![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My health broke down in the end
I don't know when The Magician's Nephew (1955) became my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia. I suspect it's because as unassilable as some of the other books are in their characters and imagery, this is the one that's stranger each time I re-read it. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a solstice ritual, to simplify drastically. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is an odyssey. The Silver Chair is a northern quest. The Magician's Nephew is a weird tale detoured into a creation myth—it begins with a mad scientist in the attic1 reverse-engineering interdimensional travel from the dust of Atlantis, moves swiftly through classic science fiction like dying earths and post-apocalypse and time that runs differently in different worlds (and the place between worlds where there is no time at all) before zigzagging back for a comic interlude in Edwardian London, and then we are into the heart of myth: singing the sun up, the animals out of the earth; the boy who let death in. The first words of the story belong to metafiction, the last to self-delusion, as though to remind the reader never to take narrators for granted.2 And yet we're told of beautiful and terrible things, the dead sun of Charn and the growing silence of the Wood between the Worlds, the song of the stars, the phoenix in the garden, the silver apples of youth and the Witch's salt-white face, eternal life stained like blood around her mouth. Children who rescue their parents, a smuggler's cave in the rafters. Polly Plummer is working on a story. It's not a perfect book; I'm not sure any of the Chronicles are. But it's like nothing except itself, if only because it's such a chimera, and that has always worked very well for me.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 arrives tonight. I think the last time we saw one another in person, there was snow on the ground and a holiday going on. Maybe I should get out more.
1. Andrew Ketterley thinks of himself as a magician and is acknowledged as such by the narrator, by Digory, and by the scornful Jadis—"a little, peddling Magician who works by rules and books. There is no real Magic in your blood and heart"—but between his experiments and his exploding guinea pigs, he's much more in line with the traditional mad scientists who practice at the boundaries of alchemy; think of the pentagrams in Rotwang's house or Dr. Pretorius' homunculi. He even looks the part, tall and thin and greyly shock-headed. He has the proper obsessed self-concern. Of course, the mechanical, empirical approach Uncle Andrew takes toward magic gets him in far more trouble than mysticism ever would have. "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny," meet "Who ever heard of a lion singing?"
2. Lewis-as-storyteller claims, "This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child . . . In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road," setting the timeline for fact with fiction. But it is Uncle Andrew, never really quite reformed, who gets in the last word: "But he always liked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.'"
fleurdelis28 arrives tonight. I think the last time we saw one another in person, there was snow on the ground and a holiday going on. Maybe I should get out more.1. Andrew Ketterley thinks of himself as a magician and is acknowledged as such by the narrator, by Digory, and by the scornful Jadis—"a little, peddling Magician who works by rules and books. There is no real Magic in your blood and heart"—but between his experiments and his exploding guinea pigs, he's much more in line with the traditional mad scientists who practice at the boundaries of alchemy; think of the pentagrams in Rotwang's house or Dr. Pretorius' homunculi. He even looks the part, tall and thin and greyly shock-headed. He has the proper obsessed self-concern. Of course, the mechanical, empirical approach Uncle Andrew takes toward magic gets him in far more trouble than mysticism ever would have. "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny," meet "Who ever heard of a lion singing?"
2. Lewis-as-storyteller claims, "This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child . . . In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road," setting the timeline for fact with fiction. But it is Uncle Andrew, never really quite reformed, who gets in the last word: "But he always liked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.'"
no subject
I liked most of the children—I think the later protagonists are much better delineated as people than the Pevensies, but I assume that's because C.S. Lewis figured out what he was doing as he went along. Jill does archery, of course, which is a major point in her favor.
The Head imagery works very well for me (mostly because that whole aspect of the plot is an essential working-out of CSL's theology as I understand it)
Explain?
But the Descent of the Eldils sequence...ah, that's magnificent, perhaps my favorite of all CSL's fiction.
I am considering a re-read of the Space Trilogy. I reacted so badly to That Hideous Strength, I may have to nerve myself up to it, but if so I'll let you know what I think this time around.
no subject
Explain?
Sorry--I was referring back to the conversation we had at Arisia. My understanding is/was that the central image for Lewis's theology is the Pauline conflict (Romans 7, and elsewhere): head/heart, mind/body, intellect/will--which gets analogized (is that the word I mean? "transposed" would be Lewis's word, I guess) to male/female, human/"nature" and now I'm not sure what's the next level up.
In this schema, Belbury represents the head-divorced-from-heart aspect, in opposition to the all-parts-in-their-proper-order-working-in-unity that is St. Anne's.
I hope that's a little clearer. Too sleepy to write more, but just noticed that I'd failed to reply earlier.
no subject
No apologies necessary. Thank you; this helped.