Narnia and Jack and Narnia again
OK, let's talk about Jack.
I've been calling C. S. Lewis "Jack"--not "Lewis," not "Prof. Lewis," but "Jack," as if I knew him or something--for years. I used to call him "Jack Lewis" until I realized there are over a dozen writers who've actually written as "Jack Lewis" while he wrote under his initials. It's not nice, I suppose; I'm obviously not an intimate. Why do I do this? Oh, a sort of semi-dismissive familiarity, probably. Or maybe it's from a goofy way of speaking about famous people I picked up from my father. Or maybe it's mainly that that's what he called himself, and it seems correct to me.
Anyway, like a lot of people, I got to know C. S. Lewis's work through The Chronicles of Narnia. And I first met Narnia through an animated version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that somebody showed at my church when I was a little kid. I remember my mother (who as far as I know never really read the books) saying it was an allegory, and that particular book kind of has...parallel elements that permit of allegorical interpretation.
So when I found the other books, which I read out of order, reading other people's copies as I found them piecemeal, I was looking for allegories and not finding them. Well, they aren't allegories. At all. Really.
One of the first I read (I was about six or seven, which may be a little young for this book; but I suppose I read at a high-school graduate level even then) may have been The Silver Chair, because I specifically remember looking for allegory in it; for a while I thought there might be some kind of creepy metaphor to the Emerald Witch / Lady of the Green Kirtle, and her enchantment of Rilian, but I think it was really just meant to be a fairy-story trope. So, yeah. That misconception led to some weird phobic connotations to sexual attraction, I guess.
Anyway, at some point I got an incomplete set of the Chronicles, hand-me-down. So there are four books I owned and read several times when I was a kid (they were quick reads I would say; I think I could get through one in a few hours). And there were three books I read borrowed copies of, but not as many times. So I feel more familiar with about half of them than with the other half.
I may have been eight (which is really too young) when I read The Great Divorce, or at least the beginning of it. I was in my thirties when I went back and re-read it, and realized how much of the book is nasty judgemental caricatures of other people's philosophical thought. Thanks, Jack.
I was maybe ten when I read Out of the Silent Planet. I liked it well enough. Malacandra is shown as inhabited by several sentient alien species, and there is some gentle (if, we now know, scientifically too optimistic) world-building.
So I tried reading Perelandra. And that is where Jack and I first seriously fell out. Because, as I recall, somewhere in the middle of the book a character explains her strongly humanoid morphology something like this: If God has taken human form, then those created in the image of God would now have human form.
What? OK, that's a character, that's not Jack himself, but where did that come from? It's offensive, it's limiting--not just limiting the author's own worldbuilding, but placing weird limits on the Creator! And it flies in the face of everything I had read of his to that point! I was already a pubescent lad trying with difficulty to get through a book with a naked green woman walking around on floating islands--which was a very distracting mental image at that age. That bit of dumb nonsense was too much. I gave up on the book--so I don't know if that statement was ever refuted--and my estimation of Lewis dropped a lot. I was so disappointed.
A few years later I read a snippet of The Screwtape Letters. I don't know if it's exactly healthy to see your evil inclination, pride, and foolishness as something cultivated by an agent of a malevolent alien bureaucracy, but if you find it useful, good for you, I guess?
I think, in high school, I was still disappointed in Lewis, and in Christianity as I had come to see it. Meanwhile my churchy friends were reading stuff like The Screwtape Letters and trying to get something out of it.
Well, it's a work of the imagination, not only in its demonology, but its morality, isn't it? Am I being a jerk? I guess such works about morality of the mind are almost of necessity from imagination and stabs in the dark, as we approach our religion through imagination. At least Lewis tried to go deep into how people think, even if I doubt some of his conclusions.
Then again, I suppose I had some fondness for the Narnia books, and for Lewis, still. And somewhere along the way I decided that the way he wrote had been influential for me, and was attractive to me, even if some of what he wrote I was less fond of.
Somewhere, somewhen, I remember opening a book he wrote about his wife, and there was a nice passage in it. I think I had to learn that writers are imperfect, containing both wisdom & folly, both good & bad. We all are. Which is an observation very key to Jack's view of the world, but one that maybe wasn't very well explained in his fiction, or that I didn't entirely grok as a kid..
