Finally! We’re in the meat of the book, In Defence of Fantasy: A Study of the Genre in English and American Literature since 1945 by Ann Swinfen [it’s good practice to list the full title occasionally, and I haven’t done that in a long time.] After all the throat-clearing and table-setting, we come to where Swinfen wants to be: detailed discussion of fantasy on its own terms, without hat-tips to other genres or tortured comparisons to other “serious” literature, or earnest reassurances that “these children’s books should be read by adults and considered legit canon.” Well, almost without the kid lit apology.
Chapter 7, “Idealisms: Religious and Philosophic,” works to Swinfen’s strengths: strong writing, sensitive interpretations, clear conclusions, and only one obscure title to deal with. That obscure book is Leon Garfield’s The Ghost Downstairs, a slim YA novella that’s currently out of print. The Ghost Downstairs, however, does bridge the other two series that Swinfen discusses: C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy. Note: Earthsea is now a sextet, with the last three books expanding themes from the first. Swinfen, of course, writes only about the first trilogy, since the last three novels had not yet been published at the time of her writing.
We have long and often discussed abiding questions about whether morality is inherent in fantasy (or indeed, in fiction), whether its expression is a necessary element of the form, or an effect of the writer-as-world-creator, or an interpretation readers bring to fiction. In this chapter, Swinfen sidesteps the whole thing and takes on discussions of the meaning of life and its relationship to the Hereafter. Yes, folks, in this chapter she’s talking about salvation, transcendence, and metaphysics.
When it’s framed like that, I shudder a little. But this is where we are, so let’s go with it.
Swinfen starts with C.S. Lewis, whose didacticism is “more overt than...the work of any other recent English author, with the possible exception of the political and social satirists Orwell and Huxley” (1, pp. 147-148). [Orwell and Huxley, sadly, will remain unexamined.] As both a writer and a critic, Swinfen notes, Lewis sees his work as “a vehicle for Christian teaching,” (1, p. 148). Narnia is one example of Lewis’ Christian didacticism, and is didactic, she argues, to the point that the fiction suffers from the theology.
C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia
The central theme which provides the entire framework of the Chronicles is the archetypal Christian battle between good and evil… The lines of battle, however, are not always clearly drawn. The human children and the more complex of the Narnian characters are flawed — some slightly, some more seriously — and the course of their salvation is determined by the vital choices which they must make, each choice involving either a rejection of self and a movement towards God, or an assertion of self and denial of God. (1, p. 148)
Well, duh. Interestingly, although this is obvious to anyone who’s read Narnia, to see the obvious pointed out in all its bold starkness is actually...quite jarring. Each of the novels is a conversion text (yes, it’s a real thing in medieval studies — Dante’s Commedia is an example), with each book acting as a miniature version of the whole series even as the series moves toward its apocalypse. It’s not about the quest, except as the quest advances Aslan’s activity in the world. It’s not about the characters — it’s about salvation.
The world of Narnia embodies Lewis’s belief in the ordered, hierarchical world of medieval Christianity, which is so at variance with the modern interest in the development of the individual, the unfolding of personality. Characters in Narnia achieve virtue and eventual salvation in so far as they conform to an external hierarchical order, and repress or deny the promptings of individual personality. (1, p. 149)
Theology is probably the element most central in all discussion of Lewis’ writings, but rarely does a critic note that Lewis is primarily concerned with a medieval Christian worldview, an ordered hierarchy in which salvation hinges on people adhering to their “places”. According to this scheme, anyone who seeks to advance socially or to express individuality or growth by rejecting status quo, also rejects God’s plan for creation, and places the self outside of God’s ordained role. In an exhaustive and well-wrought discussion of the dominant themes in the Chronicles, Swinfen defends her critique of Lewis’ work as medieval Christian didacticism.
The discussion focuses on Lewis’ preoccupation with the eschatology of Narnia, the eucatastrophic climaxes of each novel that culminate in the Last Battle, the redemption of innocent Narnians, the resurrection of the blessed, and the the banishment of the damned. Swinfen argues (persuasively) that the structure of the seven-novel series enacts Christian theology:
In their overall structure, the Chronicles form an extended psychomachia, comprehending the creation, fall, moral struggle and last judgment of an entire spiritual world. … All of this is in accord with Lewis’s stress on the attainment of virtue through the imitation of a revealed pattern of faith and godliness. Unselfishness, kindness, compassion, pity — the various qualities of ‘charity’ — are rarely urged, and it is certainly never required of the children to forgive their enemies. Edmund, the repentant traitor, is forgiven, but he is one of the ‘fellowship’ of children. All other enemies are ruthlessly hunted down and destroyed. It is a code not only militant but vengeful. (1, p. 153)
She also asserts that Lewis is not primarily interested in character, not even the character of the children, with Lucy being a marker of unquestioning faith and Edmund being the redeemed sinner. Otherwise, the children are not particularly distinct from each other. And the Narnians themselves are classified as virtuous by nature (the Talking Beasts) or not-so-virtuous and therefore unworthy of mercy or redemption.
Non-talking beasts are apparently not qualified for salvation, or even passing concern by the main characters. Mistreatment of Narnian beasts is a moral outrage only when the beasts can talk. Otherwise they’re prey animals, slaughtered and eaten, or mistreated without raising any character’s hackles. There’s a vicious side to Lewis’ theology, grounded in part in its insistence on hierarchical values, in part in its medieval typology, and in part in its embrace of predestination. If, for example, some beasts earned or were granted speech at creation and some were not, the non-talking beasts have no avenue to admittance in Aslan’s realm at the end of the Last Battle. Sucks to be them. Too bad, but what can you do?
