"Weak on Dragons"

From Laura Miller, The Magician's Book:

Eustace Scrubb, in the early chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, manages to get himself turned into a dragon largely because the books he has read have “a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”

I have a sinking feeling that Laura Miller is going to evade The Problem of Susan...

Comments

[Brad]

For me, Cowen is strong on restaurants but weak on books. I think this stems from how he views both. So his recommendation of this book turned me away from it. Let me know what you think.

[wkwillis]

I don't see what is bad about Susan not going to Narnia when she dies. Grownups have better things to do with their time in the next world. They don't still need the nursery experience.

[low-tech cyclist]

The problem with Susan isn't that she doesn't go to Narnia. The problem is her denial of the truth of what she experienced there.

[Dave]

I thought Susan didn't go to Narnia because she lived. Didn't all the others die in the train crash? Am I remembering the whole thing wrong?

[Scott Ferguson]

As I recall Susan's problem was a fondness for stockings and parties, the former of which don't seem to exist in Narnia.

[Ken]

By the way, Miller doesn't avoid The Problem of Susan. There's a whole chapter. She even talks with Gaiman about it.

[AIMAI]

Scott is right. Susan famously gives up Narnia for parties, lipstick, and boys. I think she ends up there finally after the last battle, though, or at least she's kind of promised to get there eventually. C.S. Lewis's hatred of all things new, like co-education, modern child rearing philosphies, negotiation, etc... is pretty awful. I was reading the voyage of the Dawn Treader to my children and the description of Eustace's parents (horrid, horrid, "alberta" insisting she be called by her name instead of her title), like the description of Jill and Eustace's school in Prince Caspian, was fairly close to my own children's school. Interesting to explain to the children why modern attitudes towards food, women, education, politics etc... didn't, in fact, lead to a free for all dog-eat-dog world of student on student harrassment. And given what was widely known about traditional English Boy's schools, favoritism, brutality, and sexual misconduct among students and teachers the entire attack on "the head" and her "favorites" must be an early case of projection on Lewis's part. Plus a reminder that even at that early stage arch christians never had any trouble bearing false witness.

aimai

[Noni Mausa]

I think that economists (excepting present company) really DO know too little about dragons.

Example: a number of years ago there was a big debate here in Canada about redress for Federal workers, all women, who had been underpaid for the same jobs as their male counterparts, most of them for decades. Another concurrent case involved Bell Canada.

The government argued that yes, the 200,000 women had been shortchanged, but that to repay them now "could weaken the economy." To which I replied, "Is the Economy a dragon, that we should sacrifice our women to it?" Some background here: http://www.cbc.ca/newsinreview/Dec%2099/Pay%20Equity/Intro.html

Fiction, and especially fantasy, are excellent tools to demonstrate an underlying dynamic which is difficult to present in any other way.

Can a boy turn into a dragon? I think so. What did the little boy Bernie Madoff turn into when he grew up? I am sure he didn't intend to become Ponzi redux, but that fate overtook him anyway, by steps well known to the dragon- (or ponzi-) literate.

One becomes a dragon by not knowing very simple but hazardous moral crossroads for what they are.

None of us are free of these dangers. Though their outward damage is proportionate to our talents, position and powers, the inward damage is identical.

Noni

[Lex]

Dragons are the wrong metric for just about anything. A better metric is werewolves, as Ginmar has outlined.

[Lex]

Oops, the link didn't work. The post is at:
http://ginmar.livejournal.com/620797.html

[Chris]

The original Problem of Susan, I think, was that she became interested in *boys* and then stopped being a good, um, Aslanist, which is presented in a way which allowed (or even encouraged) an inference of causality. If you see that Aslan was a *very* thinly veiled Jesus and combine this with the Narnia series's Satan figure being a witch and Christianity's noted history of misogyny and anti-sexuality you can make a really ugly picture.

Wkwillis's radical reinterpretation is interesting, though - although the idea that Susan's remaining in the real world is in some sense *preferable* to going to the fantasy kingdom with Aslan is certainly something Lewis could never have come up with. Overall I think I'd rather just read His Dark Materials, though. Some of the early works of fantasy are famous not because they're really all that great but just because they were early and there wasn't much competition in the field, and people have nostalgic memories of things they read as children.

[guthrie]

Then if you go and read some of Lewis' other work such as "That hideous strength", you realise he prefers his women to do as he tells them to, preferably worship him.

Am I being too harsh?

[AIMAI]

guthrie is right. That Hideous Strength is a scary, scary, book. Lewis wanted everyone to give up rational thought and self critical analytic thought--at least in his sci fi books and famously in important sections of the narnia book. He considered the willingness to question (some) authorities to be terribly dangerous, even though he represented the questioning of other authorities as meritorious. But its a sign that a christian has lost his or her way when they talk back to god or refuse to accept the mystery of his actions, query his morality, or find fault with his dispositions. In fact, as I recall it, its a sign of devotion to reject the testimony of your own eyes and morality. If you can't square what god is up to with morality or sensibility then shame on you, you've made a mistake. Rote learning, repetition, and blind faith are the marks of a christian--they are the tests of a christian.

(I last read THS in college so its a long time ago, and i always found screwtape excruciatingly arch, but I do read the narnia books fairly frequently).

aimai

[AndrewBWAndrewBW]

I remain baffled by the popularity of the Narnia Chronicles. The first one wasn't bad but after that it was straight downhill.

[Rob]

My problem with Libertarians is that they tend to be of the "my sin is OK, and ought to be tolerated", but "your sin isn't" sort. I thought that was just in my rural western Washington county, but having seen Greenspan and Friedman operate I have come to the conclusion it is systematic amongst Libertarians. Were they honest, they would announce their hierarchy of core Libertarian values, and weigh it against candidates who wanted their endorsements. Instead they pick and choose in order to justify the conservative Republican candidate almost every time. Rob

[Emma Anne]

I read the Narnia books a lot of times. But frankly, there was a lot less good scifi and fantasy for kids back then (my kids read them once and didn't bother again). At least Narnia had girls in it.

[harold]

I interpreted Susan's love of lipstick as a sign that she was no longer interested in the life of the imagination and had become a conformist/consumer type. It seemed logical to me that she had shut herself out of Narnia (I guess I was a proto-hippie).

However, I agree that it was downhill after the first Narnia book (which I read at age nine), the others weren't even interesting. Even the first Narnia book lost its charm for me after I realized it had been a (flawed) supposedly "Christian" allegory. C.S. Lewis is an awful scold. George McDonald is closer to what I (as a non-Christian) imagine Christianity to be, someone who cares about the plight of the the weak and those who suffer in obscurity and who has a sense of love, wonder and beauty. There are many children's fantasy books that are superior to C.S. Lewis in humor and warmth -- even H.C. Anderson despite his shoe/foot amputation fetish, had more of a genuinely Christian spirit -- The Little Match Girl, for example. Or even the Little Mermaid, who sacrificed herself for love.

Still, as a college student, I enjoyed Lewis's The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image. The fiction, not so much.

[Ed B.]

OTOH, the people in charge at Eustace and Jill's school talked a lot of ideology but what it boiled down to was a place in which the strong were free to bully the weak. In the wake of the critique of modernist institutionalism that emerged from the 60s, is this really such a backwards critique?

And what about the revolutionary victory of the oppressed Narnians over the Telmarines? Now that is good fun, and good liberation theology all at the same time! One could dig up lots of examples, but the point is that while we can pull out things about Lewis that get our goat, putting him in a 2009 progressives vs. christianists schema doesn't really work.