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Allegory On The Loose: The Uncontainable Narnia
Like Laura Miller of Salon, I too experienced C.S. Lewis? Chronicles of Narnia series as a child without understanding — even considering — its intended Christian allegory.
And now — as the lavish film version of the first book in the series (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) hits your local multiplex — I am being made to feel as if my wondrous childhood journey into Narnia?s permanent winter landscape was blanketed in ignorance and naivete.
And it?s not just because the chief buzz coming into opening weekend centers around Disney?s hiring of the Barna Group and Motive Entertainment (famous for its promotion of Passion of the Christ) to preach the power of Narnia?s Christian agenda to evangelicals across the country. (A pastor promoting the film to kids in Ft. Lauderdale, seen on a recent CNN report, made it clear that he held the key that would unlock the secrets of the story ? and you really couldn?t get into the true wardrobe without it).
It?s also my liberal and literary guilt talking to me. I have always enjoyed and preached looking at science fiction and fantasy texts as reflections of our own culture (see recent post on Serenity and Battlestar Galactica). So, while I am reluctant to accede the ground of interpretation to Christian critics, I know I should be joyful that finally someone is talking about a piece of imaginative literature as more than just a mindless escape into another world.
But, in the end, I also know that there is never just one allegory embedded in a piece of imaginative literature. What captured and still captures my passion about good science fiction and fantasy is the sense of possibility and challenge it always presents. It forces me to reevaluate my relationship to my own world by allowing me to see it from a distant, but often clearer, perspective.
Salon’s Miller similarly rescued Narnia from an exclusively Christian reading, concluding that ?the work an artist professes to make is often quite different from the work he actually does make.? She, however, is inspired by the work of John Goldthwaite, a scholar of children’s literature who has long argued that Lewis failed in his professed intent to create a Christian allegory because, in Goldthwaite?s own words,
whenever a professed Christian feels he must create some wholly other world to explore the meaning of his religion, he is flirting with bad faith. When he fills that world with the make-believes of other religions, he is playing at polytheism. When he further sets sorceresses to rule over it, and werewolves, incubuses and wraiths, he is dabbling in Manichaean dualism, the idea that standing opposed to God’s good creation is another, separate and equal, or nearly equal, creation given over to evil.
While I might agree that there is something inherently blasphemous in the idea of a Christian fantasy with animals that talk, on a broader level I don?t think any decent piece of imaginative literature can construct a simple allegory, maintaining a one-to-one correspondence between the literal and symbolic at all times.
Most science fiction and fantasy, of course, is not intentionally allegorical, but nevertheless, it always is — having been written in a particular time and a particular place and by a particular person. It?s also read in a particular time and place and by a particular person.
Even when the allegory is intentional — and Lewis? intentions couldn?t be clearer (or so we thought) — the context around that intention will always divert it slightly and disrupt the authorial path.
That?s what the recent purveyors of a Christian cinematic renaissance are forgetting.
Eventually the imagination always wins.
Posted at 3:12 PM | Permalink | | 
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December 11, 2005 at 4:17 pm
The Chronicles of a Movie Experience
I saw The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe last nite, and thought it was very well made and pretty faithful to the book, though I must admit I had read it years and years ago. The 9:45pm showing last nite wasn’t packed, but …
December 12, 2005 at 1:07 pm
[Ed. note: this comment was originally posted at an earlier date and accidentally deleted. We apologize for the error.]
Ah, but after writing Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis seems to have acquired his friend Tolkien’s disdain for allegory. Narnia isn’t an allegory of our world. It’s a different world, created separately and for a different purpose. It’s populated with the sorts of creatures we only dream about and with a “deep magic” similar and yet different from our own.
Aslan isn’t an allegory of Jesus. He is Jesus as he would be in that other world. Lewis was simply doing with his imaginary Narnia what he did with two real worlds–Mars and Venus–in his science fiction. He peopled all three with creatures who are different from us but nevertheless live under the same God, making similar choices for both good and ill.
That’s also what Tolkien did with Middle-earth and is tied to what both believed about myth, true myth, and subcreation. (I touch on this on p. 114f of my Untangling Tolkien.) Only God can truly create, but as God’s creatures we can sub-create imaginary worlds in which what is myth in our world becomes true and real, much as the Greek myths about a God who visited earth to die came true in Jesus. It was that very point, made by Tolkien in the wee hours of an Oxford night, that led Lewis to Christian faith.
And why do skeptics think they can tell believers what they can or cannot believe, do, or imagine? The God who populated our world with such odd creatures could certainly populate another world with a different set. If he created a man and a horse, then why not a man-horse combination? If he gave us speech, then why couldn’t he give speech to the beavers? The God who created our world certainly loved richness and diversity. Why assume that same God would create another world that simply mirrored our own? That’s roughly what Lewis was saying when he has a Narnian tell the children that Aslan was a good lion, but he was not a tame one. He has his own ways and does act at our bidding.
Nor is Narnia an example of that favorite buzz-word among would-be intellectuals, a “Manichaean dualism.” Conflict is not dualism. Like Jesus in our own gospels, Aslan is able to fulfil both the law that sin means death and defeat the White Witch. Good in the end does triumph, bringing up (again wrongly) that other buzzword of the critics, “simplistic.” And there’s yet a third– “mindless escape”–already used above, although more typically directed at Tolkien’s masterpiece. If it is mindless, then why is it such a rich source of discussion and debate?
And why label as “inherently blasphemous” the idea of “animals that talk?” In the Old Testament Balaam gets rebuked by his ass. In the New Testament Jesus once referred to his message being so powerful that if human voices were silenced, the very stones would cry out. (G. K. Chesterton suggested that the very stones did cry out in praise with the great Gothic cathedrals.)
One thing is certainly true. In Western societies, for the first time in perhaps 1600 years, we leave in an age when many in the chattering classes know virtually nothing about Biblical Christianity. They’re as ignorant of it as stone age savages were of quantum mechanics. They demonstrate that almost every time they speak.
And that is sad. It’s also why so much that passes for art today is cynical, depressing or hedonistic. As far wiser people than me have observed, the corollary to “God is dead,” is that man is also dead and his life has no meaning.
I once stood in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral in New York City and thought of how small that once-towering building looked surrounded by skyscrapers. Then I realized that there was an important difference. The skyscrapers inspired no awe. Their only message, if they could even be said to have one, was that they were large in the same sense that I was small and that neither of us was of any significance. We were mere things with no intrinsic value. That was most certainly not the message of the cathedral. In it, I was small but significant. In it I could stand in the presence of Someone who inspired awe.
–Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
December 13, 2005 at 7:44 am
Great post Mike,
You have said everything i ccould not..thank you.
What I will say in response to the imagination is that I was conceived out of an amazing imagination and it was motivated by Grace. There I find my significance and identity.It happened outside of time itself cos He is; I choose to believe this cos we, man, can only understand time ‘contained’.
We live in a post christain society but thank God He is not limited or disheartened by our movements,’isms’, ideas, mistakes, achievements. there is always a way He can get through, cos he is Grace and His infinite imagination will always keep creating.