Trailing clouds of glory do we
come...
Wordsworth
In interviews on children’s literature, two
prestigious children’s authors have given their verdicts on The Chronicles of Narnia. Philip Pullman expressed his loathing: “I
hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a
golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away.” J K Rowling, by contrast, expressed her
admiration; though sharing with Pullman
I
find this an odd adjective to use about a writer who believed in the reality of
The Fall. Sentimental views of children,
in my experience, tend to derive – one sees it in educational theory – from
adaptations of Rousseau: children are born good, but are corrupted by their
social environment. By contrast, for a
subscriber to the doctrine of the fallen human condition, children are affected
by The Fall no less than adults: though constrained, generally, by lack of
power. This view is not negated by
Christ’s dictum of becoming like a little child. The implication of Christ’s words seems to be
that believers should be dependent on God as children are dependent on their
parents. Nowhere does Christ make the
suggestion that children are without sin.
The
children in Narnia are not a particularly pleasant bunch, and even the best of
them – Lucy – has her very-human failings.
In The Magician’s Nephew, Polly
and Diggory squabble and bicker, and Diggory make the foolish decision to
strike the bell that awakens Jadis the Witch.
He tries to excuse this later by stating he was a bit bewitched at the
time, until Aslan forces him to admit that the choice was all his own. In Lion,
Edmund bullies Lucy and betrays his siblings. Lewis is sometimes damned – especially by
those who have never read Surprised by
Joy, or even, possibly, Narnia –
as an upholder in the Chronicles of the public-school system. Far from lauding
schooldays as the happiest time of one’s life, “that horrid school” is seen as
the reason that Edmund first began to go wrong.
In
The Horse and his Boy, Shasta and
Aravis – class is an issue – score points against each other. Aravis callously frames her servant, who is
flogged as a result. Shasta had once
thrown stones at a cat. Both Aravis and
Shasta are punished by Aslan in proportion to their crime. Susan, in Prince
Caspian, behaves towards Lucy with realistic sisterly bitchiness; and Lucy
– the one closest to Aslan and the first to see the direction in which he wants
them to go – is overruled in her perceptions by her older siblings. In Susan, we see the early signs of apostasy. The Telmarine school – and Lewis, after all,
has been unfairly compared in his educational attitudes to Frank Richards,
creator of Billy Bunter – is boring, sterile and joyless. Eustace, in Dawn Treader, is the unpleasant product both of educational methods
that Lewis loathed and of a misguided upbringing. These in addition to being a fallen being,
until this trio of misfortunes is “undragoned" by Aslan. In the same book Lucy, via a spell, listens
in to a conversation between two of her schoolfellows. Lucy’s best friend betrays her; but only
because the friend – “‘She is weak, but she loves you. ’” – is
afraid of the other girl.
Experiment
House’s belief in the inherent goodness of children means, in The Silver Chair, that bullies are seen
as “interesting psychological cases”. But
their victims are also flawed. In the process of showing off her head for
heights, Jill Pole sends Eustace over the cliff. The children squabble with each other in a
manner reminiscent of Polly and Diggory, forget the signs that Aslan has given
them, and allow themselves to be diverted into Harfang Castle
Only
in The Last Battle are children
favourably depicted throughout, and even then the apostasy of Susan, now an
adult, is confirmed. Overall, the
depiction of children in the Chronicles is as unsentimental and unsparing as
the depiction of the disciples in the Gospels.
I think, however – and one must treat the views
of an author who has captured the devotion of a whole generation of children
with due respect – that Rowling does have a point. An undoubtedly-sentimental view of children –
prevalent among the Victorians, but probably impossible since Freud – was the
belief that, as part of their innocence, they were without sexual
awareness. If this is what Rowling means
by Lewis’ sentimentality, then there is a case to answer. Certainly – especially in The Goblet of Fire – she explores
adolescent emotional tensions much better than Lewis does: who does not, in
fact, explore them at all.
Rowling
then, it seems to me, is both right and wrong about Narnia. It is true that boy-girl romantic tensions
are missing, and that this absence is an arguable weakness in the series. But it is not true that the absence is
because of a sentimental view about childhood sexuality. Rather, it was an area that Lewis – who had
read his Freud – acknowledged, but chose not to visit.
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