This forum was closed on October 1st, 2010. However, the archives are open to the public and filled with vast amounts of good reading and information for you to enjoy. If you wish to meet some Wardrobians, please visit the Into the Wardrobe Facebook group.

The New Yorker article on Lewis

The man. The myth.

The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Adam Linton » November 16th, 2005, 3:08 am

Has anyone else seen the recent article about Lewis in The New Yorker (November 11, 2005 issue)?

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarg ... at_atlarge

Of course, not that I couldn't question a couple or so of this article's statements, but it seemed to me to be thoughtful, as well as carefully and well written. Worth the read.
we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream
User avatar
Adam Linton
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 981
Joined: Jan 2005
Location: Columbia Falls, MT

Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Karen » November 16th, 2005, 12:41 pm

Yes. Adam Gopnik is an excellent writer (have you read his Paris to the Moon?), and while the article has a distinctly skeptical slant (this is The New Yorker, after all), it was interesting to read his take on Lewis and Narnia.
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. -- Jorge Luis Borges
User avatar
Karen
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 3733
Joined: Jul 2002
Location: Pennsylvania, USA

Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Adam Linton » November 16th, 2005, 2:39 pm

we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream
User avatar
Adam Linton
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 981
Joined: Jan 2005
Location: Columbia Falls, MT

Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Karen » November 16th, 2005, 2:47 pm

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. -- Jorge Luis Borges
User avatar
Karen
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 3733
Joined: Jul 2002
Location: Pennsylvania, USA

re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby wood-maid » November 17th, 2005, 5:14 pm

I wouldn't have guessed that he knew much about Lewis...it talked about A Grief Portrayed. And seemed a little derogatory toward Lewis' Christianity as well, I thought.
"Jill," said Tirian, "you are the bravest and most wood-wise of all my subjects, but also the most malapert and disobedient."
"By the Mane!" he whispered to Eustace. "This girl is a wondrous wood-maid. If she had Dryad's blood in her she could scarce do it better." - The Last Battle
User avatar
wood-maid
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 288
Joined: May 2005
Location: Washington

re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Fea~mar~vanwa~tyalieva~* » November 18th, 2005, 7:35 am

"Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme, of things not found within recorded time" JRR TOLKIEN
User avatar
Fea~mar~vanwa~tyalieva~*
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 30
Joined: Nov 2005
Location: Narnia!..I mean Canada

re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Tony » November 18th, 2005, 12:03 pm

That was very well written. I just wish there wasn't so much of what seemed to be bashing Lewis on the head with a cast-iron pan.

I love that man. :(
"The Church is the natural home of the Human Spirit."
-Hilaire Belloc
User avatar
Tony
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 435
Joined: Sep 2005
Location: Montréal, Québec, CA

re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Boyd Britton » November 26th, 2005, 5:26 pm

User avatar
Boyd Britton
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 76
Joined: Feb 2005
Location: Los Angeles

Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby MotherLodeBeth » November 27th, 2005, 5:07 am

:~:Am very much like Lucy in that I
am plain but trust the Lord with all
my heart:~:
User avatar
MotherLodeBeth
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 55
Joined: Aug 2004
Location: Sierras of California

re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby larry gilman » December 1st, 2005, 6:36 pm

The Gopnik article is offensively awful.

In it, the sound of axes being ground is deafening. Gopnik is on a self-assigned mission to liberate Lewis the storyteller from Lewis the Christian. But Gopnik's assumed role---the transatlantically hip, ultra-informed guide to the Real Guy Behind the Myth---is as stylized, and as fake, as a mask on a stick. Not only is he deeply out of sympathy with his subject, but he is poorly informed about it as well.

