Intro
So, last night was the monthly
meeting of the book club I am in, The Inklings of Pittsburgh, meeting at the
Abbey in Lawrenceville, and it was a really enjoyable discussion comparing the
first two chapters of The Silmarillion, which is the creation of Middle
Earth by Iluvatar as carried out by the Valar, with C. S. Lewis's The
Magician's Nephew (book 6 of the Chronicles of Narnia, but book 1 in its
fictional chronological ordering) and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (book
1 of the series but book 2 in the chronological ordering). We did Wardrobe
in part because it was our Christmas meeting.
This post is a thought that came to
me in reading the two Narnia works, and I think it came to me because it's the
first time I have read them side by side and since having done so much literary
work in grad school, although I loved them and read them numerous times when I
was a kid. Again, as per my usual method, I am going to assume that a potential
reader of this post has read the works (or will be interested enough to go read
them on their own) just to save space, but I will carry through a nice phrasing
that the leader of the book club brought out in the wonderful and well though
out set of discussion questions she makes for each meeting, which is that this
is two creations of Narnia. The Magician's Nephew obviously has the fictional
actual creation of Narnia as its content, but The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe is also a creation of Narnia as a fictional place because it is the
first time Lewis made that world; it is the real world creation (a literary
process by a historical person in our own world) of a fictional world, rather
than the fictional creation account of the fictional world (which is what Magician's
Nephew is).
So, I pretty much read the two
Narnia books all in the same sitting (I had read up to the waking of Jadis in
Charn while waiting in the lobby of Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown when I
took my mother there for her to see the Andy Williams Christmas show featuring
the Osmond Brothers and the Lennon Sisters, but on Monday I finished the rest
of Magician's Nephew, which includes the whole of the creation
narrative, and then went directly to Wardrobe and finished that all in the
same reading as the bulk of Nephew). And I think having the encounters
with them be that condensed is what made what I am going to describe stick out
to me so strongly. And that is that these are really two different Narnias.
Obviously they are the same world
and obviously Nephew seeks to fill in the backstory of the world
described in Wardrobe. But I think that what that world is for Lewis as
an author differs between the two books.
Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
In Wardrobe, Lewis's first creating of Narnia, it is a kind of world
in which to place many elements that are viewed as "other" in our own
tradition, such as centaurs and dryads and a sorceress witch, but I don't think
it is as wholly a different world as it is in Nephew. The most distinctive element that shows this is the
presence and key role of Father Christmas. Many of the folklore and
mythological elements can be "other world" without any problem, just
as the presence of elves and orcs in Middle Earth present no problem for it
being a holey alternate universe. But Father Christmas is an anthropomorphic
representation very particular to Christianity in our own world. If you want to
see a true "alternate universe" anthropomorphic representation of the “spirit of Christmas” or something like it,
see Terry Pratchett's Hogfather in his discworld series (a truly
wonderful book, but I'm not offering it as an example to say "Lewis was a
hack; read this other guy,” but rather to demonstrate the particular facet of
Narnia in Wardrobe for which I am
arguing here). If Narnia is truly an alternate world, which is sort of required
if it, as a world, is to be allegorical of the Christian story,
there's no place in it for a character named Father Christmas, since there's no
"Christ" separate from the allegorization in Aslan and no institution
of a Mass (Christ-mas) for that tradition
(ASIDE: One of the issues here goes further than I really
want to in a post of this scope, but just to give a glimpse, it is that, in Wardrobe,
the world of Narnia as a whole is not allegorical, only Aslan at
the interchange with Jadis are, and this connects somewhat with what I
say parenthetically below about the difference between Lewis's and Tolkien's
thinking as Protestant and Catholic, and it is interesting that Tolkien's
world, which would be more open to allegory because it is a holey alternate universe,
is not one-to-one allegory … I think some of the issue here is that, if you’re
going to have your character be allegorical, I think you kind of have to have
their whole arc be allegorical, but that is a discussion that would have to be
well thought out beyond what I wish to do here … again, I am mainly trying to
say that the two Narnias, Wardrobe
and Nephew, are different, not to judge
either of them).
