Laura Miller (23 page)

For academics, seeing literature’s former gods brought low doesn’t constitute much of a dilemma — the salt miner keeps going to the mine every day whether or not he likes salt; that’s his job. The common reader has different prerogatives. In a few unhappy cases, however, both readers are forced to exist side by side in the same person. In his academic satire,
The Handmaid of Desire,
the novelist John L’Heureux, who teaches creative writing at Stanford University, describes an English department under siege by a young firebrand professor who wants to turn it into a department of Theory and Discourse. But the firebrand has a secret stashed in a locked cabinet — a copy of Jane Austen’s
Emma.
His professional reputation depends on hiding this forbidden passion from his colleagues; his own discipline, his livelihood, is dedicated to proving that the pleasures of old-fashioned novels are invidious, regressive, illusory.

The honest, educated reader, when tackling the towering literary works of the past, now faces a different, though no less precarious task: how to acknowledge an author’s darker side without losing the ability to enjoy and value the book. Prejudice is repellent, but if we were to purge our shelves of all the great books tainted by one vile idea or another, we’d have nothing left to read — or at least nothing but the new and blandly virtuous. For the stone-cold truth is that Virginia Woolf
was
an awful snob, and Milton was a male chauvinist. The work of both authors can be difficult to read, but also immeasurably rewarding. Once upon a time, when people believed encounters with great art were morally uplifting, it was easier to summon the extra bit of initiative required to give the classics a try, and literature professors were expected to encourage them. Today, scholars are more likely to tell readers about the pernicious influence of the great books they used to revere.

In recent years, it’s gotten easier to write off complaints about how an author portrays race, class, or gender as “political correctness,” but that’s just as facile as reducing every author to the sum of his political beliefs; hatred and injustice are wrong, not merely “incorrect.” When it comes to a favorite author, the impulse to try to demonstrate that he wasn’t really a racist, or at least wasn’t so bad, can be nearly irresistible. C. S. Lewis’s most devoted Christian readers regard his writings as, if not quite sacred, then at least sacralized. For them, the temptation to deny that he held a lot of objectionable opinions is very strong. Nevertheless, he did indeed hold those opinions, and they can’t be rationalized away with talk of “readymade” sources. The racism, sexism, and snobbery (of various types) lie pretty close to the surface in some parts of the Chronicles, and so do some less easily labeled faults like Lewis’s knee-jerk objections to any kind of change or reform. He was, in many respects, what Neil Gaiman fondly describes as one of Britain’s “old buffers, somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.”

But perhaps ethics are not all that counts, or even what really counts, when it comes to reading stories. I have hated some morally impeccable novels, and liked some reprehensible ones. I’m not convinced that either kind has altered the moral underpinnings of my own life. Like Lewis, I’ve noticed that the best-read people I know don’t seem to be any more trustworthy, kind, honest, brave, or decent than the ones who scarcely read at all. And as Exhibit A to this particular argument, I hold up my own case. However much I may have been shaped by the Chronicles, I’ve remained impervious to the one ideology their author deliberately tried to instill in me: Christianity. Maybe even some of the lesser virtues that I like to think I’ve absorbed while reading about Narnia were there to begin with. Perhaps I did not so much learn from these books as recognize my better self in them.

When I returned at last to
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
and then to the rest of the Chronicles after my long estrangement from Lewis and his work, I could see, oh so clearly, all of the flaws I’ve detailed in the past seven chapters. I winced at the depictions of the Calormenes and understood for the first time that the White Witch is a dominatrix. Lewis’s frankly stupid asides on the subject of Experiment House annoyed me. I realized that Corin and his taunting of Rabadash were among the reasons that
The Horse and His Boy
had never quite sat with me. And all these reservations were piled on top of my fundamental disinterest in the books’ religious message, which to my adult ear arrives with the leaden thud of a Sunday newspaper full of ads.

