Month: March 2017

[This is the second part of a three-part blog post. The first part dealt with Lucy’s journey through the wardrobe, the second deals with Edmund’s, and the third will deal with the toings and froings of all four Pevensie children between our world and Narnia.]

The question of the reality of Lucy’s visit to Narnia – whether or not it ‘really’ happened – underpins the next interface with fantasy in Lewis’s narrative: Edmund’s visit. Partly as a result, this interface involves an exact reversal of Lucy’s experiences. Things happen back to front, as if in a mirror; and one reason for the reversal is that Edmund has already made up his mind before he enters the wardrobe that Lucy fabricated all her adventures. As a result, the world he finds on the other side is disturbing to him because it violates his sense of what is real, or perhaps of his own capacity to distinguish what is real from what is imagined. In addition, he feels as unable or unwilling to reverse his mental position in response to this disruption of his world view as Lucy earlier found it to pretend she was ‘playing at’ Narnia when she was not. Edmund necessarily sees Narnia through different eyes because the mind behind those eyes has different priorities, a different philosophy.

Another reason for Edmund’s different experience can be found in his mood when he enters the wardrobe: that is, in the kind of pleasure he is seeking as he passes through the mirrored door. Where Lucy was driven by Alice-like curiosity and a sensuous delight in the feel of fur, Edmund is driven by the desire to mock his sister for her inventions: ‘he wanted to go on teasing her about her imaginary country’. For him, this is a continuation of the power game he has been playing since Lucy first made her claims about entering Narnia; not a collaborative game, played by an agreed set of rules for a certain time, but a competition for supremacy in which there can only be one winner, whose victory isn’t temporary but permanent, establishing the victor once and for all as wholly superior to the defeated players. So it’s not surprising that Edmund is deeply disturbed by the loss of control he feels when he leaves his comfort zone. The discovery that the wardrobe does not in fact contain Lucy, that it is larger than he expected, that it sounds and feels unlike the interior of a piece of furniture, makes Edmund shiver – and, one presumes, not just with cold. There are two possible reasons for the fear suggested by his shivering. One is that he has been ‘unpleasant’ to Lucy about the things she seemed to have invented – so that she would have every right (according to his understanding as a player of power games) to be equally ‘unpleasant’ in response. The other, related reason is that the country he finds himself in is definitely not his. Lucy found it first, which makes it effectively hers from a colonialist perspective – from the perspective, that is, of a person who likes to stamp his authority on other people. It represents, in effect, a contest between them which she has won in emphatic fashion, thanks to his having been forced into the position of primary witness to her truthfulness. For both these reasons, Narnia can be taken as inimical to him. His state of mind is neatly summed up in the following sentence: ‘though he did not like to admit that he had been wrong, he also did not much like being alone in this strange, cold, quiet place’. The place is ‘strange’ because it once seemed impossible, and because its existence proves that he was mistaken in his assumptions about what was possible, which means he should logically rearrange his perceptions of the laws that govern the universe (as Todorov points out in his book on the fantastic). Both these things contribute to make Edmund ‘not much like’ the woods, and he seeks his sister’s company not so much to apologize as to make himself feel safer by getting together with someone who knows the ‘strange […] place’ better than he does.

It’s perhaps as a result of these selfish motives, in a kind of fairy tale logic of moral rather than scientific cause and effect, that when Edmund calls out for his sister what he gets instead is the self-styled Queen of Narnia, the White Witch. The Witch is the polar opposite (no pun intended) of Lucy’s Faun, and hence, to some extent at least, of Lucy herself. She is powerful, tall and arrogant, and she reacts to her meeting with a human stranger not with friendliness but sudden violence (‘she rose from her seat and looked Edmund full in the face, her eyes flaming; at the same moment she raised her wand’). Ironically, her physical appearance also ticks a number of boxes in the iconography of goodness. She arrives on a sledge with bells on it, drawn by reindeers, which invokes Christmas as inevitably as Tumnus’s packages. She is associated with whiteness, the colour of ‘good’ in conventional Western narratives: her reindeers and furs are white, and so is her face, which is ‘not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar, except for her very red mouth’ (and here the rapid shift from snow to paper to icing-sugar has a wonderfully disconcerting effect, making her sound like an artificial confection, a spun-sugar sculpture or a table decoration for a high-class banquet). Tumnus, by contrast, was shaped and coloured like a conventional devil (red, with hooves, horns and a very un-goat-like tail); so that if we accept Lucy’s reading of the Faun as accurate (and her now evident ‘truthfulness’ invites us to do so) then the Witch’s reverse iconography should mean she must stand for something devilish.