Narnia in The Magician's Nephew
In Nephew, we get a
distinctly other world, and I think it is marked in the tropes used. As I will
say below, Jadis in Wardrobe is the
Christian Devil, but really only in that interchange of killing Aslan. Other
than that, her background is monsters from our world's myth/folklore (half
jinn, half giant). Likewise, the other bad guys, her minions, are all from our
world's mythology and folklore, and that is the main source of tropes.
In Nephew, on the other
hand, Lewis draws on the Hebrew Bible, and not just the Genesis creation
accounts. This would be the first time that I have read Nephew since
taking a course on the book of Ezekiel (really a directed study with one other doctoral
student, directed by a prominent scholar with whom I feel fortunate to have had
the chance to study before he passed away, Fr Lawrence Boadt, C.S.P. [Society
of St Paul, aka the Paulists]), and so it is the first time in reading
Nephew that I would have been able to identify that tree that grows by the
river when Diggory throws the apple from the tree in the faraway garden.
Ezekiel 47 is the prophet's famous vision of the new Temple with a river
flowing out of it to the east, and 47:12 reads, "And on the banks, on both
sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves
will not whither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fruit in every month,
because the water for them flows from the sanctuary" (New Revised Standard
Version).
Obviously this description has
resonances with the Genesis creation accounts, but my interest for Narnia lies
in the antecedents of the Ezekiel trees of life (which are taken up in the
description of the New Jerusalem/Temple in Revelations 22), and these come from
other ancient cultures with which Lewis would have at least a passing
familiarity. The "tree of life" is a very common trope in ancient
near Eastern cultures. Basically it is a very large tree with very large
sweeping branches in which many different birds can nest, representing
many different nations/peoples in the world being able to take shelter in it.
It is a tree of protection, just like the one in the Narnia of Nephew, and I
think that Lewis knew of both that larger "tree of life" tradition in
the ancient near East (and probably other historical cultures closer to his
home, I am guessing) and its presence in Genesis 2 and Ezekiel 47, and I think
he was drawing on it in having that tree by the river as part of his creation
of Narnia story.
(NOTE: I think that
the Nephew version of Narnia began
with Prince Caspian and that, in
part, Nephew can be seen as Lewis's
attempt to bridge the gap between Wardrobe and Caspian–Horse
and His Boy.)
There is one further trope from
Genesis 2 that I see in the creation account of Narnia in Nephew, and
that is the gold trees that grow from the coins that fall from Uncle Andrew's
pockets and from which the dwarves fashion the crowns, as well as the gems that
the moles dig up for them to put into the crowns. I think their source is the
"good gold" and the gems described in Gen 2:12 in the context of, like
Ezekiel, a river, but adding that four rivers flowed from the one and that the
land around one of the rivers has "good gold" and gems.
To support the idea that Lewis
could be using the gold and gems can as an intentional allusion to a source like the
Genesis 2, I'll give a little piece of scholarship that shows how the gold and
gems there (Gen 2) were themselves allusions to another part of the same Judeo-Christian
tradition, particularly the Judeo part. A scholar named Gordon Wenham did the
first volume, Genesis 1–15, of the Word Biblical Commentary series, and he also
did a shorter piece called "Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of EdenStory." In that shorter piece, he draws on archeological findings to
support the idea that Genesis 2 describes creation as a proto-sanctuary on the
model of the Tabernacle constructed by Moses in the wilderness wanderings and
the Temple built by Solomon. For instance, one scholar he cites sees the menorah
(the lampstand) in the tabernacle as a highly stylized tree of life and bases
this claim in the description of it in Exodus 25 and findings of archeology in
the near East.
For my purposes here, which is to
show that it is not out of place to think that Lewis is drawing on images from
Genesis 2 just as Genesis 2 drew on elements of the tabernacle sanctuary, the
importan ones are the gold and the gems. The gold is important because Exodus
25 prescribes that all of the furniture in the tabernacle, such as the table of
the show bread, be covered in pure/fine gold (I wrote a post somewhere in the
Muggle Matters days on the use of gold and silver in Harry Potter; perhaps I
will dig it out some time).
