Laura Miller

by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

  Lucy’s connection with the sea girl is a matter of faith — the earthly, humanist kind — and faith is precisely what she lacks when she listens in on Marjorie’s conversation. What motivates her to recite the spell is not curiosity about Marjorie, but the egotism of insecurity. Lucy eavesdrops on her friend for the same reason that the nurse reads the actress’s letter in Persona: because she’s seeking her own reflection. She’s dying to know what other people think of her and hoping that what they say will be flattering. (A lot of snooping comes down to not much more than that.) Persona is an indictment of the actress’s narcissism, but I’ve always been a little disappointed that the nurse doesn’t come in for the same degree of stern scrutiny.

  If Lucy was anything like me (and I was sure she was), then she wanted to know everything about that lonely-looking sea girl: where she lived, what her parents were like, how she kept her fish herd in tow, and what she wanted to be when she grew up. This is an entirely different sort of curiosity from the kind that craves assurances of other people’s good opinion. Lucy’s faith in her friendship with the sea girl is a leap of the imagination, a belief that however different they might seem, she and the sea girl must have something important to share.

  It is also a reader’s faith, and it is omnivorous. As Lewis wrote in An Experiment in Criticism:

  The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality … in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

  The characters in books can never really be our friends because as much as we might learn about them, they can never know anything about us. Still, they exercise our capacity for empathy, extending it beyond the boundaries of race, gender, species, even virtue. Readers will sometimes blame a morally objectionable main character for a novel’s failure to engage them; really, the fault lies with the author’s inability to make us stop quibbling about such things. If characters had to be admirable or even likeable to captivate us, then Humbert Humbert and Scarlett O’Hara would not be people you recognize without my having to explain which novels they come from.

  Lewis, for example, makes us feel sorry for Eustace Scrubb, who is just about the most insufferable boy in the world before his transformation on Dragon Island in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Even the slave traders on the island of Doorn are reduced to offering him as a free gift with purchase, and still they get no takers. Eustace’s penchant for the wrong kind of books is once again part of his problem. His habit of reading practical nonfiction renders him blind to his companions and even to his surroundings. One of the funniest bits in the Chronicles is Eustace’s preconversion shipboard diary, a crafty litany of excuses, rationalizations, self-justifications, and outright whining that makes it abundantly clear just how miserable it is not only to be around him, but to be him. Eustace simply can’t see the Dawn Treader as Lucy does — “a beauty of her kind, a ‘lady’ as sailors say, her lines perfect, her colors pure and every spar and rope and pin lovingly made.” In his eyes, the ship is “a rotten little tub,” bereft of both wireless and stateroom.

  Nevertheless, Eustace’s diary does succeed at slipping us into this unfortunate boy’s head. Somewhere along the way, as Eustace sneaks off to avoid doing his share of the work on Dragon Island, then finds himself hideously transformed, he snags our sympathy. Rendered enormous, scaly, and fire-breathing, he enjoys a few moments of reveling in his terrible new power before realizing that he’d much rather “get back among humans and talk and laugh and share things.” His reform begins only when he resembles on the outside the monster that he’s long been on the inside, and realizes what an “unmitigated nuisance” he’s been to the others from the start.

  Fixing Eustace requires divine intervention, so severe is his inability to put himself in anyone else’s place. My condition was not so remedial; after all, like Lucy, I had read the right books and instantly appreciated the Dawn Treader for the marvel she was. Simply reading about Lucy — her compassion, modesty, and generosity — probably improved me, a child not richly endowed with any of those qualities. It wasn’t that I wanted to be good for the sake of being good, or even to please Aslan; it was that I could see how Lucy’s way of being good was the opposite of Eustace’s awfulness. It made her happier, and drew her closer to other people. I hoped that I was already a lot like Lucy, but I was inclined to try to be more so mostly because I loved her. Like the sea girl, she inhabited another, unreachable world, but we would have been the best of friends if we ever met, I was sure of it.

  Part Two

  Trouble in Paradise

  Chapter Eight

  Forests and Trees

  Mrs. Belden may not have been able to get much out of me about my revelatory first encounter with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but she learned enough to assure her that I’d missed the book’s religious symbolism. Adults marvel that this subtext, so glaringly obvious to us, is invisible to children. Children, after all, are usually adept at discovering most of the things we try to hide from them: profanity, sharp objects, Christmas presents, preferences for one child over another.

  But children are literalists: they lack not only the cognitive skills but also the sheer bulk of information it takes to formulate abstractions and recognize general patterns. They think in specifics, of the concrete, tactile reality they encounter every day. As Philip Pullman, the author of His Dark Materials, an epic and intellectually demanding fantasy trilogy for children, is wont to say, “Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.” Sometimes they do not see the forest because they’re still getting acquainted with the trees. Once, when my three-year-old friend Corinne and I were reading a book about the ocean, we came upon a painting of a blue whale.

  “This is very high up,” she informed me, pointing at the whale.

