Eight Children in Narnia. Jared Lodbell
Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity . . . and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long long ago (it hardly seems longer now) in Tegner’s Drapa, that Siegfried (whatever it might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes. And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself.”
In Chapter 5, “First Things, Last Things: The Second Larger Life,” we conclude our separate looks at the separate volumes of the Chronicles of Narnia, beginning with the way in which the first and last volumes (by Narnian chronology) show the consciousness that “In my ending is my beginning.” Here we consider Digory and Polly in The Magician’s Nephew as they might have been friends of Jacks (they were certainly his older contemporaries)—that is, beginning the whole story in the familiar times of his youth before going off to adventures not really within his timeline at all, inside the stable (but what stable? and where?) in The Last Battle, before going “Higher up and further in” in the Delectable Mountains, in a time-line that includes Christ and Christian, but not the quotidian days of Clive Staples Lewis. This is the beginning of the Second Larger Life. (For those of my readers unfamiliar with the prayer on the anniversary of one departed in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer it reads this way: “Almighty God, we remember this day before thee thy faithful servant [N.], and we pray thee that, having opened to him the gates of larger life, thou wilt receive him more and more into thy joyful service; that he may win, with thee and thy servants everywhere, the eternal victory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.)
But that, as John Donne might say, rather leaves us hanging. After we have looked at “chronicles” one by one, ending with the first and last (the book-end “chronicles” we might say), we will, in Chapter 6, (“Child! I Tell No-One Any Story but His Own”), consider some questions of style and content—including the style of the content and the content of the style. When Aslan tells Lucy that she really does not need to know the stories of others (and tells Shasta and Aravis)—and that she will not be told what would have been (ever!)—no stories of If!—he is asserting, for the author’s purposes in this creation, that the content of what is being told is universal, which is probably why it is told in the narrator’s voice of C.S. Lewis.
This sixth chapter looks at certain questions and connections—1. real children and unreal estates? 2. avuncular stories or parental stories? 3. Narnia and the “Greatest Story Ever Told”—and then 4. a discussion of what has come after. This bears the title, “Pevensies, Peregrinations, and Potter.” The Pevensies, of course, are Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. (I connect their name with the Sussex location that plays so great a role in Kipling’s children’s books.) I do not think of them as real children in unreal estates, as I do of E. Nesbit’s five children, or Kipling’s Dan and Una. Eustace and Jill are neither more nor less real than the Pevensies, to my mind—but Digory and Polly seem to come out of C.S. Lewis’s childhood, when he said determinedly to his parents, “I’se Jacks!” Jadis comes out of a book (by E. Nesbit, as it happens)—whether Digory and Polly come from one too (or several) we cannot say, but they are (to me) a little more flesh and blood than the others. The wonderful illustrations of Pauline Baynes have almost guaranteed that the four Pevensies would need the medium of film to take full form.
Peregrinations (a word connected with “pilgrimages”) refers—in this context—both to Peregrine (Pippin) Took (Tûk), the Hobbit of that ilk, in The Lord of the Rings and to the Narnian stories as pilgrimages. Potter is, of course, Harry Potter in the J.K. Rowling heptology of that name. No doubt the Narnia books had some influence on Rowling, but what we will be looking at in Chapter 6 is the children’s milieu (for want of a better word) in both sets of books, and their place in the Arcady of childhood. Here we may briefly suggest the relation of some of the classic children’s books to the idea of Arcady.
First, G.A. Henty (1832–1902) is Arcadian—though his is a slightly different vision of Arcady from Grahame and Kipling—his novels are certainly not part of the same stream as The Wind in the Willows. Nor are they part of quite the same stream as Kipling’s, though they are much closer to being school stories (they are essentially about schoolboys), as indeed are the Narnian stories. The schoolboy excursions in defiance of authority in Kipling’s Stalky & Co (1899) are Arcadian, and I believe they suggest that the book is pastoral, that there is an amorality to pastoral (to which the English, at least, have found it necessary to add some kind of moral judgment), and that this exemplifies the natural linking of youth and pastoral—and thus Arcady (or Arcady and thus pastoral). And then there is the matter of the houses—the great grand houses—in the country.
There are dwelling-places in Arcady in Henty’s boys’ books (and his occasional girls’ book), and, for that matter, with Bevis. Inns are dwelling-places in the Arcady of the open road. For, after all, there are wolves in the pastoral (else why do we need the pastor?) just as there are dangers in the Wild Wood, dangers from which, in The Wind in the Willows, Ratty and Moley are rescued by Badger’s House. This too is surely a dwelling-place in Arcady. But it is also in the Wild Wood, and beyond that is the Wide World, of which it is forbidden to speak. Now for Lewis, as it is for Lewis’s friend Tolkien, it may be that recapturing the past (even the Arcadian past) is a kind of advance. Come to think of it, that is a theme in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, as it is in E. Nesbit’s The House of Arden. And in all these, irony aside, Kenneth Grahame’s vision of children as Arcadians among the Olympian adults holds true.
Whatever the age of the children, Arcadia is beset with perils, so an agreeable dwelling-place is all to the good—but note, there is a link between child and countryside, as well as between schooldays and golden days: the link is the link of Arcady. There is also a strong sense of the past somehow immanent in the present, not always a golden past but at least a past streaked with gold. And also we remember, that in the ninth chapter of The Wind in the Willows, “Wayfarers All,” the Rat is entranced by the call of the Sea Rat, and is only kept from leaving all his world behind, by the forcible action of the Mole. He is not to be a wayfarer: home is sweet, dulce domum, and the call of the Wide World is a siren call.
There’s a pattern beginning to take shape. Even if we go wide in this world, wonders to hear, we will come back—the pattern is “there and back again.” (Yes, I know, that’s the pattern of The Hobbit—and The Lord of the Rings—but so it is of the first six Narnia books.) And this leads us to Chapter 7, on what has come after—not only the competition (so to speak) in the form of Harry Potter at Hogwarts and elsewhere, but the glorification of the Narnia books over the past half-century as being (at least almost) C.S. Lewis’s greatest achievement.
Several of them have been made into movies, and doubtless the others will follow (or are already following)—and while I would have said once that no one is likely to make any films of Lewis’s other books, barring Screwtape and The Great Divorce, I think it possible that the Ransom stories will be made into films, with the (true but exaggerated) claim that Elwin Ransom is really based on Professor Tolkien. Nevertheless, it has been Narnia that has led that way, Narnia whose achievement has continued C.S. Lewis’s name as a house-hold word for more than half a century. No matter that his finest sustained work is English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. You can’t make a movie out of that, and Oxford even changed the book’s name some years after Lewis’s death.
My approach in this book, as I have suggested, is individual and personal, and reflective—some critics may even say it is idiosyncratic. For example, to anticipate some of what I write in Chapter 3, the name Narnia, in combination with Lucy, suggested to me at my first reading, the name of the Blessed Lucia da Narni—presumably because I had seen that name very recently in a book assigned as summer reading for my class at the Episcopal boarding school I was then attending. It was. I think, Samuel Shellabarger’s Prince of Foxes [1947]).
I do not suppose many others first reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe around 1952–53 would have had that reaction, though of course I cannot be sure—but there was certainly a reference to “Saint” Lucia of Narni abroad in a popular book of that time, and it may have had an influence on Lewis, already writing a book