Transcript
[0:05] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author and I also run the Centre and I'm joined by my regular podcast partner Jacob Rennaker.
And Jacob, would you like to introduce yourself?
[0:30] Sure. Jacob Rennaker, background in a myth, world literature.
[0:36] And a writer in different forms and formats currently working as a narrative designer and manager at Robinsburger Games.
And as you can tell we've got a transatlantic conversation going on here which is very appropriate to our subject.
This month on the 22nd of November marks the 60th anniversary since the death of C .S.
Lewis, who was of course one of the two big inklings who we at the Oxford Centre for Fantasy are dedicating our centre to.
And to mark this, we thought it be a good idea to just stop and think about C .S. Lewis 60 years on.
The day of his death was a very unusual day in world history because two other people died on the day.
People who had more profile than him at the time and probably subsequently because one of those was JFK, John F. Kennedy.
That was the day he was assassinated and the news airways were obviously going to be flooded with that tragedy.
But also the sci -fi writer Aldous Huxley died on that day.
So another great figure in literature passed away.
And then quietly in a hospital in Oxford, C .S. Lewis passed away.
[2:04] What do you think is your initial impressions of C .S. Lewis 60 years on, Jacob?
What do you see as the headlines of his legacy?
Which bits of his work are still relevant?
Still relevant? I mean, immediately relevant are popular media.
Netflix is working on a Chronicles of Narnia series, well, actually films right now.
And it's, isn't it completely clear exactly how it's going to be just films or films with kind of a television or streaming series, but that's been in the news a lot lately with Greta Gerwig, who most recently did an adaptation, an excellent adaptation of Little Women.
So there's a lot of excitement. Oh yeah.
And Barbie. Yeah, most frequently adapting a children's toy into a film that had some really clever, I'm very impressed with her, by the way, I just listened the other day to an interview, with her on Script Notes, an excellent podcast for people in storytelling that's mostly talking about screenwriting, but she did an interview about her adaptation of Little Women.
I was just very impressed with her approach to honoring, you know, author's source material.
[3:28] And finding what's at the kind of the heart of particular stories, and as well as telling a story that intersects with relevance for audiences today.
So Narnia, as I say, it's Greta Gerwig, who just did Barbie, if you like the Barbie movie.
It probably won't be the same as the Barbie movie, probably fewer references to popular toy lines, but yeah, so that's one that I think that probably most popular for people regardless of kind of their background in academic or you know, popular media that Chronicles of Narnia is probably, broadly speaking, probably what he's best known for and in terms of you know, media coverage, that's the sort of thing with the previous Disney films or two, the three films adaptations, two produced by Disney and the other one not but those are still you know the advertising and everything that comes along with that.
Lots, lots there but yes so that's all I'll pause there and turn back over to you for what other sorts of things that you think what's continued to today.
Yeah so I definitely agree about the Narnia series and it's very big in fantasy just allowing a popularization of the portal fantasy.
We'll come and talk about that in a bit more later on But I think it's helpful to think about him having...
[4:51] Three sides to him. One is the academic role that he took in particularly in medieval literature, and then we'll touch briefly on whether any of that is still relevant.
Then there's obviously the large body of Christian apologetics, which is one of the places where he gets his strongest adherence, things like the screw tape letters.
So that's obviously literature as well, but mere Christianity, surprised by joy, a grief observed, and many others.
Some very interesting Christian writings.
And then finally, obviously, his role as a writer of fiction.
And we have talked about it as part of this podcast before, but he's not just Narnia.
He is also the Ransom Trilogy, the Space Trilogy.
He is also a book called Till We Have Faces, which is absolutely fascinating.
I'm going to talk about that in a bit.
And there are some other works that he found time to do in his very busy schedule.
[5:57] Part of the apologetic side of him, of course, is that he was a public speaker doing important work during the Second World War as a sort of addressing the public and became like the equivalent of today's TV don.
So he was one of the first of the academics to become famous in a mass media shit way.
Whereas before that, they were all hidden behind in ivory towers with just their books on the shelves.
Then he and others of his generation began to sort of come out and be known as, oh yes, that chap from Oxford, then Cambridge, and be called on for opinions.
[6:34] Looking at what, how he was received afterwards, I think.
In a way, he's been a bit unfortunate in that the major biography on him was the A. N.
Wilson one, which some years ago now.
And it has some amazing puff on the back. By the way, never take too much notice of the puff on the back of a book.
But anyway, it won the Whitbread Award for the best biography, Tolstoy, A. M.
Wilson's biography of Tolstoy, sorry, let's get this right, won the Whitbread Award for the best biography of 1988. So there was an expectation that his next book would be amazing.
And indeed, you know, John Sutherland, a noted literary professor here in Oxford said, one of our most stimulating biographers.
I don't know that he's talking about this book, because this book is, I think, really troubling in its tone to its subject.
He doesn't like C .S. Lewis.
Just flicking through again, I remember having this was my first serious attempt to get to know C .S.
Lewis as a person, and I ended up thinking, oh, I don't like this man very much.
Not Ayn Wilson, but the subject. And now I know more about C .S.
Lewis. I've discovered it's more of a problem with the attitude of the biographer.
[7:58] He talks about C .S. Lewis having a cult around him.