  “It is?” I replied.

  “It’s very, very high,” she explained patiently. “Sadie really likes it.”

  Sadie is her babysitter, and like many people caring for little children in Manhattan, she has only a few places to take Corinne and her brother on rainy days. One of those places is the American Museum of Natural History on West 79th Street, and in the vast Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, where toddlers are allowed to run around loose, there is a life-size model of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling. When I looked at the picture in the book, I thought “blue whale,” summoning up a generalization, a typical blue whale distilled from everything I know about the creatures, including the fact that they live in the ocean, which is “down.” When Corinne looked at the picture she had one memory to call upon, the only representation of a blue whale that she had ever seen before. She thought not of blue whales in general, but of one whale in particular. And that whale is very high up.

  Corinne and I were both correct; we simply read the image in the book differently. I saw a reference to a concept, and she saw a depiction of a familiar thing. Soon, as she gathers more data, Corinne will learn to look at the museum’s whale model and see it as a representation of an animal that lives down in the sea, even if this particular representation is suspended from the ceiling in a room full of dioramas. She’ll recognize that the high-up-ness of the model is an irrelevant (if cool) detail, while its color and size are telling her something meaningful about the animal it stands for. Eventuall
y, though not for many years, she’ll learn to apply the same sort of understanding to more sophisticated artifacts, like stories.

  To someone who has heard and read many stories about the self-sacrifice of god-kings or other saintly heroes who suffer for the salvation of others, Aslan is obviously an analog of Christ. But to someone who is still encountering instances of the great themes of Western culture for the first time, Aslan cannot be Jesus because Jesus is a bearded man in sandals and robe, while Aslan is a lion. We shouldn’t, however, mistake the less-experienced reader’s interpretation as simply wrong; Corinne’s whale was in fact very high up, and Jesus was a bearded man in sandals. If not being able to see the forest for the trees is one kind of blindness, so is not being able to see the trees for the forest. When Corinne was even younger, sitting in her stroller in a parking lot, she began to repeat the word “bubbles” to her mystified parents. Nowhere around them could they see any bubbles, and besides, the baby was pointing to a car. Then they noticed that it had rained while they were inside the store, and that the drops of rainwater that beaded up on the smooth surfaces of the car looked just like bubbles. Once we learn to see things with the idea that they belong to a particular category, we’re in danger of missing all the qualities they share with things in other categories, not to mention all the qualities that are theirs alone. What’s in front of our noses can become invisible to us if we can’t fit it into one of the frameworks we have set up for understanding the world and ourselves. Sometimes the “irrelevant” facts we screen out are poetic as well as physical (like the similarity between drops of rainwater and bubbles) and occasionally they’re crucial. There’s an Agatha Christie novel, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, in which the solution hinges on the fact that what several characters have described as a “bit of red rubber” is actually two different things; the murderer has substituted an innocuous rubber object for the deflated balloon that was evidence of his crime. Both ways of thinking — the generalized and the concrete, the deep and the broad — can be powerful, and both are limited. If we want to understand the world around us more completely, we need to keep both methods in play.

  All this is by way of saying that the child readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe who do not recognize its parallels to the biblical story of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not necessarily mistaken. Our particular, immediate experience of something is as true as the conclusions we reach after we have sorted all the details, figured out which ones match a pattern we’ve observed before, and discarded the rest. To me, the fact that Aslan was a real, material, warm, and furry lion was as important as the fact that he died and was brought back to life. It was even more important, really, since death wasn’t especially interesting to me, and animals were.

  In his youth, Lewis lost what faith he had had as a small boy. Explaining this estrangement in later years, he wrote, “The externals of Christianity made no appeal to my sense of beauty. Oriental imagery and style largely repelled me; and for the rest, Christianity was mainly associated for me with ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry.” When, as an adult, he decided to embed a Christian message in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, his plan was to strip the theme of Christianity’s unattractive “externals,” its “stained-glass and Sunday School associations,” in hope that his young readers would then perceive these themes “in their real potency.”

  Lewis didn’t intend his audience to recognize what he was doing, or at least not right away. In an essay titled “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” he described this plan as an attempt to elude the defenses readers set up against authors and stories that aim to teach them something for their own good. He wanted, as he memorably phrased it, to “steal past those watchful dragons.”

  Yet it’s worth asking whether the stained-glass and Sunday school associations aren’t as much a part of Christianity as the mystical Resurrection of Christ, even if they aren’t supposed to be as important a part. Is a religion a great story about the meaning of life or a daily practice, or is it perhaps something else — a collection of icons? Although, doctrinally speaking, accepting Jesus Christ as one’s lord and savior is the key act of Christian conversion, many Christians seem to believe that going to church and abiding by a list of detailed restrictions are just as important.