The trajectory of Edmund’s meeting with the Witch, too, reverses that of Lucy’s meeting with Tumnus. As with the Faun, her mood undergoes a sudden change, but this time from rage to cunning, from violence to seduction, from command to conversation. She offers the boy food and drink after her change in mood – not before it, as Tumnus did – and the provisions she offers are yet further removed than those of Tumnus from the dreariness of wartime rationing: a hot drink magically made from snow; a box of that unobtainable sweetmeat, Turkish Delight. With food comes talk, as it did with Tumnus and Lucy; but the communication between Edmund and the Witch is all one way (‘she got him to tell her’ all about himself, and he never thinks to inquire about her habits and adventures – when she describes her house to him it is solely as a place he would take pleasure in). The Witch may promise to adopt Edmund as her son, and hence eventually as her equal, but the imbalance of their relationship is obvious from their verbal exchanges.

The most intriguing aspect of their conversation is the way it ends. The White Witch finishes not with a discussion of the speakers’ ‘real’ identity (Tumnus ended his talk with Lucy by revealing his status as the Witch’s spy) but a return to the world of children’s games – that is, of transient fictions – which has by this time been rendered problematic by the fact that Narnia was not a game or fiction, as well as by Edmund’s preference for power games or competitions over consensual playfulness. The Witch suggests that ‘it would be fun’ for Edmund to pretend he has never met her, and that he should save the information he has about the Witch’s house ‘as a surprise’ for his siblings when he brings them back to Narnia. The reason for this ‘game’, however, is a serious one; if Edmund mentions the Queen alarm bells might be rung in Lucy’s mind, because she will have heard ‘strange stories’ from Tumnus about her. Strange stories here are implied to be fictions, and unpleasant ones at that; but Edmund’s experience with the strange story of Narnia should suggest to him there is substance behind them. He might also have noticed that what the Witch is suggesting to him is not a bit of transient ‘fun’, a ‘surprise’ which is pleasurable for its own sake, but a functional lie, a verbal trap; if he does not play this particular game his siblings are unlikely to approach the Witch’s domicile. Edmund’s mind, however, is too preoccupied with another kind of pleasure (also a trap) – the enchanted Turkish Delight he craves to have more of – for him to notice the inconsistency between her claims that what he will be promulgating is a harmless fiction and the suggestion that this fiction is being devised to suppress another ‘fiction’, the possibly well-founded rumours that the Queen is harmful.

Edmund’s encounter with the Witch, then, raises questions not just about the borders between fiction and reality but about the function of games. A game that is not participated in by all its players with a similar purpose – to spend a set period of time in consensual, rule-bound activity – is not a game; Lucy’s experience showed this, as did Edmund’s teasing, which was a game for him but perceived as bullying by his sister. Gradually, in fact, Lewis is building up a sophisticated dialogue between terms that are often carelessly used, especially in the context of children’s activities. The notion that there is a clear dividing line between fiction and fact, the game world and the ‘serious’ world, is itself a convenient fiction; after all, games must of necessity make use of otherwise functional spaces and materials (including time), just as fictions must make use of words and concepts which are in other contexts ‘factual’. And Lewis is suggesting that the relationship goes further than this; that the conventions that govern games (everyone who plays them agrees to abide by the rules) and the conventions that govern fictions (the recipients of any story agree to take it to some degree as ‘fact’ for as long as it lasts) are directly connected to, and serve as serious preparation for, certain essential life skills. Edmund is not an accomplished player of consensual games, as his treatment of Lucy shows, so he is ill equipped to see when he is being played with against his consent; that is, when he is being manipulated. He isn’t clearly aware of the distinction between stories and lies – his teasing assumes that Lucy is lying rather than telling a story (though in fact she is telling the truth) – and so agrees to tell the Witch’s lies as if they were a story. Further: since he has been discomfited and (in his eyes) diminished by the revelation that Lucy’s story or ‘lie’ was in fact the truth, he chooses to adopt lies as his personal mode of discourse, instead of gaining a new alertness to the possibility of truths underlying apparent fictions (such as the strange stories about the Queen). The success of a story, as of a game, depends on a collective act of imaginative complicity between the teller and the listener; a lie depends instead on the consciousness of the liar that she or he possesses information unknown to his or her audience. The imbalance of power between the Witch and Edmund reflects Edmund’s preference for power imbalance in the world beyond the wardrobe, and the exchange between them is designed in all its details to perpetuate and intensify this imbalance of power.

