Planet Narnia

Back from university some time in 2009, my dad told me about a programme he had recorded from the television called ‘The Narnia Code’ (BBC, April 2009), where an academic had come up with a theory explaining the coherence of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. We watched it together and I thought the premise intriguing. Michael Ward, a Lewis scholar, was reading Lewis’s poem ‘The Planets’ as part of his research when he was struck by the line in reference to Jupiter: ‘winter passed/And guilt forgiven’. He realised this was the premise of the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and began linking the rest of the books in the series to planets in the pre-Copernican constellation: Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus and Saturn.

I was interested by this theory and emailed a Lewis specialist friend from my time in Lille, France, who sent me a review she had done of his book Planet Narnia (2008). The main argument against it was, she said, that even academics who are familiar with the medieval view of the planets had difficulty connecting them to the books in the way that Ward does.

Summer 2009. I am at Greenbelt festival (see this post) and notice that Michael Ward is going to do a talk about Planet Narnia. Interested, I decide to go along. Unfortunately in 50-odd minutes there’s not much he can say that I haven’t already heard in the BBC documentary, although he does go into a little more ‘academic’ detail than would presumably have been appropriate for television. The bookshop stock the book but at its hardback price I decide against it.

A few weeks ago I was in Sheffield city centre library in the literature section and wondered whether I would stumble across Planet Narnia; it had been in the back of my mind to read for a few months. There it was, and five minutes later I was reading it on the train home for a day. I spent most of that weekend reading when I could, and some evenings while doing a placement in a Sheffield secondary school. It definitely makes interesting reading, if you are at all familiar with Lewis. For me the main problem was the frequent references made to Lewis’s ‘Ransom’ trilogy (another for the ‘to read’ list), but I could follow the main point of what is being said. It did feel as though more time was given to this series than to the Narnia books themselves at times. Ward’s thesis goes further than just linking the books to planets, however; he is trying to prove that Lewis was attempting to make his readers Enjoy the planets rather than Contemplating them. (The difference between Enjoy and Contemplate is the difference between the French connaître and savoir – the first is knowledge gained by experiencing it rather than observing and knowing in the mind) He calls this ‘donegality’; the process of understanding the characters of the planets through reading books which are written in the ‘spirit’ of that planet. I’ve explained that badly.

In conclusion, if you are a Narnia enthusiast and have a bit of concentration (although it’s not written in the highest scholarly style there are some presumptions made about the level of academic knowledge of the reader) it’s well worth a read. Then it’s up to you as to whether you are convinced by Ward’s thesis; personally I’m still on the fence.

'What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth'. Discuss.

Between the ages of about 13 and 15 I was unhappy. Before then I enjoyed primary school or was managing OK with the senior school transition. After that I was busy working on my GCSEs before escaping to sixth form. The reason I was unhappy wasn’t anything particular, it’s just I was a teenager. I was also not very popular, difficult to get along with and acted like I was superior to everyone else. In any case, books were my escape. I think it was in this period that I would read almost one book per day. I remember coming home feeling miserable and lying on my bed with yet another book, escaping.

Books help us deal with reality. Or at least, they seem to give us the impression that there is shape to our lives, that one day we will get to the end of whatever thing is troubling us and move on, in the same way that we know the hero or heroine will win through in the end. I suppose when I was reading fantasy novels I was, in my imagination, also adventuring in ways I never would in real life. My own quest was to finish my five years in secondary school intact.

I’m fairly sure that if I were to read back over some of those novels – mostly a mixture of fantasy novels and novels about children in various wars and conflicts – they would evoke that part of my life. It’s this layering of reality and fiction that I’m finding while reading Reading Lolita in Tehran (Aza Nafisi, 2003). I must have picked it up a few years ago but never got round to reading it until a friend told me how much she’d enjoyed it. I’m about three quarters of the way through and am indeed finding it very interesting, although it’s difficult to know how much of it is fact and how much (especially conversation) is fabrication. It’s about the author’s career teaching English Literature at various universities (and a book group) in Tehran, Iran, during the 1980s and 1990s and is stimulating and heartbreaking at the same time. It did remind me, oddly, of Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip (2006). This is the story of a young girl, Matilda, who lives on a tropical island where the only white man becomes the teacher and uses Dickens’ Great Expectations as his main teaching aid. Considering Mister Pip was so highly acclaimed (and was nominated for the 2007 Man Booker prize) I was underwhelmed, but I have a feeling that if I had more affection for Great Expectations (my least favourite Dickens) I might have enjoyed it more.

My overall impression is that in Reading Lolita in Tehran it seems that the novels and writers under discussion are being read into the Iranian society of the 1980s and 1990s, whereas with Mister Pip the emphasis seems to be to be on the utter foreignness of the text. It’s completely out of place on the island, and wondering about this other world – Pip’s world in unknown England – is what helps Matilda to escape what is happening in reality. For Azar Nafisi and her students, every novel becomes a starting point for political debate and to illustrate what is happening in Iranian society. Lolita, a young girl whose life and textual voice has been taken away from her, seems to embody the position of Iranian women, with so many rights and freedoms taken away from them. Yet literature is for these women an immense escape. Nafisi describes how, racked with insomnia during night attacks at the time of the Iraqi-Iranian war, she would read. Yet she describes herself as being capable of greater concentration than usual under these straitened circumstances.

Right at the beginning of Reading Lolita Nafisi tells us she warned her students: ‘...do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.’ Yet she admits that “It is of Lolita that I want to write, but right now there is no way I can write about that novel without also writing about Tehran. This, then, is the story of Lolita in Tehran, how Lolita gave a different color to Tehran and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov’s novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita.”

Perhaps C.S.Lewis was right to say that ‘Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it’ after all. Because in the end what we bring to our reading of any text – our beliefs, prejudices, experiences – shapes how we view it and how we remember it, as well as how we experience life itself.

On a lighter note... Literary highlights on stage and screen recently for me have been:

BBC’s new adaptation of Emma. Light and delightful, although everyone is far too beautiful! (Oddly enough I quite enjoy adaptations of Emma although I heartily dislike the book itself and only got through the whole thing with much will-power and at least three false starts)

RSC’s production of Hamlet as shown on Boxing Day in the UK. David Tennant impressed me greatly, particularly by the fact that he genuinely made me laugh. There was something particularly memorable about the grave scenes (the digging of Ophelia’s grave and her burial) for me, although I’m not enough of a Hamlet buff to know why. Of course, when you sit through three hours of something like that, it does make it slightly (and accidentally) amusing to see the majority of the cast die in the last 5 minutes!

A stage production of Flat Stanley (original book by Jeff Brown, 1964) which I went to see this very afternoon with my mum and two of my young cousins. Anyone else remember the story about the boy whose notice board fell on him in the night and made him flat? It was excellently staged and lots of fun, although the fake American accents were a little grating.