Laura Miller

by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

  Not long ago, while writing a piece about the fiction routinely assigned to grammar school students, I reread Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies. The experience was claustrophobic, and at first I blamed this on my foreknowledge that most of the sympathetic characters in each book are doomed. But so, too, are the main characters in King Lear and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and rereading either of those has never felt grim or dutiful to me. I decided, finally, that Animal Farm and its fictional cousins feel constricted for the same reason that they’re useful to teachers; their purposes are simple, and so are their meanings.

  If literary writing has any distinguishing characteristic, it’s that the more you look at it the more you see, and the more you see the more you want to go on looking. It invites a plurality of interpretation. “A genuine work of art must mean many things,” wrote George MacDonald, the Scottish writer whom Lewis regarded as his master. “The truer its art, the more things it will mean.” The meaning of Animal Farm is fairly obvious, but what’s the meaning of King Lear? The question doesn’t even make sense, really; it’s like asking what I mean, or what you mean. Works of art, like human beings, are irreducible. This is why contemporary readers dismiss allegory, because it appears to lack the density of significance we associate with art. The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

  I don’t mean to suggest that Animal Farm isn’t moving. Even as an adult, I found the novel terribly sad. I pitied poor Boxer the draft horse, who dies serving a regime that he can’t even see has betrayed him. I pitied him so much that I almost wept. But pity always contains a seed of superiority and therefore contempt. We pity those we regard as less than ourselves: animals or simpletons. As maddening as Lear and Hamlet can be, I don’t pity them. I’m too smart to make Boxer’s mistake, but Shakespeare’s tragic heroes err in ways that I can all too uncomfortably imagine succumbing to myself (if not in so grand a manner).

  Nevertheless, to get to the point of being able to read — really read — King Lear, you must first serve an apprenticeship with more manageable books, like Animal Farm. So direct and clear-cut are Orwell’s intentions that the book can be used as a kind of primer for thematic analysis. A double meaning is far easier to recognize than an infinite one. There are better books for younger readers that couldn’t serve this purpose nearly as well. Where the Wild Things Are and Harriet the Spy are both better than Animal Farm, I’d say, and most of us could reread either one of them again and again with a gladness that Animal Farm will never invoke. But Animal Farm is nevertheless a good enough book, and, more important, it’s a fine book on which to cut your critical teeth.

  It was with Animal Farm that my classmates and I learned to read fiction with a critic’s detachment. Up to that point, we experienced stories as truth, if not always as fact. It’s not that we believed that the events in, say, The House at Pooh Corner had actually occurred; rather, our limber imaginations let us occupy a world where made-up stories had the same legitimacy as reality. Like real events and real human beings, the characters and events in those stories didn’t stand for something else. They were what they were, and it’s only with great effort and fairly late in the game that a child can understand them as created rather than simply existing the way that the people and objects in the world around us do. If we love a story enough, as I loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, we might decide that it has to be real, that a place like Narnia is so necessary that it must be out there somewhere, as palpable as California or Boston (the fabled city my mother came from).

  Novels like Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies are usually given to children with a specific, if unspoken agenda: Animal Farm was meant to inoculate us against communism, and Lord of the Flies, I’ve always been convinced, was intended to warn us off the naive Rousseauian idealism then running rampant in the counterculture. But above all, these books were supposed to teach us how books work, to show us how what seems to be a story can actually be an argument about ideas or beliefs or the best way to run a country. Stories can be enlisted to serve a rational cause, such as a political ideology, and this, we are led to believe, elevates the fiction, making it useful and worthy in a way that a mere pastime or diversion could never be. According to this formula, Animal Farm, which takes up the weighty responsibility of critiquing totalitarianism, is naturally a more substantial and worthy book than Harold and the Purple Crayon, even if we don’t enjoy it as much.

  In sixth grade, when I first studied Animal Farm, I felt that I had embarked upon a journey of great consequence, and I was right. I was making a momentous transition, and I’m surprised to find that few writers have ever attempted to describe it. Even Surprised by Joy, the memoir of a consummate reader, doesn’t. What Lewis does write about is a period, during the dark ages of boyhood, when he briefly gave up reading fairy tales and switched to school stories and fat bestsellers in the sword-and-sandals vein — Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur — “mainly rubbish,” as he characterizes them. This change, he felt, marked “a great decline in my imaginative life.”

  It didn’t last, fortunately, and he would return to the old, resplendent inner life when he rediscovered Norse mythology in his early teens. Literature, it seems, was about the only aspect of his life that Lewis didn’t second-guess during his adolescence. But then, reading English poetry and prose was for him an almost entirely independent, extracurricular activity, and as a result, his teachers rarely set him to analyzing the kind of books he liked to read for pleasure. Reading remained part of his untouchable private world. “Never in my life had I read a work of fiction, poetry, or criticism in my own language except because, after trying the first few pages, I liked the taste of it,” he wrote of the years before he was sent to Malvern College in Worcestershire at the age of fifteen.

