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Thursday, January 23, 2014

Messages in Fantasy – Part 4



 

In my past three posts about Messages in Fantasy (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3), I discussed the works of three specific modern authors still living today. Now I feel it’s very relevant to mention the work of an author whose work is more classic. C.S. Lewis has made a profound impact in children’s fiction as well as the fantasy genre. Just like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia is a work of fantasy fiction that delighted many of today’s fantasy readers in their younger years.

 

Those who know C.S. Lewis’s background as a Christian apologist should not be surprised to hear of or notice the Christian theme throughout The Chronicles of Narnia series. Many children who read the books would probably not notice any Christian themes; and probably some adults as well, as, though there are very clear comparisons to the character of Aslan and Christ, the message is subtle in many ways—but may be noticeable to a Christian or someone with a knowledge of Christianity. Lewis does not plant any kind of evangelizing message in his series (at least nothing obvious), but he builds each book around a story which will include a hint of Christian elements. However, books like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle have the most apparent Christian message; with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe presenting the symbolism of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, and The Last Battle showing an idea of the Judgment Day and heaven.

 

The essence of the entire series is Aslan the lion. Aslan is the messianic deity throughout The Chronicles of Narnia; who is the son of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea and creator of Narnia. In the Bible, Christ is referred to as “the Lion of the tribe of Judah” (Revelations 5:5), which is one of the reasons why Lewis used the lion, Aslan (which means “lion” in Turkish), in his stories. The Bible also calls Christ the Lamb of God (John 1:29, Revelation chapters 5 & 6), and toward the conclusion of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan briefly appears in the form of a lamb.

 

The most obvious parallel between Aslan and Christ is in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Aslan surrenders his life to the White Witch in place of Edmund (due to the boy’s treachery)this is symbolic of Christ laying down his life for the sins of mankind. Then the scene (known as the Stone Table scene or Stone Table sacrifice) occurs, which is depicted similarly to the scripture of Isaiah 53:7,8 which reads:

 

7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
    yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.

8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
    Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
    for the transgression of my people he was punished.

In chapter 14 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the scene of Aslan’s “crucifixion” is written with the lion being scoffed at, bound and sheared, and placed onto the Stone Table to be killed; and while all that happened he did not open his mouth or speak a word.

At the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan tells Edmund and Lucy that they will not return to Narnia, because they are too old, and they should come close to their own world. Lucy responds with: "It isn't Narnia, you know. It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?" 

Aslan replies with: “But you shall meet me, dear one.”

Edmund asks: “Are — are you there too, Sir?”

And Aslan answers: “I am. But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."

By the time the reader comes to the scene mentioned above (considering that they’re reading the series in order) they can conclude that Aslan is known as Jesus Christ in Edmund and Lucy’s world (which is our world).

In chapter 14 of The Last Battle (the final book in the series), the story reads much like parts of the book of Revelation in the Bible. There’s a scene where Aslan silently “judges” a great multitude of beings, very similar to Matthew 25:32 and Revelation 20:11-13. There is a new Narnia created, almost like what you would find in Revelation chapter 21 (the new Heaven and the new Earth). As you read the last two chapters of the book, there’s an evident depiction of heaven, where characters in the series who were long dead reappear, and other characters enter the new Narnia after being made worthy by Aslan. Now, even though there are similarities to the Bible, it all works within the story that C.S. Lewis is telling, and not at all preachy.

There are many subtle scenes throughout the series where Aslan has that Christ-like influence and relationship with the characters. He is loving and kind, yet also instructive and powerful; and it works within the nature of the character.

Lewis has clearly dismissed any responses suggesting that The Chronicles of Narnia are works of allegory. In a letter that he wrote in 1958 to a Mrs. Hook at Magdalen College in Oxford, discussing allegory in his writing, he said:

“By an allegory I mean a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in which immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan, a giant represents Despair.

“If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way on which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all.”

In Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, Lewis writes:

“Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child-psychology, and decided what age group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them.  This is all pure moonshine.  I couldn’t write that way at all.  Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.  At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord…

“The Lion began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.  This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen.  Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’  At first I had very little idea how the story would go.  But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it.  I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time.  Apart from that, I don’t know where the Lion came from or why He came.  But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him.”

