Laura Miller (39 page)

Although Lewis’s wood has a similar effect on people’s memories, it represents a qualitatively different primeval state. Stories may not happen here, but this is where they are born. Looking around, Digory feels not only as if he “had always been in that place,” but also that he’d “never been bored although nothing had ever happened.” There are no animals or insects, yet the Wood seems charged with vitality: “When he tried to describe it afterward Digory always said, ‘It was a
rich
place; rich as plumcake.’” This becomes manifest after the children have made an exploratory visit to the world of Charn. Charn’s last empress, the sorceress Jadis, succeeds in hitching a ride back with them, only to find that the air in the Wood — “this horrible place,” as she calls it — suffocates her. If the Wood is dense with life, Jadis, who has killed every other living thing in her own world rather than submit to being conquered by her sister, is an avatar of death; she can’t survive there.

The Wood Between the Worlds shares some traits with other liminal spaces, way stations and thresholds like the bardo of Tibetan Buddhism or the door-lined hallway that Alice tries so hard to get out of in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
But unlike other “between” places in myth and fiction, the Wood is both empty
and
full. It is a unitary moment, containing everything, the pause before a story is told, in which nothing has happened and so anything might. It is not the point of embarkation, but the embarkation itself, the feeling we all experience when we understand that a story is about to begin, the reading mind rendered geographical, like the allegorical medieval self. The pools open into entire worlds, and this, too, is what stories do. They build a world around us as they go along.

On a less abstract level, the Wood is also a library. For someone like Lewis, who lived so much through his reading, each book was potentially a portal to another world. This is one of the chief differences between a child’s experience of a favorite book and an educated adult’s. For the adult, a book may be a work of art, possibly a very great one, but for the child reader, certain books are universes. If we are lucky, we retain some of that capacity to be immersed in a story; Lewis seems to have held on to it better than most, and in this sense, those who describe him as a man who remained a “child at heart” are right. Nevertheless, the adult awareness that a book is a
made
thing — the work of a human being who, however talented he or she may be, is still only human, and flawed — always takes up some of the imaginative space formerly occupied by total belief. At seven, Neil Gaiman believed the events in the Chronicles to be “true”; now he knows they are “made up.”

The made-up-ness of Narnia has always seemed particularly glaring to certain well-read adults who never encountered the books as children. Lewis’s mythic syncretism — fauns and dragons and dwarves and Arabian Nights exoticism all jumbled together — undermines the Chronicle’s religious integrity for readers like John Goldthwaite, and the Christian subtext spoils the imaginative freedom for readers like my own teenage self. For Tolkien, these undigested borrowings and the lack of coherent, unified world-building make Narnia a flimsy, derivative concoction that spits in the eye of true sub-creation. The idea that the Chronicles are allegories — a supposedly crude, reductive, pedantic form of literature — as well as a collection of insufficiently original tidbits, offends against the premium that contemporary critics place on naturalism and novelty. “Narnia is all pieces of other fullnesses,” complains Goldthwaite, “hastily thrown together like stage props retrieved from a warehouse. The only law of consistency Lewis observed was the law of his own fancy.”

Perhaps children are just too ignorant to recognize this as a flaw, but I think not. Here at least is one case where the naive reader knows better. When Goldthwaite describes “his own fancy” as the “only law” Lewis obeys, he underestimates the potency of that fancy. The Chronicles
are
unified, not by anything resembling the exhaustive cultural
stuff
that Tolkien invented for Middle-earth, not by a single aesthetic or style, and not even, really, by a cogent religious vision, but by readerly desire. Lewis poured into his imaginary world everything that he had adored in the books he read as a child and in the handful of children’s books he’d enjoyed as an adult. And there is more, too: treasures collected from Dante, from Spenser, from Malory, from Austen, from old romances and ballads and fairy tales and pagan epics. Everything that Lewis had ever read and loved went into Narnia, and because he was a great reader, these things were as deeply felt by him as actual experiences. In his own way, Lewis, too, believed that everything in the Chronicles was true, and this conviction is what he communicates to his young readers.

