In short, I was a lot like Lewis as a child, and in more ways than one. He disliked the trappings of his father’s faith, but he also resisted it out of what he later called “my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness.” We are each the product of different nations and historical moments, however. The individualism Lewis calls “monstrous” is a quality Americans admire, and no more so than in the 1960s and ’70s, when I was a kid. I grew up with a lot of ambient encouragement to rebel against authority, and with few incentives to reconcile myself to a hidebound institution like the Catholic Church.
While the Narnians’ obedience to Aslan irks some adult readers, for me it was essentially different from the docility demanded by the Church. First and foremost it wasn’t founded on self-denial. The Narnians did as Aslan asked because he was strong, kind, warm, and lovable, and because his requests always led to that most desirable of ends: the continuation of Narnia as it should be, the most wonderful country imaginable. Christianity instructed me to comply with a list of dreary, legalistic demands because Jesus, whom I had never met, reportedly loved me and had redeemed me from the guilt of a sin I had never committed by dying before I was even born. The proof of his love was his suffering; I owed him, and he expected to be paid in kind. Narnia and Aslan made me happy. Jesus wanted me to be miserable.
Perhaps most important, however, I shared with Lewis the bookish child’s stubborn insistence on retaining some ultimate privacy. I did not take kindly to being told how to think and feel in my deepest self; the order to love God whether I liked him or not made me dig in my heels. Wrote Lewis, “I wanted some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, ‘This is my business and mine only.’” For me that sanctum was Narnia, and Narnia was so incompatible with my understanding of Christianity that it never would have occurred to me to connect the two.
Narnia was the transport Lucy experiences when Mr. Beaver first mentions Aslan’s name, “the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.” Narnia was liberation and delight. Christianity was boredom, subjugation, and reproach. For all the similarities between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the New Testament, and for all Lewis’s evangelical intentions, I don’t think I was that grievously mistaken. The Christianity that I knew — the only Christianity I was aware of — was the opposite of Narnia in both aesthetics and spirit. More than just opposite, really, since the Church was a major part of the lackluster world I sought refuge from in Lewis’s books. For me, Narnia was Christianity’s antidote.
Chapter Nine
The Awful Truth
By the time I turned thirteen, I’d become pretty adept at searching out my kind of book — the ones “with magic” — at the local branch library. An enormous, musty-smelling used bookstore downtown, the shrine at the end of an hour-long pilgrimage by bus, had a more promising selection, but it was less organized and more difficult to plumb. I was always on the lookout for clues that might lead me to further treasure.
On my own, I’d discovered Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy and Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Cheap paperbacks with dragons and unicorns printed on their covers began to appear on the racks at our neighborhood newsstand. Among them I found a book with a strange cover illustration. Against a background of leaves and flowers was an opening shaped like a woman’s head and neck, revealing a vista with a castle, a knight in armor crossing a bridge, and a unicorn. The unicorn and the arch of the bridge formed the woman’s eyes, a butterfly was her nose, and for a mouth she had … a mouth, floating in midair. The picture was both pretty and creepy, evocative of the alarming hallucinatory art of the hippies who had settled in our beachside neighborhood. The book was called Imaginary Worlds.
Lin Carter, author of Imaginary Worlds, was a novelist who served as editorial consultant for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, the publishing imprint responsible for most of the dragon- and unicorn-bedecked paperbacks I’d seen at the local newsstand. But Imaginary Worlds was not itself a novel; it was a history of fantasy, a genre that had only just been so identified, on the heels of the success of The Lord of the Rings. Carter, one of those inexhaustible autodidacts who flourish at the margins of American culture, wanted to inform all the bright-eyed, Johnny-come-lately Tolkien buffs that a long tradition of “imaginary-world romance” had preceded the Oxford professor’s trilogy; Ballantine hoped to capitalize on their hunger for more.
Imaginary Worlds was the first literary criticism I ever read. It was exciting to learn that a label had been devised for the sort of stories I liked, but Imaginary Worlds left me unsatisfied for a couple of reasons. Carter was not himself a particularly good writer, and he enthused over books that even I could tell were mediocre, notably the sword-and-sorcery pulp genre founded by Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the barbarian. Strangest of all, I had never before had the experience of reading someone else’s calm, equable opinions of stories that felt as though they were written on my own heart.
People read criticism of works they already know well because they hope to expand their understanding, perhaps even to relive the experience through someone else. Great critics show us new dimensions of a book or a film, but they also articulate what it feels like to encounter the work, a sensation many of us can’t adequately capture on our own. Imaginary Worlds didn’t do much of either for me. On a less exalted level, however, there’s always the juvenile gratification of seeing a book you love (or hate) being praised (or denounced) by a writer who is swathed in the authority of print, a pleasure I’ve never managed to outgrow even though by now I really ought to know better. I kept reading Imaginary Worlds partly for leads to other books, but also because I wanted to see Lewis and the Chronicles celebrated by someone, a real author, more important than myself.
What I discovered instead was that Aslan’s death in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was really a “blatantly symbolic Crucifixion-and-Resurrection scene,” which Carter deemed “beautifully and simply written” but “very out of place on these pages.” His criticism troubled me less than the revelation itself. Lewis, Carter explained, was famously Christian, a fact I’d somehow managed to miss. I was shocked, almost nauseated. I’d been tricked, cheated, betrayed. I went over the rest of the Chronicles, and in almost every one found some element that lined up with this unwelcome and, to me, ulterior meaning. I felt like a character in one of those surreal, existential 1960s TV dramas, like The Prisoner or The Twilight Zone, a captive who pulls off a daring escape from his cell only to find himself inside another, larger cell identical to the first.
Here was a moment of truth. If the Chronicles had worked according to Lewis’s plans, and in the way many of his Christian admirers believe them to, I would have reassessed my attitude toward my religion. I would have realized that Narnia and Aslan represented another face of Christianity, a better one than the Church had ever shown me, and that in turn would lead me back to the faith. “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia,” Aslan explains to Edmund and Lucy at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in a scene whose heavy-handed imagery (a lamb, a meal of fish) had gone utterly over my head, “that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”