rushthatspeaks | oh, right, philology

I was having a bout of insomnia the other morning, so I reread The Magician's Nephew, which is soothing and familiar and gorgeous and also has Jadis of Charn, Queen of Queens, and I found myself thinking about how odd and interesting it is that two perfectly random working-class Londoners wind up being the first King and Queen of Narnia. I remember as a child finding that their names chimed strangely with the sort of name I was used to in history and high fantasy, King Frank and Queen Helen, not the kind of noble and unspellable appellation you usually see, it made for a tonal weirdness...

... and then the names I've read for years without ever really thinking about them hit my frontal cortex, and I recalled that names in C. S. Lewis are always chosen carefully. King Frank. As in honest. Sincere. A pun too obvious to notice. And Helen, of course, both because she is the most beautiful woman in that world-- she is, after all, the only human woman in it-- and as a subtle rebuke to Jadis' poisonous beauty. They're perfectly appropriate names, in one case literally straight out of epic, and he did it so subtly that it has taken me thirty years to figure it out.

Shout at him as I often do (and oh, do I), the man could write.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

wordweaverlynn

Oh, that really is lovely.

From:

redbird

Nice.

On the other hand, high fantasy often goes for the unspellable or at least exotic; actual history gives us Edward, Henry, Stephen, John, James, Maud/Matilda, Anne, and Mary. So not (at least in the books) Hank, Steve, Jack, or Jim, but still ordinary (and short) names to go with Elizabeth and Victoria.

Tolkien wanted "Elessar Telcontar" to sound fancy, and it does, but we're also told that in the common tongue it's close to the king being named Jewel Walker.

From:

shewhomust

Whereas Jadis is archaic French meaning 'formerly, long ago' (as in François Villon's Ballade des belles dames du temps jadis). She is the Old Testament, and will be replaced by the New. Charn itself I suppose is a charnel house, the place of the dead...

He knew what he was doing all right...

From:

anne

Came here to say this. I may have squeaked in my Old French class when I learned that "jadis" meant something.

From:

moon_custafer

Apologies if everyone's already read the Mary Poppins fanfic "Eternity In a Kiss," but it seems tangentially relevant (and I love the explanation of Bert's weird accent): https://archiveofourown.org/works/309757

From:

sovay

the Mary Poppins fanfic "Eternity In a Kiss,"

Well, that is a crossover (several of them) I was not expecting. Thanks!

From:

rushthatspeaks

I had not. That's quite a thing. Thanks!

From:

rushthatspeaks

Oh, nice. I figured it probably meant something, but it also has the resonances with 'jade' as in the jewel and 'jaded' sitting right there, so it works all round.

There's a street quite close to us called Charnwood. I feel this was a bad idea.

From:

shewhomust

OK: Charnwood Forest is an area of Leicestershire, and according to the internets its earlier name was Charley, which is much friendlier. The same source equates the 'charn' bit with a cairn, or heap of stones.

But I suspect that's not what Lewis had in mind...

Edited Date: 2018-02-27 09:47 am (UTC)

From:

ethelmay

I thought he meant "jade" as in 2a in the OED: 2.
a. A term of reprobation applied to a woman. Also used playfully, like hussy or minx.
1560 Nice Wanton in W. C. Hazlitt Dodsley's Sel. Coll. Old Eng. Plays (1874) II. 179 Such a jade she is, and so curst a quean, She would out-scold the devil's dame I ween.

Mr. Carpenter calls Emily (in the _Emily of New Moon_ books) a jade more than once. I am pretty sure when I first read the book I thought he meant it as a pet name (as I'd heard of Jade as a jewel name), the same way Dean calls her Star, and was puzzled that he used it when he was being rude to her ("You write! Jade, get a spoon and learn to cook!"). When I realized what it actually meant I was quite shocked.

From:

asakiyume

I had noticed the resonances of Frank but not Helen! Thanks for sharing this insight and also putting a good spin on it, because having the female characteristic be beauty is not a thing I love, but if it's a matter of contrasting the two types of beauty (grounded and affirmative/generative versus ungrounded and destructive), I can manage it.

