Over the Garden Wall

I thoroughly enjoyed watching the miniseries Over the Garden Wall (2014). It's one of the most unique and quirky series in recent memory.

There are a hodgepodge of influences. The setting is predominantly but not exclusively 18th-19th century New England or the Midwest. The specific season is Autumn; I suppose Halloween best suits. Aesthetically it elicits an old timey wimey Americana feel. Other influences I noticed: the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, gothic horror, Peter Rabbit, the Wind in the Willows, Betty Boop, Shirley Temple, Little Nemo, Studio Ghibli, even Disney (e.g. a songbird albeit a sarcastic one). Likewise I detected shades of Dante. For example, the opening chapter begins with the characters lost in a deep dark wood. Our protagonist is "midway" between childhood and adulthood. Also, Beatrice serves as a guide. And the ten shorts seem to roughly correspond to Dante's ten divisions in Inferno.

Story-wise, it's about a pair of brothers on a journey or pilgrimage to return home. One wonders if the story is allegory or reality. Is the pilgrimage in the similitude of a dream (cf. Bunyan) or is it meant to be real - a world between worlds, perhaps a limbo between life and death (cf. Dante)?

The characters are universal archetypes. Wirt is a Byronic hero. Greg is a knight of faith. It's interesting the two brothers are juxtaposed with one another like this - one the prototypical heathen, the other a kind of Christian. The Woodsman is a wild-eyed prophet in the wilderness. The Beast, in my view, is the personification of hopelessness: cue Dante's "abandon hope, all ye who enter here". Same with places and events. For instance, the Unknown seems to represent the afterlife or something like it. At the same time, there's a subversion of expectations in Over the Garden's archetypes (e.g. the big bad wolf is a tame pup).

Pilgrimage stories typically consummate in reaching a destination where the end is the narratival summum bonum. The Pilgrim's Progress' end is the celestial city where God and his people dwell. The Paradiso's end is the beatific vision: "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle". Over the Garden Wall's end seems to be romantic love in the guise of a girl named Sara. If so, I'm afraid that's a bit of a letdown, for it would suggest (among other things) that even the best secular pilgrimage or journey stories like Over the Garden Wall haven't evolved much since Homer's Odyssey in which Odysseus longs to return home to reunite with his beloved Penelope. Perhaps this is what adolescent or youthful love finds most grand, but then it'd better suit springtime rather than the autumnal themes which are what pervade the entire series. Perhaps this reflects the sad fact that our secular culture has no higher aim or ideal in life to live for than romantic love.

Christless Calvinism

An interesting take from John Ehrett on Stephen King's oeuvre: "The Dark Theology of Stephen King".

Tolkien and the Film Adaptations

I prefer Lewis to Tolkien as a fiction writer, but this is insightful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfktLVP4Qr0&list=PLKjwFyELc2Snqt4O6X4VhCm2Pk1k2pXUx&index=19

Till We Have Faces

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uk-ukf7iaA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCipem2XoG4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMffwQPp2FM&t=1s

Many critics deem this to be Lewis's best novel. It isn't fair to judge a book I haven't read, but at the same time there's a reason I never read it. Watching the lecture is a nice of a cheating. Giving me insight as a substitute for reading the book. I think a lot of Lewis fans haven't read it because:

i) It isn't Christian. It's a reversion to Lewis's lifelong fascination with Greek mythology. So the pagan setting is off-putting, and unlike the Greco-pagan elements in The Chronicles of Narnia, this isn't diluted.

ii) The main characters are women, it's written from a female perspective (insofar as Lewis can get inside a woman's mind), and it seems to have a female slant in terms of all the psychologizing and relational dynamics. This may reflect the influence of his wife reading the drafts. He's not merely adopting a feminine voice or viewing but taking his clues from her critical feedback. 

That's less appealing to the stereotypical male reader than some of his other fiction, with their more externalized focus on exploration and exotic landscape. 

iii) Whether or not I read a fictional book depends on a snap judgment from reading a plot synopsis. If the plot doesn't interest me I don't read the book. Same thing with movies and TV dramas. 

