C.S. Lewis the Novelist Part 1 (with a critical digression on The Hobbit)
March 13, 2007
by Michael
It seems plain to me that Lewis is a good storyteller. Millions of people have been reading the Narnia books for five decades, and adults find something worthwhile in them as well as children. They can be read on a variety of levels accessible to different groups of people: adventure, fairy tale, morality tale, allegory, unabashed Christian propaganda, Introduction to Medieval Studies—and they work well on all these levels.
But it also seems plain to me that the Narnia books are not great literature. And although they’re “children’s classics,” they don’t seem to be classics in the way that Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, or The Hobbit are. They share many virtues with these other books, but lack others, and have vices that they don’t have.
To name only one, the Narnia books, as a totality, but also each one considered individually, are less satisfying as wholes than as the sum of their parts. Like many others, if my own conversations are any guide, I always liked Voyage of the Dawn Treader the best, and I think it’s no accident that this is the most episodic of the collection. Sailing on the book’s eponymous ship, Edmund, Lucy, Eustace, Caspian, and Reepicheep hop from adventure to essentially disconnected adventure, searching for the End of the World. On the way they see all sorts of strange, wonderful, beautiful people and things and have some scary moments: it’s one delight after another. The only thing in the way of real plot is Eustace’s transformation from selfish jerk to loving cousin and friend, and I don’t think it’s the draw that makes people want to reread the book.
All the other books are like that, though—what I remember best and like best in retrospect are the moments, the scenes, the images: in The Magician’s Nephew, the trays of magic rings, the Wood Beyond the Worlds, the rows of frozen, ancient kings and queens lined up in the ruined halls of the dying world; in The Silver Chair, the enormous cliff at the edge of the world, and Jill being blown off by Aslan’s breath, the realization that the trenches were really the writing of giants, Father Time lying underground (and his awakening in The Last Battle), the glimpse, in the Lower Realms, of the beautiful and seductive, brilliant kingdoms even lower down—and so forth.
For all these wonderful things, there are elements that keep the books as wholes from being really satisying. For one thing, the strange juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements. This is by far at its worst in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which includes Greek fauns, Norse wolves, the beavers’ curious knowledge of human gnostic and cabbalistic legends, and worst of all, Father Christmas! What the hell is he doing there? This feeling of Narnia being more of hodgepodge than a world of its own lessens somewhat as the series goes on but never quite goes away.
A contrast with The Hobbit is, I think, illuminating.
The Hobbit is really no less episodic than any of the Narnia books. More than half of the book is simply Bilbo and the dwarves going from one adventure to another on their way East. The trolls, the goblins, Gollum, Beorn, the Spiders, and so on, are essentially disconnected stories tied together by a loose travel narrative. Or are they? The growth of Bilbo’s character is more strongly marked, intelligible, gradual, plausible (growth within reason, not incredible transformation, such as we get at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), and each of the episodes is a crucial step in the process (possibly excepting the Beorn interlude), besides providing entertainment on the way. Furthermore, somewhere pat halfway through the book the plot stops being episodic and begins to focus on the Quest, the initial purpose of the journey. Not only does the tension and excitement increase—dragons are much cooler and scarier than giant spiders—but the whole tone of the narrative rises above itself: without abandoning the “for children” feel the prose takes on a nobility and high seriousness that never shows itself in Narnia, even when it would be most appropriate. The child reading the book has been amused by the dwarves, scared by the goblins, creeped out by Gollum and delighted in his riddles, fascinated by Beorn, and so on. Now Smaug in his fury, lashing the mountainside or interrogating Bilbo, filled with malice, cunning, and power on a scale beyond anything he’s seen, raises the child out of himself and insists that it’s time to put aside childish things—a lesson Bilbo himself has been learning the whole time. Smaug’s presence transforms the book: Gandalf is no longer a silly and helpful magician throwing burning pinecones around, but a declaiming prophet. Someone like Bard the Bowman could not have existed in the early chapters. Beorn is a ravening, deadly giant, the goblins cruel, murderous, and nightmarish, not merely mean and scary. And the Dwarves! Remember Thorin, grumpy from having fat Bombur fall on top of him at the Unexpected Party—is this the same bearded hero roaring out To Me! Elves and Men! To me! O my kinsfolk!, his voice shaking like a horn in the valley? His death is genuinely tragic, the result of hubris and greed, but tempered by his insight and reconciliation before he dies, and we believe in Bilbo’s weeping.
Ah, I wax enthusiastic. My point, however, is that for all their virtues the Narnia books don’t ever reach these heights. Similarly, despite some inconsistencies, the world of The Hobbit, although not yet the Middle-Earth of LOTR, is real and believable in a way that Narnia is not, and its people human and inhuman are believable persons in a way that the Narnia children and animals are not. Tolkien’s scope and ambition is smaller than Lewis’—the Narnia books narrate the Creation and the Apocalypse of their world, among other things—but his success in producing real literature is more spectacular. I think this is true of the Narnia books with The Hobbit alone; to compare them with the whole Silmarillion-LOTR complex would be grossly unfair and inappropriate.
In my next post I’ll look at Lewis’ “Space Trilogy” and other fictional works.
Comments
On March 13 at 4'24 PM
, Fafner wrote:
Well said. I must say I agree with just about everything here, and that’s as a fan of both authors.
On March 13 at 4'35 PM
, Martin Marks wrote:
Yes, this is very nail on the head, I have to say. Especially Father Christmas. He was always particularly jarring.