Shortly after Edmund’s encounter with the Witch he meets Lucy on her way back from a second tea with Tumnus, and his sister at once anticipates the pleasure of shared storytelling as they tell their elder siblings about their visit to Narnia. ‘What fun it will be!’ she exclaims, and concludes that from now on ‘we’re all in it together’. True to his nature, however, Edmund at once sees an imbalance in the collective pleasure she anticipates. He ‘secretly thought it would not be as good fun for him as for her’, partly because he will have to admit he was wrong and thus publicly acknowledge his ‘loss’ of the earlier competition between himself and Lucy, and partly because he assumes the others will be on a different ‘side’ in the politics of Narnia than the one he has taken – that is, they will be against the Witch, making it more urgent and possibly harder for him to keep the secret of having met her. Games, then, have turned into something different for both children; a real-life companionate ‘adventure’ for Lucy (the word still has a smack of storytelling about it), and a competition for unprecedentedly high stakes for her brother.

When they re-emerge from the wardrobe, Edmund and Lucy find that the ‘game of hide-and-seek’ they had been playing before entering Narnia is still in full swing. But their attitude to the game has changed entirely, since they now know that there is something genuinely strange hidden in the wardrobe which was one of the hiding places in the game. The real is secreted in the playful, just as forms of truth are secreted in fiction; on this, at least, both the younger siblings should be able to agree, whatever their contradictory readings of the place they’ve just returned from. This makes it all the more shocking when Edmund decides that his best tactic both for preserving his self-esteem and hurting his sister is to pretend that he and Lucy have been playing a different game instead of experiencing a different reality: a game-within-a-game, so to speak, rather than an unsuspected truth-within-a-fiction. ‘Oh yes,’ he tells Peter and Susan, ‘Lucy and I have been playing – pretending that all her story about a country in the wardrobe is true. Just for fun, of course. There’s nothing there really’. The cruelty here is compounded by his redeployment of Lucy’s word ‘fun’, which for her involved collective pleasure in an astonishing discovery (‘What fun it will be!’). Peter improves things a little by coming to Lucy’s defence: he suggests that Edmund’s ‘game’ with Lucy is merely a continuation of his bullying, a malpractice rendered more serious by Peter’s increasing suspicion that his younger sister is ‘queer in the head’. Lucy, meanwhile, remains true to her insistence that her ‘story’ is real: she ‘stuck to her story’, as Lewis puts it, and it’s this development of the concept of story beyond the invented or imaginary – this seeming conviction of hers that stories can be true – that induces Peter and Susan to consult Professor Kirk on the matter.

The Professor’s response to their question (has Lucy gone bad or mad? Is she suffering from mental illness?) is to apply a kind of logic to it which Lewis particularly associates with the Scottish enlightenment tradition (think of the Scottish sceptic MacPhee in his unfinished novel The Dark Tower, who becomes an equally sceptical Irishman in That Hideous Strength; Professor Kirk’s name, like that of Mrs MacReady, helps to link him with Scotland). ‘There are only three possibilities,’ he tells them. ‘Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.’ The ‘logical’ position he takes here is unusual, in that it assumes that a known truth-teller should be believed even when the scenario she describes would seem to be ‘impossible’ by any conventional standards of assessment. In other words, the Professor is more concerned with the psychology of human beings than with the empirical evidence of the senses. For him, the question of Lucy’s personality – her attested tendency to tell the truth – is vastly more important than questions of precedent (such as: have countries ever been found in items of furniture in the past? Do fauns exist? etc.). From this point of view Narnia would seem to be a country of the mind, whose capacities, like those of the house he inhabits, are vastly more spacious – and vastly more interesting – than conventional empiricism or logic would tend to assume.

Lewis associates logic with Scottish culture, but Scotland also produced the visionary writer whose work Lewis most admired, George MacDonald. MacDonald’s books are full of no-nonsense characters – most of them old women – who treat encounters with the fantastic with the same intellectual rigour as any other aspect of human experience. Edmund’s attitude to games and fictions when he first enters Narnia indicates, among other things, his muddled thinking – his lack of the sort of intellectual and moral rigour cultivated by Professor Kirk and George MacDonald’s formidable grandmothers. By the end of the novel, by contrast, Edmund has become an exemplary thinker, someone who judges the evidence of the mind and senses with such rigour that he comes to be known as ‘Edmund the Just’. Edmund, then, is a complex, changeable character in a way that Lucy is not; and his name confirms his potential for opposite ways of thinking, and for undergoing opposite destinies or endings, just as Lucy’s confirms her singularity as a custodian of the singular light of truth.

