say something negative about c.s. lewis

(or rather the attitude he has to it)

As a dead man, he's not much of a conversationalist.

It's interesting that Gopnik in that New Yorker essay makes much the same point that Mark and Ethan did up-thread: that Lewis's Narnia is an odd amalgamation of Christianity and Pagan mythology and its hard to say which of the two comes out on top. I thought that Gopnik's account of Lewis's conversion was thought-provoking, esp. his argument that for Lewis Christianity was a myth that was true. I liked how he kind of traced that thread through Lewis's later writings, such as his account of the "third world" of the mythical imagination that was invented in the Renaissance, and his use of myth and allegory in the Narnia series. Gopnik's bias against allegory seems to follow pretty much the literary conventional wisdom that allegory is an inferior form. That the beauty and poetry of mythical imagery is adulterated and weakened by being forced to conform to didactic purposes. However, the reasons given for this bias seem to come down pretty much to subjective experience - ie., what resonates with me. Perhaps a Christian would have a different reaction?

This was my experience too. If there's anything I find troubling now, it's Lewis' characterization of the Calormenes; they recite ponderous poetry, are described as a "cruel, proud" people with dark skin (in contrast to the happy whiteys of Narnia and Archenland), and worship a bird-demon ("Tash"). It's as if Lewis was able to flash forward, read Bernard Lewis, get it all wrong, and then sat down to create the most unspeakable Muslim stereotype imaginable.

Actually, I'm not sure I do understand this distinction. So Narnia is an allegory whose referent is an allegory? By the referent I assume you're referring to the Christian doctrines that the Narnia stories are trying to allegorize. How are Christian doctrines themselves an allegory? Do you mean that the tale of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion, and so on should be read as an allegory - perhaps as an allegory of God's relation to man? I guess that's a reasonable interpretation.

Dante's Inferno is not an allegory in the same way that Narnia is, I agree. It purports to be a literal recounting of a trip through the underworld, ie., it's not an allegory whose referent is the doctrine of hell - it's literally set in hell, which is not the same thing. However, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the Inferno's allegorical elements refer to the real world, unless you are saying that the doctrine of hell itself is an allegory of the real world - perhaps an allegory of the way that evil causes suffering?

Also, and this is not directly related to your post but a general aside, I found this definition of allegory online. It's interesting to me because it seems to trace the literary antipathy to allegory back to the Romantic period:

Here is the definition of allegory from M. H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms (Fifth Edition):

An allegory is a narrative in which the agents and action, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived so as to make coherent sense on the "literal," or primary, level of signification, and also to signify a second, correlated order of agents, concepts, and events. We can distinguish two main types: 1) Historical and political allegory, in which the characters and actions that are signified literally in turn signify, or "allegorize," historical personages and events.... 2) The allegory of ideas, in which the literal characters represent abstract concepts and the plot incorporates and exemplifies a doctrine or thesis.... The central device in the second type, the sustained allegory of ideas, is the personification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind, modes of life, and types of character; in the more explicit allegories, such reference is specified by the names given to characters and places. Thus Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress allegorizes the doctrines of Christian salvation by telling how Christian, warned by Evangelist, flees the City of Destruction and makes his way laboriously to the Celestial City.

An important distinction to be made is between allegory and symbolism. The Romantic poets at the turn of the nineteenth century theorized symbolism as a way of suggesting multiple meanings for the characters and actions of their works in contradistinction to allegory's simple one-to-one correspondance. Of interest is Northrop Frye's definition of allegory in The Harper Handbook to Literature. He explains that allegory became especially important in the Medieval period when it was believed that all of nature represented a "second Word of God." Hence, it was expected that everything, in essence, be read allegorically. According to Frye, "The dramatic rise of science from the seventeenth century onward greatly weakened this attitude of mind. With Romanticism came the revolt of the poets themselves, who could no longer accept the view that it was their duty to be an answering chorus to morality".

-from http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/guidesf.html#allegory

me too. except that my mom only knew about the lion, the witch & the wardrobe, so when my aunt gave me the whole set i was very happy.