Shippey on Tolkien

Here's an excerpt from chapter 4 of Tom Shippey's J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century.

Beowulf

I'm not a Tolkien scholar, so this post will reflect my limitations in that regard. I read LOTR once, as a teenager, to find out what all the hoopla was about. Once was enough. It's not a bad novel. It has a travelogue quality that appeals to a boyish sense of adventure, common to many men–myself included. It has a few memorable scenes and characters. But in general it's overrated. He's not a great storyteller like Homer (esp. The Odyssey)–much less the incomparable Dante. It lacks the primitive appeal and elemental simplicity of the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the past I have suggested that it reflects the medieval chivalric tradition. I found the movies enjoyable. Not the highest art, but they work at the level of the material. 

One of the interpretive issues regarding LOTR is the relationship between the story and Tolkien's Catholicism. If it has a Catholic Christian subtext, that's very muted. Not only are the characters not Christian, but they don't seem to be very pious. There's no worship or prayer, that I recall, either individually or institutionally. 

Tolkien wrote a seminary essay on Beowulf:

https://epistleofdude.wordpress.com/2019/02/11/beowulf-the-monsters-and-the-critics/

And one question is whether LOTR was partly moldeled on Beowulf. There's an interesting tension between the worldview of the narrator and the worldview of the characters. The basic story is Viking legend. The product of a warrior culture with pagan values. The Protagonist is something of a demigod, doing battle with monsters. 

The outlook of the protagonist is essentially heathen. Similar to the honor-code of Homeric heroes. Mortality is inevitable, so what matters is to die a glorious death.

However, the narrator is a medieval Christian. So he's retelling the legend from the retrospective standpoint of a medieval Christian. The generates an interesting tension between the pagan, polytheistic viewpoint of the main character and the providential, monotheistic viewpoint of the narrator. The narrator attributes the hidden hand of providence to certain outcomes. There's nothing overtly Christian about the setting, plot, dialogue, or characters. Christian insight is supplied by the editorial asides of the narrator.

This is nicely explicated in a two-part lecture by Scott Masson: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnuM-WkM50

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTEeBt16orA

So Beowulf reflects a transitional period from Norse paganism to Norse Christianity. Both forward-looking and backward looking. 

There may be an residual element of that same unresolved tension in LOTR, between the Catholic viewpoint of the narrator (Tolkien) and the pre-Christian (?) viewpoint of the characters. 

Of course, Middle Earth has a different history than our world, so there's a sense in which it couldn't be Christian in any direct respect. The Christian faith is the product of a particular world history. That can't be transferred or duplicated as is to a planet with a different world history. At best, Tolkien could create a variation on Christianity. Something analogous to Christianity, but with a different backstory. 

It is striking, though, that Tolkien feels no duty to integrate LOTR into Catholicism. Perhaps that reflects a lay/clerical dichotomy, where he thinks it's the role of the clergy rather than laity to promote the Catholic faith–whereas the Anglican Lewis felt no such inhibition. Cf. A. Jacobs, The Narnian (HarperOne 2006), 199.

It may also go to the stereotypical difference between a cradle Catholic and an adult convert. Lewis had the evangelistic and apologetic zeal of a convert. The need to justify his conversion as well as the enthusiasm to share his discovery with the lost. What they are now, he used to be. He reaches back to bring others into the light. 

I find Beowulf of some personal, autobiographical interest due to my own Viking ancestry (on my father's side). Of course, the Christianity of the medieval narrator is far removed from my Protestant theology. I'm stand at the end of that trajectory. 

Interplanetary politics

1. From what I've read, Perelandra is the most popular entry in the Space Triology, although a few connoisseurs (e.g. Rowan Williams) prefer That Hideous Strength. Perlandra's my personal favorite in the Space Trilogy. 