There was a real, historical Edmund the Just, a tenth-century King of England who obviously suggested the sobriquet to Lewis (among other things, this Edmund I made peace with the Scots: quite an achievement for an English king in the tenth century). But the other Edmund invoked by the name of Lewis’s child-traitor is the antagonist in King Lear, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Gloucester who betrays his brother in a fit of murderous playfulness, a betrayal that leads to the deaths of his father, his king, the king’s three daughters, and Edmund himself. Where Lucy’s name suggests a singular truth – a light shining in darkness – Edmund’s has several competing associations, and can be read in different lights depending on the situation he finds himself in. There could hardly be a better way of signaling Lewis’s conviction, everywhere apparent in the Narnian chronicles, of the urgent need for his readers to cultivate the skill of reading well.

For the third post on Lewis’s Interfaces, see here.

[This is the first part of a three-part blog post. The first part deals with Lucy’s journey through the wardrobe, the second with Edmund’s, and the third with the toings and froings of all four Pevensie children between our world and Narnia.]

The interface with fantasy in any narrative – the moment when the reader first encounters the particular version of the impossible with which the story will concern itself – both defines a text as fantasy and indicates the kind of fantasy it will be. It’s also frequently the most exhilarating moment in any fantastic story: the most surprising, the most idiosyncratic, the most memorable. Alice spotting a rabbit as it runs by pulling a watch out of its waistcoat pocket – and the burning curiosity with which she responds to this impossible action – sets the perversely logical tone of Carroll’s book of dreams. The moment when Nesbit’s five very ordinary children dig a fairy out of the sand in an abandoned gravel pit, only to discover that the fairy is precisely the opposite of the ones in books (wingless, hairy, with apelike hands, a spidery body and the retractable antennae of a snail), perfectly sums up the many reversals of the children’s expectations that will follow this discovery. The morning when young Will wakes up to find the world blanketed in snow and all his numerous family asleep and impossible to rouse – this is the essence of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, where magic brings solitude and coldly impersonal decisions as well as beauty and wonder. As I thought over the last few weeks about the phenomenon of the Narnia books, which compete with The Lord of the Rings for the title of most influential works of fantasy in the postwar years, it struck me that what sets Lewis’s work apart – not just the novel but the series as a whole – is its fascination with this moment of interface, the point at which the protagonist recognizes that they have left behind the physical and social rules of the fields they know. So exciting does Lewis find this moment of first encounter that he re-enacts it over and over again in the course of his series: most notably, perhaps, in the multiple pools that offer entrance to innumerable worlds in The Magician’s Nephew; in the door in the air at the end of Prince Caspian; in the picture that comes alive in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – followed by the many disembarkations on unknown island-worlds with which that book is filled; and in the plural encounters with successive layers of the Narnian universe in The Silver Chair, beginning with an entrance through a door in a wall reminiscent of Lewis’s favourite short story by H G Wells. The interface with fantasy is Lewis’s theme, and his abiding fascination with it is what makes his work distinctive.

If Lewis’s Narnian sequence is a fantasy of interfaces, then The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the most characteristic of the Narnia books, since it consists almost entirely of a series of entrances into and encounters with the impossible, the magical, the strange. The first of these entrances, I would suggest, is by way of the book’s title. I can still remember quite distinctly a time before I first read the novel, when I knew only what it said on the cover of the Puffin paperback edition, above a picture of two girls dancing with a lion (I suspect I was told the title instead of reading it; I was a late-ish reader and remain a slow one). The bizarre combination of a beast, a quasi-human figure of horror (I found witches terrifying throughout my childhood) and a grown-up item of furniture (I wasn’t sure what a ‘wardrobe’ was until someone explained) surprised me by its fusion of the exotically powerful, the supernatural and the mundane. No story I knew contained just these elements, or any combination like them, and I couldn’t wait to learn how the three mismatched terms were linked. Tolkien talks in his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ about how the deployment of unexpected combinations of words can serve as an act of imaginative conjuration, and I think Lewis achieved this in his title (which owes something of its effect to Nesbit’s titles: Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet).

