Content Note: Genocide, Othering through Romanticization, NazisNarnia Recap: The Pevensie children have rescued a dwarf.
Prince Caspian, Chapter 4: The Dwarf Tells of Prince Caspian
Hey! You know what would be awesome? I'm going to tell you what: leaving these Pevensie protagonists behind for four chapters or so. I mean, the book only has fifteen chapters total, so it's not like that's more than a quarter of the book. Let's go find a new protagonist, one who is less burdened by hurtful memories and sad emotions and muddled theological implications about gods who override choice despite ostensibly being all about free will. A new protagonist who represents everything that good, right-thinking people want and need in a protagonist: an innocent white male who will most definitely not be blamed for the heaping amounts of privilege he's been cozily wrapped in his entire life.
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| @ fanpop.com Who needs a White Witch when you can have a White Knight? |
And sarcasm aside, I really do not think it's a coincidence that the Prince Caspian narrative takes over here, with the Pevensie stuff being more like an unusually long prologue to the book, because Prince Caspian is very quickly going to be the glue that holds these books together, a sort of combination Protagonist-MacGuffin-WorldBuildingFillerPutty. Let's examine the series in the order in which it was written:
- LWW: English children help Aslan take back Narnia from hostile forces.
- PC: English children help Prince Caspian take back Narnia from hostile forces.
- VDT: English children help Prince Caspian journey to the edge of the world.
- SC: English children help Prince Caspian by finding his lost son.
- HaHB: Prequel. (Sort of.)
- MN: Prequel.
- LB: English children help Prince Caspian descendent/Expy go to heaven.
So what I'm saying is to settle in because this Prince Caspian guy isn't going anywhere any time soon.
I don't think this is a coincidence; I think after LWW, the series needed something to coalesce around. Aslan isn't really a good focal point, since he's vague and mysterious and apparently all-powerful and how much help is the Son of God going to need from English children, anyway? The Pevensies aren't much of a focal point, either, or at least not one the author seemed willing to sustain -- already we're seeing the characterization wave-form collapse on itself, and it's not terribly surprising that he'll vote the oldest two off the island at the end as being dreadfully difficult to write. So much easier to pare the family down to the two youngest, and then toss in Eustace in the next book (and Jill in the book after that) to serve as the Outsider who doesn't know what's going on as well as the one to reform into a Better Person by the power of Narnia.
But you still need a focal point, so now we have Prince Caspian riding in to save the day. And of all the characters to coalesce the series around, he is a very problematic character indeed! (Whoops!) He's a human who is Ruler By Birthright in a land of talking animals, which was pretty problematic to start with when it was the Pevensies in LWW, but at least their rule was A Prophecy and they had been Brought There By Magic and good stuff like that. Caspian, on the other hand, rules because he's the descendent of some guy who conquered Narnia and then genocide'd all the inhabitants as best he could. I mean, Aslan gives Caspian his stamp of approval, but we're still basically stuck with Ender, Son of Hitler as the ruler here.
(Yes, I just Godwin'd Narnia. And, yes, I know Ender was not Hitler's son. That was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the controversy and concerns surrounding the character.)
And like Ender, the narrative wants to make this all very, very clear that none of the Bad Things are Caspian's fault. Just because he's a white male from a conquering race who enslaved and killed the indigenous peoples and now expects to rule over them by virtue of his pedigree doesn't mean he should be blamed for all that. In fact, despite his absolute buckets of privilege, we should feel very sorry for him, and we are going to feel sorry for him because the narrative is going to focus very closely on how rough his life has been and is going to pretty much disregard how rough all the non-privileged peoples' lives have been. K?
PRINCE CASPIAN LIVED IN A GREAT CASTLE in the center of Narnia with his uncle, Miraz, the King of Narnia, and his aunt, who had red hair and was called Queen Prunaprismia. His father and mother were dead and the person whom Caspian loved best was his nurse, and though (being a prince) he had wonderful toys which would do almost anything but talk, he liked best the last hour of the day when the toys had all been put back in their cupboards and Nurse would tell him stories.
And now we come to the first thing that is really rough about Caspian's life: he's an orphan and he's being raised by his evil aunt and uncle. Isn't that just awful?
Using non-parents as stand-ins for evil parents is not a new thing; the Brothers Grimm were editing folk stories in the 1800s so that it was step-mothers doing the killing of children and step-fathers trying to wed the daughters against their will. (And speaking as a step-mother, this grates my gorgonzola a bit, but that's another story for another time, I suppose.)
But there's more going on here, I think, than just setting up a father figure who can be killed with impunity because it's not like he's Caspian's dad or anything, and we're back to this notion of divine right of kings. Caspian should be the ruler, because he's the genetic descendent of the guy who conquered Narnia; Miraz should not be the ruler, because he's also the genetic descendent of the guy who, wait. Hang on, I got myself confused there. Here we go, Miraz should not be the ruler because despite being the brother of the last king, he also killed him. There we go. Anyway, point being that Miraz is a usurper whereas Caspian is the real deal, blessed by god and Aslan and the lady of the lake.
And I hate this more than I hate most things because we're back to the same issue we saw with the White Witch, this bizarre insistence in the text that it's not enough that a ruler be evil or good as the determining factor for their reign, they have to also be illegitimate or legitimate. And this bugs me because if there's one thing that history has taught us, it's that the genetic legitimacy of a ruler has absolutely nothing to do with their awesomeness. And for that matter, where does that legitimacy come from? For the Pevensies, they were the only descendents of Adam and Eve in all of Narnia. That's still a bad thing to hinge legitimacy on, but it's something. Caspian is now one of lots (hundreds? thousands?) of descendents of Adam and Eve, now that the Telmarines have spread throughout the land. So why is Caspian special simply because his ancestor was the lead guy in the invasion?
Free elections for Narnia, folks, is what I'm saying.
Anyway, Miraz who is TOTES EVIL is grooming Caspian to be king. Which he doesn't get points for, obviously, because Caspian is supposed to be the true king anyway (by virtue of being the sperm-baby of the last king) and Miraz is only keeping him alive until he has his own sperm-baby. And because of all those things -- because Caspian's parents were killed by his awful uncle and because his awful uncle is keeping him alive and teaching him and training him and raising him like the princeliest prince that ever princed past the princing parlor -- we should probably feel really bad for Caspian.
"I wish -- I wish -- I wish I could have lived in the Old Days," said Caspian. (He was only a very little boy at the time.)
Up till now King Miraz had been talking in the tiresome way that some grown-ups have, which makes it quite clear that they are not really interested in what you are saying, but now he suddenly gave Caspian a very sharp look. [...] "Who has been telling you all this nonsense?" said the King in a voice of thunder. Caspian was frightened and said nothing. [...]
"N -- Nurse," faltered Caspian, and burst into tears.
"Stop that noise," said his uncle, taking Caspian by the shoulders and giving him a shake. "Stop it. And never let me catch you talking -- or thinking either -- about all those silly stories again. There never were those Kings and Queens. How could there be two Kings at the same time? And there's no such person as Aslan. And there are no such things as lions. And there never was a time when animals could talk. Do you hear?"
Next day Caspian found what a terrible thing he had done, for Nurse had been sent away without even being allowed to say good-bye to him, and he was told he was to have a Tutor.
Caspian missed his nurse very much and shed many tears; and because he was so miserable, he thought about the old stories of Narnia far more than before. He dreamed of Dwarfs and Dryads every night and tried very hard to make the dogs and cats in the castle talk to him. But the dogs only wagged their tails and the cats only purred.
Isn't that sad? Oh my gosh, that is very sad. Prince Caspian was only a very little boy, and his uncle yelled at him and then took his nurse away and he didn't even get to say goodbye to her. That is so very sad. And then he cried and dreamed of things he wanted but couldn't have and tried to teach the castle animals to talk and they wouldn't. That is so so sad.
(Hey! You know who else had all their loved ones taken away from them without being able to say goodbye and who could only experience the wonderful things of Narnia in dreams and wishes and tears and who may very well have tried to teach their pets to talk but they wouldn't? No, never mind, moving on.)
In all seriousness, it is sad. Miraz really is evil and Caspian really is being raised in an environment that is neither safe nor loving. This is basically the life Edmund would have had if LWW had been totally different and the White Witch really had taken him to raise as a prince.
But as sad as this genuinely is, this eclipses all the sads that are happening to people who aren't Prince Caspian, who aren't white and male and human and princes. Outside the castle walls, people are being killed if they don't look human enough. Those non-humans who can't pass for human and who want to survive have to go into the deepest hiding, driven from their homes. The persecution and bloodshed is so much worse than that which everyone suffered under the White Witch's reign -- who, after all, allowed pretty much everyone to live and go about their daily business as long as they kept their heads down -- and has been going on for much longer. The snowpocalypse lasted for 100 years; the Telmarines have been wiping out the Narnian peoples for 300 years. Three hundred years.