Perelandra was initially Lewis's favorite until he wrote Til We Have Faces. Some literary critics agree that that's his best novel, but that may be because they think they're supposed to admire it and rank it higher than the others. For a couple of reasons, I think it's possible that Lewis himself overrated Til We have Faces. The myth of Cupid and Psyche had captivated him since he read it for the first time in 1916, when he was still a teenager. But there were many false starts. He tried to do a poetic version. He struggled with how to retell the myth for almost 40 years. His own worldview as well as the interpretation evolved over time. Cf. Peter Schakel's chapter (20) in The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis.

In addition, the breakthrough moment came when he talked it over with his future wife:

Jack has started a new fantasy–for grownups. His methods of work amaze me. One night he was lamenting that he couldn't get a good idea for a book. We kicked a few ideas around till one came to life. Then we had another whiskey each and bounced it back and forth between us. The next day, without further planning, he wrote the first chapter! I read it and made some criticisms…he did it over and went on with the next. D. King, ed. Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman (Eerdmans 2009), 242.

So he may have associated the book with his wife, which lends it a special poignancy for him.

2. Because for most readers, myself included, That Hideous Strength is a letdown after Perelandra, it raises the question of how or whether it could be better written. Another question is whether he should have ended with Perelandra. What do you do for an encore? If the final installment can't equal, must less surpass, the second entry, would it be wiser for Lewis to quit while he was ahead rather than end with an anticlimactic climax?

In fairness, it's not a bad book. It has some memorable scenes. Strokes of genius. It's prophetic. But it's not all of a piece. 

3. As every commentator explains, That Hideous Strength marks an abrupt stylistic shift from the first two installments, due in part to the newer influence of Charles Williams and spent impact of Tolkien. Tolkien was no longer a creative stimulus for Lewis, in part because Lewis had outgrown Tolkien, who was a smaller talent, and due to irreconcilable artistic visions.    

But over and above that, a change was inevitable. At a scenic level, That Hideous Strength can't compete with the extraterrestrial landscapes and seascapes of Venus and Mars, or their species. That's exacerbated by the fact that Lewis makes no pretense of astronomical accuracy. They exist in his cosmological mythos. That frees him to indulge in surreal flights of fancy unconstrained by what's physically possible. By contrast, That Hideous Strength must have a more realistic setting. After all, his readers are earthlings. 

4. One of the tensions in Out of the Silent Planet is Lewis attacking secular science and its counterpart in hard science fiction. In particular, the materialist notion that outer space is mostly deserted and dead. But as a matter of fact, that's the case. And even though Lewis didn't have the benefit contemporary astronomy, c. 2020, he must have known back in the 1930s that there was no presumption of other life in our solar system. 

Of course, this is soft SF, not meant to be accurate, but then, what does his critique amount to in that respect? It works at the level of his fictional cosmology, but it's not a refutation of the hard SF view of the universe as mostly deserted and dead. 

However, that's offset by the fact that soft SF is never obsolete, whereas the danger of futuristic hard SF is to become dated when overtaken by real events. It works if you have a dualistic view of reality, where there are spiritual agents behind the physical realm, who participate in the physical realm. Interaction between two different domains. Sacramental universe. 

5. Despite the comedown, there is some justification in the third and final installment. All three share the common theme of a primordial angelic rebellion. Against his will, Ransom is drawn into the internal affairs of Mars. Then he is summoned to Venus. The Martian guardian angel visits earth to facilitate the trip. 

In terms of dramatic logic and closure, it makes sense that events come to a head on earth. Having decisively intervened on Venus, it's only fair that heavenly angels lend Ransom a hand for a critical battle with the dark side on earth. Especially since earth is the epicenter of the cosmic rebellion. That rounds out the dramatic arc of a story that began with Mars and proceeded through Venus. 

6. In addition, it gives Lewis a pretext to reinterpret the King Arthur mythos–a theme many English poets and novelists find irresistible. Merlin fits into Lewis's philosophy of myth and magic. However, making Ransom a descendent of King Arthur is ad hoc. King Arthur has no useful role to play in a 20C setting. He's timebound in a way that Merlin is not. 

