I am deriving quite a lot of entertainment from the Times Literary Supplement Review correspondence about Tolkien‘s book ( The Fellowship of the Ring only). It’s such a joke that whenever anybody does write a formal allegory it is dismissed as the lowest form of life. Artificial. Didactic, and all the rest of it. But if people are faced with an imaginative romance about a magic ring they can’t rest till they’ve reduced it to allegorical terms and labeled and pigeonholed everything what it stands for. The ring must not only confer power, it must be power, and a specific power at that. It has now been identified as atomic power, political power, and bureaucratic power. (I like the picture of Galadriel tempted by the prospect of becoming an unlimited bureaucrat, and one wonders what will be in our next thrilling installment.)
It is well-known that Tolkien "cordially disliked allegory" and felt Lewis had veered too close to that in his Narnia Chronicles and lessened their literary value. I would have agreed when I first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that Lewis's Aslan, at least, was an over-obvious Jesus in that book. (By the second book I thought that had toned down, and by The Voyage of the Dawn Treader it was noticeable only when one looked for it). Lewis noted elsewhere, not in direct argument with Tollers but apropos the sentiment, that out of seventy reviewers of Out of the Silent Planet, only two of them noticed any Christian themes in the book. Those who grow up with Lewis as children, or those who come to him later without literary expectations do not see him as a purely Biblical, earth bound Christ, intrusive into the plot. Amazing as it seems to me, only those trained to look for Christ-figures seem to see it overdone in Aslan.
David Downing, one of the directors of the Wade Center at Wheaton, which is devoted to the works of Tolkien, Lewis, and five others* had a female student who asked why LWW was considered a Christian book. She didn't see it. "Well, Aslan dies for another person. Then he rises again and this saves both him and the other characters. Doesn't that remind you of anyone?" She looked concerned for a moment, and then her face broke into a great smile. "Oh!" she said "Gandalf!" Which is accurate, in a way.
So you can write a non-allegorical adventure and people will insist on making an allegory of it, one that fits their current day concerns. Or you can write an adventure that actually is somewhat allegorical, and people will miss it altogether. I recently read online a young man who resented all these Christians trying to force a claim that " The Lord of the Rings" was a Christian book when it clearly wasn't. Why couldn't people just accept that it was a secular adventure without intrusively shoving their personal religious views into it? Commenters were quick to supply quotes from Tolkien himself in correspondence and interviews that LOTR was a Christian, even Catholic book. For him who has eyes, let him see. People want to keep their adventures and their literature domesticated and connected to their own smaller world.
^GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, George MacDonald, and Owen Barfield.
2 comments:
For kids it seems that a lot of things only signify themselves--they are what they are, unless something/someone points up the connections with something else.
It was so long ago when I read LWW that I don't know if somebody had mentioned the allegory in my presence or not. In a missionary household that kind of discussion wouldn't have been a surprise. The parallel jumped out at me, though I can't tell if it was my perspicacity or spoilers.
When my dad came home from Vietnam we moved to Leavenworth and he attended C&GS, and every night he would sit in the living room with three of us clustered around him and read us a chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was magical but the we were 7, 5 and 3.
We were not looking for anything beyond the story and thus it was with all the Narnia books and then with SwallowsAnd Amazons.
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