“If the witch understood the true meaning of sacrifice, she might have interpreted the Deep Magic differently, for when a willing victim who has committed no treachery, dies in a traitor’s stead, the stone table will crack and even death itself will turn backwards.”
“Oh, how interesting,” Lucy said. “What is the true meaning of sacrifice, Aslan?”
“It is an artificial anti-concept,” Aslan said in his low, golden voice. “It is the ultimate force of destruction. The very word self less suggests self-immolation, a complete annihilation of one’s own self for the sake of others. Sacrifice destroys knowledge, skill, talent, usefulness, all in the name of duty. It destroys love and self-esteem, which are the same thing. Self-sacrifice is an immoral nightmare.”
“I don’t quite understand,” Lucy said. “Does this mean Edmund is going to die instead of you?”
“Let us put it this way,” Aslan said. “If I exchange a penny for a dollar, have I made a sacrifice?”
“No,” Lucy said.
“But if I were to exchange a dollar for a penny instead,” Aslan said, sounding rather as if he had a locomotive in his throat, “would I be making a sacrifice then?”
“Y-e-s,” Lucy said.
“And you understand why your brother is not the dollar, in this analogy,” he said.
“So Edmund must die,” Lucy said triumphantly, “or else you would be betraying your own values!”
“Exactly,” Aslan said. “Have a penny.”
Edmund burst into tears, like a Communist.
“Oh, do be quiet,” Lucy said to Edmund. “I want to listen to Aslan explain his plans for a transcontinental railroad into Calormen again.”
***
“Thank you for your hospitality,” Susan said politely, “but we really have to go.”
Mr. Beaver’s face fell. “Oh, you can’t just leave.”
“He’s right. We have to help Mr. Tumnus,” Lucy said.
“We don’t have to do anything,” Aslan reminded her. “Mr. Tumnus’ troubles sound like a Mr. Tumnus problem.”
Lucy helped herself to another slice of cake instead of chasing after a pantsless man-goat who had failed to guard his own self-interest, and was all the happier for it.
***
“A propos of nothing in particular,” Aslan said rather suddenly, “I don’t want you thinking I’m a metaphor for Jesus, or anything like that.”
“Oh, no, rather,” Susan said.
“And nothing happens to you after you die,” he said. “I want to be very clear about that.”
“Nothing at all,” Peter said. “Very sensible outlook, that.”
“It’s why we must focus on our own well-being in the present,” Aslan said, “and build as many trains as we can before dying.”
“To trains,” Lucy said, and they all raised a meaningful glass.
***
“I can’t do it,” Mr. Tumnus cried. “I was going to turn you over to the White Witch, but now that I have met you, and had tea with you, I cannot give you to her. And she will surely turn me to stone for defying her.” And he began to weep bitter tears.
“You know what you should do,” Lucy said, helping herself to another piece of Battenberg, “is go on strike.”
Tags: ayn rand rewrites, sorry sorry sorry, the chronicles of narnia
Related Posts
Ayn Rand’s If You Give A Mouse A Cookie
How To Tell If You Are in a Dostoevsky Novel
The Best Moments in Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy
The Hogwarts Houses of the Periodic Elements: A Critical Analysis
Immediately Buy This Book For Your Friend’s Baby
John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Fifty Years Later
I have been waiting for this my whole life.
The trains toast near the end though. The trains.
I know. TRAINS.
It’s what Uncle Andrew wanted from Narnia all along.
omg true
idk going on strike seems pretty legit right now
Aslan is pretty convincing why often it is not smart to sacrifice one’s life/ health. Not sure I’m supposed to find anything in these persuasive.
No, the Ortberg-Rand hybrids are always an unsettling amount of “actually, this would be the best” wrapped in the always slightly larger volume of horrifying. See also: Ayn Rand’s Buffy. It’s a very unsettling meta-commentary on how many of our own beliefs only work because we don’t try to stretch them into their own extremes/logical ends.
very very true
Edmund would have been the most annoying character in all of Narnia, but then he introduced Eustace, just so we’d know how good we’d had it before.
So true.
But without Eustace, we would not have one of the most glorious opening lines in all of literature, “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
It’s a very good line, although I would argue he deserved it several times over, and twice that on Sundays.
I suppose that’s not quite as good a line, though.
Well, I always figured that the opening line was a retrospective after he became a dragon and 3000% better person.
Or something.
