The Lewis Heptalemma Part 1: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Patreon)

Free to all patrons as promised. Future installments will be $2+ exclusives. 

With thanks to Daniella Ripperton and Ilana Correa.

This is another project whose existence lacks hard-won justification. Nobody has ever said “gosh, I really hope Christine writes a seven-part analysis of The Chronicles of Narnia.” But, y’know, C. S. Lewis’s books are out there and were a hugely formative part of my childhood, and there are things to be learned from their avuncular, parabolic reactionism. What affected me as a little Catholic boy impacts me differently as a left-wing universalist Christian trans woman. I’d like to delineate what was a major guiding text for me as a kid, and revisit it as an adult to better understand what’s wrong with it. So while C. S. Lewis can eat a bag of ashen dicks, he can at least do so in a way that tells us something about the early 20th century right-wing Anglican mind.

I’d like to clarify that the project I’ve infuriatingly titled The Lewis Heptalemma will not be a redemptive reading. On the whole, the Narnia books are really bad. Their bourgeois, reactionary politics are only half the problem, although the sexism and racism found in each book of the series is staggering (if not more so than any other popular novels of Postwar Britain). Their biggest problem is how crappily assembled they are — they’re sanctimonious in ways that preclude any remotely interesting dialectical conversation on moral theology, their pacing is horrendous, plotting is incoherent at best while characterization is based exclusively on post-Victorian Church of England morality, and Lewis seems to genuinely have an exceedingly low estimation of his readers’ intelligence. While their aesthetic conceits have their charms (J. R. R. Tolkien’s criticisms of Narnia’s bricoleur tendencies is lame as fuck), they still ultimately manifest in paeans to notions of patriarchal Eurocentric Christofascism. If that sounds extreme, it’s nowhere near as extreme as this passage from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where Beaver explains why the White Witch’s genetics and ancestry mean she should be murdered:

“That’s what I don’t understand, Mr. Beaver,” said Peter. “I mean isn’t the Witch herself human?”

“She’d like us to believe it,” said Mr. Beaver, “and it’s on that that she bases her claim to be queen. But she’s no Daughter of Eve. She comes of your father Adam’s” — (here Mr. Beaver bowed) “your father Adam’s first wife, her they called Lilith. And she was one of the Jinn. That’s what she comes from on one side. And on the other she comes of the giants. No, no, there isn’t a drop of real human blood in the Witch.”

“And that’s why she’s bad all through, Mr. Beaver,” said Mrs. Beaver.

“True enough, Mrs. Beaver,” replied he, “there may be two views about humans (meaning no offence to the present company). But there’s no two views about things that look human and aren’t.”

“I’ve known good Dwarfs,” said Mrs. Beaver.

“So’ve I, now you come to speak of it,” said her husband, “but precious few, and they were the ones least like men. But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human but isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”

Uh-huh. That’s a talking beaver advocating eugenics and slaughtering those deemed insufficient human in a children’s book. Nice one, Lewis. Also nice call on using the Jinn, a demon race originating in pre-Islamic Arabian mythology, and Lilith, a character first identified as Adam’s ex in the medieval anti-Semitic jokebook Alphabet of Sirach, to code the Whitch Witch as Arabian-Semitic bad news. Terrific emulation of Mark 7:27, Clive Staples “Jack” Lewis.

The book’s coding of the White Witch as exotic or foreign is an incoherent (the Narnia books like to fold morality into Westernness or non-Westernness) but pervasive aspect of her characterization. More frequently though, it’s subjected to an idea of appropriating Englishness where the White Witch masks her pernicious foreign influence with Anglo-Saxon aesthetics. Her castle comes across as an English castle with neo-Gothic spires —- English-esque, but ultimately Germanic. Her further secularized adoption of sledges, reindeer, and de-Christianized Christmas speak to a wholly Other force imbibing the Christianity out of Narnia and haphazardly appropriating its European qualities. The book’s plot is catalyzed by male authority figures (Aslan, Father Christmas) returning to overthrow a haughty woman’s reign. Lewis doesn’t abandon this theme of fake whiteness either — The Last Battle’s antagonist is an ape who attempts to pass as a human and whose name is literally Shift.

Narnia’s most consistent recurring theme is Western civilization as a corpse that experiences a pious and triumphant restoration. There really is no distinction between Christianity and so-called “European culture” here. The mishmash of Greco-Roman mythology, Anglo-Saxon legends, and Nordic theology leave little room for cultures from any region farther east than Austria. The classicism boils down to a reductive Beginnings-and-Ends reading of history. The books pervasively refer to human characters the “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.” The result is a series of seven novels that basically all end with elders gods triumphing over secular or otherwise heretical iconoclasm.

