I have wondered about this. I'm not enough of a literary scholar to know what the generally accepted definition of "allegory" is and whether Lewis' fictional works fit that definition or not. If he is defying what most other literary scholars would say and is using his own private, esoteric and more narrow definition then I'm not sure he wins the argument. But if his description is technically correct - and I kind of think it is, as I can see the difference between a "true" allegory like Pilgrim's Progress vs. a "supposal" like the Narnia tales - then we should defer to Lewis.


Tolkien and Lewis shared that very narrow definition of what constituted a true "allegory" and both had a distaste for allegorical interpretations of literature in general, and of their own work in particular. You might find these quotes from the 2 of them interesting in light of your post:

“I dislike allegory wherever I smell it." JRRT

"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of the reader. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author." JRRT

"I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more 'life' a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.)" - JRRT


[C.S. Lewis, writing about 'Til We Have Faces"]
"An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else, so I give my account of Till we have Faces simply for what it is worth. [It is a] work of (supposed) historical imagination. A guess of what it might have been like in a little barbarous state on the borders of the Hellenistic world of Greek culture, just beginning to affect it. Hence the change from the old priest (of a very normal fertility mother-goddess) to Arnom; Stoic allegorizations of the myths standing to the original cult rather as Modernism to Christianity (but this is a parallel, not an allegory). Much that you take as allegory was intended solely as realisitic detail. The wagon men are nomads from the steppes. The children made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do. The Pillar Room is simply a room. The Fox is such an educated Greek slave as you might find at a barbarous court--and so on.

"Psyche is an instance of the anima naturaliter Christiana making the best of the Pagan religion she is brought up in and thus being guided (but always 'under the cloud', always in terms of her own imaginations or that of her people) towards the true God. She is in some ways like Christ because every good man or woman is like Christ. What else could they be like? [Ryan, this reminds me of your comment re. Alyosha] But of course my interest is primarily Orual.

"Orual is (not a symbol) but an instance, a 'case' of human affection in its natural condition, true, tender, suffering, but in the long run tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow. All this I hoped would stand as a mere story in its own right. But—

"Of course I had always in mind its close parallel to what is probably happening at this moment in at least five families in your home town. Someone becomes a Christian, or in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious order. The others suffer a sense of outrage. What they love is being taken from them. The boy must be mad. And the conceit of him! Or: is there something in it after all? Let's hope it is only a phase! If only he had listened to his natural advisers. Oh come back, come back, be sensible, be the dear son we used to know! Now I, as a Christian, have a good deal of sympathy with those jealous, suffering, puzzled people (for they do suffer, and out of their suffering much of the bitterness against religion arises). I believe the thing is common. There is very nearly a touch of it in Luke II. 38, 'Son, why hast thou so dealt with us?' And is the reply easy for a loving heart to bear? "

-CS Lewis, Letter to Clyde Kilby

Send this to Ebert. :-)

I was seriously bugged when I read his review of "Dawn Treader" and he says that the Narnia books are Christian allegory.

I mean seriously. Ebert should know better. Does he think that every time a movie has imagery that represents or alludes to something else, that it makes the whole movie an allegory? Sheesh.

Jared,
I agree wholeheartedly.

I don't even think one has to rely on Lewis to define the terms. (though you did a great job.)

I think you are right about the terms though. People don't know what words mean anymore, or don't care.

I'll need to check a dictionary, but I'm pretty sure that a dictionary would support us on this one! In an allegory, everything represents something else. Just because a story uses imagery, or even has one thing represent something else, that doesn't make the whole work an allegory.

In fact, there are very few things in Narnia that represent something else - I think a complete list would be pretty short...
Aslan, the emperor over the sea, and maybe the "true narnia" in the end of the Last Battle.

But even those aren't so much representing something else, as much as how they are known in the imaginary land of Narnia.

Stephy, I don't think it's in dispute that the Narnia stories have symbolism and "representations" in them. The question is whether they are allegories, according to the literary genre of Allegory.

I understand the impulse to say they are allegorical, but I still maintain that we only do that because allegory has come to modern understanding to mean anything with symbolism. Going by the classical rules of literature, though, which Lewis the Romantic held to and exposited, they are not allegorical. If Aslan was "sacrifice" or some intangible virtue, he would be an allegorical character. And certainly we can consider him so. But he is Jesus, a tangible figure, so allegory doesn't quite fit.

