Pullman reminds me of a good friend of mine, a professor at my school, who is an atheist and has been one his whole adult life. He believes that religion, and Christianity in particular, is a poisonous blight on the world, warping minds and emotions. He uses strident language to condemn Christianity, above what I think he really believes personally, for the sake of getting the message across. His greatest weakness, like Pullman's (as June points out) is not understanding what faith really means to the believer. He sees the effects of Christian fundamentalism on America and American politics at this present time and attributes the ugliness that has arisen to something intrinsic in Christianity and how it influences thought.
To which my response is, I don't see how a person who hasn't had faith *can* possibly understand what it really means, and that while Pullman's argument is severely off base in several points, I'm not sure he or anyone else who hasn't been there is capable of seeing the thing from the proper perspective.
Both those articles raised some interesting points, but this one in particular drew my attention (from the blog entry):
Rather, he thinks that the story allows us to to infer things about C.S Lewis's unconscious attitude to sex. This game - discovering feelings that writers didn't know they had on the basis of things they didn't say - is great fun, and anyone can play it.
I'm not saying that the particular psychological analysis he's lampooning is one I agree with. But this practice of psychological evaluation and inference based on biography---it's what we literature types *do*. It's what we're trained to do in school, and while the conclusions it generates can sometimes lead to flights of academic fancy, it doesn't mean that the subtext shouldn't always be taken seriously.
I don't agree that Susan was kicked out of Narnia for being an adult, sexual woman. I've always latched on to the line from that section where Polly says "I wish she *would* grow up." But there *are* to my mind troubling undercurrents to Lewis' portrayals of gender, across all his writing. Just because Lucy is his heroine, and Aravis is kick-butt, etc, it doesn't entirely negate the suggestion that he's sexist. Every misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, etc, knows one or two women, black people, Jews, etc, who are "all right" usually because "his" [woman/minority] abides within the social limits he thinks proper. Lucy is Lewis' perfect girl, so naturally he approves of her.
I don't think Lewis was any *more* misogynist than most men of his upbringing, social class, and era. But that doesn't mean he's *not* a misogynist. In fact, considering his time and era, it would have been almost impossible for him not to have been.
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Date: 2005-12-02 02:59 pm (UTC)To which my response is, I don't see how a person who hasn't had faith *can* possibly understand what it really means, and that while Pullman's argument is severely off base in several points, I'm not sure he or anyone else who hasn't been there is capable of seeing the thing from the proper perspective.
Both those articles raised some interesting points, but this one in particular drew my attention (from the blog entry):
Rather, he thinks that the story allows us to to infer things about C.S Lewis's unconscious attitude to sex. This game - discovering feelings that writers didn't know they had on the basis of things they didn't say - is great fun, and anyone can play it.
I'm not saying that the particular psychological analysis he's lampooning is one I agree with. But this practice of psychological evaluation and inference based on biography---it's what we literature types *do*. It's what we're trained to do in school, and while the conclusions it generates can sometimes lead to flights of academic fancy, it doesn't mean that the subtext shouldn't always be taken seriously.
I don't agree that Susan was kicked out of Narnia for being an adult, sexual woman. I've always latched on to the line from that section where Polly says "I wish she *would* grow up." But there *are* to my mind troubling undercurrents to Lewis' portrayals of gender, across all his writing. Just because Lucy is his heroine, and Aravis is kick-butt, etc, it doesn't entirely negate the suggestion that he's sexist. Every misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, etc, knows one or two women, black people, Jews, etc, who are "all right" usually because "his" [woman/minority] abides within the social limits he thinks proper. Lucy is Lewis' perfect girl, so naturally he approves of her.
I don't think Lewis was any *more* misogynist than most men of his upbringing, social class, and era. But that doesn't mean he's *not* a misogynist. In fact, considering his time and era, it would have been almost impossible for him not to have been.