And yeah he really can write.

From:

amaebi

I noticed Frank and also Helen, but didn't take Helen so seriously. Partly because she really doesn't get fair ups, poor thing, like Lewis women generally.

From:

sartorias

Oh,yes. Reminds me, I need to reread Till We Have Faces.

From:

lydy

I love that book, have read it many, many times. And I haven't a clue what it's actually about. Can you tell me?

From:

sartorias

Stand by. I think it needs an entire riff, hopefully to spark discussion.

I need to shoehorn in a reread of EVELINA in for book group Saturday, and will pull out the Lewis and try to hammer it in there somewhere.

From:

moon_custafer

I always describe it as “Cupid & Psyche fanfic which also partly answers The Problem of Susan.”

From:

anne

That's the first time I've ever thought it sounded interesting! I'm adding it to my TBR list at the library!

From:

amaebi

It's my favorite Lewis. By far.

From:

kore

It is an amazing book.

From:

lydy

The Cupid and Psyche is text, not sub-text. I'm don't quite see how it answers the Problem of Susan, but I may be being dense, here.

I love the entire book until the last chapter, at which point I'm just lost. I see the riff on substitutionary atonement, but at no other point in the book do I see Orual function as a type of Christ. And I may be blinded by the fact that I actually think Orual has a perfectly good complaint against the gods, such that I cannot see the snswer. But it is not that I reject their answer, it is that I am utterly unable to parse it. And yet, this was clearly the point of the book as far as Lewis is concerned, since Orual's understanding of their answer is the title of the book. There is probably some thematic link back to the fact that she wears a veil her entire adult life, but I honestly do not see it.

Sometimes, when you read a book too young, what you saw utterly swamps anything else that is also there, so that every time you read it, you read it with your twelve-year-old heart, and not with your adult head. Her terrible sister was so very much like my own terrible sister, even to being a red-head, and her father was frighteningly like my own father. There are intense and personal resonances that other people do not have. So, this may prevent me from parsing the final chapter. But man, I cannot parse it at all.

From:

moon_custafer

Which is why I think it only *partly* addresses the Problem of Susan — it does look at the story of Psyche and ask “well what if the sister(s) were not jealous or overly sceptical, but genuinely concerned about Psyche, given her wild-sounding story about being married to someone she’s not allowed to actually see?” Of course Susan had actually been to Narnia, so she’d have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to convince herself that she didn’t really remember it and her siblings were all caught up in some kind of obsessive delusion.

From:

lydy

I had always thought that the Problem of Susan was that as soon as Susan acquired a sexual nature, Lewis condemned her to hell. I believe that the thing he was going for was something along the lines of suffering the little children, and maintaining a child-like nature in order to be closer to God, but his signifiers of her adult-hood were lipstick, nylons, and an interest in boys. Orual redeems none of this, as she remains a virgin her entire life, and hidden behind a veil as well. Lewis really, really doesn't know how to handle female sexuality.

I had forgotten the bit about Susan insisting that Narnia was just a fairy story. That is definitely interesting. Thanks.

From:

kore

I don't really understand the ending (or Part 2 itself) all that well either, but I thought I found a key when I read an academic article that pointed out that when she's repeatedly told "You are, you will be Psyche" (as opposed to "I am Ungit," the stone -- although ungit doesn't mean stone, it's from the Latin ungo/unguo and means ointment or anointment, and oil is used for sanctification, healing, light. So even that has a hidden, blessed meaning). Psyche is the soul wedded to the "bridegroom," Eros, and the Biblical metaphor is that the soul is married to Christ, so not only does Orual see that she helped in all of Psyche's tasks at the very end of the book in that radical re-perspective, but she sees the truth -- that her complaint, her book, is the answer, she's answered herself making it, because it can't be answered. Not that the gods or God or the divine won't answer it, but because it's a mortal question being asked of an immortal truth. It's not exactly a conversion experience, but it's like Augustine in the garden begging for divine wisdom instead of his human understanding. Which is what Orual wants. But the revelation can't be grasped by the logical, finite, human mind, no matter how brilliant it is (a big point with Lewis, who knew how brilliant he was). And that is Aquinas -- the man who brought Aristotle back to Western thought -- supposedly saying at the end of his life that all his brilliant writing "appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me" (Lewis has made Orual like the famous Christian intellectuals, Aquinas and Augustine, in her rationalism and writing, as well as the endgame revelation).