It may be reduction to say they are supposals, not allegories, but I would prefer the reduction to the author's intent rather than the dulling to the sensibilities of modern readers.

Can you explain how the story is being diminished? I am unclear on how saying they aren't allegorical diminishes them.
Saying they are not allegorical is not saying they aren't rich, deep, symbolic, etc. It's just saying they aren't the genre of allegory. They are not science fiction either, and acknowledging that doesn't diminish them.

I think saying they're allegories diminishes them. If Aslan is a virtue, he is something intangible, wooden, vague. But if he is Christ, he is rich, big, multi-dimensional -- like Christ.

That makes perfect sense, yes. Thanks for explaining.

I'm still not clear on how denying it as allegory does that, but that may just be my myopia.

I'd love to stay and discuss more. Discussing literature is one of my favorite things in the world. But I have an appointment in about 20 minutes and must go. One last word, though, literary analysis of a work is not done by the author but by readers. If a reader can set up their viewpoint citing evidence from the work, then this meaning exists. Sometimes authors say they see things they didn't at first in their own works after reading someone else's analysis. You know, most authors die without having left detailed descriptions of the meanings of all their works. Does that mean we can not read one of those works and see themes?

Okay, you win. Wikipedia says that Narnia is a "generic allegorical elements of good and evil, as well as many Christian themes, expressed in a narrative with strong fantasy fiction elements and credible characters: not fully an allegory".

Can we all wipe off the theolojizzing off our screens and move on?

I mean seriously, it's NARNIA. Please don't ruin my childhood crush on Prince Caspian by nitpicking the true definition of allegory. They're great stories, semi-allegorical or not.

One of my favorite Lewis' essays is The Death of Words, in which Lewis writes:

The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker's yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.

I see this all the time in my own profession of finance where technical terms continually get lost to people's use of them in simplistic good/bad definitions.

I think this is part of the problem with the word allegory as well. Rather than leave the word with its narrow definition, it has at least been partly lost to people expanding it to literature or stories they happen to like or dislike.

Where is the despair and crude language? Please don't disengage.

It seems to me (pardon me for butting in) that Jared is positioning himself to a certain extent as the defender of what he claims to be Lewis's intention as a writer:

But if we want to interpret his writing correctly, we must do so according to the author's rules at the very least. And if we are going to follow his rules for his writing, we must make the distinctions between Allegory and Symbolism and Supposal that Lewis himself does.

This is a risky position to take; Jared constructs a model of the reading experience in which the reader either succeeds or fails in extracting the 'correct' interpretation from the writing; while this makes a certain amount of sense w/r/t non-fiction, this does seem an unnecessarily reductive way to read fiction, or for that matter poetry, if only because so much important fiction and poetry actively resist interpretation. Even when the author attempts to guide our interpretation, the guidance may prove to be unhelpful, as we'll see below.

When Stephy counters that 'literary analysis of a work is not done by the author but by readers', which is true (if only half the truth), Jared dismisses this as 'the reader-response theory of lit criticism. At best, it's fun. At worst, it's disrespectful of an author's intent' and then, somewhat rudely, says 'Is it okay if I read your comment to say that you have purple skin and eight eyes? After all, it's not up to your intent, but how I read it.' But this clearly won't do; there is a difference between, on the one hand, acknowledging that readers bring their own expectations, preconceptions and modes of understanding to a piece of writing, and on the other hand claiming that this acknowledgment amounts to importing meanings into a text that are blatantly not there. It is disingenuous of Jared to claim that this is what reader-response criticism essentially amounts to, but we can assume that he does so not out of bad faith but out of profound respect for Lewis's intention as a Christian writer - perhaps at the expense of Lewis's intention as a fiction writer.

In case Jared thinks that I am getting at him, I might point out that Karl quotes Tolkien at length on JRRT's dislike for allegory, but Tolkien made these themselves rather disingenuous comments in the context of denying that LOTR was an allegory for 20th century history, which of course it isn't. Elsewhere, Tolkien enjoyed and readily made up allegories, such as the allegory he used in his classic lecture on Beowulf in which he retold the composition of Beowulf as a story about a man building a tower out of old stones that he'd found lying in a field; more conspicuously, the stories Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major are allegorical by anyone's standards. So Tolkien was by no means as averse to allegory as he claimed to be. This is another reason why attempting to recover the author's intention is more complicated than it looks.

