On the moral and literary incoherence of C.S. Lewis's Narnia

Some articles passed along by the Janitor ("Eric Raymond. anarcho capitalist and founder of the open source movement. of course the stuff is good. I've been reading him since I first knew what linux is):

C.S. Lewis is morally incoherent

"Lewis’s creation is morally and dramatically incoherent in a deep and damaging way.

The core of the problem is Aslan, the godlike lion who sang Narnia into existence in The Magician’s Nephew (seventh book to be written but earliest in narrative time). The dramatic problem is that Aslan is a total deus ex machina, whisked onstage any time that Lewis wants to ratchet the plot past some obstacle or hammer home a moral, then whisked offstage before anybody has time to wonder why nothing ever seems to happen without Aslan in back of it. As a child I didn’t question this; as an adult, I grew quite fed up with the creature’s excessively convenient appearances and gnomic pronouncements by the middle of Book Three. He might as well have “Authorial Contrivance” stamped on his forehead in letters of fire.

But the problem with Aslan goes deeper than a mere dramatic flaw; or, if you like, the dramatic flaw is a symptom of a deeper incoherence in Lewis’s world. The deeper problem is that Aslan’s role in the Narniaverse fails to make either logical or mythical sense.

Logically, if Aslan is sufficiently powerful to sing Narnia into existence (as he does in the first book) he should have been able to create anything or anyone he needed to in order to cold-cock the White Witch (who is for certain not powerful enough to make worlds and hosts of sentient beings). Instead, all he does is mumble about a prophecy and rely on four children accidentally arrived from another universe to set things right."

An eloquent review of the above on Stumbleupon:

"An excellent essay detailing the flaws in C. S. Lewis' writing in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Especially recommended: the comparison between the major works of Lewis and Tolkien (who, interestingly, hated Lewis' Narnia series for much the same reasons the author of this essay did), and the final point: Lewis intended the Narnia series to be a long Christian allegory and apologia. By having Aslan offer himself as a substitute sacrifice for Edmund with the full foreknowledge that he would not actually die or suffer lasting harm, Lewis unintentionally casts light on the identical nature of the Crucifixion he so clumsily parallels. To wit: If Jesus was, as was Aslan, fully aware he would not die, and would in fact set into motion events leading to reawakening, assumption to a celestial plane, and an eventual return to "judge the living and the dead," then his 'sacrifice' on the Cross, the lynchpin of Christianity, is rendered into a bizzarre sadomasochistic type of divine masturbation."


Thoughts on the Prisoner of Narnia

"For all his enthusiasm, Lewis was a poor Christian, and an uneven (and ultimately unsuccessful) evangelist. J.R.R. Tolkien, who had been reponsible for Lewis’s conversion, understood this and was much bothered by it. When Gopnik reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury was offended by Lewis’s “vulgar, bullying” religiosity there is no reason at all for us to doubt that, either...

This describes with laser-beam precision what’s wrong with the Narnia books. It’s already a serious problem in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and it gets worse as the series progresses. By The Last Battle all that’s left of whatever narrative coherence Narnia originally possessed is a series of gorgeous imagistic set pieces. Lewis tries so obsessively to pump these full of allegorical meaning that, paradoxically, they lose all meaning. The clanking of the allegory machine is just too audible.

Even children pick up on this; I did, though when I first read the books I didn’t understand what I was feeling."