It can be argued that these things shouldn't be shown in a children's book and... maybe that's true. I honestly don't know. But I do know that this framing -- the Loss of Narnia as encompassed not by those people who have personally suffered the loss, but by those people who have romanticized it as something they'd sort of enjoy -- struck me as entirely natural as a child. Why shouldn't it? I was a privileged child living in a world of privilege wrapped in comfy privilege blankets at night. It never struck me as odd that the Loss of Narnia should be seen through the eyes of someone different from me. And I wish, deeply, that more stories did show that loss through the eyes of the natives who have actually had to suffer that loss. People who don't miss the romantic version, but the real one -- the one where their homes weren't burned and their families weren't murdered.
And it all reminds me so much -- too much -- of Pocahontas where the stealth protagonist John Smith is providing the Privilege Gaze throughout the film of look at this beautiful paradise we're ruining, isn't that so sad and stuff? and the many, many problems with that is that we really should hear from the people who have actually have their homes there and whose lives are being actively destroyed because THEIR VIEWPOINT IS THE ONE THAT MATTERS MOST. But it's being shoved aside in favor of Privilege Gaze because privilege lets you do stuff like that. And the worst thing about privilege is that you frequently aren't even aware you're doing it.
Caspian felt sure that he would hate the new Tutor, but when the new Tutor arrived about a week later he turned out to be the sort of person it is almost impossible not to like. He was the smallest, and also the fattest, man Caspian had ever seen. He had a long, silvery, pointed beard which came down to his waist, and his face, which was brown and covered with wrinkles, looked very wise, very ugly, and very kind. His voice was grave and his eyes were merry so that, until you got to know him really well, it was hard to know when he was joking and when he was serious. His name was Doctor Cornelius.
Speaking of which, it's good to see that the first Native Narnian in Caspian's story isn't pissed off over that whole genocide thing. Always ready to smile and laugh for the privileged people, that's what I like in my oppressed natives. (More on that next week.)
Of all his lessons with Doctor Cornelius the one that Caspian liked best was History. Up till now, except for Nurse's stories, he had known nothing about the History of Narnia, and he was very surprised to learn that the royal family were newcomers in the country. [...]
"Please, Doctor," asked Caspian one day, "who lived in Narnia before we all came here out of Telmar?"
"No men -- or very few -- lived in Narnia before the Telmarines took it," said Doctor Cornelius. [...]
For a moment Caspian was puzzled and then suddenly his heart gave a leap.
Do you want to hear a funny joke? Of course you do!
"The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way." --Earle Hitchner
However, I am going to opine that if you're building a fictional world that doesn't exist more than about 2,500 years total, then calling a 300 year chunk in the middle of that a not-really-that-long-of-a-time is maybe not thinking everything through super well. Especially since the Caspian family which has ruled for ten generations or so are "newcomers" to Narnia, in the same way that the current British royal family are "newcomers" to the throne, what with George I being the first British monarch from the German House of Hanover.
Anyway, Caspian's heart leaps at the news that the Old Stories might be true, which you can really understand from his point of view, but I feel compelled to point out that if the Old Stories ARE true, that means that a whole lot of genocide has been going on for the last 300 years which is the sort of thing that might give you pause if you hadn't been socialized from birth to only view things in terms of how it affects you, personally.
Cornelius refuses to tell Caspian any more, saying that he'll end up with his (Cornelius') "head cut off" by Miraz if he tells Caspian any more, but he then takes Caspian up onto a tower in the middle of the night for an astronomy lesson.
"It's a pity that tree gets in the way," said Caspian. "We'd really see better from the West Tower, though it is not so high." [...] "The virtue of this tower," said Doctor Cornelius, "is that we have six empty rooms beneath us, and a long stair, and the door at the bottom of the stair is locked. We cannot be overheard." [...] "Listen," said the Doctor. "All you have heard about Old Narnia is true. It is not the land of Men. It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts. It was against these that the first Caspian fought. It is you Telmarines who silenced the beasts and the trees and the fountains, and who killed and drove away the Dwarfs and Fauns, and are now trying to cover up even the memory of them. The King does not allow them to be spoken of."
"Oh, I do wish we hadn't," said Caspian. "And I am glad it was all true, even if it is all over."
"Many of your race wish that in secret," said Doctor Cornelius.
I'm really not trying to be a dreadful, mean, bitter, cynical person here; I'm really not. I'm not trying to suck all the joy out of literature or take away all the nice things. I'm not trying to say that fantasy like this is bad or that you shouldn't enjoy it or that this book didn't resonate with me and enrich my life as a child. I don't want any of those things to be the take-away here.
But for the record, here are some reasons why the above is problematic.
The above is problematic because there is a huge power differential between tutor and child, with one taking all the risk and the other reaping all the reward, and yet the narrative is obstinately focused on the privileged one. Cornelius is telling things to Caspian that could end up with him being executed. He's taking a huge risk, but it's a risk that is barely touched on because he's not the star of this show and Caspian is. So once again -- and this is example 5,674,893,412 if you're counting -- we have a disadvantaged person whose role in the plot is to educate the privileged person, even if it's at great personal risk to themselves. And they do so cheerfully, happily, kindly, sweetly because that's what disadvantaged people do, they coddle privileged people and understand their role in life.
The above is problematic because Caspian has just said to this person who is risking his life to tell Caspian these things that he's "glad it was all true, even if it is all over". And we understand that because we understand Caspian's desire to romanticize that which he has never known. But what Caspian is saying, without realizing it, is that he's glad that Cornelius' people were around to be genocide'd because it makes Caspian feel nice to romanticize the dead. He's making all the horrors of the past about himself and expressing how it makes him feel. Caspian is sad that the Narnians are dead because he would have liked to see all the pretty Others. Caspian is happy that the Narnians existed because he likes dreaming about what it would have been like to see all the pretty Others. He, him, himself.
The above is problematic because the Narnian who has suffered so much is sagely saying "many of your race wish that in secret". And while this is a drop that Cornelius is a Native Narnian, it's also something much more, because Caspian's story isn't just about him joining the Native Narnians and embracing their ways and driving out the invaders. It's a story about the Good White People and the Bad White People duking it out on the battlefield over how the Narnians will be treated henceforth. And, yes, some of the Narnians will be there to help out. And, yes, it's a story of reconciliation between two peoples and bringing peace to a divided country. But it's a story where the country is divided because the privileged people have been murdering the marginalized people for three hundred years, and it's a story where the privileged people get patted on the back by the marginalized people if they reach a bare minimum of decency.
All at once Caspian realized the truth and felt that he ought to have realized it long before. Doctor Cornelius was so small, and so fat, and had such a very long beard. Two thoughts came into his head at the same moment. One was a thought of terror -- "He's not a real man, not a man at all, he's a Dwarf, and he's brought me up here to kill me." The other was sheer delight -- "There are real Dwarfs still, and I've seen one at last."
"So you've guessed it in the end," said Doctor Cornelius. "Or guessed it nearly right. I'm not a pure Dwarf. I have human blood in me too. Many Dwarfs escaped in the great battles and lived on, shaving their beards and wearing high-heeled shoes and pretending to be men. They have mixed with your Telmarines. I am one of those, only a half-Dwarf, and if any of my kindred, the true Dwarfs, are still alive anywhere in the world, doubtless they would despise me and call me a traitor. But never in all these years have we forgotten our own people and all the other happy creatures of Narnia, and the long-lost days of freedom."
Two things. One, Caspian's first thought is that his kind, nice, wise, trusting tutor will kill him simply because he's not a white human like Caspian is. Two, the kind, nice, wise, trusting tutor affirms that real Narnians -- ones who don't have the blood of white humans in their veins -- would shun and condemn him for doing what he had to in order to survive the last 300 years of genocide.
So, basically, people who aren't at least partially white humans are very unreasonable and violent and Caspian was probably right to be scared of them. And once again we're back to dwarves being awful just because the narrative says so yet we've still not seen an unambiguously evil dwarf yet who couldn't be explained away by being pressed into servitude by a powerful magician with mind-mojo-magic food.
"I'm -- I'm sorry, Doctor," said Caspian. "It wasn't my fault, you know."
And that's the crux of Prince Caspian, both as a book and as a character.
It's not Caspian's fault that the Native Narnians have been persecuted and murdered for the past three hundred years. He hasn't even been alive for most of that, and when he has been alive he's been a child, and completely isolated from the violence going on in the kingdom. Caspian isn't responsible for the sins of his fathers.
But that's not the point. Privilege doesn't mean Responsible. Privilege doesn't even need to mean that the privileged person is participating in oppression or condoning it or actively furthering it. The horrible thing about privilege is that the privileged person can lie back, close their eyes, and let it wash over them like a warm current, all the while feeling like a very good person for not being at fault for any of it.
