C. S. Lewis, Narnia, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Jill, one of the children from C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia who newly arrived in Narnia for the first time, is alone and desperately thirsty. She realizes the presence of a stream nearby but is shocked to notice a Lion lying next to it. “If you are thirsty, come and drink,. . . are you not thirsty?” says the lion. “Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?”; she asks; and the Lion replies, “I make no promise.” Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.

“Do you eat girls?” she said.

“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.

“I daren’t come and drink.” said Jill.

“Then you will die of thirst.” said the Lion.

“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”

“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.

Rowan Williams in his book The Lion’s World – I am much indebted to Williams for some ideas and wording here – notes how the Aslan of the Chronicles makes no promises to assuage our need for assurance; nothing can make him safe, and there is no approaching him without an overwhelming sense of risk. He cannot pretend what and who he is, continues Williams. He cannot be other than truth. And confronted with truth in this shape, there may be no promises, no rewards and no security, but there is nowhere else to go. “Aslan cannot make himself other than he is; he cannot make salt water fresh, and if we elect to drink salt water, he cannot make the consequences other than they are. He will do all he can to persuade us not to drink, but that is something else. There is no other stream. The way to life or reconciliation or forgiveness or renewal is always a path through what is there” (68-69).

This respect for reality, this commitment to truth, is the reason why Aslan confronts us concerning the stories we tell ourselves. In fact, the theme of self-deception, the lure of self-dramatizing that is so central to Dostoevsky and to the Gospels is also very prominent in Lewis’s writings. He movingly depicts this inordinate struggle to face the truth, the pain of letting go, the anguishing to hold on to that what destroys us. He often depicts individuals, as he does inThe Great Divorce, who present themselves in a certain light, or explain themselves in a certain way, or who tell their own stories with a certain twist, and in doing so remain cut off from the reality of God. They cannot hear his voice. They find his light to be unpleasant and disturbing. They want to crawl back into the suffocating space of the false self. They are truly, as Augustine put it, incurvatus in se, curved inward on oneself.

Take a look at the thoroughly obnoxious Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. “He is censorious, vain, and cowardly.” He makes us smirk and squirm because his character reminds us of people we know. Lewis is pulling no punches in describing his unlikability, using him as a poster boy for many present societal ills. What happens is that Eustace suddenly finds himself turned into a dragon after stumbling upon a pile of enchanted gold. He is subsequently rescued by Aslan. “Although Eustace tries to shut his eyes against Aslan’s gaze, he cannot resist his call to follow. He is taken to a garden where there is a well in which he is told to bathe; but first he must undress. He scratches off his scales, so he thinks, peeling off his outer skin—and then sees his reflection realizes that he is still wearing the dragon’s hide. He peels off another layer and another, but to no avail.” “Then the lion said… ‘You will have to let me undress you’.” Eustace, having reached the pitch of full desperation, consents. The Lion’s claws cut so deeply that the hurt is “worse than anything I’ve ever felt.” The dragon’s skin is at last peeled off completely, and the Lion tosses Eustace into the well and re-clothes him. He is human again, conscious of the rawness of his skin yet delighted to see his own body once more.

To message here is brutally clear. “In the presence of Aslan no blame and no excuse, only the summons to strip, to be exposed. Aslan cannot spare us that. He cannot protect from who he is, and he cannot spare us from who we are.” He needs to make us aware. Mere introspection, self-analysis, or journaling, will not do the trick. The rediscovery of human identity is not something that we can do in our own strength; we will always be tempted to stop before we get to the deepest level and so imagine that we had “arrived” when we haven’t. Only Aslan’s claws can strip away the entire clothing of falsehood with which we have surrounded ourselves. Only Aslan can lead us to conversion. Eustace needed to learn that. Adam needed to learn that. And so did Abraham, and Jacob, and David. And so do we. Williams writes:

What or who are we “under the skin”? Lewis is reluctant to give any room to the idea that we could ever answer such a question. In a very specific sense, he is as hostile to the notion of a real self underlying the flux of experience as any deconstructionist critic or psychoanalyst. . . . It is only in relation to that Truthfulness that we can be said to have a real self – not a hidden level of consciousness that, once we find it, will show us what we really ought to do, but a hidden story, the narrative of our lives as seen by the eye of God. In the nature of the case, we have no access to this except in the eye of God. (88-89)

I have to agree with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that “nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” Dostoevsky reminds me of that, and so does C. S. Lewis. But most importantly it is Jesus who confronts me with that reality. It is he who stands before me and invites me to surrender to the Spirit of truth. It is Jesus who knows exactly what is in me and who alone is able to cut through my protective shields. It is Jesus who is aware of how various innuendos and half-truths figure into my various self-justifications. It is Jesus who cannot be tricked by sanctified prejudices that fuel my cynicism and sarcasm. It is before Jesus that my clothing of falsehood is exposed. And that’s that. There is only Truth. Only the summons to strip. There’s nothing more to be said. Only the voice of Jesus: Repent!

