Thomas Howard - Narnia and Beyond: A Guide to the Fiction of C. S. Lewis

NARNIA AND BEYOND

THOMAS HOWARD

A GUIDE TO THE FICTION OF C. S. LEWIS

With a Foreword by Peter J. Kreeft

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Previously published under the title
C. S. Lewis: Man of Letters
Ignatius Press, San Francisco
1987 by Thomas Howard
All rights reserved

Cover photographs:
Photograph of the lion Darren Baker
Photograph of the lamp Jan Tyler

Cover design by John Herreid

2006 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-148-3
ISBN 1-58617-148-8
Library of Congress Control Number 2005909730
Printed in the United States of America

To Mrs. Kilby

For you, dear & noble Lady,
because you like Mother Dimble & Mrs. Beaver
& Lucy & Tinidril
exhibit to us all,
every day, all day,
what goodness (that is to say, glory)
looks like

CONTENTS

FOREWORD
by
Peter J. Kreeft

CHAPTER ONE
The Peal
of a
Thousand Bells

CHAPTER TWO
Narnia:
The Forgotten
Country

CHAPTER THREE
Out of the
Silent Planet :
The Discarded Image

CHAPTER FOUR
Perelandra :
The Paradoxes
of Joy

CHAPTER FIVE
That Hideous Strength :
The Miserific
Vision

CHAPTER SIX
Till We Have Faces :
The Uttermost
Farthing

FOREWORD

At last! A book about C. S. Lewis that doesnt sound like a term paper, a book that is a joy to read, a book written with Lewis own passionate power with words, mercurial magic. At last a book that shows us things we didnt see or appreciate in Lewis before, instead of trotting out a recital of the obvious things we did see (unless we were morons).

At last a book that looks along Lewis rather than merely at him; a book that looks at something far more important than Lewis: his world, which is also our world because it is the real world.

So far the plethora of Lewisiana has illustrated two maxims: that inflation cheapens value and that the more interesting the author, the duller the books about him. To see the first maxim, all you need do is live in America. During inflation, the value of gold soars. We are living through a Lewis inflation, and here is some gold.

For the second maxim, first read Homer, Plato, Saint Augustine, or Kierkegaard, then read any commentary you can find about them. Better yet, first read the most exciting book in the world (the Bible of course), and then read a few dozen of the thousands of astonishingly dull books about it.

Lewis is a magnificent writer, strong and soaring. But with only a few exceptions, books about him have been leaden-footed and platitudinous. Here is the most notable exception so far.

What makes it exceptional is that it accomplishes the two things a good book should aim at, according to the sane, sunny common sense of pre-modern, pre-publish-or-perish literary criticism: to please and instruct. That is to say, it offers the human spirit its two most essential foods: joy and truth. Lewis does this; thats why he moves us so, and why most books about him dont. Throw them away and read Lewis again. Why eat hamburger when you can eat steak? Why read by reflected moonlight when you can read by direct sunlight? Why look at a photograph when you can look at the real thing?

Why read this book then? Doesnt any book about Lewis merely shed snow on his bell? The shape may be faithful to the bell, but the snow blurs it a bit; and the sound may be the bells sound, but the snow muffles it a bit. Why not blow away this new snow and hear the naked bell ring out again?

Because this book is not just more snow on the bell. It is an echo chamber, a corridor through which those reverberating bell tones can reach into silent, empty rooms and tombs. It is a witness preaching the ancient and universal Gospel of a glory-filled universe to mousy Modern Man, opening a window onto a world that is not modernitys dungeon but the Great Dance; not Playboys playpen, but Providences play, the Cosmic Drama; not the formulas of flatness but the fountain, the hierarchy, the Great Chain of being, packed with peril and drenched in joy: this world is like Aslanits not tame, but its good.

Tom Howard takes the delightful trouble to make this worldview, which is implicit in all Lewis fiction, explicit in this book. Because he believes, together with the democracy of the dead, together with all premodern, presecular civilizations, that it is the true world; that nothing is more important than living in the true world; and that one of the most effective ways to waken us out of our little dram world into the enormous, terrifying and wonderful real world is through the imagination of a master storyteller. And who can do this better than the author of Chance or the Dance ?

I would no more put snow on Howards bell than he on Lewis. My prophetic burden is: look with Tom Howard (not at him), and Lewis tells you to look with the world, along the world (not at it). If you do, you will see the ancient stars shining through the modern smog. We are lost in a haunted wood; why should we always be staring at the ground? Lift up your eyes, O Jerusalem, and see the weight of glory.

What an unfashionable task for a book today. Hopelessly naive, of course. Simple-mindedness, wish-fulfillments, desperate dreams. Science has conclusively demonstrated that.... modern scholarship is unanimous that.... the consensus of the most enlightened opinion assures us that....

Oh, shut up, Screwtape! Go on, reader, I dare you. Take another look.

Peter J. Kreeft

PREFACE

C. S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia began appearing in the United States in the early 1950s. They made a stir then; but presently the stir became an insistent sound, which itself became eventually a roar, so to speak. By the time of this writing, two, or perhaps three, generations of children have been regaled by these fairy tales (as Lewis called them). And indeed they are fairy tales, in the best tradition of that genre. Everything is here: spells; talking animals; fauns; centaurs; unicorns (or at least a unicorn); witches; dryads; heroes; and, best of all, a lion who turns out to be the Son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea.

There is an irony in all of this, however. The thing is, what we find extolled in the Chronicles are such odd qualities as purity, humility, fidelity, valor, courtesy, domesticity, simplicity, and holiness , forsooth. This is all very well, but the point is that virtually every one of these qualities has long since been buried and forgotten in the avalanche which has swept over Western civilization in the last fifty years. The boulders and rubble in this avalanche have such names as self-authentication, self-actualization, self-assertion, and self-promotion, and with all of this comes a certain harshness, callousness, cynicism, and a thing which calls itself liberation, which is as old as mankind itself, namely the indulgence in ribald forms of public sexual license which would make Babylon itself blush.

But this is to strike an unhappy note. The Chronicles are full of pure joy. Glorious, hilarious, rhapsodic joy. To be sure, there is sorrow, and terror and wistfulness and horrible evil. But Lewis is like Dante: he knew that Joy is a higher and deeper word than sorrow. He knew that Joy is the Last Word. The Chronicles of Narnia are a comedy in the old sense of that word. It does not mean lots of laughs. Rather, it refers to a tale that ends in marriage, whatever ordeals may have gone before. Readers already versed in the Chronicles may object here that there is no marriage in Narnia. No. Not as such, of course. But that great rush at the end, when Jewel the Unicorn leads them all in a great race farther up and farther in, is akin to the glorious consummation of all things which we find in Dante, and, before that, in Christian revelation itself. It is the in gathering of all of Gods people into his kingdom, the way a bride is brought into the household of her lord or, in this case, the way all of the good creatures in Narnia are swept up into Aslans country.