Caspian's kingdom was built on the blood of those his ancestors murdered. He's not at fault for that. But he will go on to profit from it. He'll set himself up as the True King and he'll fight his uncle and he'll reign as supreme monarch for the majority of the series. He'll eat the best foods, drink the best wines, marry the prettiest woman, go on the best adventures, and have all the best things because ultimately his ancestors paved the way for him to do these things through brutal conquest.
And if anyone brings up these unfortunate facts, the narrative and the character will make the entire thing about his feelings, his innocence. It's not my fault!, he cries here, even though Cornelius hasn't indicated even the slightest bit of anger or frustration or exasperation at his student. At most, he's allowed some sadness to creep into his voice, and Caspian took that as a cue to point out preemptively that while he's very very sorry about that whole genocide thing, people should most definitely not blame him for it.
In fact, they should set their own feelings aside to coddle the prince. "Poor little prince, who has reaped all the benefits of genocide and feels his conscience slightly troubled by that! Here, let us soothe you. The genocide has been rough on us, it is true, but so much more so on you, since you have to feel vaguely uncomfortable about it."
Will that coddling be enough to make Caspian feel less bad about his privileged origins? No, the coddling will not be enough. But fortunately, there is a solution!
"I am not saying these things in blame of you, dear Prince," answered the Doctor. "You may well ask why I say them at all. But I have two reasons. Firstly, because my old heart has carried these secret memories so long that it aches with them and would burst if I did not whisper them to you. But secondly, for this: that when you become King you may help us, for I know that you also, Telmarine though you are, love the Old Things."
"I do, I do," said Caspian. "But how can I help?"
"You can be kind to the poor remnants of the Dwarf people, like myself. You can gather learned magicians and try to find a way of awaking the trees once more. You can search through all the nooks and wild places of the land to see if any Fauns or Talking Beasts or Dwarfs are perhaps still alive in hiding."
"As penance for your privileged origins, and so that you need not ever again feel guilty about the genocide your ancestors committed on us, we request that you rule over us with absolute, unquestioned power, and that you meet a minimum standard of decency by not continuing to genocide the few of us who are left. We also ask that you revive the pieces of our culture that you've romanticized, without -- you know -- giving up any of that absolute, unquestioned power stuff."
It's a tough job, to be sure, becoming the all powerful king of a rich and beautiful country so that you can then enjoy all the best things for the rest of your life while picking and choosing which aspects of native culture to romanticize and keep and which to throw away as non-valuable or incompatible with your own preferred culture.
But they wouldn't call it the White Man's Burden if it was easy.
119 comments:
...Three hundred years isn't that long. (From a British perspective, anyway.)
That said, I'm absolutely gobsmacked by your revisioning of Prince Caspian, in so many ways I cannot find words for it, except thank you. There's nothing like having a book turned upside down and inside out.
I actually think Prince Caspian's reaction isn't too far out here. I mean, he's been isolated from it, and he just finds out that his parents, and his parents before that, were mass murderers. That would probably be fairly traumatic for a child, and he might be scared that his tutor WILL blame him for the genocide simply because he belongs to the royal family. I think he reacted with "but I'M not responsible" because he was afraid that maybe the Native Narnians DO think he's responsible and want to kill him.
White privilege aside, yes, I do think that'd be very rough on a young child. I don't think that comes across very well in the text, but I think that might've been what Lewis was trying to get across. I mean, the tutor pretty much just turned Caspian's life upside down.
I agree with the rest of what you wrote, though. And yes, as a child, I did find it annoying when suddenly the viewpoint would shift for multiple chapters to another protagonist. And I hated hated HATED it when backstory was presented in the form of "sit down, kids, I'm going to tell you a story."
To be clear, I am not saying that Caspian is unrealistic for making it about him. I do think that for a very young child who has been raised as a prince in a privileged atmosphere that that is a natural reaction. (I said as much in post about how natural it felt to me as a child.)
The issue here, to me, is that the narrative firmly keeps this focus throughout the entirety of the book, and at no point does Caspian or the narrative grow to a more nuanced understanding of Privilege. This will not be the last time that the issue of Caspian's privilege comes up, and every time it does, a Narnian will leap in to vehemently defend that Caspian has absolutely nothing to feel bad about, dammit.
That's a problem, in my opinion.
It makes sense for Caspian to react this way because he is a small child. But it does not excuse the text for condoning the way he acts, making the reactions of a small child out to be the absolute best way to handle the situation.
Ana, this is an absolutely profound and devastating analysis. I'm kind of in awe of your amazing brain right now. :)
Whenever I read stories like this, I am reminded of a quote from one of Terry Pratchett's books (almost certainly from the mouth of Sam Vimes) that observes that there is something in the human mind that thinks "Kings! What a good idea!" despite any amount of oppression or neglect on the part of all the rulers they've actually had. Somehow, people just have this idealized image of the absolutely good absolute ruler who will make everything better, and never think about the actual actions of monarchs throughout history. How can you tell that your absolute ruler will 1) not be opressive, nor allow citizens to be opressive, and 2) actually meet his or her responsibilities?
TW: genocide, mind control
While we're [slightly] bashing Mercedes Lackey in another thread, the only example I can think of where getting a new king is the best of not-very-many options is in Lackey's Mage Storms trilogy. The context is that the country of Hardorn has been all but destroyed by the actions of its previous ruler, who used magic to mind-control most of the population into fighting in his army as he attempted to conquer the neighboring country, with the effect that the population is now depleted to a tiny fraction of what it had been and mostly consists of folks too young or old to be effective fighters. This, combined with unusually harsh weather AND a magical natural disaster mean that the country will not survive the winter, since they can barely manage to harvest what crops they have and there's no organization whatsoever.
When a general from the neighboring Eastern Empire shows up expecting to conquer the country, he finds himself and his army trapped by the winter and cutoff from the Empire. Over the next months he demonstrates his organizational skills and willingness to work with the nearby citizens, until eventually the citizens of the country decide to offer him the crown on the condition that he be magically bound to the land.
I'd say this decision makes more sense than many similar occurrences in fantasy novels, for the following reasons:
• The decision was made collectively by the majority of the citizens, or at least a majority of delegates. (Don't ask me how they were able to communicate with one another all over the country in the current conditions.)
• The former general has demonstrated that he has exactly the sort of administration skills to create the kind of infrastructure the country most needs right now. Between the soldiers of his army, the supplies and resources he has brought with him, and his own expertise, he can help the citizens get enough food to last the winter, save them from the magically-created monsters, and help them rebuild the country.
• The aforementioned magical binding to the land. The new king is bound to the land with the help of some priests, so that if anything bad happens to the land or the people who live on it, he'll suffer the consequences. This gives him a strong incentive to rule wisely.
This instance is also notable because the character has done some terrible things earlier in the trilogy, for which he is never entirely forgiven. It's more or less stated that the decision to make him the king is NOT a matter of liking him or thinking that he's a good person, but more a matter of expediency: He's probably the most qualified person for a very difficult job, and he can probably be trusted to make things better.
There's still the issue of having a king, rather than some other form of government, but then, this is your standard High Fantasy setting.
Lackey's commitment to the idea of a High Fantasy Setting Complete with Royalty despite her clear personal leanings that are a lot closer to those of Dennis the Constitutional Peasant never fails to crack me up.
Regarding Caspian:
The thing that struck me when I watched the movie, really forcefully, was that this was a story about Ireland. Or, more specifically, a wish-fulfillment story about Ireland. C.S. Lewis was Anglo-Irish -- in other words, a Telmarine. The guilt, the desire to have the Wise and Friendly Natives reassure him that it wasn't his fault, and most of all, the desire for a happy ending, I think it all pretty clearly stems from his own internal conflicts about the country of his birth.
The Professor/ Diggory is a fairly obvious Mary Sue for Jack Lewis; Mr. Tumnus is often read that way, as well. I think Caspian is his Mary Sue for teenage self.
So Doctor Cornelius is a Magical Negro, essentially? On the other hand, I agree with your later comment that it is not an out-of-character reaction for a young child of privilege.
...Three hundred years isn't that long.
I'm pretty sure I disagree with you because I see only two ways you could mean this given the context of the post, but since I see two different ways then I'm not sure how I disagree with you.
Most of the times that three hundred years was brought up in the post it was responding to the duration of a single ongoing event, that event being a genocide. In that case your examples seem to contradict the idea that 300 years isn't that long.
The first example, the one from 400 years ago, lasted either one day or a little under a year and a half. (Depending on whether one considers it to mean the incident itself, or also includes everything going back to the first meeting about the incident.) Round up to a year and a half we see that the Narnian genocide lasted 200 times as long as your example.
Your second example, the one from 700 years ago, lasted for two days. So the Narnian genocide lasted fifty four thousand seven hundred eighty-seven and a half times as long that example.
Moreover, if a genocide started before the industrial revolution, and was still going on today, I have serious doubts that the response to it's duration, even from a British perspective, would be, "It hasn't been going on for that long."
The other way I could see you meaning it is the time since the invasion.
