Why should we re-read the Chronicles of Narnia?
“And I have such desire to find the signification of this thing that I would not by my good will turn back for the richest jewel in all Narnia and all the islands.”
King Edmund, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Perhaps we ought to ask a basic question before we go any further: why re-read the Chronicles of Narnia at all?
Edmund’s comment towards the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe suggests that we should. In chasing the White Stag, he has come across the lamp-post but he doesn’t fully understand it. He wants to find its signification (an interesting word, meaning to which I’ll return later) and so the Kings and Queens of Narnia go on, accepting whatever adventure comes their way.
We see this search for meaning elsewhere in the chronicles: “I wonder where we are and what it all means?” Peter muses in Prince Caspian, while later in the same book, “the frightened Telmarines saw [the great fire] from far away and wondered what it might mean.”
In The Horse and His Boy, the search for meaning takes another form. In this wonderful book – one of my favourites in the series – Shasta experiences his epic journey twice over, first on horseback and then once more in the imagination as Aslan explains the meaning of his travels:
I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.
As readers, we nod along as Shasta learns what we have known all along, only to discover, with the last revelation on the list, that Aslan has surpassed even what we might have guessed.
What we’re beginning to see, in other words, is that re-reading is absolutely essential: the Narnian books only yield their full meaning on a second or subsequent reading.
Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. After all, Lewis himself was a great fan of re-reading. In a fascinating letter to Arthur Greeves in February 1932, he wrote:
I think re-reading old favourites is one of the things we differ on, isn’t it, and you do it very rarely. I probably do it too much. It is one of my greatest pleasures: indeed I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
We get an inkling here of Lewis’s extraordinary approach to reading. Extraordinary in our time, that is: his approach would have been wholly typical in pre-modernity.
We often assume that reading is straightforward, that we all know what we mean by it, but Lewis knew that reading was understood quite differently in antiquity and post-antiquity. I can best explain what I mean by referring to the work of Jean Leclercq. In one of his books, he explained that:
For the ancients, to meditate is to read a text and to learn it “by heart” in the fullest sense of this expression, that is, with one’s whole being: with the body, since the mouth pronounced it, with the memory which fixes it, with the intelligence which understands its meaning, and with the will which desires to put it into practice.
This type of reading – seen especially in the reading of the Bible – was a wholehearted and wholebodied activity. It was a total experience, which explains why “Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level with walking, running, or ball-playing.” (If only I’d known that as an eleven-year-old. I’d have skived rugby lessons and taken reading as my physical activity for the week!)
As Matthew Crawford and many others have argued, we now have a problem with attention. We find it hard to do anything other than skim read, but the type of reading described by Leclercq and practised by Lewis is poles apart from such superficiality. In his wonderful book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, Leclercq writes about the “phenomenon of reminiscence whereby the verbal echoes so excite the memory that a mere allusion will spontaneously evoke whole quotations and, in turn, a scriptural phrase will suggest quite naturally allusion elsewhere in the sacred books. Each word is like a hook, so to speak; it catches hold of one or several others which become linked together and make up the fabric”.
If we become absorbed in a book, we naturally want to re-read it. If we are alert to the riches of the book, we naturally range back and forth across it (and other books) in our minds as we read. Our memories and imaginations are engaged in pursuing truth wherever it takes us on, or beyond, the page. As another author put it, “words ruminated upon in one passage allude to and recall other words and other passages, their meanings fusing together in a ‘chain’ of signification.”
Which takes us back to the Chronicles of Narnia and Edmund’s strange comment at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
“Signification” is not the sort of word you would normally expect to find in a children’s book, so why is it there? I want to suggest that it alerts us – even implicitly – to a key feature of the chronicles. The children’s task, throughout the seven books, is to learn how to be alert to the signs of Aslan’s presence. And when Aslan is (apparently) not with them, they have to learn to be alert to the full, rich meaning of his words.
The clearest evidence for this comes in The Silver Chair where Aslan warns Jill to “let nothing turn your mind from following the signs.” The passage in which that warning occurs could serve as our guide as we re-read the the whole series:
“Here on the mountain,” [Aslan says], “I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them down there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.”
Surely there is one of Leclercq’s verbal echoes here, the signs here echoing the “signification” of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But they are echoes which Jill misses. She muffs the signs (as she puts it at the end of The Silver Chair).
And she’s not alone. The chronicles are full of characters who misinterpret what they see. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace is constantly jumping to the wrong conclusions, mainly because he “had read none of the right books,” and the first talking animals in The Magician’s Nephew have great trouble making sense of Uncle Andrew: some think he “might be an animal of some kind” while others decide that he is a tree and so kindly plant and water him. The animals’ misinterpretation is the comic counterpart to Uncle Andrew’s horrific refusal to understand what is plainly before him. Like the dwarfs in The Last Battle, he cannot believe what he sees because he will not believe what he sees: “For what you see and hear depends on where you are standing,” the narrator tells us before adding: “It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
(We’ll look at the best order in which to read the Chronicles on another occasion, but it’s worth saying here that The Magician’s Nephew prepares us for the darker misunderstandings of The Last Battle in which a donkey is mistaken for Aslan himself, a mistake which leads to far greater errors, as Aslan is first melded with Tash and then abandoned altogether.)
What we find in the whole series is a quest for understanding and a search for meaning. Some of the characters go horribly wrong as they search for that meaning, while others succeed triumphantly.
But this is the series in a nutshell: the children, and we the readers, are looking for signs. (Not clues: signs are far richer than that.) Signs of Aslan’s presence. Signs of meaning in an apparently arbitrary world. Signs that point them towards the richness of truth. They only succeed after a struggle. And so do we.
That is why we should re-read the chronicles of Narnia.