Laura Miller

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

  We are informed that “horrid things” in the line of cliques and bullying are allowed to flourish at Experiment House, abuses that “at an ordinary school would have been found out and stopped in half a term.” It’s hard to imagine what could be worse than the goings-on permitted at an “ordinary” school like Malvern — de facto slavery in the form of the fag system, catamites, sanctioned beatings. But whatever the horrid things perpetrated at Experiment House, the school’s authorities merely indulge the culprits, drawing them out in long chats and treating them as “interesting psychological cases.” Further signs of the school’s deficiency include the fact that Bibles are “not encouraged” and the “Head” (headmaster, or principal) is a woman.

  The swamp of misguided progressivism that is Experiment House can only be drained with the help of Aslan, who at the end of The Silver Chair sends Jill, Eustace, and (briefly) Caspian back into our world with orders to thrash some of the worst bullies. Jill beats them with a switch, and Caspian and Eustace with the sides of their swords, raising a ruckus and driving the Head to hysterics. (Later, we’re informed with uncharacteristically leaden wit that this individual will rise to a station more commensurate with her incompetence: a seat in Parliament.) The scene appalls Goldthwaite. All Christians, he maintains, are bound to honor the ideal of pacifism, even if they can’t always strictly abide by it. “I cannot imagine,” he writes, “a betrayal of one’s faith more complete than this last picture of Christ at the playground, putting weapons into the hands of children.”

  Any child who has ever been bullied relishes scenarios in which schoolyard tyrants get their comeuppance; revenge is an ancient and satisfying narrative theme. It’s not, however, a particularly Christian one, and the beating delivered in the coda of The Silver Chair does seem gratuitous. It traffics in the sort of self-righteousness that Lewis usually makes a point of condemning elsewhere. Couldn’t Aslan have simply appeared before the bullies and terrified them into virtue with a single glance — he is God, after all — without asking our heroes to wallop a bunch of unarmed kids? Is hitting people really the best way to reform them? I suspect Lewis himself sensed how dicey the scene is; he becomes euphemistic when describing the thrashing itself, using the word “ply” instead of “beat” or “whip.” The whole episode has an air of bad faith and self-indulgence. Lewis gets the satisfaction of imagining his old enemies, the bloods, being scourged, but he excuses the tradition that gave them the power to persecute him in the first place. In this looking-glass world, progress and reform, not the hallowed institution of “bloodery,” have enabled sadists to run amok.

  Throughout the Chronicles, Lewis will often play an imaginative sorting game, hoarding everything good and admirable on the side of what’s familiar while pushing all vices toward what’s not. The Calormenes, the foreigners to the south, are given all the shameful excesses of civilization, and the Narnians in the north get to keep all the justice and virtue. Both nations have hereditary monarchies, but Calormen is ruled by tyrants while Narnia’s kings are born noble and true. The hierarchy of Calormen is manifestly unfair, permitting spoiled aristocrats to push everyone else around, while the social ladder of Narnia consists of everybody knowing his place and feeling perfectly comfortable in it.

  As the German psychologist Bruno Bettelheim pointed out in his most celebrated book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, such dichotomies are typical of traditional fairy tales. Bettelheim argued that the wicked stepmother figures in stories like Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella serve as stand-ins for troubling aspects of a child’s real mother. “Although Mother is most often the all-giving protector,” Bettelheim writes, “she can change into the cruel stepmother if she is so evil as to deny the child something he wants. Far from being a device used only in fairy tales, such a splitting up of one person into two to keep the good image uncontaminated occurs to many children as a solution to a relationship too difficult to manage or comprehend.”

  When Lewis wrote “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said” in 1956, he surely didn’t have this particular use of enchantment in mind. He would have hated Bettelheim’s Freudian analysis of the tales he loved so much. Nevertheless, in light of The Uses of Enchantment, it’s hard to ignore how well Calormen serves, unconsciously at least, as a way to “manage” all sorts of difficult relationships and situations. The evils of the British class system could be displaced onto a nation of swarthy foreigners while the romance and poetry of its chivalric past could be kept by the Narnians.

