another long book entry
**** 1221) "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" by Laura Miller

We read this as a "book club" book over at  bookaddiction a while back, but I never got around to making a personal post on it. I'm going to copy material from my discussion posts there, so this will be a bit longer than my usual book review. In short, in this book Miller talks about her childhood love of Lewis's Narnia series, her disillusionment with the books when they were presented to her as Christian symbolism, and her search for the reason why she still loves them despite disagreeing with their religious premise. Part memoir, part literary criticism and history, part psychology, and with a bit of biography about Lewis and his writings, I found this book very enjoyable and full of interesting ideas. The only thing that frustrated me was the lack of source notes. She presents many references to other works, but no specific sources for her most tantalizing speculations.

Quotes (some that I liked and some that I just thought were good discussion topics)

"...we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem most highly-- or the ones we'd most like people to think we read over and over again" (p 4).

"...while the process of writing about a book can reveal things you'd never get from simply reading it, it can also make reading a less immediate and visceral experience" (p 5)

"The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious" (p 11)

"Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?" (p 23).

"...all stories are escapes from life; all stories are unrealistic, or at least all the good ones are. Life, unlike stories, has no theme, no formal unity, and (to unbelievers, at least) no readily apparent meaning. That's why we /want/ stories... Perhaps that's why humanity's oldest stories are full of outlandish events and supernatural beings; the idea that a story must somehow mimic everyday life would probably have seemed daft to the first tellers. Why even bother to tell a story about something so commonplace?" (p 25).

"Like Lewis's, my material life [in childhood] often seemed to be nothing more than the drab and shadowy interludes between the hours when I could read and retreat to an interior realm furnished with the fabulous treasure I had scavenged from hundreds of books." 42

"Gardens make a particularly good image of the self for a writer, because while a garden can be cultivated and enjoyed privately, it can also yield fruit that can be shared with others." 50

"...children are literalists; they lack not only the cognitive skills but also the sheer bulk of information it takes to formulate abstractions and recognize general patterns. They think in specifics, of the concrete, tactile reality they encounter every day. As Philip Pullman... is wont to say, 'Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.' Sometimes they do not see the forest because they're still getting acquainted with the trees." 87

"Once we learn to see things with the idea that they belong to a particular category, we're in danger of missing all the qualities they share with things in other categories, not to mention all the qualities that are theirs alone." (p89)

"Like Lewis, I hankered after the ineffable and the sublime, but the story of Jesus had never spoken to that part of my imagination. Christianity was too monolithic, comprehensive, and established. Temperamentally,  preferred uncertainty, slippery boundaries, little neglected corners of the world where magic lurked unnoticed, and strangeness." (p 100)

"If literary writing has any distinguishing characteristic, it's that the more you look at it the more you see, and the more you see the more you want to go on looking." (p 113)
I am tempted to disagree with this, although I cannot say why. I can think of an example in which it is true-- Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" (another children's book with an underlying religious message, in some ways). Perhaps I object not so much to that statement as to one which follows it closely:
"The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems." (114)

"[In school] If anything, the more I enjoyed a story, the less likely it was to be serious, worthwhile literature." 116 How true!!

"Disgust, however elemental it feels, is often just a matter of the company you keep." 122 There is some room for debate on this, from a psychology perspective.

"We want the artists who have changed our lives to lead exemplary lives of their own." (p 125)


This following section is not very well informed, I think, but a fascinating premise to follow up on:

"But surely what the sadist or masochist craves most is a particular /dynamic/, generated by a theatrical imbalance of power, in which one player towers above, possessed of all the strength, glory, and authority, while the other cringes below in utter humility and dependence. The imbalance creates a charged emotional appeal; who plays what role matters less than the voluptuous contrast between them. Often no real violence and very little pain are involved. The sadomasochistic impulse seems to arise not from the urge to behave aggressively, but from the desire to be suspended in an ever-unfolding continuum of overwhelming feeling. And this, in turn, throw new light on the emphasis Lewis put on him submissiveness before God; for here was a man for whom piety and prostration were very much the same thing...

