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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Somewhat belatedly and via this story, I've come across the comments made by Philip Pullman on CS Lewis:"In Pullman's world, the universe is ruled by a senile, viciously sadistic deity who has to be deposed in battle so that its inhabitants can join with angels in creating a "republic of heaven".
In reply to a question, Pull man told an audience made up largely of children and young people that he had first read the Narnia books when he was a teacher. He added: "I realised that what he was up to was propaganda in the cause of the religion he believed in. It is monumentally disparaging of girls and women. It is blatantly racist. One girl was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys."
It's not so much that I disagree with Pullman (though he generalises his comments are far from unreasonable) as that I suspect he has missed what is actually so unpalatable about Lewis. To a large extent, the difference between literature and propaganda seems rather arbitrary (Pullman's own work is, after all, propaganda for an anti-christian worldview) and in all fairness to Lewis, his works certainly do encompass myths other than the christian. However, this still leaves the rather unpleasant and rather sadistic way in which Lewis often seems to dwell on the need to purge inherent sin through suffering and punishment, whether than applies to Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It still leaves the choice of the lion rather than the lamb as the central metaphor for christianity. And it still leaves the dismissive comment in The Last Battle that "she's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She was always a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up." It seems rather difficult not to compare all this to Pullman's notion of sin as a birth into consciousness and to find something much richer and stranger there.
As a footnote, there's an interesting comparison to be made here to Tolkien, and his tendency to dwell on man's innate corruptibility and the evils of progress, when contrasted to Mervyn Peake's account of how Titus comes to rebel against tradition and order as surely as the villain of the novel, Steerpike, does. See also Michael Moorcock's comments on Tolkien:"Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted faith for artistic rigour he sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo... his High Tory Anglican beliefs permeate the book as thoroughly as they do the books of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, who, consciously or unconsciously, promoted their orthodox Toryism in everything they wrote. While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban..."
posted by Richard 9:09 pm
