Laura Miller

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

  Freudian literary criticism, especially the kind written during Lewis’s lifetime, can be crude and simplistic. In the myopic attention it pays to the drives and fears of the individual, it often leaves out the social, cultural, and intellectual elements of artworks that are, after all, meant to be acts of communication with other human beings. But fairy tales — unlike, say, comedies of manners or epic poems or historical dramas — tend not to have much social, cultural, or intellectual content. They transpire in a dream landscape full of primal forces and totemlike people and objects: wolves, stepmothers, houses in the woods. This place, sometimes known as Faerie, is also called “The Perilous Realm,” and the stories set there are, as Tolkien once put it, “plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability.” If any type of narrative invites Freudian interpretation, it is the fairy tale. And “fairy tales” are what Lewis said he wanted to write when he began the Chronicles. Quite possibly he assumed that psychoanalytic critics would take no interest in the sexless, critically ignored realm of children’s fiction. But it is exactly the contexts in which our imaginations feel most relaxed and free — in dreams and in play — that most welcome the return of the repressed.

  A few of the Chronicles’ characters — the White Witch, Prince Rilian, and Aslan himself — do have the archetypal resonance of fairy-tale figures. Others are more psychologically realistic, like the Pevensies, Caspian, and the other children from our world. Lewis’s familiarity with medieval allegory surely contributed to making the landscape itself psychological; Narnia is, more than anything else, the domain of his own imagination. When Lucy first discovers it, it has been frozen for years, dominated by an implacable female tyrant. With the arrival of Aslan comes the thaw, and the joyous restoration of all the countryside’s natural beauty; this is the story of Lewis’s conversion embodied in the land, and also the voice of his own hidden desire for liberation, written at a time when Janie Moore had become utterly impossible and was on the brink of requiring institutionalization.

  But Narnia has its own unconscious, the place to which all its less acceptable desires are exiled, and that place is Calormen. Alan Jacobs is right when he observes that Lewis drew upon a “readymade source of ‘Oriental’ imagery” in creating Calormen. Lewis was far from the first Western writer to find it convenient to believe that the East had a concession on sophisticated depravity — or to regard that depravity with a thinly concealed fascination. In the 1920s and ’30s, British writers indulged in a penchant for decadent Oriental pageantry, especially on the stage. Lord Dunsany, a pioneer of the fantasy genre and an author much admired by Tolkien, found early success writing stories and short plays about implacable gods and cruel potentates in curled slippers for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

  Lewis saw one such play, a drama in verse called Hassan, by James Elroy Flecker, performed by the Oxford University Dramatic Society in 1931. Forgotten today, Hassan is an exercise in bejeweled cynicism and languid savagery, in which the Caliph of Baghdad offers two illicit lovers a terrible choice: either separate forever or enjoy one day of perfect love to be followed by death in “merciless torment.” (They choose the latter, and their ordeal takes place offstage, after enough paraphernalia has been paraded across the stage to fuel the audience’s worst imaginings.) Lewis saw the play with his brother, and Warnie, presumably sickened by the implied torture, walked out. Lewis compelled himself to stay to the end, writing to Arthur Greeves that he considered it “almost a duty for one afflicted in my way to remain … the same principle on which one trains a puppy to be clean — ‘rub their noses in it.’”

  Lewis was referring to his own sadomasochistic inclinations — specifically, his interest in erotic flagellation. A fetish for whipping or birching is sometimes referred to as “the English vice,” supposedly encouraged by the British public school system and its lavish, ritualized use of corporal punishment. When they were in their late teens, Lewis and Greeves had confided in each other about their sexuality; Arthur admitted to being attracted to other men and Lewis to fantasizing about “disciplining” shapely young women. As an Oxford freshman, he once got very drunk at a party and loudly offered to pay a shilling a lash to whoever would submit to a whipping at his hands. Later, Lewis came to view such tastes as antithetical to his religion, and by the time he saw Hassan performed in Oxford, he was apparently striving to eradicate them.

