On Tuesday, after
yoga, I started putting the finishing touches on my essay. Mostly I worked on
the in text citations, but one of the books, “A Coyote Columbus Story”, does
not have page numbers and so there was nothing to put in parentheses. I thought
about just counting the pages, but I first checked out the MLA website and, as
far as I could tell, it seemed to be saying that one shouldn’t make up page
numbers but should rather simply refer to what the author has said, each time.
I sent an email to my TA two hours before I had to leave, to ask her what I
should do, but she didn’t get back to me at all before I left or even later
that day. I finished the essay and wrote a new end paragraph. I’m fairly happy
with the essay, but the end was a little rushed. Mind you though, an essay that
I got an A-plus on last year had an ending that I just threw in at the last
minute.
I
got to the lecture hall just as the previous class was finishing. I think the
Medieval History professor was making eyes at me before she left.
Christine,
one of the TAs, was our guest lecturer for the discussion about C.S. Lewis’s
“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. I haven’t read it because writing my
essay put me behind on the reading.
C.S
Lewis was called Jack by his friends and family. By a strange coincidence, he
died on the same day as Jack Kennedy, as did Aldous Huxley.
Lewis
was also known for his writing on Christian theology and some people think
there’s a little too much Christian symbolism in his “Chronicles of Narnia”
series. He had been drawn to spirituality because of the experiences of
overwhelming joy he would experience, starting from childhood. His attitude was
reminiscent of the Romantic poets. I’ve experienced that same joy and I say
it’s meaningless.
Lewis
wrote “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” first, though some of his
subsequent books are set in a time preceding the original story.
Lewis: “Sometimes fairy stories may say best
what’s to be said.” They defamiliarize the imagination and can also be a training
ground for learning how to interpret facts. He said of Narnia that he had not
set out consciously to write a Christian story, but since he was Christian,
that was the imagery that came to him.
Lewis
was heavily influenced by both George MacDonald’s fantasy writing and his moral
teachings. When Lewis became well known, MacDonald’s books had already slipped
into obscurity but Lewis promoted them and brought them back into the public
spotlight.
In
his paper, “The Fantastic Imagination”, George MacDonald wrote, “ The
natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them; but they
themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent
a little world of his own, with its own laws … When such forms are new embodiments
of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere
inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: in either
case, Law has been diligently at work.
His world once invented, the highest law that comes next
into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new
world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must
hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by
its own postulates, incredible. To be able to live a moment in an imagined
world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out
of it. The imagination in us, whose exercise is essential to the most temporary
submission to the imagination of another, immediately, with the disappearance
of Law, ceases to act.”
I found this
interesting because it mirrored a quote from Ursula K. LeGuin that I read in
Science Fiction class last year, “In fantasy you get to make it all up, even the rules
of how things work, and then follow your rules absolutely. In science fiction
you get to make it up, but you have to follow most of the rules of science, or
at least not ignore them.”
This idea of the laws one must follow is interesting because Lewis seems
to find a way of breaking those laws by coming up with the idea of deeper magic
that existed before time and which has different laws than the current magic.
The Narnia stories also draw from a
lot of previously established tropes of fantasy, such as Alice’s finding an
unexpected passage to another world; timelessness, as in Peter Pan’s Neverland;
there are creatures from mythology; there is an evil queen; there is a sleeping
figure, as in Sleeping Beauty, but the sleeping figure is the place of Narnia.
The idea that it is perpetually
winter but never Christmas in Narnia is interesting because Christmas itself is
barely in winter. That would mean that Narnia is frozen somewhere within the
four day period between the winter solstice and Christmas.
The narrator of the story is biased
and slightly manipulative.
The lion character, Aslan, has been
compared to Jesus Christ but Lewis has insisted he is not an allegorical
representation of Christ but a parallel of Christ for that particular world.
When one of the children asks if the lion is safe, they are told that he is of
course not safe but he is also good.
The question, “What are you?” is
often asked in Narnia, as opposed to “Who are you?”
The children change Narnia but it
doesn’t change all of them.
After class I rode up to OISE to
renew a book and then down to Bay and Dundas to Top Cuts. Now that my essay was
handed in I felt free to take the time for my bi-annual haircut. Amy wasn’t
busy, so she took me right away with her magic fingers.
On the way home, since it seemed to
be a day of getting things done that had been put off for a while, I stopped at
The Australian Boot Company to see if someone had time to treat my Blundies.
Again, there was someone who wasn’t busy at all. It took about ten minutes and
it’s cool how the treatment makes them darker.
That night I watched the fourth
episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. The story was entitled,
“Nightmare Typhoon”. The aliens were dropping bombs into the atmosphere that,
when exploded caused cataclysmic weather in the area below. The Universal
Leader threatened to wipe out New York City but some of the storm footage
showed palm trees in a hurricane. Cody developed a dispersal gas to counter the
effect of the bombs and also destroyed the alien spaceship that was dropping
them, with the crew inside. It was the first time he’d actually killed anyone.
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