You Don't Escape to Narnia

Read another book! The slogan is biting, caustic. And in a vacuum, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s a potshot at fundamentalists. But in the meme-thick atmosphere of the internet age, it refers to something very specific: those millennials, many now sporting receding hairlines or crows’ feet around the eyes, who cannot help but refract the world through the lens of Harry Potter.^[1] Every authoritarian is Lord Voldemort; every bureaucrat is Dolores Umbridge; every protest movement is Dumbledore’s Army.

For some, such comparisons are simply good fun. They may even be healthy. Recall C.S. Lewis’s memorable quip to his goddaughter Lucy. “I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books,” Lewis muses in the dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. “As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”^[2]

Lewis’s words are powerfully evocative. They are a promise, a hint that on the far shore of adulthood, meaning and wonder may once again be found. Perhaps the cynicism and sobriety of grown-up life won’t carry the day. Over against that promise, the refrain of read another book lands like an anvil. Cold realism blows in.

It lands hard because the exhortation makes a point. There can be something morbid, even grotesque, about an addiction to children’s fantasy that persists into maturity.^[3] Most contemporary works in the genre follow a familiar script: there is a singularly talented Chosen One, anointed before birth with a special destiny, forced to dwell among those who cannot recognize his or her talents. This “Mary Sue” or “Marty Stu” figure—a largely blank-canvas protagonist with whom the reader is invited to personally identify—is effortlessly talented, oddly attractive, and always fated to prevail. (Ironically, the Potter books are less offensive on this front than most others.) A huge share of contemporary video games take a similar approach, featuring nearly silent, he-man protagonists navigating worlds of easy achievement and progress. Escapism is the business model.

To engage this media is to flee into a vision of life as story, with oneself as the main character. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle. But no nine-to-five job can live up to the promise of a prophesied quest. No hard-fought personal development can match the discovery of one’s latent magical powers. No romantic partner will ever match up to a mysterious elven prince(ss) with a dark secret. By comparison to its fictional equivalents, the world as it is, in all its imperfection, can only be experienced as horror and tragedy. Confrontation with reality must be disillusionment.

What if, we might wonder darkly, Lewis was wrong? What if there really is such a thing as too old for fairy tales?

*        *        *

Something like this is the motive-spring of Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians, one of the most searing treatments of the classic fantasy genre—and its aficionados—ever put to paper.

Grossman’s protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, is a singularly unimpressive young man, reared on a steady diet of fantasy books. Chief among these are stories of the magical world of “Fillory” (an obvious stand-in for Lewis’s Narnia), a magical land of talking animals and mighty kings ruled by the mystical rams Ember and Umber, and which real-world children periodically visit. For Quentin, these stories occupy a decidedly pathological place in his social development:

Like most people Quentin read the Fillory books in grade school. Unlike most people—unlike James and Julia—he never got over them. They were where he went when he couldn’t deal with the real world, which was a lot. (The Fillory books were both a consolation for Julia not loving him and also probably a major reason why she didn’t.)^[4]

Why the appeal? In Quentin’s thinking, “[i]n Fillory things mattered in a way they didn’t in this world. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened.” Even more to the point, in Fillory “[h]appiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.”^[5] Quite a dream indeed—but this dream, it turns out, happens to be real. In a way.

To his (and everyone’s) great surprise, it soon becomes clear that Quentin is actually capable of magic. From there, he’s swept off to the magical academy of Brakebills in upstate New York, where he and his peers learn the risks and rewards of the sorcerous arts. Brakebills is not Hogwarts, with its bright-eyed student population and romantic vision of English boarding-school life. Instead it rather resembles a middling college campus, filled with jaded students who cheat and fight and sleep around. The mystique of magic quickly wears off, replaced by more utilitarian considerations.

But more thrillingly, Quentin comes to learn that Fillory is not merely an imagined world. It is quite real, and he can go there.

Fillory doesn’t live up to Quentin’s childhood imaginings. Despite the fact that Quentin and his friends soon find themselves on a familiar sort of magical mission—figuring out why Ember and Umber have disappeared from the land—the whole experience feels alien, or maybe they feel alien. They certainly do not relate to their Fillory experience in the way the children of the old stories did.