In general, what this discussion has mostly lacked is a coherent definition of allegory other than Lewis's one, and it has also (in my view) suffered from the widespread modern distaste for allegory that Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of German Trauerspiel, traced back at least as far as Goethe. I hope nobody will mind if I quote Benjamin on allegory, which he wrote about in the context of discussing 16th century German drama:

Any person, any thing, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility, a destructive but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance. But it will be unmistakably apparent, especially to anyone who is familiar with allegorical textual exegesis, that all of the things that are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plane, and which, indeed, can sanctify them.

(I slightly modified the translation to bring it closer to the original.) I'm not sure if this exactly provides a definition of allegory, but it does illuminate it somewhat from a different angle, and it does, at least for me, say something interesting about the somewhat arbitrary-seeming nature of allegory when used by religious writers, although I should point that Benjamin valued allegory and was seeking to revalue it. In the meantime, it seems to me that a certain amount of energy is being wasted on this thread by knocking down straw men; and if Jared feels that crude language is being used, he might care to review some of his own comments. I make my own in a spirit of bringing an outsider's perspective to the debate.

Alex, I'll admit to not having studied the history and use of the word allegory nearly as much as you have.

But I think you are arguing past the crux of Jared's argument. I think the issue is largely that which Lewis addressed in his essay "The Death of Words".

In that essay, Lewis starts out by explaining how the word gentlemen lost its definitive meaning (i.e. a gentlemen was a landowner), and become a vague word to denote a man that others found "nice" or "good" or "well-mannered".

I'll give you a similar example from finance. I don't know the first usage of the word recession, but in the 1970's, economists defined the word narrowly as two consecutive quarters of economic decline, typically as measured by GDP. As such, it is a precise mathematical determination if a country has had, or is in, a recession. Unfortunately, the news media and people have taken the term, and expanded it to essentially mean any poor economic times. Today, you have news organizations that even poll people to ask them "Are we still in a recession?" There are hundreds of words to describe bad economic times, including "bad economic times". There is no need to kill the word recession by broadening and therefore diluting its meaning into just another one of those.

Or as Lewis questioned at the end of his essay:

What is the good of deepening a words connotation if you deprive the word of all practicable denotation?

I think Lewis defined "allegory" vary narrowly as well, and using his definition, Narnia is not allegory. If others use the word allegory more broadly to include things like Narnia, I think such broadening merely "kills" the word by making it a word of very little value.

And the fact there is clearly argument about the word, probably means it is already "dead".

A friend of mine directed me to this discussion to ask what I thought. I am a big fan of Lewis's writings, both fiction and theological. Besides reading all his works, I grew up not far from a Christian college that had, for a time, a large collection of C.S. Lewis memorabilia: the original wardrobe that supposedly inspired the one in the book, a writing desk, and all kinds of original letters and other papers. These could be studied with appropriate permission from the college librarians. (They also had a nice collection of Tolkien's materials.)

Lewis stated that "the whole Narnian story is about Christ." Is that allegorical? Or is it merely symbolic? Perhaps it is a metaphor, or a parable, or a figuration. The specific term does not matter: Lewis intended for the stories to connote various aspects of Christian faith to the reader. Thus, if the question is, "Did Lewis write the Narnia books as an allegory of Christ?" then it is disingenous to say "no" simply because you disagree with the use of the word "allegory". That is akin to arguing over the letter of the law instead of the spirit of the law.

There are many etymological debates we could have about the word "allegory". The word dates back to the Greek "allegoria", which means "a speaking about something else" in the sense of concealing one's real meaning. Perhaps Lewis (or the time and place of the culture he lived in) gave the word different meaning. And in modern times, its common meaning may be different yet. If you want to argue that Narnia is not an "allegory" in the C.S. Lewis sense of the word, perhaps you are right. If you want to argue that Narnia is not an "allegory" in the modern, widely-accepted sense of the word, then you are flat wrong.
Incidentally, in my youth, the librarians charged with the C.S. Lewis collection told me that he wrote the series specifically to remind children of Christ, almost as a seed of the Christian faith, so that later in life they would more easily recognize Christ. And even today there are many scholars who say this. But, I later read Lewis's writings which indicated this was not actually true; he began writing the stories simply as fiction, and as the stories began forming, he realized there were strong parallels with faith in them, which might have helped him understand God when he was younger. In short, if he did not set out to write metaphorically, he saw that they might be metaphors nonetheless, and from there he stuck with it. For example, he came up with Aslan as "an imaginary answer to the question: 'What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia?'" So Narnia came first; then came the allegory.

