Renowned C. S. Lewis scholar Bruce Edwards took some time to answer some questions about the upcoming film, and his Chronicles of Narnia books.
NarniaFans.com: How do you think the movie will impact Lewis’s legacy?
Bruce Edwards: Difficult to say–especially without seeing the movie first. Movies, even badly made ones, tend to send people back to the original text. And this promises to be a very good movie given the high production values, skilled director, and the integrity of Walden Media and Doug Gresham at the helm. The main thing is, if it will bring more readers not only to Narnia, but to the rest of Lewis’s works, which are uniformly thought provoking and excellent, it will be worth “the risk.” I am more excited that the movie(s) are being made than learning that “more” Narnian tales are being created by present day authors, who may not possess the Christian imagination that characterized Lewis’s life and work. It’s the quality of the person more than the re-assembling of Narnian characters that makes the difference.
NF: Will the movie attract new fans to Lewis’s other works?
Bruce Edwards: We can hope so. Movies can be fickle; and are sort of “self-consuming artifacts,” as literary scholar, Stanley Fish (who also admires Lewis’s work on Milton), used to say of certain books. That is, movie have am elusive “presence” only when one is watching them. . . while the written word seems to have a more enduring and lingering quality even if the book is closed. The Lord of the Rings movies certainly elevated an already high profile Tolkien possessed. . . and, in my view, Lewis has so much more to offer the adventurous reader–not in terms of fantasy, but in all the other genres he mastered (literary criticism, satire, narrative poetry, dream-vision, science-fiction, memoir. . .) There is a feast awaiting any reader who only knows Narnia.
NF: How was Lewis’s writing able to become so powerful and memorable yet so simple?
Bruce Edwards: Deceptively simple I would say–it takes a lot of hard work to make a work “seem” so simple. Quite honestly, I think it is Lewis’s lifelong perspicacious reading, which began in childhood (at age 3 no less!), that gave him much to draw on. He had an intrinsic sense of eloquence, but there is also no doubt that those authors who had the greatest impact on him when he was young (E. Nesbit or Beatrix Potter–as well as Chesterton and MacDonald) had a tremendous influence on his own composing. When I teach Lewis I also draw attention to mastery of the arresting metaphor–and his foundational tri-chomomies–the forced choice among three mutually exclusive options (liar, lunatic, lord) whic he learned from St. Augustine and, I believe, William Kirkpatrick, his tutor in the last stages of his adolescent learning, whom he called The Great Knock, a little of whom is in Professor Kirke.
NF: How will Not a Tame Lion help readers and moviegoers better understand The Chronicles of Narnia?
Bruce Edwards: If I may quote from my preface–the aim of NOT A TAME LION is to:
“. . . prevent the possibility that Lewis’s Christian convictions, which inhabit and animate the Narnian landscape, will be “lost in translation” as the stories migrate from text to film.
“We can hope that this is not the case, and no one would be happier than me should the movies do justice to these beloved tales. But I have endeavored in this book to take nothing for granted, making it my goal specifically to orient the willing reader new to The Chronicles (as well as the veteran sojourner there) to what we might call Narnia’s spiritual geography, that is, to its ultimately Christian themes, and, most assuredly, to its undeniable center: King Aslan, the Great Lion, Son of the Great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea.
“Aslan must again be the one to save Narnia, to rescue it from becoming just one more kingdom swept away in the homogenizing flood of popular culture that jettisons its core convictions and compelling charm.”
NF: How does Not a Tame Lion illuminate the rich meaning in the text?
Bruce Edwards: Well, this is for the reader to say, but what I have attempted to do is point out the fact that the center of gravity in the Narnian story is Aslan, who is Lewis’s greatest literary creation in my view. My book is a kind of “synoptic gospel” of Aslan’s encounters with Narnians, and the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. It is, in a word, a “biography of Aslan.” It is covers not just The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but ALL seven tales.
So my new book pays its greatest homage is to Aslan. Indeed, “He is not a tame lion,” as Mr. Beaver intones near the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. By titling my work, Not a Tame Lion, I am implying, no, stipulating, that without Aslan the Narnian adventures would have little meaning, certainly lesser value, and lack spiritual poignancy or potency.
NF: And finally, why is an exploration into the spiritual dimensions of Narnia so important?
Bruce Edwards: There are stories and movies a plenty which feature vagabond children making their entrance and exit through strange and dangerous worlds using their ingenuity or creativity or sheer bravado, learning their lessons and claiming their renown. But Narnia is not a world one simply passes through on the way to somewhere else, storing up experience for the next fantastic journey. Narnia is a spiritual address, a world imbued with ultimate destinies determined by profound personal choices driven by individual allegiances, either to eternal truth or mournfully temporal falsehood. What do I mean by “spiritual”?
Narnia is a “cosmos,” an orderly, yet created world that has a discernible beginning, middle, and end. Narnia’s ordered existence is willed-rather, sung-into being by Aslan. Under Aslan’s rule, there is, if you will, both a “natural order,” and a “supernatural” or spiritual order. There is, on the one hand, the day-to-day, the deeds, the thoughts, the outcomes wrought by each individual; on the other hand, there is a meaning and an impact beyond these deeds, thoughts, outcomes that point to Something Else, and, what’s more, to Someone Else. Here we discover that we are not our own. Our lives rest in Another.
NF: We would also like to point out that in addition to NOT A TAME LION, he also has a second book coming out next week, Further Up and Further In: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is an entirely different work.
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