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The Chronicles of Narnia
by C.S. Lewis
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
In his book The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis discusses the
peculiar tendency of allegorical literature to externalize
the inner life. As Lewis explains,
people in the Middle Ages, who
didn't have access to Freud or
Jung (perhaps a blessing?), were
forced to “personify their passions.”
Lacking a technical language for
discussing psychological states,
they explored them by means of
stories.
This led to, in Lewis’s words, “the
emergence of mental facts into
allegory.” Two characters meet
on the battlefield, one is named Avarice and the other is
called Charity, or one is Wrath and the other Mercy. By
presenting their confrontation in personified form, the
medieval mind could describe inner conflicts that were
difficult to circumscribe, at the time, in more abstract
ways.
To some extent, a youngster’s mind is much like the
medieval psyche. Children learn about their own
characters and choices through stories, not concepts. For
this reason, the externalization of inner conflicts in the
form of action-oriented narratives is a perfect foundation
for their tales—or, put more directly, for their journeys of
self-discovery, which at a young age are made via stories
of imagination. Don’t talk to kids about ego, id and super-
ego. Don’t try to explain Jungian archetypes and
synchronicity to them. Just tell them a tale.
And Lewis does just that, magnificently, in The Chronicles
of Narnia. True, there are other stories for youngsters
that have more action and sharper hooks in the plot.
There are certainly more modern and progressive tales
for children. Heaven knows, there are spectacles for the
young with more dazzling special effects. But no writer
does a better job of imparting mythic grandeur to his
storytelling than Lewis, of creating an external world that
mirrors the deepest conflicts of a child’s inner life.
Laura Miller describes her own adult conflict, trying to
reconcile the appeal of the Narnia with the author’s
didactic intentions. She describes feeling “tricked” and
“horrified” when she learned about the “secret” meaning
in a text that had so delighted her at age nine. Yet when
given the assignment to describe a work of literature that
changed her life, she returned to C.S. Lewis, and realized
that her disagreements with the author didn't destroy the
radiance of the story. “When I finally came back to
Narnia,” she writes, “I found that, for me, it had not lost
its power or beauty, or at least not entirely. . . . What I
dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about
it.”
Of course, you don’t need to understand the religious
symbolism of this work to fall under the sway of its quasi-
medieval splendor—and I suspect that a significant
proportion of its fans have read it without probing deeply,
or at all, into its theology. I read the entire series aloud to
my sons, and did not explain any of the Christian
symbolism to them at the time. Yet their lack of insight
into Lewis’s personal values did not limit their fascination
with the tales of Narnia. They could feel a larger-than-life
significance in Aslan, without having to assign it to a
specific religious denomination.
I prefer to follow Lewis’s own lead, as demonstrated in
another of his books—the much under-rated The
Abolition of Man—and point out that the most important
values are those that tend to cut across the standard party
lines, whether philosophical, ideological or denominational.
The Chronicles of Narnia is much the same. You cannot
reduce this work to a catechism any more than you need
to believe in Zeus and Athena in order to appreciate
Homer. Lewis’s work has enjoyed its well-deserved
popularity because it is built on an acute psychological
understanding of human nature, not dogma.
What about Aslan? Is he simply a sugar-coated Christ, and
Lewis no different than the proselytizers who leave
pamphlets at your door? In point of fact, we have known
at least since Sir James Frazer published The Golden
Bough that the concept of the dying and resurrected deity
predates Christianity. It is a timeless story, eternally
linked with the natural realities of death and regeneration.
Elements of it exist in almost every culture. As I point out
in my own book Healing Songs the Greek story of
Orpheus bringing his wife Eurydice back from the dead is
echoed in similar stories found in over fifty Native
American tribes. Did Greek mythology travel to pre-
Columbian America? Hardly. The appeal of the rising-
from-the-dead story is trans-cultural, respecting no
dividing line between nations, races, creeds.
Children’s adventure books always have heroes and
villains, and Lewis’s series is no different in this regard.
Yet despite what you may have heard about these books,
they are especially nuanced in looking at that murky area
between self-righteousness and villainy. Characters in this
work are constantly confronting hard choices, and
sometimes making bad decisions. Even better, they find
ways of recovering from the wrong choices of the past—a
matter of great interest to youngsters, but rarely dealt
with in children’s literature. Forgiving others—and
forgiving yourself; finding ways not to right past mistakes
(sometimes they can’t be made right) but recovering from
them nonetheless; learning from painful experience . . .
these are matters that Lewis handles masterfully. And not
by talking about them in a pedagogical way. As with the
allegorists that Lewis wrote about with such discernment,
this novelist always weaves the deepest interior issues
into a vivid external landscape, populated by characters
who grapple mano-a-mano with the obstacles at hand.
All that said, I am not sure that these stories work as well
for adult readers. After you have tasted the rich
psychological novels, the fruits of James and Dostoevsky
and others, it is hard to assume the mind-set that would
allow one to enter fully into the universe of Narnia. The
Harry Potter books, for example, are much better suited
to appeal to both children and adults. I did not read C.S.
Lewis as a child, and only came to his stories as a grown-
up and a parent. I fear that this limited my ability to give
myself over completely to the magic of this alternative
universe.
But for the fresh, unimpeded mind of a nine year old—the
mind that knows even better than us jaded grown-ups
that the universe is a magical place—The Chronicles of
Narnia have an almost inexhaustible richness. Moreover,
the stories are built on such enduring themes of youthful
wish-fulfillment, that they are likely to hold their charm
for later generations. It’s almost impossible to predict
literary trends these day—who knows if we will even have
books and book retailers in a few decades time?—but I
have confidence that the youngsters enjoying these stories
today will be sharing them with their own children and
grandchildren.
by C.S. Lewis
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
In his book The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis discusses the
peculiar tendency of allegorical literature to externalize
the inner life. As Lewis explains,
people in the Middle Ages, who
didn't have access to Freud or
Jung (perhaps a blessing?), were
forced to “personify their passions.”