That's a bit strong. He's got fans, but I can't see a cult.
And he's definitely wanting to, well, C .S. Lewis was no plaster saint, but he's definitely trying to look for the faults. not very generous spirited.
[8:22] And then of course, C .S.
Lewis has also found detractors in people like Philip Pullman who condemned Narnia as being dodgy and unpleasant.
Though again, that does seem quite personal when you actually dig into the Pullman comments about C .S.
Lewis. there does seem to be a bit of annoyance, real anger that when he read Narnia, there was something in Narnia that didn't work for him.
He didn't like the idea that Diggory could cure his mother, which is one of the plot lines in The Magician's Nephew. He absolutely hated that.
I've heard him talk about this actually.
But of course, when you look, can you remember the biography?
This is CS Lewis writing the book, he wished he could have done for his own mother who did die.
And I don't think that's wrong. You can use fantasy to imagine curing your mum if you want.
So, I don't know.
[9:24] It seems as though...
Maybe I put it like this. I think C .S. Lewis, if you imagine all the inklings of the cheese board and you've got really lovely popular cheddar Tolkien and you've got really zany, peculiar ash washed cheese that is Charles Williams.
I think that C .S.
Lewis is a bit like the really strong camembert, the one that some people love and some people hate.
And I think during his life, he was a bit like that, though he was known as a really good friend to many people, he could get into real ding -dongs with other people in academia and elsewhere, and he came out swinging, punches, that is.
So I think that it's probably not surprising to find that he's still a sort of controversial figure for some people a bit later on.
That's my take. Anyway, shall we just talk about the academic side?
I don't know if you know much about Jacob, but I think there are two big books to think of.
One is the Allegory of Love and the other is the Discarded Image.
The Allegory of Love is looking at the way allegories were used widely throughout medieval literature.
[10:44] I remember reading that as an undergraduate. And Discarded Image talks about the Aristotelian version of the heavens and the way that the physics, the astronomy of the medieval period was set up in a completely different way to ours and how that influences how people wrote about things.
I've recently bumped into a few people in Oxford who say, Oh, no, no, we don't read him anymore.
That's probably not quite fair because I think not many old academics get read. they like that idea in.
Wasn't it Newton who said we stand on the shoulders of giants?
Academia, you move on. You say that work is done. We move on to synthesize that.
I think that's probably what's going on. And I think there's absolutely no harm in reading them. There's nothing that's wrong in them.
It may be people feel they understand the argument and are ready to move on.
But he was a good academic in his own right.
And I think he also did some editing on Chaucer as well. What was that?
He certainly knew Neville Popner.
Yeah, he definitely did work on Chaucer as well as Dante.
[12:07] Dante's Divine Comedy was a uh focus of his he actually worked closely with Dorothy Sayers when she was doing her english translation of, the divine comedy um so he was essentially kind of reviewing her text as she went along um one of the other works that uh he did a little but just a an endorsement of discarded image i just, uh uh read that within the past few months um it's a really excellent view one of the things i think that makes it compelling as an academic work is that it really tries to inhabit the world, a medieval world view from the inside and and try to help you understand what that looks would have looked and felt like um and Lewis, you know, famously uh when he was, I think it was uh it was speech.
I believe it was uh when he's beginning at Cambridge um teaching there that he described himself as a dinosaur, uh that you know he actually believed or agreed with or somehow resonated strongly with this medieval worldview.
And so even if what he said people didn't agree with, he was at least valuable as a specimen for study.
[13:18] To see what somebody who actually buys into some of these more emotionally -oriented views of the world and the cosmos could look like, which he depicts in a certain degree.
You see that kind of worked out in the Ransom or Space Trilogy.
You see some of the work that he does there in Discarded Image kind of personified or explored in really imaginative terms, especially as they're talking about what it feels like in space and out of the silent planet, some strong resonances there.
So really valuable, yeah, if you're at all interested in the medieval way of looking and thinking at the world and humanity's place within it and its emotional significance, I definitely recommend Discarded Image.
One of Willow's works that I engaged with in my academic study...
[14:11] A part of my dissertation, a good third of my dissertation dealt with Paradise Lost.
So one of the things that I consulted there was Lewis's preface to Paradise Lost.
And so that one I can't say is one that it is valuable.
It's more valuable as kind of an overview to what an epic is and what Milton was kind of reacting to and what he was at in writing Paradise Lost.
But it's not something that is regularly referred to by contemporary Milton scholars.
But nevertheless, it's something that people are aware of and have referenced, even if it's just in kind of doing a history of scholarship on something which is foundational for any any major work, like you were saying.
So any worthwhile academic work is going to be aware of the entire kind of academic conversation up to that point.
And so Lewis definitely, by virtue of the fact that he was participating and was published and was in conversation with people during those times, it is still part of the conversation.
Even if it's not a central part the conversation today, it still is a legacy of his.
[15:30] I think also because of the way he and Tolkien helped shape the Oxford syllabus, that has a relevance to the way medievalism has been not rejected as being quirky and sort of.
[15:45] Let's go on to the moderns because that's where it's really happening.
I think they made people think about English literature stretching back into Middle English and Old English in a way that stressed the continuum in that, which could have been lost.