Even though C.S. Lewis resisted any inclination that the Narnia stories were works of allegory, or that he made an effort to write a Christian story, he does not deny the Christian meanings therein. He felt that the books were more of an analogy than an allegory. Whether analogy or allegory, Lewis’s friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, thought that the Christian meanings in the Narnia books were too obvious (which was only one of Tolkien’s dislikes about the Narnia books).

In a letter that Lewis wrote to a ten-year-old girl in 1961 (read about it here and here), he summed up the meaning of his series saying:

“The whole Narnian story is about Christ. That is to say, I asked myself ‘Supposing that there really was a world like Narnia and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours), what might have happened?’ The stories are my answers. Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He would become a Talking Beast there, as He became a man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) the lion is supposed to be the king of beasts; (b) Christ is called ‘The Lion of Judah’ in the Bible; (c) I’d been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the work. The whole series works out like this.
The Magician’s Nephew  ---  tells the Creation and how evil entered Narnia.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  ---  the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Prince Caspian  ---  restoration of the true religion after corruption.
The Horse and His Boy  ---  the calling and conversion of a heathen.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader  --- the spiritual life (especially in Reepicheep).
The Silver Chair   ---  the continuing war with the powers of darkness.
The Last
Battle  ---  the coming of the Antichrist (the Ape), the end of the world and the Last Judgment.”
 
Again, one would have to either be a Christian or someone who has knowledge of Christianity to catch most of the meanings described above. The Narnia books do not preach, but tell delightful children’s stories for all to enjoy—as what has been proven through the decades.

In conclusion of this 4-part series on Messages in Fantasy, it is certain that books with a message can be good, but when the message is louder than the story it can ruin a work of art. The origin of fiction started with the means to convey a message and to entertain. Today, the means to entertain now overshadows the focus to teach or uplift the reader. There has to be a perfect balance between message and entertainment. A story filled with too much entertainment (action, violence, sex, twists) is like eating junk food—it eventually makes you sick. A story filled with too much message (philosophy, religion, politics) is like eating too much health food—you eventually get sick of it. The best books (in my opinion) are the ones where you can read and get your dose of entertainment with a seasoning of messaging—much like sitting and eating a balanced meal.


Inspirations of Fantasy

Friday, January 10, 2014

Fantasy Authors Discuss the Genre & Writing - VIDEO



About a year ago or so, author Patrick Rothfuss used to host a monthly online video forum through Geek & Sundry called The Story Board. He and other authors would discuss different content in fantasy fiction. I used to watch these as Rothfuss announced their release each month, and I really enjoyed them. Unfortunately, it only lasted up to 8 episodes; but I suggest, when you have some time, watching all the episodes on YouTube (if you’ve never watched them before). It’s quite interesting seeing some of the big names in fantasy fiction discussing the genre in an open, candid conversation.

Below are two episodes that I really enjoyed—one is about Characters and the other is about Form & Function. Each episode is well over an hour long, so you’ll need to make time to watch them. If you haven’t seen them before—enjoy!




 

 

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Thursday, January 2, 2014

Messages in Fantasy – Part 3



In my last two posts, I talked about messages found in modern fantasy fiction (Part 1 | Part 2). It’s no surprise that, just like some mythology and fairy tales, writers use the fantasy genre to play with—or convey—morals, ideas, beliefs and objections that they hold.The next fantasy series that we're going to look at places a strong voice for this author's worldview.

Best selling author, Philip Pullman, best known for his fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, lays out a clear Atheist perspective in his books. The first book, Northern Lights (known as The Golden Compass in America) starts the trilogy off as a nicely paced, intriguing kind of “children’s fiction”—showing no clear Atheistic message. However, toward the end of the book, the reader begins to discover that “the Church” in the story is not a good institution. Also, when the character, Lord Asriel, discusses the story of Adam and Eve from the Bible with his daughter, Lyra, his reading of the 3rd chapter of Genesis (with added terminology to the biblical verses that support the story that Pullman is writing) leads to dialog such as:

“But...” Lyra struggled to find the words she wanted: “but it en't true, is it? Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve? The Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy tale.”

