“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
Someone should post that next time someone complains on TORn that they don't like CoN cause Lewis is being preachy.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you, Ammie, about characters just coming alive.
ReplyDeleteI 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.