The Lion, the Witch and the Metaphor

QUESTION

The Lion, the Witch and
the Metaphor
THOUGH it’s fashionable nowadays to come
out of the closet, lately folks are piling in –into the wardrobe, that is, to
battle over who owns Narnia: secular or Christian lovers of C. S. Lewis’s
stories.
Children,
of course, have been sleeping through the magic cupboard into the mythical land
for 50 years without assistance from pundits or preachers (though fauns and
talking badgers have been helpful). But now that the chronicle’s first book,
are fighting to claim the action. And that means analyzing it. Or not.
The
7-year-old who sat next to me during a recent showing said, “This is really
scary.” It was scary when the White Witch kills the lion Aslan, who dies to
save the loathsome Edmund before rising to help him and his sibling vanquish
evil. But adults reducing the story to one note- their own-are even scarier.
One side dismisses the hidden Jesus figure as silly or trivial, while the other
insists the lion is Jesus in a story meant to proselytize. They’re both wrong.
As
a child, I never knew that Aslan was “Jesus.” And that’s a good thing. My
mother recently remarked that if she’d known the stories were Christian, she
wouldn’t have giving me a book-which are among my dearest childhood memories.
But
parents today will not be innocent of the religious subtext, considering the
drumbeat of news coverage and Disney’s huge campaign to remind churchgoing
audiences of the films religious themes. The marketing is so intense that the
religious Web site HollywoodJesus.com even worried that ham-fisted promotion
might ruin it for non- Christians.
But
a brief foray into Criticism 101 shows that the wardrobe is big enough for
everyone. Symbolism, for example, is when one thing stands for another but is
not the thing itself. Psychoanalysts, for instance, have interpreted “The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ as Dorothy’s quest for a penis – that is, retrieving
the witch’s broomstick. Does that symbolism – if you buy it- make Dorothy a
pervert? No, because it’s hidden. That’s the point. Overt and covert meaning
can exist independently.
Those
with a fiduciary, rather than phallic bent, might prefer the theory that L.
Frank Baum’s Oz stories are a Populist manifesto, with the yellow brick road as
the gold standard, the Tin Man as alienated labor, Scarecrow as oppressed
farmers, and so on. (And surely some Jungian theory about the collective
unconscious explains why both Oz and Narnia are populated by four heroic
characters fighting an evil witch.)
Yes,
its allegory land, a place that strings symbols together to create levels of
meaning, which a determined scholar has actually quantified as ranging from two
to seven layers. (No word on why not eight.) Allegory, the oldest narrative
technique, often involves taking animals, from Aesop’s fox with the grapes to
Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle, supposedly a Hitler figure.
Does
that twist the Seuss tale into a political treatise on fascism? No, it adds
another level for adults, it teaches morals (even the meekest can unseat the
powerful, etc.), and it’s fun – when plain little Mack burps, he shakes the bad
king Yertle from his throne built on turtles.
But
which layer is more important – the surface or beneath? Deep thinkers
specialize in hidden meanings (building demands, of course, for their
interpretive expertise). And Oxford English professor, Lewis himself explored
the depths in his scholarly books. But he also defended the literal, lamenting
in his essay “On Stories” how modern criticism denigrates the pleasure of a
good yarn- and that was 50 years ago.
While
critics today call it “fallacy” to interpret a work by siting the author’s
intention, Lewis left a road map for us marked with special instruments for not
annoying children. In his essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to
Be Said,” he denounced as “moonshine” the idea that he wrote the Narnia
chronicles to proselytize the young. The lion Aslan, he wrote, bounded into his
imagination from his experience as a Christian, coming to him naturally as
should all good writing.
“Let
the picture tell you their own moral,” he advised in “On Three Ways of Writing
for Children.” “If they don’t show you a
moral, don’t put one in.”
In
keeping with that advice, the Narnia chronicles don’t beat you on the head-nor
does the faithful movie adaptation. If everyone stays on his own level-the
surface for adventurers, and the depths for believers- we can all enjoy, so
long as the advertisers stay out of the way.

Answer these question
1. Identify
the two conflicting groups (or viewpoints) In this article and describe
characteristics of each

2. Summarize
Seigel’s thesis and explain why you do or do not agree.

3. In
the final paragraph, Seigel differentiates the two categories as “adventures”
and “believers.” Are her subgroups consistent,
exclusive, and distinct? For
example, could a reader be both an adventure and a believer? How might a third
(or fourth) category affect Seigel’s argument?

ANSWER:

REQUEST HELP FROM A TUTOR