The dragon chapter was republished on its own in some children’s anthology magazine that I read some time before I got my hands on the series. That was a head trip. So was re-encountering the story in context when I read the book.
I FORGOT ABOUT THAT ENTIRELY.
I could never figure out why Eustace wanted to become human again. Who wouldn’t want to be a dragon forever??
He was lonely! He cried boiling hot tears that made the sailors skip backward uttering ejaculations that I shall not repeat!
Because the ring was cutting into his arm and it hurt. The only way to cut the ring off, clearly, was to remove all of his skin and become a boy again.
I dunno, I thought being a dragon would be much more fun, personally. Find a blacksmith, dude.
“It was, however, clear to everyone that Eustace’s character had been rather improved by becoming a dragon.”
That really is an almost perfect sentence.
Without Eustace Scrubb, we would never have had the glorious Toast comment featuring a mashup of Narnia and Bastille’s No Angels.
I LOVE that line. That’s the line that got me to read the whole series.
I recently re-read the series, and I have decided that Eustace is the best, but his attitude sucks. Because C.S. Lewis uses Eustace to reveal his gross militaristic and patriarchal bullshit.
“Eustace isn’t brave and has no blood lust, like A REAL MAN should.” “Even that oboxious mouse liked killing people gloriously, but THAT COWARD Eustace wanted to avoid battle.” And “Eustace complained that Lucy got her own room because she was a girl, arguing that gender restrictions weren’t fair because he was a PANSY MAN with NO HONOR.”
And, “Eustace went to a secular school so he’d never even heard of Adam and Eve, because apparently going to a secular school cuts you off from the rest of England.” God, SHUT UP, Lewis. I am trying to enjoy your books, here.
also with Eustace, we got Jill, who is the coolest.
Right, and there’s that sneering passage about Eustace’s parents being “vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers,” god forbid.
And they have Eustace call them by their first names, which just seemed odd to note.
You can imagine Lewis thinking up this line whilst energetically cutting into a nice steak at the Bird and Baby, having just clinked glasses with Tolkien after long, pipe-filled argument about the origins of intransitive verbs or the role of the catechism in daily life.
I want to summon Lewis from beyond the grave and tell him about how smoking in pubs is banned now, and that my circle of friends from Oxford is full of vegetarians and atheists. We are overthrowing everything you hold dear! Take that!
(Sadly I do not think I’ve been to the Eagle and Child since my boyfriend became a vegetarian, due to its lack of decent options, but I want to go there now and eat an aggressively meat-free meal just to spite Lewis.)
I always ate at the Gardener’s Arms when I was in Oxford, but now I want to join you in this meatless spite.
(I am in Oxford no longer, alas. “There was a lady who lived in Milton Keynes, and she nearly deserved it.”)
I only learned of the existence of the Gardener’s Arms a few months ago, and when my partner and I attempted to visit it when we were last in Oxford* we got there too late due to wandering around getting lost. Hopefully I’ll have better luck at some point.
(*I am in London. Rent prices as high as Oxford’s with none of the Oxford-ness to make up for it.)
I………. disliked Eustace’s attitude so completely that I have mostly avoided rereading anything he appears in for a very long time, so now that you say this, I vaguely remember much of this, but certainly didn’t pick up on it as a wee one. This is all a very good point.
Now I want to get a rewrite of stuff from the perspective of the sort of character Eustace could have been, the sort of “harry potter and the method of rationality” for Narnia…..
So basically The Fountainhead but with lions.
This sounds like a movie pitch that happens in Hollywood at least once a year.
“Edmund burst into tears, like a Communist.”
*dies laughing*. (even in this version Edmund is still an analogy for The Worst Kind Of Person and that gives me life.)
But Santa Claus did not stop his sleigh, he just kept riding right by.
“My gift to you is independence,” he said, cracking his whip, “Figure it out for yourselves!”
“Thank you,” Lucy shouted after him.
Still better than “battles are ugly when women fight”.
finding out from the comments that not everybody likes Edmund best is blowing my mind. Even after he’s all redeemed and beaten down he’s still not as bad as Peter.
(Children ranked in order of best to worst, as one should do with children in general wherever one finds them: Jill, Aravis Edmund, Eustace, Susan, Lucy, Peter. INARGUABLE)
I was SO EXCITED when I came across a character in a story who had my name who was not starring in possibly the most insipid nursery rhyme ever.