Perhaps that makes us both right.
(Aside: it's very cute to call your site "Thinklings.")

(sorry for leaving two messages -- not sure how that happened -- please delete one!)

*yawn*

Who cares?

Go save some souls.

Alex, very clever.

By the way, who hates allegory. Saying Narnia isn't allegory isn't saying allegory is bad.

Stranger and stranger this thing gets . . .

e2c, why do you think that unsettles me? You're right; we're all stating opinions here. As you read through the thread, does it appear that I'm the one unsettled?

I like what Lewis says about his own work and I have chosen to agree with him. I have been surprised at how unsettling this has been for more than a few commenters. I honestly didn't think my post was such a bombshell. As people disagreed, I tried to engage. Then it got weird. People really started taking it personally.

I submit the unsettlement began in comment #15 ("Deb"). Since then I haven't been able to disguise my bewilderment. But I've said multiple times that people are welcome to disagree with Lewis, with me, with whoever they want. I've said several times anyone can think about Narnia whatever they want. This has not really appeased anybody, though. I'm not sure what will, barring my saying I change my mind. (shrug)

Okey dokey.

And now, to go check out the other comments thread . . .

deep breath . . .

[into the abyss]

Wouldn't it be easier to settle this by asking Devin Brown, a Lilly Scholar and Professor of English at Asbury University, is an expert on C.S. Lewis? Their are some people who research these questions for a living.

Sorry about being snarky. A friend brought this post to my attention and after reading it, I didn't see any purpose to the post other than a C.S. Lewis quoting fest, aka "theolojizzing."

Coming from an English professor, I can understand the discussion. Coming from a Christian blogger, it makes me want to smack my head against my keyboard. The Narnia stories are a big part of a lot of people's faith journeys. Reducing them to a sterile discussion and quibbling over one word kills the beauty and wonder of the books that many of us felt when we first read them. It's like writing a commentary on "consider the lilies of the field" by saying that the only acceptable interpretation of "lilies" is using the exact genus and species that was around when the passage was originally written and then debating what that might have been. A thing of beauty is a thing of beauty and everyone is going to look at it in their own way.

Oh, and Mr. Thinklings, some of the earlier comments several people made are now gone. Why did you delete parts if this conversation?

Sorry folks, I meant to write "there" not "their"

I have not deleted or altered any comments.

As this is my post, I get the email notices for comments left, and so far every notice of a comment I've gotten appears in the thread.

Is it possible someone didn't answer the spam-checker question and then thought they'd posted a comment but it didn't go through? Just an idea.

Btw, next time I have an idea for a blog post I will email some of these folks to make sure I'm qualified to publish it. ;-)

This debate is awesome. All we need now is for Mac Swift to drop in and lay some smack on us.

@ Karl: Excellent points!

I wonder, though, if there'd be any kind of consensus among literary scholars. My guess is that if 3 were asked, there would be good answers, but likely with varying ways of understanding the question(s), and ... well. The study of literature is a pretty subjective thing and there's a plethora of opinions and viewpoints out there on any given writer's body of work (Dickens, Hawthorne, Poe, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Faulkner.... and Lewis, too).

I just don't believe that there is any single "right" answer to the questions raised here, though doubtless many people who've studied Lewis' fiction will have similar points of view. But identical povs - nope.

Good point, Andrew. Even the author's words don't clinch it, because careful study could reveal ideas or themes in a work or series of works to which the author is or was blind.

But on not casting an opinion, you're a coward. Man up.

:)

Don't shoot the messenger.

@ Raindream: great point, and one that I think has been largely ignored in this discussion.

"Even the author's words don't clinch it, because careful study could reveal ideas or themes in a work or series of works to which the author is or was blind."

Forgive me for thinking that this is all starting to sound like fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, but...

Well, even many non-fundamentalists think that there are correct and incorrect interpretations of the Bible.

