We love stories
I’ll be shortly hosting my Narnian posts only on my Narnian Substack here. Please subscribe there if you’d like to receive the rest of the series. But for the time being I’ll post in both places, so here’s the first section of my take on C.S. Lewis’s use of stories in the Chronicles of Narnia.
“Oh dear,” said the Dwarf. “I’m doing this very badly. Look here: I think I’ll have to go right back to the beginning and tell you how Caspian grew up in his uncle’s court and how he comes to be on our side at all. But it’ll be a long story.”
“All the better,” said Lucy. “We love stories.” Prince Caspian
Before we plunge into the books themselves, we need to ask a simple question: is there anything more to these books than children’s stories? It’s a question Lewis himself addresses again and again in the chronicles.
The answer, though, is not as simple as we might like. Stories are far from straightforward in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example. When Lucy enters Narnia she meets the bookish Mr Tumnus who, like the Professor, has “a shelf full of books” on his wall: The Life and Letters of Silenus, Nymphs and Their Ways, Men, Monks and Gamekeepers; a study in Popular Legend, Is Man a Myth? But the books remain unopened. Instead Mr Tumnus tells Lucy stories:
He had wonderful tales to tell of life in the forest. He told about the midnight dances and how the Nymphs who lived in the wells and the Dryads who lived in the trees came out to dance with the Fauns; about long hunting parties after the milk-white stag who could give you wishes if you caught him …
The tales are entrancing but that, it turns out, is the problem. Lucy stays in his home longer than she had intended and almost falls asleep when the Faun plays his flute for her. Fortunately – if fortune it is – Mr Tumnus’s conscience gets the better of him and he confesses that he has pretended to be friendly “all for the sake of lulling [her] asleep and then handing [her] over to the White Witch”. Mr Tumnus, in other words, is a Quisling who sees the error of his ways. Having collaborated with the White Witch, he realises the depths to which he has fallen when he meets a real Daughter of Eve.
I describe Mr Tumnus as a Quisling with good reason. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950, a few years after the end of World War II, but Mere Christianity, a book it echoes in significant places, was created during the war. As George Marsden points out in C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, “Lewis delivered the first of his talks from Broadcasting House on Wednesday, August 6, 1941, from 7:45 to 8:00 p.m. That might sound like prime time, but it was not. The preceding program was fifteen minutes of news broadcast in Norwegian to Nazi-occupied Norway.” At that time Norway was led by the Norwegian Nazi sympathiser, Vidkun Quisling.
For Lewis, who loved northernness, this was a double betrayal: a betrayal to the horrors of Nazism and a betrayal of the noble stories of the north which he had grown to love as a child. What Lucy hears, then, when she listens to Mr Tumnus’s tales is a corruption of the good. Mr Tumnus lives in what seems, on one level, like Norway, a wonderful place corrupted by a terrible ideology. I’ll explore this idea in more detail in a later post.
However, the point I want to make here is that Mr Tumnus’s stories are quite different from the White Witch’s. When Edmund meets the self-styled Queen of Narnia, she wins him to her cause not just with Turkish Delight but with a fantasy, in the worst sense of the word.
“It is a lovely place, my house,” said the Queen. “I am sure you would like it. There are whole rooms full of Turkish Delight, and what’s more, I have no children of my own. I want a nice boy whom I could bring up as a Prince and who would be King of Narnia when I am gone. While he was Prince he would wear a gold crown and eat Turkish Delight all day long; and you are much the cleverest and handsomest young man I’ve ever met. I think I would like to make you the Prince – some day, when you bring the others to visit me.”
The White Witch tempts Edmund with a story that does not lead him out of himself but that withers him. So, when Lucy and Edmund return to the Professor’s house, they bring competing stories with them. Lucy is beginning to sense that the stories she has heard point to greater truths than she has ever possibly imagines: Edmund is beginning to think that he has a greater future than he has ever imagined.
It is surely significant, then, when Lucy returns from her first visit to Narnia that Peter dismisses her excited account of a wood and snow and a Faun as nothing but a story: “she’s just making up a story for fun”.
This strange comment echoes an earlier remark that we might easily pass over. Before Lucy finds the way into Narnia, Edmund complains about being stuck inside. It’s raining heavily and they can’t explore as they had planned. Susan tells him to stop grumbling: “Ten to one it’ll clear up in an hour or so. And in the meantime we’re pretty well off. There’s a wireless and lots of books.”
Lewis himself, we imagine, would have been perfectly happy with those books but Peter dismisses the idea that they should sit down and read:
“Not for me,” said Peter; “I’m going to explore in the house.”