The second entrance, encounter or interface is by way of the house to which the four children of the opening sentence are evacuated in the book’s first chapter. In Five Children and It Nesbit’s titular children arrive at a rural house from the city of London, and the building seems magical to them because it’s isolated from other buildings and because its grounds have no clear boundaries or enclosures. Their previous experience of domestic space has been urban and rule-bound (they’re not allowed to roam the city streets unsupervised), and the sudden emergence from urban regulation suggests that their new life will be governed by new criteria. We don’t know much about Lewis’s Pevensie children apart from the facts that they, too, live in London, and have been sent to the country (somewhere in Dorset, scholars tell us, though the description of the area, with its mountains, stags and eagles, makes it sound like Scotland) to escape the Blitz. They, too, relish the house because of the unaccustomed freedom of movement it offers (‘That old chap will let us do anything we like’ Peter enthuses); but whereas for Nesbit’s children this freedom takes them out and about (only one of their adventures is housebound), the Pevensies have their adventures inside the house, which Lewis transforms into quasi-magical terrain by making its topography both vast and mysterious. In the first chapter Peter points out that ‘It’s about ten minutes’ walk’ from their bedrooms to the dining-room with ‘any amount of stairs and passages between’, the vague terms ‘about’ and ‘any amount’ underscoring his unfamiliarity with the building’s layout. The youngest child Lucy finds this sense of vague expansiveness intimidating (‘the thought of all those long passages and rows of doors leading into empty rooms was beginning to make her feel a little creepy’). And closer acquaintance with the house only makes it more mysterious. While the first few doors the children open lead only into ‘spare bedrooms, as everyone had expected’, the later rooms they find prove more suggestive: ‘a very long room full of pictures’ with a suit of armour in it; ‘a room all hung with green, with a harp in the corner’, evoking the Irish legends from Lewis’s Belfast childhood; rooms lined with books, ‘most of them very old […] and some bigger than a Bible in a church’; a room containing only a wardrobe. Lewis carefully builds up the impression that the house is too large to know well, and that its rooms have stories in them, some of them written down or printed (and the comparison of some of these books to ‘a Bible in a church’ suggests that the words inside are in some sense potent). Later we learn that the house is so famous that sightseers come ‘from all over England’ to visit it, drawn by its association with different kinds of narratives:

It was the sort of house that is mentioned in guide books and even in histories; and well it might be, for all manner of stories were told about it, some of them even stranger than the one I am telling you now.

With extraordinary economy this sentence extends the building’s mystery in several directions. First, we learn that it’s connected with history – no mystery there, many ancient buildings have ancient origins. But in the next part of the sentence history segues into story, which implies fiction; and some of the ‘stories’ it conjures up are ‘even stranger’ than the story of four children entering a world of talking animals through a wardrobe. One begins to wonder if the Bible-sized books in its library may contain some of those other, ambiguously-fictional narratives; or if Edmund’s teasing questions to Lucy about whether she’s found any new countries in other cupboards around the building might have a grain of truth in them; or whether the suit of armour may have been used in the English Civil Wars, or in an Arthurian romance.

Shortly afterwards the narrator again implies that the house may have something literally magical about it. As all four children approach the wardrobe together for the first time he wonders whether ‘some magic in the house had come to life and was chasing them into Narnia’ – and though he never commits himself to this explanation it marks the continued growth of the building into something organic, something more than architectural. In fact, by this point in the novel the house has acquired a vitality that makes it seem like an extension of its owner, the hairy, rational, courteous and unexpectedly open-minded Professor Kirk. Like the Professor, it is full of possibilities, rendered more diverse by the fact that none of them are particularised or confirmed.[1] These possibilities are extended further still when Susan points out, on entering the wardrobe, that anything they find inside it might be said to be inside the house; and by the Faun Tumnus’s assumption that the place Lucy has come from is another country inside the room where she found the wardrobe. ‘Daughter of Eve’ he calls her, investing her in the process with a mythical status as exotic as his own, ‘from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe’. By these means Lewis brings our imaginations ‘to life’ through a series of hints relating to the house, preparing them like a good gardener for the more flamboyant impossibilities he introduces as the book goes on.

The next three interfaces, of course, are the three entrances into Narnia by way of the wardrobe. First Lucy on her own, then Edmund and Lucy – though they effectively go separately – and finally all four Pevensie children step through the door with a looking-glass in it (a nod to Carroll?) and find themselves in another landscape, in another season, which turns out to be located in another world. So imaginatively potent, for Lewis, is this moment of transition from this world to the next that he makes us go through it three times, each time from a new perspective, which imbues each entrance with a different mood and meaning. One of the side effects of this threefold interface is that it leaves the young reader with the conviction that such encounters may not be unique – that they might in fact occur from time to time, though rarely, in ‘real’, non-literary life. This view is corroborated by the Professor’s logic, when he asks Peter and Susan whether they find Lucy a more credible witness than Edmund and goes on to suggest that if so, they should believe what she has told them about finding Narnia, no matter how incredible. An adult’s championing of the youngest Pevensie – especially when the adult has the grand title of ‘Professor’ – renders her and Edmund’s impossible experiences of Narnia distinctly plausible; and it’s perhaps for this reason that I worked so hard to convince myself as a boy that I, too, could find an entrance to Lewis’s invented country – though I suspect there were other elements to this desire for conviction, among others the strong association of Narnia with desire itself.