Lacking a technical language for
discussing psychological states,
they explored them by means of
stories.
This led to, in Lewis’s words, “the
emergence of mental facts into
allegory.” Two characters meet
on the battlefield, one is named Avarice and the other is
called Charity, or one is Wrath and the other Mercy. By
presenting their confrontation in personified form, the
medieval mind could describe inner conflicts that were
difficult to circumscribe, at the time, in more abstract
ways.
To some extent, a youngster’s mind is much like the
medieval psyche. Children learn about their own
characters and choices through stories, not concepts. For
this reason, the externalization of inner conflicts in the
form of action-oriented narratives is a perfect foundation
for their tales—or, put more directly, for their journeys of
self-discovery, which at a young age are made via stories
of imagination. Don’t talk to kids about ego, id and super-
ego. Don’t try to explain Jungian archetypes and
synchronicity to them. Just tell them a tale.
And Lewis does just that, magnificently, in The Chronicles
of Narnia. True, there are other stories for youngsters
that have more action and sharper hooks in the plot.
There are certainly more modern and progressive tales
for children. Heaven knows, there are spectacles for the
young with more dazzling special effects. But no writer
does a better job of imparting mythic grandeur to his
storytelling than Lewis, of creating an external world that
mirrors the deepest conflicts of a child’s inner life.
Laura Miller describes her own adult conflict, trying to
reconcile the appeal of the Narnia with the author’s
didactic intentions. She describes feeling “tricked” and
“horrified” when she learned about the “secret” meaning
in a text that had so delighted her at age nine. Yet when
given the assignment to describe a work of literature that
changed her life, she returned to C.S. Lewis, and realized
that her disagreements with the author didn't destroy the
radiance of the story. “When I finally came back to
Narnia,” she writes, “I found that, for me, it had not lost
its power or beauty, or at least not entirely. . . . What I
dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about
it.”
Of course, you don’t need to understand the religious
symbolism of this work to fall under the sway of its quasi-
medieval splendor—and I suspect that a significant
proportion of its fans have read it without probing deeply,
or at all, into its theology. I read the entire series aloud to
my sons, and did not explain any of the Christian
symbolism to them at the time. Yet their lack of insight
into Lewis’s personal values did not limit their fascination
with the tales of Narnia. They could feel a larger-than-life
significance in Aslan, without having to assign it to a
specific religious denomination.
I prefer to follow Lewis’s own lead, as demonstrated in
another of his books—the much under-rated The
Abolition of Man—and point out that the most important
values are those that tend to cut across the standard party
lines, whether philosophical, ideological or denominational.
The Chronicles of Narnia is much the same. You cannot
reduce this work to a catechism any more than you need
to believe in Zeus and Athena in order to appreciate
Homer. Lewis’s work has enjoyed its well-deserved
popularity because it is built on an acute psychological
understanding of human nature, not dogma.
What about Aslan? Is he simply a sugar-coated Christ, and
Lewis no different than the proselytizers who leave
pamphlets at your door? In point of fact, we have known
at least since Sir James Frazer published The Golden
Bough that the concept of the dying and resurrected deity
predates Christianity. It is a timeless story, eternally
linked with the natural realities of death and regeneration.
Elements of it exist in almost every culture. As I point out
in my own book Healing Songs the Greek story of
Orpheus bringing his wife Eurydice back from the dead is
echoed in similar stories found in over fifty Native
American tribes. Did Greek mythology travel to pre-
Columbian America? Hardly. The appeal of the rising-
from-the-dead story is trans-cultural, respecting no
dividing line between nations, races, creeds.
Children’s adventure books always have heroes and
villains, and Lewis’s series is no different in this regard.
Yet despite what you may have heard about these books,
they are especially nuanced in looking at that murky area
between self-righteousness and villainy. Characters in this
work are constantly confronting hard choices, and
sometimes making bad decisions. Even better, they find
ways of recovering from the wrong choices of the past—a
matter of great interest to youngsters, but rarely dealt
with in children’s literature. Forgiving others—and
forgiving yourself; finding ways not to right past mistakes
(sometimes they can’t be made right) but recovering from
them nonetheless; learning from painful experience . . .
these are matters that Lewis handles masterfully. And not
by talking about them in a pedagogical way. As with the
allegorists that Lewis wrote about with such discernment,
this novelist always weaves the deepest interior issues
into a vivid external landscape, populated by characters
who grapple mano-a-mano with the obstacles at hand.
All that said, I am not sure that these stories work as well
for adult readers. After you have tasted the rich
psychological novels, the fruits of James and Dostoevsky
and others, it is hard to assume the mind-set that would
allow one to enter fully into the universe of Narnia. The
Harry Potter books, for example, are much better suited
to appeal to both children and adults. I did not read C.S.
Lewis as a child, and only came to his stories as a grown-
up and a parent. I fear that this limited my ability to give
myself over completely to the magic of this alternative
universe.
But for the fresh, unimpeded mind of a nine year old—the
mind that knows even better than us jaded grown-ups
that the universe is a magical place—The Chronicles of
Narnia have an almost inexhaustible richness. Moreover,
the stories are built on such enduring themes of youthful
wish-fulfillment, that they are likely to hold their charm
for later generations. It’s almost impossible to predict
literary trends these day—who knows if we will even have
books and book retailers in a few decades time?—but I
have confidence that the youngsters enjoying these stories
today will be sharing them with their own children and
grandchildren.
conceptual
fiction
fiction