  Narnia is an idealized reimagining of a society toward which Lewis felt a deep aesthetic and spiritual affinity, the world of medieval Britain. But Narnia’s government is feudalism without serfs (Narnia has no discernible agriculture), a place where the epitome of civic virtue is to mind your own business unless Narnia itself is being threatened. By making the hereditary kings of Narnia human beings who rule over animals and semihuman creatures, Lewis could preserve a hierarchy that seems perfectly natural. A mole or a dwarf doesn’t mind being relegated at birth to a life of digging the way a human being would, because, of course, they “don’t look on it as work. They like digging.” When the citizens are different species, it’s easier to see caste as merely a matter of “each kind of creature joyfully living out their natural attitudes.” This left Lewis free to savor the romance of Arthurian-style aristocracy without countenancing the kind of underclass (the human kind) that makes any aristocracy viable. No wonder, then, that the half-bred dwarf Doctor Cornelius admonishes Caspian that Narnia “is not the land of men.”

  All this makes it tempting to call Lewis misanthropic, but he liked people well enough — as long as he believed they were a lot like him. He and his circle saw themselves as surrounded by a hostile world intent on destroying everything they valued. Perhaps this kept Lewis from recognizing that even as he condemned the pursuit of the “inner ring,” he was often hard at work constructing such rings and determining who would or would not be let in. Membership was based on a presumed uniformity of taste as well as a generally conservative outlook. “Authors whom he did not admire,” write Walter Hooper and Roger Lancelyn Green in their biography of Lewis, “such as James and Lawrence, he would dismiss as ‘not for us’ in conversation with literary friends.” There’s not much air between “not for us” and “not our kind,” the watch phrase of the snob and the bigot.

  But why did Lewis, who suffered so much misery under the reign of the Malvern bloods as a boy, wind up defending traditionalism as a man? Like his father, he was a creature of habit who feared change. He had seen his beloved countryside eroded by the modernization that many of his contemporaries regarded as an unalloyed good. He believed that modern art and literature were implacably set against faith and beauty, two qualities he cherished. And finally, in puzzling out this contradiction, it’s worth remembering that the most energetic defender of an inner ring is often the member whose own standing is a bit tenuous.

  Many of Lewis’s casual readers are surprised to learn that he wasn’t actually English, so entirely did he embody the role of shabby-genteel British gentleman. Descriptions of him make it sound as if Mole, from The Wind in the Willows (a favorite book of Lewis’s, one that he felt embodied the best of Britishness), had jumped off the page and taken a job as an Oxford don. When Lewis first arrived at the university, just before the First World War, he surely must have felt himself to be something of an outsider, the son of an undistinguished Belfast solicitor on scholarship among the wealthy and well-born British graduates of schools like Eton and Harrow. If Lewis rarely discussed the inevitable discomfort of this position, perhaps that was because the type of Englishman he sought to emulate put a high premium on a confident indifference.

  Nevertheless, whenever Lewis felt unsure of himself, his Irishness would come flooding back. In the two years after he completed his undergraduate education, his future as a professional scholar remained unclear. His domestic situation with Mrs. Moore and he
r daughter made relocating to another university town untenable, so his choices were limited. He applied unsuccessfully for a couple of fellowships in Philosophy, a subject that (with Classics, or Greats) was one of his original areas of study. When he took a position on the English faculty at Magdalen College, it was the best alternative he could get, and it meant accepting that he’d never become a professional philosopher, as he had once planned. By way of reconciling himself to this new course, he cited his Irish temperament. “I have come to think,” he wrote to his father, “that if I have the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy… . What is a tonic to the Saxon may be a debauch to us Celts.”