The Chronicles resemble the Wood Between the Worlds in this way: they, too, are a portal to other worlds, literary worlds. I was probably the only undergraduate in my junior-year seminar on Edmund Spenser who felt perfectly at home with
The Faerie Queene,
although at the time I couldn’t have told you why. The “troupe of Faunes and Saytres . . . dauncing in a rownd / Whiles old Sylvanus slept in shady arber sound,” who come to the lady Una’s rescue when she is menaced by the knight Sansloy, were old friends of mine, people whose company I had missed. The marvel-filled woods that Spenser’s heroes roamed, Prospero’s Island, the lands Odysseus visited, and the Underworld traversed by Aeneas — all these were like old haunts to me. I would even catch flashes of a familiar figure like Uncle Andrew (“Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures”) in the characters of Raskolnikov and Dr. Frankenstein. For the rest of my life as a reader, I will no doubt be meeting again the characters, places, and events that I first encountered in Narnia.

Lewis not only provided my first introduction to these wonders, he also taught me how to understand them, by which I mean that he showed me how a story can work in several different registers at once. I learned to read ironically with the excerpts from Eustace’s diary in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader;
that meant looking past a character’s own descriptions of events to get to a more impartial version of what had actually happened. I learned to read morally by recognizing my own flaws in the ignoble impulses of Edmund Pevensie and Jill Pole. Both are styles of reading I would need once I became old enough for
Lolita
and
Crime and Punishment.
But Lewis also showed me how to read in another way: allegorically, or as he would later come to call it, symbolically.

Lewis traced a familial connection between allegory and literary myth in
The Allegory of Love.
Allegory, he thought, was a stage that religious stories passed through on their way to becoming the mythic elements used by poets, romancers, and novelists. It is a big leap from faith to art. As long as people believe in a god, they will most likely want something from him, regard him with what Lewis called an “urgent practical interest” and subject him to “selfish prayer.” But, given time, an unworshipped god can “come to light in the imagination” as a symbol pure and simple. Only when the last vestiges of belief have faded can he attain the full imaginative power of what Lewis called myth. This can take centuries. While those years pass, a god or a hero is always in danger of being simply forgotten. The idea of that god or hero, like the bottled juice of grapes fermenting into wine, “must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory.”

Demeter, for example, was the goddess of the harvest to her ancient worshippers, a deity who walked the earth, replete with all the meanings that Barfield described as residing in a full-fledged, primordial myth — motherhood, fruitfulness, grief, deprivation, pilgrimage, recovery. She is now a “myth” in Lewis’s sense of the word, a figure who exists only in stories. She still contains most of the old meanings, and even some newer ones, but artists can now do whatever they like with her without fearing either divine retribution or irate believers. (This is a freedom that no one today enjoys with either Muhammad or Jesus.) At some point, between the days when people all over the ancient world convened in Greece to celebrate the rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Demeter’s honor and the moment in the nineteenth century when Alfred Lord Tennyson sat down to write the poem “Demeter and Persephone,” the goddess underwent an imaginative sea change. Lewis believed that she (and Orpheus and Aphrodite and the rest) spent the first part of those long centuries of metamorphosis in the “sleeping-place” of allegory.

In the 1940s, after he’d written
The Allegory of Love
but before he started the Chronicles, Lewis sometimes used the word “symbol” interchangeably with “myth” in order to distinguish it from allegory. He had not lost his interest in the allegory as a form, but it did have its limits. He still thought that a good allegory must be read skillfully — by giving equal status to the images of the sparkling fountain and the lady’s eyes in
The Romance of the Rose,
for example — and by recognizing that the character’s behavior and actions are often a way of representing what we now regard as entirely internal conflicts. Modern readers who lack these skills misperceive allegories as no more than a pointlessly labored narrative code. But if allegory is not really as reductive as contemporary readers usually think, it is still constrained. An allegorical figure labeled “Patientia,” for example, is permitted to stand for only one thing: the virtue of patience.

