Much Ado About Susan
Thursday, September 29th, 2005**Spoilers – LWW and The Last Battle Article also includes some more adult topics, reader discretion is advised.. thank J.K. Rowling for that**
Recently, there has been much ado about Susan, the Pevensie that falls away and does not return from a life of materialism. We’ve got two fan essays, here in our Fan Section about the fate of Susan. It is a topic that has always seemed to strike a chord, and a very sharp one, with readers of the series.
What is it about her fate that hits the reader so strongly? I have a feeling, and this is a generalization on my part, that it has to do with ourselves. We all know may know someone that is like Susan, or may even ourselves be much like her character. The idea that you or I could be so like a fallen character hits some of us like a resounding gong.
from TheOnion.com’s AV Club interview with Neil Gaiman:
AVC: Your short story “The Problem Of Susan,” about C.S. Lewis’ Narnian character, has finally been published, though for years you said it could never see print because of the copyright issues. Did that turn out to be a problem in the end?
NG: Nobody’s sued me. Some of it was trying to figure out how to craft the story so that C.S. Lewis’ estate lawyer would say “I probably couldn’t get an injunction against this. This is borderline, but you could probably get away with it.” And I think that I probably did. I hope. It’s a problem story. Every now and then, someone comes up to me and says “That was an enormously wonderful story,” and other people get really offended by it. One woman described it as “blasphemous,” which I loved, that a potshot at a fictional lion from a series of children’s books could be seriously described as blasphemous. It’s just one of those moments where you look at a children’s book and there’s a thing that sticks in your head and irritates you. I was amused to see an interview with J.K. Rowling in Time where she started going off about the problem of Susan again. It’s the thing that sort of Philip Pullman hates about the books, though he hates the books and I love them. But that’s the thing he focuses on most of all. So I was trying to write a story that would address that issue, and also the wider issue of how people relate to children’s books and death. It is an intensely problematic story, and I don’t actually know if it’s any good.AVC: It’s a difficult story to interpret, because the original characters had such defined symbolic values, and it’s hard to tell whether you’re creating your own symbolism, or subverting C.S. Lewis’.
NG: And also the fact that when you start getting into it, is what part of the text actually belongs to which of the characters in it. And for that matter, quite literally, whether the Professor is meant to be seen as what Susan grew up to be, or is merely an interpretation. Mostly, it just seems to be a story that people either love, or it pisses them off. American Gods did that, which took me rather by surprise. I was so used to doing stuff that people either really liked, or didn’t read. So for the first time with American Gods, I found I’d written something that people liked or hated. And the people who hated American Gods are absolutely articulate about why it never should’ve been published in the first place, why it’s a book of astounding terribleness. And people who love it can similarly tell you why it’s one the best books they’ve read in their whole life. Both points of view left me rather puzzled.AVC: Because of the hyperbole?
NG: Partly the hyperbole factor, and partly because I didn’t think I was writing the best book anyone would have read in their whole life. Nor did I think I was writing an incompetent heap of drivel.
Neil Gaiman is a big fan of Narnia (I’m a fan of his, but this recommendation comes with reservations and for adults only). The comments that he is referring to, by J.K. Rowling, are these, from Time Magazine:
The most popular living fantasy writer in the world doesn’t even especially like fantasy novels. It wasn’t until after Sorcerer’s Stone was published that it even occurred to her that she had written one. “That’s the honest truth,” she says. “You know, the unicorns were in there. There was the castle, God knows. But I really had not thought that that’s what I was doing. And I think maybe the reason that it didn’t occur to me is that I’m not a huge fan of fantasy.” Rowling has never finished The Lord of the Rings. She hasn’t even read all of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia novels, which her books get compared to a lot. There’s something about Lewis’ sentimentality about children that gets on her nerves. “There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex,” Rowling says. “I have a big problem with that.”
Where Rowling goes wrong is in attributing Susan’s fall to her becoming “irreligious because she found sex.” This is something that she put in, but is not implied in the Narnia novels. Susan has become engrossed with the world and with material things. While this could include sex, that is something that is primarily up to the reader to add and is certainly not implied by Lewis, when he speaks of her interest in Lipstick. Granted, Rowling is a fan of C.S. Lewis, for the number of books in the Narnia series is the reason that she’s doing seven Harry Potter books.
What I believe Lewis is trying to show, is that people can and do fall away from their faith, even when they have witnessed miracles, that faith takes more than just a one time thing, it is something that must be worked on, and practiced. If you’ve read this, thank you for sticking around.. I apologize for the abrupt ending, but I must depart for Bible study.
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