C.S. Lewis's Narnia is not an allegory

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by Jeremy Rios

I frequently see a series of popular memes teasing at the differences
between Lewis and Tolkien. In one panel, Tolkien laboriously creates
Middle Earth’s history, languages, flora and fauna. In the other,
Lewis haphazardly throws in every aspect of imagery—from Santa Claus
to Minotaurs. In others, Tolkien is maddened by Lewis’s liberal use of
allegory, while Lewis appears carefree and careless about what he has
included in the Narnia books. If you’re like me, then if you’ve heard
it once you’ve heard it a thousand times:“Narnia is an allegory for
Christianity!”

Narnia is not an allegory. It is something very different. 

Understanding this difference helps us to make sense of many of
Narnia’s images.

Already I can hear objections, “But Aslan is an allegory for Christ,
isn’t he?” Of course Aslan is an image of Christ, but when we use the
word “allegory” we say more about how we read badly than anything
about how Lewis crafted Narnia.

Let’s start at the very beginning: genre. For Lewis, Allegory is a
very specific, very specialized genre of literature.  We know this for
a fact because Lewis himself wrote an allegory, the first book
published after his conversion, called "Pilgrim’s Regress." The title
is an obvious callback to that most famous of English Allegories,
"Pilgrim’s Progress." The key literary feature of both of those
allegories is that each character has a name which embodies his entire
character, outlook, and behaviour. “Faith,” “Great-heart,” and “Love”
are given those names because their actions, words, and relation to
the hero, Christian, are meant at every point to illustrate the
meanings of faith, greatheartedness, and love.

Lewis takes this model and puts it to play narrating his own journey
of conversion to Christianity—except that this time the figures
represent the various philosophies and trajectories Lewis encountered
on his own journey to Christian faith. Now, the main character
encounters people called things like Reason, Enlightenment, and
Humanist. And, true to allegorical form, those characters are
embodiments of those characteristics after which they are named. 

In addition to this literary venture, Lewis was also a longtime
student of and frequent lecturer on Spenser’s famous allegorical poem,
"The Faerie Queen." In fact, after his death, his lectures on Spenser,
along with his literary criticism, were published in a volume called
"Spenser’s Images of Life." 

All that to say, Lewis had a definite idea of what constituted
allegory, and little to nothing of what is in Narnia falls within his
own definition.

“But,” I hear an increasingly apoplectic reader stammer, “what about
meaning? Doesn’t Narnia mean something, and isn’t that allegory?”

Yes, and no. Yes, Narnia means something. Yes, the world of Narnia is
explicitly Christian in its execution and imagery. But for Lewis (and,
I might add, Tolkien), an author as allegorist is always explicit in
his acts of meaning-making. If there is a character named “Faith,” the
things that character does should all illustrate “Faith” for the
reader. True Allegory, in this sense, is a bit like a kind of
puppet-show, because the author’s guiding hand is always driving the
reader to an explicit conclusion.

This is at least part of the reason behind Tolkien’s quite strong, and
even censorious, words about allegory in the foreword to the second
edition of "The Lord of the Rings." In the background, various readers
and literary critics had pestered him about the “secret” meaning of
his book, and in frustration he rebuffed their claims: there is no
secret meaning to "The Lord of the Rings." “As for any inner meaning
or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is
neither allegorical nor topical.” A few moments later he elaborates
further, saying that “I cordially dislike allegory in all its
manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary
enough to detect its presence.” For Tolkien, the story is the story.
Enjoy it on its own merits, or not at all. This, again, is not to say
that "The Lord of the Rings" is not also a deeply Catholic book; it is
to say, rather, that Tolkien didn’t write it with the intention that
you become Catholic (although I expect he’d be quite happy if you
did).