  At some point, Greeves went back though Lewis’s old letters, burning some and in others crossing out the passages that refer to his friend’s enthusiasm for “the rod.” He was most likely worried that their correspondence would be published someday, and that the younger Lewis’s wayward lusts might prove embarrassing. To his credit, Walter Hooper (briefly Lewis’s secretary and currently a trustee of Lewis’s literary estate, as well as a Roman Catholic priest) restored those passages in editing his mammoth, three-volume Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. It can’t be pleasant to learn of the unorthodox sexual predilections of an idolized religious mentor, but it probably helps that Hooper has chosen to regard the adult Lewis as having been cured of these “teenage lusts of the flesh” through the agency of faith.

  Greeves no doubt knew better; few traits are more ineradicable than unwelcome sexual fantasies and desires, as the more candid participants in the Christian “ex-gay” movement have admitted. Behavior, on the other hand, can be controlled, and after his conversion Lewis probably put away any hopes of acting on his fantasies. (Although I like to think that in his marriage he found a willing partner for what strike me as fairly commonplace and innocuous bedroom games.) Repression tends to intensify sexual impulses, however, and as time went by, Lewis’s must have come to seem monstrous to him; he probably thought them much worse than they really were. It took the extravagant, homicidal cruelties of Hassan to exceed his own “affliction”; only Flecker’s wicked Caliph of Baghdad could go far enough to revolt him.

  Imaginary (or real) atrocities set in the Near and Far East have for a long time both horrified and comforted Westerners who prefer to disassociate themselves from their own worst instincts. In 1932, Lewis wrote to his brother:

  When I have tried to rule out all my prejudices I still can’t help thinking that the Christian world is (partially) “saved” in a sense in which the East is not. We may be hypocrites, but there is a sort of unashamed and reigning iniquity of temple prostitution and infanticide and torture and political corruption and obscene imagination in the East, which really does suggest that they are off the rails — that some necessary part of the human machine, restored to us, is still missing with them.

  Europe’s past, of course, was just as full of spectacular and ingenious sadism, committed by everyone from the ancient leaders of Greece and Rome to devout churchmen to the kings and queens of Lewis’s beloved Britain. The people of Shakespeare’s time routinely saw criminals, religious dissidents, and enemies of the crown publicly tortured, dismembered, and killed in the streets of London. On a more modest scale, if we are to judge from the diaries of Samuel Pepys, respectable bourgeois citizens customarily beat their misbehaving servants without a second thought. Swarthy people in turbans and harem pants by no means held a monopoly on this sort of abuse, but it was convenient — and also exciting — to think of them that way, especially when the imagined victims were young, pretty, and helpless.

  Lewis’s own life and fiction abound in less exaggerated and lurid scenarios of dominance and submission. From his obedience to the exacting orders of Mrs. Moore, to Prince Rilian “tied to the apron strings” of the Green Witch, to Lewis’s own daily efforts to humble himself before God, he clearly found this dynamic fascinating, whether for ill or good. Most of these situations, real and imaginary, hinge on the abasement of a man before a woman; Rabadash’s promise that he will drag Susan to his palace by her hair is one of the rare exceptions. It’s even possible that Lewis saw his servitude to Mrs. Moore as a kind of penance for his own sadistic impulses.

  But as Freud observed of sadomasochism in Three Es
says on the Theory of Sexuality, “the most remarkable feature of this perversion is that its active and passive forms are habitually found together in the same individual … a sadist is always at the same time a masochist, although the active or the passive aspect of the perversion may be the more strongly developed in him and may represent his predominant sexual activity.” Lewis admitted in one of his letters to Greeves that he had often fancied himself in the victim’s role when he was young, but that he came to consider it “a feeling more proper to the other sex.”

