OT: The Problem of Susan

Adam Stephanides · 07 Nov 2004, 18:11 · from 2004-November.txt.gz

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From: adamsteph at earthlink.net (Adam Stephanides)
Date: Sun Nov  7 18:11:42 2004
Subject: (urth) OT: The Problem of Susan
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370411051516624eb6fb at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BDB432C4.4A136%adamsteph at earthlink.net>

Thanks for your courteous reply; I'll try to keep my answer in kind.

on 11/5/04 5:16 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes at danldo at gmail.com wrote:

> On Fri, 05 Nov 2004 16:27:31 -0600, Adam Stephanides
> <adamsteph at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
>> Greta's dream, in which the girls are eaten while the boys are transformed
>> into a "twisted thing" (401).
> 
> This is, for me, probably the single thing I found most distasteful about
> the entire story: it is based on an actual scene in _LW&W_ in which (as
> I imagine you can guess) neither Aslan nor Jadis destroy any of the
> children, nor do they have sexual relations. The scene in question is
> the one in which Aslan offers his life for Edmund's, which would be in
> many ways the most important scene of the entire book; rewriting it in
> this way is one of my reasons for claiming that it is simple Lewis-bashing.

In fact, I remembered that scene. I was a fan of the Narnia books as a child
and read them all, most of them more than once.

> If I had to name the three "big hot" names in fantasy right now, they'd
> be Pullman and Gaiman and Mieville. Mieville has also dumped on
> Lewis (though not as deeply as Tolkien "the wen on the arse of
> fantasy literature" Tolkien).  "The Problem of Susan" makes the
> trifecta.

Undoubtedly you're more in touch with the current fantasy scene than I am,
but are these really the three hottest names in fantasy right now? Hot, no
doubt; but hotter than anyone else? (And shouldn't Susanna Clarke be on the
list?)

I wasn't aware that Mieville had criticized Lewis (or Tolkien); I've never
read anything by him, fiction or nonfiction. For that matter, I've never
read Pullman's notorious attack on Lewis: anybody have a citation?

> You have not, I take it, seen him or read much in the way of
> interviews.

You are correct. As I said, I'm not much of a Gaiman fan.

>>> Susan is most emphatically _not_
>>> "denied Heaven." This is the "Pullman Heresy" that is, I think, at the
>>> heart of the trash-Lewis fad.
>> 
>> If I give all your brothers and sisters candy, and I don't give you any,
>> then I've denied you candy, even though I still have the option to give you
>> candy later.
> 
> The analogy is badly flawed. If you give my brothers and sisters
> candy, and I'm not there, but you give me some when I show up,
> you haven't denied me anything. Susan won't "show up" until
> she's dead.

Well, I'd been taking it for granted that the other "friends of Narnia"
didn't just "show up" in the afterlife: Aslan caused the railway accident.
Does your reading differ?

>> I, and I suspect most others who criticize Lewis, certainly "get"
>> Lewis's point. Our point is that as his exemplar of someone who
>> had turned their back on God, Lewis chose a girl whose "fault"
>> is to be preoccupied with just those things that most adolescent
>> girls in his society were preoccupied with.
> 
> Oh, my. You mean a Christian writer illustrated the idea that
> excessive concern with Things Of The World [tm] is Not
> Necessarily A Good Thing? How shocking! What a sexist!

To be frank, I threw in the paragraph you quoted at the last minute; and the
issue as a whole is not something I'd given much thought to until reading
Gaiman's story. I'll try to make my point clearer. The stereotype of
adolescent girls when Lewis was writing, and to a large part today, is that
they are preoccupied with "nylons and lipstick and invitations." To the
extent that a reader accepts in this stereotype (which, like many
stereotypes, has an element of truth in it), she could reasonably conclude
from THE LAST BATTLE that most teenage girls had, at least temporarily, shut
themselves out of Heaven. On the other hand, there is as far as I know
nothing in any of the Narnia books to suggest that adolescent boys, by
following their usual interests, are shutting themselves out of Heaven.
Hence, it's easy to see how a female reader might conclude that the Narnia
books denigrate her sex--whether or not that was Lewis's conscious intent.

In any case, I don't believe that Gaiman's implied critique of the sex roles
in the Narnia books is based solely upon Susan's temporary or permanent
exclusion from Heaven (which, as I said in my last post, is not what Gaiman
is most concerned with). Greta's dream, which expresses this critique most
vividly, is based on a scene from the first of the books, as you point out;
and the cover of the Narnia book the professor sees in her dream is also
based on a scene from one of the earlier books, iirc.

>> Because Gaiman is hostile to the Narnia books, it doesn't follow that he's
>> hostile to Christianity as such, let alone kneejerkingly so.
> 
> No, that statement was a result of reading quite a bit more of
> Gaiman than this one story.

I've read all of Gaiman's adult novels as well as SANDMAN (for a review of
AMERICAN GODS, which may or may not ever appear), and I don't recall any of
them being hostile to Christianity. Written from a non-Christian viewpoint,
to be sure, but that's not the same thing. But, as I said, I've only read a
couple of his interviews.

--Adam

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