For the Love of Narnia

For the Love of Narnia

By MICHAEL NELSON

The strategy for marketing the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which will open across the country on December 9, resembles nothing so much as the strategy used to re-elect George W. Bush as president in 2004: Pursue mainstream voters, er, viewers in widely broadcast ads that stress martial valor and family values, and target Christian evangelicals with overtly religious appeals church by church, radio station by radio station.

It's a strategy that appears to be working, at least so far. While Newsweek, which was given an exclusive look at the rough cut of the movie, says that Lion is "only as Christian as you want it to be," Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, describes it as a "tool that many may find effective in communicating the message of Jesus to those who may not respond to other presentations."

But it's not a strategy that Philip Pullman will allow to succeed without a fight. Pullman is the author of His Dark Materials, a three-volume children's book series that has won popular and critical acclaim rivaling that of the half-century-old, seven-book The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, of which The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the first volume. In articles, interviews, and speeches, Pullman has described The Chronicles not just as "propaganda in the cause of the religion [Lewis] believed in," but also as guilty of advancing views such as, "Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-colored people are better than dark-colored people; and so on." And those are just Pullman's G-rated charges. He also has blasted The Chronicles in public forums as "one of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read," "propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology," "blatantly racist," "monumentally disparaging of girls and women," and marked by a "sadomasochistic relish for violence."

If Pullman is right, not only should mainstream moviegoers stay away from Lion, so should evangelical Christians. "The highest virtue, we have on the authority of the New Testament itself," the avowedly atheistic Pullman said in a recent interview about the movie, "is love, and yet you find not a trace of that in the books."

But is Pullman right?

The question is worth considering because Pullman is no lightweight. To be sure, he lacks some of Lewis's scholarly credentials: "firsts" (first-class degrees) in three fields at the University of Oxford, a distinguished faculty career in English literature at Oxford and (briefly) at Cambridge that lasted from 1924 almost until his death in 1963, and magisterial critical works on medieval romance, 16th-century English poetry, Milton's Paradise Lost, and other subjects. But Pullman did earn a degree at Oxford and taught at several schools in the city until he became a full-time children's book author in the mid-1980s.

One of the books in Pullman's His Dark Materials series won the 2001 Whitbread Award both for best children's book and for best book of any kind published in England the previous year — the only time the main prize has ever been awarded to a work for children. Pullman wrote the series, he says, because "I really wanted to do ... Paradise Lost in 1,200 pages. ... It's the story of the Fall which is the story of how what some would call sin, but I would call consciousness, comes to us." Over the course of three volumes, Pullman wanted to celebrate, as he thinks John Milton does, our first ancestors' decision to rebel against God by eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Lewis's motives for writing The Chronicles were more complex. Did he, as Pullman charges, intend them to be "propaganda for the religion he believed in"?

In a sense, he did. Lewis had converted from atheism to Christianity in the early 1930s and, like Paul, Augustine, and other famous converts before him, became an outspoken defender of the faith. What made Lewis different from his sainted predecessors was the variety of literary forms in which he advanced his views. In the decade beginning in 1938, Lewis published several works of Christian apologetics, three science-fiction novels with Christian themes, an imagined account of a journey into the Christian afterlife, and a tongue-in-cheek book of letters from a devil named Screwtape to his agent on earth. He undertook Lion in 1948, partly as a way of posing and answering for children the question, "Supposing that there really was a world like Narnia, and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong, and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours), what might have happened?"

Lewis's approach in The Chronicles was deeply rooted in his own experience. A crucial element in his conversion was a long conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien in which Lewis became persuaded that the many and, to him, deeply moving ancient myths in which a god dies and is reborn to save his people had "really happened" when Jesus was crucified and resurrected, placing Christianity squarely at the intersection of myth and history. Lewis had an enormous regard for pagan myths, both for their marvelous stories and for the truths about origins, aspirations, and purpose he found embedded in them. In writing The Chronicles, in which the divine lion Aslan is slain to save a treacherous child and then triumphantly resurrected, Lewis was trying to write a myth of his own that had all the excitement and truth of other myths, including the Christian one.

