Session 23: March 10th, 2010 – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, chps 3-6

Posted in English fiction, children's literature on 03/11/2010 08:50 am by Marc Sheffner
Arthur Rackham, illustration to Hansel and Gretel
Image via Wikipedia

Today, we summarized chapters 3-6 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

We discussed archetypes - the witch is an archetype. This character exists in many different cultures. Does it not also exist in Japan? Some people thought not. Later, I got this comment from a participant:

today’s talk on the archetype and the witch made me rethink about the difference between Western and Japanese culture. And it also reminded me of my childhood when I was always wondering if there are any witches in Japan. It might be difficult to find an exact image of “witch” in Japan, but “yamanba” may be the closest.

I have to correct what I have said when you have mentioned about “noh” masks. There is a “hannya,” who turns into an “oni” due to her jealousy, but perhaps you were suggesting “yamanba” instead? (In Japanese here).

Update: It might be interesting to compare Lewis’ White Witch with the Japanese character “Yuki-Onna“. Or perhaps also with Andersen’s Snow Queen. That would make a good essay for students, don’t you think?

What interests me in the idea of archetype is that there are similar types that exist in the minds and cultures of human beings who live in very different places. Dragons, for instance, are found in the myths and legends of China and Japan. This is understandable, as the two countries are close geographically and culturally. Perhaps the notion of dragon came to Japan from China. However, dragons also appear in Norse, Celtic and Indian myths.

A New York Times article (2003) about dragon is titled From Many Imaginations, One Fearsome Creature. It suggests that the origin of the dragon idea was the bones of dinosaurs, particularly of pterodactyls. However, dragons exist in Inuit mythology, yet no dinosaur fossils have ever been found where the Inuit live:

For thousands of years, cultures across the globe have feared different versions of overgrown reptiles. GREEK MYTHOLOGY — Perseus fought to spare Andromeda from a sea dragon, perhaps inspired by sightings of oarfish (right), which grow up to 30 feet long. THROUGHOUT EUROPE — Roman accounts of dragons spawned many legends; biblical dragons gave them credibility. THE INUIT — They had visions of dragons in a region where no reptiles exist. This one, confronting a caribou, was carved in bone. MT. PILATUS, SWITZERLAND — Pterodactyl fossils (below) are plentiful in this area. CHINA — Flying dragons could be harnessed for transportation. THE AZTECS — Their serpent god Quetzalcoatl had various guises and was seen as a protector usually.

Peter Schaker writes of the White Witch,

She is, of course, the evil force in the traditional fairy-tale separation of good from evil… She is simply the archetypal figure of the temptress witch, whom we respond to quite directly as “bad.” And that is how Lewis himself viewed her: “The Witch,” he wrote in a letter, “is of course Circe, . . . because she is . . . the same Archetype we find in so many fairy tales. No good asking where any individual author got that. We are born knowing the Witch, aren’t we?” [In a letter to a friend, 1954.]  Circe, in the Odyssey, tempted men with magical food and turned them into animals. The Witch, by her affinities with Circe, fits the same pattern, or archetype, as the witch who caught Hansel and Gretel, the old witch in Grimm’s “Sweetheart Roland,” and the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz: each tempts its prey, hates human beings, and epitomizes selfishness, cruelty, and desire for control. Each suggests to children the nature of evil..

Lewis seemed to believe that the witch was an archetype, in other words, a universally recognized figure.  However, if the witch archetype, for example, does not exist in Japanese culture, that would suggest that the witch archetype is not universal. Perhaps some archetypes are universal and some are not? What are some Japanese archetypes?

Finally, the differences between Japanese and Western culture are obvious and easily explained – geographical distance, and historical isolation. What, to my mind, are more surprising than the differences are the similarities. Dragons, for example, are part of both Japanese AND Western cultures. Isn’t this odd!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Bookmark and Share
 

Shadowlands

Posted in English fiction, children's literature on 03/06/2010 09:34 am by Marc Sheffner
Cover of "Shadowlands"
Cover of Shadowlands

Shadowlands is a movie based on the friendship, marriage and love (in that order) of British author and Cambridge professor C.S. Lewis and American writer and divorcee, Joy Gresham. The Japanese title is 永遠の愛に生きて。It stars Anthony Hopkins as C.S. Lewis and Debrah Winger as Joy Gresham. (It also stars Edward Hardwicke as Lewis’ brother Warnie; Hardwicke played Dr. Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes.)

Although it’s a well made movie, at some point I stopped believing that Hopkins was Lewis. His eyes look too shifty, and he did not seem able to portray sincerity and honesty. Also, after reading Kathryn Lindskoog’s account of her meeting C.S. Lewis, I wonder if in fact he was the shy, difficult-to-reach character that the playwright William Nicholson portrayed him as.

