“Some People Think”
“Some people 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 collected information about child psychology and decided what age-group I’d write for; 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. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.”
~C.S. Lewis. Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, p. 527
posted by Arevanye | permalink for this post |
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2 Comment(s):
Someone should post that next time someone complains on TORn that they don't like CoN cause Lewis is being preachy.
I totally agree with you, Ammie, about characters just coming alive.
I am sure that LWW started off as a rather secular work, and, like Tolkien, "the tale grew in the making". But two things: 1) LWW really compares quite well to those sections of the Bible that it corresponds to, so after realizing what he had written, Lewis must have done extensive rewriting, and 2) a person who has been writing about a certain subject for a very large chunk of their life, say, Christianity, would not be able to write about another subject long without having the first subject slip in.
So while I don't agree that Lewis is preachy, I do think that LWW can be a little obvious at times, and could not possibly have become anything else but an allegory.
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