Lupiverse(es)

David Stockhoff · 15 Mar 2012, 20:42 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:42:44 -0400
Subject: (urth) Lupiverse(es)
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On 3/15/2012 3:40 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> 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.

Hardly a prejudice! Something more and better than that, as I tried to 
suggest previously. I don't read fiction to be told what I already have 
heard, or even already think I know, let alone to be subjected to 
argument by authority. The stress above is on "received wisdom," not on 
Presbyterianism. I want to question along with the characters, not be 
led or lectured. Lewis did not lecture, but he does lead, and, in 
retrospect, he comes closer to lecturing than I had realized.

My disappointment was not, after all, that Lewis was a Christian. Who 
cares? I would be equally wary of books written by psychologists. The 
disappointment lay in his didacticism and dishonesty. What I had been 
led to believe was one thing was revealed to be another. Whatever 
aspects of the story I enjoyed were apparently not considered the main 
point by its author. Worse, Narnia made me think I believed things I did 
not believe. I may be overstating some of this (I sound like I am), but 
very little of this kind of thing goes a long way.

>
>> 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 :)
There were a few bright spots for me in the later books, but the 
repetition of familiar events and crises is undeniable. One thing that 
was done well was the aging of the characters, but the more Narnia got 
fleshed out, the more it became the same. That's what I mean by "cardboard."
>
>
>> 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.
I meant the ambiguity of reality---is the story "real" in some way or 
not? Returning to Narnia as an established, independently existing 
"world" in the second and subsequent books was jarring, but I forced 
myself to get over it. In other words, artistically speaking, they were 
sequels.

Perhaps one essential difference between me and your teacher is that I 
never liked Lewis that much anyway, especially after LWW. So she may 
have felt a slightly different kind and degree of betrayal, perhaps more 
emotional.
>
>> 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.")
I wasn't thinking of choice vs predestination, but simply of creating 
characters to make them evil to fit a story that wouldn't work without 
bad people, as though Disney had stepped in and said, We need to set an 
example of somebody for the sponsors. Again, it was jarring for me 
because something was foisted on the story that didn't seem to belong. 
And that's where I stopped with Lewis---after he had twice sacrificed 
his art to condescend (in the modern sense) to children.
>
>
>> 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).

But of course---perhaps I did not emphasize "main" enough. You are 
certainly correct about Tolkien, and I can only accept your judgment of 
Lewis.

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