I'm throwing in the towel

Wait, are you throwing it in because of my comment? Don't do that - I can be ignored. Raindream, on the other hand, I thought was engaging you very thoughtfully. If I'm derailing you from a good discussion with him, please just ignore me. I thought we had a chance to see two people on this thread actually get somewhere.

By the way, for what it's worth (and I'm not being snarky here) - I did read and remember your earlier comment. To be honest, I've been a bit confused because you appeared to agree with the overall thrust of the post, and I haven't yet *quite* figured out what you disagreed with.

Look, discussing things online is tough. No body language, auditory clues, prior understanding of the person you're debating with, etc. It can take time.

I firmly believe that authorial intent is important, but perhaps not always paramount, in terms of how works of all kinds have meaning for their readers.

I agree with that, on most works of literature, and particularly fiction and poetry. Scripture, not so much.

but who - or what - determines what is "right" or "wrong" in the interpretation of literature?

I'm not sure I understand how you're arriving at this conclusion -

"...there are always an infinite number of wrong answers, some more popular than others. "

An "infinite number"? How so?

(Forgive me for thinking that this is all starting to sound like fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, but...)

I know you've said you are throwing in the towel, but I'll respond anyways.

The fact that people argue about literature at all speaks to the fact that at least those who take the time to discuss it feel that some answers are more right than others. I meant that there are an infinite number of wrong answers in the same way that there are an infinite number of wrong ways to construct an English sentence. Language, like literature, is extremely adaptable and malleable, but it still has rules. Just as someone could find an infinite number of ways to construct a nonsensical sentence, a person could come up with all sorts of ridiculous things to say about any work of art. For instance, "A fundamental theme of Narnia is the injustice done towards women by the framers of the U.S. Constitution." It's obviously wrong, and even if one knew nothing of Lewis the man, one could safely argue that Narnia has nothing to do with the social history of the United States. You cannot argue that 1984 is pro-fascist and have a leg to stand on. It is objectively not. That doesn't mean that there is a single, objective way to interpret the role of sex in the book, but the consensus that 1984 is anti-fascist is correct, and the opposite statement is incorrect. No one person decided this, but the book makes it self-evident, even though no explicit position is stated in the text. Good literature succeeds in appealing to certain universal instincts in its audience, and relies on those instincts to evoke a response. In Narnia, Lewis expects his audience to find the Witch bad and Alsan good, and I suspect that almost everybody who reads The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe would agree with it. Tolkien expects the reader to recognize Aragorn as heroic and Sauron as evil, and even if he simply communicated the facts, every reader would come to that conclusion. These are simple examples, but they at least demonstrate that in some cases there is a clear cut right and wrong in literature.

When it comes to the question of whether or not Narnia is allegory, it is a little more complicated. Still, one would be wrong to argue that Narnia is a satire or a romance.

Criticism underwent a lot of change in the last century. For at least fifty years, New Criticism dominated the scene. That school argued essentially that a work of literature is entirely self-contained, and that anything one needs to know about a piece can be gleaned from a close reading of the text. Biography, historical context, and the author's intention do not matter. An author may aim to say something and yet be unsuccessful. To paraphrase D.H. Lawrence, "Always trust the telling and never the teller." New Criticism is not as in vogue as it was in the middle of the century, but it still remains a strongly influential school in criticism, even if most critics do not practice it to the letter.

I'm not as keen on authorial intent as Jared is, but I would argue that when an author says something about his or her own work, the burden of proof shifts from the author to the critic. If you disagree with Lewis, then you must show how he is wrong. His definition of allegory may be too narrow or he may be in denial about his own work. The evidence is undisputed. It is the reader's job to take the evidence presented and form an argument from it. If Narnia is allegorical, then it should be demonstrable. I happen to think that Lewis makes a pretty strong argument on behalf of his own interpretation, but I can see where it would be possible to push back against him.

I agree with you that there may not be a single right answer. But there are plenty of wrong ones. The statement "Narnia is an allegory" may not be altogether right, but it is certainly closer to being right than the statement "Narnia is an example of chick-lit."