While puzzling over how to understand this, I found guidance in an unexpected quarter: Philip Pullman. Pullman’s trilogy of children’s fantasy novels, His Dark Materials, is often regarded as an anti-Lewisian project, and he has made his own distaste for Narnia abundantly clear. When I interviewed him for a profile in 2005, I pressed him on this topic, and got him to concede that he did see the Chronicles as “grappling with real things, with salvation and damnation and temptation and trial. . . . So although I dislike profoundly the moral answers Lewis finds, I respect the wrestle for truth, the struggle that he’s undergoing as he searches for the answers.” Nevertheless, Pullman considers Lewis’s children’s fiction to be, for the most part, “repellent” and “morally loathsome.”

Still, it was in His Dark Materials that I stumbled upon a way to consider the Chronicles as an adult, neither grieving for my childhood capacity to immerse myself in a book, nor giving up that experience as entirely lost. Pullman’s trilogy, inspired by Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
takes the opposite of the traditional view of the Fall of Man; equally influenced by the poetry of William Blake, His Dark Materials is a paean to the value of experience over innocence.

Pullman’s heroine, the twelve-year-old Lyra Belacqua, acquires an alethiometer, a dial-like device, resembling a compass or clock, with small images around the rim: a moon, a serpent, a lute, and so on. The alethiometer divines the truth about current, past, and future events, but reading it is difficult; like the figures in an allegory, the alethiometer’s symbols have many layers of meaning. At first, Lyra proves to be a prodigy at reading the device; she does it by pure instinct or intuition. But as she comes of age and falls in love, this aptitude fades. Lyra, now an adult, has become self-conscious. At the very end of the trilogy, an angelic being tells her that her old skill with the alethiometer came by “grace,” but she can “regain it by work.” The work required to relearn how to use the alethiometer, however, will take “a lifetime. . . . But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you.”

Pullman told me that he’d adapted this idea from an essay by the German playwright Heinrich von Kleist, entitled “On the Marionette Theater.” Kleist’s essay is presented as a conversation between two friends, one of whom marvels over the exceptional grace of some puppets he has recently seen performing. Without consciousness, the puppets, unlike human dancers, can never be self-conscious or affected. “We’ve eaten of the tree of knowledge,” one of the men remarks. “Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stand behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back.”

Kleist leaves the possibility of finding an alternate entrance somewhat up in the air, but Pullman believes that it is attainable. Having lost our innocence, we must pursue understanding, knowledge, and experience to its furthest reaches. There, we can hope to regain not our lost grace, but perhaps a superior one. “You have to go all the way through human life,” Pullman told me. “You have to go around the world and reenter Paradise through the back way.”

This puts Pullman at odds with a long tradition of children’s authors who regard childhood as a vanished Eden. Men like J. M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll preferred the company of children not (as the jaded modern mind sometimes presumes) because they were pedophiles seeking adult pleasures from children, but because they longed for childlike pleasures they couldn’t share with adults. What they really wanted, what they tried to regain in playing pirates or planning outings with little boys and girls, was something truly impossible; they wanted their own childhoods back.

To want to be a child, however, is not childlike. As Lewis himself once observed, children almost always want to grow up, and why shouldn’t they, since innocence (as grown-ups are prone to forget) is also powerlessness? Pullman, who worked as a schoolteacher for many years, has never forgotten this. He takes the child reader’s side by celebrating the virtues of experience, and if I had had the chance to read his books as a little girl, I would have adored him for this. “You can’t go back,” he explained to me. “That’s the point. You can’t regain the grace you’ve lost. The only thing to do is go on through that and eventually acquire the other sort of grace, the conscious grace, the taught, the learned grace of the dancer.” This idea runs against the grain of our sentimental notions about childhood, but as far as Pullman is concerned, it’s “a truer picture of what it’s like to be a human being. And a more hopeful one.”

Not long after this conversation, it occurred to me that I could apply the same principle to reading. I’d always assumed that I could never recapture the old enchantment I once found in books, especially the complete and total belief that I’d felt while reading the Chronicles. I know too much now: about Lewis’s personality and intentions, about literary sources he’d raided, about his careless reflections of the world’s injustices. But what if I decided to know even more, to learn more, about how the Chronicles came to be written and all the various ways they have been and can be read? Then I might arrive “somewhere at the back” and find a door open. Not the original one, not the wardrobe itself, but another kind of door, perhaps, with a different version of paradise on the other side.

