you're not king david

[lotesse]

I don't know why I feel driven to speak for C. S. Lewis - I don't deny that he was everything everyone says he was. But I get frustrated, because other people's perception of his authorial position in relation to his text just do not match up with my own. and the things that I find lovable about him are erased in the mismatch.

Lewis, Lewis is crazy fucking insecure. He had the quality of being able to change in really dramatic ways over the course of his lifetime, often through intense relationships with others - Tolkien returns him to religion, Joy Davidman gets him to pretty totally re-evaluate his stance on sex/gender - and in a way you can see that as admirable, but it's also maybe kind of weak. Lewis was deeply afraid of himself, in stupid twitchy ways. He really sort of thought he was bad, deep down inside. People see Lewis as really judgy, and he is, but a lot of the time he's judging himself, more or less indirectly, and for me that does make a difference. he's hateful because he doesn't love himself. it's pathetic, really.

People read Lewis as an adult judging his characters, when in fact I think he relates to them in a much more developmentally stunted way: his disappointment with Edmund for not joining Lu's fantasies about the wardrobe, his rejection of Susan after she, too, won't play his game of makebelieve, are dumb kid responses to those sorts of things. You left me and I'm sad. You won't play with me and that makes me feel alone. It's why his child characters are held to much higher standards than his adult gods are: because grown-ups screw you over all the time, it's expected, but children ought to know better.

Narnia works for me best in the particular context of education reform. Lewis does one of the best jobs I've ever seen remembering just how shit it can be to be a child, particularly at school. He was deeply traumatized by his own education, and both Edmund and Eustace are self-portraits of the damage he feared sustaining through those bad experiences. My touchstone moment for Narnia has always been that set of linked scenes in Prince Caspian, with the man beating the child with a rod being turned into a tree, the schoolmistress liberated from her nasty bullying charges, and the little girl who won't take order marks. These don't work with conventional ethics - the bad kids, as I recall, just turn into pigs? - but they're powerful fantasies about escaping school abuse nonetheless. I was deeply attracted, as a child, to the way that Lewis let his child characters do things, not just sit around in classrooms or engage in hijinks. I always figured he knew how shit it was that Aslan jerked the Pevensies back and forth - but that's what childhood is like, they rip you away and jam you into too-small boxes and that's just how it is. Narnia is a safe space, yes, but my parents never let me stay in safe spaces either, so I was with Lewis on the "watcha gonna do?" bit.

(this is mostly coming from my attempt to read through Ana Mardoll's chapter-by-chapter Narnia decon; I respect Ana like crazy, but I get antsy with other feminists and Lewis-reading, because I see him as such a damaged little beast that I want to defend him, and then get frustrated with myself because in general I try to avoid defending white Christian dudebros. I don't think anyone needs to give him a pass. Nevertheless - some girls do woobie!Loki, I got my Jack Lewis)

Comments

[legionseagle]

I find Ana Mardoll's deconstruction of Narnia incredibly frustrating (and, for that matter, an exercise in performative scolding) largely because of things like this , specifically the first half of it, where she goes off on a long riff about Bad Writing and Serious Christian White Men which is frankly a load of bollocks, especially here:

For many of us, when we see jarring, haphazard parenthetical statements inserted unnecessarily in ways that disrupt the flow of reading in self-published novels, our confirmation bias tends to make those incidents stand out. Ah, yes, the brain says. Unpolished self-published work, as expected. Yet when we see those same things in Classics produced by Serious Christian White Men, we tend to file those same mistakes under different headings. Ground-breaking classic, the brain rationalizes. Have to expect some rough edges for visionary literature. We know better now. And then we tend to move on, pass extended.

The problem with that is that what she is characterising as "Bad Writing" are stylistic choices by Lewis which fall well within the late-nineteenth and early 20th century traditions of British children's literature, a tradition within which Lewis was very consciously positioning himself, with The Water Babies, E. Nesbit, George MacDonald's Curdie books, Alice and The Hobbit all very much as part of that tradition, with possibly also The Jungle Books and those include an omniscient narrator with both an intrusive and chatty style and the extensive use of parathesis and commentary to the child reader on things the assumed child reader might not be expected to know.

She dismisses as "poor writing" (and therefore builds upon that dismissal an edifice of reasoning as to why that poor writing is tolerated in Lewis) which is unsound at the foundation; socialist polyamorous suffragist Edith Nesbit is as likely to use the kind of stylistic quirks (now, admittedly, out of fashion and so not taught in creative writing courses and, perhaps, always rather more to British than to American literary tastes) which Mardoll holds up as bad writing in Lewis, and, what's more Lewis not merely draws them from Nesbit, he openly acknowledges his debt to her (eg start of the Magician's Nephew which begins with the words "When Mr Sherlock Holmes was living in Baker Street and the Bastables looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.")

Given what Russ has to say about people refusing to see female authors as being in dialogue both with other contemporary authors and with a previous generation of female authors, it's frustrating when this sort of dialogue represented by the Narnia books is ignored (Rowling also acknowledges the debt to Nesbit; if anyone's the "groundbreaking classic" and the "visionary literature" it's Nesbit).

Having said which, I agree with everything you say about Lewis's damaged psyche (it's also why Screwtape's so good) and its causes, but I still find him an example of how the bullied become bullies (not all, certainly, and far from as the sole cause of bullying) and it's frustrating because you're right - in Edmund and Eustace he can see and describe the process happening - but in other actions (such as how he and Tolkien rammed the Tolkien/Lewis syllabus through the Oxford English faculty) and their politicking about various professorships of poetry and in a lot of his religious writing (and I don't agree Joy Gresham made nearly the impact of his views on gender, separate-but-equal, male headship in marriage and so forth as perhaps you do) he doesn't see it.

Which is probably why he's such an endless fascinating character, and another reason why the one-note nature of the Mardoll deconstruction gets on my nerves.

[legionseagle]

I forgot to mention, incidentally, in my long response above, that

It's why his child characters are held to much higher standards than his adult gods are: because grown-ups screw you over all the time, it's expected, but children ought to know better

is one of the most perceptive things I've seen written on Lewis in ages

[heliopausa]

". I always figured he knew how shit it was that Aslan jerked the Pevensies back and forth - but that's what childhood is like, they rip you away and jam you into too-small boxes and that's just how it is."

I hadn't ever thought of that before - that that's exactly what it was like for Lewis himself as a child, being reefed off to school in another country and jolted back and forth from one school to another. Thanks for the insights.:)

[starlady]

I love your thoughts on Lewis, and I think you're dead on about being ripped away from safe spaces.

I haven't read the Mardoll, and I don't think I shall from what you say here, either.