  The Freudian view of human nature, which would regard a man like Lewis as falling short of some ideal masculinity, is woefully limited. Freud’s preoccupation with individuals and their internal conflicts prevented him from seeing that relationships consist of more than the fantasies people have about each other, that a relationship between two people is really a kind of entity in itself. Freud interpreted both sadism and masochism as malformations of a normally “aggressive” libido; sadists exaggerate the innate aggressiveness in the sexual drive, and masochists turn the aggressiveness on themselves. For Freud, desire was like an arrow, either straight or bent, correctly aimed or overshot, striking the appropriate target or circling back like a boomerang toward the person who fired it.

  But surely what the sadist or masochist craves most is a particular dynamic, generated by a theatrical imbalance of power, in which one player towers above, possessed of all the strength, glory, and authority, while the other cringes below in utter humility and dependence. The imbalance creates a charged emotional field; who plays what role matters less than the voluptuous contrast between them. Often no real violence and very little pain are involved. The sadomasochistic impulse seems to arise not from the urge to behave aggressively, but from the desire to be suspended in an ever-unfolding continuum of overwhelming feeling. And this, in turn, throws new light on the emphasis Lewis put on his submissiveness before God; for here was a man for whom piety and prostration were much the same thing.

  I was recently holding forth on this topic to a friend, describing how Lewis chose to interpret interpersonal hardships — unfair or delusional scolding from Mrs. Moore, the felt obligation to respond to hundreds of letters from readers, and so on — as trials imposed on him by a God who demanded complete submission to his will. After a pause, my friend asked, “But isn’t that the same as almost everyone’s relationship to God? It’s about bowing as low as you can before an incomprehensible power.”

  His observation stopped me in my tracks. Surely not every believer is a closet sadomasochist? On the other hand, perhaps sadomasochism is not as exotic as it’s made out to be. Perhaps its devotees are merely people whose affinity for a particular dynamic takes a sexual rather than spiritual form? It only seems outrageously transgressive because we don’t recognize its meaning as theater and ritual. The church where I fidgeted through countless Sunday Masses as a girl had an unsettlingly lifelike crucifix hanging over the altar. Whenever I got bored enough to study it, I saw the tortured body of a man, swooning in agony, blood dripping from his brow, hands, feet, and side. What would someone with no prior knowledge of Christianity conclude upon walking into that god’s temple?

  Religions have been known to demand great suffering from their adherents, ordeals ranging from fasting and other forms of self- denial to self-flagellation and hair shirts to outright martyrdom. Remove the overt sexuality and the paraphernalia from a sadomasochistic scene, and the emotional center of helplessness and dependency isn’t so very different from the intense bond between parent and child or between a god and his worshipper. Perhaps all of these are facets of something universal that I, too, can recognize. It’s the desire to be carried away by something greater than ourselves — a love affair, a group, a movement, a nation, a faith. Or even a book.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Other Way In

  During my freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley, I took a course called Rhetoric 1A. I sat in a small classroom with about twenty other undergraduates clutching beat-up copies of Albert Camus’s The Fall and listened to a stout, cranky young man in a grubby T-shirt and a Yankees cap explain to us that we needed to learn a whole new way of reading. In high school, teachers were satisfied if we could point out that The Fall contains several scenes involving water or metaphors of water, which symbolized oblivion. But when we tentatively offered this sort of observation, the stout young man would sigh, and say, “OK, but what is it doing there?” At times, our obtuseness reduced him to simply repeating that same question over and over.

  Even today, I’m sometimes not entirely sure that I know what he meant by this question. Most often, I think that he was telling us to look at the components of Camus’s fiction and ask ourselves what strategy lay behind each choice the author made. The green light at the end of the pier in The Great Gatsby, for example, doesn’t just stand for the doomed hopes and fantasies of the title character; it also marks Fitzgerald’s novel as the kind of story that works through romantic symbols. A satirical novel written about a character like Jay Gatsby would never use such a motif, not when its intention would be to cast the bootlegger as a poseur and his dreams as ludicrous or deluded. The swoony, aching, soft-focus quality of the green light would be incompatible with the funny, often cruel specificity of satire.

