Pullman and Lewis would clearly never have gotten along, for more reasons than mere Christianity (pardon the pun). Lewis, and his friend Tolkien, valued fairytales and myths deeply. One reason Lewis disparaged the educational reforms of his day was their devaluement of fairy tale, myth, and legend, and the corresponding emphasis on the rational. The Narnia books state this pretty clearly, especially in the description of the school Eustace and Jill attend. (As a physicist, I value the increased emphasis on math and science, but I still can’t help feel that something of value was lost.)
I would agree. moreover, I think that education nowadays (maybe always, I don’t know) is awful precisely because it leeches the wonder out of everything. Learning is treated like a chore, and made as unpleasant as possible. I got virtually nothing out of high school math, and only enjoyed English, Science, and History because I studied them on my own as much as in class.
Think about it: they manage to make English, the class of reading great stories and fiction and so on, so unpleasant that at least half the class thinks only of doing other things. What does that tell you?
And people wonder why boys don’t want to go to college, or why no one seems to want to study science or engineering anymore.
Damn these sluttish heathens!
I can’t speak for Pullman, but I do see Christianity as a fairytale with some fine morals to be learnt from it, and see disillusionment as a good thing (though less fun than a world of friendly lions/multiplying fishes…).
Oh, I hope she escaped damnation (see above). But the point is that you can’t advance sluttish heathen-ness as an equivalent to “aspir(ing) to be knowledgable and rational, leaving behind the ‘fairytale’ of Christianity, amongst other things.” Can you? There’s nothing especially knowledgable or rational about a seventeen-year-old in the Fifties passing herself off as twenty-one in order to guzzle Singapore Slings in the company of sneering Hooray Henries, with the intention of continuing to do so while her youthful appearance and good looks hold out, which is roughly what I interpret the news in “The Last Battle” to mean. It’s just giving up childhood innocence in order to immerse herself in debauchery, which anyone genuinely devoted to “adult rationality” ought to regard as no kind of a triumph.
As you like. Personally I never hope to see a friendly lion or multiplying fish in this vale of tears, but I don’t dismiss the latter, at least, as absolutely impossible at all times in the past. The laws of physics aren’t graven in stone such that the Universe must obey them; rather, they’re derived from observation of what the Universe actually does, with the highly reasonable expectation that it will do so in the future.
I apologise - my flippancy is directly proportional to the weight of the matter at hand. For all it’s worthlessness, I suppose Susan’s behaviour can still be read as a signifier of adulthood, but it is a bit suspect… I really can’t recall the details of the books themselves, and took it for granted that Pullman (as a children’s writer I can bear) was making a valid argument. More fool me perhaps.
Cheers though Candi*
*may I call you that?
I’m much the same way, and I’m enjoying the discussion very much. Susan’s behaviour isn’t really adult, that’s the sad part - more a case of aping the worst excesses of adulthood without assuming the responsibilities. It’s sort of like going from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization. Susan didn’t have a single coherent argument to marshal as to why she shouldn’t believe in Aslan or Narnia any more; she just dismissed it with a vapid giggle as the stuff they used to pretend when they were children… despite knowing darn well it was no pretence.
If ya gotta abbreviate, I’ll run with Mal - the other is an illiteracy, though I’d have to educate you in the Martian language to explain why. (Note that “illiteracy” in the preceding sentence is a functional description, not a pejorative term.) 
(Also I have had to work hard enough to get people to realize that Malacandra is a male name, and Candi would just put me back to square one on that issue.)
I’ll grant that there’s not so much in Prince Caspian, but Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Horse and his Boy, and The Silver Chair have quite a lot of Christian (specifically Catholic/Episcopalian) theology in them, even if it’s not directly biblical. Even as a child, I remember picking up on the baptism scene in Dawn Treader, for instance (though I had a Catholic upbringing; it may not be so obvious to others).
(First, I’m sorry I keep getting behind on this thread, I have not had as much time to read as I usually do!)
I’m glad people feel the possibility for her to repent is present, I’ve always hoped so myself! Have you read “The Problem of Susan,” by Neil Gaiman? He shows us an older Susan, although I’m not sure if she repented. It’s a … puzzling … story for me, because the concept is good, and I want it to be better than it is. It feels too short, I think, to really dig into the problem of Susan.
Even though Lewis is criticizing Susan for being silly and shallow, if I were to sit down with him for a discussion about child development, I would be sure to argue the point that an interest in lipstick and stockings is a normal and healthy thing in many teenage girls, and more often that not, it passes without becoming anything alarming. As an adult reader now, I get that her exclusion from Narnia is more complex than lipstick and stockings. When I was a child reader, it was very confusing and troubling to me, and compounded my worries about being more childish than some of my peers, who were early bloomers. I even kept The Last Battle on a different shelf than the other Narnia books, because I liked to pretend it didn’t happen (which is not a bad plan in a literary sense, either).
