NARNIAN RACISM

    For  every Arthur, there is a Mordred
            For every Sydney, a Cecil Rhodes.            

                                    That Hideous Strength

 

Philip Pullman’s distaste for the Narnia sequence is forthrightly established: to talk about “nauseating drivel”, after all, is to lay one’s cards on the table with a vengeance.  With Lewis and Pullman we have two irreconcilably-differing views of existence: the conclusive truth of either resolvable only by individual death, or by the end of time.   What does concern me about Pullman’s attack, and for which some conclusion can be drawn, is the accusation that the Narnia books are “blatantly racist.”

            Accusations of racism in the modern world are a bit like the old accusations of witchcraft:  to be accused is, in a sense, to be condemned. That is because ‘racism’ – I do not say that this is true of Pullman, but it is undoubtedly true of some of those who use the term – can be downgraded to mean anything we happen to disapprove of.  ‘Witchcraft’ probably suffered the same fate: concourse with the Devil, undoubtedly, but also an opportunity  to acquire some one else’s husband, wife or land;  to settle old grudges; to wipe out any sort of suspect opinion; or simply to indulge one’s sadism by sticking pins in naked women.

Lewis made the point that the term ‘Christian’, like the term ‘gentleman’, had become meaningless: people could use both words and understand totally different things by them.  The same now applies, I fear, to calling some one a ‘racist’.  The anecdote that it has been deemed ‘racist’ to speak of ‘black’ or ‘white’ coffee is, I hope, apocryphal; but the mere fact that the anecdote exists is an indication of the sort of confusion we are in.  Surely the colour of coffee is to do with the amount of milk added, unless we are to deem Nature racist for making milk white and coffee brown?  Grant that and what are we to make of the racist implications of day and night?   Was Shakespeare being deliberately racist when Macbeth speaks of “night’s black agents”?  At what point does legitimate social concern degenerate into sheer absurdity?

I once heard a conversation arising from Pullman’s diatribe against Lewis in which The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was said to be racist because Edmund asks for Turkish Delight.   But is this sustainable?  The context is wartime rationing: and the chance to get something exotic, delicious and unobtainable.  It has had a spell put on it for a bad purpose – namely, the enchantment of Edmund – but there is no suggestion that the substance is wrong in itself: racists, in my experience, would hardly use as bait a food from a culture they despised.   One might just concede the point if the Turkish Delight had been offered by the Calormenes; but, in fact, it’s produced by the White Witch in a westernised, pre-war presentation box. 

Pullman, fortunately, is clear in what he means by Lewis’ racism.  For Lewis, “light coloured people are better than dark coloured people.”  Whatever the justice or otherwise of Pullman’s accusations of sexism or “reactionary prejudice” in Lewis’ writing, this particular statement seems to me as unfair as it is untrue.

If we consider Lewis’ work as a whole, his view of colonialism is unremittingly aware of the suffering and injustice that it caused.  In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century he compares early with later exploration, and speaks ironically of the ‘training’ of the conscience – ie its abolition – necessary to undertake the colonialism of the Nineteenth Century.  In his essay on Spenser, he speaks of the poet as being involved, through no direct fault of his own, in “an abominable policy in Ireland”.  For some moderns, I think, the oppression of one white race by another white race does not constitute racism: it is merely a family quarrel.   Racism can occur only when a race of one colour oppresses a race of another colour.  But on that, too, Lewis had something to say.

            Apart from his science fiction, Lewis wrote at least two essays on the possibility of life in outer space, and on what would happen if the colonial principles applied on Earth were transposed to other planets.  Thus in The Seeing Eye:

“I observe how the white man has hitherto treated the black…. I do not doubt that the same revolting story will be repeated.  We shall enslave, deceive, exploit or exterminate…”

And in Religion and Rocketry

“…we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonised pity, and burning shame.”

Such statements – and the bracketing of Cecil Rhodes with the villainous Mordred of Arthurian legend - seem to me only very doubtfully racist by any definition of the term: we should remember that, for Lewis, ‘creature’ meant ‘created being’: a child of God.

Lewis would have been as aware as anyone of the vision of the redeemed in Revelation, 7.9:  “a vast throng of all tribes, nations and languages”.  For Lewis, what divided people was not their skin colour, but their response to Christ.  In The Great Divorce – his response to an aspect of the Blakean view of life espoused by Pullman – we are given the view that there are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done”; and those to whom God says, “Thy will be done.”