The time that has passed since the invasion is 13.2% of the time that has passed since the creations of Narnia. While it might be tempting to compare this to a similar percent of the history of earth, I think it makes more sense to compare it to a similar percent of the history of humanity (humans having been in Narnia since its founding.)
I'm told that humans, already anatomically modern for 150 thousand years, reached mental modernity 50,000 years ago. Thus an earth period equivalent to 300 Narnian years would be 6,621 years, which seems like it is that long.
On the other hand, maybe one should stick to just civilization, which is much shorter, and thus does start to yeild some more reasonable figures. If we start with the Neolithic revolution then we're looking at 300 years at this point in Narnian history being equivalent to 1326 earth years today, which would be as if it dated back to 686 CE while we looked back at it from 2012. Anything newer than 300 CE is newfangled, so maybe I don't disagree with you after all.
And then some date civilization to be as young as 3500 BCE, in which case 300 Narnian years at the time of PC is the same as 730 earth years in 2012, and as you point out, 700 years isn't that long.'
So, as I said, maybe I don't disagree with you.
So Doctor Cornelius is a Magical Negro, essentially?
No, just the first sapient non-Telmarine Caspian meets knowingly.
It will be a very long time--most of the book--before Caspian meets another Telmarine who wants what Trumpkin calls the "Old Narnians" to take over. (And when he does, Aslan has already reasserted his control of Narnia.)
his aunt, who had red hair and was called Queen Prunaprismia.
Wait. I vaguely recall something about "pruna" being Latin for coal. *looks up* More like "ember", which I guess is why he thought fit to mention the red hair. She's named after it.
(being a prince) he had wonderful toys that would do almost anything but talk
None of his many toys talk? At all? Even if you want them to? You can tell he's living in Medieval Fantasy Land.
(I get the feeling this isn't how I was supposed to react.)
It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts.
Am I the only one who thinks "gods" is conspicuously uncapitalised?
He's making all the horrors of the past about himself and expressing how it makes him feel.
Kind of like Edward?
By the way, for a children's book that manages to do an interesting yet kid-appropriate deconstruction of privilege, I highly HIGHLY recommend "The Freedom Maze" by Delia Sherman, in which a girl who sees herself (and is seen as) white in 1960 goes back in time 100 years and is assumed to be a slave.
The insistence on humans as rulers strikes me as theological in origin: the view that human beings are the rightful overlords of the natural world -- or its custodians, if you want to be kinder. Even Talking Beasts aren't as good as the Sons of Adam (or even the Daughters of Eve, which Lewis seems to treat as kind of an afterthought). They aren't as beloved of the Emperor-over-the-Sea. So of course you need a human on the throne.
Chris, I'm afraid you've given my offhand comment more attention than it deserves. All I was thinking was that, er, yes, Ana's right: Americans find it hard to understand that in Britain we regard a hundred miles as a long way but a hundred years as not that long ago. Which made me think of a conversation I had with an American that turned on just that point (and let me link to an animated map of the last thousand years or so of European history, which I love).
But to give your comment a more thoughtful response:
Thinking of Prince Caspian as the story of Ireland from the POV of a very romantic Belfast Protestant (which makes awesome sense to me) then what we're looking at is something like the equivalent of the history of Ireland from 1641 to 1922. That includes four years of slaughter by Oliver Cromwell and his army from 1649–53 - estimates as to how many Irish people were killed range from 1 in 4 to 5 out of 6 - and the years of the great famine, when between 1845 and 1852 a million people died of starvation and over a million more emigrated: 1 in five of the population were either dead or gone. (In an earlier 18th-century famine, when blight killed the potato crops, the ports were closed to prevent export of food - but not in the 19th-century Great Famine.)
Economically, Irish Catholics were systematically denied enough land to farm to feed themselves, ensuring that Irish peasantry became a pool of cheap labour available seasonally to English business interests. This was not three hundred years of non-stop genocide, but three hundred years of exploitation. And I think that's - on whatever level - what Lewis was thinking of.
What happened when the Telmarines came to Narnia? I think Americans will see it - unavoidably - as equivalent to white Europeans coming to North America. But if Lewis was thinking Cromwellian reconquest and Protestant rule, with the romantic stories of Irish legend as a backdrop, his mental picture would have been of a people who were both romantic and dangerous - who were somehow also the inheritors of a mystical, magical Irish past and who were also (English stereotype of the period) ineducable brutes suited only to hard labour and potentially dangerous if they got out of control. Too much of a stretch to think that Lewis was associating the dwarves at least of Old Narnia with Irish peasants?
Queen Prunaprismia is a joke about "Prunes and Prisms". That's why she never appears again. http://www.wisegeek.com/what-do-references-to-prunes-and-prisms-mean.htm
Learn something new every day, as they say.
(So why mention the red hair?)
I don't see a lot of difference between the Americans and Ireland, if we're talking about privilege and romanticizing and appropriating marginalized peoples' pasts.
Both situations contained deliberate genocide. Both situations contained deliberate exploitation. And both situations are frequently remembered by the descendents of the privileged parties involved as a romaticized exotic Other past. (Colors of the wind! Celtic magic stuff! Braveheart and Mel Gibson and the Hilarious Irish Guy! Pocahontas!) And that's a highly problematic viewpoint.
Whether Lewis was writing towards Ireland in 1649 or America in 1492 or just making things up from scratch doesn't change the fact that any narrative written entirely from the point of a privileged, romanticizing oppressor can be highly problematic, particularly when the narrative recognizes the existence of the privilege but continually reassures the reader that a realization of privilege doesn't mean you have to DO anything about it -- as long as you're not the Most Racist Person In The Room, you're golden.
If Narnia's dwarves are Irish, there are problematic racial elements in the text.
If Narnia's dwarves are Native Americans, there are problematic racial elements in the text.
If Narnia's dwarves are Africans, there are problematic racial elements in the text.
If Narnia's dwarves have no real world counterpart, there are problematic racial elements in the text.
This, incidentally, also applies whether the Calormen were or were not intended to be real world expys.
If you accept Lewis's premise that a human had to rule Narnia, then Caspian is obviously the only choice, not because he was actually taught some of the skills he'll need (though this is one of Nicodemus's reasons, and something Ana objected to not being there for the Pevensies in LWW), not because the remaining Telmarines are more likely to accept the rule of the son of Caspian IX (though this is Nicodemus's other reason), but because he's the only human not temporarily-there-from-England to be on the Old Narnians' side at all.
Lewis appears to have assumed that no Telmarine would go against the status quo unless the status quo was just as bad for them as it was for the Old Narnians, whether "Many of [Caspian's] race" wished they had never conquered Narnia or not.
I don't see a lot of difference between the Americans and Ireland
Americans tend to say things like that. I try not to hold it against you.
if we're talking about privilege and romanticizing and appropriating marginalized peoples' pasts.
I think we can agree that it is more likely that C. S. Lewis was thinking in terms of Ireland than of America. And that there are substantial differences between the history of the Protestant and Catholic, English / Irish / Scottish / Welsh nationalities and privilege in the British Isles, and the history of the white settlers / slavery / African slavery / native genocide in the Americas.
Both situations contained deliberate exploitation. And both situations are frequently remembered by the descendents of the privileged parties involved as a romaticized exotic Other past. (Colors of the wind! Celtic magic stuff! Braveheart and Mel Gibson and the Hilarious Irish Guy! Pocahontas!) And that's a highly problematic viewpoint.
Well, aside from Braveheart being an American movie directed by an Australian and filmed on location in Ireland, yes, totes. The romanticised view of Scotland and Ireland that many Americans who self-identify as Scots or Irish hold is a romanticised view held by privileged people, but wouldn't they be for the most part the descendents of the dispossessed / disprivileged who left...? It's still a problematic viewpoint.
doesn't change the fact that any narrative written entirely from the point of a privileged, romanticizing oppressor can be highly problematic, particularly when the narrative recognizes the existence of the privilege but continually reassures the reader that a realization of privilege doesn't mean you have to DO anything about it -- as long as you're not the Most Racist Person In The Room, you're golden.
If Narnia's dwarves are Irish, there are problematic racial elements in the text.
If Narnia's dwarves are Native Americans, there are problematic racial elements in the text.
If Narnia's dwarves are Africans, there are problematic racial elements in the text.
If Narnia's dwarves have no real world counterpart, there are problematic racial elements in the text.
Yes.
Regarding the appropriation of Native suffering by white protagonists: I think I once mentioned, on the post of 'The help' my frustration when I saw a trailer for a movie in Apartheid South Africa, with a white writer or something as the apparent protagonist. My first thought was, "What, another one?" Cause that wasn't the first Apartheid-era movie featuring a white protagonist who of course helps the Native inhabitants against the Apartheid I'd seen announced, while I've seen preciously little just told from the perspective of an ANC member. Which frankly sounds much more interesting. You have a story of starting in oppression, beginning an armed resistance and then having to cope with a change in strategy that involves just peacefully asking for your rights because some of your leaders promise that that will work better than fighting. Which must sound like a low-percentage bet at first. Hell, has there even been a big-budget, internationally produced movie about Mandela? I feel there should be, but I can't remember ever seeing a trailer for it.