We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery.

And:

For poetry and fantasy aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite; they are what we have to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance will turn out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile hope of the mystic.

And:

Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.

I think it was exactly this dispiriting picture of the human experience of the sublime that drove Lewis to religion. Gopnik's view seems to be: The world as we rationally understand it is unsatisfying on some level. We need irrational experiences of the sublime to fulfill our appetites for something larger than ourselves. However, we can never connect these experiences to anything rational or attempt to understand them, because that would destroy their power.

It seems pretty clear that Lewis was aware of this picture of the world and consciously rejected it. His reasons for choosing religious belief were precisely that it preserved the magic and mystery of the sublime while at the same time fitting it into a rational framework such that it was possible to connect it to other parts of life, for example the ethical.

In Gopnik's view of the world, our deepest human needs are fulfilled by fleeting images which we can never hope to understand - or even to understand why we need them. These images don't tell us anything, other than the fact that we need them, for they are by necessity irrational. They do not connect to anything we can rationally think about.

In Lewis's view, religion was a way of connecting that sublime experience back to the fabric of his life and emotions and daily experiences. Gopnik may not agree with Lewis's religious convictions, but he seems to be ignorant of the process that drove him to it.

there are good AND bad calormenes, and at least one of them gets to "heaven" even though he worships tash bcz he is nice himself so his worship turns tash into aslan!!

(ie tashlan is NOT a false god!!) (!!)

if there's any justice, i will co-direct "the last battle" w.ethan

ps re CARROT-FLAVOURED TURKISH DELIGHT -- i mentioned it to my actual real turkish friend hat just last night and she said NO SUCH THING EVER EXISTED YUK YUK YUK but it did

as gopnik points out CSL liked the "jesus is either mad, or he is lying, or he is telling the truth" argument so much he used it again in narnia! the difference is that the argument works in narnia because lucy IS telling the truth (you don't have to "believe in narnia" to go there) and in real life you have to make an active leap of faith.

The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it.

It is not at odds. Organized worship in this world will never fulfill the longing for and mystery of what is after this world. It is worldly and not heaven. The relief is only in how the "world of magic" points to heaven and God's glory. This is not at odds with worship and morality (it is probably at odds with some of the adjectives used). Worship and morality is a response to that relief.

Gopnik saying that Lewis's conversion seemed like an odd kind of conversion to other people then, and it still does may be correct, but true coversion would be odd for the standards of this world. Cardinal Manning's conversion based on guilt and self motivation is not what conversion to Christianity is. That is some legalistic unbiblical version of Christianity. in John 15:16 is says "you did not choose me; I chose you"

It seems like Gopnik looks at Lewis's conversion only from the view of Lewis choosing some religion to best fit his interest in mythology and imagination. So he picked one that fit well. From the Christian perspective it was God using Lewis's longing to choose Lewis.

“The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

and it is attractive to become part of this myth.

This was Lewis' way of spinning the fact that the Christ myth steals liberally from other, earlier myths (such as the Zoroaster legends).

What was the Roman cult that had a lot of its iconography and beliefs absorbed into Christianity? Sol Invicta, I think.

wait, i thought it was the book of Hinduism! damn you Nairn you just made me lose $50! *shakes fist*

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=84bgxkbbzvqrch10g3kbwp5g8kv3ccbn

(Ethan, I was making a fuckin' joke based on the title of your thread. Please don't spazz out.)

But the difficulty is the force of effort that it requires to keep believing in the myth, when it asks us to believe in things that contradict our experience of the world and natural laws. Perhaps Lewis was able to set aesthetic considerations ahead of empirical ones, but not everyone can make that leap.

IOW, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

I believe love is by nature poignant and its existence is therefore inconsistent with a worldview of guaranteed happy endings. It is fine but not enough to admit the possibility that love may be "tested in ways that require patience, forbearance, sacrifice, and forgiveness."
One must almost admit the posibilities of absolutely unresolved injustice and undeserved, irremediable loss, which Christianity does not do.

Right.

-Wallace Stevens