on Narnia
imagined countries and our true home
This week I am thinking of England. Partly this is because Dhananjay was just there, and so I am inclined to remember sentimentally pubs and churchyards, Oxford formal dinners and evensongs. It is partly because I recently spoke about Rossetti, Tolkein, and fairy tales to Phil Klay and Jacob Siegel on their podcast Manifesto! But it is partly, too, because I have been reading C.S. Lewis.
I have, I think, engaged out of order with Anglo-Catholic stereotypes. I read the Narnia books as a child, loved them the way a child would, enjoyed The Lord of the Rings far less (I was spoiled, I think, by seeing the movies first, and at too young an age). By the time I was studying theology at Oxford—a more fitting place to reconsider them—Tolkien and Lewis were so ubiquitous, in plaques and pub signs and postcards as to feel cliché. Not that my Oxford Christianity was particularly original, either (between Chesterton, Wilde, Greene, Waugh, and T.S. Eliot, I am confident all the necessary people influenced me in all the perfunctory ways). But I never responded, either to Lewis or to Tolkien, with more than vaguely reverential nostalgia.
It took leaving England to learn to love it. I think that might be true, too, of loving Lewis’s England—an England refracted through images of boarding-school (Narnia) and the collegiate university (in That Hideous Strength). It is an English of schoolboy honor and schoolboy logic (who can forget the opening, and best line, of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “Once there was a boy named Eustace Scrubbs and he almost deserved it”), of gleefully tucking-in to lavish meals whose excellence seems as fantastical as the talking animals who offer it.
There was a time when this England felt, to me at least, agonizingly parochial. No doubt it was bound up with my own feelings about neverending graduate school (inevitably parochial, regardless of the country), about past relationships, about all sorts of qualities that had nothing to do with England itself. And, of course, any necessary criticism of English colonialism, or even contemporary English culture more broadly, involves criticism of Eton and Harrow and the like: English parochialism legitimizing English hierarchy. We do things like this because we have always done them like this, as an explanatory force, can justify monstrosities.
But now—in my thirties, in New York, no longer raging against the English class system or the early closure of English shops—I find myself falling in love with Lewis, and Lewis’s England, in a new way. Not only because, I think, The Space Trilogy, which implausibly and yet perfectly melds science fiction and Medieval angelology and Green Man mysticism and Arthurian legends, is better, or at least more adult, than the Narnia books. But also because I think I understand, and ache for, what Lewis is trying to do.
Both Lewis and Tolkien have created fantastical worlds that are, at their core, love-letters to a certain kind of cultural specificity: the myth and folklore not just of the past, broadly construed, but of their past: pagan Britain, the arrestingly Teutonic North, Morris dancing and May Mornings. They are, no less than the poetry of T.S. Eliot, projects of recovery: attempting to hold onto enchantment in the face of a modern world (whether encapsulated by the dystopian organization N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength, or Susan Pevensie’s obsession with nylons and lipsticks) that no longer believes in it. The enchantment that they tend towards, furthermore, is an enchantment of particularity: magic and myth that is rooted not just in a generic Jungian world-story but rather in the specific meaning of this tree, of that root or leaf, of the story of this village.
But these books are not only in dialogue with, say, Eliot (or Woolf, or the modernists more broadly). They’re also, by virtue of the time in which they were written (40s for the Space Trilogy, 50s for Narnia, late 30s to 40s for The Lord of the Rings), in dialogue—by necessity as much as anything else—with another vision of national recovery: the Wagnerian vision of Volk and fairy-tale that reached its apotheosis in the Third Reich’s fetishization of blood, soil, and soldiers’ glory.
Lewis may be a little too in love with boys’ school bullying and Turkish delight and Green Men—and these elements, certainly, reflect a particular and not always flattering side of the English national culture (especially once we get to the discomfiting depiction of the Calormenes, who are written as a pastiche of Middle Eastern stereotypes). But what is more striking to me, as an adult reader, is how small, how gentle, how, well, cozy, Lewis’s vision of Englishness is, compared to the bloody Wagnerian vastness that is its unspoken analogue. War here is not something to be fetishized but a tragic last resort—a king’s duty, not his privilege, is that of being “first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat”; violence is legitimate not to expand territory but to preserve the parochialism, the smallness, of Narnian life: sweet badgers and sleepy bears sipping tea and cordial and gathering around the hearth to tell stories.
