Planet Narnia

[steepholm]

 I just watched The Narnia Code on BBC iPlayer, where it's still available for a few more days in the UK, I think. It's all about Michael Ward's book Planet Narnia, which argues that C. S. Lewis based his Narnia books around the seven planets of mediaeval astronomy. I'd read reviews of the book when it came out, and thought it sounded utterly kooky in a Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare kind of way. Then here comes a lavish documentary, complete with dramatic reconstructions, fliights back and forth across the Atlantic, and Ward engagingly explaining how thrilled he was to have been the one to have discovered the secret key that Lewis had hidden away in his books.

Unfortunately the theory itself was squeezed into the middle twenty minutes of an hour-long programme. In summary, the proposed planetary order runs LLW (Jupiter), PC (Mars), VDT (Sun), SC (Moon), and er, they didn't bother saying about the rest. (I'm betting that LB is Saturn, though.) I'm not much the wiser, in fact, though Ward seems to have relied on some fairly obscure references to explain the imagery of the books in his terms. On the evidence as presented the theory still looks pretty kooky: I guess I'll have to go and read the book to find out whether there's more to it. But when I think of the wealth of symbolism that has accumulated around each of the planets and their associated deities, the thing that strikes me is how easy it would be to make a case of this kind for pretty much any book. (I'm tempted to try it on the novels of Jane Austen, with Sanditon standing in for the Sun - the carriage accident is an obvious Phaeton reference.) It's the kind of intoxication to which scholars are particularly prone, and probably has a name, though I don't know it.

There were some things about the presentation of the argument, though, which reminded me of my old Renaissance allegory days, and people like Francis Bacon in The Wisdom of the Ancients explaining how very very important the allegorical interpretation of myths really is. First, the programme made out that there was something wrong with the Narnia books and that everybody had always felt it - something missing, something askew, something that might give us a clue that there was a "secret key" out there if only we could find it. Brian Sibley was wheeled on to say exactly that (in fact they used the same clip twice). That's a classic manoeuvre. Here's Bacon saying the same thing four hundred years ago about the Greek myths: "But there is yet another sign, and one of no small value, that these fables contain a hidden and involved meaning, which is, that some of them are so absurd and stupid upon the face of the narrative taken by itself, that they may be said to give notice from afar and cry out there is a parable below."

But what was this problem - this nagging inadequacy in the books as usually read? The only one they came up with was the old non-problem identified by Tolkien, that Lewis mixed figures from different mythologies. But (as I've mentioned here before) Lewis was a Spenserian - 'nuff said. Were other "faults" identified? Not that I noticed.

The inadequacy argument requires the services of another, for despite the books' faults they have remained firmly in print for over fifty years while most other children's books from that period have not. Why so, if they're so badly flawed? Perhaps, one talking head speculated, child readers were recognizing their secret message unconsciously and feeling satisfied by it at a level they could not have accounted for. (This mysterious satisfaction coming despite the books being mysteriously unsatisfactory, of course.) At the same time, somewhat contradictorily, it was necessary to argue that Lewis had embedded his secret wisdom so deep that it had eluded millions of readers, including professional Lewisians, for half a century - making its eventual discovery a matter of huge significance. But also that, once it has been pointed out, it is so essential to the books' meaning that it reanimates them and even saturates the real cosmos with renewed life and meaning. And so it goes, as it always does in arguments of this kind, see-sawing between wanting things to be obvious and wanting them to be obscure, secret or accessible, visible to all or only to the cognoscenti. Scholars are rather strange people.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Actually, the books were written by a consortium of atheistical Cambridge dons, headed by Mrs. Moore, and sworn to secrecy. Isn't it blindingly obvious? And so cleverly concealed that I have only just discovered it.

Hmm. The planetary hypothesis sounds like Baconian cryptography, irresistibly enjoyable and infinitely accommodating. If Lewis had done something so cockcrowingly clever with his books, I can't imagine that he wouldn't talk about it. It's the emotional stuff that he was reticent about.

It's the kind of intoxication to which scholars are particularly prone, and probably has a name, though I don't know it.

If you find out, please tell us!

Nine

[fjm.livejournal.com]

chilperic says the book is very plausible indeed, but we think Lewis may have been folding in several mythological and literary structures. In a bolt from the blue, I realised that every one of the books is a religious homage:

MN: Creation
LWW: Crucifixion
HHB: the poem, Footprints in the Sand (1936)
PC: Either the sighting of Jesus after the Crucifixion, or possibly the liberation of Jerusalem. Not sure about this eon.
DT: The Voyage of Saint Brendan
SC: Pilgrim's Progress
TLB: the End

Lewis grew up in a generation that thought the ability to do the Times cryptic crossword qualified you for the Civil Service. I find Ward's arguments that he was playing games with his texts, very plausible indeed.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

If you find out, please tell us!

Until a better candidate comes along, I'm going with Ockham's Itch.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Casaubon's Chancre? To be excised with with Occam's Blunt Spoon? As a fellow allegory nerd, I recognise the affliction. Doesn't the "myths are so daft, they must have a Deeper Meaning" argument go way back? To Hesiod??

