(urth) OT: The Problem of Susan

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

I've been been slowly plodding through FLIGHTS for the past few weeks.
I'm finding most of it dull: fantasy mostly doesn't work for me at short 
lengths, except for contemporary/dark/urban fantasy, and only about half 
of _that_ in this book is actually any good. So I've avoided this thread 
until I got to the Gaiman story. I generally like Gaiman's work, from 
_Black Orchid_ and _The Sandman_ to _American Gods_ and 
_Coraline_, so I was looking forward to this story & didn't want to know
anything about it in advance.

Well, I read it this morning, and did not like it at _all_. I'm not really
surprised; it's currently fashionable to trash Lewis and especially the
Narnia books, and Gaiman is nothing if not fashionable. In this case,
I wish he hadn't been.

Charles and Rostrum are quite right in their interpretation of Susan's
obsession with "lipstick, boys, and invitations," but they miss 
something even more important - Susan is most emphatically _not_ 
"denied Heaven." This is the "Pullman Heresy" that is, I think, at the
heart of the trash-Lewis fad.

Susan is not damned; she simply doesn't die in the train crash. The 
books neither say _nor imply_ anything about her eternal fate, and 
in the one place that I know of where Lewis had anything to say 
about it - in a letter to a child - he was of the opinion that God kept
her alive so that she could come back to Him by some other route.
(That's from memory, so the wording is probably nowhere near 
CSL's.) 

Lewis was not a Universalist, but he was (by the standard of most
orthodox Christians) almost unbelievably optimistic about God's
will that "all the world be saved" and His ability to do so; cf. _The
Great Divorce_, in which he suggests (albeit in a fictional form
that allowed him to avoid, at some level, responsibility for the
idea)  the possibility that even those already in Hell might be 
saved. The assumption that he fated Susan for damnation would 
almost cetainly offend him deeply. Like near-'bout eveyrthing else
in Narnia, the "lipstick" bit is there for a polemic point - a point
further driven in by the statement that Susan is "no longer a
Friend of Narnia," that she regards Narnia as a "game we used
to play." 

Perhaps that last point is the most telling, but it's also one that 
is too easily overinterpreted. The heart of Edmund's betrayal
in _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ is his pretending,
after getting into Narnia, that he and Lucy were "playing." Then,
too, in _The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader"_, Eustace believes 
that the Pevensie children "play games about Narnia" until he 
winds up there himself. So it's easy to see Susan's dismissing 
Narnia as a "game" as a sign of ultimate rejection, of damnation.

But in terms of such symbols, the Narnia books are (to be quite
frank) written very sloppily. There is very little real consistency
from one book to the next; each has its own set of polemic
points to make, and its own set of allegorical symbols to make
them. The only really constant symbol is Aslan himself. 

Heck, I'm just sort of wandering on here. The point is, that
Gaiman bases his story on an interpretation of Susan's fate 
that I believe would be far from the intentions of Susan's 
creator. I'm sorry he didn't take Lewis's own beliefs into 
account in writing "The Problem of Susan," because there is
a very real question about Susan's fate; a talented writer who
wasn't kneejerkingly hostile to Christianity might make an 
interesting story about what Aslan/God does to bring Susan 
back to Himself, now that Narnia is gone.

But Gaiman is clearly not the writer to do it.

--Blattid

-- 
www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
"Saddam would still be in power if he were the President
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     -- The Forty-Third President, 10/8/04