I make no claim
to being a Tolkien/Lewis expert, though I’ve read everything Lewis published, along
with a lot that he didn’t (his letters), and, naturally, I’ve read Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion (multiple times—it grows in the re-reading)
and other things by him—and, finally, I’ve read lots and lots about the two of
them. I’d be surprised, therefore, to find that my grasp of the disagreement
between them over Lewis’s “Narnia” books is way out in left field.
It seems
generally accepted that their “fight” was so intense that, if it didn’t
outright end the friendship, it cast a permanent pall over it. The gist of the
fight, I understand, was over Lewis’s apparently carefree/careless, tossed-salad
style mix of creatures and images from the myths and folklore of different
cultures—from Norse legend to Greek myth to… Santa Claus!—in a single, what
Tolkien must have considered preposterous, farcical vaudeville show dressed up
as “myth” (which, as we know, meant so much to Tolkien; thus, what Lewis was
doing had to have struck him as a kind of sacrilege). Apparently, Father
Christmas/Santa Claus was, to Tolkien, the crowning insult, for which he could
never forgive Lewis.
Lewis didn’t
write the Narnia Chronicles, of course, in order to win “forgiveness” from
Tolkien or anybody else. The Narnia Chronicles aren’t about J.R.R. Tolkien, and
what they are about, Tolkien could not, by his own admission, see. When one
doesn’t see something, it doesn’t prove there’s nothing there; it simply
indicates that one doesn’t see….
It’s
critically important, in order to see what Lewis was aiming at, to understand
Lewis’s concept of “story”. Lewis placed the highest value on “internal
consistency”—the story has to be true to itself. (The Narnia Chronicles are
not, of course, “true” to Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”; “Lord of the Rings” is
one story and “Narnia” is another, neither being the objective standard for the
other any more than Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” is the criterion of
assessment for Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”.) Lewis was adamant on the
point that a story must be a “real story”; that is, the inner world of the
story must work on its own terms; the things that happen in it must really be
what we could expect to happen there if that world really existed as such. The
author carries the burden of really writing a story (thus, a “real story”), not
simply taking a story or event from elsewhere, slightly re-dressing it and pretending he has
created something (along the lines of “Veggie Tales”, about which I’m tempted
to say much, but will refrain… except to say I’m sure Lewis would have been
appalled).
The inner
world of the story is not indebted to match any world outside of it (Tolkien’s
or anybody else’s), but if it is not true to itself, then the whole show comes
tumbling down. Having said that the story’s inner world is not indebted to “match”
any world outside it, I must add that Lewis, at the same time, was fiercely intent
that his stories should be “true-to-life” on the level of truth’s very fabric:
the supremacy of righteousness, love, faithfulness, justice, mercy, the good,
over all that’s evil and “bent”.
Lewis was
also adamant on the point that his Narnia stories were not “allegory” in the way
people generally take that word. The best, classic example of pure “allegory”
is of course Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”, in which every character, place and
event is a “symbol” of something in the “real world,” in our Christian walk.
And so, the envy or fear or laziness, or the hope, faith and love that we
experience in life become, in Bunyan’s allegory, sentient creatures in their
own right. It’s a kind of guessing game and we’re supposed to guess! Allegory,
in this sense, is categorically what Lewis and Tolkien had no interest in
writing and fiercely denied writing. They did not compose guessing games. The extent
to which events in their stories are analogous to events in our own lives or in
world history, sacred or otherwise, is a reflection of the way all life is
inevitably analogous to itself! Every time forgiveness is shown, for instance, it
resonates and correlates, on some level, with every other time forgiveness has
ever been shown, ultimately expressed in the Cross itself.
Lewis
somewhere explained that the notion behind the Narnia stories was: if God
actually did decide to create another world and inhabit it with all these
fantastic creatures, what kind of things could we expect—going by the nature of
life as we know it—to happen there? That’s what makes Lewis’s story different
from allegory. Bunyan’s allegory is about what in fact is happening in our
lives, except Bunyan dresses it all up in make-believe costumes. Lewis’s story,
on the other hand, is about something that has never happened and never will happen, but… would plausibly work out “something like this” if God ever did
make such a world, based on what we know about the true and living God.
Thus, Aslan
giving his life to save Edmund is not a thinly disguised allegory of Christ
dying on the cross for the sins of the world. This point is critical to understand
if we are not to misread Lewis horribly. In the Narnia story, Aslan dying on
the stone table for Edmund is an imagined scenario of what the same Christ who died
for our sins in this world would certainly do, if there were a Narnia, where He
was incarnate as a lion, and there were a crisis in which the redemption of a
son of Adam required Him to make that sacrifice. As “pure allegory”, in fact,
Aslan’s death on the stone table doesn’t really work—the more you try to correlate
the supposed “allegory” to the “real event”, the more hopelessly it falls apart--but
as a different event in a “real story” it works beautifully… and, as story, it
poignantly expresses Lewis’s appreciation, his “take”, of the true Christ Who
is.