Late teens, I saw a copy of Mere Christianity at a coffee shop. I was confused about the Trinity after a conversation with a Jehovah's Witness. I decided to see if "Jack" Lewis could make sense of it for me. No. Well, if Jack couldn't do it, who could? I was well on my way out of Christianity, and again, disappointed in Jack.
In my twenties, I read "The Case for Christianity." Beautifully done, the writing voice that had spoken to me so much as a child. And I don't believe it. He hung too much on theism, and I didn't find it credible. At the time, I almost wanted to believe in such a worldview, but I didn't anymore.
And life goes on. I became interested in more Hindu ways of thinking, I read Japanese mythology, I got to really thinking about the evolution of religions, superstitions, and theologies through ancestor worship, animism, "divine" kings, polytheism, henotheism, and monotheism. (I could add pantheism and post-theism now, I suppose.) Lewis was part of my childhood. Aslan was a type of Krishna, or Crystal Dragon Fairy Jesus, hidden in books sold to Christian children. And since I no longer believed in them, I no longer particularly feared Heaven and Hell.
Of course, I watched some of the BBC adaptations of Narnia. I didn't stick with it, but it's that sort of fan thing where you feel curious about something that you were attached to.
When I discovered fanfiction, I'm pretty sure I looked for Narnia fic and didn't find it. I must've. I gave up on fanfiction mostly.
And then Walden Media did their films. Well, I could nitpick, but it's better, I think, just to roll my eyes at the wackiness of some bits (much of which is in fact inherited from the books). I laugh at Christians who seem not to understand that Narnia is not Holy Scripture, and Aslan is not actually Jesus but a fictional character. But honestly, the movies were really good.
And they helped build an online fandom for Narnia, which is actually pretty large now, and now actually consists of more than a few thin gen fics, some incest fics (TLTWATW breeds these naturally), and some goofy churchy fen trying to be pious. Which is nice. And right now I'm on a crazy Narnia fic kick. (It'll pass, surely.)
So I'm reading Narnia, but not Jack. And wondering about going back and re-reading some of the Chronicles again. Maybe later.
I still don't care enough to actually finish Perelandra. Maybe I'll find a used copy somewhere I can feel OK about throwing against a wall. I'm not optimistic about the likely progression of that book.
Edited to add: continued Sunday
This entry was originally posted at http://philippos42.dreamwidth.org/126394.html, where Russian botspam is a rarity.
I've been calling C. S. Lewis "Jack"--not "Lewis," not "Prof. Lewis," but "Jack," as if I knew him or something--for years. I used to call him "Jack Lewis" until I realized there are over a dozen writers who've actually written as "Jack Lewis" while he wrote under his initials. It's not nice, I suppose; I'm obviously not an intimate. Why do I do this? Oh, a sort of semi-dismissive familiarity, probably. Or maybe it's from a goofy way of speaking about famous people I picked up from my father. Or maybe it's mainly that that's what he called himself, and it seems correct to me.
Anyway, like a lot of people, I got to know C. S. Lewis's work through The Chronicles of Narnia. And I first met Narnia through an animated version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that somebody showed at my church when I was a little kid. I remember my mother (who as far as I know never really read the books) saying it was an allegory, and that particular book kind of has...parallel elements that permit of allegorical interpretation.
So when I found the other books, which I read out of order, reading other people's copies as I found them piecemeal, I was looking for allegories and not finding them. Well, they aren't allegories. At all. Really.
One of the first I read (I was about six or seven, which may be a little young for this book; but I suppose I read at a high-school graduate level even then) may have been The Silver Chair, because I specifically remember looking for allegory in it; for a while I thought there might be some kind of creepy metaphor to the Emerald Witch / Lady of the Green Kirtle, and her enchantment of Rilian, but I think it was really just meant to be a fairy-story trope. So, yeah. That misconception led to some weird phobic connotations to sexual attraction, I guess.
Anyway, at some point I got an incomplete set of the Chronicles, hand-me-down. So there are four books I owned and read several times when I was a kid (they were quick reads I would say; I think I could get through one in a few hours). And there were three books I read borrowed copies of, but not as many times. So I feel more familiar with about half of them than with the other half.
I may have been eight (which is really too young) when I read The Great Divorce, or at least the beginning of it. I was in my thirties when I went back and re-read it, and realized how much of the book is nasty judgemental caricatures of other people's philosophical thought. Thanks, Jack.
I was maybe ten when I read Out of the Silent Planet. I liked it well enough. Malacandra is shown as inhabited by several sentient alien species, and there is some gentle (if, we now know, scientifically too optimistic) world-building.