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Nice to see you're still on LJ, lilliburlero! Yes, the absurdity principle (as Michael Murrin dubbed it) is certainly an ancient one. It certainly goes back as far as Dionysius the Areopagite, but I'm happy to believe it's older still.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I had a classics prof at uni - a Roman historian - who could argue quite convincingly that all bad things that happened, like the assassination of J. Caesar, the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire, were due to Sun spots. Really.

I'm reminded of good old Casaubon and his Key to World Mythologies. It sounds like a bunch of tommyrot. And I would have thought Brian Sibley knew better! But it's so much fun to make fun of scholars :-)

[fjm.livejournal.com]

See my comments above.

[chilperic.livejournal.com]

Two books I read last year changed my mind about Lewis' fiction. The first was his own The Discarded Image, about the late medieval world-view, which showed clearly that the Space Trilogy was actually based on the following "what if": "What if the medieval cosmological viewpoint was real?". And the second was Michael Ward's Planet Narnia (which I have now read twice), and which I found 90 per cent convincing, and wholly thought provoking. Kooky? No, I think not. Right? Quite possibly.

Some of the books do not fit in very well into the idea that each is associated with one of the seven medieval heavenly bodies (and Ward suggests that Lewis did not set out initially to write one of each, although he certainly had Jupiter in mind for the first one). The Horse and his Boy is a difficult fit, for instance. But The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair are very clear fits. And the idea to do this fits in so well with Lewis' aim in the Space Trilogy (which, as I understand it -- and I have read ALL his letters! -- he did not make public any more than he did, according to Ward, his aim in the Narnia books.

Didn't see the programme (can't get BBC iPlayer in THIS country!) but do strongly urge you to read the book before making up your mind!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Oh, I will read it. As I said in my post, the frustrating thing about the programme was how little detail they went into about the theory and the evidence for it, and I do indeed intend to read the book to judge for myself.

In some ways the idea doesn't strike me as implausible. Lewis was a magpie, and the books are full of allusions to all kinds of ideas and texts. Given that he was very interested in mediaeval cosmology (The Discarded Image is one of my favourite books of his) there's nothing implausible about his including cosmological ideas in Narnia.

There are two things that I'd need to be convinced of.

The first of course is the theory itself: not just that there are scattered allusions but that there's evidence of a systematic plan. I think that this would be quite hard to do on internal evidence alone, given (as nineweaving calls it) the infinitely-accommodating nature of the material. I think Lewis was quite capable of playing with an idea and dropping it once it no longer served his turn: it's one of the things I like about him. (Hence I'm only partially convinced by fjm's list above: once you've made the undoubted parallels with Genesis, the Gospels and Revelation, there's an urge to 'fit in' the others - but why? Sure, St Brendan's there in VDT, but so's the Odyssey, to which the book is equally an homage.) Ideally I'd also like it to be shown - as in a double blind test - that the same schema can't also be applied to other texts, as per my Austen example.

It's quite possible that the book will convince me on this first point. But even if it does, I'm still very dubious about the step that takes us from "Lewis had patron planet in mind for each of the books in his sequence" to "We have finally cracked the Narnia code, and at last the books make satisfying aesthetic sense!" In other words, what makes this the key to the series (which was very much the line Ward took in the documentary), rather than an interesting footnote to put beside all the other interesting footnotes?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

But it can be the Odyssey *as well*. Hence my comments about the Times Crossword.

The problem is, as you say, when any of these are assumed to be "the" key.

[chilperic.livejournal.com]

PS. The order is LWW (Jupiter), VDT (Sun), PC (Mars), TSC (Moon), TMN (Venus), HB (Mercury), LB (Saturn). In the first drafts of SC he had the underground giant called Saturn, but then he changed him to Old Father Time: he realised he wanted to reserve Saturn for LB (says Ward).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[colyngbourne.livejournal.com]

To me, the notion of the seven planet theory is plausible but it's certainly not "an explanation" for some supposed inadequacy of the books as they stand right now. No child I've known, or adult either, has felt there is a missing link somewhere in these books. The theory of there being an arcane mystery to this series that clever people could work out by clever deduction and wide reading (except no-one did, in fifty years) - doesn't sound very much like Lewis either. So I don't consider it a "deeper layer" or "more fundamental" layer than the present stories and their allegories; it may just be an interesting additional aspect.

Mr Narnia Code was reluctant to explain more on the programme because he can sell more books that way. It made time for a good bit of Polkinghorne and Owen Gingerich in the meantime.

I'll read the book if I get hold of a copy.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Of course, hanging shadowily over this programme was the ghost of Dan Brown - hence the change of name from Planet Narnia to The Narnia Code. That kind of thing is to be expected, but Ward seemed happy to go along with it, striking a very "Behold the handmaid of the Lord" pose as he talked about his role as the vessel of Narnian Truth.