I mean, we can't do the alternate history version of this, but it certainly helped preserve in the English literature, world a sense of the long history of English literature rather than a truncated one that would begin with say Shakespeare or Shakespeare's contemporaries instead.
Okay, well, the apologetics, I'm not an expert on these at all, other than knowing that they're incredibly important to many courses of study, particularly in the States.
Some books I found touched me personally.
I found Mere Christianity wonderful to read, Screwtape Letters really funny, very insightful about all sort of flavors of humanity.
[16:50] Yeah, and I think that what strikes me about his apologetics is he has a very bluff, straightforward way of putting things.
You don't have to scratch your head about like in Kierkegaard or Kant or something where you're trying to work out what they actually meaning.
It's something which the plain person on the street can understand.
And I think that's a real gift because he's writing about very difficult.
Subjects to grasp, but he sort of makes them seem easy, not easy, graspable, graspable.
Do you have a favorite? Yeah, do you have a favorite one?
[17:32] Yeah, Great Divorce of Screwtape Letters is probably the first Lewis book that I ever engaged with, and it was as a teenager, early teenager, and that was, yeah, that was something that was just really entertaining.
That's what really connected with me was it was done in an entertaining way that as a teenager that you can see as a seemed like it was subversive, right?
You're reading letters from devils.
[17:57] And so that's just, yeah, just just the conceit was, I think, what kind of hooked me in.
But then, of course, as you're brought into that, just the arguments that are made, kind of the absurdity or just kind of the looking at things from the other end of the telescope, right?
Or there's a way that you can define, you can better define what something is by taking the counter argument.
And yeah, Lewis just did that in a really engaging way. So that was one of my favorites, probably my first, you know, Lewis again, exposure to and like engagement with Lewis.
And then the great divorce is one that just like really captured my imagination in terms of his.
And then, so yeah, so I don't know, I guess that wouldn't necessarily, cause we also, so Lewis, because he is, like you said, he has these three sides to him.
Sometimes it's hard to firmly categorize one of his works as one of the three, right?
So you have in Screwtape Letters, it is a work of apologetics, but it's also a work of imagination.
In a sense, it's a work of fiction because he creates these characters who have an internal life and there's something that exists outside of them that they refer to, right?
So he's kind of creating this, you know, sketching out a hierarchy of hell and what it's like to be an administrator.
[19:17] Or mid -level management in hell, that that is in and of itself a sort of kind of miniature hell within hell.
But that's, yeah, so there's the work of imagination there. There's some bleeding over. Same with the Great Divorce.
You have this really imaginative, exploration of, it's a bus ride from hell to heaven, people from hell are, you know, every so often they get a holiday visiting the land of heaven.
If they want to stay, they can, they absolutely can stay, and they're actually invited to, but it's kind of looking at what individuals are working through, what they're ready to accept, if they're willing to change, what they're not willing to change, and really does so in an incredibly imaginative way that is reminiscent of Dante in a lot of ways, with George MacDonald as his Virgil character leading the main character, the point of view character that the story is kind of presented in.
And you kind of see different people at different stages of their kind of like spiritual life and development.
But yeah, but couched in these incredibly imaginative, vivid ways that aren't just straight politics.
Like mere Christianity, I think I would consider that one as more of a firmly contained, traditional, apologetic in that he's talking kind of, you know, strictly.
[20:45] He makes frequent illustrations of his points.
And that's what I think what makes them so comprehensible to a broader audience.
So in terms of those kind of more straightforward apologetics, I think God in the Dock, a collection of some of his essays, is really good.
Letters to Malcolm was one that I really liked. But again these are also, turns out, these aren't actually letters that Lewis was writing to another person. The topic is prayer.
And so it turns out he wasn't actually writing this to a person named Malcolm, but that this was kind of a fictional conceit that he was writing letters to.
Yeah. So which is great. But so then again, you do have kind of a fictive element that's kind of encroached.
[21:37] On that, but only as a way to kind of explore the idea.
So he was, Lewis is more concerned about ideas and exploring and trying to get at an idea or sense of truth or meaning.
And he would tackle those topics from whichever one of these lenses or set of tools that served him best at the time.
And so, yeah, so apologetics is one of those where you kind of see him kind of blurring the line between those, but certainly, yeah.
So there's apologetics, if you haven't engaged with them, place to start.
Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters as well, Great Divorce, especially if you're more familiar with this fiction and want to kind of step into him engaging with ideas of meaning, greater meaning in life, that those are probably a few really good ones.
MS. I think a really good little reading scheme would be if you've read The Last Battle and sort of found that difficult, read The Great Divorce and put alongside it A Leaf by Niggle, the Tolkien work.
Because of course, it's very difficult to write about heaven. I mean, how can we know?
But they each have a different interesting take and I've certainly found through the years, some of the ideas fascinating.
So, CS Lewis draws on Plato, for example, things being more real.
[22:55] Which you can see in the pattern of what happens at the end of The Last Battle.
So, So I think they're really interesting.
I think unlike with academia, with the medieval scholarship, I think in terms of Christian apologetics, C .S. Lewis is still holding his own.
[23:14] People find worth in him.
Taking into account that he is a man of his generation writing in the middle of the 20th century.