Many children seem to have read The Chronicles as Laura Winner, in Slate, remembers herself and her friends doing, as simply "a riveting tale." Some children — the books have sold more than 95 million copies, after all — presumably have experienced, in Lewis's phrase, the "pre-baptism of the child's imagination" that Lewis hoped and Pullman fears would someday open their ears to the Christian story. But where's the offense in that? For Pullman, it seems, Lewis's offense was merely to love what Pullman hates.

Certainly there is nothing remotely as tendentious in The Chronicles as Pullman's attacks in His Dark Materials against Christianity. "For all its history," a benevolent witch tells Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, the young protagonists of the series, the Church "has tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. ... That's what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling." As for God, a rebellious angel later tells the children, "God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty ... was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves ... [who] told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie." In one of the last scenes of the trilogy, the children watch God die. "Demented and powerless," Pullman writes, "the aged being could only weep and mumble in fear and pain and misery." Every Christian character in the series is rotten to the core, and none of them bothers to pretend otherwise. "The Christian religion," one of Pullman's main characters blandly explains, "is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all." Oh.

What about Pullman's other charges against The Chronicles?

Sexism. No charge seems more likely to be true — Lewis, after all, spent nearly all of his life in a midcentury Oxbridge that was notoriously dismissive of women — and yet none is easier to refute. The best human character in Lion is a girl, Lucy Pevensie, and the worst is her brother Edmund. The same can be said of the book's talking animals, of whom Mrs. Beaver (a model of levelheadedness in Lion's most dangerous moment) is the best and the male wolf Maugrim the worst. Lucy ("the little girl who was my heroine" in the novel, according to Lewis) is smart, brave, inquisitive, and open to new experience. "Lucy proved a good leader," the narrator tells us, and at the end she is crowned a queen as "Lucy the Valiant." She's also tender, a quality that's on fullest display when she and her older sister Susan keep vigil with the about-to-be-slain Aslan, then return after he's executed to tend to his corpse.

Lucy isn't the only strong and appealing heroine in The Chronicles. In The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, Jill Pole is consistently courageous, compassionate, and self-sufficient, and in The Magician's Nephew, Polly Plummer is a model of intelligence, good judgment, acute perception, and adventurousness. Aravis, the heroine of The Horse and His Boy, boldly escapes her father's house to avoid an arranged marriage with a repulsive older man, shows great resourcefulness in crossing the desert, and eventually saves Narnia by foiling a surprise attack. Lewis juxtaposes Aravis with Lasaraleen, a girl her own age who is shallow, vain, obsessed with clothes, and willing to marry anyone who is rich.

Lewis's message to girls is clear: Don't let men stuff you into a trivial, man-pleasing mold. So is his message to boys: Don't grow up to be one of those men. Disparaging remarks about girls sometimes appear in The Chronicles — Edmund, for example, says at one point that Lucy is acting "just like a girl" — but the characters who make them are almost always unattractive.

Pullman makes much of the fact that in The Last Battle, the final volume of The Chronicles, Peter Pevensie judges his sister Susan to be "no longer a friend of Narnia," and Jill Pole says it's because "she's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She was always a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up." To Pullman, this means that Lewis didn't want Susan to "underg[o] a transition from one phase of her life to another. Lewis didn't approve of that. He didn't like women in general, or sexuality at all."

In truth, Lewis was portraying Susan making the same mistake he had made as a boy: throwing out the good of childhood with the bad for lack of understanding what it really means to grow up. When he turned 10, Lewis once wrote, he "would have been ashamed" if he had been found reading fairy stories. "Now that I am 50 I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness."

