Of This and Other Worlds

limblogs

Why does no one talk about how the Pevensies had to grow up with a kingdom of responsibilities on their shoulders, only to return to Earth and be children

It’s not addressed because it’s understood. It was the shared experience of the generation. You are describing coming home from World War One, battle wearied and aged beyond belief, but walking around in the body of a youth. C S Lewis went to the front line of the Somme on his nineteenth birthday and went back to complete uni in 1918 after demob.

This is what Lewis says about fairy tales, and how the conventions of that particular subgenre affected his writing of Narnia:

As these [mental] images sorted themselves into events (i.e., became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the Form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the Form itself: its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections and ‘gas.’ I was now enamored of it. Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction; as of the hardness of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the sonneteer.

To explain Lewis’s slightly old-fashioned vocabulary, “gas” is a slang term meaning “to talk at length, esp. boringly or pompously” (see The Oxford Dictionary of Slang by Ayto and Simpson, 2nd ed. 2008).

Which means that from the very beginning, Lewis had it firmly in mind that he was not going to dig into the psychology of his characters, the Pevensies included. Lewis certainly knew the horrors of war and the effect that it has on the psyche, and he was neither shy nor incapable of exploring psychological trauma in his adult SF novels*, but he had no intention of weighing down the Narnia books with it. 

So while he describes several battles over the course of the series in which many people (including good people) are killed, Lewis never uses these experiences to fundamentally change his characters’ outlook and personalities. They may be shaken and momentarily overwhelmed by the brutality of combat (as when Peter kills the wolf Maugrim in LWW, or Shasta gets caught up in the battle with the Calormenes in HHB); they are sobered by the loss of good comrades and the imminent threat of losing their own lives (as Eustace, Jill and Tirian are in LB). But when the battle or the adventure is over, the children quickly regain their equanimity and their sense of humour. Despite all the violent battles and duels Edmund takes part in during the events of Prince Caspian (which include cutting a man’s legs out from under him and then walloping off his head), his biggest lament at the end of the book is that he’s left his new electric torch in Narnia.

Older readers of the Narnia books may feel compelled to speculate about how the children’s adventures must have “really” affected them, particularly once they returned to England as children after growing up in Narnia during the events of LWW. But Lewis had no such interest, and with good reason. This is what he says about writing for children:

We must write for children out of those elements in our own imagination which we share with children: differing from our child readers not by any less, or less serious, interest in the things we handle, but by the fact that we have other interests which children would not share with us.

Lewis chose not to explore the deeper effects of trauma on his characters, not because he was unaware of or indifferent to those effects, but because he knew that his younger readers — the children for whom the Narnia books were really intended — would not be interested in hearing about them or even (yet) capable of understanding them. 

As a child of six or seven I blithely read gruesome fairy tales and never paused to imagine what it would feel like to be one of Bluebeard’s murdered wives or shoved into a barrel of nails like Cinderella’s stepmother and rolled downhill until I was dead; in the same way, most children will cheerfully read any amount of hacking and slaying without the least thought of what it would feel like to kill or be killed themselves. The last thing they want is for some boring old adult narrator to interrupt the battle between good and evil with a lot of “gas” about how being stuck with sharp objects hurts and that sticking other people with sharp objects makes you feel bad.

It’s not that children take pleasure in violence as such, or that they lack empathy, but their perception of violence and their expression of empathy is simple and abstract compared to an adult’s. They rejoice to see the heroes triumph and the baddies soundly killed, and they consider that a happy ending. And to push them to grow up too soon, to perceive pain and suffering the way adults do, is no kindness to them. Nor is it fair to take away the pleasure they take in fairy tales by rewriting those tales -- Narnia very much included -- to conform to “realistic” adult expectations.

That is the out-of-universe explanation, however. The in-universe explanation for the Pevensies’ lack of angst is far more simple: Aslan is not a cruel torturer who wants the children to suffer, but a just and merciful Lion who brought them through the wardrobe for their good and the good of Narnia itself. To leave the Pevensie children damaged by their experiences in Narnia, rather than wiser and better off for them, would be totally out of Aslan’s character. So it is quite reasonable to believe that the same magic which reverted the Pevensies to childhood also left them with a child’s perspective on their adult memories — innocent, optimistic, and blithely untroubled by the painful empathies that cause us such sorrow as adults. The Pevensies therefore remembered the facts of their stay in Narnia, but not the feelings (or at least, not any feelings that would hurt them). And if you look at the children’s behaviour on their subsequent visits to Narnia, their behaviour is exactly what we would expect if this were really the case.

I’m not saying fans can’t come at the Narnia books from any angle that suits them, because that’s what fandom is all about. I am saying, however, that Lewis was neither ignorant nor oblivious to the ramifications of what he was writing. He knew very specifically and deliberately what he wanted to do with his stories, he was writing with the interests and needs of children in mind, and the reason he left out any hint of psychological trauma in his portrayal of the Pevensies is because no such trauma occurred or was ever intended. That is the part of the magic of Narnia, and if modern adult readers find this too unpalatable to swallow, they will be better off leaving Narnia behind and seeking out books that are more to their personal tastes.

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* Pretty much the whole point of Ransom’s portrayal in That Hideous Strength is that he has become the Fisher King, deeply and painfully wounded by the events of Perelandra in a way that (to quote Frodo to Sam at the end of LotR) “will never really heal.” Lewis could absolutely write psychological damage when he chose to; in the case of Narnia, he chose not to.

Dear Jo: I'm not sure I quite get this concept. Were you lying back in 1998 (and 1999, and 2001) to make antsy readers and critics feel better about your inspirations, or did Philip Pullman just hit you with Obliviate? Yours in bewilderment, RJA.

Another very good question. [Petunia] overheard a conversation, that is all I am going to say. She overheard conversation. The answer is in the beginning of Phoenix, she said she overheard Lily being told about them basically. ... [but] there is more to it than that. As I think you suspect. Correctly, but I don't want to say what else there is because it relates to book 7.