It's also like the ending of Job: I used to be annoyed by it because Job seems to have a perfectly good complaint (why did you ruin my life for no reason, why does God allow evil in the world, why have you bet my existence on a whim, why is everything chaotic and random) and gets basically "BECAUSE I SAID SO (because I'm God)". But a slightly more charitable interpretation is, because human understanding cannot encompass the Divine. It's not "God's ways would make sense if you could see the whole picture," but the NT idea that "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (and I think Lewis must want us to remember that passage, with its emphasis on faces, knowledge and seeing. Orual's not wearing her veil, being seen "face to face," means she has that knowledge). Job doesn't bow down and say he is worthless before God, but "'I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.'" And then God rewards Job even more than he had in the beginning and Job dies "old and full of days." Job isn't punished for questioning God, he's rewarded for seeing that the question he put is meaningless, because he knows God's true nature. Orual's reward is to know not that there is "no answer," but the knowledge of God is the answer.

If the Cupid and Psyche myth is text, the story of Job and other Christian myths are the sub-text and Lewis weaves them together and that's why the book is at once so compelling and also baffling/frustrating, to me anyway. It's really psychologically realistic and also eschatological and symbolic, like Dante. All the events in it are "real," but also mean something else. Just as Psyche's actions look bizarre and dangerous without seeing (knowing) Cupid (the divine) to Orual (even when she's helping), so do the divine's actions in the mortal realm look baffling, cruel, without reason, like the tasks the sisters have to complete. Or Job suddenly losing everything. Orual is Psyche, in that she's gone through the same kind of cruel pointless tests and what's happening seems to make no sense, but in the end she has the answer and sees the truth.

Buuuuuuuuuuut all of this is really dependent in believing in Lewis's belief system and so if you don't share it the book seems to go off the rails completely at the end (at least it did to me when I first read it because I didn't know a lot about the Bible or NT Christian theology and my reaction was basically "WHUT"). -- I think Orual in the book is maybe also supposed to be like a version of the dwarves in the Last Battle who can't see that they're sitting in the middle of Paradise and think they're in a filthy stable, or it's related, anyway. But Lewis treats her much more kindly; the dwarves just refuse to see they're in Paradise. Lewis always plays around a whole lot with knowledge and sight (inevitable for a Classical type) but also perception and deception, like the medieval pre-scientific method fear of the physical senses being tricked and endangering the soul.

(As a side note this is part of what stops Hamlet, not the "man who cannot make up his mind" crap, but he fears that he is being tricked by the devil; the fact that he seeks out physical evidence to prove his hypothesis with "the play's the thing" is how you know it's a post-Renaissance work. If Hamlet has doubts they are theological, "the dread of something after death....puzzles the will," not existential. -- SORRY that just always ticks me off.*)

tl;dr that is my very inept take on it anyway, it's been a while since I've read the book and I always feel unable to put forward the Corinthians-type argument in any kind of compelling way, since I don't have faith in it. (Maddeningly, that argument does make sense if you do believe and seems like the weirdest pie-in-the-sky shit if you don't. Which makes it again like Orual's version of Psyche's myth in the book.)

tl;dr for the tl;dr While this novel can seem very divorced from Lewis's other work (not overtly Christian, female narrator, sympathetic female narrator at that, psychological realism) it can be seen as just as much of a wossname, argument for Christianity, as all the rest of it.

