Lupiverse(es)

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 15 Mar 2012, 19:40 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:40:22 -0700
Subject: (urth) Lupiverse(es)
In-Reply-To: <4F624269.8000802 at verizon.net>
References: <SNT123-W51B170E1E982B63882B931CF590 at phx.gbl>
	<1331737802.36157.YahooMailNeo at web121001.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<4F60CA8B.8060407 at gmail.com>
	<1331744686.23213.YahooMailNeo at web121005.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<CAGB0RZ4OB_A_tagJfoNZ4vid4iF+Mu3QL8cjKq3di3xDFA1L1g at mail.gmail.com>
	<BD0E4F6B-40FC-4081-B258-E011D29B1C15 at gmail.com>
	<CAGB0RZ7E8EE3e_kUjTQK2Q-5QiZkQRKzAFoq2+-22tuZMFbCOQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<4F624269.8000802 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <CAJ8=rtjTkzd8WDdHWCgtwaUbqAwmG7CweEB8eRVxX8KfTcvb0A at mail.gmail.com>

David Stockhoff wrote:

> Narnia disappointed me in the same way at the same age.

That is your experience, and I do not seek to devalue it. But...

> This was partly
> because I already had developed an antipathy toward received wisdom of all
> kinds, which included my parents' Presbyterianism,

Well, you admit that you came in with a prejudice, so please consider
the following points in that light.

> and partly because once
> you "get it," nearly all the books after the first (or first three at least)
> turn to cardboard.

I disagree with this completely. As an adult, who understands
most-if-not-all of the "allegorical" (I use the scare quotes because
Lewis didn't think of it as an allegory; _I_ do) points of reference,
I still find the books entrancing and not at all cardboard -- except,
of course, for the covers, which _are_ cardboard, but that's another
point entirely :)

> Only the first is consistently told with a level of
> artistic ambiguity an adult can appreciate or tries (successfully) to
> capture the wonder of a child discovering literature and its intrinsic
> worth.

H'mmm. To me, that's the least ambiguous of the bunch with the
possible exception of "The Last Battle." As a child reading the books,
I didn't "get it" until the end of TLB, and when I did, the
allegorical intent of TLTW&TW became immediately obvious: but I didn't
"get" the theology/allegories of the books in-between until I was much
older.

> By the time I reached the end of the last book, I was angry at Lewis
> for treating the dwarves the way he did simply because the rigid blueprint
> for his story needed scapegoats: if you have a Last Judgment, you have to
> have some bodies to throw into the flaming pit. Fuck that.

Again, I humbly disagree. Lewis makes it clear, both with the dwarfs
(and Poggin the dwarf who escapes) and the Calormenes (and Emeth, the
Calormene they meet in the Narnia-ly Paradise) that there is, for him,
no predestined damnation, that it is a matter of the choices you make,
not what you happen to be born as. (Indeed, Emeth might be a
predecessor/influence on Wolfe's "good man in a bad religion.")

> So maybe your creative writing teacher is actually judging Lewis on his
> artistic merits after all, not just her culturally-programmed aversion
> response. It may be difficult for her to tell the difference, herself. But
> do you really think Lewis's main strengths (or intentions) were literary? No
> more than Tolkien's, I think.

I think both were very literary writers whose least literary works
have been the most popular. Read Lewis's "Till We Have Faces" and come
back and tell me his strengths were not literary (or that he was
incapable of ambiguity). As for Tolkien I would point to his shorter
works like "Leaf by Niggle" and "Smith of Wooton Major" (the latter a
huge literary joke).

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net