As in Tolkien, where it is precisely the goodness and smallness and sweetness and vulnerability of the hobbits’ Shire that demands protection, in Lewis, what matters in life and national epic alike is not the grand sweeping narrative but the little stories of the little people (and animals) who just want to make their way comfortably in the world, and with one another. Those few characters—The Magician’s Nephew’s Jadis or Uncle Andrew, say, or the wicked scientist Weston in Out of the Silent Planet—who claim a higher power, a deeper privilege, or a wider panorama, are not merely wicked but demonic, corrupting not just themselves but the worlds into which they enter; inevitably, it is precisely their refusal to see themselves as ordinary, embedded in the communal ordinariness of their world, that reveals to the reader that they are not to be trusted.
Against such a background, Lewis’s parochialism becomes not a defect of his work but one of his virtues. If England’s national character is to be preserved, alongside her folk ways and folk wisdom, it is not because she has been an Empire but because she remembers (or, at least, Lewis quixotically hopes she remembers) what it means to be a village. Nobody, in Narnia, fights for glory, or for grandeur, or for Greatness. They fight for Narnia—and they fight for each other. They fight so that they can go home and sleep in warm beds and eat food far more wholesome than any boarding school will ever serve.
In his “Four Loves,” Lewis writes of this parochialism—and of all our parochialisms—as a kind of love of the familiar. He writes of “love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells … With this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life; for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it; for the local dialect and (a shade less) for our native language.”
I have my own version of this—less America than New York, less New York than the East Side of Manhattan between 59th and 96th Streets, less that than the curious cultural specificities of the micro-neighborhood of Yorkville. And, with more generosity than I had as an unhappy expatriate, I can appreciate far better the way in which the love of the specific familiar, of one’s neighbors and family and friends and local watering-holes (I am writing this, not from a pub, but, in classic Yorkville fashion, from the Irish sports bar on my corner) can help us better learn to love the world.
I remain extremely wary of the Chestertonian extreme to which this can be taken, an easy conflation of “the pint, the pipe, and the Cross” that reduces Christianity to a background element in a drowsily unexamined life. But I think that what Lewis gets right is that, if we are to look backwards for enchantment, what we want to recover from our national epics and our folktales and our fairy stories, is not grand narratives of military victory or ethnic superiority, but rather the centrality of close social ties, indeed, of the act of storytelling itself, that the so-called modern, alienated, world makes less possible, or at least less straightforward. It is in smallness, not in aestheticized Greatness, that the truest enchantments can be understood.
And Lewis knows, as, I think, we all know, that although our love of country, of our own places, helps us understand something vital, it also illuminates what we’re missing. We are all, for Lewis, wayfaring strangers, whose country is not the place where we were born, or whose passport we hold, but God’s own land, the Narnia beyond Narnia. And our love of home is also, always, a homesickness for that place beyond the place we remember. To love Narnia is to love real-life England, but it is also, no less importantly, to love the country Narnia points to—and, at the end of the Last Battle, collapses into: Aslan’s own country. It is not to hold onto to a reactionary fantasy of England—nor to, as so many of England’s reactionaries have done and still do, fetishize “true” Englishness, particularly in opposition to the multicultural cosmopolis of, say, present-day London. To do so, I think (and Dhananjay has written), is to make idols of place and home rather than seeing place as an opportunity to encounter the universal in the particular.
To love Narnia properly, I think, is to love ordinary people, and ordinary lives, and ordinary pubs, and to see in them a glimpse of God’s glory. It is to recognize magic in this ordinariness—a magic that does not require or ever call for bloodshed or apocalyptic war. And it is to recognize that, only when we see this magic, do we get a true glimpse of the home we truly belong to.
“In speaking,” Lewis writes, “of this desire for our own far off country…[I am speaking of] the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.” Books, poetry, beauty, all these, Lewis reminds us, “are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited."
We have never visited the country for which Lewis is most homesick for. Nor, in this life, are we likely to. But, Lewis suggests, the closest way to glimpse it is not to fantasize about a higher calling, a higher place. It is to see it, instead, in what is already here.