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Drama is conflict

From what I've read, it's an unquestioned axiom that conflict is the essence of drama. That's morally disturbing if true. Is life boring unless we always have obstacles to overcome? Likewise, is life boring unless we're always setting new goals? An endless (vicious?) cycle of conflict and conflict resolution?

Does this mean heaven will be boring? What worldview is implied by the axiom that conflict is the essence of drama? 

Is conflict essential to an interesting, fulfilling life–or just essential to an interesting story (novel, movie)? But is that a tenable dichotomy? 

Is this an artificial requirement for what constitutes good drama? Is that a natural prerequisite–or has it been conditioned into us? Like needing to get high. It's fun to watch a gripping movie, but you can't live on adrenalin. 

Is conflict a staple of drama because it's such an easy, lazy way to write a story? Inject that artificial stimulant. Does it take more imagination and skill to write an interesting, satisfying story that doesn't center on conflict and conflict resolution?

The stereotypical plot forms an arc. The storyteller introduces a point of conflict. The conflict intensifies in a rising motion, then peaks. That's both the dramatic high-point and turning-point, although it may not be the structural turning-point. Usually things come to a head towards the end of the story, to maintain suspense. Then there's the falling motion when the conflict is finally resolved. The climax is delayed for as long as possible to gin up excitement. Build pressure to a breaking point. Everything after conflict resolution is anticlimactic, so that's relegated to the tail-end of the story.  

That's a perfectly good plot convention, but must every story be shoehorned into that pattern to be a good story? Once again, what's the relationship between a good story and a good life? If we run out of challenges, must we constantly invent new challenges to be happy? What does that say about the world to come? Can we enjoy life unless there's conflict? In effect, is that just busywork? Filler? 

I'm not suggesting we should eliminate conflict from storytelling. Conflict is an inescapable feature of human experience–at least in a fallen world. When we write about real life, that will include many stories where conflict is a central theme. 

The question, though, is whether this convention is smothering the potential for good stories that don't center on conflict and conflict resolution. And it goes to the larger question of the relation between life and. Is conflict necessary for a happiness? Seems to me it's about balance. We need a certain amount of variety. We need a certain amount of stability and predictability. We need some repeated pleasures. Striking a balance between change and familiarity. 

Some stories have an open ending. They create plot conflict, but leave it unresolved. In real life, many situations lack closure. All the loose ends aren't tied up into a pretty bow. In a sense, hell is a paradigm example of an open ending, where conflict is forever unresolved. 

Why Lewis wrote fiction

Why did C. S. Lewis write Christian fiction? He seemed to have several related motivations:

“Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.” (C. S. Lewis, 9 August 1939), The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis.

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.  "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said"

And finally, though it may seem a sour paradox – we must sometimes get away from the Authorised Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity the transporting or horrifying realities of which the book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame or struck dumb with terror or carried out of ourselves by ravishing throes and adoration. Does the word ‘scourged’ really come home to us like ‘flogged’? Does ‘mocked him’ sting like ‘jeered at him’? "Introduction to J.B. Phillips’ Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles." 

Our great danger at present is lest the church should continue to practice a merely missionary technique in what has become a missionary situation. A century ago our task was to edify those who had been brought up in the faith: our present task is chiefly to convert and instruct infidels. Great Britain is as much part of the mission field as China. Now if you were sent to the Bantus you would be taught their language and traditions. You need similar teaching about the language and mental habits of your own uneducated and unbelieving fellow countrymen. Many priests are quite ignorant on this subject. What I know about it I have learned from talking in R.A.F.8 camps. They were mostly inhabited by Englishmen and, therefore, some of what I shall say may be irrelevant to the situation in Wales. You will sift out what does not apply.

(1) I find that the uneducated Englishman is an almost total sceptic about history. I had expected he would disbelieve the Gospels because they contain miracles: but he really disbelieves them because they deal with things that happened two thousand years ago. He would disbelieve equally in the battle of Actium if he heard of it. To those who have had our kind of education, his state of mind is very difficult to realize. To us the present has always appeared as one section in a huge continuous process.