Update: I’ve now seen the whole movie, and I take back what I said about Hopkins looking shifty. It was clearly a device Hopkins used to show a growth or change in the character. The Debrah Winger character mentions it later: now he can look her in the eyes.

The movie does a good job of showing that Lewis’ Christian faith all but crumbled under the experience of watching his wife suffer excruciating pain and then dying after an apparent reprieve (the cancer inexplicably went into remission for a few months). We see Lewis lecturing on pain a couple of times before his marriage. The effect is to make Lewis sound like an intellectual who had not really experienced pain. However, I wonder if that is true: he had, after all, been a soldier in World War I and injured.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Bookmark and Share
 

Fantasy and science fiction

Posted in English fiction, children's literature on 03/02/2010 09:09 pm by Marc Sheffner

My daughter borrowed the video of Miyazaki’s movie ゲド戦記.  I have seen this movie before. I found it intriguing, but rather unsatisfying. There were many themes or echoes of earlier Miyazaki movies, like the witch who held the heart of the main character – an idea found also in Howl’s Moving Castle (itself, based on a British novel).

When I was a teenager, I read a great deal of science fiction, and tho I read less of that genre now, I still enjoy science-fiction movies such as I, Robot, Blade Runner, and Avatar. The Miyazaki movie is based on a series of books by the American science fiction writer, Ursula Le Guin. Wikipedia tells us that

In the past, Le Guin had rejected Hayao Miyazaki’s offer to create a film based on the series, but due to her love of his films, Le Guin granted Studio Ghibli the rights. The story is based mainly on elements of the third and fourth novels of Earthsea; however, Le Guin has stated that she found this rendition of her work “disappointing” and untrue to the spirit of Earthsea.

Le Guin was very critical of The Dark Tower, a science-fiction story supposedly written by C.S. Lewis：she thought it embarrassingly bad. Later, Le Guin read a book  disputing that The Dark Tower had in fact been written by Lewis. The book was by Kathryn Lindskoog and was called The C.S. Lewis Hoax. After reading it, Le Guin changed her mind about Lewis:

I finished it liking Lewis, as man and artist, better than I had ever done before.

Kathryn Lindskoog was a fan of C.S. Lewis and wrote her thesis about his work. She went to England to meet C.S. Lewis and met him in Oxford in 1956. She wrote about her meeting him here.

Bookmark and Share
 

Allegory, myths, fairytales and fantasies

Posted in English fiction, children's literature on 03/01/2010 01:07 pm by Marc Sheffner
The Chronicles of Narnia
Image via Wikipedia

In session #22, we discussed allegory. Perhaps I gave the impression that I think the Narnia stories are allegories.  However, after reading chapter 1 of Reading with the Heart: the Way into Narnia by Peter J. Schakel, I have changed  my mind.

Lewis himself called them [the Narnia Chronicles] fairy tales and, more specifically, the type of fairy tales known as fantasies.

What are fairy tales?

Fairy tales, by definition, are short stories, involving supernatural events and characters such as elves, fairy godmothers, and witches, set in whole or in part in a never-never land. Lewis’s friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, whose ideas influenced Lewis greatly, defines a “fairy-story” as “one which touches on or uses Faërie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.” “Faërie itself,” Tolkien goes on to say, “may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power,” the power of Enchantment.

As fairy tales, then, the Chronicles, will be characterized by strangeness and wonder, usually produced by magic, but at the same time, as fantasies, they must be believable and have internal consistency. Such believability is attained, in fairy tales which are also fantasies, by creation of a separate, “enchanted” world into which characters and readers are taken.

What is a fantasy?

A fantasy, in literary terms, is “a work which takes place in a non-existent and unreal world, such as fairy-land.” [Holman, A Handbook to Literature, p. 219] A fantasy world should be independent of our world and self-sufficient: all the information needed to understand actions and meanings should be available within that world. It is an imaginary world and may have natural laws different from those of our world, but once those laws are established, they must be adhered to—if they are ignored or violated, the magic spell of the story will be broken. Tolkien again provides a useful explanation: “What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘subcreator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.” [Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” p. 60]

What is myth? Perhaps the common idea of myth is “fictitious story, or unscientific account, theory, belief, etc.” However, Lewis had a more precise idea:

A myth, according to Lewis, is a narrative with a simple, satisfactory and inevitable shape which imparts to its readers’ imaginations a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth. A myth, in other words, is a story, a narrative; it depends for effect upon its shape, upon what happens to whom for what reasons, not upon the particular words or style in which it is told; it must communicate imaginatively, not intellectually; and at its heart must be a truth of universal significance or applicability… “When allegory is at its best, it approaches myth, which must be grasped with the imagination, not with the intellect.” [Preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress, 3rd ed. (London: Bles, 1943), p. 13.]

