Planet Narnia: Michael Ward Unpacks Elegant Hidden Meaning in the Chronicles of Narnia
Written: Jul 17 '08 (Updated Jul 28 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Brilliant, painstaking, beautiful scholarship
Cons: *****
The Bottom Line: Walking through the Wardrobe doors with Michael Ward as your guide is delightful.
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| befus's Full Review: Michael Ward - Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in... |
Do the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis have a hidden meaning? Well, of course they do. And on one level, it's not really that "hidden." Lewis made no secret of the fact that he drew heavily on the Christian story when he crafted his beloved fairy-tales for children.
When writing to one of the many children who had written to him about his books, he penned: I'm so thankful that you realized [the] 'hidden story' in the Narnian books. It is odd, children nearly always do, grown-ups hardly ever.*
He also rather famously once talked about part of his purpose in writing the Narnia stories: "I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past certain inhibitions which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood... But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?"**
"Past watchful dragons." It's a beautiful Lewisian phrase, and one that reminds us of his delight in surprising us with the potent echoes of a story we thought we already knew.
Another Layer of Meaning?
But could there be another layer of hidden meaning to the Chronicles? Could there have been an underlying imaginative strategy or framework that C.S. Lewis employed in the writing of his seven books? Lewis scholar Michael Ward thinks the answer to that question is a resounding yes. And he's delved into the creative possibilities that surround that yes in his brilliant, ground-breaking work Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis.
Asking if there is a hidden imaginative scaffolding behind the Chronicles is not as odd a question as you might think. In fact, scholars have spent fifty years wrestling over it and coming up with different answers. The chief reason for the question has to do, I think, with the ongoing fascination that Lewis, a long-time bachelor and a medieval and renaissance scholar, began writing for children at all, and that he did it so successfully. It has sometimes felt difficult to account for the Chronicles' enduring popularity. So many people find these stories beloved and life-giving, returning to them again and again. Why is that? The fact that they echo the Great Story of the gospel has a lot to do with it, certainly. But is there even more to it than that? Could people be responding, on some unconscious level, to a hidden layer of artistry in their composition?
These are some of the fascinating ideas and questions that Ward's book raises. The question about the hidden meaning seems to fly in the face of critics as dearly loved as Lewis' own good friend J.R.R. Tolkien, who never liked the Chronicles much. He felt that their composition had been hasty and somewhat slapdash (especially in comparison to his own painstaking world-building/sub-creation). He and other critics in his wake have accused Lewis of mixing up mythologies, throwing in whatever pagan mythological characters struck his fancy, for instance, and not doing a very careful job of it. Most of us who have read Lewis for years accepted that kind of talk at face-value but chose to say "who cares?" because we still intuitively responded to the Chronicles as though they were a beautiful cohesive whole, all evidence seeming to the contrary.
Right, says Michael Ward. And he gallops into the breach to exonerate all of those readers with brilliant, painstaking research that shows several things so clearly that it almost made me cry for joy: Lewis' lifelong habits of careful scholarship; his love of "hidden" meaning within a well-thought out design; and his deep and abiding imaginative respect for the literary richness to be found in the seven planets of medieval cosmology. That, Ward argues (elegantly, persuasively) is the lens through which Lewis was working. That was his framework: an imaginative framework he explored in his academic scholarship, his poetry, his space trilogy, and ultimately (and best) in the Chronicles of Narnia.
Permeated by the Music of the Spheres
A brief review simply cannot do Ward's book justice. It's rare that I find myself coming away from a book of literary scholarship profoundly moved on emotional and spiritual levels, as well as challenged to think more deeply. But that's the kind of book Planet Narnia is, and why it will long be remembered as one of the most important books on Lewis and Narnia scholarship ever written. Even if Ward is not right in every single detail of his argument (and it's almost a given that he can't be, since he's not Lewis, and didn't have access to any secret files left by Lewis about the composition of the Chronicles) the overall argument is so sound and so beautifully rendered that it's hard to escape the intuitive feeling that he's really "onto something" here. As the evidence mounts up, there's a lovely kind of logic...you find yourself wondering "why did I never notice that?" or "that seems so obvious!"
Yet despite feeling "obvious," many of the things he points out have not been pointed out before, at least not in this fashion. It's as though Lewis' love of the symbolic richness of the planets is a kind of key that unlocks a door or un-shutters a window, and suddenly you find a new breeze blowing through the books. I'm not a literary scholar, and my understanding of medieval and renaissance cosmology and literature is limited (though much deeper having read this book) and so I can't fully test this argument on academic grounds. But aesthetically, it rings true and it works: it holds together and illuminates so much about the Narnia stories, even for someone who has read them again and again.
Ward makes the case that each of the Chronicles is animated by a "atmosphere," a very important word for Lewis, as he spends much time explaining. That atmosphere is permeated by the presiding spirit, or ethos, of one of the seven planets of medieval cosmology. For instance, the spirit or virtues of Jupiter pervade The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (where the children become monarchs); the virtues of Mars pervade Prince Caspian (where they "harden" and fight a war); the virtues of Sol (the Sun) permeate The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (where they journey to the end of the world and drink light). And so on. Ward provides one chapter per each of the Chronicles, exploring how Lewis chooses and employs language and imagery to effectively "soak" each of the stories in the imaginative associations of the seven planets, once common to the collective western literary imagination.
Once upon a time, the traits and virtues of the planets were regular imaginative fare in Western literature (Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton would have gotten all this far better than we do) but in Lewis' modern day, writing as he was in the 1940s-50s, literature was no longer steeped in such associations. Lewis, scholar and self-styled cultural dinosaur, was soaked in these things, however. Ward takes us through Lewis' imaginative understanding of each of the planets in scholarship, poetry and the space trilogy before diving deep into how Lewis worked that imaginative force into the particular Chronicle under discussion. He never denies that Lewis had other purposes and creative processes in mind as he worked, simply that this was his overarching framework. It's a framework that serves to heighten and deepen the overall Christological potency of Aslan's character, for instance, since Aslan conveys all of the characteristics of the planets (once imaginatively associated with pagan gods or powers) and not merely some, and because Lewis has effectively baptized those pagan associations by dipping them deep into the gospel story.
I'm looking forward to hearing the scholarly discussions that a book of this nature will no doubt provoke: Ward himself gets things rolling in that direction in his finally chapters when he raises several objections he believes others will raise, and tries to at least begin to answer them. He also provides a helpful "Coda" at book's end, where he details his own process of discovery, one that he moved into gradually and one that clearly excites him still.
If you love Lewis and have any interest in seriously considering questions about the composition and lasting power of the Chronicles of Narnia, then you will want to read Planet Narnia. I read it slowly, studying and savoring it as I went, and it's a book I will return to again and again. There is much more to this delightful and challenging book than I can possibly even begin to recount here. If you take away one nugget, know this: Ward's scholarship helps to open up the Narnia stories, and Lewis' imaginative life, in provocative, beautiful and satisfying ways. I think Lewis would have loved that.
~befus, 2008
Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis
by Michael Ward
Oxford University Press, 2008
ISBN 9780195313871
*Quoted in C. S. Lewis Letters to Children
**Quoted in Walter Hooper's book Past Watchful Dragons, Macmillan, 1979.
My Favorite Lewis Biography:
The Narnian by Alan Jacobs
An Excellent Biography of Lewis for Younger Readers:
C. S. Lewis: Christian and Storyteller by Beatrice Gormley
My Favorite Reference Guide to Narnia:
Companion to Narnia by Paul Ford
Recommended:
Yes
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