To conclude with another quote from Williams, but this time in reference to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

What he [Dostoevsky] does in Karamazov is not to demonstrate that it is possible to imagine a life so integrated and transparent that the credibility of faith becomes unassailable; it is simply to show that faith moves and adapts, matures and reshapes itself, not by adjusting its doctrinal content (the error of theological liberalism, with which Dostoevsky had no patience) but by the relentless stripping away from faith of egotistical or triumphalistic expectations. The credibility of faith is in its freedom to let itself be judged and to grow. In the nature of the case, there will be no unanswerable demonstrations and no final unimprovable biographical form apart from Christ, who can only be and is only represented in fiction through the oblique reflection of his face in those who are moving toward him (Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, 10).

Dostoevsky on the Vagaries of Self-knowledge

That Dostoevsky is my favorite novelist. For one, I applaud the robustness of his faith born in the face of human misery and suffering. As he noted towards the end of his life: “It is not as a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. My hosanna has passed through a great crucible of doubt.” Most honest believers can relate to such sentiments - the need to nurture patience and praise in the absence of answers. (On this point, Tomáš Halik perceptively notes in his Patience with God that it is precisely patience that accounts for the major difference between faith and agnosticism).

And then there is grace! It is quite marvelous, actually, to see it shimmering in the most unlikeliest of places in Dostoevsky's novels. Be it the drunkard Marmeladov, or the prostitute Sonia, or the sensualist Dmitri—they all epitomize the power of God’s grace to make the “light shine out of darkness” (2 Cor. 4:6). For Dostoevsky, it is an unplanned intrusion, grace is, full of polyphonic severity and freshness. As U2's “Grace”puts it:

She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain

That's Dostoyevsky - our existence, in all of its idiosyncrasies, deluged in God’s incalculable beneficence!

But there is one more reason why I value him so much as a writer. I really appreciate the way he gets human nature, the way he gets us as human beings. He has this uncanny ability to probe the workings of the human psyche and is acutely aware of the complex and often contradictory impulses that drive us to action. Like Shakespeare writing in a different age and genre, Dostoevsky pokes fun at the idea that we are aware of the things that motivate us; that we are somehow completely transparent to ourselves. (René Girard refers to that illusion as the "romantic lie" of which Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a perfect illustration). The people that populate his novels are disoriented without being aware of it, and are confused while claiming to be in control. The contradictions of their convictions and the blindness concerning their choices are presented to us readers in a painful way. “Lying to ourselves,” he writes, “is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” That’s why he laughs at the superficial ways in which people “try to find themselves,” the way they attempt to mine for their true self, for their inner child. Dostoevsky is not into that; he definitely is not into inner children. (That needs to be qualified a bit, however, given that he intensely values the simplicity of goodness as portrayed in Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov).

Just think of his Crime and Punishment. In that soggy and rather depressing novel, Raskolnikov, an impoverished and radicalized student, commits a horrible crime by killing a greedy moneylender and her sister. Initially, we are tempted to buy into Raskolnikov’s explanation that he did all that for purely humanitarian reasons; to help the world rid itself, as it were, of evil and injustice. And as a reader, you find yourself dragged into that pulp of confused thinking. Dostoevsky brilliantly manipulates the plotline to trick us in that way. It is only gradually that we realize the true nature of Raskolnikov’s action. He is no paragon of humanitarianism; actually, he despises humanity and is contemptuous of people. He acts for purely egotistical reasons, out of belief that conventional morality does not apply to him. As his name implies, he is a schismatic (raskolnik), a moral horror hiding himself behind the story he is telling himself about himself.

I often think about Dostoevsky and his antihero, and I have to admit that I am quite disturbed about the whole thing. Not just because of the wrongdoing he commits, heinous as it is. No, it’s not that. The reason I find him so unsettling is that he mirrors us. In Raskolnikov we see an image of fallen humanity. We too continually tell fictional stories to ourselves about who we are and why we do the things we do and have the thoughts we have. We tell them when we write our journals, when we explain ourselves to others, and when we attempt to mobilize others for our cause. We construct them while selling ourselves during job interviews, when we whine about our victimhood, and sometimes even when we say that we are on fire for God and zealous about his name. Most of the time we don’t do it consciously, but we do it nonetheless. We polish, package, and present our motives in a Facebook way—all glitter, joy, innocence, and benevolence. Like Milton's Lucifer, Dante's Ulysses, Kierkegaard's aesthete, or Jesus' Judas, we get entangled in fabricated narratives. Indeed, as Saul Bellow puts it in To Jerusalem and Back, "a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep” (127). (Readers of Ian McEwan's Atonement will find a manifest exemplar of such a self-scrubbing in guilt-driven Briony, the main character of the book).