And then there’s the problem of Susan who doesn’t do anything wrong, except maybe grow up. Whatever she had done to earn eternal exile from Narnia happens in the primary world, and is not part of the narrative. It’s not a matter of only the children, the Kings and Queens of Narnia, being taken into Aslan’s country, since even their parents are admitted after the railway accident. Everyone but Susan, and with no real reason except that she likes nylons and boys, which are sins hardly on a scale with betrayal, such as Edmund commits. Swinfen sees Susan’s fate as ambiguously problematic. (Actually, she’s not alone in that. Many writers have difficulty with Susan. Neil Gaiman wrote a famous and famously-upsetting short story about Susan.) Swinfen writes that her “small vanities seem hardly comparable with the acts of treachery for which Edmund was forgiven” (1, p. 155), and she’s right.
It is in any case further evidence of Lewis’s tendency to make his characters into lay-figures, vehicles of his ideas rather than fully realized people in their own right, and an indication of his submerged, but very clear, dislike of women. (1, p. 156)
Chapter 7 is where Swinfen as a critic really shines, both in her evaluation of the literature and in her ability to shape an argument, down to noting the shifts in diction in the children when they’re in the primary world and then when they enter Narnia. She praises his descriptions, his inventiveness, and his deft blending of traditional Christian themes with medieval motifs (like the Green Knight as tempter transmogrified into the Green Lady who imprisons Rilian), and presents a comprehensive reading of Narnia that will stand up to any other critical analysis.
Then Swinfen moves to Leon Garfield’s The Ghost Downstairs, which probably few of us have read, although I’ll bet BMScott has a copy knocking around somewhere. Her discussion of the novella with its reverse-Faust theme and weighty symbolism has me wanting to scab up a copy somewhere. It sounds like a great read, but since few of us are familiar with the book, I’ll give the analysis a pass.
Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea
And it’s on to Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy. And because Swinfen is primarily looking at religious systems, Earthsea provides the counter to Lewis’ unyielding Christianity and Garfield’s measurably more humane focus on Christian redemption. For Le Guin is not a Christian, and Earthsea is not a Christian creation.
Here is where I issue an invitation to anyone who wants to write about Lewis or Garfield or Le Guin, as well as anyone who wants to take on Swinfen, to step up and I’ll give you the floor, share resources, and argue vociferously on your behalf.
Swinfen’s principal focus in Earthsea is on The Farthest Shore, although she also discusses the first two novels—the absolute power of Names in A Wizard of Earthsea and the need for darkness to make light significant, silence to allow speech, and the dualities inherent in maintaining Balance; the emptiness of organized religion in The Tombs of Atuan with its nameless priestess Arha/Tenar and her cynical disbelieving assistants Penthe and Kossil. “Through her examination of the Kargish practices, Ursula Le Guin rejects any form of religion which is either empty ritualism or superstitious placation of unknown sources of terror” (1, p. 169). This in opposition to passing references to a kind of shared faith among the other peoples of Earthsea, even the Raft people, who observe Sunreturn and the Long Dance.
The act of sub-creation is even more necessary for Ursula Le Guin than for C.S. Lewis, for she re-examines, from first principles, the most fundamental and profound issues of human life: the essence of an individual’s being, the relationship between life and death, the possibility of immortality, the relevance of belief to daily life. Her philosophic position is never simplistic, and rarely consoling, but it has the great virtue of unflinching honesty. (1, p. 171)
Magic, whether performed by the village witch or the Archmage, turns on the power of names and the potency of True Speech. Although magic is a primary force in Earthsea, it is not Swinfen’s focus, except to note that a person’s true name contains their essence. The land of the dead:
houses the shadows of the living bodies, of the dead, each with its name , but without sentience or emotion, without change. The true essence of a mortal man, divided now from his name, lives on, caught up in the living world he savoured, dispersed when separated from the concrete form of the body, but forever present in the living and changing earth. (1, p. 184)
Much of Swinfen’s discussion centers around Cob who, in rejecting death, also rejects life and condemns himself to a dry nothingness that drains the magic out of Earthsea, until Ged stops him. Cob appears to Arren as a seductive illusion, offering a simulacrum of eternal life but in reality offering a sham, which Swinfen interprets as an explicit rejection of a Christian-style afterlife in favor of a Taoist view of balance: no light without darkness, no sound without silence, no life without death, which Swinfen calls “the underlying spiritual and philosophical theme” of the Earthsea trilogy: “the need to balance opposites, and to realize that although darkness is non-life, it is essential as a background to the illuminating light of life,” (1, 185).
Where Lewis is concerned with redemption in a Christian universe — not an individual redemption but Redemption as the conclusion toward which the great current of history trends — and Garfield examines Redemption as a personal struggle in the battleground of the individual’s soul, Le Guin, Swinfen asserts, is “primarily concerned with the meaning of death and immortality — both have meaning only in relation to the beauty and vitality of a life fully lived and a search for the ‘springs of being, deeper than life, than death,’ [The Farthest Shore, p. 181],” (1, p. 186). In other words, Le Guin reframes the question, moving morality out of a conventionally ethical frame and putting it into an existential one. Le Guin’s morality is not an easy one, except in insisting that an authentically-lived life is sufficient and, indeed, necessary.
Thus we come to the end of Chapter 7, and Swinfen has repaid most of my little criticisms of her work. In this chapter she demonstrates her strength as a critic, capable of insightful and profound discussion as well as graceful prose. Would that the whole book had been so strong; it would be a classic. Next week Swinfen tackles the other Idealisms that preoccupy her: social and political ones, close readings, unfortunately of mostly children’s books, but we’ll make of it what we can, despite the subject material. Until then, see you in comments.
Previous Installments
Reference
1. Ann Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.