“Jesus,” Josh said. “Jesus! That was a naiad, people! We just saw a river nymph! How cool is that? How cool are we? Huh? Fuckin’ Fillory, people!”

He grabbed Quentin’s shoulders and shook him. He ran at Richard and made him bump chests.

“Can I just say that she was pretty hot?” said Janet.

“Shyeah! I’ll take that over a faun any day,” Josh said. Anaïs swatted him.

“Hey, that’s Penny’s girlfriend you’re talking about,” Janet said. “Show some respect.”

The tension faded, and for a minute they all chattered among themselves, giving one another shit and just geeking out on the sheer alien magic of it all. Was she corporeal? Did she become fluid once she entered the stream? How else could she submerge herself in such shallow water? And how had she canceled Quentin’s spell? What was her function in the magical ecosystem? And what about the horn? Alice was already paging through her worn Fillory paperbacks for references to it—didn’t Martin find a magic horn in the first book . . . ?^[6]

Grossman lets the scene speak for itself. As Charles Taylor might put it, Quentin and his friends are people of a disenchanted world, who’ve stepped back into an enchanted one. They carry with them a very different internal sensibility—exploitative, calculative, lascivious—that affects their ability to respond to the genuine magic set before them. They are not the children of the old stories; like Susan, in their hearts they are no longer friends of Narnia.

And what of Fillory’s “Aslan” figures—Ember and Umber? They turn out to be impotent, weak, unable to do anything about the misery that defines mature human experience:

“Why don’t You help us? Do You have any idea how much we hurt? How much we suffer?”

A stern glance. “I know all things, daughter.”

“Well, okay, then know this.” Janet put her hands on her hips. She had struck an unexpected vein of bitterness in herself, and it was running away with her. “We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and we hate each other and sometimes we wish You or Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world or any other shit-ass world. Do You realize that? So next time You might think about not doing such a half-assed job.”^[7]

Grossman’s novel inverts both the bildungsroman and quest genres, transposing the idealism of the Potter and Narnia stories into a profoundly cynical—and yet horribly recognizable—frame. It is the frame of the modern world.

In Grossman’s telling, one’s longing to escape the real world is an attempt to find outside themselves (in fantasy) what is really a problem within themselves. Quentin is no Eustace Scrubb, redeemed from his sins by the magical grace of Aslan and set on a new road. The badness he and his friends carry with them into Fillory cannot be expunged by the storytime world in which they find themselves. In other words: magic does not make them better people. It makes them worse. Indeed, the moral of Grossman’s story is summed up by Quentin’s sensible friend Alice, who responds to Quentin’s disillusionment by stating the (ostensibly) obvious:

“If you will, for just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”^[8]

With that, Grossman throws down the gauntlet to Lewis (and Rowling), and their readers: read another book. Perhaps Eustace—with his “books of information and . . .  pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools”^[9]—was on to something.

*        *        *

Reading them as an adult, one of the strangest things about Lewis’s Narnia novels is their seemingly obsessive emphasis on the boundaries and limits of the world they depict. Few other fantasy sagas seem so concerned to restrict their universes’ scope.

The Magician’s Nephew depicts the moment of Narnia’s creation, with fecundity and light bursting forth out of “a cool, flat something which might have been earth, and was certainly not grass or wood. The air was cold and dry and there was no wind.”^[10] The scene is bookended by The Last Battle’s stark climax, featuring a giant Father Time who “stretched out one arm—very black it looked, and thousands of miles long—across the sky till his hand reached the Sun. He took the Sun and squeezed it in his hand as you would squeeze an orange. And instantly there was total darkness.”^[11] Narnia begins and ends; it is not infinite, but stands within time’s bounds.