On March 14 at 2'01 PM
, Odious wrote:
The child reading the book has been amused by the dwarves, scared by the goblins, creeped out by Gollum and delighted in his riddles, fascinated by Beorn, and so on. Now Smaug in his fury, lashing the mountainside or interrogating Bilbo, filled with malice, cunning, and power on a scale beyond anything he’s seen, raises the child out of himself and insists that it’s time to put aside childish things—a lesson Bilbo himself has been learning the whole time.
I wonder if this transformation has to do with the fact that Tolkien, unlike Lewis, had children. His concern (I don’t mean to imply that either author wrote or thought primarily for the Moral at the end of the story) would be much less abstract than Lewis’s. There’s no starker difference shown in their understanding of childhood than the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the children, who have been adults, are brought back into our world as (somehow) children still, and the end of (to be grossly unfair and inappropriate) LOTR, with the forever altered hero sailing West into the unknowable. One denies the power of the story we’ve just heard; the other insists on it. And, not coincidentally, implies that there are more stories to come.
I always like The Horse and His Boy best of the Narnians, myself.
On March 21 at 6'17 PM
, Rebekah wrote:
I love both the Narnia series and The Hobbit dearly, and for the most part I agree with your assessment. It’s also nice to hear The Hobbit getting some props — too many people discount it in favor of The Lord of the Rings.
That said, this seems like a good opportunity to raise a problem that always lurks in the back of my mind when I read Tolkien. Everybody is always picking on Lewis for his seeming inconsistencies such as the existence of Father Christmas in Narnia and the Beavers having things like marmalade and a sewing machine. But Tolkien’s world seems to have at least as great a problem.
The part of his world that I enjoy the most is the Hobbits and their culture. But their level of technological and cultural advancement just doesn’t make sense to me in the context of the much more primitive culture of Men and the other races, and also of the history Tolkien gives of the Hobbits in the introduction to LOTR. While everyone else seems to live in some sort of early Medieveal period, the Hobbits have among other things not only birthday parties and afternoon tea, but fine china, wastepaper baskets, modern bookshelves, and — to me most striking of all- umbrellas. If they have spinning jennies and cotton gins it certainly wouldn’t surprise me. How are we supposed to make sense of this?
On March 21 at 7'56 PM
, Michael Sullivan wrote:
Rebekah,
I think some of these problems have at least an implicit solution in the appendices of LOTR. Tolkien’s conceit is that the book is actually the memoirs of Frodo et al. as handed down by Hobbit tradition, and then rediscovered and translated in the modern age. Once the decision was made to take the standard language of the original, the Hobbitic dialect, to be translated by standard modern English, certain other decisions followed almost automatically—translating the dialect of the Rohirrim into something like Old English, for instance, while giving the Dwarves a “northern” tinge. Having done this, the “translator” claims, it seemed natural to make certain cultural tranlations as well, so that the world of the Hobbits seems as familiar and normal to us compared to the others as it would have to the original authors and readers. When we hear “afternoon tea”, “china”, and so forth, it’s supposed to conjure up images and associations analogous to if not really identical with those of the Hobbits’ own meal rituals and implements.
It’s also clear that the Hobbits have a more settled government and economy than most societies at the time, that it’s a relatively literate society, and also—nota bene—that the Bagginses are extraordinarily well-off. It doesn’t strike me as a priori unreasonable that they might have things more or less like bookshelves and wastepaper baskets, or even (they’re not that complicated, or don’t have to be) umbrellas. The only thing that strikes me as really technologically anachronistic is the clock on the mantlepiece.
Which leads me to my next point, which is that the Hobbits really aren’t that technologically advanced and it’s a bit of a mistake to see the Third Age as like the early Middle Ages. Tolkien admits in one of his letters that while he has a good imagination for landscapes and a good head for languages and dialects he’s not really very good with artifacts, and descriptions and explanations can be a bit fuzzy. Still it’s clear as day that the Dwarves whether of Dale or of Moria are far, far ahead of the Hobbits technologically, as are the Gondorians, who are still holding onto the remnants of the vastly superior Numenorean culture and arts. If at first glance they (either Dwarves or Men) seem more primitive than the Hobbits, this is more because their values strike us that way (they’re simply not as concerned with producing a culture full of personal comforts), not because their technological capabilities are inferior; the evidence points the other way. A good case could be made that the Hobbits are ahead of the Breelanders, but the latter are more or less backwater hicks. Whereas the Elves don’t seem to really need much technology, but when they make it, it’s spectacular.
Whether all this is particularly convincing or not, at least Tolkien went to a good deal of effort thinking it all out (much of it after the fact, it’s true), while Lewis doesn’t seem to have bothered.
On March 21 at 8'38 PM
, Martin Marks wrote:
For what it’s worth, the umbrella is said to be roughly 1,700 years old.
On March 28 at 9'31 AM
, Katherine wrote:
For my money, the worst bit in the Lord of the Ringsis that part in the beginning where the firework gets compared to an express train. It’s terribly jarring and doesn’t happen again.
Such a comparison, such language, would be perfectly at home in Narnia. It’s interesting that you should characterise Tolkien’s ambition as smaller than Lewis’s. I would have said exactly the opposite. Middle-Earth, even in ‘The Hobbit’, is a world which is held to the enormously exacting standards of possessing reality. Narnia, on the other hand, seems more like a brilliant exposition of the inside of one person’s imagination. The Hobbit must follow an external logic, but Narnia follows only the logic of the heart - and just one person’s heart, at that. The only connection between Greek satyrs and German dwarves, English breakfasts and sea voyages and talking beasts and Father Christmas, is that one person loved them all and that they spoke to his imagination. I suppose it really is quite an accomplishment to have pulled a coherent story out of something so intensely personal.