Regarding hereditary rulers: As a native of a kingdom (the Netherlands), I can say I now mind having a queen less than before. Of course she has no real power, just influence, the prime minister is the de-facto boss of the country. There are countries, such as Germany, with a similar setup but a president as figurehead. Which is more democratic and egalitarian, but the election tends to cost more than the upkeep of the monarchy does. Plus, I have to grant it to our current queen, she does succeed reasonably well at being a 'binding factor' within the country. We have our own right-wing nut party that's pretty big these days, though it's not about pro-Christian, just being anti-Muslim (and xenophobia in general). The prick that leads it can say the stupidest things and there's still hordes of voters who cheer him on. But he overplayed his hand when he tried to tackle the queen, who is effectively using what little power and freedom of expression she has to let everyone know she feels his xenophobic rants can suck it. When he tried to make an issue of the queen wearing a hair-covering garb on a state visit to a mosque in Oman, that's when he finally began tanking in the polls. So there's that.
I was thinking along the same lines as Ursula L - that both Nurse and Tutor were deliberately planted to influence the young king-to-be. Caspian seems awfully young in this section, so they'd still be in "awesome fairy tales that are actually true!" mode to solidify his allegiance, and then as he gets older he can be gradually introduced to the ugly truths of genocide and encouraged to think about concrete ways to help the surviving native Narnians. Had Miraz not fathered a son, I suspect the Narnian underground would have assassinated him (making it look like an accident, of course) once they felt Caspian was ready to become a puppet king.
In fact, is there anything in Prince Caspian, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or The Silver Chair that would contradict a reading of Caspian as a puppet ruler, with native Narnian advisers making all the real decisions? It certainly doesn't seem to be a problem for the Narnian government to have Caspian off on his voyage, totally unreachable for Aslan-knows-how-long.
Chris, I'm afraid you've given my offhand comment more attention than it deserves.
Yeah, that's sort of what I do.
This was not three hundred years of non-stop genocide, but three hundred years of exploitation. And I think that's - on whatever level - what Lewis was thinking of.
If that's the case then I think Lewis overstated his allegory, which is not uncommon in metaphoric fiction. Because the situation he's showing is one where the native Narnians have reached a point where even their own close relatives (the doctor is half-dwarf) don't know if any of them survive.
Lewis presents a world where the extermination is so thorough that it isn't even known if any of the natives survive, and strongly implied that if any surviving natives make themselves known they won't survive for much longer. If that's Lewis making a metaphor for economic exploitation, which it may well be, I think he went overboard.
One of the, many, downsides I've seen pointed out to such going overboard is that it has the effect of lessening the seeming importance of the real thing. If a real life Irish person in 1922 and a talking Dog from Narnia in whatever year PC takes place in had an oppression Olympics standoff about the last 300 years in their respective countries, the talking Dog would win by mile.
Now I say, "seeming importance," because because 300 years of exploitation does not suddenly get less bad when placed along 300 years of, "Let's kill so many of them that we can eventually convince our children/descendants they never existed in the first place." 300 years of exploitation is always just as bad. But the comparison can make it seem less bad since what it is being compared to is worse.
In fact, is there anything in Prince Caspian, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or The Silver Chair that would contradict a reading of Caspian as a puppet ruler, with native Narnian advisers making all the real decisions? It certainly doesn't seem to be a problem for the Narnian government to have Caspian off on his voyage, totally unreachable for Aslan-knows-how-long.
I can't think of anything one way or the other, but it seems to be a common theme in Narnia to begin with -- apparently the world didn't end the moment the Pevensie monarchs stopped existing in Narnia space-time, which really does surprise me very much.
I liked the comment in a previous thread that possibly the human "kings" are really just icons for the populace to hold as a kind of community property mascot. However, I do think that THAHB contradicts that -- at least, I personally, would not like to go to war under the absolute commands of my community property mascot. Unless the kings are just figure-heads in battle, too.
From what I recall of Aslan's speech at the end of the book, the Talormenes are descendents of pirates (whose ethnicity I do not remember and may not be stated), and the native population of an island or islands in a latitude where coconuts thrive. I'd expect that mixture to result in a population with a fair bit of melanin, but Lewis may well have thought of Caspian as white.
FWIW, both Caspian and another Telmarine are described in the text as "pale". (That seems to have been Lewis' go-to word for "kind of stressed-out looking".)
TW: Rape
Telmar backstory:
“You, Sir Caspian,” said Aslan, “might have known that you could be no true King of Narnia unless, like the Kings of old, you were a son of Adam and came from the world of Adam’s sons. And so you are. Many years ago in that world, in a deep sea of that world which is called the South Sea, a shipload of pirates was driven by storm on an island. And there they did as pirates would: killed the natives and took the native women for wives, and made palm wine, and drank and were drunk, and lay in the shade of the palm trees, and woke up and quarreled, and sometimes killed one another.
So the pirates are from the South Sea and their descendents are descended from the native islander women they "took ... for wives", but their children are pale and white. No, I can't tell you why.
I haven't agreed with every objection this series has made to the books so far, but this is a terrific post. This stuff really is deeply problematic. Plenty of food for thought here.
Linking the whole thing to Irish history was a new idea to me, but it does seem to make sense. It's interesting to note that when Lewis was consciously thinking and writing about colonialism he was against it - most obviously in the Space Trilogy, but also here and there in his nonfiction - but as is demonstrated here he still falls into some pretty huge traps when it comes to thinking about privilege.
Spurred by Ana's excellent deconstruction, I recently re-read Prince Caspian and came away with an interpretation similar to that of Ursula L and Loquat – namely, that Caspian is a figurehead ("puppet" is a bit too strong a term). I'm not sure I would go as far as to say that Dr. Cornelius and/or the Nurse were rebel spies, but when I read the next couple of chapters after this, I was struck as to what extent the actual decision-making is by the Old Narnians rather than Caspian, and how qualified the Old Narnian support is. We're specifically told it takes some time for the Red and Black Dwarfs to accept him, and even then the Black Dwarfs' support is grudging ("If he's against Miraz, then we'll have him for King.") Even Trufflehunter, perhaps Caspian's staunchest ally, subtly qualifies his claim: "as long as you will be true to Old Narnia you shall be my King." Glenstorm the Centaur pretty much makes the decision to escalate into all-out warfare on his own ("I and my sons are ready for war") with Caspian apparently just going along for the ride. Caspian even admits, in front of Aslan, that he doesn't see himself fit to rule yet because, in his words, "I'm just a kid." When he is crowned anyway, he appoints Dr. Cornelius as his Lord Chancellor, and we see in later books that he appoints the Red Dwarf Trumpkin as regent on at least two separate occasions. I think it's reasonable in light of all this to see Caspian's rule as taking place with at least considerable guidance and input by Old Narnians, rather than as being absolute monarchy.
Wait. I vaguely recall something about "pruna" being Latin for coal. *looks up* More like "ember", which I guess is why he thought fit to mention the red hair. She's named after it.
I have always assumed 'Prunaprismia' to have something to do with 'prunes and prism', the last of a series of words that one of Charles Dickens' characters believes to be good for developing your mouth. The reference to the hair is also part of it, I expect.
As for Dr. Cornelius, he may be a Magic Negro, but being blunt with the young Caspian about his privilege would be a genuinely awful idea. Cornelius is playing a dangerous game here, revealing himself to the child and trying to play on his romantic notions about the past and the native Narnians for human rights gain down the road. I'd say he's pitching it note-perfect.
Perhaps it's that as a writer I drift to either pure or imagined history, and leave high fantasy largely alone, but I don't see blatant god-awful privilege as a dealbreaker in story-telling or world-building, because I spend so much time in worlds where privilege, far from being denied or wrestled with, is as absolute and unshameful a fact of life as the sun rising and setting. There is no reason in my mind for Caspian to feel he should not have privilege, so I don't mind that he doesn't. Also, this is, in fact, the besetting failing of nearly all of High Fantasy, and the stuff that doesn't have it tends to have other problems...dunno. How hard a time am I going to give C.S. Lewis here?
What I do mind a lot is that Lewis has here made two distinct choices. One is to scrimp his world-building a bit and give us almost no insight into Telmarine culture, so I really have no idea who the hell Caspian is (I also thought they might be sort of Persian, as a child, because of the names, well, except for "Prunaprismia". The other is to give so very little insight into what the actual situation is. A scene of Telmarine adults showing unease around trees, or Caspian seeing his uncle deal unjustly with a dryad or something would go a lot further than this tell, don't show, approach.
So the pirates are from the South Sea and their descendents are descended from the native islander women they "took ... for wives", and their children are pale and white.