So too, Narnia is spatially restricted. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader depicts, at world’s edge, “a long, tall wave—a wave endlessly fixed in one place as you may often see at the edge of a waterfall.”^[12] And in The Silver Chair, Prince Rilian is tempted by an offer to visit the world’s abyssal bottom, where one may find “bunches of rubies that you can eat and . . . cup[s] full of diamond-juice.”^[13]

Even the age of Narnia’s human visitors is limited. “We're not coming back to Narnia,” Peter remarks ruefully as Prince Caspian draws to a close. “But not Su and me. [Aslan] says we're getting too old.”^[14] There is a reason for this rule: as Aslan explains to Lucy in Dawn Treader, “you must begin to come close to your own world now.”^[15]

There is something curious about all this. Vanishingly few fantasy novels focus so insistently on the boundaries of the world they imagine, especially across discrete narrative episodes. And yet over and over again, Lewis brings Narnia’s beginnings and ends and borders into view. What does this mean?

Throughout the whole saga, one point is made piercingly clear. There is no sense in which one loses themselves in Narnia. One does not go to Narnia in order to explore, out of a sense of sheer curiositas. Instead, one is meant to find something there, something beyond and beneath the surface level of experience, and the physical limits of Narnia all exist in service of that pedagogical end.

Aslan even explains as much to Lucy in Dawn Treader: “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”^[16] Beyond the edge of the world, glimpsed but never attained, is Aslan’s country. So too, the whole encounter with the fantastical world of Narnia is not sufficient to itself, but always points beyond itself. Aslan is already there in the world of the Pevensie children’s upbringing, and they do not need to go to Narnia to find him. What is required of the Pevensies in England—and what is acquired within Narnia—is the ability to see differently, to see more than the given. It is the ability, or at least the desire, to see God.

Just consider the sheer intertextuality of the Narnia books themselves. Not only are they children’s fantasy novels, often centered on quests and adventures, but they are distinctly Christian allegories. Beyond that, they are often social commentaries on Western politics and culture: what else is Jadis’s Deplorable Word, the weapon that destroys the land of Charn, but the command to drop the atom bomb? And if Michael Ward is right, then beyond that, the books are also allegories for the seven medieval planets.^[17]

This is the real reason so many would-be imitators have tried and failed to pen the next Narnia: throughout the Chronicles, the very same text conveys three or four separate levels of meaning. So too, for Lewis, does the world of everyday experience.

Narnia, that is to say, is not an escape. By its nature, it cannot be. Rather, adventures in Narnia are conditioning experiences by which individuals come to see reality properly. As The Last Battle concludes in eschatological splendor, the faun Mr. Tumnus remarks to Lucy that “you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner England no good thing is destroyed.”^[18] Exactly so.

The Narnia books carry within them the very answer to Grossman’s critique. The problem is not that Quentin and his friends yearn for something more and deeper, a lasting happiness that endures forever. The problem is that their conception of happiness has collapsed into an immanent frame.  Instead of a metanarrative—a way of perceiving the world and everything within it—Quentin and his friends want a “main quest,” a video game-style list of tasks to accomplish in order to obtain some fleeting good. They want something more thrilling than their mundane terrestrial lives.

In his encounter with Fillory, Quentin wants to lose himself, not find himself. And that is exactly the opposite of what the Narnia stories teach.

Viewed this way, Grossman’s The Magicians is not an indictment of theological hope. It is merely a pungent illustration of the modern predicament. There is no reason that, in principle, one cannot glimpse a glory beyond the world, wherever one roams. But this is something that must be taught, not seized. It is something that requires submission to limits—or better, beyond submission, an embrace.

*        *        *

Perhaps, in the end, “read another book” is the wrong bon mot. Perhaps the better charge is read more carefully—for the books that are really worth reading, and worth reflecting on, are those that point beyond themselves. The best stories always have.

Tara Isabella Burton has written recently that “[t]o love Narnia properly, I think, is to love ordinary people, and ordinary lives, and ordinary pubs, and to see in them a glimpse of God’s glory.”^[19] Just so. To read these stories well is to learn how to read the world better. This is the opposite of withdrawing, fleeing into nostalgia for a life without responsibilities. It is to train oneself to see more truly, to grasp the world’s challenges and sorrows as formative, not meaningless.

And that, in the end, may be the most grown-up thing of all.

Footnotes