05655
Dec. 7, 2005

New ‘Narnia’ film returns C.S. Lewis
to ground zero in religious culture wars

Opening divides Christians, others
into camps with ‘rooting interests’

by Karen R. Long
Religion News Service  

CLEVELAND, OH — At a desperate moment in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as the lion’s tortured, lifeless body lies on a stone table, the author C. S. Lewis pauses over the stricken child characters, Lucy and Susan, then addresses the reader directly:

        “I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been — if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you — you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.”

        Something in that passage — its directness, its certainty, its complete lack of irony and its kind regard — conveys why Lewis and his books still matter to millions of readers.

        A $200 million film that opens this week is based on this children's story from the pen of a childless, middle-aged Oxford don whose characters say such things as “By crikers!” and “Bless me!”

        Narnia has entered the maw of Disney, and a cast of stakeholders — book lovers, Lewis despisers, evangelical Christians, Lewis acolytes, academics and cultural commentators — are twitching with dread and expectation.

        “There are rooting interests,” said Lewis scholar Bruce Edwards, a Bowling Green State University professor, “and, as in all important contests ... you not only want your team to win, but win in a certain way.”

        The new movie arrives at a culturally pregnant moment. Detractors hope it will tank. Some believers pray that the bliss Lewis found in Christianity — as the last century’s most famous convert from atheism to Christian belief (Anglican, in his case) — begets a new come-to-Jesus momentum.

        Neither outcome is very likely, but anxiety about the place of religion in public life has fired up the chattering classes.

        No less an institution than the Times of London describes the movie as a referendum on Christianity. The cover of the current issue of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today has “C.S. Lewis Superstar” emblazoned on its cover. Meanwhile, the New Yorker is deriding Lewis as a man who took “a controversial incident in Jewish history as the pivot point of all existence” and adopted “a still more controversial one in British royal history as the pivot point of your daily practice.”

        Freudians are taking their salvos, too — probably because Lewis had no use for the theories that support psychoanalysis. Noting the thick fur that lines the wardrobe, and Lewis’ language about it, they interpret the entrance to Narnia as a symbolic vagina.

        Pity the man baptized Clive Stapes Lewis, who, like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, was a tweedy, pipe-smoking Oxford professor, literary critic and lover of old myths. (Tolkien hated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and considered it patched together from scraps; on the other hand, Tolkien’sThe Hobbit was published partly because Lewis insisted on it.

        More than a half-century later, with The Lord of the Rings a huge success in cinematic form, it’s Lewis’s turn. But unlike Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the Narnia that Lewis drenched with Christian themes has propelled its creator smack into the culture wars of 2005.

        At least that’s the opinion of Alan Jacobs, author of the new book, The Narnian.

        “Disney is marketing separately to the Harry Potter people and to the Christians who love C.S. Lewis,” said Jacobs, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. “This arrives on the heels of the contention over ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ the worry around the role of evangelicals in the last presidential election, and the furor over intelligent design. It makes it hard to talk about Lewis.”

        The divisions are so pitched that the movie soundtrack comes in two versions: rock-tinged for the secularist, and Christian-influenced for the faithful.

        So far, if there’s a clear loser, it must be Macmillan Publishing, which calculated 20 years ago that Lewis had sold about as many books as he ever would and sold the copyrights to HarperCollins, which today owns 170 titles from and about Lewis.

        HarperCollins expects Mere Christianity — a 2001 paperback edition of radio essays Lewis dashed off while riding the train into London — to sell more than a million copies. And the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia, available in 35 languages, should surpass the 90 million mark by year’s end.

        HarperCollins doesn’t have a monopoly, however. Wiley has rushed to print 50,000 copies of C.S. Lewis and Narnia for Dummies.

        Behind the commercial whirl are the spiritual and intellectual ones. Philip Pullman, an arch anti-Narnian, calls the chronicles “loathsome” and considers their emphasis on an eternal life in Narnia to be a form of death-dealing. Yet Pullman, creator of the compelling children’s Dark Materials trilogy, begins his own story with a girl in a wardrobe.

        Likewise, references to Lewis’s work are frequent in the work of Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, who has acknowledged the influence; and of Neil Gaiman, who has satirized Lewis brutally.

        Lewis has been a thorn in the side of intellectual history for decades — partly because his contributions were formidable in two fields often at odds: literary scholarship and Christian apologetics.

        Lewis’ direct, accessible and winsome writings about Christian questions landed him on a 1947 cover of Time magazine, a year before he began scribbling about Narnia. Little Jack, born into a prosperous Belfast Protestant family in 1898, was a clever and precocious boy, fascinated by nature, who spent hours alone with books.

        The major trauma of his life came when he was 9 years old. He was reading Paradise Lost and jotting his reflections in a diary that summer when his mother died of cancer. His father shipped him off to a British boarding school, a place of beatings and rages so hideous that Lewis likened it to “Belsen.” Its headmaster eventually was carted off to an institution for the criminally insane.

        In counterpoint to those grim experiences were the weeks spent in a refuge Jack and his older brother, Warnie, called “The Little End Room.” They escaped for many hours far away from adults in their Belfast home sanctuary. Part of their play featured an imaginary world called “Boxen,” for which Jack — smitten by Beatrix Potter and The Wind in the Willows  — provided the talking animals.

        In 1944, just as Lewis was becoming famous in America, Macmillan asked him for an autobiographical sketch. He responded that he had no interest in the “rot about ‘self-expression.’” But he finally gave in, tossing off a paragraph that he assumed Macmillan would edit:

        “I gave up Christianity at about 14. Came back to it when getting on for 30. An almost purely philosophical conversion. I didn’t want to. I’m not the religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I’m my own master; but since the facts seemed to be the opposite I had to give in. My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs — or else sitting up till the small hours in someone’s college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes. There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.”

        The nature of that conversion and laughter are important to Doris Donnelly, a theology professor at John Carroll University.

        “For him, conversion was a struggle,” she said. “That carries a note of authenticity for me. He wasn’t knocked from his horse. He wasn’t visited by angels. His conversion happened slowly, thoughtfully, and carried forward throughout his life.”

        Lewis’ relation to evangelicals is uneasy. His life was well-marinated in drink and tobacco, and his ecstatic, late-life marriage to a divorced American came in defiance of the Anglican bishop of Oxford.

        Still, no less a fiery fundamentalist than the Rev. Bob Jones (who once described the Rev. Billy Graham as a “limb of Satan”) met Lewis, and pronounced him a Christian.

        Jacobs credits the writings of Lewis, and the Graham crusades, for bringing the various wings of Christianity closer together.

        Nearer the concerns of everyday life, however, are the many thousands of bereaved readers comforted by Lewis’ beautiful book A Grief Observed, written after his wife’s death from cancer just four years after their marriage. Joan Didion, no devotee of the Christian afterlife, refers to it in her own The Year of Magical Thinking.

        One woman who survived a tough childhood said in a discussion that reading Lewis’s book The Screwtape Letters was the first time she can remember wanting to be good.

        Detractors see Narnia as Lewis’s escape from a pinched Christianity, a view that draws scoffs from Edwards, the Bowling Green professor who maintains a well-regarded Lewis Web site.

        “Lewis was profoundly influenced by Tolkien, who saw fantasy not as escape, but a recovery,” he said.

        Lewis wrote in a way that made goodness desirable, even radiant.

        Arguments about the uneven Narnia books— over whether they are imperialistic, racist or sexist — showcase the preoccupations of the times. For the long haul, people as diverse as Mormon theologians and novelist John Updike will continue to claim Lewis as their own.