Schakel believes that the Narnia stories are not allegory, and should not be read as such. To support his view, he quotes Lewis himself.

He tried to set matters straight in his essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said”: “Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then . . . drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all” (Of Other Worlds, p. 36). Elsewhere he cites the use of a secondary world as evidence that Aslan is not to be taken as an allegorical figure:

In reality . . . 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 allegory at all. . . . 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. ( Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis (London: Bles, 1966), p. 283.)

Lewis expected his readers to enter his supposed world fully, to accept it as real and self-contained, and not to be asking what details in Narnia stand for in our world or looking for meanings that can be abstracted from the story through allegory. Their primary appeal, he expected, would be to the heart, not the head.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Bookmark and Share
 

On jumping to conclusions

Posted in Uncategorized on 03/01/2010 12:08 pm by Marc Sheffner
Lewis at the locus
Image by kyz via Flickr

Another commenter wrote that she felt that Lewis was saying that everyone should be Christian.

Is this a feeling, or a thought? Where does this feeling (or thought) come from?

Perhaps Lewis did feel this. How can we prove whether this speculation is correct or not? We cannot go back in the past and look into Lewis’ heart or head to check whether our guess is right or not. What can we do? We have only Lewis’ writing to help us. Does he say this in Chapter 2 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? We must look here to find evidence to prove or disprove our theory. Or perhaps Lewis wrote this in some other book or lecture? If we can find such evidence, we can prove our theory. Without such evidence, our theory is not even a theory, it is a guess, based not on evidence but on our imagination, or our preconception.

Studying literature, as opposed to reading for private pleasure, involves the discipline of training our minds. It assumes an objective reality against which we can check our ideas or guesses or intuitions. In the case of literature, the “objective reality” is the author’s writing. Everything without evidence must be classified as “speculation”.

What does “gentleman” mean? Perhaps we assume that a gentleman is a gentle man. Without evidence, however, this is just speculation, although a reasonable one. Let us check our guess or “feeling” against objective reality. In fact, “gentle” originally meant “highborn, noble”. (Apparently, this is not only a Western idea.)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Bookmark and Share
 

CS Lewis and the reductionists

Posted in Uncategorized, philosophy / theory of art on 03/01/2010 11:41 am by Marc Sheffner
Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, smok...
Image via Wikipedia

A reader sent me this comment:

someone said that rose represents a woman and worm that eats rose is a man, and I had similar idea at that time I remember. Now I notice that ideas of Freud has influenced on people’s consciousness much more than we expect and it became like common sense.

I mentioned a lecture that C.S. Lewis gave in 1942 concerning psycho-analysis and the ideas of Freud. Lewis had read Freud. He disagreed with Freudian psycho-analysis of literature. Specifically, he disagreed with the idea that everything in literature, as in dreams, has a sexual meaning. He agreed that the sexual meaning is part of the literary meaning; but only part of it, not the whole thing. In addition, the psycho-analytic view can hide the

Reductionism is the term often used to describe the psychoanalysis that Lewis was arguing against: the idea that, for example, a garden in a story only means the female body, that it has no further meaning or value.

Other writers and thinkers have also argued strongly against reductionism: Ayn Rand was one. In Atlas Shrugged, a character called the Wet Nurse is someone who has been educated in the ideas of reductionism: that the human being is only a bundle of cells and chemicals, and that human life, therefore, has little or no meaning (to quote Shakespeare, “It is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing”). Through working and talking with Hank Rearden, the Wet Nurse comes to understand that a human being is so much more than that. Rand expressed herself angrily in other writing, too, about the terrible effect such ideas can have on young people, when their minds, ideas and values are still forming.

If the commenter is correct and Freudian ideas have become accepted as “common sense”, then perhaps the reductionist ideas have also become accepted, without examination. As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” 吟味されざる生に、生きる価値なし。

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Bookmark and Share
 

Session 22: Feb. 24th, 2010 – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Ch. 2

Posted in English fiction, children's literature on 02/26/2010 08:58 pm by Marc Sheffner
Domenico di Michelino, La Divina Commedia di D...
Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

Thanks for attending the Feb. 24th session. How did you find the pace? Was it too slow? Too fast? As always, I will be glad to receive your comments.