  At Malvern, the last of the series of boarding schools he attended in England, Lewis was, by his own report, transformed into a “prig.” The term as he used it has a meaning more akin to “intellectual snob” than it does today, when it’s often regarded as a synonym for “prude.” But used either way, it indicates a disdain for other people’s pleasures. Lewis learned that he was not the only person who harbored a secret ardor for poetry, but with that knowledge came what he described as “a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost.” His once-pure love for certain books and authors became a justification for looking down on the philistines who didn’t share it.

  For my part, I never really much liked Animal Farm, but that seemed beside the point. Here, for once, my experience of religion and my reading life converged. The Church had instructed me that the holiest activities were necessarily the dreariest ones, and now school was teaching me that the delight I took in a story was not the only — not even the best — criterion for judging how good it was. If anything, the more I enjoyed a story, the less likely it was to be serious, worthwhile literature.

  Still, learning has a pleasure all its own; for some people, taking a car apart can be as much fun as driving it. I found that I wanted to figure out how books worked, almost as much as I wanted to feel them work on me. I also wanted, very much, to grow up, and studying books like Animal Farm was the sort of thing grown-ups did. And I was learning. Through Orwell’s novel, I gained a perspective on political power and how easily it can be misused. I also could see the way that good writing draws a collection of vague impressions into a coherent pattern until you both recognize your own experience and see it clearly for the first time. And beyond all this, I had come to recognize stories as made things, rather than as given phenomena of the universe, like the wind, a tree, or my brothers and sisters. If Animal Farm had a purpose, it could only be because somebody had created it to achieve that purpose — a writer, the author, George Orwell.

  To me, the reality of authorship — the origin of every story in the imagination of a flawed human being — was both liberating and dispossessing. The presents you find under the tree on Christmas morning are
n’t any less desirable because they’ve been left there by your parents instead of by a jolly fat man in a red suit who came down the chimney, but some of the thrill has gone out of receiving them all the same. Still, discovering that there is no Santa Claus has its compensations. You have been trusted with secret information that younger, greener children aren’t allowed. And you recognize that more of the world is under merely human governance than you had once thought; it’s a relief to know that a supernaturally industrious stranger at the North Pole isn’t really documenting how well you behave over the course of the year.

  Adults remember learning the truth about Santa Claus as a miniature tragedy. Some of us cried. In the years since, most of us have forgotten that we were also gratified to be recognized as grown-up enough to know the truth. (I recall being impressed with how skillfully my parents had created the illusion, and I tried carefully to maintain it for my brothers and sisters — which was, strangely enough, almost as much fun as actually believing in it.) Likewise, when we mourn the way we used to read as children, that effortless absorption and unquestioning faith, we would do well to remind ourselves of the dangers of putting ourselves at the mercy of a book. For every Animal Farm, propaganda you probably agree with, there is a Turner Diaries, propaganda I hope you don’t. If we sometimes place a petty, priggish value on reading critically, we nevertheless learn to do it for excellent reasons.

  Graham Greene, in his essay “The Lost Childhood,” suggested that reading loses its first, mighty power when books stop telling us what we don’t already know about our lives. Once, each volume was a “crystal in which the child dreamed that he saw life moving,” but eventually what we read only confirms or contradicts what we already believe: “As in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back.” But Greene was a Catholic who was unfortunate enough not to lapse and this made him morose. Think of it another way: We start out with a simple, even religious, relationship to the written word; its authority is unquestioned. We end up with something more complicated, but also something more our own. And then the time comes to decide a few things for ourselves.

  Chapter Eleven

  Garlic and Onions

  In The Horse and His Boy, the foundling Shasta joins a runaway princess named Aravis and two talking horses in a desperate escape from Calormen, Narnia’s large, powerful neighbor to the south. We’ve met Calormenes before, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where they appear at the slave market in the Lone Islands. They have “dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-colored turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people.” In The Horse and His Boy, the fugitives’ route takes them through Calormen’s capital city, Tashbaan, and as they make their way along the streets, they’re bombarded with smells. The stench comes from “unwashed people, unwashed dogs, scent, garlic, onions and the piles of refuse which lay everywhere.” Although the Calormene capital looks magnificent from a distance, up close it stinks.

  The Calormenes are vaguely Turkish, with the exotic clothes and florid manners of characters from the Arabian Nights, a book Lewis disliked. Their civilization is grand yet decadent. Great lords and ladies are carried through Tashbaan on litters, and “there is only one traffic regulation, which is that everyone who is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is more important.” So when Shasta catches sight of a fair-skinned delegation from Narnia, walking on foot with an easygoing swing to their step and looking as though “they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn’t give a fig for anyone who wasn’t,” he understandably decides that he has never before seen anything so “lovely.” The Narnians are, figuratively and literally, a breath of fresh air from the north, an antidote to the Calormenes’ garlic and heavy perfume.

  Recognizing the Calormenes for the racial and cultural stereotype they are was an insight I wouldn’t acquire until my college years, but even as a child I was mystified by the role of garlic and onions in their villainy. Both alliums turn up again in The Last Battle, twirling their figurative mustaches for the end-times. The Calormenes have formed an alliance with Shift the Ape, who has tricked many Narnians into following a false “Aslan” (the donkey Puzzle disguised in a lion’s hide). According to Shift, the lion god has ordered the enslavement of the talking beasts and the harvesting of the talking trees for timber.

