that radical social evil would not be eradicated with Hitler’s defeat. The formal problem, however, is that a bit of realism begets the expectation of total realism, and so readers accustomed to novels will naturally look askance at Merlin’s return and the survival of the severed head, while they will accept the generic consistency of the floating islands in
Perelandra. Even if Lewis had deleted these effects from the third book, however, he would have had to substitute other supernatural manifestations in order to be consistent not only with the pattern of the first two books but also, and more important, with his
religious conviction of the immanence of the supernatural in everyday life. Viewing the
book as a fairy tale, Lewis felt, would allow the reader sufficient suspension of disbelief to become involved with the characters. Nevertheless, the reader would still face, as in all of 165
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Lewis’s other works, the challenge of accepting or rejecting Lewis’s position on God,
nature, and humanity.
The Chronicles of Narnia
Lewis actually began the first book of the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in 1939, when four children, inspiration for the Pevensie children in the stories, were evacuated to his home at the start of the war. Returning ten years and many books
later to the idea of writing for children, Lewis found the fictional form perhaps best suited to his genius. These tales of ordinary boys and girls transported to another world allowed Lewis to relive in some sense the childhood idyll at Little Lea that had been cut short by his mother’s death; moreover, they let him put directly into prose the fantastic images—fauns, castles, golden lions—that came to him, without his having to adapt them, as he had in the Space Trilogy, to the narrower tastes of adult readers. The fairy-tale form restricted him to simpler vocabulary and syntax, as well as to a more exclusively narrative and descriptive mode, but these restrictions freed him to do what he did best in fiction: dialogue, action narrative, and vivid description of select detail. More than anything else, however, the form let him depict given characters as essentially good or evil, though careful readers will observe that these qualities are consistently dramatized in action, not merely posited by authorial fiat. One of the many virtues of these stories is that appearance never defines character; the reader likes or dislikes persons or animals in these books only when he has come to know them.
The seven books traverse some sixty years of English time, roughly between 1895 and
1955, and more than one thousand years of time in Narnia, a land that is the home of
Aslan, the Golden Lion, as well as talking animals, dwarves, fauns, satyrs, witches, men and women, boys and girls. The chronicle begins with The Magician’s Nephew (the sequence of publication differs from the internal chronology of the series), in which young Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer magically enter Narnia at the time of its creation by
Aslan. Unfortunately, the curious Digory inadvertently breaks the spell that has bound
Jadis, the White Witch, who becomes the main enemy of the Narnians.
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, almost fifty English years have passed, but an untold number in Narnia. The visitors are now the four Pevensie children, who enter
Narnia through a magical wardrobe in the spacious country home of an old friend of their parents—Professor Digory Kirke. They find a cold world in terror of the Witch. The children eventually join those who are still rebelling against her, and their faith is rewarded when Aslan returns. His conquest is not complete, however, until he has been ritually murdered by the Witch, only to be reborn in far greater splendor. The four children are
crowned kings and queens of Narnia.
The Horse and His Boy occurs during the reign of Peter Pevensie as High King of Narnia. It concerns Shasta, a boy of neighboring Calormen, who through various adventures is revealed to be the true prince of Archenland, another Narnian neighbor. The fourth 166
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part of the chronicle, Prince Caspian, takes place a thousand years forward in Narnian time, but only two or three years after the adventure through the wardrobe. The four children are transported to Narnia from a railway bench, only to find all record of their reign obliterated by time and by the purposeful lies told by invaders. The children’s arrival, however, coincides with another coming of Aslan, who, aided by an alliance of all the
creatures of Narnia, restores to the throne the true heir, Caspian. He is still king of Narnia when the fifth adventure, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, occurs. This time, the two younger Pevensies, Edmund and Lucy, accompanied by a recalcitrant friend, Eustace
Scrubb, reenter Narnia to help Caspian sail the farthest seas to find seven Narnian lords banished by the invaders. On their voyage, they discover lands beyond imagining, including Aslan’s country itself. The sixth chronicle, The Silver Chair, is another story of a search, this time by Eustace and a friend, Jill Pole, who are called to Narnia to find the dying Caspian’s long-lost son, Rilian. Despite many deceptions and dangers, the children
eventually discover the prince, by then the rightful king of Narnia.
The chronicles end with The Last Battle, the apocalypse of Narnia. King Tirian,
Rilian’s descendant, is joined by Eustace and Jill in a final battle to save Narnia from invading hordes of hostile neighbors. As they go to certain death, they are suddenly greeted by Aslan, who ushers them into the real Narnia, of which the mere parody is now disappearing as quickly as it had been born centuries before. There they are joined by all the friends of Narnia, including three of the four Pevensies, who, with their parents, have
come to the real Narnia thanks to a railway accident in “their” world. Aslan tells them that this Narnia is forever, and that they need never leave: “The term is over; the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning.”