So he has certain attitudes and things which were prevalent then, but he still has plenty of nuggets of gold amongst everything else to be found.
So yeah, so 60 years on, he's still relevant in the world of apologetics.
Okay, so let's go to what we want to talk about most of this time, which is him as a writer of fantasy, a writer of literature.
I just should put in here a note that in the 1920s, he was really aspiring to be a poet.
That was what he wanted to be and that's how he saw himself and he did publish poetry.
But it wasn't really until he started writing his fiction that he came away from being and also ran in that field to actually being someone who's breaking new ground or certainly.
Yeah, I think breaking new ground is a good way of putting it.
So, there's a lot to talk about. We could have a whole podcast devoted to Narnia.
But let's think about the things that aren't Narnia first.
So, So obviously we have the space trilogy, which shouldn't really be called the space trilogy.
[24:43] Because he called it, so I'm just trying to find it on my desk, here we are.
So, it's three books, Outer Silent Planet, which is a trip to Mars or Malacandra, Perilandra, which is a voyage to Venus and then what's the last one called?
The Hideous Strength, that Hideous Strength, that's right, which stays mainly on Earth and that's a sort of strange mashup of Arthurian themes and it kind of gets completely out of control, that book.
But the first two, I think are still readable.
They are interesting. For example, that C .S.
Lewis is analyzing colonialism in space and sort of criticizing it because it's humans bringing the evil to Mars.
It's like the invading colonial power.
[25:38] And there's also in it some absolutely beautiful descriptions of space, but using the discarded image, using the medieval way of describing space.
There's a particular moment where the main character Ransom who's basically hijacked or, taken hostage by Professor Weston and his stooge because they think the people of Mars, the malachandrins are all wanting a human sacrifice.
So, they kind of bring him along to throw to the lions equivalent.
But anyway, he's in this spaceship and there's a moment where he is lying in the light of space because space isn't dark, of course, because the sunlight is there.
There's a most wonderful description and how he turns the way of thinking of space as a dark, empty void into a place full of joy and full of praise.
It's just absolutely wonderful, worth reading it just for that passage alone.
What do you make of the space trilogy?
Is that something that you enjoyed? Yeah, yeah, no, I really liked it.
And it was actually my own kind of Lewis experience.
He describes George MacDonald as kind of baptizing his imagination.
[26:56] Through fantasies, was the book in particular that he'd kind of picked up at a bookseller's stall, catching a train.
But there was something in that. Isn't George Macdonald the Kirdi in Back of the North Wind? As well, yeah.
Both, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so Back of the North Wind, yeah, yeah, the Kirdi, yes, Prince and the Goblin, that's yeah, same thing.
So, Fantasties is also, yeah, is Macdonald.
[27:25] So yeah, so that, I had something similar. It was, it was actually, Perilandra was my first book of, of Lewis's fiction that I, that I read.
So I started it wasn't actually with Narnia because I didn't read Narnia.
That wasn't one of my childhood books. My parents didn't get that for me and I wasn't exposed to it elsewhere.
So my actual first work of Lewis fiction, if you don't count screw tape letters, was was Perilandra.
And it was actually Perilandra at the time I was a graduate student and didn't and that felt I didn't have time for for fiction, right?
That it was that I was solely concerned about these ideas and kind of academic nonfiction, that that's where my head was and that that was what kind of felt most important.
At least that's what was talked about most. And so it was kind of bumping into Paralandra, giving it a chance reading it.
That's what kind of really opened my eyes to the beauty as well as the fiction and the way that fiction can explore questions of meaning that you just cannot do in a, you know, academic.
[28:38] You know, a non -fiction setting, right?
There's a way of engaging with the imagination that opens up questions of meaning and relevance and applicability to your own life that just isn't possible when you're kind of in a different mode.
So yeah, so I love it, still do.
And yeah, that one, and of course that this, Lewis even writing fiction kind of grew out of a sort of conversation that Tolkien and Lewis had about kind of deploring the state of science fiction and literature and said like, well, why don't we do it?
Flipping a coin, possibly, right? One of them took space travel, one of them took time travel.
Lewis ended up with space travel, Tolkien with time travel, and he started writing something that was kind of gonna explore Numenor in the contemporary age.
[29:26] Yeah, so it was unfinished, kind of fizzled out, but it was Numenor -centered, time travel -related, Um, and that didn't end up going anywhere, but Lewis's, I think it had legs because he found ways to interact with, uh, questions that he was considering in other areas of his study. Right.
So you definitely see this more with Lewis is he's just bringing in absolutely everything that he's thinking about, um, talking about engaging with reading.
There's nothing that's off, off limits for Lewis, right?
And that's what one of the things that when we get to the fiction portion of him specifically with Chronicles of Narnia, that some issues people have with his world aren't as meticulously constructed internally.
They're not as internally consistent and self -contained as Tolkien's Middle -earth.
But Lewis has a different mindset and different approach and different goal.
And that's his way of thinking is like everything is grist for the mill, right?
And that he's bringing in all of these different things in each of these, you know, in his academics he can reference works of fiction, works of poetry, in his apologetics he's doing the same thing and exploring apologetic arguments in some of his academic writings and in his fiction.