Genre is important. It is critically important for a professor of
English Literature who has spent his life teaching and studying
literature in a huge variety of genres. Here, something else in
Lewis’s writings is of interest. In his short book of literary
criticism, "A Preface to Paradise Lost," he notes something of the
process by which Milton chose “epic poem” as his genre. Lewis says,
“The author doesn’t just choose the poem, he chooses form of the
poem.” In other words, Milton didn’t just set out to write the story
of the fall and redemption of mankind, he chose to do it in the way
and manner of an epic poem, and this had natural and necessary
consequences on how he wrote, what he wrote, and how he completed the
project. Lewis continues, “If you choose one [genre], you lose the
specific beauties and delights of the other: for your aim is not mere
excellence, but the excellence proper to the thing chosen…” I think it
is not unreasonable to assume that Lewis was equally careful and
intentional about the genre he chose for Narnia. 

With this in mind, let me state it quite clearly: Lewis knew what
allegory was. He had already written one. When it came to choose the
genre for Narnia, he did not choose allegory.

So, if Narnia is not—on Lewis (and even Tolkien’s) definition—an 
allegory, what is it? In broadest terms, it is a Children’s Fairy
Story. More specifically—especially regarding how Lewis crafted his
world—it is a Children’s Fairy Story written from the perspective of a
Platonic Imagination. 

That last bit about the Platonic Imagination is probably the most
important one for understanding how “meaning” gets communicated in the
Narnia books. To understand this fully, however, we have to go back to
Lewis’s own spiritual journey. Recall (as he tells it in both
"Pilgrim’s Regress" and "Surprised by Joy") that Lewis was hungry for
myth but frustrated with meaning. His heart ached with longing when he
read the Norse myths, but his mind had been hardened in a kind of
self-defensive atheism. He tells his own journey much better than I
will, but you will recall that the crisis point came during a
late-night walk with Tolkien at Magdalen College. Like a flash of
light, something clicked: you love the myths, what if Christianity is
the true myth? Suddenly, for Lewis, all his searching made sense. The
things he was looking for in Baldur and Odin and every other piece of
literature were calling to his heart. They weren’t false, per se, they
were merely parially true, and placing Christianity at the centre as
the True Myth made sense not only of his own search for answers but
also for his understanding of literature as a whole. 

Now, everything for Lewis—every book, picture, sunrise, and
experience—has potential to draw the soul toward God. He writes (in
"Surprised by Joy"), of the literary aspect of this experience, “A
young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful
of his reading. There are traps everywhere… God is, if I may say it,
very unscrupulous.” Lewis, hungry for truth, now come to faith, began
to experience it even retroactively in all his reading. When he
describes this in "Pilgrim’s Regress" he puts it this way, “How if
there is a man to whom those bright drops on the floor are the
beginning of a trail which, duly followed, will lead him in the end to
taste the cup itself?”
 
So, how does this connect with “Platonic”? Lewis came to interpret
this process of God’s self revelation through myth and image in
Platonic terms. If you slept through that day of philosophy class, one
of Plato’s beliefs is that there are “forms” and that there is the
material world. The things we experience in the material world draw
their existence, reality, and function from their participation in
those cosmic forms. For Plato, this is the case for both material
objects like a tree, chair, or apple, and also concepts like goodness,
truth, and beauty. Every thing we experience and know draws, in some
sense, its meaning from those eternal forms that exist in the mind of
God. If you experience something good, it is because that good thing
connects in some meaningful way to eternal goodness. If you
acknowledge something to be true, it is an acknowledgement that the
“truth” connects meaningfully to an absolute truth. And so on. 