Till We Have Faces
Almost nothing of the style of the Space Trilogy is recognizable in Till We Have Faces, Lewis’s first novel for adults after 1945, and the last of his career. Though Lewis here was reworking an ancient myth, that of Cupid and Psyche, this book can be unambiguously
called a novel, in the full modern sense of that word. It begins and ends in the spiritual turmoil of the mind of the narrator, Orual, Queen of Glome, a tiny state somewhere north of Greece, sometime in the centuries just preceding the birth of Christ. The novel is the story of her life, told in two parts. The first, much the longer, is Orual’s complaint against the gods for their hatred of humankind, hatred shown most obviously in their failure ever to make themselves clearly known. The second part, a few brief chapters hastily penned by
the dying queen and ended in midsentence by her death, repents for the slanders of part 1
and tells of a few pivotal encounters and an extraordinary dream that have resolved her
anger.
Part 1 recalls a lifelong source of her rage, her ugliness, which has made Orual hated by her father, the king, and shunned by most others. A far greater injury, however, is the sacrifice of her wonderfully beautiful sister, Psyche, whom the head priest of Glome offers to 167
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the god of the Grey Mountain in the hope of ending a drought. Orual cannot forgive the
gods for taking the only joy of her life. What irritates her most, however, is her discovery that Psyche has not been devoured by the god of the mountain, as most people believe, but that he has wedded her. Moreover, Psyche is happy. Convincing herself that her sister’s
happiness can only be a fatal delusion, Orual persuades Psyche, with a threat of suicide, to disobey her lord’s one command: that she never look at him. The result is that Psyche is banished and forced to undergo ordeals. Orual is also punished: The god tells her, crypti-cally, “You also will be Psyche.” Never fully comprehendin
g this sentence, and enraged
by the ambiguity of the portent, Orual passes the years, eventually succeeding her father and distracting her thoughts by careful attention to government of her people. Orual becomes a wise and masterful ruler, but her mind remains troubled. When, by chance, she
discovers that the story of Psyche has given rise to a cult of worshipers, she decides finally to spill her anger and doubt onto paper. The story the sect tells is false, she feels: In it, Psyche’s sister is accused of deliberately plotting her fall. She feels that she must write to clear the record, to exonerate herself.
In part 2, she repents. She admits that the very writing of part 1 has brought back dis-
quieting memories: Perhaps she had been jealous of Psyche. Her self-awareness grows
when two meetings with longtime observers of her life convince her that her perspective
on people and events has always been narrow and selfish. Finally, two terrible dreams—
visions, she realizes—bring her crime before her eyes; she understands the sentence of the god. She has indeed been Psyche, in that while her sister has performed the ordeals assigned her, Orual, in her years of suffering, has borne all the anguish of them. Thus, she has both committed the crime and expiated the guilt. Her confession in part 2 gives way to thanksgiving, as she discovers that, washed clear of her guilt, she is as beautiful as the sister whom she is at last free to love.
Critics have likened the richness of Orual’s character to the increasing depth of com-
passion in Lewis’s essays of these later years. The striking resonance of these works has been attributed, at least in part, to the influence on Lewis’s life at this time of Joy
Davidman, to whom he dedicated Till We Have Faces. That Lewis’s renunciation of bachelorhood late in his life signaled an opening of himself, and his prose, to emotions and ways of seeing that he had not before allowed himself seems plausible; nevertheless, the simple design and straightforward nature of this last novel can as easily be explained as further developments of Lewis’s style in the direction taken by the Narnia books. Perhaps the exploration of his own childhood necessitated by writing these books taught him lessons about his writing as profound as those Orual learned in trying to recapture her past.
Perhaps he learned that he was truly happy as a writer when he could explore the curious corridors of his personality, just as he had loved to explore the rooms and passages of his boyhood home. It is surely no coincidence that the first part of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, was published in 1955, while he was at work not only on Till We Have Faces but also on The Last Battle. All three books reveal an exquisite sensitivity that can be at-168
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tributed to Lewis’s deep introspection at this time. This sensitivity, this honesty, makes these books far more memorable in themselves than his more clever experiments in less
traditional forms.
Christopher J. Thaiss
Other major works
short fiction: The Dark Tower, and Other Stories, 1977.
poetry: Spirits in Bondage, 1919; Dymer, 1926; Poems, 1964; Narrative Poems, 1969.
nonfiction: The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933; The Allegory of Love, 1936; The Personal Heresy, 1939 (with E. M. W. Tillyard); Rehabilitations, 1939; The Problem of Pain, 1940; Broadcast Talks, 1942; Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem, 1942; A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” 1942; The Abolition of Man, 1943; Christian Behaviour, 1943; Beyond Personality, 1944; The Great Divorce, 1945; Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 1947; Arthurian Torso, 1948; The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses, 1949; Mere Christianity, 1952; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, 1954; Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, 1955; Reflections on the Psalms, 1958; The Four Loves, 1960; Studies in Words, 1960; The World’s Last Night, and Other Essays, 1960; An Experiment in Criticism, 1961; A Grief Observed, 1961; The Discarded Image, 1964; Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 1964; Letters of C. S. Lewis, 1966; Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1966; Christian Reflections, 1967; Letters to an American Lady, 1967; Spenser’s Images of Life, 1967; Selected Literary Essays, 1969; God in the Dock, 1970; The Joyful Christian: 127 Readings from C. S. Lewis, 1977; They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 1914-1963, 1979; On Stories, and Other Essays on Literature, 1982; C. S. Lewis: Letters to Children, 1985; Present Concerns, 1986; Letters: C. S. Lewis and Don Giovanni Calabria, a Study in Friendship, 1988; Collected Letters, 2000-2006; From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis, 2003 (Ryder W. Miller, editor).
miscellaneous: Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, 1966; The Business of
Heaven, 1984; Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis, 1985; A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works, 2003.