Jill is the best. 9-year-old me related really well to Jill, and her dreams and fears and showing off and courage and love of creature comforts.
Hell, 44-year-old me still relates really well to Jill.
46-year old me would also totally forget to tell Eustace the very important thing you’re supposed to tell Eustace before you do anything else because she was blown away (literally and figuratively).
Jill did sensible things like join the Girl Guides and learn woodcraft so she would be prepared if she found herself in Narnia again. I approve.
I agree with your ranking on almost all counts. (Susan and Lucy were a tie for child me.) Edmund is the best of the original four hands down. Haters gonna hate.
But there is no Polly on your list. Not fair. She wanted to be an author and dressed like Samantha. Instant coolness points in my third grade eyes.
I forgot Polly and Digory!!! YES Polly is pretty much as good as Jill and Aravis, although Digory I can take or leave.
I am eternally so sad that it was Digory that the four met. IMAGINE IF POLLY HAD BEEN THE PROFESSOR.
You forgot The Magician’s Nephew. Polly is the best.
oh I guess also you could stick Shasta in there, any old where. Here is a ranking of Talking Beasts for good measure:
all the bears, the cat from Last Battle, Puzzle, the White Stag (whether it talked or not), Hwin, EVERY OTHER ANIMAL ON EARTH OR IN NARNIA TALKING OR NO, and then Bree, Aslan, and Reepicheep. if those three were human men we would all know and loathe them.
man I am still pissed about the part where Susan and Lucy contemplate how dreadful it would be to eat a Talking bear, all the while chewing on some poor bastard non-Talking bear whose pain means nothing because it didn’t say Ow or whatever when it got an arrow in the kidneys.
I would eat a bear so fast
Bear is delicious.
Oh, man, that bear sounded DELICIOUS, too.
Look, if God wanted the pain of lower animals to mean anything, he would have given them the ability to talk. If you can’t offer a lengthy discourse on your own mortality, do you really even exist?
DAMMIT I meant to put Fenris Ulf before the White Stag. And that creepy lamb situation is dead last.
I felt SO betrayed when the new editions changed Fenris Ulf’s name.
The dogs in the Last Battle, though! SUCH GOOD DOGS!
HIGHLY ARGUABLE
…. So, what’s your list, then?
Don’t forget, as you attempt your ranking, that Susan, at the end, is no longer a friend of Narnia and a slut because she’s interested in nylons and lipstick and invitations.
Yes – adulthood is a ZERO-SUM GAME. You can never go back.
that always boosted Susan’s standing for me
Agreed! like, you turn her into an adult queen, then kick her out and turn her back into a normal girl- MORE THAN ONCE- and she has the resiliency to enjoy things in the world she’s forced to live in- that’s a GOOD thing.
OMG you guys, the Susan-love full on washed over me when I read this beautiful wistful description of what happened to Susan after being banished from Narnia – hint: she only grows more fabulous http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/69470941562/if…
Well, that and its companion piece made me cry. Thank you.
But she denies Narnia, doesn’t she? I never liked Susan, and it’s not because of the lipstick. As a young kid I had little compassion for someone who only barely tries to enjoy Narnia and usually defaults to being worried, negative and passive. She just wanted to go home as fast as possible, which I understand now but disliked as a kid. But when they’re in England, she actually sneers at Narnia and adventure, and she also tries to gaslight Lucy into believing that their adventures didn’t actually happen but we’re just pretend. That’s just wrong.
I saw Susan as someone who actively wants to cultivate passivity instead of agency, normality instead of creativity and comfort zones instead of challenge. Agency and adventure is “childish” and unrealistic, real adults sit pretty (if female) and stick to what’s “normal”. And she tries to impose her view on others, and shows that she thinks her choice is more mature and morally superior. THAT’S why I disliked Susan.
But even my tomboy self thought that CS Lewis was mean and misogynistic for sneering at her lipstick or her trip to the US with her parents (who wouldn’t want to do that?). Why can’t she have both?
Seanan McGuire’s song “Wicked Girls” has THE BEST take on Susan & Lucy.
Jill is my mom’s favorite, too.
I’m…..almost at the point where I like Lasaraleen best, or something. (I’ve been reading Ana Mardoll’s deconstructions and it’s as if Narnia-books-I-remember-happily are an ice floe that shrinks more and more all the time. Because she makes very good points and I can’t un-notice them.) Polly was an awesome little girl but she grew up to be a jerk. (Though I remember being a child and thinking that being old and having a man friend you could call upon in times of trouble without having to be married to him or have him in the house sounded awfully appealing.)
oh Las is solid, the Cordelia of Calormen.
