Obligatory Narnia Post

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made a shitload of money over the weekend. I have no opinion about that¹.

Like everyone except Roger Ailes, I do have an opinion about the novels: great stories; too bad about all that Christian stuff in there.

This is not an uncommon opinion, and (perhaps predictably) in comment thread after comment thread the Lewis partisans misinterpret it as an attack on Christianity. It isn't. I don't object to the content of the allegory Lewis squeezes into his story (as opposed to the casual racism in a couple of the Narnia novels, content I do find objectionable) but to the existence of the allegory and the squeezing. The problem is simply that it gets in the way of the story.

(And by the way, if I had a nickel for every time I read somebody saying they never noticed the Christian allegory, I could buy lunch. I have one thing to say to all of you: I don't believe you. It's just way too obvious for even a small child not to notice.)

Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, sums up the problem nicely:

...throughout his own imaginative writing, Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the allegorical—his conscience as a writer lets him see that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say....The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies.

Anthony Lane puts it a little more bluntly:

As every parent knows, there is a large Christian allegory sitting bang in the middle of Lewis’s tale, roughly as hard to spot as a rhino in a phone booth. Whether the film indulges or dishonors it, however, is beside the point; the problem with any allegorical plan, Christian or otherwise, is not its ideological content but the blockish threat that it poses to the flow of a story.

Exactly.

I believe in stories. I believe that a writer's highest loyalty has to be to the story. Reading the Narnia novels, what offends me is not the Christianity of the allegory, but the fact (incomprehensible to me) that at key points the author chose loyalty to some deity over loyalty to the story.

¹I suppose I have an opinion, of sorts, about the marketing, which is that you could make a serious drinking game out of it if you take a shot for every time the 'making of' featurette mentions Tolkien (or, more broadly, anything related to LOTR). Just don't try driving afterwards.

Update: A post by djw at Lawyers, Guns & Money reminds me of something else that always bothered me: the Susan problem.