Path: ultra.sonic.net!uunet!in5.uu.net!newshub1.wanet.net!dimensional.com!frii.com!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!dispose.news.demon.net!demon!news.demon.co.uk!aslan.demon.co.uk!andrew From: Andrew Rilstone Newsgroups: alt.books.cs-lewis Subject: What order to read the books? (LONG) Date: Sun, 5 Oct 1997 02:23:08 +0100 Organization: The Small Carrot Shop Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <61131q$152@bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net> <01bcd045$a76eab60$f021450c@a.stallw> Reply-To: This@Left.Blank.To.Discourage.Junk.Mail NNTP-Posting-Host: aslan.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: aslan.demon.co.uk [158.152.30.126] MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Newsreader: Turnpike Version 3.03 <3aYeJUWAsGS1FwPCwFgLAUIQiZ> Lines: 163 Xref: ultra.sonic.net alt.books.cs-lewis:9157 > >To assume there is no order to the books destroys Aristotle's assertion in >the Poetics that all drama has a beginning, a middle and an end. Even >Tarantino's Pulp Fiction has a beginning, a middle and an end, and if one >tried to order the movie according to how it happened, there would be no >message left. (I do not, however, wish to go into that issue on this ng. >Anyone who wishes can contact me via e-mail to continue this thread of the >structure of Pulp Fiction.) Hitchcock revised Aristotle and say that a good film should have a beginning, a middle and an end--but not necessarily in that order. "Pulp Fiction" was certainly constructed to be 'read' in one order but 'thought of' in a different order. (One could say the same of "Paradise Lost", "Wuthering Heights" "The Godfather Part II" or the eventual six part "Star Wars" trilogy.) The film works because you can "hold" both orders in your head at once. But we all agree that there is a single entity called "Pulp Fiction". My question is whether there is a single entity called "The Narnia Chronicles" in anything like the same sense. I am sorry if I came across as sarcastic. I was attempting to make a point by comically overstating a case. Sarcasm to me implies "intent to wound" which I certainly did not have. My intention was to avoid being long and boring. Long and boring I now propose to be. Any book--any work of art--is to some extent the product of an interaction between the text and the reader. It exists both "out there", one the page, and in our minds. "Remembrance of Things Past" is only a lot of black marks on white paper until I bring my imagination to bear on it. This is not to say, as some literary theorists do, that any book can mean anything we want it to--"Mien Kampf" is a love story, "Wuthering Heights" a recipe for cheese. In fact, the better the book, the more successful the author, the more likely it is that the book which we create in our heads --the pictures we make out of the black marks on white paper--will be quite close to the ones which the write WANTED us to create. That is what "good writing" means. Lewis says more or less this in "Experiment in Criticism". I will get around to my "Lewis as deconstuctionist" article one of these days. The circumstances around a book--the form in which it is distributed, the things which are said about it--affect the types of mental pictures and impression we feel permitted to form. We read "Hamlet" subtly differently when we find it as part of a longer book called "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" than we would if it were part of a browns-spined scholarly "Early English Text Society" series, complete with foot notes and obsolete spelling. A rather good romantic lyric about Marilyn Monroe is changed forever when the author chooses to stick doggerel words to it and belt it out in Westminster Abbey: you can NEVER AGAIN listen to the original record in the same way. You look at a piece of Victorian furniture differently if it placed in a Museum from the way you would if it was sitting in a rich guy's house. This is, of course, part of the point of the modernists who put bricks into art galleries. "What would happen if you looked at a brick, or a toilet, or a picture of Marilyn Monroe AS IF it was a piece of art?" And that's a very good question, even if it rarely yielded very good answers. The Venus De Milo or a brick is a pretty much a fixed object with a fixed shape. You can't change the thing itself. But books are more complicated. You can--you expect people to--change the cover, the typeface, the binding from time to time. We don't blame editors for updating spellings in very old books. We certainly expect them to take hand-written MSS and correct spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, minor inconsistencies. Sometimes authors go back and correct books after they wrote them. Sometimes they leave different manuscripts. The question "what is the real text of the Silmarillion -- the Canterbury Tales -- Hamlet" has been answered by an editor before we take the book of the shelf. And the editor makes decisions based on the way he thinks that the author wanted us to read the book -- his idea of the pictures the author wanted us to see. Let us imagine two innocent virgin readers, who have never head of C.S Lewis or even seen "Shadowlands" approaching Narnia