by 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.