(urth) OT: The Problem of Susan

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

On Sun, 07 Nov 2004 20:15:03 -0600, Adam Stephanides
<adamsteph at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Thanks for your courteous reply; I'll try to keep my answer in kind.

Looks like you did a better job of it than I; I've been grumpy of late.


> > If I had to name the three "big hot" names in fantasy right now, they'd
> > be Pullman and Gaiman and Mieville. Mieville has also dumped on
> > Lewis (though not as deeply as Tolkien "the wen on the arse of
> > fantasy literature" Tolkien).  "The Problem of Susan" makes the
> > trifecta.
> 
> Undoubtedly you're more in touch with the current fantasy scene than I am,
> but are these really the three hottest names in fantasy right now? Hot, no
> doubt; but hotter than anyone else? (And shouldn't Susanna Clarke be on 
> the list?)

I think it's a bit soon for that. One hot book does not a hot name make; 
I hesitated even about Mieville. 

> I wasn't aware that Mieville had criticized Lewis (or Tolkien); I've never
> read anything by him, fiction or nonfiction.

Mieville is a very political socialist. That he would diss old religious 
righties (though not what we would call the Religious Right today)
such as the core Inklings really isn't all that surprising. He's pretty
much following in the feetstep of Michael Moorcock here, down to
touting Mervyn Peake as the guy who should have got the props
Tolkien did get. (And Peake certailny did deserve more than he got
in his lifetime.)

>  For that matter, I've never
> read Pullman's notorious attack on Lewis: anybody have a citation?

http://books.guardian.co.uk/guardianhayfestival2002/story/0,11873,726818,00.html
might be of some use.


> >> If I give all your brothers and sisters candy, and I don't give you any,
> >> then I've denied you candy, even though I still have the option to give you
> >> candy later.
> >
> > The analogy is badly flawed. If you give my brothers and sisters
> > candy, and I'm not there, but you give me some when I show up,
> > you haven't denied me anything. Susan won't "show up" until
> > she's dead.
> 
> Well, I'd been taking it for granted that the other "friends of Narnia"
> didn't just "show up" in the afterlife: Aslan caused the railway accident.
> Does your reading differ?

Let me put it this way. If I tell you that seven people have died and
gone to Heaven, and one is still alive, do you think that the one has
been punished in some way? To equate a young and violent death
with candy strikes me as just a bit wonky.

Again, I think Lewis was in many ways a sloppy writer. The ending of 
_The Last Battle_ is actually one of the weakest parts of the whole series, 
because Lewis clumsily wrapped things up with an "and they all got run 
over by a truck" ending.  Gaiman _is_ right to point out that, because it 
utterly ignores the effect of the trainwreck on the survivors, this is a bad 
way to pull a happy ending ouf of a hat; I've thought so myself for years. 

My basic problem with it, and I stand by this, is that Gaiman doesn't
deal with the problem of Susan at all; Susan Pevensie lived in a 
particular world where a particular set of things were true, even if she
came to deny some of them. Gaiman has written about a vaguely 
similar character in a completely different world where those things 
are not true, and so it does not (in my opinion) provide any real
conclusion to, or even any real commentary upon, "the problem of
Susan." 

This is vaguely similar to Delany's very apt criticism of Robert 
Heinlein's _Starship Troopers_: It posits a universe with certain 
basic moral and ethical postulates, and the rest of the book follows
pretty logically from those postulates. But if you don't accept the
postulates, the whole thing falls apart.

Gaiman doesn't accept the fundamentally Christian postulates of
the Narnia books, which is absolutely his right. But if you can't
accept the postulates of a world, you shouldn't write a story set
in that world. "The Problem of Susan" falls apart because it 
simply doesn't fit logically with the texts to which it nominally 
a coda.

> > Oh, my. You mean a Christian writer illustrated the idea that
> > excessive concern with Things Of The World [tm] is Not
> > Necessarily A Good Thing? How shocking! What a sexist!

Please forgive my sarcasm. As I said, I've been rather grumpy
lately.

> [...] I'll try to make my point clearer. The stereotype 
> of adolescent girls when Lewis was writing, and to a large part today, is that
> they are preoccupied with "nylons and lipstick and invitations." To the
> extent that a reader accepts in this stereotype (which, like many
> stereotypes, has an element of truth in it), she could reasonably conclude
> from THE LAST BATTLE that most teenage girls had, at least temporarily,
> shut themselves out of Heaven.

