Sigh. I know what you mean, Crotalus. I’d been hoping for a some serious tributes to both men. Oh well, let the children have their fun. I appreciate you and Skammer trying.
Not all of us who have read and appreciated C.S. Lewis believe he deserves any serious tribute, Tante. And Huxley would take the ribbing in good part, I’m sure.
If you want to insult other posters, do it in the BBQ Pit.
Indeed. I discovered the nonfiction of both of these gentlemen during my formative college years, and found them to be great examples of clear, intelligent writing, and they may have had some beneficent influence, however small, on my own ability to express myself. Those English guys knew how to write!
Well, mine is a serious post, too. I thank the OP for making this. I wasn’t even born until 75, and didn’t come to this country until 1979, so while I have been inundated with stuff about 11/22/63, it’s totally out of my realm. Even my parents didn’t come to this country until 1975, so it’s not in their realm of experience, either.
Lewis and Huxley, however, have been big influences on my life and I’ve read both extensively.
It is rather difficult to excuse the overt bigotry in A Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle. The entire Narnia series draws the good-vs-evil line in a superficial way that I submit is unhealthy for its intended audience, reinforcing the notion that you can identify bad/dangerous people by looking at them. Lewis was a skilled and creative writer whose work was disturbingly lacking in depth and complexity. Material of that sort is not what we need more of.
. . . and, more importantly, whose thought . . .
Wouldn’t that be more appropriate on their birthdate rather than death date? For Lewis it would be more understandable because the death date would be him leaving this world and going to Heaven. But in most cases it is generally birth dates that are celebrated.
Can you back up these claims? It’s been too long since I’ve read either book for me to judge whether they’re fair or not. I tried to find out by searching online, to see if I could find evidence defending or refuting this claim, and the best I could come up with was this pro-C. S. Lewis address: Are The Chronicles of Narnia Sexist and Racist?
Huxley understood that psychedelics were a window into a repressed form of consciousness. It strips away the ego and bares your true self in no uncertain terms.
The vast majority of human beings are afraid of their own selves. They rail on and on against things they don’t understand, and hide from their deeply buried secrets. They point fingers outward, choosing willful ignorance of the the fingers pointing at themselves.
“…we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one’s right mind.”
I do remember when I first read those books, perhaps around age nine or ten, it was quite obvious that the Calormene were analogous to Arabs, with their olive skin and their strange ways. Except for one person (the ex-princess in A Horse and His Boy) they were all quite unpleasant people, generally antagonistic toward the good people, and their culture was clearly inferior. Even as a child I recognized the portrayal of the Arabic culture in a negative light.
The characters that are evil are always recognizable as such. Wolves, ogres, hags, giants, the nasties are consistently typecast in a way that encourages young readers to feel that you can visually identify who is most likely to be bad. Most non-predatory woodland animals are either good or may have been deceived or beguiled into serving the needs of a bad person. And, of course, strong women are always bad (the antagonists in The Magician’s Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Silver Chair are powerful women, though perhaps actually the same character).
Then, one could consider the case of Eustace Clarence Scrubb. He came from a family with unusual habits which strongly resemble how someone like Lewis might view modern liberals. He was not at all happy to visit Narnia, but a cathartic incident transformed him into an adherent, after which his mother was displeased by what had happened to him. Here, we can note that characters do have transformational experiences, this is kind of natural for Lewis’ ideology (seems to me, he was a “saved” atheist himself), but the power of goodness is so great that no character ever goes from the good side to the bad side. That seems to me to be a dangerously naïve perspective.
Narnia are cute and nicely written books that, IMO, ought never be read or given to children younger than about 15 – but, then, that is how I feel about religious instruction in general (sorry to touch that point in Cafe, but I cannot see a way around it).