Lucy’s experience of the interface with Narnia can be understood as a series of mirrorings (remember the mirror in the wardrobe door, which Pauline Baynes doesn’t include in her illustrations). These mirrorings ensure that the transition between ‘our’ world and the ‘other’ one isn’t too sudden to feel convincing, and that the two worlds in some sense interpenetrate each other: there are things in one that occur in the other, though in a new relationship and with different connotations. One might think of George MacDonald’s observation in his novel Phantastes about how a room is rendered magical when seen in a mirror; it’s identical to the one you live in, but the reversal of the relations between the objects in it suggest the possibility that in the reflected world there has been a fundamental realignment of all the regulations that govern our quotidian existence.

Lucy’s entrance into Narnia is partly impelled, like Alice’s decision to follow the rabbit, by curiosity: first the modest curiosity as to whether or not the wardrobe door is locked, which is what makes Lucy stay behind when her siblings leave the room; and later the excited inquisitiveness as to the nature of the snowy wood to which the wardrobe leads her. The other impulse that takes her into the wardrobe is that of pleasure. In the wardrobe she finds fur coats, and since ‘There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur’ she at once steps in and rubs her face against them, going ‘further in’ (a phrase that acquires particular resonance in the final Narnia book, The Last Battle) to indulge her senses of touch and smell more fully. As she goes forward into the dark she first loses one of her senses – that of sight – quite naturally, because it’s dark; and she then fails to sense something she expects, which is the rough woodwork at the back of the wardrobe. Afterwards her sense of touch conveys to her something she expects – the crunching of mothballs under her feet – only to surprise her when she reaches down to touch them, since the crunchy substance is ‘soft and powdery and extremely cold’. Next the texture of the coats changes, to be replaced not with the expected wooden planks but with wood in another form, the prickly ‘branches of trees’. Her sense of sight returns to her, but as often happens when one has been in the dark her understanding of distance has been affected, and the light she sees appears to be much further away than ‘where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been’. As a result of these incremental alterations, it seems perfectly natural as well as surprising when Lucy finally realizes that she is standing ‘in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air’. The stress on many senses, not just one – and the stress on familiar, precisely-evoked sensations – is what makes the transition so utterly convincing.

Alongside sensation, Lewis also uses wordplay to link the new land Lucy discovers with the house she’s left. The first things she finds in Narnia – a wood full of fir trees, the whiteness of snow, the darkness of nighttime – are all perfectly consonant with the experience of playing, or falling asleep, in a dark wooden wardrobe full of fur coats and snow-white mothballs. Lewis has already shown us that Lucy is a little timid – she disliked the large unknown spaces of the Professor’s house – so it’s a stroke of genius to have her look back over her shoulder when she reaches the wood and see not only ‘the open doorway of the wardrobe’ between the trees behind her but even ‘a glimpse of the empty room from which she had set out’. The empty rooms of Professor Kirk’s house had earlier frightened her, so it should come as no surprise that she quickly summons up courage to move forward through the much more crowded space of the Narnian wood in which she finds herself. Her discovery of an ordinary lamppost a few steps later – in the middle of wood, far from any discernible path – reassures her still further: it suggests modern industrial civilization, perhaps even the urban environment she knows best, where some helpful authority has made provision for the needs of citizens to find their way about at night. So again it’s hardly surprising that when a ‘very strange person’ steps out into the light of the lamppost Lucy should react not with fear but only intensified curiosity: especially since the ‘very strange person’ is much the same height as her, carries an umbrella, wears a ‘red woollen muffler’ that matches his skin, and is weighed down with what looks like his ‘Christmas shopping’. Umbrellas and mufflers are designed for protection, not assault, and anyone who has the generosity to buy Christmas presents for his friends can pose no threat (or so one might reason); and though this assumption may be simplistic (as indeed it proves to be) it seems to be corroborated by the faun’s exclamation of surprise when he first sees Lucy. ‘Goodness gracious me’ is hardly the phrase a devil might use, despite the stranger’s possession of horns and reddish skin, and serves to justify Lucy’s confidence in talking to him in the next chapter.