In this session, we touched on a number of topics:

  1. CS Lewis’ philosophy (his Christianity, his idea of “reality” and heaven and hell – a big thanks to Yoko for her report on The Great Divorce),
  2. the Scandinavian mythology, properly called Norse mythology (or in Japanese 北欧神話here)
  3. fauns and
  4. dryads
  5. and nyads (or naiads)
  6. Silenus (Silenus appears as a character in a later Narnia story, Prince Caspian)
  7. and Bacchus or Dionysus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus
  8. allegory; famous allegorical stories in Western literature are
    1. Dante’s Divine Comedy,
    2. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress,
    3. and a modern one for children (fun and easy to read, and I warmly recommend it) called The Phantom Tollbooth (and on Amazon Japan here http://snipurl.com/uiob3 [www_amazon_co_jp] )

The next session will be Wednesday, March 10th, 3-5 pm. Your homework is to finish reading Chapter 2, and read chapters 3-5. In the next session, we will not read all the text, but only read some excerpts. I will ask you to give short summaries of the chapters.

If you find some interesting or useful articles or books in Japanese about CS Lewis, either general ones, or ones about the Narnia or other stories, please pass them on to me.

Also, I encourage you to try and read some other works by C.S. Lewis. If his adult fiction sounds too difficult, then how about trying another Narnia story? Although the one we are now reading is the most well known, I think some of the other Narnia stories are even better and more satisfying.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Bookmark and Share
 

How to get more enjoyment out of reading

Posted in Howto on 02/12/2010 09:05 am by Marc Sheffner

Do you enjoy reading English? Are you enjoying the story we are reading at the moment? Did you know that you can get some benefit from reading a book even if you do not really like the story?

Some of you have told me you are happy to read CS Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch nd the Wadrobe”. However, perhaps there are some of you who are not so happy, or who do not enjoy this story so much.  I hope so! People who do not like the story can be of great help to us. Why? Because of dialectics 弁証法

Dialectics is a vital part of Western thinking. One example is the justice system: in court, the judge (or jury) hears not just one side of the story but both sides. The purpose is not necessarily to find the truth, but to decide which story is more probable. Justic cannot be done from hearing only one side. (This system is also called the adversarial system.)

What has this got to do with reading an English children’s story?  Is it a good story? Is it well-written? Does it have interesting dialogue? Are the characters believable? If you like the story, you can learn more about why it is a good story if you first

  1. hear someone else criticize the story, then
  2. defend the book (and your opinion) against this criticism.

We will discuss the merits (and weaknesses) of this story more after we have finished reading it. In the meantime, if you do not like this story, or if you find yourself losing interest, I encourage you to come forward and express yourself! Your thoughts are very welcome, in fact very useful and important.

Until our next session.

Bookmark and Share
 

Session 21 Follow-up 2

Posted in English fiction, children's literature on 02/04/2010 03:19 pm by Marc Sheffner
Plaque on a park-bench in Bangor, County Down
Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to one of our members (thank you, Yoko), below is a list of links to Japanese websites related to CS Lewis. Perhaps one (or more) of you will have enough time and interest to read something else by C.S. Lewis in Japanese and tell us about it at one of our future sessions.

  1. A brief biography of C.S. Lewis in easy-to-read table format
  2. A list of Japanese translations of works by Lewis
  3. A list of Japanese translations of works by Lewis by the Japanese bookstore Junku-do

Tezukayama University library has a number of books, by C.S. Lewis, as well as books about Lewis, in both English and Japanese (actually more books in Japanese than in English). You can search the library online by clicking here.

C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters has been translated into Japanese, and is titled 悪魔の手紙

One of the links below is to a dramatization of Lewis’ allegory, The Great Divorce (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis), now playing in Seattle. (The Japanese translation is called 天国と地獄の離婚―ひとつの夢)

And here, a young mother blogs about reading Lewis’ Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (in Japanese, 顔を持つまで 王女プシケーと姉オリュアルの愛の神話). It’s nice and short, and gives you an idea of what it’s about, and whether you would like to read it or not.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Bookmark and Share
 

Session 21 Follow-up

Posted in English fiction, children's literature on 02/04/2010 09:47 am by Marc Sheffner
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1979)
Image via Wikipedia

In Session 21, we read chapter 1 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and discussed it. Some of the matters we discussed were:

  • the evacuation of London during World War II
  • the delight of exploring new places
  • the attraction of large buildings with lots of rooms (perhaps it reminded Lewis of the image in the Bible (New Testament): “In my Father’s house are many rooms” John 14:1-4)
  • what we learn about the four children from what they say in chapter 1
  • the possible significance of the children’s names (Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy all the names have a long history, but only two of the names are Biblical (Peter and Susan)
  • big books (especially the Bible – some – photos - here)
  • how some words have changed in meaning and use since 1950 when the book was first published (especially chap, wireless and queer)
  • badgers – a well-known and well-loved wild animal in Britain.
  • the meaning of “bluebottle“: is it a fly or a flower?

(to be continued…)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Bookmark and Share
 
Older Entries