But… to
come back to Tolkien! Where Tolkien saw a dilettante-ish, intellectually
insulting grab-bag of world myths irresponsibly tossed into a work without any
genuine controlling center, for Lewis—I take this from, among other things,
what Lewis said about “story”—the controlling center was the creative premise itself:
what if God did create such a world, what might happen there? In the story, it
is not C.S. Lewis desperately raiding all the cultural treasure troves he can
lay his hands on for tasty images, it is rather God choosing—as is His perfect
right—to make a world in which all of our Earth’s ancient myths, dreams and
legends are enfleshed and made responsible agents in the universal drama (the
drama encompassing all worlds, whether Earth or Narnia) of life in the sight of
God. And the hint is more than obvious that, in this fiction, God would have
created this world, stocked with everything from fauns to centaurs to Santa
Claus, finally and inevitably for the delight of the children of Earth, the
children of Adam, who—certainly not counter to Aslan’s wishes—“invaded” it. It
is the presence of HUMANS in Narnia that adds REASON to the presence of all
Earth’s most ancient dreams there. This is a world, and a story, that is
internally consistent—it works on its own terms.
Tolkien
seems, to me, to have paradoxically blamed Lewis for doing two opposite things
at once: for writing a “Tolkienesque” work on the cheap, a farce, something
caricatural and mocking of Tolkien, and for not writing a Tolkienesque work! It’s a bit like people who can never learn,
say, French because they can never quite forgive French for not being English;
they can’t get past the annoying reality that “it doesn’t work like my
language.” They never come to the place where they realize, “This language
doesn’t exist to be compared to English; I have to take it on its own terms.”
Tolkien
could not bring himself to budge from a certain, rigid, conceptual stronghold
in order to perceive Lewis’s particular creative genius in the construction of
the Narnia-world. It’s as if Lewis’s creation was a foreign language Tolkien
wouldn’t attempt for fear of losing his own; thus he couldn’t hear or
acknowledge Lewis’s language as anything but gibberish—in Tolkien’s own
terms, “unreadable”. Considering how readable the Narnia stories have been to
millions (a million children can't be wrong!), the verdict “unreadable” can only be a verdict on Tolkien’s blind spot in this case.
Lewis's work is not Tolkien's work. It's not even an attempt at being Tolkien's work. Tolkien's work, and tastes, do not define what Lewis was about, and, evidently, Tolkien was deaf to what Lewis was about when he created Narnia. Which is sad. Not every concert work of genius must sound like Beethoven's Fifth or "Thus Spake Zarathustra". Genius may be heard as well in "The Afternoon of a Faun" or "The Carnival of Animals." I must add to this point, that the distinct and exquisite level of genius hidden in the Narnia Chronicles was brought stunningly to the fore not long ago with the publication of Michael Ward's "Planet Narnia". The book argues that each book in the Narnia series contributes to an unfolding motif centered on medieval cosmology, the characteristics, qualities and mythical associations of the classic seven "planets" (including the sun and the moon) quite directly and vividly setting the stage in each book: the silvery moonlit atmosphere in "The Silver Chair"; the golden sun-drenched world in "Voyage of the Dawn Treader", the oppressive, saturnine heaviness of "The Last Battle".... When the concept was sketched to me, even before I had the chance to read the book, I knew instantly that it was right; it was something I had already felt but had no way to formulate. The evidence Ward presents in his book is utterly compelling, above and beyond the fact that it's something you recognize as true on a gut-level. Interestingly, the best attempt I've read, in an issue of the annual journal "Seven", published by Wheaton College, to refute Ward's theory, falls utterly flat.
When Nixon
went to “Red China”, everybody said that “Only Nixon could go to China.”
That is, only the legendary anti-communist crusader Richard Nixon could make such a move without wrecking his anti-communist credentials. On a higher plane, C.S. Lewis said of Christ that only the Author of the commandment "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart... and thy neighbor as thyself" could pronounce with utter rightness, "Anyone who does not hate his father, his mother, his brother, his sister for My sake cannot be My disciple." Such "hate," enjoined by the Author of love, could only be right, and true and, ultimately, love. In a similarly paradoxical way, I will say that only C.S. Lewis, one of the greatest classicists of the 20th century, a man who cherished the riches of the "pagan" world (which is to say, the whole world that Christ came to redeem) and saw their best meanings caught up into and realized in the refining, transfiguring glory of Christ--only C.S. Lewis could, with such audacious abandon, ransack those riches and throw them together, willy-nilly, into his story, without doing them insult; rather, he did them honor and, in the process, expressed his rock-bottom conviction that, in the real world, all things belong finally to one Maker and living God, and that it would be sacrilege ever to deny it.
