(urth) Lupiverse(es)
James Wynn
crushtv at gmail.com
Thu Mar 15 16:22:58 PDT 2012
For the record, I never had any problem seeing the allegorical parts in
LWW or the Silver Chair (the most allegorical of all the stories). TLB
is not even allegorical. It's merely eschatological. Given who Aslan was
revealed to be in "The Magician's Nephew", it is inevitable that he
would play the role he did at the end of the the Narnian world.
If one sees materialism as an "oppositional identity" to Christianity
(and all young materialist in the West do because that is almost always
their only counter-example), then you are likely to feel chaffing at
Aslan's role in TLB. But Aslan's plays the same role in TLB as he does
in ALL the other book. He shows up at the end to sort things out and
sends the characters on their way. But only if one associates
End-of-the-World stories SOLELY with Christianity would one suddenly
realize in TLB that Aslan is Jesus.
But there is sooo much more to Narnia than the Christian allegory.
Almost all of it is, as Lewis called it, a stew with lots of familiar
flavors rather than a lock-and-key allegory. It's just that there are a
few clumps of beefy allegory in there as well.
In fact, being young and recognizing the allegories in the story made
"The Last Battle" quite confusing for me, I think. Because Lewis has a
very idiosyncratic theology (it certainly wouldn't jive with
Presbyterianism). If, because of one's youth, he is unaware that there
are so many subtle shades of Christian belief, he will surely have a WTH
reaction. And I did.
So TLB would be better if it were read by an older, more worldly person
who can both recognize how different Aslan is from our Standard Jesus
and is willing to accept that that is okay. Or someone who has had the
time between the first book to the last to familiarize himself with some
of Lewis's other writers ("The Great Divorce", "Til We Have Faces",
"Pilgrims Regress")
J.
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