I have not seen the Mardoll ones but I have never read a so-called deconstruction of Narnia that has anything like the sophistication and self-awareness of the books themselves, or very much contextual awareness or extra-textual background.
[For one thing I have no time for anybody who doesn’t notice that Susan’s fatal flaw is compassion, not vanity; her separation from the others not a surprise development we’re meant to take on faith, it’s there in book after book, and that readers fail to notice it as a flaw is not because it’s not hammered on early and often; it’s a lot more interesting than the lipsticks & nylons bit – which is a particular stodgy character’s opinion, and not even the expressed opinion of the book’s God – does nobody notice in that scene who speaks and who stays gravely silent? –
and it’s so much more interesting if you want to do a feminist reading, because it is such a feminized sin for Lewis, much more so than Worldliness – Susan’s inability to participate in – or placidly accept – joyous righteous cruelty puts her outside the charmed circle. BUT NO, everywhere you go you just get more banging on about the least interesting problems with Susan. what DO they teach them in these schools. perhaps I should turn my unpublished essays on the subject into pamphlets and hand them out on street corners.]
YES PLEASE DO THANK YOU
too late for pamphlets, I wrote a novel in your comments section. SORRY
WHY DON’T YOU EVER PITCH ME
next time I get the urge to write a five-page comment at work I will repress it and send it in as an article proposal instead, I promise! I just have no impulse control is the thing
(pLUS I thought the Toast had issued a moratorium on Narnia Screeds? Or was that only Harry Potter Tedium you’ve had enough of? I for sure have an eternal everflowing fountain of cs lewis blather left in me)
*chin hands* Tell me all your CS Lewis blather. CS Lewis blather is my main thing right now.
we say a lot of things, I will publish anything you send me
Honestly, I’m pretty sure that if you grab the commenting you have done in this thread, give it context on its own (rather than just responding 8 posts deep so those of us that care know what’s going on but wouldn’t all make sense divorced from it), flesh out some bits you slightly handwave on because it’s already a billion word comment but you CLEARLY have thoughts about, grab a few quotes, etcetc, you’re about 70% the way to a pitchable piece already.
I mean, please? Please?
Yepyepyep.
I am so curious about your thoughts. Especially on Susan.
Reading Susan’s fatal flaw as compassion sounds super interesting! Could you say more?
the two emblematic instances I can point to without rereading anything or looking it up are when she pretends to Trumpkin that she was only accidentally a better archer, she only shot better because of the wind or some such thing, even though putting him in his place is required to prove their identifies and secure his aid – I believe there’s even a line about how she feels terrible even as she strings her bow, because she knows she’s better and she knows it’ll humiliate him (which – if I may digress for a second – is every bit the thing that would also damn her forever if this really were Ayn Rand’s Narnia; doing less than your best, or pretending not to be better than someone else to spare their feelings i.e. falsifying your own pure dominant nature for the sake of an altruistic impulse, can you imagine – that is, if you will, Susan’s tragedy, that she is living in Ayn Rand’s Narnia while the rest of them get to live in the comparatively gentler Lewis’s Narnia.)
and then there’s at least one scene where she’s hunting and feels terrible for the pain of the animals — although the pain of dumb beasts is not to be regarded by a hardy Christian soul as long as you’re not vivisecting them or something – and I may be making this up in my memory but I almost think she pities Rabadash at one point, is that possible?
anyway – without going into it all here and now – you would think, we are most of us trained to think, that this is a list of virtues,, but it isn’t. Trying to be nice to the obstinate dwarves in Paradise doesn’t bring them any closer to salvation or opening their eyes; you have to let them wallow in their own egotism and denial of grace; yielding to Rillian’s pleas for release instead of standing fast and leaving him him to writhe struggle and suffer against his bonds would have been disastrous; letting Aravis get away without clawing her back bloody to pay her back for her sins would not have occurred to Aslan. Being cruel to be kind is one of the paramount values of Narnia and Susan lacks the stomach for it altogether – that, and she doesn’t limit her compassion to the deserving, which (again, because she’s in Ayn Rand’s Narnia) is as bad as being one of the undeserving herself, or nearly.