In reacting this way, he mirrors the behaviour of the actual evacuees who stayed with Lewis during the war. As Alister McGrath tells it in his biography of Lewis:
The threat of bombing raids on London led to a constant stream of ‘evacuees’ at The Kilns, who often stayed there for several months. Lewis’s correspondence during this time notes with amusement their constant complaints that they had nothing to do. Couldn’t they read something? Lewis wondered.
Of course, Lucy’s story proves to be truer and, ultimately, more powerful than the thin fantasy Edmund has been fed and eventually it is good books which help Peter reach that conclusion. When Edmund tries to persuade him not to follow the robin which seems to be leading them through the forest, arguing that it might be leading them into Peter replies: “That’s a nasty idea. Still – a robin, you know. They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve ever read. I’m sure a robin wouldn’t be on the wrong side.”
As Alister McGrath points out, the same questions confront us throughout the Narnia books: “Which story is the true story? Which stories are merely its shadows and echoes? And which are mere fabrications – tales spun to entrap and deceive?” The answer to those questions about true and false stories tends to lie in stories themselves. Good stories lead characters to the truth. False stories lead them towards danger. Here’s McGrath again:
Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are about finding a master story that makes sense of all other stories – and then embracing that story with delight because of its power to give meaning and value to life.
Stories matter. They can mislead us or they can lead us into life. We see this again in Prince Caspian, when Trumpkin, the dwarf, explains the puzzles the children have been baffled by by offering them “a long story.” No wonder, then, that Lucy replies, “We love stories.”
Like Lewis’s imagined readers, the children now know that good stories are the gateways (or maybe the wardrobe doors) to truth. The same realisation had been reached by Caspian himself who “liked best the last hour of the day when Nurse would tell him stories.”
His wicked uncle, by contrast, hated them:
“That’s all nonsense, for babies,” said the King sternly. “Only fit for babies, do you hear? You’re getting too old for that sort of stuff. At your age you ought to be thinking of battles and adventures, not fairy tales.”
But, of course, it is already clear to us (and it soon becomes apparent to Caspian) that the stories are true (which is the reason Miraz hates them). Caspian’s best hope of survival lies precisely in thinking about the fairy stories his uncle has forbidden.
Caspian soon learns this truth but other characters take longer to catch on. Trumpkin himself is sceptical when High King Peter is mentioned, asking, “Do you believe all those old stories?” and then, “who believes in Aslan nowadays?” Caspian’s answer is important:
“I do,” said Caspian. “And if I hadn’t believed in him before, I would now. Back there among the Humans the people who laughed at Aslan would have laughed at stories about Talking Beasts and Dwarfs. Sometimes I did wonder if there really was such a person as Aslan: but then sometimes I wondered if there were really people like you. Yet there you are.”
For Caspian, as for Lewis, stories are the bridges which lead him to faith. The story of how Lewis became a Christian after a late night walk around Magdalen College Deer Park in Oxford is now very well-known, though it doesn’t appear in Surprised by Joy, Lewis’s conversion memoir. Instead, we find the fullest description of this momentous walk in a moving letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves. In this letter of 18 October 1931, Lewis explained how he was convinced by J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson that,
the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the [pagan myths of sacrifice], but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties.
A key phrase here (which it’s easy to miss) is “one must be content to accept it in the same way”. One important path to faith, Lewis believed, was through story. Receiving stories as stories – not stripping them bare to find embedded doctrines or rational proofs – is one way of coming to, or deepening, faith in God. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Lewis was averse to doctrine or opposed to rational argument – quite the opposite – but it does mean that he placed a high value on stories as stories.
In his highly influential Planet Narnia, Michael Ward critiques A. N. Wilson’s argument that “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe grew out of Lewis’s experience of being stung back into childhood by his defeat [in a debate about miracles] at the hands of [Catholic philosopher, Elisabeth] Anscombe.” Rather than retreat to a juvenile view of the world, Ward argues, Lewis instead “turned to romance not as a retreat from apologetics after his debate with Anscombe, but precisely as a way of explaining his case to himself in imaginative form.”
I would go further, arguing that Lewis had already written stories as bridges to faith in his interplanetary romances, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. In the Chronicles of Narnia, he simply took this approach in a slightly different direction. To explain this change of direction, however, would take more space than I have available here so I will leave my explanation of how stories function as bridges to faith to a later post. But that will have to wait because in my next post I’m going to continue my exploration of the importance of stories by looking at The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the most bookish of all the Narnia books.