*One reason I have always LOATHED the "LOL Hamlet has Othello's problems and if you switched them everything would be fine" gag is that it implies Othello is dumb, which he isn't, and that Hamlet is too smart for his own good and it would be much better if he put down those books and lived in the real world, or something.

Edited Date: 2018-02-27 11:11 pm (UTC)

From:

lydy

Ok, that's really helpful.

I once read the book of Job during a psychotic break or a profound religious experience, or possibly both. What I heard God say was, "Geez, man, I gave you free will, what more do you want?" Also, God seemed to be saying that I am very, very large, and you are very, very small. If I interfere in your life in the ways that you ask, I will squash you, and your life will be meaningless. There is no practical way for an infinite being to mess about with the finite without overwhelming it utterly. Which, given the premise that God had essentially done just that at the beginning, is an interesting way to view his defense.

In the end, it was always the Problem of Pain that drove me away from the faith. An all powerful and all knowing being set the ball in motion which caused so much pain, and yet refuses to accept responsibility? I call BS.

Nevertheless, this is a much more complex and nuanced view of the book that I previously had, and I thank you for it. The things I love about the book have little to do with Lewis' argument for Christianity. I interact with the Narnia books the same way. I can see what he's talking about, there, but I just don't care. I want talking horses and belligerent mice and terrifying Snow Queens. The Christian allegory can go hang.

From:

kore

I'm glad it was helpful!

God seemed to be saying that I am very, very large, and you are very, very small. If I interfere in your life in the ways that you ask, I will squash you, and your life will be meaningless.

Yyyyyeah that's kind of the interpretation that sticks with me, even though it sort of makes God into a bully. I was fascinated with Job or a while and read a lot of (Christian) commentaries on it, because it's so often used to justify that NT worldview. Whereas in the OT God is a lot more present.

The things I love about the book have little to do with Lewis' argument for Christianity. I interact with the Narnia books the same way.

OH MAN, I still remember the time I realized Narnia was this big Christian allegory (not that long after I'd read it, but long enough). The sense of betrayal was nasty. IIRC that's what Tolkien didn't like about the Narnia books, he thought Lewis had mashed up real sub-creation and allegory (and pop culture stuff like Father Christmas) and that it was creatively wrong.

From:

carbonel

Thank you for taking the time on this! It's very interesting and helps with making sense of the story.

I do in fact have so much difficulty with the essential worldview that it's a shame I don't like beer. Otherwise, I could just say that I'd rather have some malt, if it's all the same to you.

From:

kore

You are welcome!....explicating literature was what I was supposed to do for a living, after all, ahaha.

I understand that Housman reference! //Captain America

From:

kore

Also HOLY WALL OF TEXT, sorry lydy and rush and everybody.

From:

lydy

Love the Wall!

From:

kore

Aw! It was one of those moments when right after you press "send" (or post in this case) you're all like OMG WHAT HAVE I INFLICTED ON EVERYONE, hah.

From:

cahn

And Helen also means light! (which I know because it was one of the names we were thinking about for our kid) Whoa. I had never thought about all of this before.

From:

rushthatspeaks

Names are never accidental in Lewis, but what hits me about the use of Helen here is that he started and never finished a novel focusing on Odysseus in the Iliad, and apparently did a lot of thinking about Helen of Troy for that. So it's a considered reference, something that would definitely have been a regular part of his mental furniture.

From:

sovay

They're perfectly appropriate names, in one case literally straight out of epic, and he did it so subtly that it has taken me thirty years to figure it out.

". . . but Helen had let her hair down and it made a great improvement in her appearance."

I remember re-read where I noticed that Frank, when he is still in London and known only as "the Cabby," is described as "obviously the bravest as well as the kindest person present" because in all the chaos of Jadis' standoff with the police he's the only person trying to get close to Strawberry and calm the badly hurt and terrified horse down. I don't remember ever thinking about the names, except that the book taught me Nellie as a diminutive of Helen. That's nice.

From:

nineweaving

By god, the man could write. Dangerously well, at times, since he had the great gift of inevitability. Of course, the King is Frank; the Queen is Helen.

Nine