(urth) OT: The Problem of Susan

[Adam Stephanides]

A couple of comments before we lahy this to rest (as we seem to have reached
the point of talking past each other):

on 11/27/04 6:11 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes at danldo at gmail.com wrote:

>> [...] there's nothing in the professor's
>> thoughts, as we're shown them, to indicate that she's Susan (I could be
>> wrong about this, since it's been a long time since I read the Narnia
>> books.) 
> 
> I read it thus: The Professor has continued in the line of denial
> that some think is the only meaningful interpretation of the last
> we hear of her in _TLB_. Because she still denies Narnia there
> would be no such hints in her thoughts.

But Gaiman could have figured out some way to have the Professor's thoughts
reveal that she had been to Narnia without admitting to herself that Narnia
was real; after all, he's a clever writer, and likes to do that sort of
thing. Or he could have put some other sort of clue in her thoughts that
would show she was Susan, which again he didn't, as far as I can tell. His
not doing either of these is, to my mind, indirect but fairly strong
evidence that the Professor is not intended to be Susan.
 
>> If you do think that the professor is Susan, then your dislike of the story
>> is more understandable. While I don't think, as you apparently do, that it
>> would be illegitimate for a writer to try and continue Susan's story while
>> rejecting Lewis's Christian worldview, I agree that "The Problem of Susan,"
>> if read as such, doesn't continue Susan's story in an interesting way.
> 
> H'mmmph.  Not what I said. I said
> 
>> 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."

Apologies for misinterpreting you; I took the "particular set of things"
that Gaiman denies to be the Christian world-view, and Aslan as the
equivalent of Christ. If that isn't what you meant, it's not clear to me
what you did mean.
 
> Note that I did not say it would not be acceptable to reject the Christian
> worldview in such a sequel - but if you are to reject it, you must
> acknowledge and deal with its influence on what has gone before, not
> simply decide that Aslan and the White Witch were lovers with no
> explanation offered at all. (Yeah, yeah, I know, it's a dream sequence.
> It's also the most blatant example of what I'm talking about.)

Whether or not the Professor is Susan, Greta's dream is not real. If Narnia
isn't real in Gaiman's story, then of course Greta's dream isn't real; and
if the Professor is Susan, then Greta's dream can't be real, because in it
Susan gets eaten as a child (I take it we can exclude the possibility that
Narnia being real but the professor isn't Susan.) The dream is a
metaphorical "critique" (see my last post) of the Narnia books, not Gaiman's
version of "what really happened in _TLtWatW_."

--Adam