[30:49] So, yeah, so I think that that's what the space trilogy does is allows, it gives this broad canvas with certain constraints, certain genre constraints, for him to explore the same sorts of ideas of meaning of, right, so what does it mean to be a human?
What does it mean to engage with or consider or devote yourself to something that's larger than yourself?
You see that in Paralandron specifically, they're kind of the beginning of human consciousness, human reasoning, kind of exploring the story of the fall, the biblical fall in Genesis.
[31:29] So that's, yeah, that's still entertaining, engaging, super imaginative, just the writing, the description, the lush description of the kind of Paralandron landscape is just like, that's what drew me in was just the vividness of his prose and just like how it just kind of, so that when I say like it baptized my imagination, it really kind of like set my imagination on fire.
So it wasn't really a watery column, it was more of a wow, like this, this, he's not only activating my imagination and just kind of putting images like into my head, like forcing these images into my head.
But as he's doing so, he's also raising these questions and having these really important conversations that I feel like I am kind of a part of by virtue of the fact that I'm immersing myself in this world.
So yeah, and so yeah, space trilogy, a long way of saying, yes, I do like the space trilogy and I recommend it.
Yeah. But like you said, the first two are easier. So like the first one is more I think more out of the silent planet is more of a straightforward.
[32:31] Uh kind of science more in the traditional science fiction genre where you have different species of alien races and a human trying to make sense of that world, um, and figure out what's happening in the A world that has completely different sense a way of doing things and interacting with different species and have its different assumptions about society uh, but that hideous strength is also So, it is a much farther difference, kind of a continuum.
This other side of the planet is more traditional science fiction.
Perilander is still science fiction, but it almost kind of borders on fantasy.
It's more kind of closer to, till we have faces, kind of more like adult oriented fantasy, exploring questions of meaning.
And then that hideous strength is where I think he is influenced most by Charles Williams.
So he gets closer on the cheeseboard to Charles Williams is definitely there where you're looking at like archetypes and you do have him engaging with medieval ideas of the cosmos there with kind of the spiritual.
[33:38] You know, the different deities or spirits that are attached to the different planets that end up kind of coming down and being part of what's happening on Earth.
So discarded image has intersections with, I think, with the space trilogy in a couple, at least a couple of different places there.
So yeah, space trilogy, wonderful, especially the first two accessible.
And if you want to kind of see Louis working his kind of imagination in a slightly different way, if you like Narnia, this is one to try out and probably start, yeah, with Out of the Silent Planet.
And if you like that, then keep going. So I think one of the connective tissues really between Lewis's desire to be a poet and his fiction writing is his ability to.
[34:26] Call up the most impressive imagery. And I think this is really the power of the Narnia stories.
Because when I think about the Narnia stories, which I read, one of the first books I remember reading on my own as a child, is I have really vivid pictures of what happens in the stories in my head. Really, really vivid.
The Taste of Turkish Delight, the beavers, warm kitchen in with the fried fish supper, Father Christmas on his sledge, Aslan being like playing with the thunderstorm.
These things which they're all from Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which I think is the one that affected me the most.
But there is something about being a poet in that. And it also connects to how Lewis himself said the stories came to him.
He said it came through an image of a fawn carrying parcels in the snow, which of course is the Lucy meeting Mr. Tumnus by the lamppost.
And the lamppost was in that image as well. So he wrote to explain that image to himself.
And when you actually go back as an adult having perhaps read it as a child and come back to it, you discover that the narrative of the Narnia stories is very brief and very fast paced.
Whole battles happen in a blink an eye.
[35:52] But I don't remember that from the experience of reading.
It's a very interesting, it'd be really fascinating to watch what your brain is doing when you're reading them.
Because it seems as though there's a very epic scale story unraveling in my mind, because he's just flicking the right associations in my brain to fill out the rest of everything.
[36:13] And I think this comes down to the idea of him being a bit slapdash.
So whereas Tolkien will provide you with all the details at great length so that you can immerse yourself in it.
I think with C .S. Lewis, it's a bit more of a dash.
He's like a cook who will be in a kitchen making up a dish and sort of pull things off the shelf and throw them together and create something.
Whereas Tolkien's much more planting a garden, letting it grow slowly and you have to go through a long process with him and it actually, each of those approaches have their pleasures.
So, that I think does link back to his, C .S.
Lewis as the poet, taking because poetry obviously has a sparser, smaller frame and the power of the image is a really important skill in poetry.
So, yeah, that's how for me, the Narnia series work, a series of interlinked imagery which I cannot shake.
[37:15] How about you that's great. That's a that's a great explanation.
Uh, yeah, this is and I have a slightly different uh, I guess experience with relationship with lewis because of my kind of coming to his uh, fictional works, uh as an adult, um, but yeah, it's yeah the imagination one side because i'd actually read And engaged with uh that point his apologetics first then seeing kind of how that influenced and how he's You know exploring the same sorts of questions but doing so in like a really entertaining engaging way So I think, yeah, it is entertaining, but he mentions that the necessity sometimes of stealing past those watchful dragons that might prevent us from asking these questions that by creating a world that is, I think, satisfying by itself, that's entertaining, imaginative, that captures, like you're saying, captures people's imaginations, It opens you up to different possibilities, that's what fiction does, right?
