by larry gilman » April 27th, 2005, 8:20 pm
Good stuff, Stanley. Yeah, and the weird thing about the publisher going along with Gresham's insistence about Lewis's alleged preference is: so, granting that Lewis liked the Narnia books chronologically, so what? Couldn't he just be wrong? Lewis was the one person in the world who was least qualified to see the Narnia books from the typical reader's point of view! (You said something to this effect too.) Especially when there are compelling stylistic and structural reasons to just take them as they came---as one takes the books of the Odyssey. For instance, a pretty deep knowledge of Narnia, of the character of Aslan, ofthe nature of the comings and goings between that world and ours, and so forth is presumed in the narrative of The Magician's Nephew. No reader who begins there will have any of that. Sadly, I suspect that the re-ordering is going to deter, confuse, and diminish the reading experience of some number of kids out there. That "Once there were . . ." on the first page of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was not only there for a reason, almost as ritual a gesture as an invocation of the Muses, but it worked perfectly.
Messing with what already works . . . the George Lucas approach to Narnia. Hah, maybe we can go back, next, and better the Narnia books by removing those scuffy old two-dimensional, black-and-white illustrations and putting in exciting, 3-D, computer-generated illustrations based on actual lions, real British schoolchildren, etc. Much "better"!
I rant, therefore I am,
Larry
PS Good to talk to you again, Stanley. I think I've recovered from the metaphysical assassination attempt by Mr. whatsisname, a few months ago---the guy who said I didn't exist and was part of a wicked atheistic Web gang. Geez, I wish my life was that exciting.
PPS Have you read the mongo new Lewis letters collections? I'm drilling through Vol. I right now. Interesting, but it's outrageous and even creepy that Hooper persists in specially highlighting the naughty bits in the letters to Greeves that Lewis himself never highlighted---only Greeves, many years later (by trying to redact them)---repeating this bizarre editorial choice from the earlier edition of the Greeves letters. One might as well publish Pepys's diary with all the bits that previous editors redacted in bold type, so we can skip right to them . . .