I had an idea from somewhere that the pirates were supposed to be Spanish. Maybe the 'natives' were actually a Dutch colony. Drunk pirates don't have the best grip on reality.
Is it still "romantic othering" if the entities involved are, in fact, Others?
At least, to offer another interpretation: the point of Narnia as "Aslan's country" is that it's a place where the whole world is alive. The naiads and dryads and dwarfs and fauns and Talking Animals are the waters and the trees and the earth and the forest and all its inhabitants literally personified. They are not human. And that's kind of the point here: human beings are not entitled to stomp on the rest of Creation.
Miraz and his cohort are illegitimate as rulers, not because they don't have the right ancestry-- they are Sons of Adam-- but because they rule with greed and cruelty. Because as rulers their job is to take care of the world, and instead they're ruining it out of lust for power and possessions.
True, in the real world, or even in a realistic novel, it would be deeply problematical to treat a real person as a symbol. But this isn't a realistic novel; it's an allegorical fantasy.
Thinking more about Caspian's role in the Old Narnian political system.
In SC, Caspian is described as "Caspian the Navigator." Now, I don't think he'd earn such a title merely on the basis of the one sea voyage we see in VDT, followed by decades of uninterrupted rule in Narnia, and then one brief voyage at the end of his life.
Instead, it suggests that Caspian spent much of his reign at sea.
The place of Trumpkin as regent in both VDT and SC tells us that there was an established custom for how Narnia was ruled. Caspian was king in name, but actually away on sea voyages much of the time. Actual ruling was by a counsel of some sort, that involved Trumpkin as regent, and other Old Narnians in other roles over time, such as Cornelius being Chancellor, etc.
Caspian X isn't remembered as "Caspian the Great," which would be an obvious choice in a fantasy story. He also isn't known by a title such as "Caspian the Restorer" to commemorate the restoration of the Old Narnians during his reign. Being "Caspian the Navigator" is about him being remembered for going away, leaving the human/Telmarine population with an absentee leader/representative in the new government, with an Old Narnian, Trumpkin the Dwarf, holding the actual powers of the monarchy in his role as regent.
Yeesh. Sometimes I have 'oh that Ana she's surely reading too much into Mike being a douche or something' moments but here, it's really chilling. It's amazing what we always reveal through our writing, intentional or unintentional.
>>>I had an idea from somewhere that the pirates were supposed to be Spanish.
Did you see the movie? Because the Telmarines are TOTALLY Spanish in the movie.
It doesn't matter if they're physically white. They could have the average skin color of Barack Obama, or Bjork, or Hayao Miyazaki. The position of privilege makes them clearly White.
Of course he could have been known as The Navigator merely because he was the first Telmarine to be unafraid of the ocean!
No, I didn't see the movie, but I might have picked up the notion from someone who had. Maybe even here. Can't remember.
Chris: Because the situation he's showing is one where the native Narnians have reached a point where even their own close relatives (the doctor is half-dwarf) don't know if any of them survive.
But there are two reasons why Doctor Cornelius might tell Caspian what he does.
One of them is that Cornelius's family went over to the enemy. He knows Old Narnians are real and were not all killed off hundreds of years ago, but he's never himself met any because none of them trust him.
Two, which I think is more likely: Cornelius doesn't trust Caspian. If he tells Caspian that only a day's ride from Miraz's castle there is a thriving colony of dwarves, a family of badgers, a host of centaurs, and Caspian at any point lets this out to Miraz or to any Telmarine authority who will tell Miraz, then all of them are in hideous danger. Whereas if Cornelius tells Caspian only that the Old Narnians once existed, Cornelius himself may be killed, but Caspian cannot reveal to Miraz anything that would put any other Old Narnian into danger.
Cornelius sends Caspian off to ride to Archenland. Does he expect Caspian to get there, or does he know perfectly well he is sending Caspian to ride through Old Narnian country - without telling Caspian, in case Caspian is captured?
Would Miraz be so paranoid about Caspian being told that some of the beasts in Narnia really can talk, if Miraz was sure that there were no Talking Beasts left alive? Would Caspian have been told stories about dwarves being wicked and dangerous (as he obviously was!) if the adults who told him the stories were sure there were no dwarves left?
Ana: To be clear, I read your comment as saying that Lewis' romanticization of the Irish would be less bad than, say, his romanticization of the Native Americans
No, that's not what I was saying. But I've slept on it and with your permission, I'd rather not take it any further. I think you're an American and I'm a Scot and we'd just have a rather pointless disagreement that had very little relevance to the Narnia books.
Would Miraz be so paranoid about Caspian being told that some of the beasts in Narnia really can talk, if Miraz was sure that there were no Talking Beasts left alive?
Of course not, but that's a big part of what it makes it seem like a 300 year long genocide. The plan at this point in time is for Caspian to become king someday because Miraz hasn't produced an heir yet and heirs are pretty important for stability under a hereditary monarchy.
The fact that Miraz is trying to convince Caspian that the Natives don't exist means one of two things. Either he wants Caspian to believe this forever, or he plans to initiate Caspian into the truth at some point. Neither one of those seems to work with economic oppression.
In the first case it means that Miraz thinks that by the time he's gone there won't be any native Narnians left. Otherwise it would be important to let the future ruler to know about the potential threat posed by these pissed off people from whom the land was stolen*. If he really expects to be rid of the natives by the time Caspian takes over, then we're definitely talking about an extermination.
In the second case it means that we're still talking about privileged knowledge. The people, like Miraz and eventually Caspian and presumably various parts of the army, who will be involved in carrying out the oppression know that the oppressed classes exist, but others do not. That doesn't read like economic exploitation to me. If the native Irish looked like centaurs and fauns and unicorns, I don't think the British colonists/decendants who were exploiting them could keep their very existence a secret from those living in Ireland but not directly involved in the process of exploitation.
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Though, again, none of this would mean that Lewis wasn't thinking exactly what you're saying he was thinking. Given what you've said I think he probably was thinking about that. I just think that the text he actually wrote fails to parallel his source material, and fails to do it in some pretty key ways.
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* Can you imagine a generation coming to power in Britain in the time period you're talking about unaware that there had ever been such a thing as Irish people and instead believing that the island had empty when British colonists arrived in the 1640s and all those currently in Ireland were the happy loyal descendants of those people?
It's important to note that it wasn't just any sea voyage we see in VDT. It's The Sea Voyage. He goes as far as it is physically possible to go and come back, after him no-one will ever be able to travel further from Narnia than he went. That's a pretty impressive achievement.
For what it's worth though, I do agree that from Caspian's time on the monarchy is far more of a figurehead. Tirian definitely wields no real power, and the fact that Caspian disappears for God knows how long in VDT and during SC leaving power in the hands of old Narnians supports this. I think it's significant that VDT implies that this voyage is the first thing that Caspian does after consolidating his rule, he unites Old and New Narnians under his banner and then disappears, establishing a precedent for Narnia being ruled by a council instead of him. I think an argument can be made for this being an attempt to work around The Deep Magic, Narnia needs a human king, no-one ever said he actually had to wield any power.
I've definitely always assumed they were Spanish since long before the recent movie. Was it a line added in the BBC version?
I looked up the character on Wikipedia, because I could just swear the books say that the VDT is his only voyage, but I was tragi-mused to note this in the portrayal section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_X
n Walden Media's 2008 release of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, the character is portrayed by English actor Ben Barnes. In this version, the Telmarines are of Spanish descent so Caspian is portrayed with a Spanish accent, dark hair and dark eyes; [...]
Caspian is again portrayed by Barnes in Walden's sequel, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, this time with a beard to show that time has passed and the Spanish accent has been changed to Barnes' natural British accent.
Naturally, the Telmarines are Spaniards, but the TRUE king, once properly immersed in Narnian culture, is British. LOL YOUR PROBLEMATIC RACE PORTRAYALS. *sob*
@Susan B
Whenever I read stories like this, I am reminded of a quote from one of Terry Pratchett's books (almost certainly from the mouth of Sam Vimes) that observes that there is something in the human mind that thinks "Kings! What a good idea!" despite any amount of oppression or neglect on the part of all the rulers they've actually had. Somehow, people just have this idealized image of the absolutely good absolute ruler who will make everything better, and never think about the actual actions of monarchs throughout history. How can you tell that your absolute ruler will 1) not be opressive, nor allow citizens to be opressive, and 2) actually meet his or her responsibilities?
I don't think it's that people necessarily expect kings to be good rulers so much as personable rulers.
The fact of modern representative government is that it's an awful mess. Even when it works, the making-the-sausage of governing is something that turns people right of the process. Policies, committees, and ministries are all important checks and balances and delegation of authority, but they all make government an "it" -- a thing rather than a person.
As a species, we don't like things. Even when rules are set and followed, somewhere in the back of our brains we scream about them being arbitrary and pointless and slow and stupid. It's the same kind of problem people have with upper-level math: it's horribly unintuitive. We're creatures of intuition.
