Past Watchful Dragons: Fantasy and Faith in the World of C. S. Lewis

Mythlore, Spring-Summer, 2008 by John D. Rateliff

PAST WATCHFUL DRAGONS: FANTASY AND FAITH IN THE WORLD OF C. S.

LEWIS. Ed. Amy H. Sturgis. Altadena, California: The Mythopoeic Press, 2007.

222 pages. $20.00. ISBN 978-1-887726-11-5.

THIS, THE MYTHOPOEIC PRESS'S SEVENTH BOOK, is a collection of papers presented not at one of the Society's annual Mythopoeic Conferences but at Belmont University's C.S. Lewis Conference, held in November 2005 in conjunction with the release of the new film The Chronicles of Narnia I: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Ably edited by the Society's own Dr. Amy Sturgis, who contributed one of the best essays to the Mythopoeic Press's previous collection, Tolkien on Film (Mythopoeic Press, 2004), its twelve essays mostly center on Lewis but also deal with writers such as Tolkien, Rowling, and Wilde.

Any collection assembled from papers presented at a conference is liable to be a mixed bag, and this one is no exception. Given the broad range of its contents, there's no need to read the essays here in any particular order; the reader should be encouraged to browse, starting with those whose topics most strongly catch his or her interest. Ironically, given the book's primary focus, its best essay (the last in the volume) is Kathryn N. McDaniel's "The Elfin Mystique: Fantasy and Feminism in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series," which praises Rowling for depicting a non-ideal fantasy world before honing in the focus specifically on the moral problem of house-elves as apparently willing slaves. Also thought-provoking is Karen Wright Hayes' "Surprised, But Not By Joy: Political Comment in Out of the Silent Planet," which argues persuasively for an anti-colonial message in that book alongside its more overt theological theme. Hayes also makes the telling point of how ironic it is that Lewis, who hoped to "smuggle" theological doctrine to unsuspecting readers, is now so widely identified as a Christian writer that it undermines his entire strategy as a writer of fiction.

Some of the essays are notable for addressing topics that usually get overlooked in the understandable focus on Lewis's most popular works. Thus Devin Brown examines how Lewis set an example by exercising his vocation through his occupation. Similarly, Gregory M. Anderson explores a neglected area: Lewis as a writer of sermons, focusing specifically on the 1941 sermon "The Weight of Glory" and the rhetorical devices Lewis used to deliver his argument and move his audience. A little further afield, Ernelle Fife uses The Four Loves to interpret Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, demonstrating an applicability for Lewis's ideas beyond his own works or those of his fellow Inklings.

Given the timing of the conference, it's not surprising that two of the pieces deal with film adaptations of Lewis's and Tolkien's works. Of these, Hugh H. Davis focuses on treatment of a specific scene, Aslan's sacrifice at the Stone Table, and compares how three film and one audio adaptation of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe presented it. While his discussion sometimes threatens to bog down in minutia (do we really need to know that the 2005 film devotes 5.13%, or seven minutes and twenty seconds, of its running time to this scene, while the book itself spends 4.3% of its page count?), his larger point that filmmakers tend to spend more time on action scenes like the battle at the end of the movie than the quieter moments on which the book's story hangs is well-taken. By contrast, Greg Wright (author of two books about Tolkien and Peter Jackson) discusses the recent Narnia movie and Jackson's Lord of the Rings films in the light of Lewis's and Tolkien's own well-known comments about film adaptations. Wright reaches the surprising conclusion that Lewis and Tolkien are critical about films partly because they had a bias against film and partly because they lived a long time ago and didn't know any better--a regrettable lapse into chronological snobbery, all the more striking for coming in a discussion of two authors who were always vigilant to avoid it. In addition, Wright's piece is marred by factual inaccuracies about film history that severely undercut his thesis.

Of the other pieces, noted Inklings scholar Donald T. Williams summarizes the argument or thesis of The Abolition of Man and Miracles (rather better than Lewis did himself) and applies them to The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, suggesting that in Narnia we see the visible results of the trends Lewis warns against in The Abolition of Man. Similarly, H. L. Reeder IV looks at J.R.R. Tolkien's essays "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" and "On Fairy-Stories" from a Deconstructionist perspective, but unfortunately uses so much jargon in his discussion of "Christian resistance" that those not conversant in Foucault might find his arguments impenetrable (e.g., "the understanding of a genealogy of knowledge, its manufacture and subsequent deployment as a discourse of power[,] becomes the central trait in a theory of resistance"--page 173). Reeder also claims that while the Beowulf essay is much-cited by Old English scholars, the fairy-story essay is largely unknown outside of Tolkien studies; this assertion ignores the enormous impact Tolkien's ideas about secondary worlds, subcreation, escape, and recovery have had on fantasy scholarship.