  To his Celtic blood (which was really more Welsh than Irish), Lewis attributed all the whimsy, mysticism, and gloom conventionally associated with that ethnicity. This he regarded ambivalently, as an inheritance from his moody father, a descendant of Welsh farmers. To his mind, his mother’s family, the Hamiltons, represented practicality, common sense, and a cool, ironic view of life; his mother earned a B.A. in mathematics from Queen’s College in Belfast, but her son, sometimes to his despair, never inherited her aptitude with numbers. Through his maternal grandmother he claimed descent from a Norman knight interred at Battle Abbey in Sussex — if not an Anglo-Saxon, then at the least a very English forebear. Jack complained that his paternal relatives and Celts in general were “sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical,” but when asked to temper his heavy breathing during a radio recording session, he responded, “Did you ever know an Irishman who didn’t puff and blow?”

  You can listen to a few audio clips of Lewis reading from his apologetics on the Web. No trace of a brogue — if he ever had one — remains in the deep, plummy intonations issuing from the speakers in my laptop as I write this. What I hear is a stately Oxbridge voice that rolls majestically onward, holding its vowels in the pockets at the back of the cheeks like a chipmunk guarding his hoard of nuts. I have no expertise in accents, but to my ears Lewis did a pretty good job of passing for English. Yet everything about himself that didn’t quite fit this persona, and many of the traits that would eventually lie closest to his heart, he would label “Irish” — so at the very center of his embodiment of tweedy, no-nonsense, old-fashioned Englishness lay a crumb of exception.

  There were other reasons why Lewis never felt entirely at home in Oxford. In his early years, he had to hide his relationship with Mrs. Moore. As recently as the late nineteenth century, the university had required celibacy of its fellows (who were originally required to be priests), and it remained fairly straitlaced. Until Minto was old enough to be presented as a plausible “mother,” the scandal of getting caught living with a married woman might have seriously damaged Lewis’s academic career. (Around the same time, the critic William Empson was famously sent down from Cambridge in disgrace because a servant discovered condoms in his room.)

  There was intellectual friction, too. The little crowd that Lewis gathered around him at Oxford (including Tolkien, also an odd duck by virtue of his Catholicism) he envisioned as a rearguard defense against an atheistic, progressive contingent he believed to be unofficially running things. Many of Lewis’s academic adversaries regarded him as the representative of an entrenched old regime, and when he and Tolkien succeeded in instating a new syllabus for the English faculty that excluded works published after 1830, they appeared to have a point. Even though Lewis won that battle, he never seemed able to settle into an image of himself as an insider.

  On top of this, his contempt for administration and politicking of any sort made Lewis unpopular among the rest of the faculty. Many of his colleagues considered the popular success of his Christian apologetics in print and on the radio to be vulgar. Others resented both his proselytizing and his opposition to any sort of modernization. Still others found his manner objectionable; he could be rude and overbearing in debate and scornful of college protocol and anyone who disagreed with him. Students flocked to his lectures, but they were not the ones who voted dons into professorships, and when Lewis campaigned to be made Chair of Poetry at Oxford in 1951, his peers elected someone else. (He would later accept a similar position at Cambridge.)

  No wonder, then, that politics was something of a bête noire for Lewis, an imponderable factor that bored and thwarted him and niggled at his secret insecurities. In Narnia, where biology replaces politics, things are much simpler. Only in The Last Battle does anyone — the ape Shift, who is in effect the Antichrist — aspire beyond his station. The beginning of politics is, in Narnia, the beginning of the end of the world.

  Of course, it’s absurd to speak of the “politics” of Narnia. These are children’s fantasies, not designed to address such adult concerns as class systems, nationalism, and economics. They take place in a dream world where talking beavers bake marmalade rolls despite having no surplus goods to trade for oranges and sugar, commodities that can only have been imported from a warmer land. Who raises and slaughters the pigs to make the bacon and sausages gobbled up at almost every Narnian meal? Who grows the wheat and grinds the flour for bread, and who imports the tea and coffee? Even Tolkien, who labored for countless hours to make Middle-earth a consistent, coherent alternative world, never made it entirely plausible economically, and he thought Narnia a disgracefully slapdash creation.