[38:17] And I think one of the things that he does really well is kind of exploring how we can look at the world in different ways by presenting something that's completely fabricated.
And you know, he mentions this in an experiment, I think it's an experiment in criticism where he says, you know, that he wishes that he could see with a thousand eyes, right?
If he could have a dog, he would love to read a book written by a dog from a dog's perspective explaining what it's like to see the world through smell.
[38:51] What is the dog like? they're just their fundamental experience of reality.
He wanted to try to understand everything from different perspectives.
And I think what Narnia does is kind of gives us as readers that gift of making the world and the ways that we're engaging with the world, helping us to see those through new eyes, through fresh eyes, which is what poetry does.
So I think you're, yeah, you're absolutely right to kind of look at Lewis kind of beginning life, hoping to be a poet and working towards that and seeing how that has affected his writing and the way that he approached storytelling really.
So yeah, absolutely, great point, Julia. I love that. I think we also should do a shout out to the, he was very fortunate in his illustrator, Pauline Baines.
Again, part of my childhood memory is her drawings, which are just so gorgeous.
[39:49] And then I can summon them up really clearly in my head, even the little vignettes of like the beaver beckoning and the robin in the trees.
So her style fits the clarity of his prose in a lovely way. It's a very good match up there.
So okay, let's go to some of the difficult questions that we need to put C .S. Lewis 60 years on.
I'll let you take is he racist and I'll do is he misogynistic, just to kind of, you know.
Okay, so over to you. In what way do we understand his attitudes to race?
[40:26] Yeah, this is where you see Lewis really as a person of his time and ideas, understandings, like culturally you're seeing him, you do see.
[40:39] I think similarities sometimes in the way that Tolkien presents other people.
So anytime you're presenting people as dark -skinned and as foreign and as kind of threatening or mysterious in some way, those are kind of playing into racist ideas, racist tropes that were in circulation kind of in an unexamined, certainly in an unexamined way in that time.
So with the sort of person, And yeah, so was he a racist?
If you, yeah, so I guess it depends on how you define the term.
If you define the term as somebody who is, you know, like actively trying to, you know, persecute and maintain some sort of privilege over people of other races.
Was he actively trying to do that? No, but a lot of like, as racism, as we understand it today.
[41:35] Isn't just actively what you're doing, trying to you know put down uh but it can it can manifest itself in more seemingly benign ways in yeah again like how we describe other people and the place that we afford them in our conversations and in our literature um so you definitely like the horse and his boy uh that book is engaged with racist ideas right about it's kind of depicting this culture of people who a darker skinned, it's definitely pulling on kind of like an, you know, Ottoman Empire.
[42:13] Kind of society is kind of the starting point for what he's looking at.
But at the same time, so you don't see but it's not he doesn't, he isn't creating the society.
And just for the purpose of making it the villain, right?
Because as you see, in in the last battle, you have the Calarmines, some of them by Emmett, who is this character who is then praised and kind of held up as more honorable than.
[42:41] Narnians in some ways because his search for truth was what would define him, not his cultural context.
So, so you do see, so it's not all, you know, caricatures and racist tropes.
You do see, I think, because Lewis was so kind of expansive, that he was able to perhaps unknowingly or unconsciously, kind of break through some of those that that kind of those racist assumptions and depictions that you see in other literature.
You see kind of like glimmers of the Louis the seeker, right?
And Louis, the empathizer who's trying to understand things from the inside.
I think you definitely do see glimpses of that, but again, because it wasn't something that he and others around him really recognized as being something that they were actively doing, certainly engaged with that and perpetuated harmful ideas about other cultures, kind of like a non -European, non -white, non -English -speaking culture. So he definitely did so.
[43:48] And so, but does that mean that we should throw his writings away, those writings that engage with that, those ideas or do perpetuate those ideas?
Do we throw those away? I don't think that that's helpful.
I think it's recognizing it and being aware of what it's doing and making sure that you're not doing that yourself and how you're using it.
But there's a lot that you can learn from and see as well as make sure that you don't make the same sort of mistakes, don't slip into the same sort of unexamined assumptions about other races, other cultures, as you're creating your own worlds.
Yeah, I think there's definitely a sort of puritanical streak in us modern folk who look for the moat in the brother's eye and ignore the beam in our own we don't know what our own prejudice will look like to our children and our children's children.
So I think you're right to say let's contextualize him within that context.
He's actually trying to be progressive, oddly.
So there is actually a very dramatic thing that Emmet says, who's the Calamine who is through the stable door in the last battle.
He says, Aslan says to him, what you did in service to Tash, you did in service to me.
So in terms of looking at this as a sort of Christian theology, this is quite radical and there will be people, more conservative Christians, who will find that difficult and would criticize him for saying that.
So I think we should allow him to be complex and not perfect but interesting.
[45:18] And I don't think he's gone as far that it needs to be re -edited, like they're doing with some people.
Well, write in if you've got a view on this, but I feel that he is of his time.
But yeah, I don't see him as racist.
I see him as prejudiced in that we are all pre -judging because our own moment in history gives us a set of ideas that's quite hard to break free from.
Anyway, so I'm going to take on the misogynistic. Now, this largely is around the fact that the sibling relationship, particularly in Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the boys get to fight battles, the girls get to sort of heal things and shoot arrows from a distance, you know, that kind of thing.
