Laura Miller

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

  In his memoir of his own childhood reading, The Child That Books Built, Francis Spufford describes the effect that the Chronicles had on him when he first read them:

  The book in my hand sent jolts and shimmers through my nerves. It affected me bodily. In Narnia, C. S. Lewis invented objects for my longing, gave forms to my longing, that I would never have thought of, and yet they seemed exactly right: he had anticipated what would delight me with an almost unearthly intimacy. Immediately I discovered them, they became the inevitable expressions of my longing. So from the moment I first encountered The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to when I was eleven or twelve, the seven Chronicles of Narnia represented essence-of-book to me. They were the Platonic Book of which other books were more or less imperfect shadows.

  Which is spookier: that Spufford has so perfectly articulated my own childhood feelings about Narnia, or that Lewis was able to achieve this “unearthly intimacy” with me, Spufford, my Irish hostess, and millions of other young readers? We have very little commentary directly from Lewis himself about what he thought he was doing when he first sat down to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Later in life, he could offer no more illumination than that he was in the grip of an old image (a faun walking through a snowy wood) cherished for decades, and that a “fairy tale” seemed the best form for what he wanted to say. But what exactly he meant by that image, or by any of the rest of it until, rather late in the process, he hit upon the idea of rewriting the Passion of Christ, he could never entirely explain. He wrote the Chronicles in a pell-mell rush, at a time in his life when he was distracted, emotionally taxed, and physically exhausted, in an effort that seems almost haphazard. But just as we sometimes dance best when we are not consciously thinking about the steps, it was in writing the Chronicles of Narnia that Lewis finally managed to do what he had admired for so long in others: create myths.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Further Up and Further In

  Of all Lewis’s inventions in the Chronicles, the one that comes closest to his conception of myth is the Wood Between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew. Digory’s scheming, vainglorious uncle Andrew tricks Polly into picking up a magic yellow ring that transports her out of our universe, and Digory has no choice but to follow her, carrying the green rings that can bring them both back. The rings are made from the contents of an otherworldly box of dust Uncle Andrew inherited from his godmother (“one of the last mortals in this country who had fairy blood in her”), but he has always been too much of a coward to try them out himself. Uncle Andrew has no appetite for adventure, although he was willing to undergo “disagreeable” experiences with “devilishly queer people” in order to obtain his expertise in magic. He regards sorcery not as romance but as a kind of technology. Like all bad magicians, he is “dreadfully practical” (never a term of praise coming from Lewis).

  The yellow ring takes Digory to the Wood Between the Worlds. In this quiet forest, there are small pools beneath the trees every few yards as far as the eye can see. It is warm and bright, although leaves obscure the sky. Digory steps out of one of the pools and finds Polly safe, lying on the grass “just between sleeping and waking.” Eventually, they discover that each pool is a passage to a different world. If you jump into any one of them while wearing a green ring, you will find yourself in another universe; touching the yellow rings takes you back to the Wood.

  Before they figure this out, however, the children almost get lost forever. The Wood isn’t a dangerous place, exactly. (Digory and Polly come across one of Uncle Andrew’s previous experimental subjects, a guinea pig, and decide to leave it there, since the magician will only do “something horrid” to it if they bring it back.) But, once in the Wood, people find it easy to forget who they are and where they came from. The narrator speculates that Digory, if asked, would have replied that he had always been there. At first, he and Polly just barely recognize each other and can’t recall why. They are like people trying to remember a dream that is slipping away, but in this case, the dream is real life. The guinea pig is the trigger that brings it all back, but even after they recover themselves, Polly argues against lingering in the Wood, “or we shall just lie down and drowse forever and ever.”

