REFLECTION – NARNIA AND THE ANDROGYNOUS LION

NARNIA AND THE ANDROGYNOUS LION

“A lesser work, with an even lesser reinterpretation.”

Narnia, although I am not particularly fond of it, is a classic. I consider it a lesser work* when compared with masterpieces such as The Lord of the Rings or The Pilgrim’s Progress, and with the respective universes their authors created. That, however, does not diminish its historical importance, nor does it give anyone license to treat its identity and narrative as disposable raw material in a cinematic reinterpretation.

And I must make an important qualification: I consider Meryl Streep the finest actress of her generation. Precisely for that reason, her casting is not the problem. The problem lies in what is being done to Aslan and to the character’s symbolic identity.

Aslan is not merely a talking animal. He embodies an imagistic, literary, and theological construction carefully developed by C. S. Lewis. His presence, his language, his majesty, and his representation all serve a particular function within the symbolic architecture of Narnia.

And so the inevitable questions arise: scales, fur, and feathers? In every color imaginable? Aslan embodying the whole spectrum of diversity? A woman’s voice? All that was missing were sequins and glitter!

The irony is precisely this: when a work must be continually reshaped to accommodate a contemporary aesthetic, cultural, or ideological agenda, there is a danger that the very thing that made that work distinctive will cease to exist. An adaptation may interpret; it may update the language of cinema; it may add elements; it may even disagree with certain aspects of the original text. But there is a difference between (re)interpreting a work and using its prestige as a vehicle for an entirely different message.

Disrespecting Lewis’s original work is utterly absurd. If this is the theme you want to explore, then create your own characters and your own fiction. Do not become symbolic thieves.

There is something intellectually more honest in creation than in appropriation. If someone wishes to build a fantasy in which anthropomorphic animals embody a particular conception of diversity, in which the identities of the characters are deliberately reconstructed, or in which traditional symbols are given new meanings, there is complete creative freedom to do so. Create your own worlds. Create your own characters. Create your own mythology and allegory.

This version of Narnia will have a great deal to do with director Greta Gerwig and David Bowie, and very little to do with C. S. Lewis, his values and ideas, and the fictional universe he created.

* My criticisms of the Narnia universe in no way diminish Lewis’s theological and literary importance. They merely express a personal aesthetic judgment concerning what I perceive as an excessive mixture of elements, the rushed treatment of the material, and its Christian allegory, which, from my literary perspective, is inferior (as is Tolkien’s). I regard other works by the same author quite differently.