Gopnik's digs at Lewis comprise the sort of criticism that is most enjoyable if one doesn't stop to ask what the zingy phrases actually mean. For instance, what does the "nasty little-Englandness" of the Narnia books consist in, exactly? Gopnik doesn't say, and I can't imagine. That phrase appears in Gopnik's paraphrase of Philip Pullman's attack on Lewis. But Pullman does not use the phrase "nasty little-Englandness," or indeed any form of the word "England," or make the charge of "nasty little-Englandness" in any form at all that I can discern, so this appears to be a projection or fabrication by Gopnik. Perhaps Pullman made the accusation in some anti-Lewis piece that I have not been able to obtain; but in any case, Gopnik seems to accept Pullman’s charges at face value. As for "narrow-hearted religiosity," of which the Narnia books also stand passingly accused here, they are actually scorned by some fundamentalists for portraying a demon-worshipper as being "saved" at the end of the series, not because he has changed his mind and affirmed the right Christian doctrines but because his worship of Tash was sincere. So much for Lewis's "narrow-hearted religiosity." But Gopnik too much enjoys taking self-righteous shots at self-righteousness to let facts stand in his way.

Gopnik’s gravest offense is that he doesn’t know Lewis’s life or work, yet presumes to opine. He reveals how little actual reading there is behind his pose of knowingness when, for example, he says that as a child CSL "loved landscape and twilight, myth and fairy tale, . . . and the stories of George MacDonald"---naming “At the Back of the North Wind," "The Princess and the Goblin," and Phantastes. "Macdonald's stories,” Gopnik says, “evoked in Lewis” the emotion that Lewis called "Joy."

Wrong. In fact, Lewis never mentions, anywhere in his essays or letters or in his autobiography that I am aware of, having read "At the Back of the North Wind" and "The Princess and the Goblin" as a child (though he certainly read them later). He did not read Phantastes until he was 17 years old. In his autobiography, he does not even mention MacDonald when describing his childhood experiences of Joy: he mentions a garden, Beatrix Potter, and a poem by Longfellow. It was G. K. Chesterton, not C. S. Lewis, who adored the MacDonald fairy tales as a child. Perhaps Gopnik was confusing the two writers. But since his main relationship to these men seems to be to despise them (as a gratuitous hit against GKC on page one of the article makes clear), one must sympathize: it is hard to keep one's facts straight when writing about people one doesn't take seriously. By the way, Gopnik describes the feeling of Joy as trying to tell Lewis "not just that there is something good out there but that there is something _big_ out there." But Lewis never once speaks of a sense of magnitude or bigness or scope as an aspect of the Joy feeling. This is Gopnik’s own invention.

Gopnik gets some things right but distorts and even invents whenever it comes time to make Lewis look a twisty-minded loser. Most egregious example: he says that Lewis converted because he wanted “the cake” (pleasures) to “keep coming” and thought "the Anglican Church was God's own bakery." Which makes Lewis sound like a sectarian fool. But Lewis never wrote a single sentence that I know of, in any letter or book or essay, touting the unique superiority of the Anglican church over other Christian groups; he was, as most readers of this forum will know, the most stubbornly ecumenical of writers. Gopnik repeats the cheap shot about Lewis being a narrow Anglican in the next paragraph, amplifying: "In fact, it seems much easier to believe in the power of the Romantic numinous if you do not take a controversial incident . . . in British royal history [the defection of Henry VIII from the church of Rome] as the pivot point of your daily practice." Indeed, how silly that would be---except that Anglicans don’t, and Lewis didn't. Gopnick goes on: "Lewis insists that the Anglican creed isn't one spiritual path among others but the single cosmic truth . . . " That is a straight-out lie: Lewis never hinted, much less insisted, any such thing. The whole tenor of his writing is against it. Even replace the word "Anglican" with the word "Christian" in that allegation and you have at best a half-truth about what Lewis thought: in the final Narnia book and in other writings Lewis makes it clear that he believed God could and would accept non-Christians as "saved.”

One could go on. Gopnik openly despises Lewis’s religion, twists Lewis’s views of allegory by selective quotation, refers foolishly to The Allegory of Love as “a study of epic poetry”---it is not, it is a study of the allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages, as Lewis says in its first sentence---and commits other errors and distortions. E.g., he hints that Lewis’s relationship with Mrs. Moore “may have had a sadomasochistic tinge”: sez who? It might have, for all I know, but can anybody name any actual evidence, even enough to justify a “may have”? (“May have” is cheap: Gopnik’s relationship with his cat “may have” a sadomachistic tinge, for all the rest of us know, but why would anyone say it except to slime Gopnik?)

