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I’m currently busting my ass on a Friday deadline, with the opening of this film waiting for me as a reward at the end of the week, so: huzzah.
A couple of interesting links to keep the convo rolling before the screenings begin:
First, a letter in which Professor Lewis expressed adamant opposition to a live-action Narnia, mostly on the grounds that it’d be impossible to get Aslan right. Walt Disney might be able to pull it off in animation, he mused, then lamented that Walt was such a prick. (I’m paraphrasing, here.) Interesting that with this version (its corporate source and its new technology) both Lewis’s greatest fears and fondest hopes are fulfilled.
Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly (and thanks to Our Lady, who reminded me of it): an interesting New Yorker article, nominally a review of a Lewis biography but an interesting gloss on the Theology of Narnia. Money quote:
[The] central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.
Now, I don’t know that I’d go that far: but I always got the sense that if Aslan is Jesus, he’s certainly a different sort of Jesus than the one we get in the Gospels. Part of what gives the Chronicles their weird hold—and make them distinct from mere allegory—is that they resist a simple one-to-one equivalence with Scripture. In fact, while the traditional reading is that Lion = the Passion, Battle = Revelation et cetera, I was always haunted by the sense that the whole action of the series was post-Apocalyptic—not in the Mad Max sense, but in the sense of picking up after Revelation, rather than retracing the steps towards it.
The conflation of Christmas and Easter in Lion is, I think, a pretty good clue that if Aslan is the Christ, then he is not the Christ of your fathers. He is the Christ Triumphant, the Christ already returned. With the reign of the White Witch, he has been relegated to the realm of myth. His coming in Lion is a Second Coming, but with a twist—he returns (bringing Christmas with him), then sacrifices himself (again?), pretty much at one swoop.
And it’s that way throughout the Chronicles. Though he appears briefly as a lamb at the end of Dawn Treader, Aslan is only briefly (in the overall scheme of things) a sacrificial figure. He is, throughout the remaining six books, a Christ in Glorious Appearing mode, King of Kings rather than Man Of Sorrows, and true ruler of Narnia—presiding, perhaps, over a thousand-year reign of peace (mostly).
Which makes The Last Battle particularly interesting. See, for the viewpoint characters—the kids—Narnia is pretty much already Heaven-on-Earth anyway: a place where you’re all kings and queens and you have magical adventures in the company of fabulous beasts and creatures, all under the benevolent eye of a King who is the Risen Lord. But when we discover that even this earthly paradise is, in the end, imperfect and transitory, and must pass away to make room for one even better, even truer—just how many layers does this onion have, anyway?—that Revelation is not an event, but a cyclical process, and it’s always going on and indeed may have already happened: with a message like that, forget about offending Muslims—The Last Battle is gonna put a huge twist in Christian-fundie knickers.
(The above reading is probably why I never much liked The Magician’s Nephew, because in its attempt to make Narnia more explicitly Biblical, it plays hell with the coherence of its internal theology.)
So yeah, I’d argue that Lewis is not laying down any sort of orthodox line, but a highly personal, idiosyncratic, ecstatic (casting Bacchus as Aslan’s attendant), even Gnostic version of Christianity.
And that, I think, is the key to both the enduring popularity of and the swirling discontent with the Chronicles: they seem to confirm the worldviews of both fantasy-minded kids and Biblical-literalist fundies—but only at first. When you examine them too closely, they tend to fall between two stools—unless you can bring yourself to buy into Lewis’s distinctive, quirky vision.
Thoughts? |
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