Oxford, 6/18/08

Don June 20th, 2008

Today I talked about the Chronicles of Narnia. We had a wide-ranging two-hour discussion that touched on all of them but focused on two questions: the preferable order for reading them and how they relate to the new movie versions.

HarperCollins has reordered the series into chronological order, starting with The Magician’s Nephew instead of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, because Lewis’s stepson Doug Gresham says that Lewis told him that was the way to read them. I offered four reasons why the original order is better the first time you read the series.

First, Lewis understood the way an epic works: you start in medias res [in the middle of things]. Then you fill in the background to that situation in a flashback, and finally finish up the story. This plunges you into the action and allows for suspense and surprises that are not possible with a straight chronological narrative. Second, starting with TMN ruins a number of passages in LWW that simply cannot have the effect on the reader that they were designed to have. When Mr. Beaver first tells the children that ‘Aslan is on the move,’ the narrater says, ‘Now, they did not know who Aslan is any more than you do.’ Not only does this comment make no sense if you have already read TMN, but it hinders the sense of mystery about Aslan that Lewis is trying to build up in that passage. Third, when Professor Kirk gives his reasons for believing Lucy, it is more effective if you do not know that he himself has already been to Narnia as Digory. This forces you to attend to the reasons and puts the burden on Lucy’s character and whether you really know in advance that such things can not happen. The impact is lessened if you know that Kirk knows, and is not himself believing and depending on the reasons for that belief that he gives. Fourth, you are deprived of several delightful surprises that come your way as the stories unfold–like finding out who Professor Kirk is and how the Lamp Post got there.

Therefore, while all serious students of Narnia should read the books chronologically at some point, it is better for us, our children, and any students we are able to influence, if we read the books in original publication order the first time. I have no reason to think Doug is lying. Therefore, either Doug misunderstood Lewis, or read more into his statement than was there, or Lewis actually did say it but was wrong. Based on my reading of Lewis as a literary critic, on my knowledge of his knowledge of literature, I think the last option the least likely.

My review of the Prince Caspian film appeared here earlier. We talked about my theory that the changes to the character of Peter are not accidental but parallel to the changes Peter Jackson made to Aragorn and Faramir in his LOTR. We live in a cynical age, and such directors fear that an unambiguous hero who does not waver in his commitment to the right will be unbelievable to their audience. But this misses the point that Lewis and Tolkien were trying to make: that it is precisely in a cynical age that we need literature to give us better role models than nature herself can. They represent a tradition that goes back to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy. Their directors and screenwriters unfortunately do not get that, and so their works get distorted in the translation to screen in ways that are not demanded by the new medium as such, but are more related to a failure of moral imagination in society.

Then Dr. Bauman spent an hour on Lewis’s less well known book Reflections on the Psalms. [See my website, doulomen.tripod. com, under topics for my own take on that work.] Lewis deals among other things with challenges like the imprecatory psalms, such as the one saying that the man would be happy who dashes the head of Babylonian babies against a stone. Ever the Advocatus Diaboli, Bauman started channelling Hitchens and Dawkins and the other new atheists with their belief that the Old Testament God is simply evil, a supporter of ethnic cleansing [the Amorites] and infanticide. The students had to try to defend against these attacks and to evaluate the accuracy and effectiveness of Lewis’s defense. At the end of the hour they had more questions than answers–a state in which Dr. B. loves to leave them. They’ll spend the evening shoring up the answers and come back tomorrow ready for more.

Then this afternoon we visited The Kilns, Lewis’s house, which has been restored by the C. S. Lewis Foundation to the form it was in when Lewis lived there. Behind the house is a pond where Lewis swam and a nature preserve where he loved to walk. We got a ways into the woods to a lovely clearing next to a very English looking paddock with two horses that we immediately christened Bree and Whin. ‘We’ve got to Narnia,’ the students cried. Wish you were here.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

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