In the preface to the novel Lewis says that the story is not a religious allegory.
Could have fooled me.
I haven’t set foot regularly in a church in 28 years, but even I knew the whole damn thing was a religious allegory.
Right?
Go ahead, prove me wrong. I’m strong I can take it.
I just read through the preface to That Hideous Strength and Lewis never mentions the term “religious allegory.” The closest I can find to what you mention is in the very short preface to Perelandra, where Lewis says that “All of the human characters are purely fictitious and none of them are allegorical.” This has to do with a distinction that has been made on the SDMB before. Do a search on “allegory” and “C. S. Lewis.” There’s a common argument about whether the Narnia books are allegorical. Well, it depends on what you think of as being an allegory. In the strict sense of “allegory,” only a book like The Pilgrim’s Progress (or Lewis’s own "The Pilgrim’s Regress_) is allegorical. In the strict sense, every character has to be matched up to specific virtue or vice or other religious or philosophical abstraction. In that sense, it is not sufficient that there be a religious or philosophical meaning to the story, even if it is a fairly explicit meaning. An allegory, in this sense, is a very explicit diagram, with all the characters carefully matched to specific virtues, etc. This is what Lewis meant by allegory. Being an expert on medieval and Renaissance literature, he had read many allegories, and he knew that his books weren’t allegories in this sense.
However, the fact is that hardly anybody these days writes allegories in the strict sense. Thus, many people use a loose sense of the term. In the loose sense of “allegory,” it means any story that has a fairly explicit religious or philosophical meaning. In this loose sense, it is not necessary to carefully match all the characters to virtues, etc. This is what people mean when they say that the Narnia books or the Ransom books are allegories.
Personally, I don’t think that the loose sense of “allegory” is a useful term. If you want to say that a book has a religious meaning or that there is religious symbolism in a book, that would be fine. Don’t use the term “allegory” though, since that has a much more specific meaning.
Well… you can’t always take an author’s statements about his work as gospel.
At the start of “Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain insists there’s no plot and no moral (and says anyone looking for them should be shot!)- do you believe THAT?
Whenever Samuel Beckett was asked for an explanation of “Waiting For Godot,” he always insisted it had no symbolic meaning, that it was simply “a play about people who are like that and behave like that.” Do you buy THAT?
Now, were there layers of meaning to most of Lewis’ books, and were most of his works God-affirming and Christ-affirming? Of course, and he never denied that. But both he and (especially) his friend/colleague J.R.R. Tolkien were wary of writing simplistic allegories. Both believed that a story must stand on its own merits, and that an author who wants to create great literature (as opposed to mere fables) should create a world and characters that are real and true in themselves.
So, for example, Tolkien’s LOTR trilogy is FILLED with images that Christians will recognize as their own… and there’s no doubt Tolkien wanted it that way. BUT… if a reader came away thinking simplistically, “OHHHHHH, I get it… Sauron is Satan, Frodo is Jesus, and when he’s carrying the ring up Mount Doom, that’s just like Jesus carrying the cross up Calvary, and Gollum is like Judas,” Tolkien would have been either angry (“That dunderhead is reducing my work to a mere metaphor”) or disappointed in his own failure as a writer (“Frodo was supposed to feel like a REAL person… if the reader sees him only as a superficial metaphor, I didn’t do my job as a writer”).
It’s not that Tolkien and Lewis weren’t Christians, and didn’t intend readers to see Christian messages. Rather, it’s that they wanted people to appreciate a good story FIRST, and reflect on possible Christian messages later. Both thought that didacticism ruined good stories (though Tolkien often indicated that he thought Lewis regularly crossed the line toward simplistic didacticism in his fiction.)
Frodo was definitely not a Christ figure. In the end he gave in to temptation.
I thought That Hideous Strength was very deep. My husband couldn’t stand it.
Websters has allegory as:
“the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence.”
“That Hideous Strength” (which disturbs me each time I review it) is not an allegory so much as a straight representation of academic life. The Christian part is more of a fable than an allegory, the way I read it.
But to address Lewis’s comment about allegory: Tolkien said much the same thing. Tolkien was concerned that people would read one of the world wars into his work. I feel that Lewis was more or less saying “me too”, in that he didn’t wish to be seen as pedantic. That may be so, in regard to “That Hideous Strength”. However otherwise Lewis was as preachy as it comes. “The Screwtape Letters” may be a unique, useful contribution to Christian literature, but it also shows Lewis’ bent to use any method necessary. Tolkien was less interested in making his writing a religious statement.
Frodo DID carry out his mission, but with much reluctance… and in the end, he might not have been able to do it, had Gollum not stepped in, for reasons of his own.
Jesus was as reluctant to die as Frodo was to carry out his task. In the garden of Gethsemane, he wept and swetaed blood, praying that he wouldn’t have to endure the suffering that awaited him. And it may be that, while Judas acted for selfish reasons of his own, he enabled Jesus to fulfill his mission.
A perfecxt analogy? Not at all- but it’s a legitimate one. I’m sure Tolkien would have chastised me for seeking a simplistic parallel between Jesus and a fictional hobbit… but the parallel is there.
This sort of discussion comes up frequently, and it seems to me that it’s just a pointless discussion of the meaning of words like “allegory.” Are there religious analogies, or parallels, or meanings, or symbolism in Lewis’s or Tolkien’s works? Of course there are in some sense, and they’re more obvious in Lewis than in Tolkien. Fables? Maybe, but I’d rather restrict that word to things like Aesop’s fables. Allegories? Well, Lewis wanted to restrict that term to things like The Pilgrim’s Progress, and so do I. The problem is that neither Lewis nor I can control the meaning of words in English. Ultimately, this is a discussion of how strictly to limit the meaning of terms like “allegory,” “fable,” “symbolism,” etc.