& she’s not just an archer because women = Diana & amazons & all that, although that’s a factor – she’s an archer because she can only kill from a distance, she’s not up for the more sadistic pleasures of killing that accompany face-to-face slaughter.
edit: I think it helps to envision her as the classic wet blanket who, when you are laughing at something hilarious like someone being beaten senseless in a poetically just way, says, oh, but what if he’s seriously hurt? Stop spoiling our fun, Susan!
it is ultra-gendered in, I guess, broader society – mothers who are supposedly too protective of their children to punish them in character-building ways, which must be done by the wiser and more emotionally distant fathers – but times a billion for Lewis, who, we should remember, had this whole big sexy vision of God as the most masculine lion-like manly being possible, the ultimate disruptor who would burst in on humanity as it were the kool-aid man busting through a wall or Mark Zuckerberg giving some really amazing presentation, in comparison to whom we, humanity, are all just so many demure virgin ladies primed to drip our knitting and faint, overcome: in relation to god (LEWIS DOES SAY THIS) we are ‘all female’.
all that stuff he writes is your standard romance novel rape fantasy imagery, pretty powerful if you like that kind of thing. but the better you are, the more like Jesus you are, and the more godly you are, the more masculine you are – even though no matter how masculine, in relation to God Himself you might as well be a woman – and part of that godly masculinity is the no-compromises, grab-you-by-the-throat-and-throw-you-up-against-a-wall brutal conquest of the soul part of it. So the traditionally feminine virtues of endurance and compassion and gentleness present a knotty problem for a man who feels this way about it.
i love you. You are brilliant and this is all so true.
(I said the Rilian thing backwards but I think it still stands as an example, it only works to trick the children because in any ordinary heroic situation, letting him suffer would be the right thing to do.)
and oh my GOD what happens to Uncle Andrew, when they plant him in the ground like a tree and he’s all pathetically breaking down mentally and they keep on placidly torturing him, there’s not a more upsetting scene in the series. But there again – he’s getting what he deserves, and it’s the innocent and holy Talking Beasts who give it to him.
Your critique is brilliant! Please write more!
That said, there are a couple Uncle Andrew types in my life (who raided the family till and still think they are quite fine fellows, though they’re not smart enough to come up with Trans-Reality Rings) and if some nice elephants and bulldogs wanted to stick them in mud…
Maybe I’m not as damned as I thought I was?
“the ultimate disruptor who would burst in on humanity as it were the kool-aid man busting through a wall”
I am in love with this post and everything in it. Thank you.
Honestly, Lewis’ attitude towards gender is so ridiculous. I need to reread his stuff, but I do remember him writing that God, when it comes to trying to convert people, “cannot ravish; He can only woo.” Which is a little less upsetting than that rapey metaphor stuff, but still weird.
I kind of think “lipstick and nylons” are just symbols of banality for Lewis, rather than femininity. So I guess what I’m getting out of your observations here is that Lewis might actually think of those things as the same. War is not banal. Caring for sick people is. So… Masculinity is not banal. Femininity is.
“the Cordelia of Calormen”
I have been sitting here trying to figure out a way to sum up what I like about Lasaraleen, and this is EXACTLY it.
Adding my voice to those who really want to read more about Susan’s fatal flaw being compassion.
Yes please same
FINALLY. FINALLY. MY SUSAN THOUGHTS HAVE BEEN PUT INTO WORDS. LET ME SHOWER YOU WITH ROSE PETALS AND MISOGYNIST TEARS. I have been reading a lot of Lewis lately, ok? The simplification of everything to lipstick and nylons gets me. It gets me big time. Susan is soooo much more complex than a metaphor for sex and growing up.
I remember even as a child thinking that it wasn’t over just then for her. She still had things left to do so she did them and carried on as women do and looked fabulous doing it. And was still very much a queen. (Once and always.) Then died later in a much more dignified and less trainwreck-y way.
