Laura Miller

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

  It was to help readers grasp this convoluted system that Lewis wrote The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. He conceived of this long essay (or short book) as a Baedeker to the past, intended for readers who, like cultivated travelers, prefer to visit a foreign country with some sense of what “those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives.” Ideally, reading is a kind of collaboration: the more a reader brings to the book, the more he has to contribute to the experience and the richer it will be. In another text with similar ambitions, A Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis remarked that while Milton’s poetry is often compared to organ music, “it might be more helpful to regard the reader as the organ and Milton as the organist. It is on us he plays, if we will let him.” No musician can play well on a faulty or inadequate instrument; the ideal reader responds to the work on every octave it sounds.

  It’s difficult for moderns like ourselves, steeped in the Romantic veneration of individuality, to think of the closed, structured medieval universe and the period’s slavish veneration of “authorities” as anything but conformist and oppressive. But, as the writers of sonnets often claim, artistic constraints can be paradoxically liberating. In this case, Lewis argued, they steered writers away from pretense and hot air. When you choose from a list of presanctioned subjects and themes, you need not justify the material as important or worthy; it supplies all the required weight on its own. As a result, the best authors of the Middle Ages wrote humbly, clearly, gracefully, unself-consciously. “The glory of the best medieval work,” Lewis wrote, “often consists precisely in the fact that we see through it; it is a pure transparency.”

  Not coincidentally, this sounds very much like Neil Gaiman’s description of what he likes about Lewis’s prose: “It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it makes sense,” he told me. “It doesn’t do anything but what it’s meant to do.” When I finally found my way to Lewis’s criticism, I discovered that it had the same clarity as his children’s fiction (a genre in which lucid writing is required). Even Lewis’s great detractor, Philip Pullman, aspires to the same, very English, ideal of a transparent style: novelists like James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov, he told me, write books in which “a lot of the interest and sometimes all the interest, is in the surface of the prose [but] my main interest is in the things that you can see through the window of the prose.”

  The great beauty Lewis found in medieval literature lies in its effortless integration of precise, modest detail — the “homely,” as he and Arthur Greeves called it — with the vast, comprehensive grandeur of the medieval cosmos. In such a scheme, every small thing — the fall of a sparrow, as Hamlet put it — plays its own, essential part. To demonstrate this, Lewis liked to pluck plainspoken, endearing little touches of realism out of old poems and hold them up to the light for his readers’ admiration. One of his favorites was the moment in Chaucer’s “Summoner’s Tale” when the itinerant Friar John pauses to “droof awey the cat” before sitting down on a patron’s bench. Lewis was also fond of the passage in Layamon’s Brut, a Middle English poem about the history of Britain, in which the fifteen-year-old Arthur is told by a party of Britons first that his father is dead and then that he must assume the throne; they observe the prince sitting “full still; / one while he was wan, and in hue exceeding pale; one while he was red.”

  To this list, he might also have added, from the famous scene of the Redcrosse Knight’s battle with the dragon in The Faerie Queene, the poor grass “bruised” by the monster’s huge, hot body and the startlingly bourgeois observation that the blood gushing from its wound was forceful enough to “drive a water-mill.” This sort of “vividness,” as Lewis called it, the deployment of the telling, concrete detail, has in our time become “every novelist’s stock-in-trade.” The medievals, however, more or less invented it, and “it was long before they had many successors.”

  Lewis himself embraced the same technique, and it served him particularly well in the writing of the most medieval of the Chronicles, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace Scrubb, blundering into the dying dragon’s valley, finds the floor “grassy though strewn with rocks, and here and there Eustace saw black burnt patches like those you see on the side of a railway embankment in a dry summer.” It is an image that any child of Lewis’s time would have instantly recognized, and an observation particularly well suited to Eustace, who knows so much more about modern machinery than he does about dragons. (Like steam engines, dragons have flaming innards.) The story is about to move toward a mystical transformation, but those black, burnt patches keep its feet on the ground, rooted in the idle perceptions of a schoolboy waiting for a train.

  Of all the Chronicles, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader most resembles a traditional medieval romance. It tells the story of a journey, specifically the quest by Prince Caspian to find the seven lost lords of Narnia, friends of his father’s who were sent off on an exploratory mission by the usurper Miraz. In this book, the visitors from our world — Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace — have mostly just come along for the ride. Like Lancelot or Gawain, the Narnian voyagers are motivated by worldly honor and a thirst for adventure, but there is a spiritual aspect to their quest, too, for at least one member of the party; he is out to fulfill a prophecy uttered over his cradle and intends to present himself on God’s doorstep.

  In Reepicheep, the talking mouse who is, ironically, a “parfait knight” to rival Galahad himself, Lewis manages to tweak the tradition of the chivalric paragon and to celebrate it at the same time. The mouse is both comical and admirable, his gallantry and unfailing physical courage (“no one had ever known Reepicheep to be afraid of anything”) all the more impressive in someone so small:

  “While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise and Peepiceek will be the head of the talking mice in Narnia.”

