Qin, I think the key point is that such an incendiary quotation from such a popular and much-discussed writer would be very widely known if it were found in a verifiably authentic document. There have been whole conferences built around discussions of (perceived) racism and sexism in the Narnia books. And yet this particular letter of Lewis’ has only ever been noticed by David Colbert?
Rishathra then.
Sure, but so were Beren and Luthien, or John Carter and Deejah Thoris, or Sarek and Amanda, or Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Are you uncomfortable with any of those?
Hey! Leave George RR Martin out of this!
–
And possibly Jacqueline Carrey.
:eek:
And I thought My Little Pony slash was bad!
Or Supergirl and Comet the Superhorse. And that really *is *canon.
It’s actually pretty good.
…Er.
When compared to Narnia slash, I mean.
Yeah.
:dubious:
He cites The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis vol. I, p. 711. This is viewable on Google Books. The citation is to a letter written by Lewis to his brother, Warnie, in response to one Warnie wrote describing his adventures in China. Warnie’s letter is reproduced in a footnote:
Lewis responded thus:
Unpleasant, but that looks about right for 19th century thought.
Wow. That may be the most culturally provincial thing I have ever seen from Jack, and I knew about his hatred of onions.
20th century…Lewis was born in 1898…he was smart, sure, but not quite up to that level of writing at 2 years old, I would think.
Picky.
Thanks for the reference. The letters were written in 1927.
In some fairness, I suppose, to Warnie, his objections to the Chinese are preceded by the observation that “you never lose the sense of a common humanity shared with [the West African], and the same is of course true of the Indian.”
I wonder if there are any more such revealing fragments in the letters. The accusations of racism I’ve seen are based on the book texts, with something of an implication that Lewis had let slip a bit more than he meant to.
Wikipedia tells me that his conversion to Christianity was the early 30s, so I’d guess that he would (literally) have repented of this view, considering how antithetical it seems to his later theology. I’d also guess that he might never have gotten over an emotional dislike of Asians, but in his better moments recognized this as Screwtape’s minions putting thoughts into his head.
That’s a good point I somehow hadn’t thought of.
I deliberately posted the quotes without comment, but I think it bears noting as well that Warnie is describing his feelings of being isolated in a foreign land whose customs would have been even more unfamiliar to an Englishman in that time than they would be to any of us. He’s pretty clearly being hyperbolic and perhaps even a little whimsical in mentioning their reversed (by Western lights) head shakes as the first in his litany of items that make the Chinese seem inhuman aliens. Even in more enlightened times, I can see someone writing the same sort of exaggerated complaints to a close friend like a brother without meaning them to be taken seriously. (I just possibly might have even written such things about people here since I moved to California!) I can also see someone writing back sympathetically and agreeing based on what they’ve heard without it necessarily being an indication of their truest feelings.
What’s written in those letters is pretty disgusting and hateful, but there’s so much context missing when you read letters between other people who are that close to each other that it’s hard to really know the intentions.
I certainly wouldn’t want all my IMs and text messages dug up and published 83 years from now and taken as better indicators of my true feelings than the things I say and write publicly!
Yeah, I mean who hasn’t gotten a bit carried away and written something like On The Creation Of Niggers?.
O.K., the letter was dated July 9, 1927, and Lewis was 28 at the time. This was several years before he became a Christian. He’s corresponding with his brother Warren. Warren has commented on his travels around Asia, talking about all the odd habits he’s observed there. He says that they act so differently that he scarcely finds them to be human. Warren hasn’t actually made any great attempt to get to know the people he observes. Indeed, in one case he is quoting a Moslem man who he has talked to who is as much an outsider as he is, but who has spent a llittle more time talking with Chinese people. Lewis is agreeing with Warren that the behavior of many of other human beings is so strange that it’s hard to believe that they are of the same race.
It’s possible to get the idea these days that Naziism came out of nowhere, that in the early twentieth century it was an isolated opinion that vaious ethnic groups were so different in behavior that it seemed like they were like different species. On the contrary, this was more or less the standard European view of the rest of the world. In particular, it was the view of middle-class British men like Lewis and his brother. Read about Winston Churchill and his views on Gandhi.
Lewis and most of the rest of the British people had their narrow views about the rest of the world smashed by the events of World War II and its aftermath. Suddenly they had to realize that they couldn’t rule the world. They had to accept the demands of the other people that they were just as entitled to self-determination as anyone else. They had to accept non-European peoples who quoted back to them European writings on the dignity of mankind and who insisted that it applied to them too.
By 1943, Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man that the moral codes of various religions of the world were similar, and he quoted writings from all over the world to show this. He didn’t think that those various scriptures only applied to the ethnic groups that they were derived from. By the late 1950’s, he married an American woman of Jewish ancestry. He did this despite some disapproval from others. But, yes, in his younger days, Lewis sometimes showed a typical British bewilderment with the rest of the world.
The four major characters in the series are all siblings. What do you expect?
Heck, I’ve said in the past that the Indian head-bob drove me crazy trying to figure it out when I first encountered it (from a very quiet Indian post-doc, so I got a lot of it and not much verbal communication) and I still have to think about it at times, although I don’t run into it day-to-day anymore. It’s kinda like running into the Chinese “yes” reply, where “yes” doesn’t always mean “yes.” It’s a different custom, and like all customs it can be disconcerting when you’re not part of the culture, even if you learn the custom. I don’t think I’d write a letter like that. Mine would probably come out sounding more like the McDonald’s discussion in Pulp Fiction.
Aslan, Caspian, Lucy, & Eustace are not all siblings. :rolleyes: 
Which is to say, the four siblings are really “main characters” in two of the seven books.