Wellll . . . Lewis’ portrayal of Calormene culture, an obvious expy of Muslim/MENA culture, is indeed deeply shameful and embarrassing, something that might have been lifted straight from the Song of Roland or Chesterton’s “Lepanto.” But it’s not really so racial. There is indeed some Fair For Its Day racism in it, the swarthy Calormenes always describing the (white human) Narnians as “accursed but beautiful.” But, in The Horse and His Boy, the Calormene aristocrat Aravis features as a sympathetic protagonist, and the epilogue states that she eventually grows up to marry the white-blonde Shasta/Cor, and there is no hint of resentment at the miscegenation. And in The Last Battle, there is a Calormene, forget his name, who always loved and sought to know more of the god Tash, and he is treated as a sort of benighted saint – Aslan tells him that all his service to Tash he counts as service to Aslan, for no deed that is vile can be accounted to Aslan (Christ), nor can any deed that is not vile be accounted to Tash (Satan).
What’s more objectionable, really, in The Horse and His Boy is Lewis’ hamfisted employment of crude and silly stereotypes about oriental despotism, expressed in the Tisroc (the cruel and decadent Emperor), Rabadash (the spoiled prince), and Ahoshta (the evil vizier), and most of the Tarkaans (which is indeed a title kinda racist – “can of tar”).
Bigotry and racism are slightly different things, I was careful not to accuse Lewis of racism. Some of his most vile characters are whiter than snow.
What about people who want to threadshit?
–Damn, this post belongs in ATMB. :smack:
I disagree with the suggestion that “strong women are always bad” - that’s a rather hasty generalisation since Jadis is being counted twice for LWW and MN, and the Green-Kirtle Woman in SC is another one of the same type (one of “those Northern witches”, but not Jadis herself on the evidence of Lewis’s own work). Polly is probably more sensible and mature than Digory, Lucy is the most steadfast follower of Aslan and physically courageous in her own right, earning the name “Queen Lucy the Valiant” during the reign of the grown-up Pevensies and on record as taking the battlefield regularly, and although Jill makes her share of mistake in SC she certainly adapts to Narnia at least as quickly and as well as Edmund and Eustace did if not better, and in LB she is as steadfast and resolute as anyone, as well as the kindest-hearted since she intercedes for Puzzle’s life when King Tirian would have killed the foolish donkey out of hand.
As to naïve perspectives, it is not altogether true that no character ever goes from the good side to the bad side; presumably Shift the Ape and Ginger the Cat were no worse than the common run of Talking Animals at the outset, before willingly committing and complying in treachery and blasphemy, and of course Susan despite the enormous privilege of having been a Queen of Narnia herself ends up by repudiating all her blessings for no worthier end than to become a party girl. (“Ends up” as far as the book series is concerned, that is; she has many years left to her on Earth to reconsider her position.) Giants appear on the good side as well as the bad (one in LWW who lets the revivified creatures in the Witch’s castle escape, and one well-meaning but bumbling giant in PC, where IIRC several more fight for the Narnians). The antagonists in PC, of course, are white male humans - the murdering usurper King Miraz and the Lords Gloselle and Sopespian who betray their new king as willingly as their old.
Then for Harold and Alberta Scrubb, whatever you can say as to their resemblance to modern liberals, it’s evident that in their place and time they are faddists pure and simple - it may help if you consider them not in the same vein as wise, enlightened 21st-century scientific rationalists, but as vax-deniers, homeopaths, and so forth. Their influence on Eustace is apparent from his hysterical demands aboard Dawn Treader for “Plumptree’s Vitaminised Nerve Food” to be made up with distilled water, to say nothing of their displeasure when he returns as a physically and morally courageous Christian. Given that Jill, prior to his experiences in Narnia, accurately pigeonholed him as a toadying hanger-on of the school bullies, and plainly noticed a huge improvement according to the opening pages of SC, we can say with some confidence that if Alberta was displeased with the change in her son then she was in the wrong.
The Calormene to whom BrainGlutton refers is Emeth, and it all goes down much as BG says: Emeth thinks that Tash must be great and holy and so utterly worthy of admiration that it is worth dying a thousand deaths simply to look on him face to face for a moment. As soon as he sees Aslan however he realizes that he was mistaken in not offering his worship to Him, and he is too honest to try to pretend that he has worshipped anyone but Tash. It’s also worth mentioning that when Aslan calls the whole world into the stable at the end of LB, people of all races and kinds are found among both those who come in and those who flee into the darkness - and in particular, even some of those who fought on the wrong side in the Battle are welcomed in.