  Perhaps the most obvious literary ancestor of the third Chronicle is The Voyage of St. Brendan the Navigator, the story of a semi-legendary Irish monk who, with a crew of sixty pilgrims, set sail across the Atlantic in search of the Land of Delight. This fabled paradise of eternal life, perpetual summer, and bountiful food and drink is in turn derived from the old Celtic legend of the Isle of the Blessed or Tír na nÓg. Brendan was an actual sixth-century Christian churchman, but his adventures were imaginary and they carried him into territory that is essentially pre-Christian. So, too, the Dawn Treader arrives at last at the rim of the earth (Narnia’s world is flat) and partakes of pagan allegory. The sweet seawater that Caspian drinks, tasting of “light more than anything else,” is an echo of the liquid light drunk by the soul of Pompey when he reaches the outermost layer of the cosmos, the realm of pure aether, in the first-century epic of Lucan, Pharsalia.

  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a long, glittering chain of such citations and borrowings, beginning with a premise derived from Homer and Dante as well as Saint Brendan. The deathly pool that turns whatever touches it to gold is a variation on the Midas fable. There is Jesus’s expulsion of the moneylenders from the temple in the overturning of Governor Gumpas’s paperwork-laden table on Doorn. The albatross from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner appears in the bird that leads the Dawn Treader away from the Dark Island; Saint Brendan again in the encounter with the sea serpent; The Tempest in the magician who oversees the thick-witted Dufflepuds and regrets the need to rule them with “rough magic;” and, last but not least, the conversion of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus in Eustace’s ordeal as a dragon. That was the parallel, Neil Gaiman reports, that first alerted him to the Chronicles’ Christian subtext.

  Lewis even wove bits of his own critical work into the story. The horrors of the Dark Island (where dreams, “not daydreams — dreams,” come true), for example, touch on someth
ing Lewis was writing at the same time, in a very different context, about the disturbing nature of nighttime dreams. In OHEL, he remarked that it is “at once so true and so misleading” for people to call Spenser’s poetry “dream-like.” Although The Faerie Queene has none of the quality of “waking reverie” we usually associate with the term, the poem’s vivid, often gory imagery has “a violent clarity and precision which we often find in actual dreams.” Ramandu, the convalescent star the companions meet near the end of their journey, even offers an epigrammatic version of medieval cosmology when Eustace informs him that “in our world … a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your world,” Ramandu replies, “that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”

  Do these appropriations, these borrowings and quotations, diminish The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in some way, make it less bewitching because we can track down the sources of its shining wonders? Do the fragments of Christian mysticism, classical cosmology, and Celtic legend rattle against one another gratingly, as Tolkien would probably have protested had he bothered to read the book? No writer can entirely avoid borrowing, of course — Tolkien himself put some of Tír na nÓg into Valinor, the paradise of the elves in the Uttermost West of Middle-earth. Tolkien, however, took more care to transfigure those origins, anodizing them in the solvent of his own mythos; only then would his work meet his own standard of true sub-creation.

  If Lewis meant to do the same thing with Narnia, he obviously failed. But why assume that Tolkien was his model, or ought to have been? Perhaps he was no more interested in sub-creation than he was in the formal innovations of Woolf or Joyce. Why should he cast aside all the books he’d read and loved when he sat down to write — why not summon them instead? That’s what Chaucer and Malory and Spencer did. “I doubt if they would have understood our demand for originality or value those works in their own age which were original any the more on that account,” Lewis wrote of the medievals in The Discarded Image. “The originality which we regard as a sign of wealth might have seemed to them a confession of poverty. Why make things for oneself like the lonely Robinson Crusoe when there is riches all about you to be had for the taking?”

  This choice was, in part, a matter of faith; if all myths were shadows of the one true myth, then, in a sense, they were all telling the same story. The really powerful myths had a fundamental unity that transcended the superficial dissonances that so irritated Tolkien. Still, it was not always possible to make everything fit properly with everything else, a dilemma medieval scholars regularly faced. The lumber room of Lewis’s imagination contained a vast collection of ideas, images, and stories constructed according to different systems, rather like a pile of building materials cut to both metric and Old English measurements. And in addition to all that, there remained some odds and ends that defied systemizing entirely. Some of these were items he’d stashed away before his conversion, things belonging to his old “secret, imaginative life,” treasures he wished to keep even though they couldn’t be reconciled to the new regime. Their recalcitrance was part of their charm, the really wonderful thing about them. They would find a place in Narnia, too.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The Third Road

  There is an old Scottish border ballad called “Thomas the Rhymer.” The eponymous Thomas is lying under a tree when a lady in a green gown approaches. Astonished by her beauty, he kneels, hailing her as the “Queen of Heaven,” whereupon she corrects him, explaining that she is instead the queen of “fair Elf-land.” She carries Thomas off to her splendid court, where he obeys her injunction not to speak to anyone. When he returns to his “ain countrie,” he discovers that seven years have passed, and in some iterations of the story Thomas acquires the gift of prophecy. One thing common to nearly every version is a moment in which the lady points to a narrow road “beset wi thorns and briers,” naming it as the path to righteousness, and then to a broad, lily-lined road that is the path to wickedness — shades of The Pilgrim’s Progress. But then the queen shows Thomas a third way, a “bonny road,” twisting through fern-covered hillsides. That is the road to “fair Elfland.”