Lord Asriel answers Lyra with:

“The Cassington Scholarship is traditionally given to a freethinker; it's his function to challenge the faith of the Scholars. Naturally he'd say that. But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.”

Lord Asriel’s analogy using the square root of minus one is what Philip Pullman stated in an interview in regards to his use of angels, ghosts and daemons in his trilogy:

“I was asked at one point, why do I, as a rationalist—a person who believes in reason, and all those things—why do I write about things like ghosts and daemons…

“One way of explaining that, seems to me, to compare it to what mathematicians do with entities that can’t exist; like the square root of minus one. Now, there’s no such thing as the square root of minus one; it doesn’t make any sense—there can’t possibly be such a thing. And, yet, if you include it in your calculations, you can come across all sorts of extraordinary things; like the Mandelbrot Set—extraordinary…infinitely deep and beautiful picture of wondrous complexity, that was there lurking in the darkness before we came across it. And we didn’t come across it, until we included the square root of minus one in our calculations…     

“What I do when I’m talking about ghosts and angels and daemons, and that sort of thing, is much the same sort of thing. I don’t believe in them. No. Of course not. They can’t exist. And yet, when I put them in my stories I can do things with them.” 

By book two of the trilogy, The Subtle Knife, the reader discovers that there is a revolt against the “Authority” (God), much like what John Milton writes in his epic poem, Paradise Lost. Actually, one could say that Pullman is kind of rewriting Paradise Lost, showing fallen angels and those that follow in the uprising against the Authority as the good guys. The Church is seen as an institution of the Authority that suppresses free thought and pushes propaganda to keep the Authority in control. In the words of one brief character in The Subtle Knife: “There is a war coming, boy. The greatest war there ever was. Something like it happened before, and this time the right side must win. We've had nothing but lies and propaganda and cruelty and deceit for all the thousands of years of human history. It's time we started again, but properly this time...”

In The Amber Spyglass, the final book in the series, the reader finds more of a slower paced and longer book than the first two, and the Atheist view is much more prevalent than before. There are a lot more messages in the dialog of the characters, and different secular ideas mixed into the fiber of the story. The words in this book get a lot more specific, and a lot less subtle.

In The Amber Spyglass, the rebel angel, Balthamos, talks about the Authority, saying: “The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty—those were all names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves—the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and Dust is formed. The first angels condensed out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all. He told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie.” The book depicts God as a fraud, and “Dust,” which is a main focus throughout the trilogy, as true knowledge and understanding.

Another Atheist view is that there is no life after death; that when one dies, it’s over. Pullman makes this clear in his third book. In The Amber Spyglass, the two main characters, Lyra and Will, journey to the “world of the dead” to find Lyra’s departed friend. When Will asks another character in the story about what happens in the world of the dead, the character, Baruch, says, “It's impossible to say. Everything about it is secret. Even the churches don't know; they tell their believers that they'll live in Heaven, but that's a lie. If people really knew…” While in the world of the dead, Lyra and Will are trying to free the ghosts from the world of the dead, and they come across the ghost of a young woman who had died as a martyr centuries ago. This ghost woman tells the other ghosts around them: “When we were alive, they told us that when we died we'd go to Heaven. And they said that Heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew.

“Because the land of the dead isn't a place of reward or a place of punishment. It's a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace.

“But now this child has come offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”

There are other direct hits on the Christian religion throughout the story. In another part of The Amber Spyglass, another character, who was once a nun and a scientist, tells the children (Lyra and Will): “I used to be a nun, you see. I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn't any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all.” Later on, a witch tells the ex-nun of her encounter with a female (rebel) angel: “Her name was Xaphania. She told me many things...She said that all the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She and the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed. She gave me many examples from my world.”

The His Dark Materials trilogy brings readers into a grand journey in the beginning of the series, but by the third book, the message of the author becomes way too obvious, and way too heavy; weighing the story with more of the author’s worldview than true storytelling. In the short video below, Philip Pullman speaks of his intentions with the series.




In my next post, I will conclude this series on Messages in Fantasy (at least for now), looking at the other side of the spectrum, with messages in the works of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.


Inspirations of Fantasy