for the first time. One takes down from the shelf a big, leather bound edition, with illuminated capitals and line numbers. The big red book is entitled (in gold) "The Chronicles of Narnia". There is a contents page listing "Vol 1: The Magicians Nephew, Vol: 2 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wombat" and so on. On hardback sized pages, the book would be shorter than Lord of the Rings or David Copperfield. You could read through it in a few days. Our reader would be quite clear that he was embarking on one long story, and that this story told (in some sense) the history of an imaginary world, from creation to apocalypse. The other virgin reader goes to a second-hand bookshop and picks up a cheap paperback edition of "Prince Caspian". There is an appalling, lurid fantasy picture on the cover, by someone who has obviously never read the book. The opening pages imply that it is a sequel of some kind, but the reader happily finds that it is quite self-contained. He goes back to the bookshop, and finds another book, a hardback, in a non- uniform edition. This is "The Silver Chair." None of the characters, apart from Aslan, and very few of the settings from "Prince Caspian" are familiar to him. One of the characters, Eustace, has evidently appeared in another book he hasn't read. Again, the book is self-contained: he has little sense of coming in half way through a novel. This reader comes away with the impression that Lewis wrote a number (he does not know how many, maybe dozens) of fairy stories, all nominally in a linked world and with a recurrent motif (Aslan) but otherwise, not very closely related. He gradually, and out of order, reads the whole lot (although he himself does not know that he is finished because he does not know how many Lewis wrote.) It seems to me that these two people have had different reading experiences. They will be inclined to interpret the books in different ways. Yet both read the same texts. I am not sure that either person read them "wrongly". Every attempt to say "you should read them in this order, you should read them in that order" is an attempt to hierarchise the types of reading-experience, and thus to encourage a particular interpretation. At the most superficial level, if you start out peering through the wardrobe into the snow, then your are likely to think of Narnia as "that place that started out as a slightly whimsical fairy tale and gathered more and more religious significance as it went on" whereas if you start with the creation and the fall you are likely to say something odd about it being "closer in genre to scripture than anything else." The very act of putting an overall title--"The Chronicles of Narnia"-- over the seven stories brings something from outside of the text onto our readings, saying, in effect "Read this as the history of an imaginary world, not as a collection of fairy tales with a linked background." I don't say that this version is wrong; I say that it is not neutral; it is loaded; there are other ways of doing it. My own opinion? One of the things that Narnia clearly "is" is Lewis's own internal never-never land--he sends child-versions of himself into a landscape (not really a "world" in Tolkeins sense) which is full of every image, every theme, every thing almost, he ever loved as a child: dressed animals and mythology and knights in armour and sea voyages and "joy" and high teas and the Arabian nights and brotherly friendships and the hatred of school and a slight undercurrent of cruelty and hovering at the edges, working his way in, and finally becoming the central, unifying motif, Jesus Christ. To read it as strict allegory loses that. To read it as imaginary history, loses that. I think that what the "Publicationists" are saying is that you should allow yourself to read the books in that way--that is part of their charm. I think that what the "Chronolgoists" are saying is that you should read them as history and allegory and quasi-religious narrative-- that is part of their point. And they are both right. My way tends to make the books more arbitrary, more contradictory, less "sub-creationist" than they actually are; the "Chronologists" way makes them more unified, more consistent, and more strictly allegorical than is really the case. Saying "Aslan is Jesus" misses the point of the books: Aslan works as a literary creation precisely because he is NOT Jesus--because there are no stained glass windows and teachers and stupid hymns telling us we OUGHT to love him. Saying "Aslan is not Jesus, it's just a story, just a fantasy, just entertainment" as a contributor to this forum did misses the point in just the opposite way. Aslan both is and is not Jesus. The books both do an do not have order. Books are complicated things, muttering at us in different contradictory voices, refusing to stay the same when we go back to them. Tying them down too much robs of them of the magic. -- Andrew Rilstone andrew@aslan.demon.co.uk http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/ *************************************************************************** "Why can't I be a non-conformist like everybody else?" ***************************************************************************