A complicating factor, though, is the role of modernity in Narnia. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in particular smacks of the 20th century, with its Blitz-involved backstory, the presence of modern foods and conveniences such as Turkish delight and sewing machines, and a general sense that Lewis had yet to nail down the precise nature of Narnia. As Narnia is largely an exercise in aesthetics, its understanding that values are guided by aesthetics is actually quite intact.

As the earlier quote about the White Witch’s humanity indicates, Lewis’s theology is one that spurns the aspect of an object in favor of its substance. Consistently, he predicates faith on sacrificing rationality. Take the infamous scene where the Professor invokes the Lewis trilemma to answer Peter and Susan’s questions about Lucy’s sanity and character after seeing Narnia:

"That is more than I know," said the Professor, "and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed."

"We were afraid it mightn't even be lying," said Susan; "we thought there might be something wrong with Lucy."

"Madness, you mean?" said the Professor quite coolly. "Oh, you can make your minds easy about that. One has only to look at her and talk to her to see that she is not mad."

"But then," said Susan, and stopped. She had never dreamed that a grown-up would talk like the Professor and didn't know what to think.

"Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth."

This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there’s a genuine charm in logically explaining why a young child’s fantasy world must be a real place. This kind of semiotic literalism embodies Lewis and Narnia at their best. Predicating the truth of an object by the faith of its believer is quite delightful. Yet it also plays into some ham-fisted apologetics. The original “Lewis trilemma” comes from Lewis’ execrable apologetics work Mere Christianity, which posits that Jesus Christ was either a blithering lunatic, a pernicious liar, or God as he claimed. Put simply, this theorem sucks. There are plenty of options apart from those three. Allegory, visionary tendencies, or (as some argue) a Scriptural lack of corroboration for Christ’s divinity all come to mind. Lewis precludes the conversation by asserting his own correctness and working from there. It’s a false dialectic which begs the question and obstructs nuance, or any answer that’s not simple mansplaining.

Faith in Narnia is essentially fideism, an epistemology where faith entails completely surrendering the rational mind. Once again, this is a double-edged sword: yes, spiritual experiences are often pre-rational and affect those who have them on a level deeper than the intellect. Yet fideism takes this idea to an extreme: it actively banishes the intellectual mind in matters of faith, treating it as an obstruction. Resultantly, it’s difficult not to see it as merely theocratic authoritarianism.

Again this ties into a fetishism of aesthetics. Michael Moorcock may have deemed Tolkien the crypto-fascist among the Inklings, but Lewis’ crusade for aesthetic purity is blatantly fascistic. False aspects are belied by their substance, and true aspects will accompany true aesthetics. Appearances in Narnia are frequently deceitful. Things that seem to be simply aren’t, or worse, things simply appear without being.

Let’s look at Wardrobe’s semiotics again. Narnia is a truly magical place in that it is a universe where symbols become the objects they signify. The wardrobe is an immediate signifier of this motif. It should simply be a wooden structure with fur coats behind doors. It has those things, but then the doors turn out to have far more than coats behind them. Even the fur coats eventually give way to pine trees. Sure, adolescent fantasy worlds aren’t real, per se, but they’re true. The tangible transition of door to portal and coat to winter wonderland grants credence to Lucy’s imaginative senses. The aspect of an object gives way to the real object. It’s as sweet-natured and intelligent a metaphor for childhood fantasies as exists in 20th century children’s literature, and reminds me why these books meant so much to me as a child.

The Witch’s relationship with symbols is broadly alchemical. Her craft of turning people into stone is the reverse of the wardrobe. Her magic reduces her victims to images; a faun becomes a statue of a faun. The White Witch’s evil is aestheticist, not drastically different from Benjamin’s characterization of fascism. Her surface reading of the Deep Magic, essentially the work of a Biblical literalist (ironic considering who’s writing these books), operates on a symbolic logic that assumes a lack of human agency in the alchemical dispersion of symbols. For mediocre children’s literature by a snobbish hack, this is fairly profound.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is by no means a good book, and those who believe it is deserve to burn in hell. But its pathologies are unique even in C. S. Lewis’ corpus, and later Narnia books of varying quality sometimes alleviate but often exacerbate them. There’s often a charm to an author’s first novel in a universe where they haven’t figured out the rules yet. Here Narnia is pretty much in place. Whether that’s a good thing is another matter.