I don't mean to sound like a fundamentalist. Even non-fundamentalists, though, have clear convictions about certain doctrines. What separates the two camps isn't a matter of conviction. What separates them is that the fundy camp is unwilling to entertain the notion that they may be wrong on certain issues. In literature, I don't believe that's true of myself. I feel very strongly about certain interpretations of certain works, but I am not beyond being proven wrong. But it's just that. If I am wrong when I write that Gertrude's marriage to Claudius in Hamlet is not simply political, and that it proves her complicity in the plot to kill her husband, then I want to be shown how I am wrong. I want proof. If I didn't come to the conclusion haphazardly, then why would I abandon it simply because you say I'm wrong?

Thank you stephy, that is the perfect summation.

As a latecomer, what I find most interesting about this debate is that there's far less disagreement than people think. No one's talking about what the stories meant; that's not the disagreement. No one's saying they aren't important; that's not the argument. No one's even saying the books don't say what the person on the opposite side says.

They're allegory. They're not allegory. And...what? The great fault of all of this, from the OP on, is that no one really enunciates why Narnia being allegory is or isn't important.

It's not.

What's far more important is why Lucy sees Aslan first. Why, in her own world, is she first to see the painting move?

Friends, let us wonder at the proper things.

some kind of reading where there are no symbols

Who said there's no symbols?

I think the equation of "symbolic" with "allegorical" may be the problem with the problem with my post. To say Narnia is not allegorical is not to say there is no symbolism in it.

The whole point of the post and ensuing discussion (on my end, anyway) was that allegory is a specific kind of symbolism (at least to Lewis's classic view) -- where figures represent "virtues" or things intangible -- and that Narnia isn't that. I nowhere said, nor do I believe Lewis said, that there's no symbolism or representation in the stories. In fact, I talked about what Lewis said they were -- "supposals."

And if you ask me -- and at this point I'm sure nobody is asking me ;-) -- to say the stories are allegorical is precisely what can make them boring, lifeless, and "algebraic." Aslan representing "sacrifice" or "nobility" or some such etheral thing is mathematical, wooden. But if Aslan is a supposal of Christ, then he has as much Personality and richness and depth as Christ has.

Is the assumption that symbolism = allegory the problem here? Are people assuming that I'm saying the stories have no symbols, metaphors, and the like? If so, please re-read everything I've written and notice I've never said such a thing.

but somehow i don't think that's what they're really about, you know? the "about"aspect is much more elusive and mysterious - and it;'s not didactic, either.

I didn't argue that they were. I used it to try and argue that there are such things as right and wrong interpretations of literature. To say that Jadis is presented as a good character would be wrong. That doesn't mean that the stories are "about" her badness.

i guess i feel very uncomfortable when people start getting absolutist about stories.

I feel like there should be a way of arguing for a specific interpretation without being "absolutist." I believe certain interpretations correct and others incorrect, but I don't feel that makes me into an absolutist. An absolutist would say, "May view is right and is the only valid stance to take." I'm comfortable believing that I have a good grasp of Hamlet, but I don't believe that others are wrong simply because we differ. And I am comfortable admitting that I may be wrong, and would gladly change my mind if it was shown where I was wrong, or mistaken, or one-dimensional. I don't believe that is absolutism. If it is, then I really need to choose a new field. ;-)

we're not talking about algerbraic equations or chemistry experiments, after all, but about thing that have Mystery and a sense of wonder built right into them.

I don't understand how a person interested in discussing this, or any literary subject, is somehow depriving the book of mystery. In fact, I kind of resent it. Saying it isn't allegorical or that it is does not make the books less mysterious, just as making a claim on a certain parable does not make God less mysterious. I try to figure out what a work is saying because I care about it. I want to know what is being said about the world I live in. I want to know what is being said about the human condition. Refusing to make any judgments about a work of art does not make it grander or more wonderful. Why would I want to not know?

I'm fine with people not wanting to analyze books. I don't analyze every book I read. I don't puzzle myself witless over Raymond Chandler novels, though I do enjoy them. It's fine to just take books in. And it's fine to say that certain things are not worth arguing about. What I don't like is being told that I am depriving stories of their power by trying to understand them better. You're right that literature isn't algebra. It's richer than that. It has things to tell us.

I sympathize with the "who cares" attitude when it comes to the allegory v. not allegory argument. I have an opinion, but I don't care much about it. I don't sympathize with the idea that making a claim on the subject destroys the beauty of it. If that is so, then Lewis subverted his own work, long before Jared or I did.