  But perhaps that’s not what the stout young man was trying (and largely failing) to communicate to me and my fellow undergraduates. One day in Rhetoric 1a, feeling especially exasperated by the impasse, I asked him if he meant, “What the heck is that doing there?” — the sort of question you’d ask if you tripped over a garden rake in the corridor of a high-rise office building. I was being flippant, and he was not amused, but lately my interpretation seems more pertinent than not. It’s a question worth asking, not just about the water imagery in The Fall, but also about The Fall itself. Why is this book here — in my hands, opened before my eyes? Why was it written to begin with and why was it printed, bound, and sold? Why am I reading it? Why read?

  This is an immaterial question for most academic critics. However iconoclastic their approach to great books (or to the very idea of great books), however intently they seek to “interrogate” or “dismantle” the ideologies that imbue those books, for the English professor, books themselves are always a given, as the salt mine is for the salt miner. The common or recreational reader, on the other hand, has different questions flitting at the periphery of her mind: Why read this book? Why read any books at all?

  A satisfactory answer is apparently hard to come by. Many, many people don’t even bother to read; movies and television are easier and usually more fun, and athletics or spending time with friends and family are more healthful. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published a report, “Reading at Risk,” indicating that less than half of adult Americans read literature in their leisure time. (Since the survey defined “literature” as “any novels, short stories, plays or poetry,” leaving out memoirs, histories, and other forms of literary nonfiction — such as this book — we’ll have to assume the percentage is on the low side.) The results, the report maintained, “show the declining importance of literature to our populace.”

  If these ex-readers wanted it, they could find plenty of intellectual justification for their abandonment of books at the average university English department. Not long after I entered college, academic thinking underwent a series of transformations. The traditional, reverential study of canonical literature that prevailed in Lewis’s day, and the revolution-mongering of the 1960s and 1970s that supplanted it, gave way to poststructuralist and postmodern theory. Books that past generations regarded as eternal monuments of genius were dragged into the courts of theory and indicted for their ideological inadequacies. Their authors’ personal lives and political beliefs served as evidence against them. Racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia lurked everywhere, often in disguises that required expert decoding. If you wanted to explain why the world proved so resistant to the utopian designs of
a fading radicalism — and that’s exactly what many academics, having seen such dreams die, wanted to do — you could point to the poisonous bias embedded in even the most celebrated pillars of our culture.

  For academics, seeing literature’s former gods brought low doesn’t constitute much of a dilemma — the salt miner keeps going to the mine every day whether or not he likes salt; that’s his job. The common reader has different prerogatives. In a few unhappy cases, however, both readers are forced to exist side by side in the same person. In his academic satire, The Handmaid of Desire, the novelist John L’Heureux, who teaches creative writing at Stanford University, describes an English department under siege by a young firebrand professor who wants to turn it into a department of Theory and Discourse. But the firebrand has a secret stashed in a locked cabinet — a copy of Jane Austen’s Emma. His professional reputation depends on hiding this forbidden passion from his colleagues; his own discipline, his livelihood, is dedicated to proving that the pleasures of old-fashioned novels are invidious, regressive, illusory.

  The honest, educated reader, when tackling the towering literary works of the past, now faces a different, though no less precarious task: how to acknowledge an author’s darker side without losing the ability to enjoy and value the book. Prejudice is repellent, but if we were to purge our shelves of all the great books tainted by one vile idea or another, we’d have nothing left to read — or at least nothing but the new and blandly virtuous. For the stone-cold truth is that Virginia Woolf was an awful snob, and Milton was a male chauvinist. The work of both authors can be difficult to read, but also immeasurably rewarding. Once upon a time, when people believed encounters with great art were morally uplifting, it was easier to summon the extra bit of initiative required to give the classics a try, and literature professors were expected to encourage them. Today, scholars are more likely to tell readers about the pernicious influence of the great books they used to revere.