A King, now, that's a person you can get behind! To our paleolithic selves who still act like we're living in a village of 100 people, we think that if there's a problem we'll just go and talk it out with the King over a beer and it'll be fixed up right quick. We get to mentally gloss over that entire "nobility" thing, and we can easily forget that for all the mess of administration we have now, feudalism and monarchies had it worse with corruption and nepotism to spare.
The personable advantage persists to this day. That's a good part of the reason why modern constitutional monarchies are reluctant to give up their monarch. The legal fiction (more true prior to ll that constitutional stuff) that the government (crown) is actually a person makes a great deal of things simpler. Who owns the copyright on government documents? The crown! Who prosecutes criminals? The crown! Who gets sued for redress if the laws are applied unfairly? The crown!
Parliamentary systems get another neat separation of authority. Parliament may make the laws, but the monarch is responsible for the country. It's easier and less brain-twisty to have a distaste for the government but still like the country than it is in more unified systems like the US.[1] Hell, the country of Belgium recently spent about two years without a functioning parliament/government, but the country didn't collapse precisely because of the institutions of the monarchy. Two-year-long legislative deadlock in the United States would be fatal.
[1] -- And here I speak as an American by birth who's spent the last half-dozen years in Canada.
I also assumed as a child that the Telmarines weren't white -- as someone with Persian ancestry, I thought the Telmarine names were clearly telegraphing something like Middle Eastern* and Caucasus-region ancestry**. I was actually pretty upset about this, because as I saw it, the message was very clearly "Brown people are cruel and greedy and not fit to rule. Of course, they're not totally hopeless: they *might* turn out okay, if they've been carefully groomed to whiteness by white people and/or those who revere white people properly." That racefail in the movie? I don't think that's coming from the movie writers, I think it's exactly what you're supposed to imagine based on a straightforward reading of the text.
None of this is to excuse how the text condones Caspian's privilege, of course, and I think the metaphors and allusions that Ana used to describe Caspian's role in the story make a lot of sense. But I think it's pretty clear that the text is also trying to get this incredibly racist viewpoint across at the same time, and that gets lost when you think of the Telmarines as white.
*Fun fact: red hair actually originated in the Middle East! My mother, who's of Persian descent via India (it's a long story) has black hair now but used to have some natural streaks of red when she was younger. It's associated with white skin now thanks to the way the Celts migrated around over thousands of years -- they started in the Middle East, spread out around the Caucasus, then across Europe and Asia (this book has some awesome pictures of mummies of arguably Celtic people who lived near China 3000 years ago). Eventually they got subsumed into or overtaken by other human populations, except for Europe.
**Actually, now that I think about this further, I wonder if the choice of names matters. The skin colors native to that area of the world are debatably white; there actually used to be a big issue about this in the US, because non-white immigrants couldn't become naturalized citizens until the '50s or '60s (although of course their US-born kids were automatically citizens) so there was a lot of debate about whether lighter-skinned immigrants from the Middle East should count as white or not for this purpose. But in any case, skin color is pretty much determined by the latitude at which your ancestors lived, and the name "Miraz" suggests a much lower latitude, and darker skin, than the name "Caspian", which most people are going to associate with the Caspian Sea (which already makes it a more familiar name, signaling that the person with it is more likely to be a Good Protagonist) and the lighter-skinned people in the Caucasus.
I absolutely see what you are saying, but ultimately I had to pick between "their names are foreign-sounding" and "the text explicitly defines them as pale and white in multiple places".
And, of course, Caspian has historically been played by white actors. And the pictures in my book - pictures that Lewis was aware of, iirc - has him as white. And his greatest detractor is a Black dwarf.
However, as stated up-thread, White and Privileged are being used here interchangeably for a reason.
But I think it's interesting that one can see racist implications in the text in both directions. Thank you.
Though the more I think on it, I warm to the idea of a secondary layer of racism here. That would give a hierarchy of:
British / Pevensies (Best)
Spanish / Persian / Telmarine (Better)
Animals
Chris: Of course not, but that's a big part of what it makes it seem like a 300 year long genocide. The plan at this point in time is for Caspian to become king someday because Miraz hasn't produced an heir yet and heirs are pretty important for stability under a hereditary monarchy.
Yes. Miraz pretty much has to keep Caspian alive until his wife has a son, because if he has no legitimate heir and acquired the throne by conquest, there is no reason why one of his fellow nobles (by this time they are probably all cousins...) shouldn't decide to take the throne by conquest in turn. This is very much what happened in Wars of the Roses, until the Henries Tudor resolved the problem of Plantagenet cousins with conflicting claims to monarchy by having them all executed. But as soon as Miraz has a legitimate heir, Caspian's life becomes less and less valuable - especially if Miraz can't be sure Caspian will accept Miraz's son as rightful King on Miraz's death. Caspian was unlikely to be killed that night, though - too much risk the new baby would die. Which Doctor Cornelius must have known.
(Unless human babies in Narnia don't die of any of the things babies do die of in our world?)
The fact that Miraz is trying to convince Caspian that the Natives don't exist means one of two things. Either he wants Caspian to believe this forever, or he plans to initiate Caspian into the truth at some point. Neither one of those seems to work with economic oppression.
It could do, but thinking about it would require a lot more thought about how the economy of Narnia works than C.S.Lewis ever did.
(Sewing machines. Marmalade. Butter midwinter. Etc.)
In the first case it means that Miraz thinks that by the time he's gone there won't be any native Narnians left. Otherwise it would be important to let the future ruler to know about the potential threat posed by these pissed off people from whom the land was stolen*. If he really expects to be rid of the natives by the time Caspian takes over, then we're definitely talking about an extermination.
People with privilege manage to hold two contradictory belief systems in their minds quite readily, as far as I can see. For example: white evangelical American Christians seem to manage to simultaneously believe they are and represent the majority of Americans, and that they are a persecuted group mistreated by all more powerful groups, such as feminists, Muslims, atheists and gay people.
Miraz may quite genuinely believe that the best way to deal with his nephew being told a load of romanticised stories by his Nurse is to tell Caspian that none of those stories are true and never were. He does not strike me as the kind of father-figure inclined to sit down with his nephew and putative heir and carefully disentangle out of what Caspian was told, what Miraz thinks may be true once and what in Miraz's view never was and clarify this for Caspian. In fact if all the Old Narnians have successfully gone undercover, then the weirdness of living rivers and talking trees, dwarves and giants and Talking Beasts, might well have been comfortably, generationally dismissed in three hundred years as just hunters' stories or nursery tales. (After all, Caspian's Nurse was a Telmarine, and she had heard of Old Narnia.) This would obviously be safer for the Old Narnians - to be disbelieved in rather than deliberately hunted - and it's possible that the Dwarves who blended into Telmarine towns were part of that subterfuge.
Though, again, none of this would mean that Lewis wasn't thinking exactly what you're saying he was thinking. Given what you've said I think he probably was thinking about that. I just think that the text he actually wrote fails to parallel his source material, and fails to do it in some pretty key ways.
*nods nods*
Hell, the country of Belgium recently spent about two years without a functioning parliament/government, but the country didn't collapse precisely because of the institutions of the monarchy.
...er, according to the Belgians themselves (at least, those I heard from who expressed a view) it was because of the excellence of the Belgian civil service and the Belgian civilised temperament: I saw no one assert that it was because of the monarchy.
With regard to Caspian being played by white actors and generally portrayed as white -- I think this is supposed to reflect his Inherent Goodness relative to the other Telmarines. Specifically, I think we're supposed to think of the other Telmarines as darker-skinned and Caspian as light-skinned enough to pass (and this is certainly something that's within the natural range of skin tones in the regions evoked). At least, that's how it seemed to me.
As for the instances of the Telmarines being described as pale...I'm not sure what to make of those, because as someone with darker skin, I didn't realize "went pale" was supposed to literally mean an observable change in skin tone until I was ten, by which point I'd just internalized it as a weird euphemism for "looked scared". After that it always seemed to me like one of those phrases people use in a cluelessly privileged way -- I'm pretty sure I've read books where it was applied to dark-skinned characters, although I can't think of any at the moment, so I might just be making that up. On another hand, I've seen my own face get lighter when I've gotten terrified while happening to be in front of a mirror, but I'm not sure it's something other people would have noticed. Anyway, if Lewis struck me as a more attentive writer I'd agree with you, but as it is I actually see it as another example of what Kit calls his "coziness" -- he's writing for white British kids who are used to hearing this phrase as a way to describe fear, so he uses it in that way to keep the atmosphere of a nice white British world that happens to have these dastardly villains in it, and trusts that they won't think about what the phrase actually means or try to reconcile it with the names.
Ah, just to add to that -- I think it's similar to how the Beavers have all this delicious food, and a reader who thinks the world should be consistent is going "But doesn't that mean they're working for the Witch?", but the text doesn't even admit this possibility because they're obviously Good characters. That's the sense I get in terms of the Telmarines and race with these descriptions.