In his mind the present occupies almost the whole field of vision. Beyond it, isolated from it, and quite unimportant, is something called "the old days"—a small, comic jungle in which highwaymen, Queen Elizabeth, knights-in-armor, etc. wander about. Then (strangest of all) beyond the old days comes a picture of "primitive man." He is "science," not "history," and is therefore felt to be much more real than the old days. In other words, the prehistoric is much more believed in than the historic.

(2) He has a distrust (very rational in the state of his knowledge) of ancient texts. Thus a man has sometimes said to me, "These records were written in the days before printing, weren't they? And you haven't got the original bit of paper, have you? So what it comes to is that someone wrote something and someone else copied it and someone else copied that and so on. Well, by the time it comes to us, it won't be in the least like the original." This is a difficult objection to deal with because one cannot, there and then, start teaching the whole science of textual criticism. But at this point their real religion (i.e. faith in "science") has come to my aid. The assurance that there is a "science" called "textual criticism" and that its results (not only as regards the New Testament, but as regards ancient texts in general) are generally accepted, will usually be received without objection. (I need hardly point out that the word "text" must not be used, since to your audience it means only "a scriptural quotation.")

(3) A sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Our situation is thus very different from that of the Apostles. The Pagans (and still more the metuentes9) to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the Gospel was, therefore, "good news." We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else's fault—the capitalists', the government's, the Nazis', the generals', etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world. "Christian Apologetics"

The wood between the worlds

There's a sense in which The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy are Christian allegories, although Lewis resisted that classification: 

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2016/10/is-lewiss-fiction-allegorical.html

Here's another way we might draw the distinction: a necessary element of allegory is for an allegory to be set in our world. The Pilgrim's Progress is set in our world; likewise, Dante's comedy is set in our world, according to medieval cosmography. 

By contrast, Narnia represent a parallel universe. Narnia, Charn, and English represent parallel universes in a multiverse. The wood between the worlds exists outside any particular world. Likewise Aslan's Country exists outside individual worlds. Although the worlds are separate, it's possible to travel from one world to another. 

So, for instance, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe illustrates how Christian theology might play out in a fallen world with a different world history and talking animals. 

The Space Trilogy is superficially different. However, the Mars and Venus of The Space Trilogy were never meant to be astronomically realistic descriptions of Mars and Venus as they exist in our universe. So they're not allegorical in the sense that they're not set in our world, but a different kind of world. Perelandra is not an allegory of the Fall because it belongs to a universe with a different world history than the Venus of our own universe.  

Of course, there's a sense in which they are allegorical because they are fictional, and their theology derives from the real world in which Lewis exists. And they are products of his imagination. So we might say the stories are allegorical from a viewpoint outside the world of the stories, but are not allegorical from a viewpoint inside the world of the stories. 

Heroes and anti-heroes

Some thoughts on heroes and villains and storytelling. This involves some literary and film criticism. And there are tons of spoilers about The Dark Knight, Logan, and the much older film Seven. It's a bit of a jumble if not a haphazard mess, and I don't have the time I'd like to have to better organize and finesse it, but I figured it's better raw than not at all.

1. Many people are fascinated with crime stories, film noir, vigilantes, outlaws, and the like.

   Take the hard-boiled private investigator. I think the main attraction of the P.I. is that he has legal authority to investigate and arrest criminals, and he's fighting to solve crime, but he can operate outside the law. He can rough up people in a way the police can't, he can sneak into places the police need a warrant to search, he can fake the evidence for the greater good of getting rid of the bad guy, and so on. He's a just individual, but he isn't beholden to the judicial and legal system.

   Similar things could be said for the vigilante and the outlaw.

   In short, these are stories about a certain type of character - the anti-hero. Characters who are at heart good but who operate on the (legal and/or ethical) fringes of society. In D&D parlance, the police or sheriff would be lawful good characters, while the P.I. or outlaw would be chaotic good characters.