Racism. The humans in Narnia are light-skinned; the humans in Narnia's enemy, Calormen, are dark-skinned. Ergo, Pullman charges, Lewis thinks "light-colored people are better than dark-colored people."

But does he? The worst character in The Chronicles, after all, is not the Black Witch (there is no such character) but the White Witch, and two of the books' young heroes — Aravis in The Horse and His Boy, and Emeth, in The Last Battle — are dark-skinned Calormenes. That's a narrow defense of Lewis, but not a trivial one.

A broader defense, and one that's truer to a work of imagination, is to think of all the rational beings in The Chronicles as, in a sense, races, and to see how Lewis treats them. Tolkien chastised Lewis severely for including characters from different mythological traditions in the same story: fauns, naiads, centaurs, satyrs, and the wine god Bacchus from the Greek and Roman myths; giants and dwarfs from Norse mythology; and even Father Christmas from Christian folklore. But for Lewis one of the chief delights of writing The Chronicles was to imagine a happily inclusive world in which rational beings of widely varying kinds could live together, work together, and, when necessary, fight side by side for the good.

Violence. Good sometimes triumphs over evil in The Chronicles through duels and battles — Lewis was no pacifist. But neither was he a war lover. Lewis had fought in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I and been tempered by the experience to regard violence as, at best, a sometimes necessary evil. He knew, in a way that Pullman — who riddles His Dark Materials with scenes of murder and torture as well as of battle — does not, what violence entails.

Lewis's account in Lion of Peter Pevensie's duel with the evil Maugrim reflects this understanding — there's nothing romantic about it. "Peter did not feel very brave; he felt he was going to be sick," Lewis writes. "Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare. He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair." Even in victory, "He felt tired all over."

Children who read or see Lion will not be encountering their first act of literary or cinematic violence, to say the least. What they may encounter, however, is their first unglamorous act of violence, the first to make them doubt that killing, even when it has to be done, is something to celebrate.

"Death is better than life." In the final scene of The Chronicles' final book, Aslan tells Lucy and her brothers that they are dead — or, as Lewis puts it, that their life in the "Shadowlands" of this world has ended and that the "real story" of their eternal, heavenly existence has begun. Pullman's revulsion at this scene is unbounded — he calls it "one of the most vile moments in the whole of children's literature." But as John Gough, himself a professed nonbeliever, has argued, far from saying, "Death is better than life," Lewis's theme is, "Heaven is better than life."

"No Christian writers of the 20th century," notes the Wheaton College (Ill.) literature professor Alan Jacobs in his new biography, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis, "have emphasized immortality more than Lewis did." Famously, he once argued that any individual is more important than any nation because nations, no matter how powerful, have finite existences, and individuals, no matter how powerless, live forever. One can disagree with Lewis's opinion, but is it fair to condemn him simply for expressing it?

Ironically, Pullman also celebrates death in His Dark Materials, and far less convincingly. He has his characters, including Will's father, rejoice at the prospect of decomposing into particles in order to return, stripped of all consciousness and identity, to nature, thus "becoming part of the earth and the dew and the night breeze."

Lovelessness. Of all Pullman's charges against Lion and The Chronicles, the one that he has chosen to emphasize during the lead-up to the movie — namely, that Lewis's books are loveless — is the least persuasive of all. Love between brothers and sisters, between friends of the same and of different sexes, between husbands and wives, between old and young, and between humans and animals pervade every book in the series. Sometimes, in Narnia as in real life, these loves are tested in ways that require patience, forbearance, sacrifice, and forgiveness. It's good for children to know that.

In a scene in Lion in which Lucy plays with Aslan, Lewis writes, "whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind." No love is more wonderfully imagined in The Chronicles than the love displayed by the great lion. In Aslan, Lewis shows that, perhaps in reality or perhaps only in imagination, majesty and tenderness can coexist in the same being.

It's good for children to know that too.

Michael Nelson, a former editor of The Washington Monthly, is a professor of political science at Rhodes College.

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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 15, Page B14