Because I mean, she’s sexy IN NARNIA when she’s still one of the chosen! She doesn’t get cast out because Rabadash lusts after her…although I dare say she would have if she’d lusted back…but still, I don’t think there’s any question but what she’s gorgeous as a queen in a way consciously enhanced by feminine arts and wiles, and I dare say a flirt as well. and that may be a warning of her doom, but it isn’t the doom per se. And Lewis may not like that about her very much, any more than he respects Lasaraleen, but neither Las nor Susan are consigned to the pit for knowing how to play the hand they’re dealt. When Jill puts on all the accoutrements of childhood and charms the giants by swishing her skirts and playing dumb so that they relax their guard around her, assuming that she is no more than her surface self, he absolutely understands the implicit parallels to adult femininity. it’s not nearly as clear-cut as fashion=bad. And even sex isn’t altogether taboo in Narnia; people have families and children in Narnia, they have courtships and marriages. It’s sexist as all hell but it’s not that simple and dumb
Yes. I think there’s a quote from him where he says she’s ‘silly’ or something similar, but not lost irreparably. Lust I don’t think has much to do with it. (Mr ‘I Shacked Up With My Dead War BFF’s Mother’ doesn’t seem to have much room to talk there and I think he knew it.) After all, maenads and mothereffing Bacchus are running around Narnia and getting up to ‘just about anything.’ But Susan I think says something along the lines of she ‘wouldn’t feel safe with them if Aslan wasn’t there.’ It has been forever since I read Prince Caspian, but I remember that. and think it’s interesting given Lewis’s atheist/paganistic background. Sex and wildness are there in the background and no one seems to be judging any of that, but somehow you have to do it with Aslan/God.
Ugh. I don’t know. I have so many Thoughts, but apparently no coherent way of expressing them.
You know, the general idea I got for why Susan was the only one who didn’t die and everyone else did is because they all believed in Narnia and she didn’t, so God/Aslan left her alive so she could one day reconvert to Christianity/Narnia. However, the Pevensie parents both died too and they didn’t know anything about Narnia, so ??? It’s just weird and sad all around
“My sister Susan,” answered Peter shortly and gravely, “is no longer a friend of Narnia.”
I’M SO GLAD YOU’RE DEAD, PETER
and the best part is he’s asked where “Queen Susan” is and he very pointedly demotes her to “my sister Susan” in reply. one of many reasons I say you can’t trust anybody in that scene – once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia, Peter’s got no authority to rewrite that law.
I didn’t realize the “nylons and lipstick” comment was Jill’s. Still, rereading the scene, Jill’s the one who sounds less judgy. I’ll pretend everyone’s Edmund Bertram and Jill is Mary Crawford (I’m reading a biography of Jane Austen and measure everything by the Mary Crawford Scale of Awesomeness, sorry!)
Oh man, I just googled Ana Mardoll and that looks RIGHT up my alley, thank you for mentioning!
I’m close to yours:
Jill, Aravis, Shasta/Cor, Eustance, Lucy (she was insufferable but dammit she stuck to her guns), Edmund, Susan (oh how I’ve cried for you, Susan! Guilty of the sin of growing up!), Corin (he wrestled bears, yo, that’s pretty cool), Caspian, Peter, Prince Rillian (who, if not a child, had the common sense of one. Jesus effing christ, dude).
Rillian is the WORST. Hardly worth rescuing at all.
I think the worst thing about Rillian (SUCH a Gryffindor, to mix references) is that the dude HAS no Plan B. Ever. He has the first thing he thought of, and that’s it. Like in this passage:
“But won’t the others all come rushing at us to rescue the one we catch,” said Jill in a voice not so steady as she tried to make it.
“Then, Madam,” said the Prince, “you shall see us die fighting around you, and you must commend yourself to the Lion.”
THAT’S NOT HOW YOU FORM A PLAN, RILLIAN. YOU’RE BAD AT THIS.
I think Plan B is “always listen to Jill.”
Yeah but no one loves a martyr like Lewis so this is probably meant to be further proof of Rilian’s virtues…because dying in the full flower of one’s faith is the GREATEST GIFT THAT CAN BE BESTOWED ON ONE. *Shudders*
Well, C.S. Lewis was a Gryffindor too, so he totally dug everything about the gallant death narrative. Tolkien was a Ravenclaw, and I think this is what led to all their arguments. Wilde was a Slytherin! So was Evelyn Waugh! G.K. Chesterton was a Hufflepuff, and it’s a real shame about that anti-semitism! Contact me for more House sortings of old authors!
MORE PLEASE.