2. A good story needs a good enemy. The antagonist mirrors the protagonist.

Evangelizing the imagination

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-VrCTpwXAc

1. This is Bishop Barron doing what he does best. He presents a very winsome version of Catholicism, albeit a Catholicism that in key respects didn't exist until about the mid-20C or so. 

In his interpretation, fiction writers like Lewis were literary evangelists proselytizing the imagination. They realized the need to express the old faith in a new way if they hoped to reach an increasingly secularized audience. Tolkien's fiction is a Catholic pill. An exercise in pre-evangelization. That's an interesting thesis, but I find it questionable:

2. I think it's more likely that, first and foremost, they were evangelizing themselves. Their allegorical fiction creates theological analogues for traditional Christian doctrine. It's a of making traditional Christian theology more believable for themselves (i.e. Lewis, Tolkien). They translate some core doctrines and biblical accounts into fictional analogues that that they find more credible than the original accounts. 

3. There are roughly three ways you can view biblical narratives:

i) They are imaginary, like Alice in Wonderland.

ii) There's a real event that lies behind the account, but the account itself is a fictional analogue of what happened, like Godspell.

iii) The narratives provide realistic descriptions of real events.

4. I think in some cases their position corresponds to (ii). If so, one basic problem is that we lose touch with the truth that (on this view) lies behind the account. If the original account isn't a realistic description of what happened, but just an allegory of what happened, then we have no frame of reference to determine what parts of the analogy correspond to the underlying event. We can't say which analogies are closer to the event than others. We're just left with variations on some archetypal motifs, stock characters, and type-scenes. The specific setting, characters, dialogue, and plot are imaginary.   

5. On this view, allegories may replace the original account, because the original account is in itself a fictional analogue for whatever really happened. The theological allegories of Tolkien and Lewis are just as legitimate as the original, and have the added benefit (on their view) of being more believable than the original. 

(I realize they resist the classification of their fiction as allegorical. I'm not going to get hung-up on a pedantic or idiosyncratic definition of allegory.) 

Types of fiction

Human beings love stories. Human beings love fiction. I think a basic reason for that is because individual human experience is extremely provincial. You can only live in one place at a time. You can only live in one timeframe. So stories enable us to vicariously expand our range of individual experience. 

There are roughly two kinds of stories: factual and fictional. We can also subdivide the fictional category. Many fictional stories could parallel factual stories. Many stories deal with the kinds of people, situations, and events that happen in real life. 

That raises the question of why novelists, playwrights, and moviemakers so often prefer fictional stories even though there are real life stories that illustrate the same things. I think that's largely due to convenience and flexibility. In fiction you can arbitrarily select and combine the elements so that your characters say and do exactly what you wish, when and where you wish they to do so. That gives a creative artist great freedom. In real life, the variables can't be manipulated that way.

It also reflects the fact that our knowledge of true stories is quite limited, whereas imagination is much more expansive, so that  fictional stories doesn't require the same amount of knowledge as, say, a historical film or novel. 

Speaking for myself, I find dramas based on "a true story" more emotionally satisfying than imaginary stories. Knowing that it happened to real people. 

On the other hand, there are fictional stories that couldn't happen in real life. Take stories about time travel, interstellar travel, a parallel universe, or a fantasy world, viz. Perelandra, The Tempest, vampires, aliens, talking animals. 

In some cases, these might be naturally impossible, although there could be a Perelandra theme park. An artificial setting. In other cases, they might be naturally or physically possible, but we lack the technology to experience that. 

In addition, unrealistic fiction is appealing because it's how we wish things would happen sometimes. Comedies often trade on that appeal. 

Source criticism

20 years ago, Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss coauthored: (1999) "Book Review: Atheism And Theism," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 16 : Iss. 1 , Article 10. Available at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol16/iss1/10

The review is, by turns, incisive and entertaining. And it presents an interesting test-case for biblical source criticism and form criticism. I guessing Gale wrote the bulk of the review. Certainly the colorful, colloquial and sometimes risqué comparisons are his. 