[ASIDE: One of my
personal theories (although I am sure scholars have probably written it before
me, I just don't know of their work ... but it's not likely that I would come
up with a reading of this type that somebody has not at least suggested before)
is that one of the "between the lines" explanations for the later
division and eventual fall of the kingdoms because of Solomon's sins is that he
covered his throne in pure fine gold in 1 Kings 10:19, which is basically to
treat politically significant furniture with the same respect as the
religiously significant furniture of the sanctuary; indeed, this description
comes directly before the description of Solomon's perfidy through marriage
alliances with other nations, and thus their gods, in 1 Kings 11].
Likewise, the gems in Gen 2 allude
to the precious stones in the ephod of the high priest and that adorn the
tabernacle sanctuary as prescribed in Exodus 25 (another key piece of evidence
is that Adam's job of "tilling and keeping" the garden is the two verbs
used for the duties of the Levites regarding the tabernacle, which really mean
something more like "serve and protect" and are really only ever used
together for that Levitical duty, except for in Gen 2, but that example goes
beyond the ones I am trying to demonstrate in Lewis's account, which are the
gold and the gems)
My point in all this is not to
present some esoteric theory in which every little detail ties out in the
service of a network of exact correlations of an intricate allegory in which so
and so was an allegory of Ezekiel the prophet or that there must be another tree
somewhere in the "middle" of Narnia that corresponds more directly to
knowledge because there were two trees in the garden or something like that. My
goal is to show that there is a clear presence of tropes from the Hebrew Bible
in Nephew that make Narnia a
different project there for Lewis (by which I mean it is a different place
because he had some different kind of literary goal in making it) than it was
in Wardrobe, in which the tropes are
all myth/folklore tropes from other backgrounds in our world and one that
shouldn't even be there at all in an alternate world, allegorical work, Father
Christmas.
Further Exposition: Who is
Jadis?
We had a good little discussion at
the book club meeting too of whether or not having the presence of the lamppost
explained sort of ruined it, or at least made it lose some of its fun mystery
that it had in Wardrobe. I don't necessarily think it entirely does
that, or at least not that starkly (although I might think it slightly superfluous), but
I do think that noticing that Lewis went out of his way to explain that element
makes one notice the things in Wardrobe
that he did NOT explain in Nephew,
things that are actually more central to explaining the world of Wardrobe, and that this points up that
"Narnia" is two different things for Lewis as an author in the two books.
The biggest single unexplained
thing is the "deep magic," which Aslan explains in Wardrobe as having been from the
beginning of time. But when we get to Nephew, which is pretty much the
beginning of time for Narnia, we see no foundation of that deep magic and
Jadis's right to the blood of traitors. We get her in the garden with Diggory,
but nothing about traitors is there and no establishment of any type of
jurisdiction etc.
We also get no background on Jadis
that resembles the account of her being half jinn and half giant. We could sort
of extrapolate from the first king and queen in Nephew being a son of Adam and
a daughter of Eve that appearing human would be something Jadis wants in order
to lay some claim to rule in Narnia, but Nephew
presents only her origin as from a unified race other than human because it is from
a completely different world from humanity's (Charn), not some mixing of
monster races known in human mythologies or folklore.
Really, in Wardrobe, she is the Christian Devil, and this is purely in the
service of the allegory of the atonement of the self-sacrifice at the stone
table. In Nephew, she is more the
serpent in the Garden in Genesis 3, and these are not univocally the same
thing. Ultimately, as for the reality of the event, I believe as the Church
teaches that they are the same entity, but on the literary level at the time of
the composition of the Genesis 2–3 text, from the side of the human thinking in
that text, the serpent represents something almost human because it comes from
the creation account of which humanity is the pinnacle, rather than an account
of the creation of angels.
The serpent is still evil in the
human thinking at the time of composition, and I am in no way suggesting, nor
do I agree with, even from a scholarly standpoint, any of the readings that say
that the text of Gen 3 does not view the serpent as bad, but rather as good,
such that what is described is not a fall or an entering of evil, but rather a
"progression" in humanity in which individual immortality is traded
for sexual fecundity, the ability to procreate and build further community. That
is simply not the situation of the text before us (maybe some hypothetical text
some scholars wish was there, but not the one that actually is). For the human
author handling the traditions from which Gen 2–3 are taken, even from the
standpoint of a strictly academic examination of the human construction (at
least if that scholarly examination is anywhere near honest), the serpent and
that event are bad: the temptation by the serpent and the choice of the couple
are THE event by which evil, particularly death, enters the created world. But it
is not yet the Christian Devil with the angelology that goes into that concept,
which is the creation and fall of the angels and one in particular, Lucifer,
becoming the central adversary. Likewise, Jadis in Nephew is definitely evil, but she's not yet the Christian Devil we see at the stone table in Wardrobe.
