Chronicles of Narnia

Wait, I've got it. No one came into our world through the wardrobe... because the door was shut.

That would be a great gag after all those warnings to not get trapped in wardrobes.

No, Eustace and Jill came through by being called by Aslan, the same way he did with the cabbie's wife.

Speaking of the cabbie, the Medieval Stasis trope notes the oddity that a Victorian cabby set up a medieval kingdom. Thought he Victorians were obsessed with the middle ages, so that could still work (seriously, half the ideas we have about medieval society and torture devices were cooked up by Victorians).

Edited by Redmess on Aug 5th 2021 at 10:50:20 AM

"Wait, I've got it. No one came into our world through the wardrobe... because the door was shut."

I like it.

Ah, you're right. I misremembered the role the rings ended up playing (that is, not much) in the Last Battle.

The rings are pretty useless in general. Like, you can use them to leave Earth really easily, but the actual Wood Between the Worlds sounds really, really difficult to navigate. The only identifying mark Polly and Diggory left was a strip of moss or something cut off next to the Earth pool and that's pretty unhelpful for people coming from Earth who can just mark it themselves. Knowing that the Narnia pool is in the vicinity of the Earth pool and is not the dried up Charn pool is really not helpful, especially with how muddled the Wood tends to make visitors.

If the characters in Last Battle had gotten their hands on the rings, it probably would have been a disaster, especially since with Earth, Narnia and Charn all apparently in close proximity to each other, the consequences for picking the wrong pool could be really bad. About the only saving grace with Jadis is that she couldn't even remotely stand the Wood and apparently couldn't remember it at all (this is a weird element) so she'd have no incentive to go after the rings on her own.

Edited by Zendervai on Aug 5th 2021 at 6:58:19 AM

Lewis seems to go with the idea that generally, creatures tend to only hold memories of the world they are actually living in. Hence why they pretty much lost all memory of earth while in Narnia for years. Other worlds become like a dream to you, at least with many humans, and it takes being in a group recollecting stories to keep those memories of other worlds fresh.

Which may also account for why Susan started forgetting about Narnia and thinking it really was a dream. She probably started skipping those meetings.

Makes me wonder if Jadis has actually forgotten she's from Charn.

She certainly seems to have forgotten about those other humans who came to Narnia. She barely seems to know what a human is supposed to look like.

On the topic of translations, an interesting choice is how Turkish Delight is translated. As most of you probably know, Turkish Delight isn't nearly as tasty as the book would have you believe, though certainly considered a rare delicacy at one point.

The Dutch translation just foregoes this entirely and translates it with speculaas, which actually is a tasty treat in the Netherlands.

I wonder what other details were translated. This translator apparently was keen on localisation, as she also left out the Sherlock Holmes reference, which I'd think would be no problem at all, given how famous he is worldwide.

Uh tbf it's a taste values thing. I actually rather like the taste as I grew up with it but can understand why people wouldn't as it's not traditionally sweet.

Oh, I'm sure some people like it, but it is, as they say, an acquired taste.

It is also apparently a candy that does not take well to storage.

To this day I've never had a Turkish delight. I had no idea what it even was throughout my whole childhood.

Actually now that I think about it, I'm not sure I have ever even heard about it outside of the context of Narnia.

There's a well-known Dutch novel named Turks Fruit, which translates to Turkish Delight (it also has a movie adaptation).

A quote from this article:

Yeah, that makes sense. Lewis needed a lost sheep, and Susan was the only fit. It worked thematically, but not narratively, where it felt out of place for the character (as the author explains elsewhere in this article), and feels callous because of the reactions of the Friends of Narnia (who admittedly don't know they're dead at the time).

I wonder if this is part of why Tolkien hated allegory.

I read the article and while I agree with much, at times it feel it try to make lewis responsable for autor pain when it come to susan in a way is all to remicent of how fandom often feel about the autor that im not enterely confortable.

Now with Susan one coment said it best: part of it naria series is childhood and in a way matter because they are child, is also kinda while Lucy is nearly the protagonist in the whole series, is also why lewis dislike so much the british system because in part it treat children less as children and more as less devoped adult who should be grow up already(dickes feel the same).

In this case Susan is kinda like that, no only she become a disbeliver, she become "too old" in the same way teenager talk about their own experience as silly things that arent important to the true things that "matter".

I found this quote of lewis would probably matter here.

"“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” "

I think it is reasonable for this particular work, Lewis has always been a very present and opinionated narrator in his works, so it is hard to ignore that when talking about Susan.

Maybe, I just wary of those type of expresion for past dealing with fandoms.

Now dealing with the pages, I found this: https://www.tor.com/2021/04/28/a-short-detour-c-s-lewis-the-shoddy-lands-and-ministering-angels/

In Peggy’s world, anything not specifically centered on her is “shoddy.” Trees are green blobs. People are indistinct unless she finds something of particular interest; some men have detailed faces, some women have clothes that are detailed. The only flowers that look like flowers are the kind that could be cut and put in a vase for her. Store windows are marvelously detailed. At the center of it all is a Gigantic Peggy—although more conventionally beautiful than Peggy herself—in a bikini at first, and later fully naked. The don is horrified by her body, partly because of her size, and partly because it seems artificial to him, and partly because (and I am not making this up) he really dislikes tan lines.

