The Narnian Schism: Reading the Christian Subtext as Other in the Children's Stories of C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis' unique position as the writer of seminally popular fantasy for children and as one of the foremost Christian thinkers of the twentieth century has given rise to two persuasions among his followers. On one hand, professional critics of children's literature read Lewis carefully because the chronicles of Narnia are complex, masterful, and popular. On the other hand, Lewis' Christian critics read his work carefully because the same stories have a subtext of Christian traditional literature. In some cases these two branches of Lewis' critical host accommodate each other hospitably. (In particular this occurs in some of the literary journals that address both religion and literature, but these tend not to focus on children's literature per se.) This article, however, concerns itself with a less comfortable possibility that may be a case of reverse othering.

In Lewis' days at Oxford, and today, the academy has shown a tendency to define itself as a secular environment. Paul Piehler remembers, "in Lewis' Oxford it was fashionable to say things like 'Of course his academic work is quite brilliant, but why on earth does he waste everyone's time with all this religious stuff?'" (199). While this may seem like an isolated anecdote, Piehler's account reveals an atmosphere among scholars that persists today in an assumption that since academic study is to be accessible to diverse religious groups, it should be non-religious. Alison Shell writes, "some academics still refuse to acknowledge that the late twentieth century is supposed, in the West, to be post-Christian" (7). And because respect for diversity tends to increase the appreciation people have towards each other's religious beliefs, it can to some degree encourage literary critics to work without reference to faith concerns, and as a matter of sensitivity, to try to set aside issues concerning religious bias. Shell may indicate one of the reasons underlying the Narnian schism when she says that, "any historian who acknowledges in print that membership of an exclusivist religious body has suggested his or her lines of research breaks a taboo, agitating the smooth waters of academic agnosticism" (7). If this is true, then we begin to see the outlines of conflict between "exclusivist" religious beliefs in the stories of C.S. Lewis and the working culture of "academic agnosticism," whose job it is to explicate those works. Thus, even though perhaps the cultural history of English departments may have historically privileged the Christian as "us" and anyone else as "them," this situation has a reverse image within the intellectual bubble we know as literary criticism, where Lewis' Christianity is other.

The consequences are a familiar litany from the history of othering: we may sometimes ignore uncomfortable features of the other, but this elision comes at the expense of accurate reading. To help secular critics mend this rift, I suggest in this article that Lewis' mythic allegory, which is deeply informed by his Christian faith, can bridge the Narnian schism because its rich images of faith and morality are relevant to Christian and non-Christian readers alike. To read Narnian allegory in the spirit of openness that we ask in any case of othering should inform secular criticism with the creative power inherent in any encounter with otherness. Unfortunately, Lewis did not write the Narnia stories as allegories, and secular criticism is a catch-all term that designates too many approaches under one rubric to consider fairly in a brief work. Therefore, this article can only begin with the caveat that, as Lewis states in The Allegory of Love, "Allegory, in some sense, belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind, in general" (44), and so to find allegory in the minds of readers instead of the writer does sometimes still admit to it being considered allegory. With this in mind, and by explaining Paul Piehler's understanding of the mythic aspect of what I call Narnian allegory, I will read some Narnian scenes using certain aspects of Freudian psychoanalytic theory and the moralan and Lawrence...