This way of looking at the world sits at the heart of how Lewis thinks
about his conversion, his theology of heaven, and how Lewis deploys
his imagination in crafting Narnia. The partial “truths” that Lewis
encountered in the myths were true because they had their origin in
the Truth that is the Christian God. This is the theological
philosophy that sits behind Lewis’s quite compelling vision of
heaven—that we are in the “shadowlands,” that what is good on earth is
good because it testifies to the true good in heaven. This is why it
is so wicked to cling to the shadows in replacement of the
real—“making mud pies” when we’ve been offered “a holiday at sea” (cf.
“The Weight of Glory”). And that these elements are deeply embedded in
the crafting of Narnia is explicit within Narnia itself. Recall
Professor Digory’s speech at the end of "The Last Battle," where he
talks about the shadows, and the real, and how they had all come to
the real Narnia. He closes his speech with these words, “It’s all in
Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these
schools!” Indeed, it has all been in Plato. 

In turn, this Plato-inflected imagination explains many of the
conscious choices Lewis made for the imagery and characters of Narnia.
Father Christmas doesn’t show up because Lewis wants to throw
everything in the pot, he appears because what is true about Father
Christmas will necessarily be true in Narnia as well (especially in
light of his “Jovial” personality and the planetary influence of
Jupiter). Pan and Bacchus don’t show up in "Prince Caspian" because
Lewis likes drink and wild parties, they are there (in addition to
being linked to Mars, the governing planet of the book), because what
is true in their inflections in Greek Mythology will be ultimately
true in Narnia as well. I think also of that wonderful moment when, in
"Voyage of the Dawn Treader," the children  meet the star, Ramandu.
Eustace, a little confused, speaks to Ramandu “‘In our world,’ said
Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’” And Ramandu replies,
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what
it is made of.” In other words, even in the material sciences there is
a deeper truth behind our perception of reality. 

This is why Aslan is not an “allegory” for Christ. Aslan is an answer
to a question posed by the Platonic Imagination: given the truth of
the eternal form of Christianity, what would Christ look like clothed
in the material reality of my imaginary world of Narnia? The answer,
in a world populated by animals, inflected by both mythology and the
seven medieval planets, is that he would appear as the King of those
animals, a lion. This is the way by which Lewis infuses his stories
with Christian imagery, by linking the generative and mythological
imagination with what is eternally true. This process is far from
haphazard, carefree, or careless.


This, at last, brings us to the character of Emeth. If you remember,
Emeth is the young Calormene  from Tashbaan who volunteers to enter
the stable and meet with “Tashlan.” He is sincere—his name is a
transliteration of the Hebrew word for “truth”—and he is honest among
the largely dishonest and distasteful followers of Tash. In fact, we
find out later that the Calormenes had placed a soldier within the
stable to kill any who entered! Emeth, by the grace of Aslan,
sidesteps this death, and finds himself instead among the company of
glorified children in the heavenly Narnia. 

Later, in conversation with Aslan, we learn the reason. Whenever Emeth
was sincerely looking into Tash, the real one he was seeking was
Aslan. At first blush, this seems a strange choice. Is Lewis proposing
a kind of universalism? Is he saying that everyone who is sincere in
their religion, apart from Christ, has a hope?  

I don’t think so. Rather, I think Emeth fits precisely within Lewis’s
own story of conversion and his experience of the Platonic
Imagination. 

Emeth, in other words, is a representation of Lewis’s own journey to
faith—the young man in search of truth, not even aware yet of where
that truth would ultimately lead him. Emeth also reflects the
truism—as testified by Lewis himself—that we cannot always identify
the precise moment of conversion. For Lewis, he remembers being in the
side-car of his brother’s motorcycle on the way to the zoo. He writes,

“When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of
God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent
the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps
the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It
was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless
in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.” Curious, don’t you think,
that Emeth similarly “comes awake” in Aslan’s presence? Lewis is not
suggesting that every religion is true—he is saying, in hope, that all
sincere seekers of the truth will eventually find God. Or, better yet,
will be found by Him. So, repeat after me: Narnia is not an allegory.
Narnia is not an allegory. Narnia is not an allegory.


-- 
Stephen Hayes, Author of The Year of the Dragon
Sample or purchase The Year of the Dragon: 
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/907935
Web site: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail: [email protected] or if you use Gmail [email protected]