  But if Narnia, as Lewis often indicated, exists in the same imaginative realm as fairy tales, then like fairy tales it surely speaks of dreams, archetypes, and drives, the timeless leviathans that swim deep inside our psyches. Here, too, the material that Lewis brought to the task was neither as wholesome nor as dull as some would like to believe.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Arrows of Desire

  According to Bruno Bettelheim, the most important function of fairy tales is unconscious; they echo and give form to the fears, urges, and enigmas already lurking in a child’s mind. Bettelheim thought the stories both expressed and brought coherence to children’s inner lives and were essential aids in the challenge of growing up. When adults worry about exposing children to the monsters and violence in fairy tales, he cautioned, they underestimate the interior tumult with which children are already grappling. “Fairy tale imagery,” wrote Bettelheim, “helps children better than anything else in their most difficult and yet most important and satisfying task: achieving a more mature consciousness to civilize the chaotic pressures of their unconscious.”

  Lewis would have agreed with Bettelheim that children can handle the scarier aspects of fairy tales, but that’s about it. Lewis detested Freudianism and satirized it in an early prose allegory entitled The Pilgrim’s Regress. He found Freud’s theories reductive, arguing that if all artistic imagery can be boiled down to nothing more than symbols of infantile sexuality, then “our literary judgments are in ruins.” It was not that he detected no sexual fantasies in art, but rather that there was so much else there as well that sex struck him as the least of it. Besides, Freudian criticism often engages in what Lewis rejected as “the personal heresy,” the study of texts as glosses on the minds of their creators. “The poet,” Lewis wrote, “is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points.” This riposte, of course, sidesteps the question of what the poet communicates about himself — intentionally or otherwise — by his style of pointing and by the things he chooses to point at.

  Psychoanalysis frequently assumes that a patient who passionately denies a motive or an anxiety is really concealing the presence of that very feeling. (This is the original clinical meaning of “denial.”) As a therapeutic tool, this concept leaves a lot to be desired — as almost anyone would conclude from reading Freud’s case histories. I first read Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, better known as Dora, in an undergraduate course on psychoanalytic criticism. Our young instructor wanted to move quickly past the basic Freudian principles so that he could get to the work of Jacques Lacan, then a relatively new and fashionable theorist. With unconcealed impatience, he let seve
ral of us (all women) vent our outrage over Freud’s treatment of his patient, poor Dora, a young Viennese woman whose father was sleeping with the wife of a friend and who, his daughter suspected, was tacitly encouraging the friend to sleep with Dora by way of compensation. Freud validated Dora’s suspicions (her father, not surprisingly, denied trading his daughter for his friend’s wife), but he also betrayed her by insisting that, contrary to her protests, she really was in love her father’s friend. It’s always a good idea to bear in mind that Freud’s theories usually failed at their primary, stated purpose: helping his patients.

  But whatever Freud’s shortcomings as a therapist (and they were considerable), he had remarkable acumen about the workings of the human mind. We do sometimes deny most fiercely what we covertly desire, and erect a rational skepticism against what we secretly fear to be the truth. A. N. Wilson believes that Lewis’s animus toward Freudianism had personal as well as scholarly roots. Lewis was, Wilson writes, “obsessed not only by his father, but also by the possibility that his life could be interpreted in a purely Freudian way.” This fear was well founded; Freudian psychology became a pervasive intellectual fad during his lifetime, and hardly anyone in educated circles escaped the occasional armchair analysis by amateur Freudians among their friends and colleagues. Lewis’s religious conversion followed on the heels of his father’s death and a flare-up of his guilt over having treated Albert so “abominably.” Since Freud had argued that religious faith arises in part from a “longing for a father,” the obvious conclusion in Lewis’s case was that he converted to soothe his grief and loss.