[46:13] But more particularly, there are two things which Philip Pullman gets very upset about.
One is an insult to girls with little fat legs.
I was a girl truly with little fat legs and I never picked that up on that.
So I'm not sure where he's getting related about that.
But also the fate of Susan, which I think is something that needs to be rectified.
But remember, at the last battle, we don't actually know what happens to Susan.
She doesn't make it there because in his theology, not everyone's going to be there.
Doesn't mean she won't later because we don't know what final judgment is on anybody.
[46:55] So I think that he is again, of his time, has a few unfortunate phrasings and attitudes that come in, but I don't think he is in his novels misogynistic.
I think he could be in his real life at times. He could, Yeah, I don't think he was always wonderful with every female student he ever met.
But I think in his books, he actually gives us some very interesting strong female heroines.
So Lucy is the beloved of Aslan and she's particularly strong in Prince Caspian where she is the one who says, no, I can see this and she makes everyone else follow her or tries to make them follow her.
And that's a real strength, stronger than wielding a sword.
And then of course, you've got Jill and Polly, who also, they do make the story.
They are equal participants with Diggory for Polly and Eustace for Jill.
So they're definitely not the sort of damsel in distress, they're part of making the story, coming up with solutions, having their flaws.
[48:06] But I think there's one thing in particular, which I think is quite wise about the way he writes about girls and that's in the Dawn Treader, which pushes back against this girls with fat legs thing, which is when Lucy looks into the book in the house of the magician, the one with the dufflepuds outside.
You can see there's a page where she, there's a lesson there about listening to slander, which would be very good for social media.
And there's also a lesson about wanting to be beautiful.
And I think there's quite a lot of wisdom in how he phrases that.
And you see that Lucy too isn't perfect because there's an element of making Lucy just so sweet and innocent and wonderful.
There we see Lucy has her weaknesses, her jealousies just in the same way as Eustace is flawed and Edmund is flawed.
And I think that, yeah, I don't see the misogyny in that.
I see it as a interesting way of looking at what upsets you as a child and what, and what jealousies in the schoolroom context you might fall into.
So yeah, he's not perfect, but he's also pretty good.
[49:24] So I also want to put down at this point that if we stop there at Narnia, then it's a mixed bag.
What a lot of people haven't read and must read is Till We Have Faces, which is probably the best of his novels, certainly the best of his adult novels, which he wrote after he knew Joy Davidman.
So there is definitely a learning curve about adult women going on.
And she had quite a lot of influence on this story.
If you want to know what Till We Have Faces is about, it's a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth from the point of view of Psyche's sister.
And there's quite a few books today in this genre, the retelling of Greek myths.
So, you could put it alongside things like Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls or Madelaine Hunter's books, The Shield of Achilles or Circe.
But obviously, in terms of his own contemporaries, you've got people like Robert Graves writing retellings of Greek and Roman stories and Rosemary Sutcliffe.
So he's in that tradition. It's very different from the space trilogy from Narnia and it is wonderful, complex, difficult.
Absorbing, really strong female character.
[50:49] She is just fascinating. I'd love to see an adaptation of this.
I think it's an absolutely underrated, underread book.
And so if you want to say where is C .S. Lewis at 60, he is underrated because no one's reading this book, which would cap off his other novels, I think, as saying, oh, look what he did towards end of his life.
[51:13] So have you got into the brilliance of Till We Have Faces, Jacob, or is it?
Yes, yes, yes. I second everything that you've said.
Yeah, it is certainly, yeah, it is more, yeah, if you liked Narnia as a child and you would like something that maybe speaks a little bit more to complexities.
This, like you said, yeah, this is a presents some very complex characters.
And this you see the same sorts of things that you see him doing elsewhere in his fiction, namely bringing in kind of his academic experience, the questions that he's asking, the text that he's dealing with, he's bringing those all in here, right?
So you have, you know, essentially an explanation depiction from the inside of stoicism.
You have these these myths, these mythic ideas, what does it what would it look like to actually live in inside one of these stories inside this culture.
And I think this is kind of you have similarities between what Tolkien is able to do in talking about, exploring kind of concepts, religious concepts without having to deal with the religious structure itself that Tolkien does in Middle -earth, right?
So this is kind of a pre -Middle -earth, there's a pre -Christian culture, right?
So he can engage with these ideas where he doesn't have to.
[52:36] They don't have the terms for these particular contemporary religious ideas, but you see them kind of baked in and explored in different ways in a pre -Christian context.
Same thing you have here. So this is kind of like Narnia for grownups, like a pre -Christian Narnia for grownups in some way.
But it's not dealing with it. It's not really, I think, primarily concerned about religion per se.
It's this idea of love, right? What is love?
[53:09] And of course, that has religious connotations intersections but in and of itself it's exploring you know what what does what is love how can love go wrong um how can we blind ourselves to the love of others um how can we get in the way of between other people experiencing uh love um between two other people or from our between ourselves and that other person so really yeah it's like you you've joked about uh media uh you know, uh, the Joe, the Lucy, uh, learning a lesson about gossip and, you know, kind of speaking, uh, ill of other people.