However, I wouldn't be able to tell even that much if all I had to go by was the review. I've read a fair amount of stuff by and about Gale–philosophical, biographical, and autobiographical. I also watched his informal debate with Plantinga. By contest, Pruss's style is cooler and drier. 

But that aside, it would be pretty much impossible for a literary critic to figure out where Gale's contribution ends and Pruss's begins. And that illustrates a problem with biblical source criticism and form criticism. 

Furthermore, there's a lot more comparative material to work with in the case of Pruss and Gale than, say, the Gospels, or Paul's letters, Isaiah, or the Pentateuch. So much biblical source criticism and form criticism is arbitrary projection. 

Are Gen 1-2 from disparate sources?

Thread on the literary relationship between the accounts of Creation in Genesis 1-3.

Looking critically at the idea that 2 totally independent accounts of creation have been brought together with little editing in such a way that the 2 accounts are still largely identifiable.

— Peter J. Williams (@DrPJWilliams) October 25, 2018

Merlin in That Hideous Strength

Why does Merlin figure in That Hideous Strength? I've read some intricate explanations about Lewis's sources of influence (e.g. Tolkien, Charles Williams, George McDonald). I'm not a Lewis scholar, so those explanations may be correct. Of course, Lewis was a complex and impressionable thinker who sponged up many ideas from his wide and deep reading, so these are not mutually exclusive explanations.

However, it's my guess that there's a more straightforward explanation:

i) For starters, Lewis is a British fantasy writer with an antiquarian interest. That alone predisposes him to present his own creative reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend. He was spoiling for an opportunity, and That Hideous Strength gave him an opening.

ii) But over and above that, Merlin is a transitional figure with one foot in the old pagan order and another foot in the new Christian order. That may be appealing to Lewis, who saw an overlap between Christianity and paganism. For Lewis, "myth became fact" in Christianity. So Merlin may function as an evocative emblem of his theory regarding the relationship between history and mythology.

iii) Finally, Lewis has an aversion to technocracies. That already comes through in Out of the Silent Planet. And N.I.C.E. represents technocratic transhumanism.

But over and against that is something more powerful than technology: magic. That's ironic because it's older. Primitive. A throwback to something prescientific. 

So Lewis may be using the figure of Merlin to take a swipe at scientific humanism and technological triumphalism. There's something in the world more powerful than science and technology. 

Is Lewis's fiction allegorical?

C. S. Lewis denied that his Christian fiction was allegorical. Some people find that puzzling, because, on one definition, some of his fiction is allegorical. Clearly he was operating with a specialized definition of allegory. In a letter to a correspondent, he gives a fairly detailed explanation of what he means:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By an allegory I mean a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in which immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan, a giant that represents Despair.

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, "What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?" This is not an allegory at all So in Perelandra. This also works out a supposition. ("Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but successfully.")

Allegory and such supposals differ because they mix the real and the unreal in different ways. Bunyan's picture of Giant Despair does not start from a supposal at all. It is not a supposition but a fact that despair can capture and imprison a human soul. What is unreal or (fictional) is the giant, the castle, and the dungeon. The Incarnation of Christ in another world is mere supposal: but granted the supposition, He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than his death on Calvary.

Similarly, if the angels (who I believe to be real beings in the actual universe) have that relation to the Pagan gods which they are assumed to have in Perelandra, they might really manifest themselves in real form as they did to Ransom. 

Again, Ransom (to some extent) plays the role of Christ not because he allegorically represents him (as Cupid represents falling in love) but because in reality every real Christian is really called upon in some measure to enact Christ. Of course Ransom does this rather more spectacularly than most. But that does not mean that he does it allegorically. It only means that fiction (at any rate my kind of fiction) choose extreme cases. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume lll: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963 (HarperOne, 2007),1004-05.

Three wolf moon

"Remus Lupin, Werewolf" by Jim Hamilton.

Fiction & Literature

http://www.challies.com/interviews/fiction-literature-an-interview-with-russell-moore