Jared has the goods on how allegory is defined and why Narnia really isn’t one despite what you may have heard.
How then does he define Allegory? Perhaps the clearest definition in the most common language comes via a letter to Mrs. Hook (found in Letters of C.S. Lewis, 12/29/58):
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, Bunyan, a giant represents Despair.
I’ve read before that Tolkien and Lewis both disliked allegory, but I never was sure what they meant. I see now: in an allegory, a character is not fully fleshed out as an individual, but serves as a kind of cardboard cut-out embodiment of an abstract quality. A Giant, for instance, might represent Despair, and when he speaks, we have an image of our own experience when we’re listening to the voice or counsel of despair. Puddleglum, on the other hand, certainly is a character used as a device to make points about the pros and cons of having a pessimistic nature, but he’s also a genuine character.
I suppose people think Lewis is allegorical because he’s mythological and symbolic, and because he created a character who clearly was equivalent in some fairly direct way to Christ. But Lewis doesn’t think of Christ as an abstract quality. He thinks of Him as a real individual person who can be known. So Aslan was his idea of how God would choose to be incarnated in a world of talking animals — that is, as a talking animal himself, and in fact the King of Beasts, a lion. He’s not a stand-in for the abstract notion of Godliness or anything so bloodless. He’s a person, someone you miss when he’s absent, a friend, a leader.
While I love myths and stories based on magical realism, I share Lewis’s distaste for true allegory, perhaps because the characters seem so flat, not like people you could know or whose destinies you could get interested in.
Yes. Very good.
Texan99, did you read C. S. Lewis’s “The Pilgrim’s Regress”? It is somewhere in the middle between allegory and symbolism.
I think it makes a big difference what your definition of allegory is. The Narnia books fell within Tolkien’s definition, and he disliked them for it.
Ori, I did read The Pilgrim’s Regress, and liked it the least of Lewis’s works — precisely because the characters were not believable in themselves, but were sort of walking posterboards for arguments.
Lars, I had read that Tolkien didn’t like the Narnia books for that reason. I guess he thought that the dramatic structure was too subordinated to the Christian argument. Certainly the theology in the Tolkien fantasies is murky by Lewis’s standards: whoever’s running the show in the Lord of the Rings tends to stay in the background and not interact directly with the principal players. In Lewis’s fantasies, God is always appearing in one guise or another to specific individuals and demanding a choice of allegiance and action from them, not merely under an abstract code but as a matter of personal relationship. Maybe it’s a Protestant-Catholic thing.
It would seem that our understanding of the word “allegory” as Christians ought to be strongly affected by the fact that it’s used in the New Testament:
“This is allegorically [Greek allegoroumena] speaking: for these women [the bondwoman and free woman] are two covenants …” Galatians 4:24 NASB
Being that Sarah and Hagar were actual living, breathing humans as well as parts of what Paul calls an allegory, this deepens the discussion nicely, doesn’t it?!
Texan99, given that it was C. S. Lewis’s first post conversion book, and he did not get back to writing in that style, I think it was his least favorite too.
Michael, I think this is due to influence of the one author who can make allegories come alive.
I thought one reason Tolkien didn’t like Narnia was because it was so derivative, having Santa Claus and Greek mythological characters in it. I’d like to see what he said about the stories being allegory. Perhaps he meant that they have big allegorical elements, but not full allegories themselves.
Michael, I don’t see how your example deepens it. Paul was drawing an allegory out of history, not explaining how the history was allegory.
Ori — on the other hand, he said he wasn’t very happy with The Screwtape Letters, which is one of my favorites. But Lewis’s problem wasn’t with with the style but with the fact that he found it wearying to adopt the ugly persona of a devil.
Frank Wilson has a good comment on Lewis on his blog. He says in part: “I think his fictional masterpiece is Till We Have Faces, which is a very good book. … As for his scholarly work, The Allegory of Love in particular is an essential work.”
Funny, “Till We Have Faces” is not one of my favorites, either: it seemed a little too self-consciously joyless, as if Lewis were trying on a “serious” literary pose.
“That Hideous Strength” was terrific. I loved “The Great Divorce,” too.
Phil, I’ll try to reply when I have a little more time to summarize my thoughts. I like Ori’s comment!
I personally think Lewis is at his best when writing informatively about literature, his area of professorial expertise. The Discarded Image is one of the ten books I’d pick out if I could only take ten books with me, because it’s a masterpiece on how to step out of one’s own world view (as best as one can) and see the world through the eyes of someone who sees the universe differently (he wrote it to help people not just to read their own modern preconceptions into Medieval and Renaissance literature). Of a kind with it is his little-known English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), especially in its lengthy introduction entitled “New Learning and New Ignorance,” in which he sometimes gets on a roll, making his points in a witty, snarky way that has me laughing out loud and rolling on the floor.