(NOTE: I am not
setting out here to answer the question of what exactly the serpent of the
original composition is, but the best answers I have heard are along the lines
that it represents humanity being led by the side of themselves that is closer
to the beasts, rather than leading that side. Gen 2 establishes human
leadership in Adam naming the animals, but Gen 3 shows the couple following the
lead of one of the beasts. In particular it is the most cunning" [there is
a wordplay in the original Hebrew between the couple being "naked" at
the end of Gen 2 and the serpent being "cunning" at the beginning of
Gen 3], and the serpent is a symbol of wisdom in a number of ancient near
Eastern cultures that surrounded Israel, in cults that were more along the
lines of nature religions, and so the reversal of following the beast rather
than leading/ruling the beast as a bad thing goes hand in hand with following
the wisdom of surrounding cultures rather than following the Lord's wisdom and
leading them to it.)
Even "the satan" (ha
satan, in Hebrew) in the beginning of the book of Job is more of a
quasi-human questioner, an "adversary" in a courtroom sense, and as
evidence for that claim, I would offer the literary issue of the fact that
"the satan" completely disappears and never reappears to be answered
by the end of the book. The big finale is God answering Job and then rebuking the
friends who thought themselves so wise. I'm not saying this is some sort of
magical work in which the serpent was really the friends in disguise or
anything cheap like that. I'm saying that the fact that "ha satan" can pretty much just
disappear like that and the work still feel complete with God's answers to the
human characters (Job and his "friends") shows that the point of
"the satan" was a human wisdom question (Job is classed in a certain
vein of wisdom literature) rather than the Christian Devil who prowls about
seeking the ruin of souls (although, as a Christian who believes in a unity of
Scripture that flows from the divine author, God, I think they are connected).
I would say that Jadis in Wardrobe
is more strictly that Christian Devil as the murderous, vindictive adversary of
Christ/Aslan in the vein of a primarily juridical reading of Calvary. Jadis in Nephew
is the serpent in the garden, that core human temptation. And I think that
these two versions of Jadis go hand in hand with what I have said about Narnia
of Wardrobe and Narnia of Nephew being two different things for Lewis as an
author.
[ASIDE: With all due respect to ecumenical efforts (and I do
honestly mean respect, because understanding and good will towards those with
whom we disagree and a recognition that our own understanding is always
incomplete no matter form which side of a debate we com are very important), the
reading of Calvary is an unavoidable tension that there will be between Lewis
as a member of Protestantism, which tends to heavily emphasize the juridical
aspect of atonement, and Tolkien as being Catholic, which emphasizes Calvary as
the pinnacle of the Incarnation as a whole].
Conclusion
I would close with just one further
idea that came to me in reading the two Narnia books alongside material from
the Silmarillion. I don't really have
a "point" to make from it; it's more just something I have found
fascinating as far as the processes that go on in what Tolkien calls
"sub-creation." It is a more well-known and commented upon issue that
the first two chapters and the last two chapters of the Silmarillion were added later in Tolkien's process as a sort of
frame around a core body of narrative (which the published version even sets
apart as the "Quenta Silmarillion") whose composition process began
as early as the end of the First World War, 1916 or 1917, making it the
earliest compositional work of the Middle Earth material. Lewis's Chronicles of
Narnia is usually not studied at as deep of a literary level as Tolkien's work,
and this is somewhat justified because they are, by Lewis's own admission,
aimed at a child audience. But it strikes me that there is a similarity between
the two regarding a "frame." Obviously it is only in the
single-volume editions that have come out more recently that Magician's Nephew and Last Battle actually frame the other
books, but when taken from the perspective of the lateness of the
"frame," simply the simple fact that they are the last two works
Lewis wrote of the series, meaning that they represent his most matured
thinking on the material (notice the pairing of the far distant gardens on the
top of great high hills as evidence of the closeness of these two works and
their "inclusio" quality as a pair), does present a similarity with
Tolkien's later addition of a framework around the Quenta-Silmarillion.
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