Truly a shameful job, smart-aleck literary criticism at its masturbatory worst. Gopnik writes like a caricature of the secularist literati, trashing Lewis as punishment for being too lowbrow, too religious, and too well-loved by too many uncredentialed people.

Gopnik thinks Lewis’s religion was “straitened and punitive,” and that Lewis could have written Narnia much better if he had dropped the nasty old Christianity. But to paraphrase Wendell Berry, the one sure fact we have is that C. S. Lewis, believing, wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, while Adam Gopnik, not believing, wrote “Prisoner of Narnia,” a work of an entirely different order.

My best to all,

Larry
Last edited by larry gilman on December 1st, 2005, 6:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
larry gilman
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 233
Joined: Jul 2004
Location: Sharon, VT

Re: re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Karen » December 1st, 2005, 6:50 pm

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. -- Jorge Luis Borges
User avatar
Karen
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 3733
Joined: Jul 2002
Location: Pennsylvania, USA

Re: re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Karen » December 3rd, 2005, 2:15 pm

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. -- Jorge Luis Borges
User avatar
Karen
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 3733
Joined: Jul 2002
Location: Pennsylvania, USA

Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby Fairfax » April 30th, 2010, 8:04 am

Fairfax
 
Posts: 37
Joined: Jan 2010

Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby larry gilman » April 30th, 2010, 1:04 pm

Fairfax:

Good question. According to Wikipedia, a lion-headed man is often portrayed in Mithraic carvings. But this was a marginal figure: Mithraic ceremony centered around the ritual sacrifice and redemptive eating of a bull, not a lion. So if you wanted to make a really Mithraic Narnia book, you would have Christ appear as a bull -- an herbivore, by the way, not "at the top of the food chain," where Gopnik seems to think a Mithraic figure would be found.

Bulls have been associated with divine power in many religions (the "golden calf" of Exodus is a trace of this history) . . . And there are interesting resemblances between Christianity's core story and those of many other religions, including Mithraism, as Lewis himself knew well and wrote of. (The Dying God and Redemptive Resurrection stories per se are not Christian-copyrighted, and if they really are part of the fabric of the universe there is no reason why they should be.) The resemblance in this case, such as it is, is not Lewis's cranky personal invention, as Gopnik hints, but a fact of religious history.

Most embarrassingly, Gopnik appears to not know, or not care, that the Christ-Lion is a symbol that goes all the way back to the New Testament (Revelations 5:4) and has appeared in Christian literature, art, and heraldry repeatedly throughout the centuries. Lewis did not invent it and when Gopnik says that it is "not Christian" to write of a Lion-Christ he talking nonsense.

Sincerely,

Larry
larry gilman
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 233
Joined: Jul 2004
Location: Sharon, VT

Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby larry gilman » April 30th, 2010, 1:11 pm

PS. Because Christ is likened throughout Christian literature to a "sacrifice," harking back to Hebrew animal sacrifices (which is why Christ is more often a "Lamb" than a "Lion" in Christian iconography), one can find some resemblance or resonance between the Christian story and ANY religion which features sacrifice -- including Mithraism, including religions of human sacrifice. The idea that something of value, something alive, perhaps something human or even a god, must be sacrificed so that life can be renewed is one of the commonest religious notions of humankind. I'm not belittling Christianity, mind -- I prefer a religion that connects me to hundreds of thousands of years of religious history -- and I delight in the fact that the Sacrament is highly ritualized cannibalism -- I have no interest in a "spirituality" that is too fastidious or otherworldly for blood.

But for a Gopnik, these elementary facts are just ammo for cheap shots.
larry gilman
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 233
Joined: Jul 2004
Location: Sharon, VT

Next

Return to C. S. Lewis

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered members and 16 guests