Would you, could you, with a goat?

[steepholm]

Hmm. I offer this for what it’s worth, but despite having read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe many times, and being familiar (as I thought) with Pauline Baynes’s illustrations, it took one of my students to point out to me yesterday that, in the series of little vignettes Baynes drew to illustrate ‘Narnia in the old days’, as reminisced about by Mr Tumnus to Lucy while they’re enjoying unrationed tea and toast, the final illustration distinctly shows Silenus being pleasured by a faun.

Or does it? Maybe the brain is hardwired to find such interpretations? Did Gombrich say something on those lines? All I know is that, ever since someone on Mock the Week pointed out that the 2012 London Olympic logo looks like Lisa Simpson giving a blow job, it’s very hard to see it any other way. But maybe that’s just me?

Comments

[chilperic.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of the logo on the masthead of the magazine Punch, throughout the Victorian period from its foundation (in the 1840s?) and well into the twentieth century, which showed Mr Punch in a bacchanalian procession, sitting on a horse or an ass, nursing his own very large phallus. Did Victorian eyes just slip over this and fail to recognise it, or does my own feverish mind see something that isn't there?

[jadelennox]

Ow?

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I only have a paperback set, which can't be opened or the pages fall out -- 35 years old, and have spent much time in storage. I am now tempted to look at the copies in the library, though!

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

For those of us whose personal copies of LWW are in storage halfway across the United States, could you possibly provide a scan of this illustration?

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Can't speak for him, but I could.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I have risked my 40-year-old spine to bring this art to the steepholm-reading public (see below).

My own interpretation of the perspective is that the faun is being used as a fig leaf - except that his right horn is mimicking that which it should conceal (perhaps that's why he seems to be blushing). Naughty Pauline slipping that one through!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks, kalypso_v - you must have been doing that just as I was risking my 45-year old spine in a similarly-precarious exercise!

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I should have been quicker to act, to save your senior spine. Mine survived (or at any rate it's no worse than before), so I hope yours did too!

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOODNESS.

Thank you!