I've been reading a lot of CS Lewis the past few days. When I was a young lad, maybe thirty years ago, he was my favorite author because the Narnia books were among my favorite books. (Side note: I remember thinking at one point that all the loser writers probably took pen names that started with "L" so they'd be next to Lewis and L'Engle on the racks, because the discriminating readers would start their trips to the library there -- I had a pretty limited idea of how marketing worked back then. But it seems like it worked for that hack, Robert Ludlum, anyway.)
He aged well alongside me -- in my teens, the science fiction trilogy rocked my world, although That Hideous Strength was definitely too hard for me until I got a little older. His non-fiction works, starting with Mere Christianity, came within reach, and I devoured them as I grew old enough to understand them, and finally I picked up one that looked scary, fictional, and exciting -- maybe a fantasy to match the sci-fi of the trilogy. It was called Till We Have Faces.
Somewhere near Oxford University, there's a pigeon sitting on a gate, looking in, admiring some of the pretty trees and flowers that probably grow there. And within the university gates, there's a greater beauty, minds growing and conversations flowing and philosophy blossoming; there's magic that is completely beyond that pigeon's scope of understanding, even beyond his perception. When I read Till We Have Faces, I felt like that pigeon. It's rare that you can read the words of a book, be completely aware that it is talking about stuff that is utterly beyond your grasp, and still be fascinated by its beauty.
I re-read it again in my twenties a few times, and I've been re-reading it again this week. But this time, I'm coming into it with an education, with a background in literary criticism, and with some miles on my tires -- some actual life experiences, some knowledge of grief, some small amount of emotional maturity. I'm starting to see some depth to the shadows of this book, some dimensions that I wasn't able to perceive before.
The second hardest trick in writing that I'm aware of -- and probably the hardest one that people actually have the guts and skill to pull off regularly -- is probably the unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator is the one where the person telling the story doesn't tell you all the bits of it, but the author intends you to be able to piece it together and at least suspect it yourself. The trick that is one step harder than that, the one that only true masters even attempt, is the ignorant narrator. The ignorant narrator is the one where the writer knows something and he communicates it to you, the reader, but the narrator through which he communicates it remains unaware. Nick in The Great Gatsby doesn't ever come out and tell you, in so many words, that he was gay and in love with Gatsby; he probably never even suspects it of himself. (Some people think that he's an unreliable narrator and he just tells you that he's straight -- I prefer to read it that he really likes Jordan and his other girlfriends; he just never realizes why it doesn't work out, and he thinks Gatsby is just a really admirable friend, a Great Man.) The ignorant narrator is a story told through allusion and implication; it's a message encoded for the reader, a more sophisticated person than the protagonist.
I think Orual in Till We Have Faces plays that role, the ignorant narrator, on at least a few occasions, and the thing that really tipped me off was the multiple times she almost directly quoted Lady MacBeth. I don't know if you've read MacBeth lately -- I sure as hell haven't -- but Lewis, an Englishman who lived on letters, wouldn't have alluded to her accidentally. I don't know of any character in literature who comes to mind when a powerful woman cries to be un-womaned, to have the qualities of her gender removed from her, faster than Lady Mac. "Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty."
So Orual had that in common with Lady MacBeth. When you read the book, the mood is desperate, crushing sadness, bitterness, anger at the gods for having mistreated her -- and the mood is those green trees that even the pigeon on the gate can marvel at; it lingered with me from the first time I read it, haunting for years. But Lady MacBeth is not a victim; she's a killer. And, through that allusion, I can see Orual in a different light as well... and, as any good literary critic can tell you, when you first start to see a really good theory idea, you find that the supporting evidence for it starts leaping off every page.
I've seen Orual as a sympathetic figure for like twenty years. It's crazy now, reading the book with the new perspective of years, education, and imagination, but I think she was the monster all along.
The guy wrote like a dozen fiction books, at least half of them targeted for children. And I think this book might be one of the best of all time -- I've read some great ones, but never one with more levels, with more threads woven together, with more literary craftsmanship than this. I'm going to have to re-read it another three or four times just for the literary characterizations, I think... without even looking at the theological narratives he was trying to weave, because that's the easy target. You know how the easy target in Gatsby is the Marxist theory, the narrative about materialism and how no one is really motivated by anything other than money and the joy in waving it in front of other people's noses? The easy target in Faces is about religion -- you are brought up to love a god, you find disappointment and blame a god, then you discover what you are in comparison to a god and how silly it is to rage at them, like throwing celery at volcanoes. That's just the surface layer -- only the easiest of the themes (and even that one eluded me when I was trying to read it as a younger guy). There are at least three or four others that I can see from here, and the deeper I delve, the more I think I'll find.
I probably ought to do a critical paper on it, if I ever write one of those again... I bet most of the theory on it has been on theology in it or the mythology in it, and I think there's a lot more ground to cover. Marxism. Shakespeare. Racism. Queer theory. Maybe I should do three or four critical papers on it...
I've been reading some of The Great Divorce, too, and I feel like I've been shortchanging it, but it's an overt response to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I read part of and don't ever want to read again. Reading Lewis is like being a pigeon on the gates of Oxford; reading Blake is like being a pigeon transfixed in the hypnotic eye of a snake. That way, they say, lies madness. I feel like he's the literary Joker in the comic book world of English Romanticism -- much more brilliant and horrifyingly insane than anyone ever had any right to be. I wanted to write a thesis project on his creation mythos at one point, before I remembered that I liked being happy. The Great Divorce will be a pleasant read, less fiction and more parable, and I think I'll enjoy it. But I won't dive deep into it; I certainly won't delve into William F. Blake again for it. There are universes hidden in fiction, and as far as I'm concerned, hidden is a good place for some of those universes to stay.