The series of mirrorings I mentioned earlier refers to the fact that the room can be seen behind Lucy after she’s moved out of it – a space rendered as magical as Narnia by its unexplained presence ‘between the dark tree-trunks’ – and by the Faun’s perfect equivalence to Lucy in terms of size. It continues with the rapid-fire questions the Faun poses to her, which suggests he is just as curious as she is, and by his readiness to take Spare Oom and War Drobe as geographical locations as exotic for him as Narnia is for her. Soon afterwards, Lucy’s belief that she should be getting ‘home’ to the Professor’s house is mirrored by the ‘homely’ picture painted by the Faun of its own habitation, where there is ‘a roaring fire – and toast – and sardines – and cake’. And the ‘dry, clean cave’ to which he takes her is much more child-sized and child-friendly – much more ‘homely’, in fact – than the rambling, many-doored mansion Lucy has left behind (there is only one door in the cave, which ‘must lead to Mr Tumnus’s bedroom’ – there is really nowhere else it can lead to). The Faun’s home is also better stocked with provisions than England is, given that Lucy’s England is at war and therefore subject to rationing (cakes would have been a rarity because of the shortage of eggs). Again, Mr Tumnus’s cave mirrors the world she’s left in its fondness for books and stories, especially strange ones: the books on its shelves refer to humanity as a possible fiction (Is Man a Myth? is one of the titles), and Tumnus himself is a fount of strange tales like the ones that have accumulated around the Professor’s house. Strangeness and familiarity are blended in the Faun’s cave, in fact, exactly as they were in the mansion, although in slightly different proportions.

At this point in Lucy’s adventure Lewis engineers a sudden change of mood. After telling his tales of midnight parties where Fauns dance with Nymphs, of milk-white stags which grant your wishes and of summer visits from the god Silenus, who makes the rivers run with wine instead of water, Tumnus abruptly reveals that such seasonal delights no longer take place and that Narnia itself has receded into the past, to be replaced by the perpetually snowbound country Lucy has discovered. The Faun then drops the bombshell (the wartime metaphor seems appropriate) that he himself is not what he appears to be – that he is a bad Faun, not a good one, and that his entertainment of Lucy has a hidden agenda: to lull her into a false sense of security and then hand her over to his paymistress, the wicked White Witch. This is a mirror-style reversal more extreme than any we’ve encountered so far, whereby apparent acts of friendliness become a mask for treason, a pleasant wood becomes suddenly sinister, snow becomes oppressive – it is now the sign of the Witch’s power – and the return journey to the lamppost becomes as full of anxiety (‘The whole wood is full of her spies,’ Tumnus tells Lucy) as before it was full of wonder. Even this reversal, however, mirrors a similar reversal in the world that Lucy has left. It might be said to resemble something we never actually witness in the novel: the sudden, unlooked-for recollection that the world is at war, which transforms the loveliness of the countryside into a fragile refuge from violence and forces one’s idealized imaginary homeland to recede into the distance – into the past and perhaps, though not certainly, the distant future – while the present becomes discoloured or warped by suspicion and fear.

Lucy’s experience of the interface with Narnia, then, contains in itself the possibility that the country can be read in different ways. But the change of mood also affirms that a ‘true’ reading of the evidence provided by the country is possible. By the time it takes place, a bond has been forged between Lucy and Mr Tumnus, a bond founded on a shared pleasure in food and stories and curiosity about strange cultures – pleasures it’s difficult to fake. So when Tumnus breaks down in tears and tells the girl that he is wicked she assumes that he is talking about some past misdemeanour on his part, and assures him that he cannot possibly be bad now because he is so sorry for what he has done. The revelation that his misdemeanour is in fact taking place now, at this very moment, and that the child he has been telling her about is not an element in a finished tale but Lucy herself, who is currently in danger from the Faun to whom she is speaking – this revelation shocks Lucy into terror (she turns ‘very white’). But her conviction that Tumnus is what he appears to be – a friend – helps to change the direction of the narrative once again. By being certain that he is ‘a very good Faun’ Lucy ensures that he behaves as one; while, conversely, Lucy’s own behaviour ensures that Tumnus realizes he could never betray an actual human child, no matter how easy such a betrayal might seem when the child was imaginary. There’s a sense here that behind the hall of mirrors that enabled the transition between the Professor’s house and Narnia – and between the possible and the impossible, which have been so richly twined together in the description of that transition – there is a common set of values, a shared recognition of the appropriate way to behave towards strangers, whether children or adults, migrants or evacuees, that transcends any fleeting consent one has given to other sorts of behaviour on the basis of fear or wilful self-delusion.

