Ah. Thanks.
Um–that sentence you noticed is missing a critical word that I thought I’d added back in but obviously didn’t:
…once the thaw starts, (to me) the book loses all that weird, otherworldly atmosphere and becomes a generic fantasy novel. Nephew never loses the otherworldliness.
…make more sense now? 
She did, as Elyanna points out. A big part of why I cannot like, and have never liked, The Last Battle is that the joyous looking forward (“Further up and further in!”) comes with an utter disregard for the pain of those left behind. Not to mention the cognitive dissonance of “We’re dead! And our parents are dead too! Yay!!!” And while I do think the door is left open for Susan to be saved later, for now sucks to be her, I guess. Enjoy your life as an complete orphan, Sue!
I never got it, not even when I was twelve.
Ah, not so subtle and nuanced, then. It makes sense now.
Lewis gets into this in great detail in The Great Divorce. Lewis’s idea is:
[ol]
[li]Heaven is perfect peace and happiness.[/li][li]Sin is a result of individual choice–nobody’s forced to sin.[/li][li]People who choose to sin are also choosing not to go to heaven. (note: Lewis is 100% clear on this point-Hell is NOT eternal–you can choose to leave at any point, just by choosing to give up your sin(s). Note also that Hell isn’t fire and brimstone–it’s like the worst, dreariest day of your life over and over. It’s separation from God, not “torture”…but since God is the source of all joy and good things…[/li][li]It can’t be perfect peace and happiness in Heaven if you feel sorrow/longing/regret for those who chose to not be with you. People who have chosen their sin over forgiveness no longer have the power to cause you pain.[/li][/ol]
Therefore, you remember the good parts about the person who’s chosen to stay behind and you see God’s bigger plan and you rejoice that they can choose to join you at any time.
Note: this is Lewis’s theology–I’m not defending or justifying it (heh–I’m Jewish so this is all kind of an abstract point for me).
Yeah–it’s got a uniquely creepy and atmospheric flavor before the thaw, after the thaw, it’s a standard sword & sorcery thud-and-blunder flavor. (His crucifixion/resurrection of Aslan* doesn’t have 1/1000th of the awe and intensity of say, Edmund approaching the White Witch’s castle at night after leaving the Beaver’s.
*Except for the bit about the mice. That was weird in a powerfully good way.
I understand the theology behind it as an intellectual matter, I just don’t buy it emotionally. My ideas of Heaven, while inarticulate and probably indefensibly inconsistent, do not include no longer caring that people I love are standing in the darkness while I am standing in the light. As a Christian, I do believe that in this, as in all things, we will eventually have understanding ("For now I see through a glass darkly, but then, face to face . . . " – of course, one of Lewis’s lesser-known books is Through A Glass Darkly). But the idea – they will struggle, they will be in pain, and you will not care – still sounds incongruous and heartless to my fallible human ears.
For what it’s worth, I struggle with this concept myself.
I’m not a Christian anymore, but I can still see Lewis’ point here. It’s not so much that the saved in heaven no longer CARE about the damned; it’s that they have sufficient perspective and wisdom to accept that the damned are free to make their own choices.
The nameless narrator of the Great Divorce makes the same point you do, and MacDonald answers it quite neatly. If no one can be free to feel joy until and unless everyone is saved, then we have ceded ultimate authority to the damned; we have made a dog in the manger the dictator of the universe. The notion of free will implies that some souls are not going to achieve salvation, because they are free to reject it.
I have that perspective and wisdom now. But perfect happiness is not consisent with caring about the damned; if the so-called saved cared, they wouldn’t be perfectly happy.
But of course this isn’t a “quite neat” answer, in the sense that it is a discussion of the ability to feel joy – any joy – not an assertion that “perfect happiness” is an absence of concern for others. It is the idea that Heaven is perfect happiness, unalloyed with any more complicated emotion or concern, that is the problem. I think the Pevensie family could have been represented to feel the joy of a Heavenly assumption along with sorrow, regret, or concern for Susan being at least temporarily left behind. But that’s not how Lewis presented it.
But then personally I’ve never fully accepted the idea of Heaven as perfect eternal happiness. How would you know you were happy, if happy was all you had?
