Demeter, for example, was the goddess of the harvest to her ancient worshippers, a deity who walked the earth, replete with all the meanings that Barfield described as residing in a full-fledged, primordial myth — motherhood, fruitfulness, grief, deprivation, pilgrimage, recovery. She is now a “myth” in Lewis’s sense of the word, a figure who exists only in stories. She still contains most of the old meanings, and even some newer ones, but artists can now do whatever they like with her without fearing either divine retribution or irate believers. (This is a freedom that no one today enjoys with either Muhammad or Jesus.) At some point, between the days when people all over the ancient world convened in Greece to celebrate the rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Demeter’s honor and the moment in the nineteenth century when Alfred Lord Tennyson sat down to write the poem “Demeter and Persephone,” the goddess underwent an imaginative sea change. Lewis believed that she (and Orpheus and Aphrodite and the rest) spent the first part of those long centuries of metamorphosis in the “sleeping-place” of allegory.
In the 1940s, after he’d written The Allegory of Love but before he started the Chronicles, Lewis sometimes used the word “symbol” interchangeably with “myth” in order to distinguish it from allegory. He had not lost his interest in the allegory as a form, but it did have its limits. He still thought that a good allegory must be read skillfully — by giving equal status to the images of the sparkling fountain and the lady’s eyes in The Romance of the Rose, for example — and by recognizing that the character’s behavior and actions are often a way of representing what we now regard as entirely internal conflicts. Modern readers who lack these skills misperceive allegories as no more than a pointlessly labored narrative code. But if allegory is not really as reductive as contemporary readers usually think, it is still constrained. An allegorical figure labeled “Patientia,” for example, is permitted to stand for only one thing: the virtue of patience.
Many people today also talk about “symbols” in this way, as simple equations; the farm in Animal Farm stands for the Soviet Union, and so on. As Lewis used the word “symbol,” it could not be so easily pinned down or exhausted. For him a symbol, like a myth, was “a story out of which ever-varying meanings will grow for different readers and in different ages.” A strict allegory is harnessed, more or less subject to its creator’s conscious control. A myth or symbol is less obedient. “Into an allegory,” Lewis explained to one correspondent, “a man can put only what he already knows: in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come to know in any other way.” Like the images on the alethiometer in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, like literature itself, its meaning can never be exhausted.
In the Chronicles, Lewis endeavored to create symbols like this; so, too, did Tolkien with The Lord of the Rings. That contemporary readers often mistook those books for allegories only served to illustrate for Lewis the degree to which readerly sophistication and versatility had atrophied in modern times. People really only knew how to read realistic fiction. Lewis (unlike Tolkien) appreciated quite a few realistic novels, but that was merely one arrow in literature’s quiver! As a writer, he could move easily in and out of various literary modes in the course of a single book. In The Magician’s Nephew, for example, the confrontation between Jadis and Digory’s aunt Letty in Letty’s London parlor is farce, with Aunt Letty assuming that the tall, outlandishly dressed Jadis is a circus performer and her Charnian incantations the mutterings of a drunk. Tolkien, had he read the book, would probably have regarded this scene as unconscionable levity — Jadis, after all, is Lewis’s villain; it’s hard to imagine the creator of Sauron allowing him to appear so ridiculous, however briefly.
This doesn’t keep Jadis from serving as a credible menace later on, insinuating and manipulative when she tempts Digory in the garden. Aunt Letty’s parlor, where mattresses are mended and adults make remarks alluding to an alternate, Trollopian narrative taking place offstage (“Andrew, I wonder you are not ashamed to ask me for money”) coexists in the same story as the Wood Between the Worlds and the mystical creation of Narnia. The fracas Jadis causes on the streets of London when she commandeers a hansom cab is Dickensian comedy; the scene in the garden is dreamlike and allegorical. Today, I wonder how Lewis managed to make all this feel as if it belongs together, in the same book. As a child I took it for granted, though if asked I might have said that The Magician’s Nephew was as rich as plumcake.
This is the other side of Neil Gaiman’s boyhood intimation that Narnia is an infinite number of stories waiting to happen. Countless stories went into it, and countless stories come out of it. Narnia is the country of literature, of books, and of reading, a territory so vast that it might as well be infinite. This is why the conclusion of The Last Battle feels like such a mistake, and no doubt why everyone I interviewed for this book described it as their least favorite Chronicle. After the destruction of the world, it is revealed that the Narnia we have known in the previous six Chronicles is “only a shadow of a copy of something in Aslan’s real world.” Everyone of merit is ushered into the “real Narnia,” a Platonic paradise where colors are brighter, the fruits are infinitely richer and sweeter, and “every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.”
This is a far cry from the voice that told of trees stirred by “a hushing, ruffling sort of wind which meant that rain was coming soon.” Lewis, reaching for celestial beauty, attains only a hallucinatory hyperrealism that unstitches Narnia from the humble, medieval details that made it live. The Last Battle was the one Chronicle I didn’t reread very often. The ending left me feeling empty and gloomy instead of satisfied.
Jonathan Franzen calls The Last Battle a “weak finish” that “quickly turns into that which [Lewis] has amazingly avoided” in the previous six books; that is, a story overwhelmed by its preacherly and philosophical elements. For Neil Gaiman, the book “has got a few good bits in: it’s got the dwarves, it’s got ‘further up and further in,’ and yes, we’ve gotten to see a couple of characters we’d loved who are dead.”
“Although,” I interjected, “have you noticed that one of the best, Puddleglum, doesn’t get any lines? That really disappointed me, but at the same time I know Lewis could never have let Puddleglum be his usual self, that pessimistic Marsh-wiggle we all loved, because how could he say something Puddleglummish in that completely perfect and therefore completely dull Narnia?”