So have I. Frankly I do agree that Susan’s treatment by Lewis was harsh. Then again, in the Battle of the Pevensie sisters, I always liked Susan more than little miss perfect Narnian Lucy. Maybe it’s that I prefer underdogs – Lewis makes it so damn clear that Susan is the Lesser Narnian of the two. There was always such an air of disapproval in the way Lewis spoke of Susan, mainly since so much of LWW and PC take place through the eyes of Susan’s admittedly jealous little sister.
We’re supposed to dislike her because she behaves too much like a grown-up in LWW; can’t she be forgiven that behavior, since the kids have been sent away from their parents during a war and she is one of the oldest of the siblings? What’s Lewis saying there, that older siblings shouldn’t behave responsibly towards their younger ones even in an emergency?
Then in PC, when the foursome are swept back into what turns out to be Narnia, poor Susan is forced to into the role of grumpy disbeliever that Edmund abdicated in LWW. How I hated when Aslan took Susan to task for daring not to believe the wondrous prophet that is Lucy! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Susan resented Lucy’s special place in Aslan’s heart. I don’t mind a deity having favorites … but does he have to be so freakin’ obvious about it?
Speaking of that big lion … boy, he’s kind of an ingrate, isn’t he? Susan did her best to help free him before his Resurrection fer pete’s sake!
Anyway, back to Lewis’s final dispensation of Suze in LB. Did her oh-so-awful crime of being a tad shallow really deserve such a bitter comeuppance? I’m not even talking about not seeing Aslan at the end – one can fanwank that she does end up in heaven/Narnia eventually – but rather, the horrific tragedy of losing her entire family at once. None of her siblings do much more than shrug at the thought of Susan’s having been left behind to mourn alone … not even the supremely compassionate Lucy.
(Okay, yeah, I guess I have Lucy issues of my own. Proper little Aslan’s pet.)
The problem is that, well, Apocalyptic stories are a bit hard to deal with. Everybody’s dead, and you’re supposed to be happy. :dubious:
On the other hand, while I agree Susan is being hit with a pretty hard blow in LB, it’s not the same fate, nor permanence, that, for example, the dwarfs who refused to ‘accept’ Aslan faced. Which was mourned, IIRC. If I may extend a biblical metaphor: the Pevinses, Eustace, and Jill Pole are all arrived at the great feast, do they then refuse to enjoy it becaue some of the other guests are late? That’s always been the impression I’d had about Susan whenever I’d read LB. She’s simply late, not abandoned. It may be my own nature forcing that interpretation onto the bones of the story, but I don’t think it’s all that far from it, either.
Just my $.02.
Update: an interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education looking at Pullman’s ever-more scathing criticism’s of the Narnia books (apparently he hasn’t let up). It argues many of the same points people argued here before, but it’s still an interesting article.
Well, as the thread’s been bumped:
Why not be happy? So far from being dead, everyone’s just begun to be truly alive for ever - and since they all knew on some level that they would die sooner or later, they can count themselve blessed to have experienced it so easily.
As for Susan, whether late or delayed is no longer the concern of the Pevensies et. al. This issue (or one like it) is addressed towards the end of The Great Divorce, and the thinking goes something along these lines: There comes a point at which those who insist on staying out in the cold can no longer compromise the happiness of those who have gone into the warm. Those who, in effect, use the pity of others as a weapon against them must find themselves disarmed.
If all that was wrong with Susan was a little shallowness and flightiness, she had the rest of her life to turn aside from it. Possibly the tragic loss of her family was the enormous kick up the behind that she needed. Or possibly she went into a giant life-long sulk. Who knows?
Upon checking the link - the author royally pwns Pullman, imho.
I don’t think it is surprising that every author writes a little bit of he believes in into his story. I think good stories come about because authors feel an overwhelming need to express themselves - what they believe is good about the world, their wishes, frustrations and desire. Hence, to me it is not surprising that Chronicles and LOTR has Christian overtones. Both men who wrote the story are Christians.
Take for example, HP. Lovecraft. He believes that religions are silly, the cosmics are there that there is and we men are insignificiant. His stories reflect that view. C.S Lewis, for instance, fought in World War I. When he has Father Christmas saying that it is an ugly thing when women fight, it might be something from his personal observations which has sunk into him.
As for the racisim, standards for racisim change all the time. Chronicles is written decades ago and I don’t think it is fair to judge it with today’s standards of what is politically correct. Or are racial parallels only acceptable when that culture has ceased to exist or gone into obscurity? For example, in A Song of Ice and Fire, the Dothraki are plainly the Mongol Hordes. Is that a valid ground for complains?
The Chronicle article has several good points.
First, that Susan is just a fictional character. In the TLB, she’s used as a stand-in for Lewis. It’s a good point that Lewis was actually talking about his own failing in the transition from childhood to adulthood. If it makes anyone feel better, Lewis (and presumably Susan) grew out out of those pretensions.
As for The Problem of Susan, it’s not really more of a problem than for anyone else. Everyone dies, and we all lose people - quite a lot of them in most cases. Sometimes, it’s pretty horrible. The problem is not that Susan lost people, or that’s she’s been “denied Narnia,” but that she goes out and blames Aslan (God) because British rail managed to smash a coupla hundred people into meatcakes. And it’s not like she didn’t have personal experience with Aslan being less-than-impressed with mortal screwups. It’s not like Aslan didn’t take the same pain on himself.