Yes, please. Pitch this. I will read any Hogwarts Sorting of non-Hogwarts people. Especially old authors.
cs lewis HATED vile English boarding schools and he would have run away rather than be stuck in a House that loved Games as much as Gryffindor does. FUCK QUIDDITCH, he would have said had he been as vulgar as me
Well sure, he was a Hermione-type Gryffindor. She didn’t give a single solitary shit about Quidditch unless her friends were playing, and even then…
Someone as nerdy as CSL (all those languages and stuff) seems Ravenclaw-ish to me. What’s your rationale? Please write a book about this so I can buy it
Oh, he was for sure a HUGE nerd. But so was Percy Weasley, and so was Hermione Granger (even Charlie Weasley was a nerd for dragons). But for me, it comes down to what a person values most. And in his own words (or “Screwtape’s” words): “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” I can’t claim to be a Lewis scholar or anything, but I do know that the first course of study young Lewis ever got fired up about was the Icelandic sagas, full of death and honor and glory and a lot of (what seems to me) pointless killing. And that’s what led him to his study of mythology, of which Celtic and Norse were his favorites. (nothing but honor, glory, and glorious honorable idiocy in those suckers.) He also had a horrible experience in WWI, but still attempted to join the military in WWII and was turned away.
But I look more at what he wrote. In his Narnian books, the highest purpose of any character’s life was not to seek knowledge, but to fight bravely and (if possible) die gloriously in service to Aslan. Contrast this with Tolkien, who had many of the same life experiences, but whose final scene in the Lord of the Rings cycle was not spent with a grand or glorified character. After Lewis’ The Last Battle, the deserving characters were swept into a higher, glorious country, where they left behind the cares of Earth and of the destroyed Narnia; they were going to a better more perfect Narnia which had already been prepared for them. After the final battles in Tolkien’s LotR, there was shit to clean up! And lots of work to do! And a world to repair and rebuild! The elves sailed away, but he didn’t end on the elves. He ended on Samwise, coming home, accepting that sometimes the highest good and purpose worth defending is a warm and quiet life in humble surroundings. (Which almost makes me want to declare Tolkien a Hufflepuff, but the man created his entire fictional world as an excuse to use the languages he built from scratch, so I’ve got to stick with Ravenclaw here. And the man did love a riddle, he’d have gotten into Ravenclaw Tower without the slightest problem.)
Characters in the Narnian books whom Lewis considered too “intellectual” or “modern” were always flawed and often spoken of with contempt. I’m thinking of Eustace’s parents and Uncle Andrew in particular. But even the star/magician Coriakin on Duffers Island in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader was held in a little bit of friendly contempt by the narrator, it seems to me; he was very wise and studied constantly but was also completely ineffectual, and turned himself invisible by accident. There have been several more modern theologians who criticize Lewis for his lack of scholarship, saying that a lot of his pronouncements were not backed up in the actual biblical texts. He was more concerned with the story, with the grand workings of God, then with the minutae, in my estimation. Someone with a deeper knowlege of Lewis is welcome to correct me, but his spirit seems much more Gryffindor than Ravenclaw, to me.
Didn’t Corin box with bears? Which seems sort of unfair, because punching isn’t really an ursine strong point.
Seriously, they’re swipers, not punchers. Goddammit, Corin!
Peter is such a doofus.
I love Edmund. King Edmund the Just – “a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgement” – was so much more appealing than King Peter the Magnificent. (I also liked Susan better than Lucy because she was more beautiful. That seems like a less praiseworthy attitude on child-me’s part.)
Jill had horrible claustrophobia (as do I) and she went so fucking bravely into that terrifying tunnel I am crying a little in admiration right now
“A propos of nothing in particular,” Aslan said rather suddenly, “I don’t want you thinking I’m a metaphor for Jesus, or anything like that.”
I was SO ANGRY when 12yo me figured that out, so I’m quite glad this was addressed
As a third-generation atheist, all the Jesus stuff went totally over my head when I read these as a kid. (Although I didn’t make it all the way through the series).
I was raised in a secular household, for the most part, so I knew that there was some kind of symbolism or metaphor going on, but I didn’t know what it was.
Same! Except only second-generation, and I reached the end eventually.
And then I reread the underground city portion of The Silver Chair recently, and oh my–goodness, does Lewis ever break out the torches and pitchforks for atheism. The Green Witch is the most transparent caricature of naturalism I’ve ever encountered. (There are more charitable readings, but screw being charitable where Lewis is concerned.)
Oh, how cool is that, none of my kids liked the books so I haven’t re-read them in ages. OF COURSE she is. Now I’m going to have to re-read all of them from that angle.
On my honeymoon I got food poisoning and the only thing on tv in the condo was the Tom Baker as Puddleglum version of that book. It was horrible, except for the Tom Baker parts.
