C. S. Lewis - Narnia, etc.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Anita: If you want to hear new adventures of the Fourth Doctor, visit the Big Finish Productions website - http://www.bigfinish.com/ranges/v/docto ... adventures" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thanks, but I've yet to rediscover many of the Tom Baker TV episodes so I'm not looking for any "extras" at the moment. It's interesting that new audio adventures have been recorded though.

I don't get the impression he [C. S. Lewis] intended the Calormenes to be specifically a caricature of Muslims - they come across as a mixture of all sorts of exotic elements that floated around in most British (and other Western) people's imaginations as "Eastern", "Oriental" or simply "the other", during most of the history of British imperialism. While a lot of aspects of the Calormene civilisation certainly look like a Westerner's take on the Middle Eastern Islamic cultures, other aspects might have been inspired by Hindu and other Asian imagery. I have no idea how much or how little Lewis actually knew about Islam, but I would assume he was at least aware that Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians - certainly not a bird-headed, four-armed demon-god like Tash!

The Calormenes are described as looking like the sort of olden-time Muslims who appear in The Thousand and One Arabian Nights. However, as Courtenay said, their beliefs don't resemble Islamic beliefs as the Calormenes are polytheistic and worship a number of gods, including ones with beaks and multiple arms. I read somewhere that one of C. S. Lewis's inspirations was in fact an English translation of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, which contains stories from all over the Middle East, Asia and North Africa. Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist influences are interwoven in the tales, and certain aspects of the stories may have influenced C. S. Lewis. He seems to have given Calormen and its inhabitants a general "Oriental" flavour based on old legends and stories - a bit like someone giving a fantasy setting a general "European" flavour by taking elements from the fairy-tales collected by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.

The problem with The Horse and His Boy for me is that it feels so different from the rest of the Narnia books. It's set in the period when the four Pevensies ruled Narnia. They have grown into adults while living in that society and they speak in the "mannered" fashion of Narnians, formal and archaic, and there are no modern child visitors from Earth (as there are in the other books) to temper the archaism. This gives The Horse and His Boy a particularly old-fashioned, long ago flavour. Lewis had a love of ancient literature and revelled in the formality, praising the even more formal literary style used by the Calormenes for telling stories:

"Aravis immediately began, sitting quite still and using a rather different tone and style from her usual one. For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays."

[Paul Austin]

Court, I would hope both Lofting and Blyton would have been the first to offer to wield the knife were they still alive and able to understand the damage some of their original texts had caused to black and brown people , especially children. Author Anne Fine says that she feels that at least Lofting would have.

I shudder to imagine a young black child reading the originals of Lofting's work and being confronted with the lines telling them that people with their skin colour are inherently stupid and ignorant.

[Courtenay]

I shudder to imagine a young black child reading the originals of Lofting's work and being confronted with the lines telling them that people with their skin colour are inherently stupid and ignorant.

So do I, Paul. As I said, that indisputably crosses the line. But I know very little about Lofting and his personal beliefs and attitudes, so I have no idea whether he would have been "the first to offer to wield the knife" if he were around today.

As for Blyton, since so very few of her books have any content that is indisputably patronising and offensive towards people of colour, I'm even less sure. I'm afraid I've never seen any evidence that her works, in and of themselves, have been a major contributor to either racist attitudes in white children or shame and hurt in non-white children. It takes far, far more than a few cute stories involving golliwogs to implant and cultivate racism in any society - just look at the US, where as we've recently seen, a white man can still shoot or strangle a black man to death and get off scot-free. I don't think Enid Blyton (who has never been very popular in the States) had anything much to do with that.

That's just why I was asking, Paul - is there a particular reason why, in nearly every thread you've contributed to lately, you've steered it onto the topic of racial (or sometimes gender) controversies in Blyton and other authors? We have a number of non-white members of this forum - including young ones - who love Blyton and who seem far less concerned about racial issues than you do.

[Paul Austin]

It's a topic that interests me, given my real life impairment and left-side paralysis.

I agree with you that some people take advantage of genuine grievances to push broader political agendas.

Getting back to CS Lewis, I found this on the old CBB board:

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Title: Re: Other boarding school books
Post by Adelheid on Apr 24th, 2003, 11:19pm
Okay - so I've FINALLY read KB's post...days later.

I won't subject you to my honours thesis (completed last year), but my basic argument was that although Lewis was sexist in his portrayal of the human girl characters in the Narnia series (ie, Polly, Susan, Lucy, Jill and Aravis), he was less sexist than he might have been, and he improved greatly as the series went on.

But oh, yes, he was sexist: "women are not to fight"..."crying, just like a girl"...Polly always being interested in dresses, and it being her fault (not that it was, but it's written like that) that Jadis was raised. Although that last one I'll admit was based on Genesis, and Pandora's Box.

[Courtenay]

As for the sexism-in-Lewis argument, I find this even less convincing, Paul. Many of his strongest, and most admirable characters - particularly Lucy - are female. Concepts like "girls shouldn't fight in battles", "crying like a girl", etc. were perfectly standard in the era in which he grew up and lived. But they don't reflect on the central role that female characters play in every single one of the Narnia stories.