So I tried reading Perelandra. And that is where Jack and I first seriously fell out. Because, as I recall, somewhere in the middle of the book a character explains her strongly humanoid morphology something like this: If God has taken human form, then those created in the image of God would now have human form.
What? OK, that's a character, that's not Jack himself, but where did that come from? It's offensive, it's limiting--not just limiting the author's own worldbuilding, but placing weird limits on the Creator! And it flies in the face of everything I had read of his to that point! I was already a pubescent lad trying with difficulty to get through a book with a naked green woman walking around on floating islands--which was a very distracting mental image at that age. That bit of dumb nonsense was too much. I gave up on the book--so I don't know if that statement was ever refuted--and my estimation of Lewis dropped a lot. I was so disappointed.
A few years later I read a snippet of The Screwtape Letters. I don't know if it's exactly healthy to see your evil inclination, pride, and foolishness as something cultivated by an agent of a malevolent alien bureaucracy, but if you find it useful, good for you, I guess?
I think, in high school, I was still disappointed in Lewis, and in Christianity as I had come to see it. Meanwhile my churchy friends were reading stuff like The Screwtape Letters and trying to get something out of it.
Well, it's a work of the imagination, not only in its demonology, but its morality, isn't it? Am I being a jerk? I guess such works about morality of the mind are almost of necessity from imagination and stabs in the dark, as we approach our religion through imagination. At least Lewis tried to go deep into how people think, even if I doubt some of his conclusions.
Then again, I suppose I had some fondness for the Narnia books, and for Lewis, still. And somewhere along the way I decided that the way he wrote had been influential for me, and was attractive to me, even if some of what he wrote I was less fond of.
Somewhere, somewhen, I remember opening a book he wrote about his wife, and there was a nice passage in it. I think I had to learn that writers are imperfect, containing both wisdom & folly, both good & bad. We all are. Which is an observation very key to Jack's view of the world, but one that maybe wasn't very well explained in his fiction, or that I didn't entirely grok as a kid..
Late teens, I saw a copy of Mere Christianity at a coffee shop. I was confused about the Trinity after a conversation with a Jehovah's Witness. I decided to see if "Jack" Lewis could make sense of it for me. No. Well, if Jack couldn't do it, who could? I was well on my way out of Christianity, and again, disappointed in Jack.
In my twenties, I read "The Case for Christianity." Beautifully done, the writing voice that had spoken to me so much as a child. And I don't believe it. He hung too much on theism, and I didn't find it credible. At the time, I almost wanted to believe in such a worldview, but I didn't anymore.
And life goes on. I became interested in more Hindu ways of thinking, I read Japanese mythology, I got to really thinking about the evolution of religions, superstitions, and theologies through ancestor worship, animism, "divine" kings, polytheism, henotheism, and monotheism. (I could add pantheism and post-theism now, I suppose.) Lewis was part of my childhood. Aslan was a type of Krishna, or Crystal Dragon Fairy Jesus, hidden in books sold to Christian children. And since I no longer believed in them, I no longer particularly feared Heaven and Hell.
Of course, I watched some of the BBC adaptations of Narnia. I didn't stick with it, but it's that sort of fan thing where you feel curious about something that you were attached to.
When I discovered fanfiction, I'm pretty sure I looked for Narnia fic and didn't find it. I must've. I gave up on fanfiction mostly.
And then Walden Media did their films. Well, I could nitpick, but it's better, I think, just to roll my eyes at the wackiness of some bits (much of which is in fact inherited from the books). I laugh at Christians who seem not to understand that Narnia is not Holy Scripture, and Aslan is not actually Jesus but a fictional character. But honestly, the movies were really good.
And they helped build an online fandom for Narnia, which is actually pretty large now, and now actually consists of more than a few thin gen fics, some incest fics (TLTWATW breeds these naturally), and some goofy churchy fen trying to be pious. Which is nice. And right now I'm on a crazy Narnia fic kick. (It'll pass, surely.)
So I'm reading Narnia, but not Jack. And wondering about going back and re-reading some of the Chronicles again. Maybe later.
I still don't care enough to actually finish Perelandra. Maybe I'll find a used copy somewhere I can feel OK about throwing against a wall. I'm not optimistic about the likely progression of that book.
Edited to add: continued Sunday
This entry was originally posted at http://philippos42.dreamwidth.org/126394.html, where Russian botspam is a rarity.