  For Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, such practices as taking Communion and making confession were as central to his religion as its core metaphysical beliefs, if not more so. Lewis participated in similar rites, but primarily regarded his faith as an object of contemplation and analysis. Religions are forever being pulled in one direction or the other. Islam was originally intended to be a streamlined faith, asking only five simple, practical duties from believers: acknowledgment of Allah as God, prayer five times daily, charity, pilgrimage to Mecca, and fasting through Ramadan — the “five pillars of Islam.” Over time, this minimalist architecture was embellished. Visionaries and clerics developed variations, such as the mystical philosophical tradition of Sufism or those elaborate lists of rules about veils, dancing, and kite flying, rules that some believers now consider essential enough to kill or die for.

  In her book The Battle for God, the scholar Karen Armstrong writes of the indivisibility of belief and rite in ancient religions: “Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies, which worked aesthetically upon worshipers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.” The sacrament of the Eucharist is one such rite. Holy Communion allows worshippers to act out and mystically embody the story of Jesus feeding transubstantiated bread and wine to his followers. The ritual is essential; religion is as much something you do as something you believe. It’s also something you paint and carve; the “externals” of a faith include everything from the bowls of holy water and statues in a church to the hymns sung and the devotional art and shrines that believers keep in their homes. How can these be separated from the “real potency” of a faith’s myths, any more than the ritual service of bread and wine to communicants can be separated from the metaphysical import of the Last Supper?

  So when Lewis’s child readers don’t see Christianity in the Chronicles, they are in fact perceiving a truth about Narnia that adults usually miss. The Christianity in Narnia has been substantially, rather than just superficially, transformed — to the point of being much less Christian, perhaps, than Lewis intended. In his essay “On Stories,” Lewis describes a conversation he once had with “an intelligent American pupil,” who remembered being thrilled by a scene in a Fenimore Cooper story in which the sleeping hero is stalked by an Indian brave. To Lewis’s surprise, the student remarked that he would have been just as excited if the villain were “a crook with a revolver,” sneaking up on a twentieth-century version of Natty Bumppo. Not so Lewis: “Take away the feathers, the high cheek-bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk, and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged — the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, war-paths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names.” Without those trappings, it was not the same story at all.

  It would never have occurred to me to liken Narnia to the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. They were as different as cheese and chalk. And despite Lewis’s own lifelong uneasiness with Catholicism, his High Church Anglicanism was not so very different from it, a fact which struck me when I stood in the chapel at Magdalen College in Oxford, a place where Lewis prayed almost every day after his conversion in 1931. In that room, I felt almost materially transported back to the church where I took my first Communion. My church called its weekly classes “catechism,” instead of “Sunday School,” and we attended it on Tuesdays, but we had the very same stained-glass windows and candles flickering in little wells of red and blue glass.

  Ours was a mild form of Catholicism — so mild, in fact, that you could say it was almost Angli
can. These were the years during and just after Vatican II; if I dig deeply enough, I have very dim memories of hearing Mass conducted in Latin. When I was still small, however, we switched to a progressively minded parish more in line with the leanings of my Kennedy Democrat parents. In our new church, Sacred Heart, youthful nuns played guitars during folk mass and no one talked about martyred saints. No crucifixes hung on our walls at home and I barely knew who the pope was. I knew the name of our parish priest (all I can remember about him now is that he had a glass eye), but we didn’t socialize with him and he certainly never came to our house. The first time I encountered a truly gruesome image of the bloodied, tortured Christ was at the local art museum, where a Spanish painting of Jesus with rolling eyes, crown of thorns, and gore dripping down his face so terrified me I was afraid to venture back into the building for years. (Even today I experience a twinge of dread whenever I pass it.)

  Nevertheless, I was raised in the Catholic Church and confirmed in the faith at the age of thirteen. In catechism classes we learned about sin, about obedience to authority, and about the necessity of the sacraments to the salvation of our eternal souls. My family’s strain of vaguely Scottish Catholicism put a particular emphasis on self-denial. I can remember a conversation with my grandmother before church about the possibility of my putting part of my allowance into the collection plate; it wouldn’t really count, she informed me, unless I gave all of it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice. Most of the things required of me by my religion — church attendance and participation in other dull ceremonies, fasting before taking Communion, giving up various pleasures for Lent — persuaded me that unhappiness was next to godliness and that virtue was consolidated by suffering.

  Traditionally, the Catholic Church doesn’t encourage independent study of the Bible, but we did read the New Testament in catechism. (The Old Testament I wouldn’t read until I got to college.) Children believe what adults tell them as a matter of course, and so I suppose I considered the stories in the Gospels to be “true.” But did I ever really believe in the Christian God? When I consider the profound, passionate faith of Lewis and other real Christians, I can’t honestly say that I did. Certainly, I never believed in Christianity as fully as I believed in Narnia, and this was largely because Christianity as I knew it offered such a drab, grinding, joyless view of life. Perhaps this was a failing of my teachers, but I saw our religion primarily as a body of onerous rules and red tape, like a secular code of law, or interstate commerce regulations. And so, with the determination of a corporate tax attorney, I set about discovering how those rules could be gotten around.