Bibliography
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Major study of the lives and works of the Inklings, a name first applied by Lewis, perhaps as early as 1933, to a group of literary friends who met regularly together at Oxford University.
Downing, David C. Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Begins with an introduction that
provides a concise, insightful view of Lewis’s varied career as literary critic, novelist, 169
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philosopher, and theologian. The first chapter shows how his early life influenced the
writing of his trilogy, and subsequent chapters explore his Christian vision, his use of classicism and medievalism, his portraits of evil, his treatment of the spiritual pilgrim-age, and the overall achievement of the trilogy.
Edwards, Bruce L. C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy. 4 vols. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007. Comprehensive study aims to provide a more wide-ranging view of Lewis’s life
and work than had previously been available. Essays in volume 1 focus on Lewis’s life,
and volumes 2 through 4 discuss Lewis as a “fantasist, mythmaker, and poet,” “apolo-
gist, philosopher, and theologian,” and “scholar, teacher, and public intellectual.”
Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Extremely useful volume contains a biography, a chronology of Lewis’s life, summaries
of his major works, samples of reviews of his works, explanations of key ideas, and an
exhaustive bibliography of Lewis’s works.
Lindskoog, Kathryn. C. S. Lewis: Mere Christian. 4th ed. Chicago: Cornerstone Press Chicago, 1997. Excellent single-volume work on the life and career of Lewis offers a
broad overview as well as provocative evaluation of each of the author’s works.
Manlove, C. N. C. S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
Examination of Lewis’s major works of fiction is easily accessible in its consideration of narrative, structure, and themes. Includes an analysis of each of the Narnia books,
Myers, Doris T. C. S. Lewis in Context. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994.
Readable study views Lewis less as an isolated figure and more as a writer who was re-
flective of his times. Includes a useful bibliography.
Smith, Robert Houston. Patches of Godlight: The Pattern of Thought of C. S. Lewis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. Offers scholarly but accessible analysis of
Lewis’s philosophy of religion. Links what is dubbed Lewis’s Christian “Objectivism”
to the profound influence of Platonism on his views of the nature of humanity and of
God. Sympathetic treatment nevertheless finds Lewis to have been flawed as a philos-
opher, a rational mystic torn between a romantic vision of the absolute and the bound-
aries of a reasoned faith.
Ward, Michael. Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. New interpretation of the Narnia novels describes how medieval cosmology offers a key to the seven books, with each book ex-
pressing characteristics of the seven medieval planets.
Wilson, A. N. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. 1989. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.
Iconoclastic biography presents an important interpretation of Lewis and his work
from a Freudian perspective. Paints Lewis as neither a saint nor a full-time Christian
apologist but as a man of real passions and a contradictory nature unbefitting the cult
following that developed after his death. Traces many of Lewis’s adult preoccupations
to the sometimes traumatic experiences of his early childhood and comes to some
controversial conclusions regarding several of Lewis’s relationships.
170
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Born: Kyoto, Japan; January 12, 1949
Principal long fiction
Kaze no uta o kike, 1979 ( Hear the Wind Sing, 1987)
1973: Nen no pinboru, 1980 ( Pinball, 1973, 1985)
Hitsuji o meguru boken, 1982 ( A Wild Sheep Chase, 1989)
Sekai no owari to hadoboirudo wandarando, 1985 ( Hard-Boiled Wonderland
and the End of the World, 1991)
Noruwei no mori, 1987 ( Norwegian Wood, 2000)
Dansu dansu dansu, 1988 ( Dance, Dance, Dance, 1993)
Kokkyo no minami, taiyo no nishi, 1992 ( South of the Border, West of the Sun, 1999)
Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru, 1994-1995 (3 volumes; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1997)
Suputoniku no koibito, 1999 ( Sputnik Sweetheart, 2001)
Umibe no Kafuka, 2002 ( Kafka on the Shore, 2005)
Afutadaku, 2004 ( After Dark, 2007)
Other literary forms
Haruki Murakami (myur-ah-kah-mee) is also an accomplished writer of short fiction,
and English translations of his many stories are collected in The Elephant Vanishes
(1993), Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru (2000; After the Quake: Stories, 2002), and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006). Murakami is also a translator of international reputation, translating the works of American writers such as Raymond Carver, F. Scott
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