It’s important not to treat the books as strict allegories – except, perhaps, for The Last Battle. Rather, they are stories with allegorical bits stuck in. That is, certain bits are meant to be strictly allegorical (such as Aslan == Christ), but these are just raisins in the pudding. The pudding itself is Story, and has its own mind.
The key to Narnia (the world) is in Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, in which he described the imaginary world he created with his brother. Susan, alone of the Narnia Visitors, renounces the joy of that simple childhood fantasy, and so must find another, more difficult, path to Joy. “Joy”, as Lewis used it, is a feeling of intense, yet disinterested, longing, both painful and rewarding; Lewis saw it as an unconscious reaching towards Heaven. Susan, by striving to be Grownup and Successful, moves into a joyless realm. She will, I have no doubt, find her way out of it. But not through Narnia – for good or ill, she has closed that door.
This, btw, is the key to the most disturbing (to us in the 21st C) part of the books – the Calormens. They are no more racist than Peter Pan’s Red Indians. They are characters from beloved children’s books, transported into a child’s imaginary world that becomes real.
Lastly, I would like to point out the parallel between Susan and C.S. Lewis’ brother, Major WH Lewis. Major Lewis, the author’s childhood collaborator in imagination, had sunk into chronic alchoholism by the time Lewis wrote Narnia, and the Major’s joyless life was probably weighing on him. Having all the Narnia Visitors remain in a state of Joy, even under the pressures of adult life, would strike Lewis as false. (He talks about this in Screwtape as well.)
You know, I don’t think that’s an excuse. Peter Pan’s “Red Indians” are racist too. It is entirely possible for innocent children (and well-meaning authors of children’s literature) to be racist. That’s not to say there’s no value in books that contain racism, or that racist characters should be Bowdlerized or disclaimed, just that the racism should be honestly identified as such.
Barre was not interested in the indigenous North Americans. He was interested in a fantasy folk created by children in their play. Neither Barre nor the children he drew had access to accurate ethnographic data. If they had, they wouldn’t have cared. They were playing.
Lewis has a better excuse than Barre. Like Barre, Lewis had no ethnographic interest in medieval Middle Eastern culture. Instead, he wanted to play Arabian Nights. If you read the bowdlerized, romanticised Arabian Nights then popular as a children’s book, you get a picture of a people pretty much like the Calormens.
As the Arabian Nights is an 18th c Arab-Egyptian collection of much older stories, no intentional racism can be imputed to it. The extant childrens versions prettify it substantially, making the characters much nicer (in a European’s eyes) than the original. If you used the original Arabian Nights as a model for your play, you’d get something rather worse than Calormens.
I don’t buy it. Lewis was writing a religious work and took the opportunity to bash a competing religion and culture.
You don’t buy it? Oh well, you must be right then. Having decided that Lewis made his Calormenes a vile caricature of Muslims, you demonstrate this by pointing out all the ways they are like Muslims (er, they live in a desert country and wave scimitars) and ignoring all the ways they are not (polytheism, a complete absence of anything like Islamic religious practices).
Susan rejected Narnia because she was, inadvertantly, Lewis’ most wholly realised character: she was the only Pevensie - and indeed the only Narnian - who had even a sniff of a sexual relationship. She had Rabadash slavering after her, and was not wholly averse to his attentions, at least initially: she did follow him to Tashbaan, after all.
In the light of this, her “lapse” into lipstick and invitations, Lewis’ shorthand dismissal of adult relationships, is thoroughly understandable: Susan wanted more than a lifetime of pre-adolescent chastity, and in Lewis’ view, at least as expressed in the Narnia books, this was akin to a fall from grace. Lewis seemed to regard a fully realised adulthood as a state of lapsed innocence, and thus Susan was banished from his Platonic paradise precisely because she refused to remain a child forever.
Because we know that Mr. & Mrs. Pevensie and all the good Narnians who had kids got them by immaculate conception…
or did they use the hole in the sheet?
:dubious:
Your snark would be more effective if you picked the right theological term.
Virgin birth is not immaculate conception.
I actually meant to follow I.C. with an (I know, I know), but then I thought about the hole in the sheet & forgot about that.
How my comment should read-
Because we know that Mr. & Mrs. Pevensie and all the good Narnians who had kids got them by immaculate conception (I know, I know)…
or did they use the hole in the sheet?
:dubious:
There! Now it’s perfekt!