Nooooooo, don’t do it! Just pretend it’s actually about Plato’s Cave or something! D:
That was my introduction to Tom Baker, and it’s made Puddleglum my favorite character. Bless that little marshwiggle. Reshpectabiggle.
My dad, who is very religious, read the first book to me and my sister, and wasted no time at the end making sure we got the metaphor, putting it in explicit terms. It is my earliest memory of hating religious literature. It was fine until Dad explained it to me!
My mom straight up told me “Aslan is Jesus” but I would’ve got it anyway. I don’t know why parents do that.
The main thing I get from non-Christian readers of the Chronicles of Narnia is that they are all INCENSED and feel BETRAYED that Aslan is supposed to be Jesus. The closest parallel to this that I have as a Christian is when I read His Dark Materials. However, I think I knew that Philip Pullman is atheist, and I just found his support? of atheism in that series silly and bitter. But then I read those in college and had forewarning, while kids generally don’t, so I guess there isn’t a good parallel/way for me to understand those Narnia-betrayal feelings after all.
My mom is Christian and my dad is Jewish and I read the Narnia books on their own and remember liking them as a kid then rereading when I was in junior high and feeling so betrayed
I knew Aslan was Jesus before I knew the plot of the book. My dad is a HUGE CS Lewis fan and I’m the youngest of his children, so I knew most of the plot of most of the Narnia books before they were read to me.
Same here … except my dad was ALSO a huge fan of Rocky Horror Picture Show, so in addition to being steeped in the Chronicles of Narnia books from a very young age, I had also memorized the RHPS soundtrack by the age of 9 or so. I had a very eclectic upbringing.
I have shared this on a Narnia post before, but it’s too good to leave out: my partner and I were once on our way to his parents’ house, and passed some teenage boys hanging around a bus stop. They were earnestly discussing the Narnia films, and Aslan’s assurance that “you know me in your world by a different name”. “Who do you think it is? Is this going to be a plot point in the rest of the series?” My partner contemplated telling them it was Jesus, but was concerned that they might think he was evangelising and punch him.
I bet Aslan refused to accept Medicare when taking payment for de-stoning the statued creatures
I… feel compelled to point out that the eventual cause of death for the main characters (except Susan) was a train…
IRONY
THEY BECAME ONE WITH STEEL AND STEAM, TRANSCENDING THE MERELY HUMAN!
A train takes them into paradise!
I couldn’t even bring myself to fully point it out in my initial comment. But that’s why I’m here at the Toast. Y’all already know.
But Eustace makes it clear that they are (as he puts it) “smashed up by British Railways” – clearly nationalisation is to blame and if it had been a proper privately-owned corporation nothing of the sort would ever have happened.
Jill is the best. 9-year-old me related really well to Jill, and her dreams and fears and showing off and courage and love of creature comforts.
Hell, 44-year-old me still relates really well to Jill.
I can’t wait for the deleted comments. CAN’T. WAIT.
Lucy helped herself to another slice of cake instead of chasing after a pantsless man-goat who had failed to guard his own self-interest, and was all the happier for it.
This is the best bit.
story of my love life basically, pass the cake
Still not quite as good as Dirtbag Aslan . Remember him? That guy had ‘tude.
Everything I write is without flaw, thank you for your input.
Oh now you’ve done it, Mallory. Using one of the sacred cows of the American Right to make fun of -another- sacred cow of the American Right? I’m surprised you didn’t throw a Reagan reference in there to make their heads explode.
You guys are going to be so busy screening comments full of impotent rage.
Honestly, my dad’s favorite author is Ayn Rand and my mom’s is C.S. Lewis. This piece made my life a better place.
I am so sorry. What interesting conversations they must have, though… !
Mallory you are history’s greatest monster.
Wait. The railway was Edmund’s idea, not Aslan’s. Aslan stole Edmund’s idea! He’s a taker, not a maker!
Brilliant.
“Edmund burst into tears, like a Communist.”
“You know what you should do,” Lucy said, helping herself to another piece of Battenberg, “is go on strike.”
Possibly my favorite lines of this brilliant piece.
The trains made me deaf, you know.
The trains made me deaf, you know.
Actually, Atlas Shrugged
going to buy a copy of Atlas Shrugged immediately, as a direct consequence of this
So, basically, change the title to “When Aslan Shrugged” . . .