters in animal stories, often more easily than they identify with child characters. Children’s authors know that what insults an adult reader — being likened to an animal — delights a young one. Robert McCloskey’s celebrated picture book Blueberries for Sal, for example, is simply an extended conceit on the similarities between the small child Sal and Little Bear — to the degree that at one point the two youngsters accidentally swap mothers. Curious George is ostensibly a mischievous monkey, but his most devoted readers recognize that he is also a wayward three-year-old.
And in Narnia, even God is an animal. Although as a girl I adored Aslan, he is another part of the Chronicles that no longer moves me as it once did. This is only partly because I now see, all too clearly, the theological strings and levers behind Lewis’s stagecraft; the great lion seems less a character than a creaking device. I also stopped loving Aslan because I have since grown into the autonomy I was only tentatively experimenting with at seven. The kind of story in which a distant, parental presence hovers behind the scenes, ready to step in and save the day at the moment when hope seems lost — a narrative safety net of sorts — now annoys rather than comforts me. I no longer need this device in the same way that I no longer need to hold someone’s hand while crossing the street.
Laura Miller Page 3