In other words, by this stage in the novel the question of what is real has come under scrutiny. The country Lucy comes from, England, is a land in crisis. So is the country she arrives in, Narnia. Both places, then, are in one sense not themselves – the ‘real’ England and the ‘real’ Narnia lie elsewhere, in a time of peace and prosperity that has long been absent and might not come again. Any hope that this double crisis will be resolved lies in behaving as though the moral values of the ‘real’ country remain intact during this period of absence. Lucy behaves in this way quite naturally, by assuming Tumnus is ‘good’ whatever crimes he may have committed in the Witch’s name. Tumnus’s ‘badness’, meanwhile, is the result of an act of imagination: he agreed to betray, in theory, what he thought of as an imaginary person – a human being, at a time when human beings have not been seen in Narnia for many centuries (hence the title of his book, Is Man a Myth?). But as soon as that imagined person proved to be real Tumnus realized he could never betray her without also betraying his sense of his own real self as (first and foremost) a decent person. In addition, his agreement to serve as the Witch’s spy was based on the threat she posed to his identity, his faunness, so to speak. If he fails to do her bidding she will cut off his horns, pluck out his beard, fuse his ‘beautiful cloven hoofs […] into horrid solid hoofs like a wretched horse’s’ – or worse still she will turn him to stone, a simulacrum of a living goat-man. On meeting the real girl Lucy, however, Tumnus realizes that his ‘real self’ is not the physical one with horns and beard and cloven hooves but the one who refuses to hurt children, who treats strangers with respect, and who seeks to help them at great risk to his own life. In doing these things Tumnus identifies himself as a ‘real’ Narnian, and brings closer the possibility of the ‘real’ Narnia being restored. If all of the White Witch’s spies go through the same process of self-realization her power will be diminished, and Narnia will re-emerge in some form at least from its long quiescence.

When Lucy returns to the Professor’s house after her time with Tumnus, the question of what’s real continues to trouble her. She tells her siblings about the visit to Narnia, and they at once assume that her story is impossible. This gives rise to three alternative interpretations of her narrative: first, that it’s a lie; secondly, that it’s a game – an activity with rules which we take part in for a certain period of time for the sake of a transient feeling of pleasure; and thirdly, that it’s a joke. All three siblings also decide that whichever one of these interpretations or readings of the story is correct, the lie or game or joke has gone on far beyond what is acceptable. Convention dictates that at one point a fiction be acknowledged for what it is – that the book be closed and ordinary life begin again – but Lucy stubbornly refuses to obey this convention even for the sake of a quiet life (she was a ‘very truthful girl and knew that she was really in the right’). On person’s game or joke or fiction, then, is another person’s reality; the dividing line between the imagined and the actual is permeable, and ‘realness’, as well as the conventions that determine its parameters, is a contested concept. Later, the older siblings Peter and Susan begin to wonder whether there is a fourth explanation for Lucy’s insistence on the truthfulness of her impossible story – not that it’s a game (her unhappiness puts paid to that idea) but that she believes she is telling the truth even though she is not; in other words, that she is suffering from some kind of mental illness. This is what drives them to discuss the problem with the Professor. But the fact that the reader has already been convinced, within the framework of the story, that Lucy has ‘really’ undergone the experiences she describes suggests that the limits of the possible are vastly greater than Peter and Susan are aware; and this suggestion is later corroborated both by the references to the even stranger stories associated with the house and by the Professor’s ready acceptance that Lucy is sane, and that therefore – in the absence of any evidence against it – her story should be believed. The game abruptly becomes potential fact, and the relationship between the elder siblings and the youngest shifts in consequence. Objects and people – Lucy, Susan, Peter, the mysterious wardrobe – subtly change places, in the process changing their signification.

It might be at this point in the story that the knowledgeable reader brings to mind the mythical connotations of Lucy’s name. Lucy comes from lux, the Latin for light, and the saint who originally owned the name became associated by the Catholic Church with the longest night in the year, a time when the memory of light, and the current location of its source, must have seemed (in the days before artificial lighting) as far away and inaccessible as an imaginary country. But even in the longest night of the year the sun is real, and the conviction that its light and warmth will at last return can be sustained by stories as well as memory. That’s the promise Lucy’s name brings with it, in conjunction with her story: that things unseen may be as real as things we can smell and touch, and that the impossible may perhaps be made possible through a concerted effort of the desiring imagination.

For the second post on C.S. Lewis’s interfaces, see here.

 

NOTE

[1] This is an effect that gets destroyed, I would imagine, or at least altered, if you read The Magician’s Nephew first in the Narnia sequence. Lewis seems in fact to have written it last.