Many people today also talk about “symbols” in this way, as simple equations; the farm in
Animal Farm
stands for the Soviet Union, and so on. As Lewis used the word “symbol,” it could not be so easily pinned down or exhausted. For him a symbol, like a myth, was “a story out of which ever-varying meanings will grow for different readers and in different ages.” A strict allegory is harnessed, more or less subject to its creator’s conscious control. A myth or symbol is less obedient. “Into an allegory,” Lewis explained to one correspondent, “a man can put only what he already knows: in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come to know in any other way.” Like the images on the alethiometer in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, like literature itself, its meaning can never be exhausted.

In the Chronicles, Lewis endeavored to create symbols like this; so, too, did Tolkien with
The Lord of the Rings.
That contemporary readers often mistook those books for allegories only served to illustrate for Lewis the degree to which readerly sophistication and versatility had atrophied in modern times. People really only knew how to read realistic fiction. Lewis (unlike Tolkien) appreciated quite a few realistic novels, but that was merely one arrow in literature’s quiver! As a writer, he could move easily in and out of various literary modes in the course of a single book. In
The Magician’s Nephew,
for example, the confrontation between Jadis and Digory’s aunt Letty in Letty’s London parlor is farce, with Aunt Letty assuming that the tall, outlandishly dressed Jadis is a circus performer and her Charnian incantations the mutterings of a drunk. Tolkien, had he read the book, would probably have regarded this scene as unconscionable levity — Jadis, after all, is Lewis’s villain; it’s hard to imagine the creator of Sauron allowing
him
to appear so ridiculous, however briefly.

This doesn’t keep Jadis from serving as a credible menace later on, insinuating and manipulative when she tempts Digory in the garden. Aunt Letty’s parlor, where mattresses are mended and adults make remarks alluding to an alternate, Trollopian narrative taking place offstage (“Andrew, I wonder
you
are not ashamed to ask
me
for money”) coexists in the same story as the Wood Between the Worlds and the mystical creation of Narnia. The fracas Jadis causes on the streets of London when she commandeers a hansom cab is Dickensian comedy; the scene in the garden is dreamlike and allegorical. Today, I wonder how Lewis managed to make all this feel as if it belongs together, in the same book. As a child I took it for granted, though if asked I might have said that
The Magician’s Nephew
was as rich as plumcake.

This is the other side of Neil Gaiman’s boyhood intimation that Narnia is an infinite number of stories waiting to happen. Countless stories went into it, and countless stories come out of it. Narnia is the country of literature, of books, and of reading, a territory so vast that it might as well be infinite. This is why the conclusion of
The Last Battle
feels like such a mistake, and no doubt why everyone I interviewed for this book described it as their least favorite Chronicle. After the destruction of the world, it is revealed that the Narnia we have known in the previous six Chronicles is “only a shadow of a copy of something in Aslan’s real world.” Everyone of merit is ushered into the “real Narnia,” a Platonic paradise where colors are brighter, the fruits are infinitely richer and sweeter, and “every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.”

This is a far cry from the voice that told of trees stirred by “a hushing, ruffling sort of wind which meant that rain was coming soon.” Lewis, reaching for celestial beauty, attains only a hallucinatory hyperrealism that unstitches Narnia from the humble, medieval details that made it live.
The Last Battle
was the one Chronicle I didn’t reread very often. The ending left me feeling empty and gloomy instead of satisfied.

Jonathan Franzen calls
The Last Battle
a “weak finish” that “quickly turns into that which [Lewis] has amazingly avoided” in the previous six books; that is, a story overwhelmed by its preacherly and philosophical elements. For Neil Gaiman, the book “has got a few good bits in: it’s got the dwarves, it’s got ‘further up and further in,’ and yes, we’ve gotten to see a couple of characters we’d loved who are dead.”