  The Wood Between the Worlds owes a little to the “wood where things have no names” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Wandering through that forest, Alice meets a fawn, and for a while they walk together, Alice with her arm around the fawn’s soft neck, until they reach an open field. Out of the wood, the fawn suddenly recalls that it is indeed a fawn, and runs away, leaving Alice on the verge of tears at losing “her dear little fellow-traveler,” but somewhat comforted at having regained her own name. This interlude, a sojourn through that preverbal land where child and beast are reunited, feels like an afterthought and takes less than a page. Perhaps for a writer as fond of wordplay as Carroll, the idea of a wood without words was uninteresting, merely empty.

  Although Lewis’s wood has a similar effect on people’s memories, it represents a qualitatively different primeval state. Stories may not happen here, but this is where they are born. Looking around, Digory feels not only as if he “had always been in that place,” but also that he’d “never been bored although nothing had ever happened.” There are no animals or insects, yet the Wood seems charged with vitality: “When he tried to describe it afterward Digory always said, ‘It was a rich place; rich as plumcake.’” This becomes manifest after the children have made an exploratory visit to the world of Charn. Charn’s last empress, the sorceress Jadis, succeeds in hitching a ride back with them, only to find that the air in the Wood — “this horrible place,” as she calls it — suffocates her. If the Wood is dense with life, Jadis, who has killed every other living thing in her own world rather than submit to being conquered by her sister, is an avatar of death; she can’t survive there.

  The Wood Between the Worlds shares some traits with other liminal spaces, way stations and thresholds like the bardo of Tibetan Buddhism or the door-lined hallway that Alice tries so hard to get out of in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But unlike other “between” places in myth and fiction, the Wood is both empty and full. It is a unitary moment, containing everything, the pause before a story is told, in which nothing has happened and so anything might. It is not the point of embarkation, but the embarkation itself, the feeling we all experience when we understand that a story is about to begin, the reading mind rendered geographical, like the allegorical medieval self. The pools open into entire worlds, and this, too, is what stories do. They build a world around us as they go along.

  On a less abstract level, the Wood is also a library. For someone like Lewis, who lived so much through his reading, each book was potentially a portal to another world. This is one of the chief differences between a child’s experience of a favorite book and an educated adult’s. For the adult, a book may be a work of art, possibly a very great one, but for the child reader, certain books are universes. If we are lucky, we retain some of that capacity to be immersed in a story; Lewis seems to have held on to it better than most, and in this sense, those who describe him as a man who remained a “child at heart” are right. Nevertheless, the adult awareness that a book is a made thing — the work of a human being who, however talented he or she may be, is still only human, and flawed — always takes up some of the imaginative space formerly occupied by total belief. At seven, Neil Gaiman believed the events in the Chronicles to be “true”; now he knows they are “made up.”

  The made-up-ness of Narnia has always seemed particularly glaring to certain well-read adults who never encountered the books as children. Lewis’s mythic syncretism — fauns and dragons and dwarves and Arabian Nights exoticism all jumbled together — undermines the Chronicle’s religious integrity for readers like John Goldthwaite, and the Christian subtext spoils the imaginative freedom for readers like my own teenage self. For Tolkien, these undigested borrowings and the lack of coherent, unified world-building make
Narnia a flimsy, derivative concoction that spits in the eye of true sub-creation. The idea that the Chronicles are allegories — a supposedly crude, reductive, pedantic form of literature — as well as a collection of insufficiently original tidbits, offends against the premium that contemporary critics place on naturalism and novelty. “Narnia is all pieces of other fullnesses,” complains Goldthwaite, “hastily thrown together like stage props retrieved from a warehouse. The only law of consistency Lewis observed was the law of his own fancy.”

  Perhaps children are just too ignorant to recognize this as a flaw, but I think not. Here at least is one case where the naive reader knows better. When Goldthwaite describes “his own fancy” as the “only law” Lewis obeys, he underestimates the potency of that fancy. The Chronicles are unified, not by anything resembling the exhaustive cultural stuff that Tolkien invented for Middle-earth, not by a single aesthetic or style, and not even, really, by a cogent religious vision, but by readerly desire. Lewis poured into his imaginary world everything that he had adored in the books he read as a child and in the handful of children’s books he’d enjoyed as an adult. And there is more, too: treasures collected from Dante, from Spenser, from Malory, from Austen, from old romances and ballads and fairy tales and pagan epics. Everything that Lewis had ever read and loved went into Narnia, and because he was a great reader, these things were as deeply felt by him as actual experiences. In his own way, Lewis, too, believed that everything in the Chronicles was true, and this conviction is what he communicates to his young readers.

  The Chronicles resemble the Wood Between the Worlds in this way: they, too, are a portal to other worlds, literary worlds. I was probably the only undergraduate in my junior-year seminar on Edmund Spenser who felt perfectly at home with The Faerie Queene, although at the time I couldn’t have told you why. The “troupe of Faunes and Saytres … dauncing in a rownd / Whiles old Sylvanus slept in shady arber sound,” who come to the lady Una’s rescue when she is menaced by the knight Sansloy, were old friends of mine, people whose company I had missed. The marvel-filled woods that Spenser’s heroes roamed, Prospero’s Island, the lands Odysseus visited, and the Underworld traversed by Aeneas — all these were like old haunts to me. I would even catch flashes of a familiar figure like Uncle Andrew (“Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures”) in the characters of Raskolnikov and Dr. Frankenstein. For the rest of my life as a reader, I will no doubt be meeting again the characters, places, and events that I first encountered in Narnia.

  Lewis not only provided my first introduction to these wonders, he also taught me how to understand them, by which I mean that he showed me how a story can work in several different registers at once. I learned to read ironically with the excerpts from Eustace’s diary in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; that meant looking past a character’s own descriptions of events to get to a more impartial version of what had actually happened. I learned to read morally by recognizing my own flaws in the ignoble impulses of Edmund Pevensie and Jill Pole. Both are styles of reading I would need once I became old enough for Lolita and Crime and Punishment. But Lewis also showed me how to read in another way: allegorically, or as he would later come to call it, symbolically.

  Lewis traced a familial connection between allegory and literary myth in The Allegory of Love. Allegory, he thought, was a stage that religious stories passed through on their way to becoming the mythic elements used by poets, romancers, and novelists. It is a big leap from faith to art. As long as people believe in a god, they will most likely want something from him, regard him with what Lewis called an “urgent practical interest” and subject him to “selfish prayer.” But, given time, an unworshipped god can “come to light in the imagination” as a symbol pure and simple. Only when the last vestiges of belief have faded can he attain the full imaginative power of what Lewis called myth. This can take centuries. While those years pass, a god or a hero is always in danger of being simply forgotten. The idea of that god or hero, like the bottled juice of grapes fermenting into wine, “must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory.”

  Demeter, for example, was the goddess of the harvest to her ancient worshippers, a deity who walked the earth, replete with all the meanings that Barfield described as residing in a full-fledged, primordial myth — motherhood, fruitfulness, grief, deprivation, pilgrimage, recovery. She is now a “myth” in Lewis’s sense of the word, a figure who exists only in stories. She still contains most of the old meanings, and even some newer ones, but artists can now do whatever they like with her without fearing either divine retribution or irate believers. (This is a freedom that no one today enjoys with either Muhammad or Jesus.) At some point, between the days when people all over the ancient world convened in Greece to celebrate the rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Demeter’s honor and the moment in the nineteenth century when Alfred Lord Tennyson sat down to write the poem “Demeter and Persephone,” the goddess underwent an imaginative sea change. Lewis believed that she (and Orpheus and Aphrodite and the rest) spent the first part of those long centuries of metamorphosis in the “sleeping-place” of allegory.

  In the 1940s, after he’d written The Allegory of Love but before he started the Chronicles, Lewis sometimes used the word “symbol” interchangeably with “myth” in order to distinguish it from allegory. He had not lost his interest in the allegory as a form, but it did have its limits. He still thought that a good allegory must be read skillfully — by giving equal status to the images of the sparkling fountain and the lady’s eyes in The Romance of the Rose, for example — and by recognizing that the character’s behavior and actions are often a way of representing what we now regard as entirely internal conflicts. Modern readers who lack these skills misperceive allegories as no more than a pointlessly labored narrative code. But if allegory is not really as reductive as contemporary readers usually think, it is still constrained. An allegorical figure labeled “Patientia,” for example, is permitted to stand for only one thing: the virtue of patience.

  Many people today also talk about “symbols” in this way, as simple equations; the farm in Animal Farm stands for the Soviet Union, and so on. As Lewis used the word “symbol,” it could not be so easily pinned down or exhausted. For him a symbol, like a myth, was “a story out of which ever-varying meanings will grow for different readers and in different ages.” A strict allegory is harnessed, more or less subject to its creator’s conscious control. A myth or symbol is less obedient. “Into an allegory,” Lewis explained to one correspondent, “a man can put only what he already knows: in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come to know in any other way.” Like the images on the alethiometer in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, like literature itself, its meaning can never be exhausted.

  In the Chronicles, Lewis endeavored to create symbols like this; so, too, did Tolkien with The Lord of the Rings. That contemporary readers often mistook those books for allegories only served to illustrate for Lewis the degree to which readerly sophistication and versatility had atrophied in modern times. People really only knew how to read realistic fiction. Lewis (unlike Tolkien) appreciated quite a few realistic novels, but that was merely one arrow in literature’s quiver! As a writer, he could move easily in and out of various literary modes in the course of a single book. In The Magician’s Nephew, for example, the confrontation between Jadis and Digory’s aunt Letty in Letty’s London parlor is farce, with Aunt Letty assuming that the tall, outlandishly dressed Jadis is a circus performer and her Charnian incantations the mutterings of a drunk. Tolkien, had he read the book, would probably have regarded this scene as unconscionable levity — Jadis, after all, is Lewis’s villain; it’s hard to imagine the creator of Sauron allowing him to appear so ridiculous, however briefly.


  This doesn’t keep Jadis from serving as a credible menace later on, insinuating and manipulative when she tempts Digory in the garden. Aunt Letty’s parlor, where mattresses are mended and adults make remarks alluding to an alternate, Trollopian narrative taking place offstage (“Andrew, I wonder you are not ashamed to ask me for money”) coexists in the same story as the Wood Between the Worlds and the mystical creation of Narnia. The fracas Jadis causes on the streets of London when she commandeers a hansom cab is Dickensian comedy; the scene in the garden is dreamlike and allegorical. Today, I wonder how Lewis managed to make all this feel as if it belongs together, in the same book. As a child I took it for granted, though if asked I might have said that The Magician’s Nephew was as rich as plumcake.

  This is the other side of Neil Gaiman’s boyhood intimation that Narnia is an infinite number of stories waiting to happen. Countless stories went into it, and countless stories come out of it. Narnia is the country of literature, of books, and of reading, a territory so vast that it might as well be infinite. This is why the conclusion of The Last Battle feels like such a mistake, and no doubt why everyone I interviewed for this book described it as their least favorite Chronicle. After the destruction of the world, it is revealed that the Narnia we have known in the previous six Chronicles is “only a shadow of a copy of something in Aslan’s real world.” Everyone of merit is ushered into the “real Narnia,” a Platonic paradise where colors are brighter, the fruits are infinitely richer and sweeter, and “every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.”

  This is a far cry from the voice that told of trees stirred by “a hushing, ruffling sort of wind which meant that rain was coming soon.” Lewis, reaching for celestial beauty, attains only a hallucinatory hyperrealism that unstitches Narnia from the humble, medieval details that made it live. The Last Battle was the one Chronicle I didn’t reread very often. The ending left me feeling empty and gloomy instead of satisfied.