But if Narnia, as Lewis often indicated, exists in the same imaginative realm as fairy tales, then like fairy tales it surely speaks of dreams, archetypes, and drives, the timeless leviathans that swim deep inside our psyches. Here, too, the material that Lewis brought to the task was neither as wholesome nor as dull as some would like to believe.
Chapter Fourteen
Arrows of Desire
According to Bruno Bettelheim, the most important function of fairy tales is unconscious; they echo and give form to the fears, urges, and enigmas already lurking in a child’s mind. Bettelheim thought the stories both expressed and brought coherence to children’s inner lives and were essential aids in the challenge of growing up. When adults worry about exposing children to the monsters and violence in fairy tales, he cautioned, they underestimate the interior tumult with which children are already grappling. “Fairy tale imagery,” wrote Bettelheim, “helps children better than anything else in their most difficult and yet most important and satisfying task: achieving a more mature consciousness to civilize the chaotic pressures of their unconscious.”
Lewis would have agreed with Bettelheim that children can handle the scarier aspects of fairy tales, but that’s about it. Lewis detested Freudianism and satirized it in an early prose allegory entitled The Pilgrim’s Regress. He found Freud’s theories reductive, arguing that if all artistic imagery can be boiled down to nothing more than symbols of infantile sexuality, then “our literary judgments are in ruins.” It was not that he detected no sexual fantasies in art, but rather that there was so much else there as well that sex struck him as the least of it. Besides, Freudian criticism often engages in what Lewis rejected as “the personal heresy,” the study of texts as glosses on the minds of their creators. “The poet,” Lewis wrote, “is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points.” This riposte, of course, sidesteps the question of what the poet communicates about himself — intentionally or otherwise — by his style of pointing and by the things he chooses to point at.
Psychoanalysis frequently assumes that a patient who passionately denies a motive or an anxiety is really concealing the presence of that very feeling. (This is the original clinical meaning of “denial.”) As a therapeutic tool, this concept leaves a lot to be desired — as almost anyone would conclude from reading Freud’s case histories. I first read Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, better known as Dora, in an undergraduate course on psychoanalytic criticism. Our young instructor wanted to move quickly past the basic Freudian principles so that he could get to the work of Jacques Lacan, then a relatively new and fashionable theorist. With unconcealed impatience, he let several of us (all women) vent our outrage over Freud’s treatment of his patient, poor Dora, a young Viennese woman whose father was sleeping with the wife of a friend and who, his daughter suspected, was tacitly encouraging the friend to sleep with Dora by way of compensation. Freud validated Dora’s suspicions (her father, not surprisingly, denied trading his daughter for his friend’s wife), but he also betrayed her by insisting that, contrary to her protests, she really was in love her father’s friend. It’s always a good idea to bear in mind that Freud’s theories usually failed at their primary, stated purpose: helping his patients.
But whatever Freud’s shortcomings as a therapist (and they were considerable), he had remarkable acumen about the workings of the human mind. We do sometimes deny most fiercely what we covertly desire, and erect a rational skepticism against what we secretly fear to be the truth. A. N. Wilson believes that Lewis’s animus toward Freudianism had personal as well as scholarly roots. Lewis was, Wilson writes, “obsessed not only by his father, but also by the possibility that his life could be interpreted in a purely Freudian way.” This fear was well founded; Freudian psychology became a pervasive intellectual fad during his lifetime, and hardly anyone in educated circles escaped the occasional armchair analysis by amateur Freudians among their friends and colleagues. Lewis’s religious conversion followed on the heels of his father’s death and a flare-up of his guilt over having treated Albert so “abominably.” Since Freud had argued that religious faith arises in part from a “longing for a father,” the obvious conclusion in Lewis’s case was that he converted to soothe his grief and loss.
Freudian literary criticism, especially the kind written during Lewis’s lifetime, can be crude and simplistic. In the myopic attention it pays to the drives and fears of the individual, it often leaves out the social, cultural, and intellectual elements of artworks that are, after all, meant to be acts of communication with other human beings. But fairy tales — unlike, say, comedies of manners or epic poems or historical dramas — tend not to have much social, cultural, or intellectual content. They transpire in a dream landscape full of primal forces and totemlike people and objects: wolves, stepmothers, houses in the woods. This place, sometimes known as Faerie, is also called “The Perilous Realm,” and the stories set there are, as Tolkien once put it, “plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability.” If any type of narrative invites Freudian interpretation, it is the fairy tale. And “fairy tales” are what Lewis said he wanted to write when he began the Chronicles. Quite possibly he assumed that psychoanalytic critics would take no interest in the sexless, critically ignored realm of children’s fiction. But it is exactly the contexts in which our imaginations feel most relaxed and free — in dreams and in play — that most welcome the return of the repressed.
A few of the Chronicles’ characters — the White Witch, Prince Rilian, and Aslan himself — do have the archetypal resonance of fairy-tale figures. Others are more psychologically realistic, like the Pevensies, Caspian, and the other children from our world. Lewis’s familiarity with medieval allegory surely contributed to making the landscape itself psychological; Narnia is, more than anything else, the domain of his own imagination. When Lucy first discovers it, it has been frozen for years, dominated by an implacable female tyrant. With the arrival of Aslan comes the thaw, and the joyous restoration of all the countryside’s natural beauty; this is the story of Lewis’s conversion embodied in the land, and also the voice of his own hidden desire for liberation, written at a time when Janie Moore had become utterly impossible and was on the brink of requiring institutionalization.
But Narnia has its own unconscious, the place to which all its less acceptable desires are exiled, and that place is Calormen. Alan Jacobs is right when he observes that Lewis drew upon a “readymade source of ‘Oriental’ imagery” in creating Calormen. Lewis was far from the first Western writer to find it convenient to believe that the East had a concession on sophisticated depravity — or to regard that depravity with a thinly concealed fascination. In the 1920s and ’30s, British writers indulged in a penchant for decadent Oriental pageantry, especially on the stage. Lord Dunsany, a pioneer of the fantasy genre and an author much admired by Tolkien, found early success writing stories and short plays about implacable gods and cruel potentates in curled slippers for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.