  By Lewis’s own admission, the medieval model of the universe, though resplendently harmonious, was “a shade too ordered.” Although there is something very human about the desire to inhabit such a comprehensible system, there’s also something very human in finding it suffocating from the inside. “For all its vast spaces,” Lewis wrote of the model in The Discarded Image, “it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered byways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?”

  The first time I read those lines, a few years after I wrote my first piece about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I experienced a jolt of recognition. This had been exactly my own complaint about Narnia as a teenager, after Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds had clued me in to Lewis’s Christian agenda. The road that had once seemed to lead to free and open country had in reality doubled back to church. Now I was trying to explain why my damning adolescent assessment of the Chronicles wasn’t entirely sufficient, either. As an adult, I’d discovered that I could follow Lewis pretty far without feeling obliged to return to Christianity, and that the old sensation of freedom, of wildness in Narnia, remained. Where did it come from?

  The books I’d read about Lewis hadn’t helped much; in fact, they only made me doubt my own response. Today’s Lewis scholars might, as Walter Hooper does, caution others against succumbing to “the mistaken notion that if you have found a biblical or literary ‘influence’ behind a work there is no more to be said about it,” but this is in fact exactly what nearly all of them do. If glosses on scripture are really all there is to Narnia, I don’t believe I could have ever mistaken it for a glimpse of far horizons. The true believers’ Narnia is monolithic, black-and-white, closed. It has no byways or twilight. There is no out-of-doors.

  Now, at last, I had found Lewis himself writing wistfully of a third road, like the bonny road that leads to Elfland, which is also Fairyland or Faerie, as the place was known of old. A better name for it now might be the Otherworld, since the word “fairy” has, in the last 150 years, become tainted. Originally, a fairy was neither an animate Barbie doll with wings nor an adorable urchin wearing a petunia for a dress, but a creature belonging to one of many supernatural species in northwestern European folklore. Some were beautiful, some were ugly, some common, some rare. Many looked like human beings, others did not, and while some fairies were indeed small, others were larger than men, and still others could be big or small, depending on how they felt at the moment. The fairies in the folktales of the British Isles are most often the same size as human beings; in fact, some of them may once have been human beings. Specifically, they may be the dead, or people thought to be dead who perhaps aren’t after all. Vagueness is their brief.

  Lewis devotes an entire chapter to these creatures in The Discarded Image, calling them Longaevi after the pagan author Martianus Capella, who with that word encompassed those beings who “haunt the woods, glades, and groves, and lakes and springs and brooks; whose names are Pans, Fauns, Satyrs, Silvans, Nymphs,” a list that includes almost all of the anthropomorphic population of Narnia. The importance of what I will have to call the fairies (Longaevi is a bit much) lies, as Lewis wrote, in their unimportance. “They are marginal, fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model does not assign, as it were, an official status. Herein lies their imaginative value… . They intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory.”

  Tolkien, too, was fascinated by the notion of Faerie and its inhabitants. These creatures, he wrote, are “not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet. Even upon the borders of Faerie we encounter them only at some chance crossing of the ways.” The third road pointed out to Thomas the Rhymer, the road to Elfland (“elf”
was one synonym for “fairy”), leads neither to heaven nor to hell, and it promises a place where the relentless moral weighing that Christianity imposes upon every action in this world simply doesn’t apply. It is not a safe place — to the contrary, the traditional beliefs hold that the less a human being has to do with fairies and their business, the better — but then the real out-of-doors has never been very safe, either.

  Lewis, as an Irishman, knew fairies more intimately than his friend. The housemaid who helped raise him and his brother had seen them near Dundrum in county Down, where their aunt lived, and as a man Lewis had vacationed in a bungalow on Ireland’s northern coast which the locals wouldn’t approach after dark. It was haunted, but according to Lewis, the ghost didn’t frighten the neighbors nearly as much as “the Good People” also known to frequent the spot: “They are greatly dreaded,” he reported, “and called ‘the good people’ not because they are good but in order to propitiate them.” In Celtic legend, they are known as the Sidhe (Gaelic for “peace,” another placating euphemism), local spirits who fiercely guard their favored sites and are sometimes said to be descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a mythical race of gods and heroes who were expelled from Ireland by human invaders before relocating to the Otherworld.