            In Mere Christianity Lewis compares the human race to a tree, and the common link between the Calormenes and the Narnians was established when Lewis was planning the Narnia sequence.   Lewis sketched out an outline of Narnian history.  In 180, Prince Col leads followers into uninhabited Archenland.  In 204, outlaws from Archenland flee across the Southern desert and set up the new kingdom of Calormen, which by 300 has become a great empire: time, obviously, is compressed here.   The point is that the races are linked.  The Calormenes are ex-Narnians made darker by a hotter climate: calor men.  The ‘men’  reference is arguably sexist, but the ‘calor ‘ whether you define it as ‘colour’ or ‘calor’ suggests the pigment that stops you getting skin cancer.

            Lewis has been accused of calling a Calormene a “Darkie”.  Actually, he doesn’t.   A dwarf does, which is not the same thing; unless we are simple enough to assume that writers create only characters of whom they approve. Because Macbeth says, “I am in blood steeped so far,” it does not mean that Shakespeare advocated genocide, or was himself a serial killer.  

What are we to make of the depiction of Calormene culture?  The Calormene Empire is much larger and more powerful than Narnia. The Calormene Empire has slaves, but then so does the Charn of Jadis the White Witch.  If there are Calormene slavers in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there is also Pug, the Narnian. When King Caspian, putting his new kingdom to rights, abolishes slavery in The Lone Islands, Pug complains that he will be beggared.  Caspian replies better to be a beggar than to continue trading in broken hearts.  That seems to have been Lewis’ take on slavery, whatever race was practising it. 

            Tashbaan, the Calormene capital, is in many ways an impressive city, and – significantly – when the new world is created at the end of The Last Battle, a redeemed Tashbaan is still there.  The banquet that Shasta eats, though different from a Narnian meal, is delicious.  The gardens, with their tinkling fountains, are beautiful.  Aravis tells her story in “the grand Calormene manner”, and Narnian Bree thoroughly enjoys the technique. The Calormene poets, though sometimes pompous, are a source of moral truth.  Emeth – ‘truth’ in Hebrew – quotes them with Lewis’ obvious approval. 

True, the Vizier quotes them as well.  True, also, that the depiction of the Vizier and the Tisroc is satirical, but it’s nothing compared to the home-grown Arabic satire in  The 10001 Nights: the character of the Barber, for instance,  or the antics that give rise to Scheherazade’s peril in the first place. 

Susan declines to marry Rabadash, but that is not because he’s non-white, or because marriage would lead to sex and sex is bad.   She declines because the Narnians discover Rabadash’s true personality:  “a cruel, bloody and luxurious tyrant”.  Prince Cor marries Aravis, and King Lune welcomes her as a daughter.  The Hermit makes no discrimination in his treatment of her.   Nor, for that matter, does Aslan.

As to Calormene religion, I do not feel, as some have done, that Tash is an equivalent of Satan; although there may be echoes of the dragon of Revelation.  It is the witch Jadis who brings evil into Narnia.  Tash is more of an offshoot, like the idol worship of the Old Testament.  The worship of Tash, with its emphasis on human sacrifice, has echoes of the ancient Semitic religions.  ‘Tash’ is Turkish for ‘stone’, and the pictures of Tash are reminiscent of the Assyrian eagle-headed gods in the British Museum.   (Before we damn Lewis’ racist use of a Turkish word for something evil, we should remember that ‘Aslan’ is Turkish for ‘lion’.) The cult of ‘Tashlan’, with its blending of different religious systems, recalls the activities of Jezebel and Ahab; and it is the Narnian Shift who establishes it, quite as much as the Calormene Rishda Tarkaan: who does not believe in the reality of Tash or Aslan.

            With Tashlan, Lewis was undoubtedly criticising the view that all religions say the same thing and that all are equally true.  That was not because Lewis thought Christianity superior by virtue of its being a Western religion – which in origin, of course, it isn’t – but because he believed it to be God’s self-revelation. 

            In Mere Christianity Lewis expressed the view that there was truth in other religions, except when they specifically clashed with Christianity.  (Reincarnation and the Christian view of the afterlife cannot both be right; although they can both be wrong.)  In the same book, he took the view that some belonged to Christ without knowing it, that Christians recognised each other across barriers “of creed”. This is the idea that is explored with Emeth: who encounters Aslan despite being a faithful servant of Tash.   Such an inclusivist view has proved unpalatable for some: Lewis has been called “the devil’s wisest fool” on the strength of it by some Christian fundamentalists. But whatever we make of it doctrinally or ideologically – I myself happen to agree with it – I doubt that we could call it ‘racist’. 

At the start of this essay I mentioned witchcraft trials. These are gone, but the spirit that gave rise to them is perhaps still with us.   The rage to tell us what we may, and may not, think – addressed to us in intemperate language; the terrifying certainty that is one remove from the urge to persecute: these things are not, I fear, confined to religious believers.