  Early in the book, Narnia’s monarch, King Tirian, and his companion, the unicorn Jewel, kill some Calormene soldiers, and then, overwhelmed with guilt, decide to turn themselves in. The king despairs at the thought that “Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for.” It would be better to be dead at the hands of the Calormenes, Tirian swears, than to live with the knowledge that this is what Aslan really wants for his chosen people. The young king’s surrender is a moment of utter wretchedness, culminating as “the dark men came round them in a thick crowd, smelling of garlic and onions, their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces.”

  For Lewis, garlic was an unwelcome exoticism. He liked his meals mildly seasoned and unsauced; anything livelier he rejected as “messed-up food.” His feelings on this matter were pronounced enough that his brother devoted a whole paragraph to the subject in his introduction to The Letters of C. S. Lewis. “Plain domestic cookery was what he wanted,” stated Warnie, and apparently he shared his brother’s preference — although, unlike Jack, Warnie had seen enough of the world during his military tours of Africa and Asia to know what splendors lay beyond the ken of the average British kitchen. The fancy dishes that the Lewis brothers disdained back in England were probably limited to French cuisine and perhaps the Indian curries brought home to the motherland by more gastronomically adventurous Britons. Both types of food would have been redolent of garlic.

  In their culinary conservatism, Jack and Warnie remind me of the characters in Barbara Pym’s comic novels of genteel provincial English life. For the staid wives and maiden ladies Pym wrote about, bland cooking symbolized fidelity to all the conventions and proprieties of their class and nationality. When someone in a Pym novel begins to cook with garlic (or oil or saffron), she is running a little wild — often outside the kitchen as well as in it. But for Pym, if not for the Lewises, a certain wistfulness also attaches itself to garlic; it speaks of Latin passions as well as Latin appetites. In Jane and Prudence, Jane, a forty-one-year-old vicar’s wife, thinks, “I should have liked the kind of life where one ate food flavoured with garlic, but it was not to be.”

  Garlic, for early- and mid-twentieth-century Britons, was the badge of the foreigner, whose extravagant emotions and behavior matched his excessive cookery. The odor of garlic permeates the houses where it is used, insisting upon the carnal nature of those who live there. For well-bred Britons, being reminded of cooking was almost as repugnant as being reminded of sex and other, even more unmentionable bodily functions. Lewis expected his description of the Calormenes and their reek of onions and garlic to provoke an unthinking disgust in his readers, who he assumed would also regard the smell as alien and offensive. This wasn’t an unreasonable conviction in his day; when I mentioned to a bookish friend that I was thinking about the role of garlic in British fiction, he exclaimed (over a plate of spicy Thai noodles), “Oh God! It’s always the symbol of the dirty foreigner!”

  Smell is so visceral a sensation that it’s strange to think of it as a symbol for anything, especially for a relatively abstract concept like “foreigner.” When we walk into a room, we notice the fact that we smell mildew or rotting food before we conclude that the place is filthy. Our response to smell feels primal, and yet it, too, can be shaped by culture and history. Unlike Lewis, I grew up in a house that often smelled of garlic. My mother, an excellent cook, used plenty of it in her famous spaghetti sauce, and my father was known not just as one of the few husbands who cooked but as a pretty decent amateur Chinese chef. He could be found, every other week or so, stirring garlic and fermented black beans in the si
zzling oil at the bottom of his wok. So I don’t share Lewis’s disgust for exotic, strong-smelling foods. To me, the aroma of garlic is appetizing and also welcoming, the smell of dinner at home.

  On the other hand, both of the Lewis brothers were very fond of their pipes, and they made a game of stopping up the windows and doors of their ground-floor sitting room, lighting a coal fire, and puffing away until clouds of tobacco and coal smoke filled the room; “fugging up” the place, they called it. My parents were committed nonsmokers — even their friends rarely lit up in our house. The odor of stale tobacco smoke on upholstery or someone’s clothes makes me queasy, probably because I associate it with the motion sickness I got while flying as a child, back in the days when people still smoked on planes and left the strange, bitter stench of old cigarettes behind. I think of the Lewis brothers’ “fugged up” room with horror, and if, at age ten, I could have met them, chances are I’d have found them much stinkier than the garlicky Calormenes.

  Disgust, however elemental it feels, is often just a matter of the company you keep. Some of its objects — human waste, for example — are universally abominated, while others — certain foods or grooming customs — are prized in one society and reviled in another. A sophisticated and open-minded person makes a point of learning to tell the difference between the two, although acquiring that ability is harder for some than for others. Many see no reason to try. Lewis, who left the British Isles only twice (he went to France in World War I and on a last-chance holiday to Greece in 1960), belonged to the latter group; rejection of the unfamiliar was his default setting. According to one Lewis family legend, Jack, at the age of four, informed his father that he had conceived a prejudice against the French. When Albert asked for his reasons, Jack replied that if he knew the reasons it wouldn’t be a prejudice.