The “silly stereotypes” in HHB are no worse than in any pantomime featuring wicked emperors and fawning viziers, and it’s a huge stretch to suggest that “Tarkaan” owes anything to the expression “can of tar” (I’d never suggest that a double a could be intended even to rhyme with the short a in “can”) rather than “-khan”; let’s not forget that the feminine form is “Tarkeena” although female Calormenes are surely quite as tarry as their menfolk. :rolleyes: Also, of course, “Tarkaan” refers to a particular rank in Calormene nobility, not the whole race - and the Tarkaans would probably be a shade less tanned than the common folk by being exempt from hard labour in the midday sun.
I read the Chronicles of Narnia as a boy and wasn’t hugely impressed. It was decent enough (especially the Magician’s Nephew, I actually thought that was very good) but a bit generic for my already jaded tastes.
However, as an adult (and not a Christian believer) I read the Space books. They are very old-fashioned but I found them very very good too, although there is an obvious tonal shift between books one and two. I thought the depiction of the Devil in the second book was actually excellent - chilling and bereft of glamour, a committed and focused selfish being of tremendous power but an unsophisticated if immense intellect. It was thoroughly nasty and repellent whilst keeping a real element of temptation and fear. The scene where the protagonist decides to physically battle it despite thinking he has no chance of success is outstanding, especially when you realise that much of its posturing was a kind of bluff.
I don’t agree with everything CS Lewis said, but he was an intelligent, compassionate man, and I find much of the internet anger at him is based on wilful ignorance and misreading of his work, with a healthy dose of tribal anger at Christian apologists too. I hope if he is anywhere, that he knows many people very much appreciate his work.
Lewis OD’d on nonsense.
I was composing a post in my head to defend the accusations against Lewis of bigotry, but I don’t think I can improve on Malacandra’s post. I do think Lewis is guilty of cultural snobbery, but what Englishman isn’t?
Thanks to those of you who pasted thoughtful comments (on both “sides”). I hope this isn’t too much of a thread hijack; I’m appreciating the discussion.
What I have read, and that it makes sense, is that Lewis’s depiction of the Calormenes, especially in A Horse and His Boy, was heavily influenced by The Arabian Nights, and that that book was Lewis’s attempt at writing what was in some ways an Arabian Nights-style adventure. Thus, Calormen is supposed to be sort of fairy-tale version of Arabia, much like Narnia is a fairy-tale version of Medieval Europe.
[QUOTE=For You]
The characters that are evil are always recognizable as such. Wolves, ogres, hags, giants, the nasties are consistently typecast in a way that encourages young readers to feel that you can visually identify who is most likely to be bad.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know if this is a flaw so much as it is a standard characteristic of the genre. Lewis was steeped in fairy tale and mythology, in which creatures that are inherently good or bad are a common element. (On the other hand, the beautiful-but-evil and the virtuous-disguised as plain or homely are also common fairy tale elements.)
If I were going just by the Narnia books, my impression would be that Lewis was all for strong and heroic girls, but that adult women were never anything but Evil. I don’t think Lewis’s depictions of or attitudes toward women are one of his strong points—but see Till We Have Faces, the novel he wrote with the help/influence of his wife Joy, whom he married late in life.
I’ve always liked the Narnia books okay, but they’ve never been either my favorite fantasies nor my favorite works by Lewis.
I, too, very much appreciate his work. He had his faults, and many of these (and some of his virtues) come from his old-fashioned point of view: he loved and was extremely well-read in old books.
[QUOTE=C. S. Lewis]
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.
None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
[/QUOTE]
(from “On the Reading of Old Books”)
Two counter-points: the adult Polly, a mother-figure to all the friends of Narnia and with her head thoroughly screwed on the right way round (though she gets too few lines in The Last Battle), and Uncle Andrew’s sister who keeps him on a very short rein and deservedly so, and has backbone enough not to be intimidated by a seven-foot sorceress from another world even though she is strong enough to toss her across the room.
(Not sure where to file Mrs Beaver from LWW :D)