I think this discussion has been going in circles for some time.

Enjoy it, people.

Has somebody mentioned Hitler or Nazis yet? Just checking? ;)

So the word 'ejaculate' doesn't count as crude? :)

I would suggest that a discussion among Christians about the word allegory ought to be illuminated by the usage of the verb form of the word in the New Testament, in Galatians Chapter 4:

"This is allegorically [Greek allegoroumena] speaking: for these two women are two covenants ..."
Galatians 4:24 NASB

Hello, this is Devin Brown checking in. I have enjoyed your lively exchanges. This seems to be the very sort of "hammer and tongs" discussion that Lewis and his friends so enjoyed.

Regarding allegory, perhaps I can help at bit. Not because I am a Lewis scholar or an English professor, but simply because I have thought and read about this topic a fair bit.

Let's start with a clear example of an allegory, the Parable of the Sower. Some seed falls on the path, some among the weeds, some on rocky ground, and some on good soil. We all agree that the seed clearly represents something more than seed and so do all of the places the seed falls. In addition, we all agree that the literal story itself is not the primary focus. The interpretation is.

Stories like this, in lit classes we call them allegories, have three qualities. 1) All (or at least most) of the major elements point to a unified secondary element. 2) We all generally agree on this secondary interpretation. 3) The literal story is not the primary focus (and often is not really a very good story).

You can see, then, that THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS fits this definition. So does Lewis's PILGRIM'S REGRESS. So does Pharaoh's dream of the seven fat and seven thin cows that came up out of the Nile. So does ANIMAL FARM. All of these stories fit the three-part definition of allegory.

Even if someone has a different name for this kind of story (even if they mean something different by "allegory"), we can all agree, I think, that the Narnia stories do not in general fit these three defining aspects. Peter is not supposed to be the Apostle Peter. Edmund does not represent Judas. Lucy and Susan are not Mary and Martha, The White Witch is not Pilate. To try to force this kind of interpretation on the Narnia stories not only does not work and also lessens them as stories, I think.

I think everyone would agree that the kind of writing in the Narnia stories is not the same kind of writing we find in the Parable of the Sower (or that Lewis did in THE PILGRIM'S REGRESS).

People may also agree, perhaps, that at times, Lewis may have a few specific elements in the Narnia stories that approach allegory--for example, when Aslan appears as a Lamb cooking fish on the beach at the end of THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER. For many people, this element does not work very well on a literal level but works primarily as a pointer to the way the risen Christ appeared to his disciples in the gospels.

When someone tells me that the Narnia stories are allegories, I always start by asking what exactly they mean by allegory. Often they have a vague idea of what they mean and end up discussing "parallels" to the Christian story or "echoes" of the Christian story. Then we both agree that yes, there are definitely parallels and echoes of the Christian story in the Narnia tales.

Well, sorry for the excessive length.

Best Wishes,
Devin Brown
Asbury University

What Devin Brown said. :-)

I wish I could have done so well. I guess that's why you're a prof at a great university and I'm not. ;-)

Seriously though, you honor us with your presence, and your comment was instructive, clear and concise. Well-done.

Jared is the man? That didn't seem to be Devin's consensus. :)

Did I miss something, or didn't Devin agree with Jared? And Devin is an expert! Or is he? His second paragraph, which seems to list his qualifications, was actually a bit ambiguous. But hey, we'll go with the simpler interpretation because you can't do better than to draw an expert to the table, as long as they agree with you. When they don't agree with you, you have to become an anti intellectual. Unless, of course, you are an intellectual. In that case you just become petulant. And did I mention that this is comment number 83! Holy Moly. It makes me wonder what the most comments on a Thinklings post was. What's the record, so to speak. -- Really, I'm just talking to myself here. I'm tired, so I'm nonsensically rambling for the sheer joy of it. No, not your joy, my joy. There can't be anyone still reading this far down can there? Hellooooo.

The most-commented post in Thinklings history is "What Color is This Liquid," which is holding at 1,553 comments and now adds one or two (legit) comments per month.

1,553. Leaves me dumbfounded. Not really, I just wanted to write dumbfounded. But, hey, we could beat that. Right? It wouldn't be so hard. Are you sure there wasn't some spam getting through on that other post? Now I have to go read that post and decide which one really deserves the most pointless, rambling commentary.