In both The Lion and Prince Caspian, for example (the first two of the books to be written), when Susan and Lucy are kept away from the battles, they are given equally important things to do that don't involve violence, but rather healing and rescuing - and alongside Aslan himself. I would argue that that is actually a more positive image than having them taking up weapons and killing; as a young girl reading the books myself, I always felt so.

Lewis meanwhile makes clear in all the stories that physical fighting is sometimes necessary, but always brutal and horrible - the male characters don't enjoy it at all either. He himself was a veteran of WWI, in which he lost at least one of his closest friends, and it's completely understandable that he thought of warfare as no place for girls and women.

If you read back a few pages earlier in this thread, there's an excerpt I posted from an article by Lewis's stepson, Douglas Gresham, in which he made some very interesting and moving observations about the man who became his stepfather and close friend. I think this is quite pertinent:

A misogynist some have libellously labelled him, and yet I never knew a man so considerate of women, nor one more charming and entertaining in their company.

I think that in today's sad and dark world many people will have difficulty in believing in the real Jack. He was a man who had grown up with the thinking of the 19th century. He believed in honesty, personal responsibility, commitment, duty, courtesy, courage, chivalry and all those great qualities that society in its wisdom dispensed with in the 20th century on the grounds that they were somehow outdated, and now needs so desperately to recall and recover. Jack also had come to understand a great deal about humanity and the nature of the species. He was no stranger to suffering: he lost his own mother at the age of nine, and experienced the horrors of one school that was Dickensian to say the least, and others of varying degrees of worth. Jack had fought in the first world war, and lived through the second one, losing friends and colleagues in both. He lived out his eve-of-battle commitment to fellow soldier Paddy Moore, taking care of that man's family for more than 30 years. Jack had learned to love and to lose, and had suffered the agonies of both.

(from "My stepdad, CS Lewis")

I guess all I'm saying is - it pays to look a little deeper, and to get to know a bit more about an author and the background and context in which he or she wrote, before jumping on our high horses and making sweeping allegations of sexism, racism etc.

(Oh, and as for the reference to the story being written as if it were Polly's fault that Jadis was raised, I'm not sure what that writer was talking about. It is bore obvious from the story itself that Digory blames Polly out of his own embarrassment and shame when it was he who fell for the temptation to strike the bell that woke Jadis!! )

[pete9012S]

I've enjoyed reading through your last few posts Courtenay.
Good solid,mature,logical reasoning including a friendly non threatening use of the Ransberger Pivot.
Paul,on the subject of sound,courteous, considered debate I think you may have met your match.

[pete9012S]

I'm currently recording 'The Chronicles of Narnia : The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe on BBC1 today (Sunday).

Are there any other Narnia /CS Lewis films on over Xmas does anyone know?
I'm sure I spotted another film or maybe a biography but I can't seem to locate it??

Regards

Pete

[Anita Bensoussane]

There's a documentary on BBC4 at 9 PM on Tuesday 30th December. It's called Narnia's Lost Poet: The Secret Lives and Loves of C. S. Lewis.

[pete9012S]

Thanks Anita.I will record that.
If anymore films pop up I will try and record them too.

[Anita Bensoussane]

We're not able to record TV programmes, but luckily many programmes are available online for a while after being broadcast.

[7upromana01]

Courtenay, I may be wrong, but wasn't Aslan a representation of Jesus. Like his resurrection and when Lucy was the only one to believe he would save them?

[Farwa]

I don't think so - Aslan was just a very great king, that's all!

[Daisy]

The beauty of the Narnia books is that you may draw your own interpretations from Lewis's descriptions. Abi, I agree with you but others may not. I always thought that the "King over the Sea" was meant to be God. At the end of Dawn Treader Aslan says he is known as someone different in our country... and the mention of the Lamb fits in with a Christian interpretation. We can read as much or as little into the books as we wish.

[Courtenay]

Courtenay, I may be wrong, but wasn't Aslan a representation of Jesus. Like his resurrection and when Lucy was the only one to believe he would save them?

Yes! Lewis infused all the Narnia Chronicles with ideas and concepts from Christianity as a way of introducing children to those ideas without all the heavy traditional trappings - "stained-glass windows and hushed voices", as I think he put it. From what I've read, he didn't intend the books to be allegorical - that is, the kind of story where every character or event is meant to represent something specific in the Bible or in human history. Rather, he took the basic elements of Christian theology and infused them into a world of his own imagining. I don't have any direct quotes from him about it on hand right now, but he called the Narnia stories a kind of "supposal": supposing there was another world (Narnia) in need of saving, and Christ came into it as he did in our world, what might it be like?

It's very possible to read the Narnia books without any awareness of this background and just enjoy them as good stories, but I've found my appreciation of them has increased over the years from delving into the deeper concepts within them. That said, it's just as possible to over-analyse the books and come out with a whole lot of dry moralising that's a long way from the beauty and straightforwardness of the actual stories! But each to their own, I guess.

[Deej]

I might give The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe another read now it's Christmas.

The Chronicles of Narnia is bound to be on TV over Christmas as well. Must check the schedule!