Of all the fantasy autho
rs out there, CS Lewis still strikes me as the cruelest.
Not necessarily to his readers, but to his characters.
I am sure that there are those who would argue that someone like GRR Martin would rightfully top that scale, but I respectfully disagree. Let’s – as Susan Penvensie w ould say – look at this ‘logically’
Martin – bathes in the blood of his characters, but that’s just it – he just kills them. You learn quickly not to be attatched because of that. But they’re just dead. For the most part.
Barrie – Neverland makes you forget and if you leave and grow up you forget you were ever there (“See that man with the briefcase who doesn’t know what story to tell his children? That used to be John” – Peter Pan)
Carroll – Wonderland is a dream (or possibly a drug trip if you believe some theories)
Eddings – characters always live to their destiny and pretty much get the happy ever after
G.G Kay – political, characters come out a bit scathed, but see destiny thing. Also, those that are dead, are just dead.
But Lewis? Lewis will not allow his characters to forget. More than any phyiscal torture, not being able to forget…think of what that would do to you, what it would do to your soul, your entire sense of being – who would you be? An adult, a powerful adult, trapped in a child’s body, forced to grow up all over again ,to go through it all over again – and to never ever be able to talk about what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve seen…to watch the world fail and flail and fall around you and know that once you could have fixed that, that once you did fix it…and now you’re 14 and stuck…and you can’t ever forget that.
Cruelest words ever spoken in fantasy:
“Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia”
And why would you ever go back? Why? Except that you had forgotten the “real” world, and by the time you remembered it was already too late. You could forget on one side of the wardrobe, but not the other. C.S Lewis gave his characters the world and then expelled them from it…and then forced them to remember forever what they had lost. And most of them never are allowed to return to that world…one is expelled forever simply for the crime of forcing herself to move on (ah the ‘problem’ of Susan).
I dedicated one of my most popular posts to the idea that Susan was in fact the smart one in the Pevensie family, that she alone had the courage to force herself to forget what she could no longer have. To block out what had been stolen from her. I felt sorry for Susan as a child, now I admire her backbone. She got on with her life. What other choice would you have?
But it’s not just the Pevensie family. People who have only seen the movie trilogy don’t realize the fact that the Professor of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is in fact Diggory from the (in reading order not publication order) first book. The wardrobe itself is made of the wood from a tree that sprang from an apple that was birthed when Narnia was young; a tree that tumbled in a London windstorm, and Diggory who was unable to forget his time in Narnia, could not bear to have the only physical reminder of his time there turned into kindling, so he turned it into a wardrobe in his great house in the country.
Lewis tortured his characters.
My apologies for the random literary rant, this is what happens when you spend your IPM day working on cross-stitch and half-watching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