"...my friend asked, 'But isn't that the same thing as almost everyone's relationship to God? It's about bowing as low as you can before an incomprehensible power.'
"
His observation stopped me in my tracks. Surely not every believer is a closet sadomasochist? On the other hand, perhaps sadomasochism is not as exotic as it's made out to be. Perhaps its devotees are merely people whose affinity for a particular dynamic takes a sexual rather than a spiritual form? ...[in church as a girl] I saw the tortured body of a man, swooning in agony, blood dripping from his brow, hands, feet, and side. What would someone with no prior knowledge of Christianity conclude upon walking into /that/ god's temple...

"Remove the overt sexuality and the paraphernalia from a sadomasochistic scene, and the emotional center of helplessness and dependency isn't so very different from the intense bond between parent and child or a god and his worshipper. Perhaps all of these are facets of something universal that I, too, can recognize. It's the desire to be carried away by something greater than ourselves-- a love affair, a group, a movement, a nation, a faith. Or even a book." (166-7)

I confess, I just love the idea of religion as an S&M relationship with God!

"Men like J. M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll preferred the company of children not (as the jaded modern mind sometimes presumes) because they were pedophiles seeking adult pleasures from children, but because they longed for the childlike pleasures they couldn't share with
adults." 174 My instinct is to agree strongly. But this is one of those places where I'd love to see some source material for her conclusion.

"Ideally, reading is a kind of collaboration; the more a reader brings to the book, the more he has to contribute to the experience and the richer it will be." 264

"Fairies, neither angels nor men, neither good nor evil, have no place in God's plan. That is the real source of their appeal and their threat, and the reason why fundamentalists object to witches, wizards, and other occult elements in children's books. It's not that these figures lure readers to Satanism, but that they introduce the possibility that God and Satan are not your only options." 276

"The power of a myth doesn't arise from the particular words used to convey it; it can even be felt when no words at all are used." 286


From my original posts:

The third part of the book struck me as the least organized-- as if it contained, in no particular order, all the thoughts and research the author had left-over after writing the main portion of the book. Some parts I found very intriguing, while others (such as the tangents about Tolkien's writing) seemed out-of-place.

One thing I did like in particular was the beginning of the section, in which she talks about what Narnia /looks/ like. If nothing else, it left me with a powerful urge to visit the British Isles! We miss out on so much historical landscape here in America. My own vision of Narnia was based largely on the BBC/Wonderworks movies I watched as a child, with a bit of the book's illustrations thrown in (although I didn't actually remember that the books had illustrations until she mentioned it). And yet, despite the fact that the filming took place in real and probably quite mundane locations, I always had a very magical image of the land-- as with the story itself, there always seemed to be something more just around the corner, the constant possibility of other marvels and stories. I'm curious now, too, to go to facebook and find all the pictures tagged "Narnia," to see other people's visions of it.

I agree with Miller that Lewis's inconsistencies and melding of many stories adds to the excellence of the books rather than detracting from them. Yes, Tolkien's creation is far more technically accomplished, but I've never been a fan of Lord of the Rings-- the weight and realism of it all makes it rather dull to me, like reading poorly-written history rather than fantasy (I was a bit surprised that she didn't mention this critique among the many objections to Tolkien-- I know I'm not the only one who's had that reaction to his work). The thing is that C. S. Lewis, like Lewis Carroll, is able to think and write in the same magical, rambling voice in which children imagine. There doesn't need to be logic and consistency in a child's world, because it's all so dream-like at a young age. At least, that's how I remember it.

I was greatly interested in Miller's discussion of Lewis's own literary criticism, and the many mythologies and literary forms on which he drew. I find myself wanting to read the British fairy tales (I was shocked, though, at her claim of how modern most of them are-- can anyone recommend good source material on that?) romantic poetry, and medieval allegories, all of which are sadly lacking in my personal repertoire.