Though of something. People have commented about the general distate in both Lewis’ and Tolkein’s books for, essentially, Arabs. They are not depicted very pleasantly, it is argued, and this is racist.
I neither know nor care whether they were racist. It’s irrelevant to me. However, I would note that England has never had a very pleasant relationship with ht Middle East (and Northern Arfrica); it has pretty much always been hostile on some level, and this goes back a millenium. It would be very unusual to expect Britons to not be less-than-pleasant about the Middle-East, at least in their histories, fiction, and “collective consciousness.” This is, in fact, roughly true of most of Western and Southern Europe as well (not Italy so much).
This goes back to the Crusades; despite persistent beliefs to the contrary, it was an ugly affair with nasty deeds on both sides. Certainly the Third Crusade (pretty much the first meeting of English and the ME ever) involved some rather vicious executions on both sides. Other “relationships” would have involved dealing with African pirates, other African pirates, and more African pirates. It might not be fair to lump them in with the Middle East, but I suspect the English did.
So, the point is that it would not be unusual for English or European authors to have a certain distaste for swarthy south-easterners. As a matter of fact, I think we ought to give Lewis kudos for not playing them too stereotypically. (They don’t really occupy any important place in Tolkein’s book, so we never get a sense of them except as soldiers).
Suddenly, upon reading this, I was struck with the notion that Susan and Lucy could be parallels of the NT sisters Martha and Mary. FWIW.
The Calormenes are vaguely Turkish, with perhaps a bit of Persian thrown in. Also idolators of Tash, who is a mysterious “bad god” (though good & well-meaning devotees of Tash are excused for following the god of their culture, interestingly enough). Not really Arabs as such.
Well, Turkish Delight is just candy. The Emerald Witch’s use of sex in her domination of Rilian is a pretty strong subtext. It’s only in like, the last week, coincidentally, that it’s occurred to me that I misinterpreted that as a child. It’s not that the Emerald Witch represents sexuality itself, but someone who uses sex (otherwise a good thing) for evil. So yeah, there is an unfortunate tendency for misinterpretation there, which is reinforced by all that misapprehension of the Narnia books as allegory (they are not) rather than fairy-story (which they are).
Actually, far from being “the Christian view,” that’s Lewis’s view. Glad to see he convinced you. Go forth & convert more of your co-religionists.
Lewis’s idea of love is rather removed from many modern people’s, although not, I would suggest, so far removed from how it’s been understood for the best part of the past two thousand years or so, at any rate, by philosophers and others who have made it their business to reflect on such things.
The idea of love (merely) as a feeling is given short shrift by Lewis. It’s more a matter of making the choice, against your own interests typically, to do what is right in any given situation, whether that be to ask forgiveness of God or other people, to simply obey God’s commandments or to set aside what you want to do to do what you know you should do. The feelings will grow as it were on the framework constructed by these acts of obedience.
In a wartime letter to a woman who was considering being a Christian, Lewis addresses the severe picture of Jesus presented by the Gospels, which was seemingly troubling the woman as it had once troubled Lewis:
"My own experience in reading the Gospels was at one stage even more depressing than yours. Everyone told me that I should find there a figure whom I couldn’t help loving. Well, I could!..Some of his behaviour seemed to me open to criticism, e.g. accepting an invitation to dine with a Pharisee and then loading him with torrents of abuse.
Now the truth is, I think, that the sweetly-attractive-human-Jesus is a product of 19th century scepticism, produced by people who were ceasing to believe in his Divinity but wanted to keep as much of Christianity as they could. It is not what an unbeliever coming to the records with an open mind will (at first) find there. The first thing you really find is that we are simply not invited, so to speak, to pass any moral judgement on Him, however favourable: it is only too clear He is going to do whatever judging there is: it is we who are being judged, sometimes tenderly, sometimes with stunning severity…The first real work of the Gospels on a fresh reader is, and ought to be, to raise very acutely the question, ‘Who - or What - is This?’ For there is a good deal in the character which, unless He really is what He says He is - is not lovable nor even tolerable. If He is, then of course it’s another matter: nor will it then be surprising if much remains puzzling to the end. For if there is anything in Christianity, we are now approaching something which will never be fully comprehensible."
Heh. Well, I’ve been trying to convert a great number of people, without any apparent success. But one never knows.
I think Lewis (and Tolkein’s) expressions of love are also more brotherly (or sisterly) than most are comfortable with today. Brotherly love is not something which usually gets attention, romantic and sexual love being all-consuming in the media nowadays. This may even be why Pullman thinks of it as being “devoid of love” : there isn’t anything he recognizes.
Yet, there is a clear showing of this kind o love throughout the books, and friendship. I think both of these are important because of Lewis’s (and Tolkein’s) experience in WWI. Even memoirs about war often have a similar focus on heroism, sacrifice, and comradeship, so I can see how the experience of the War to End All Wars might have had a similar effect on two grunts in the trenches.