I have to disagree strenuously. "Most teenage girls" have not had the 
experience of Narnia to turn their backs upon. Since the story does not,
in any case, address the situation of "most teenage girls," but one 
particular girl, the question then is whether Susan has "at least
temporarily shut [herself] out of Heaven."

Frankly, we know almost nothing about Susan at the time of the series,
_except_ 

(a) that she has ceased (or claims to have ceased)  to believe that 
her adventures in Narnia ever actually happened, and 

(b) that she's become a bit of a social butterfly - something, by the way, 
clearly foreshadowed at the beginning of _The Voyage of the "Dawn 
Treader"_, when Lewis explains why Lucy and Edmund are at the 
Scrubbs' house without their older siblings.

(a) Not believing in Narnia anymore, while it may be foolish, even 
delusional, does not seem to me to automatically mean that Susan had 
abandoned the Christian faith (which is clearly what the children are 
expected to follow in the "real" world: viz. Aslan's words at the end of 
_Dawn Treader_, to the effect - since I don't have the text at hand I'm 
quasi-quoting from memory - that "I brought you here so that you would 
know me better when you met me in your world.") 

(a.1) Since Narnia is not their world, Aslan is not, in that name, their 
savior; their path to Heaven is through "the name of Christ Jesus." (That 
this name is never directly invoked at any point in the books is part of 
Lewis's overall plan and intent, which was to sneak Christian ideas and 
imagery past children's intellectual cynicism and into their imaginations.) 

(a.2) Further, it's clear that Aslan isn't the only path into Heaven, given
that the Pevensie parents, who (so far as we know) never met Aslan, are 
waiting for them in Heaven at the series' end.

(a.3) At any rate, Susan at the end of the Narnia books for all we know be 
a completely faithful,churchgoing Anglican. 

(b) Which leaves the question of whether being a social butterfly is a vanity
sufficient (in Lewis's mind) to shut oneself out of Heaven, an idea I find 
extremely dubious, and which I very much doubt you could support from 
the text. 

As a final note on the "lipstick and invitations" thing - it should be 
noted that the remark is made by a younger child, who seems to 
rather resent the older child's having abandoned their clique, and
while Lewis was a rather sloppy writer, he was .generally pretty good
about keeping straight the points of view of his various characters.

   
> On the other hand, there is as far as I know nothing in any of the Narnia 
> books to suggest that adolescent boys, by following their usual interests,
> are shutting themselves out of Heaven.

This would be relevant only if. I might add, however, that if we had a
picture in the series of an adolescent boy following "their usual interests" 
- which, based on my own experience as an adolescent boy, are mostly 
sex - it would doubtless be, ah, rather problematical whether that boy
was Heaven-bound.


> Hence, it's easy to see how a female reader might conclude that the Narnia
> books denigrate her sex--whether or not that was Lewis's conscious intent.

H'mmm. "You forgot Poland" - or in this case, Lucy, who is far and away 
the series' most important child-character, the most identified-with of the
eight children who visit Narnia. She is also the most loved of Aslan. If
Susan is a "problem," Lucy is almost the opposite problem, a woman-on-
a-pedestal. Fortunately, we have the additional cases of Polly and 
Pole, both of whom are quite normal, if a bit tomboyish, girls, neither
as allfired holy as Lucy nor "taken up with lipstick" like Susan - though
Polly, at least, is likely to have gone through that phase, and still winds
up in Aslan's Paradise.


> In any case, I don't believe that Gaiman's implied critique of the sex roles
> in the Narnia books is based solely upon Susan's temporary or permanent
> exclusion from Heaven (which, as I said in my last post, is not what Gaiman
> is most concerned with). Greta's dream, which expresses this critique most
> vividly, is based on a scene from the first of the books, as you point out;
> and the cover of the Narnia book the professor sees in her dream is also
> based on a scene from one of the earlier books, iirc.

Unfortunately, by completely reimaging the scene, Gaiman makes any
critique of Lewis based on that dream problematic. If he had stuck to
what actually happened in that scene, and shown how it was "sexist" -
which it is not, really, though the book as a whole _is_, rather - he'd
have been playing a bit more fairly. But the scene he chose to present
simply has no real bearing on what Lewis actually wrote.

--Dan'l

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