Part Three

Songs of Experience

Chapter Sixteen

Castlereagh Hills

F
rom the top of Slieve Ban, one of the peaks of the Mourne Mountains on the southern border of Northern Ireland, you can lie back in the grass and watch the blue shadows of clouds drift across the glinting surface of the Carlingford Lough while bees buzz nearby in the heather. It is otherwise utterly quiet, and the side of the slieve is so steep it seems to plunge directly down before your feet, as if a pebble you accidentally kicked over the side would land on the back of a cow grazing peaceably in a field by the shore, hundreds of feet below.

Across the lough, on Ireland’s storied Cooley Peninsula, is Carlingford Mountain, which — I was told almost as soon as I arrived in the village of Rostrevor — is also said to be the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (or Finn McCool) in profile. He’s lying down for a nap, and the fog that rolls over the top of the mountain and sometimes refuses to burn off even on fine days is his coverlet. The Cooley Peninsula is where the hero Cúchulainn fought the rapacious Queen Medb over the brown bull of Cooley, a magnificent animal she wanted for her own, in the Old Irish epic “The Cattle Raid of Cooley.”

Behind Slieve Ban, the long chain of granite mountains extends up along the eastern coast of county Down, beginning with Slieve Martin and the thickly wooded slopes of Rostrevor Forest. The trees on the higher ground are firs, their pointed tops like the spear tips of a mighty army. The trees are packed so densely it would be difficult to walk among them. No sunlight can get through, so nothing grows below, and beneath the top layer of silvery green needles there’s a dim, silent, monochromatic realm of copper-colored trunks rising from a blanket of copper-colored needles. Lower down the mountain, you can walk through an older and more hospitable oak forest dating back to the eighteenth century, and at the very top of the mountains are heaths, open grass- and heather-covered uplands, soggy and riddled with pools of water stained as dark as tea.

This is the landscape that C. S. Lewis said reminded him most of Narnia. Or, rather, it might be, since that bit of information comes to us thirdhand, from Walter Hooper, who apparently had it from Warren Lewis sometime before he died in 1973. And if Lewis did, as reported, think of Narnia while walking with his brother through the hills around Rostrevor, I can’t be entirely sure that the hills looked then — in the 1950s — as they do now. Those forbidding firs, so evocative of the “dark and seemingly endless pine forest” that Caspian rides through while fleeing his uncle’s castle in search of the Old Narnia, are neither wild nor ancient. They were first planted in 1930, and to judge by appearances — from a distance you can see that the trees are laid out in unnaturally uniform patches of all the same height — they’re occasionally harvested, as well. This place is steeper and more rugged than my own vision of Narnia. During my travels through England and Ireland I’ve seen fragments of
my
Narnia here and there; the whole thing, never.

For me, the Chronicles were first and foremost about a place. More than I wanted to meet Lucy or to romp with Aslan, I wanted to
go to Narnia.
In this, I was not alone. “The only problem I’ve ever had with Narnia is that I never got to go there,” Tiffany Brown told me. Neil Gaiman said that as much as he liked Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, he never really wanted to visit that world, or to have the adventures Tolkien described, either. But Narnia was different: “Narnia, you felt, was just an infinite number of stories waiting to happen. If you went there, you would have adventures that were different but equally as cool. You would go to places that he hadn’t mentioned on the map.” As of this writing, there are more than seven thousand images on Flickr, a photo-sharing Web site, tagged “narnia”; most are shots of landscapes that reminded the photographers of a place that doesn’t actually — or even approximately — exist.

Lewis’s invented land, though far less sturdily elaborate than Tolkien’s, felt every bit as real to these readers, just as it did for me. Rife with logical improbabilities in everything from its economics to its history to its agriculture, Narnia nevertheless remains palpable, a place you can almost see, almost smell, almost hear. Its reality is rooted in the sensual richness of the natural world, described by Lewis with ardor, care, and simple grace. Here, at length, is one of the best of these passages, from
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
the part in which Edmund trudges through the woods as a captive of the White Witch and her dwarf henchman: