Narnia nd Fairy Tales

I was raised on stories that had rape (Snow White), torture (Red Rose, with the red hot shoes), death by freezing (Jack London), bodies transmogrified by nascent surrealism (Alice in Wonderland), beatings (Huck Finn), absentee fathers (Huck Finn), animals of all sorts dying (Old Yeller, Jackie the Cur), frozen legs being chopped off by (Mrs. Mike), starvation (The Little Match Girl), cannibalism (the marzipan heart in Snow White), hidden gardens (The Secret Garden), eyes being pecked out (Cinderella), evil witches, Indian spies (Kim) and all other kinds of mysterious spaces- it was weird and odd and wonderful- it featured more sex and violence, and out there sex and violence -then ever could have been healthy- I loved them all though, and every thing else my mother read me that wasn¡¯t children¡¯s literature (i.e. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Blake)

Children were not shielded and the world was not happily ever after- it was a cruel place, but a place filled with adventures and secrets- an exciting places. Narnia, which I avoided as a child-does not have any of the mysterious spaces, the sex, the violence, the danger or the subterfuge- there is always an escape route back to the English middle classes. Its also celibate in a really repressed way- In his essay reviewing Norton¡¯s Annotated Fairy Tales, found in the 12/09/02 New Yorker- Adam Gopnik says this:
" ... CS Lewis's Narnia tales uneasily mix an optimistic Christian morality with a darker and more intuitive pagan one... "
Now this is not a bad thing, except that as a folk form the parable and the fairy tale are diametrically opposed- one is about danger and sex, all of the id ridden Freudian black spaces, and one is about safety and celibacy, the super ego imposing order.

The struggle of Narnia is not one of Good against Light in a divine sense-but of form ¨C my early up bringing has lead me to like my children¡¯s lit to maintain the possibility of death, and Narnia doesn¡¯t do that?

In Dante¡¯s Divine Comedy Heaven is dull compared to Hell, writing about joy leads you less adjectives and is more tenuous then the varied unpleasentries found in the Inferno. The same case can be made for Milton- and Blake made it best when he said ¡°Milton was of the devil's party and he didn't know it." ¨Cnot to say that Milton or Dante were into hell as people, their theology leant towards heaven and so did Lewis¡¯s- As well comparing a series of Children¡¯s Novels to some of the best Christian theology is ludicrous- the argument I am making is that Lewis seems to be scared of the muck, of the shit, of the daily effects of sin and life, and so the books are didactic and dull- the strongest passages from a writely point of view deal with the witch and Charon and evil- I mean describing Anslan and as a big pussy cat really has no regal power does it ?

This is matched by elements of low comedy and sudden rescue, much of it seems clumsy and much of it seems like there is a better book coming out of it.

So why do I feel a compulsion to finish it?