Um, this really, I think till we have faces is probably one of the most relevant, I think, uh, stories that Lewis has done for our time, um, where people are.
[53:56] You know, trying to understand their own identities, how they interact with people of other identities.
Um, uh, yes, people's lived experiences, differences between others, but then trying to find some sort of thread that can bring people together, um, till we have faces is incredible, is an incredible work, um, yeah, that looks at the highest lows of love and how we perceive how other people, uh, experience love and belonging and, and meaning.
So, yeah, again, second year endorsement and if you haven't read till we have faces, please, please, please pick it up, read it, it will, yeah, it's one of those ones that sticks with you, like the feeling.
Like you said, you know, as a child, these images of Narnia still kind of stick with you.
[54:46] Some of the images from Till We Have Faces still stick with me, but more than that, just kind of the feeling that I had as I was reading it, just kind of like the tone of it, just just kind of like haunts me.
[54:59] Consistently. So, yeah, it's good. It will echo in your head and in your heart.
And yeah, I appreciate you contextualize this. This is Lewis after he has been married, so he can speak.
Whereas before, Four Loves, I don't believe that was, I think, do you know when Four Loves was written?
No, I don't. Was that pre -Joy Davidson?
[55:23] Because that's an academic kind of passion. So comparing the two, I wouldn't be surprised if he wrote The Four Loves before he was married, because it's this very, you know, kind of like academic dissection, you know, kind of a taxonomy of love and the different degrees of love.
And so he's looking kind of intellectually at what love is.
And there's some valuable things there. And I think it's a brilliant read.
I highly recommend The Four Loves.
But Till We Have Faces is like, what does love feel like? And what's the messiness of love like?
[55:56] And it's important to say it's not love, sort of like a romantic love, it's largely about all the other kinds of love.
Yes. Yeah, I think that's important. Yeah, so if we haven't said that, so if somebody doesn't know about Juliana Faces, it's not a romance novel.
No, at all. This isn't a love story. this isn't kind of a girl meets guy misunderstanding and they're reunited at the end, right? Yes, it's not a bodice ripper.
It's not like, it's not even, it's just looking at, yes, like the idea of love in all of its facets.
It includes all of the different terms, kind of like collegial love, familial love, some erotic love, it does touch on that, But that is not in any way, shape or form the center of what the question is asking.
It's looking at love as a whole and the different faces that love has.
[56:59] Yeah, that's why the main character, the heroine, is so radical because he's thought of a main woman who is, well, she'd be quite at home in some of the world of Game of Thrones, to be honest. She has a harsh side.
But yeah, so a fascinating book.
And I think just to put alongside that as to cap off our Lewis at 60, since his death, there is also new scholarship about him, particularly ushered in by Michael Ward's Planet Narnia, which suggests that Lewis' Narnia stories were much more complicated and clever than we ever thought.
So people, I think, are learning to look at Lewis as the writer of ideas and seeing that this simplicity does mask more complexity than we imagined, which is great.
I think he will still put up the backs of those who aren't in sympathy with his Christian faith because he's very forthright about that.
Not everybody, but he will put some people's backs up.
[58:05] And I think he would expect that because as I said, he is the camembert.
He wasn't expecting to go well paired with every wine.
He was expecting to meet with some pushback and that's how he liked to argue.
And perhaps that's best legacy for him is that people are still arguing about him 60 years on.
So, we always end up with a final moment where we think where in all the world is the best place for something.
Let's think about where in all the world is the best place to have an identity which means you are going to become like Aslan the god or something like that, or personify a god.
Do you have an idea where it'd be a good place to pop up?
Because we haven't really talked about the level of gods.
There's lots of them in Gods and Goddesses.
[59:06] I'm gonna give you one to start with, which is I do think that this idea of fantasy re -imagining identity, re -imagining gods, which is central to Lewis's work.
I'm actually very keen on the Rick Reard and Percy Jackson universe, which for me was a brilliant entry into this, what would Greek gods be like in the present day, the reimagining, which obviously Lewis did so well with Aslan as a god in an animal world.
So, I would pick Percy Jackson for me. That's the best place to come back as a god.
[59:50] Okay, yeah, so that's yeah, I was when you were when you asked the question I was actually thinking like yes Percy Percy Jackson series I it would be fascinating to have one of those novels not written from the perspective of Percy Jackson or another youth But from one of the gods, right what they like how they are Understanding the world and across the sweep of time. So I guess what I'll say in those lights.
I Don't want to say it's the best but probably the most interesting world would be Neil Gaiman's American gods. Yes.
I agree. So that you see, right, so that like, that explores the idea of these kind of like mythic at core ideas.
What does belief imbue, the power of belief, and what is it like to be an idea, an ideal of something, and how that kind of fluctuates over the ages, and in some cases, you know, declines.
People believing in, following, yes, humoring you.
Yeah, so American Gods for me I think is one of the best explorations of the idea.
Again, in some cases you get like from the inside, what does it feel like to be a god who's being neglected?
[1:01:07] I'm kind of now wishing I'd said Brandon Sanderson as well. There's so many really interesting modern treatment.
But anyway, we've got to draw a line there.
So thank you so much, Jacob, for joining me to talk about C .S.
Lewis, 60 years on from his death.
Thank you very much.
