The honest, educated reader, when tackling the towering literary works of the past, now faces a different, though no less precarious task: how to acknowledge an author’s darker side without losing the ability to enjoy and value the book. Prejudice is repellent, but if we were to purge our shelves of all the great books tainted by one vile idea or another, we’d have nothing left to read — or at least nothing but the new and blandly virtuous. For the stone-cold truth is that Virginia Woolf was an awful snob, and Milton was a male chauvinist. The work of both authors can be difficult to read, but also immeasurably rewarding. Once upon a time, when people believed encounters with great art were morally uplifting, it was easier to summon the extra bit of initiative required to give the classics a try, and literature professors were expected to encourage them. Today, scholars are more likely to tell readers about the pernicious influence of the great books they used to revere.
In recent years, it’s gotten easier to write off complaints about how an author portrays race, class, or gender as “political correctness,” but that’s just as facile as reducing every author to the sum of his political beliefs; hatred and injustice are wrong, not merely “incorrect.” When it comes to a favorite author, the impulse to try to demonstrate that he wasn’t really a racist, or at least wasn’t so bad, can be nearly irresistible. C. S. Lewis’s most devoted Christian readers regard his writings as, if not quite sacred, then at least sacralized. For them, the temptation to deny that he held a lot of objectionable opinions is very strong. Nevertheless, he did indeed hold those opinions, and they can’t be rationalized away with talk of “readymade” sources. The racism, sexism, and snobbery (of various types) lie pretty close to the surface in some parts of the Chronicles, and so do some less easily labeled faults like Lewis’s knee-jerk objections to any kind of change or reform. He was, in many respects, what Neil Gaiman fondly describes as one of Britain’s “old buffers, somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.”
But perhaps ethics are not all that counts, or even what really counts, when it comes to reading stories. I have hated some morally impeccable novels, and liked some reprehensible ones. I’m not convinced that either kind has altered the moral underpinnings of my own life. Like Lewis, I’ve noticed that the best-read people I know don’t seem to be any more trustworthy, kind, honest, brave, or decent than the ones who scarcely read at all. And as Exhibit A to this particular argument, I hold up my own case. However much I may have been shaped by the Chronicles, I’ve remained impervious to the one ideology their author deliberately tried to instill in me: Christianity. Maybe even some of the lesser virtues that I like to think I’ve absorbed while reading about Narnia were there to begin with. Perhaps I did not so much learn from these books as recognize my better self in them.
When I returned at last to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and then to the rest of the Chronicles after my long estrangement from Lewis and his work, I could see, oh so clearly, all of the flaws I’ve detailed in the past seven chapters. I winced at the depictions of the Calormenes and understood for the first time that the White Witch is a dominatrix. Lewis’s frankly stupid asides on the subject of Experiment House annoyed me. I realized that Corin and his taunting of Rabadash were among the reasons that The Horse and His Boy had never quite sat with me. And all these reservations were piled on top of my fundamental disinterest in the books’ religious message, which to my adult ear arrives with the leaden thud of a Sunday newspaper full of ads.
While puzzling over how to understand this, I found guidance in an unexpected quarter: Philip Pullman. Pullman’s trilogy of children’s fantasy novels, His Dark Materials, is often regarded as an anti-Lewisian project, and he has made his own distaste for Narnia abundantly clear. When I interviewed him for a profile in 2005, I pressed him on this topic, and got him to concede that he did see the Chronicles as “grappling with real things, with salvation and damnation and temptation and trial…. So although I dislike profoundly the moral answers Lewis finds, I respect the wrestle for truth, the struggle that he’s undergoing as he searches for the answers.” Nevertheless, Pullman considers Lewis’s children’s fiction to be, for the most part, “repellent” and “morally loathsome.”
Still, it was in His Dark Materials that I stumbled upon a way to consider the Chronicles as an adult, neither grieving for my childhood capacity to immerse myself in a book, nor giving up that experience as entirely lost. Pullman’s trilogy, inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost, takes the opposite of the traditional view of the Fall of Man; equally influenced by the poetry of William Blake, His Dark Materials is a paean to the value of experience over innocence.
Pullman’s heroine, the twelve-year-old Lyra Belacqua, acquires an alethiometer, a dial-like device, resembling a compass or clock, with small images around the rim: a moon, a serpent, a lute, and so on. The alethiometer divines the truth about current, past, and future events, but reading it is difficult; like the figures in an allegory, the alethiometer’s symbols have many layers of meaning. At first, Lyra proves to be a prodigy at reading the device; she does it by pure instinct or intuition. But as she comes of age and falls in love, this aptitude fades. Lyra, now an adult, has become self-conscious. At the very end of the trilogy, an angelic being tells her that her old skill with the alethiometer came by “grace,” but she can “regain it by work.” The work required to relearn how to use the alethiometer, however, will take “a lifetime…. But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you.”
Pullman told me that he’d adapted this idea from an essay by the German playwright Heinrich von Kleist, entitled “On the Marionette Theater.” Kleist’s essay is presented as a conversation between two friends, one of whom marvels over the exceptional grace of some puppets he has recently seen performing. Without consciousness, the puppets, unlike human dancers, can never be self-conscious or affected. “We’ve eaten of the tree of knowledge,” one of the men remarks. “Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stand behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back.”
Kleist leaves the possibility of finding an alternate entrance somewhat up in the air, but Pullman believes that it is attainable. Having lost our innocence, we must pursue understanding, knowledge, and experience to its furthest reaches. There, we can hope to regain not our lost grace, but perhaps a superior one. “You have to go all the way through human life,” Pullman told me. “You have to go around the world and reenter Paradise through the back way.”
This puts Pullman at odds with a long tradition of children’s authors who regard childhood as a vanished Eden. Men like J. M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll preferred the company of children not (as the jaded modern mind sometimes presumes) because they were pedophiles seeking adult pleasures from children, but because they longed for childlike pleasures they couldn’t share with adults. What they really wanted, what they tried to regain in playing pirates or planning outings with little boys and girls, was something truly impossible; they wanted their own childhoods back.
To want to be a child, however, is not childlike. As Lewis himself once observed, children almost always want to grow up, and why shouldn’t they, since innocence (as grown-ups are prone to forget) is also powerlessness? Pullman, who worked as a schoolteacher for many years, has never forgotten this. He takes the child reader’s side by celebrating the virtues of experience, and if I had had the chance to read his books as a little girl, I would have adored him for this. “You can’t go back,” he explained to me. “That’s the point. You can’t regain the grace you’ve lost. The only thing to do is go on through that and eventually acquire the other sort of grace, the conscious grace, the taught, the learned grace of the dancer.” This idea runs against the grain of our sentimental notions about childhood, but as far as Pullman is concerned, it’s “a truer picture of what it’s like to be a human being. And a more hopeful one.”