(...)

Lewis’s point here is that Peggy has become focused on things of lesser importance. It’s not that flowers and bikinis and jewelry are wrong, it’s that they have become the definitional “things” of her reality. And it’s not that she sees herself wrongly overall—Lewis (ahem, I mean “the don”) recognizes her, after all. It’s that she had made her own self too large, and that she is overly focused on her body image, on her appearance, and on looking like a woman in a magazine. The don finds this “idealized” version of Peggy repulsive and even bemoans the fact that as Peggy seeks this idealized self, she must not even realize that she’s making herself into something that is less attractive, not more.

As a result, Peggy has put herself in the center of the world. The only things that interest her are centered on her, or tools she finds useful in some way—jewelry and flowers and her body. The only faces of men that interest her are those that look at her with appreciation. She hears but has not answered the requests of her fiancé to “let me in.” She hears but has not responded to God asking to be let in “before night falls.”

(...) Peggy (and the don’s) issue is literally one of focus. They are preoccupied with trivialities, preventing them from true relationships, whether mundane or divine.

So this probably show a lot of context of lewis on issue with susan: in one part he is saying Susan become vain, dealing with pointless details and probably materialims, the best male counterpart in the series is Andrew from nephies mage: he is pretty a prepotent old man who always think he is right, demand respect he isnt earned just for being older, who convinced himself so hard that he didnt hear Aslan talk and cant see Jadis as nothing but a sexy lady or see posibility to rapid growing nature of aslan, that tell you everything of him.

The issue here is threefold: first is abrupt, it feel susan was just sudenly drop with little fanfare and got a handwave response at the best of that, which it become kinda cringe worthy to see their brothers just shurg their shoulder in what it is their last aventure(which is probably another factor, Susan was left out out of the most important part which means is "permanent"), second that said handwave is hard to get unless you kinda sorta get exactly what Lewis is saying and third is....well, we know it that it is frame in a sexist coment in that susans lost her sight for being pretty much a materialistic and vain silly girl like all teenagers does.

Well, like the article pointed out, Lewis needed a character for the role of "true believer turning away from God", and Susan was really the only one who remotely fit without destroying her previous character development entirely (as it would have done for Edmund or Eustace).

It is a problem of allegorizing your characters: it doesn't always feel natural or fit the characters from the actual story. Now you see why Tolkien hated the practice.

I think the best way to summarize it would be: "Understandable, but poorly executed."

Like, I get it. I don't even not like the idea that one of the kids got so obsessed with the trappings of the here and now that they purged their old life from their minds. And for narrative purposes Susan got the short end the straw simply by process of elimination.

It's that last part that I think made people look sideways though. Lewis seems to think he did a good job foreshadowing this was going to happen, but clearly a good number of readers disagreed. An allegory is fine when woven organically through the story, but in this case it felt a little tacked on.

It felt rather sudden. A few more scenes with Susan would have helped. It would also have helped if the other characters didn't seem so nonchalant about it, but then I guess Lewis didn't want to show them grieving over her being left behind.

Lots of people fall off religion as their lives go on, whether because life is going well for them or because they get into an edgy phase where they think that pointless nihilism is "cool" or they think they've "outgrown" the need for it.

Or, you know, because they stop believing.

Susan is a pretty interesting case because she's lived, breathed, and experienced Narnia firsthand for years. She's had more time with Aslan personally than 99% of Narnians ever did. Heck, I'm pretty sure she spent more time as an adult in Narnia than she has on Earth by the time the story ends.

I have to wonder if it was some unspoken, unintentional peer pressure that caused her to literally reject reality. None of the people in the "adult" social circles she wanted to get into knew of Narnia and would probably look at her like she grew an extra head if she started talking about it. I think sadly it was just easier to erase it from her mind, tell herself it was all fantasy, in her desperate quest to obtain and then hold onto the lifestyle she told herself was the peak of adulthood.

We also have to account for the vague magic that causes people to forget about other worlds after a while if they don't refresh their memory. Normally epressed memory is one thing, magically enforced repressing of memories is quite another.

It could also be that she wanted to grow up too fast. It's a common trope in fiction, characters that are still children or teenagers wanting to be seen as grown-up and mature and thus dismissing all their old likes as "childish fantasies".

The process of elimination thing is pretty damning, honestly. Susan is by far the flattest of the four kids and spends huge chunks of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian with zero lines and does very little. She comes off like she’s just there to balance out the kids and have two boys and two girls. Jill has a similar issue in the Silver Chair where there’s huge chunks of the book where she has no lines and Eustace and Puddleglum have a ton, but it’s a lot less obvious there because Jill has way more agency as the one main girl. (Polly has a similar but not identical situation where Magician’s Nephew just ignores what’s going on with her when she’s not actually present.)

Susan being the flattest and least developed of the original four kids with very little agency of her own in the books leading to her being the one to reject Narnia comes off a little weird when you realize that, because it kind of comes off like the person who had no say and just got dragged along with everything not liking it when her family wouldn’t shut up about it.

There’s also Susan growing up in the post-WWII era where makeup became more affordable and styles changed a lot and the idea that she wanted to explore that but drifted away from her siblings and these other people she doesn’t really know that well because they wouldn’t take it seriously makes a lot of sense.