Well, 'Caspian' to me made sense with 'Miraz', since the Caspian Sea borders Iran, but it's less obviously Persian-sounding. That '-ian' suffix that is so beloved of fantasy name generators. And thus, as you point out, the name of a potential hero of this story. I can't see 'Prince Miraz the Navigator' getting to be the hero of this story. Maybe one of mine, I'm starting to experiment a bit with Middle-Eastern/West Asian-derived settings.
(Of course, I am not sure that to a man of Lewis's generation 'Spanish' was substantially more white than 'Persian'.)
As for the red hair, oh, goodness, yes. King David is supposed to have been a redhead, and the whole region is still chock-a-block with redheads. And it always startles people who expect the whole Middle East to be uniformly brunette. (Which may explain Aunt Prunaprismia's hair, although not her name.)
The thing about English Romanticized Folklore, the kind of thing that Lewis loved, and which still fuels many a fantasy writer, is that there is always another invasion coming, with the 'magic' and the 'old ways' of the previous set getting shoved away to survive under hills and in the mountains and in oak groves and such. Narnia, in its wild randomness, shows several different, rather sanitized layers of that.
Using the overlay of English history, my best guess is that the Telmarines, (the ones who invade from overseas), rather than outer space, must be meant, on some level to be the Normans (Romance-language-speaking, BTW.) Except that the Pevensies are descended--on a cultural level, even if not personally--from the Normans. And we need someone rather creepy, rather scary-sounding, quite foreign, but ultimately assimilable--Germans are RIGHT out, even if they did already sort of sneak into the royal family--aha, I have it, they can be sort of Spanish! Like if the Armada succeeded! With scary hints of Tahitian or something ancestry! And slight Persian touches! And a queen with a joke name, just in case all of this was starting to seem too serious, or historical! But basically they are The Next Invasion, who will first squash the magic, and then, if they're wise, learn to look for it and bring it back.
(As for Caspian's mutating accent, I can actually sort of see that. If learning to speak BBC English will make you seem more committed to the Narnian cause, why not? A smart king-like move.)
That bloodless, stressed look is certainly visible on darker-skinned people, just less visible than it is on people pale enough that you can see more coloring from blood ordinarily. "Going white" makes little sense outside a fairly pale range of skin, but the parallel expression where someone is described as 'looking gray' applies right across the spectrum of human skin tones.
(Besides, aren't all these people supposed to be living outside and getting hearty tans doing hearty things like going to war and gathering nuts? Although I have heard people described in books as 'going white BENEATH his tan', which strikes me as a bit too much skin layering.)
I think, yes, you're supposed to be able to envision the Telmarines as essentially white, albeit a darker and less trustworthy shade of white than the Pevensies. But I also think that Lewis spent hardly any time at all worldbuilding this sucker, and instead put in whatever sounded good at the time--so Caspian can be swarthy at one point, and pale as his shirt the next.
Yeah, it's a constant conundrum with Lewis' writing, and makes it REALLY HARD to analyze it.
ANA'S MENTAL PROCESS: Lewis just described this kid as "white". Do I take that at face (haha) value and risk running into a "no, he just meant that for coziness" or do I write that the kid is not white and risk being told that I'm contradicting what the text outright states?
It seems like either way, I'll offend someone or be taken as wrong, so I just have to go with what makes sense to me at time of writing. Though I do apologize -- as always -- for any offense caused in the OP.
So, basically, this is all Lewis' fault for not being clearer. :P Though I kind of actually mean that, because "grew pale" and "went white" as shorthand for being startled is so problematic in itself.
Tangential to the main discussion, but this:
It is not the land of Men.
and this:
“You, Sir Caspian,” said Aslan, “might have known that you could be no true King of Narnia unless, like the Kings of old, you were a son of Adam and came from the world of Adam’s sons.
Seriously?
Nice catch! So it's a land not OF men, but still FOR men? ;)
I don't have the exact passage memorized, nor do I know where my copy of the book is (if, indeed, I still have it...), but Trumpkin states explicitly that Narnia is "not a man's land, but it's a land for a man to be king of." The implication I got was that he considered finding a human male and sticking him on a throne a matter of ceremonial significance rather like the way the Four Thrones being filled fulfilled the prophecy in LWW, after which all the real (nonhuman) Narnians could get on with running things around the King.
There's solid genetic evidence that at least some Neanderthals were red-heads. There's a lovely picture somewhere on the Net of a red-headed genetics researcher looking into a mirror and a red-headed Neanderthal woman looking back.
I need to go look this up, because I could have sworn that as an old man in the Silver Chair Caspian had BLUE eyes. Yet I know there is a scene later in the book where some of the children use some sort of dye (walnut dye, maybe) to darken their skins so as to look like Telmarines. (Or was that in Horse and his Boy...)
*wanders off to find her Complete Narnia*
I can't find eye color, but when Caspian de-ages in The Silver Chair at the very end, his beard goes from "gray to yellow".
ANA'S MENTAL PROCESS: Lewis just described this kid as "white". Do I take that at face (haha) value and risk running into a "no, he just meant that for coziness" or do I write that the kid is not white and risk being told that I'm contradicting what the text outright states?
Compound that with the very different understanding of race, color and ethnicity between our day and Lewis's, and the fact that many people who define themselves or be defined as 'not white' are still about the same skin shade as people who define themselves or are defined as white...and you've got a muddle.
(I research Jewish communities around the world, and one of the things I always find utterly fascinating is how Jews tend to illuminate various odd ideas people have about race. But that is very much a rant for another time. I don't think there are any Jews in Narnia, unless there is a community hanging out in Calormen somewhere.)
What I think we can sort out, however, is the Calormenes are described in-text as 'dark-skinned', while the Telmarines appear to have a European material culture, and are clearly not dark ENOUGH to have it constantly harped on that the Pevensies, say, are WHITE in contrast. Compare this to HHB, where the whiteness (and beauty) of the Narnians and Archenlanders is compared several times to the darkness of the Calormenes. So, despite the Persian hints, and given Aslan's version, I am settling in my mind for the Telmarines being Spaniards/Polynesians. If they've been marrying in with the Archenlanders in the meantime, it might explain them not looking very Polynesian at this point. (Note: the exact nature and size of the human communities in this bloody setting confuses me no end. It's like Archenland has no functional purpose except to blip in and out of the story and be where humans come from, although not when only the Pevensies will do.)
OK, none of this makes much sense. The Polynesian part is driving me batty.
I wonder how it would have changed the arc of the books if Caspian had married Susan.
I am going to add one more thing, in the context of Irish history: there is an unkillable legend that Spanish sailors from the Armada washed ashore in Ireland, and married into local populations. To this day, dark hair, or brown eyes, or a complexion slightly darker than the driven snow will be chalked up by many people in all seriousness to Spanish ancestors in the sixteenth century. I don't know if this has anything to do with Lewis's thought process, but it seems entirely possible to me.
Anyway.
Good post. Bouncing off of that more ideas:
Compound that with the very different understanding of race, color and ethnicity between our day and Lewis's, and the fact that many people who define themselves or be defined as 'not white' are still about the same skin shade as people who define themselves or are defined as white...and you've got a muddle.
Well, and then there's RELATIVE privilege. Even if the Telmarines are blonde Spaniard/Polynesians and therefore "inferior" to British children (and accents), they're still exercising "white privilege" in Narnia by virtue of the fact that they're a privileged race who has genocide'd the indigenous inhabitants of the country as best they can.
So while I love the idea that the Telmarines (except Caspian!) are inferior as rulers because they're not 'British in their hearts' or something similar (except Caspian!), because that does sound like something that could creep in given what we already see and know of the Calormen, we still have White Privilege Caspian who is constantly reassured by the narrative that privilege isn't something he needs to apologize for. *hair pulling out*
For the record, Archenland DOES pop in and out as needed. Head canon.
Yet I know there is a scene later in the book where some of the children use some sort of dye (walnut dye, maybe) to darken their skins so as to look like Telmarines. (Or was that in Horse and his Boy...)
You're thinking of a scene in The Last Battles where they disguise themselves as Calormenes.
I think a lot of the picturing the Telmarines as non-white comes from confusing them with the Calormenes, something I've seen quite often in online discussions of Narnia. There's no suggestion at all of them not being white and Western in the books, apart from the ambiguous origin story at the end of PC (and the pirates might have been European to start with, couldn't they?).
I am going to add one more thing, in the context of Irish history: there is an unkillable legend that Spanish sailors from the Armada washed ashore in Ireland, and married into local populations. To this day, dark hair, or brown eyes, or a complexion slightly darker than the driven snow will be chalked up by many people in all seriousness to Spanish ancestors in the sixteenth century. I don't know if this has anything to do with Lewis's thought process, but it seems entirely possible to me.
That's interesting. In reality, I thought dark hair and eyes was the original Celtic look (the Celts apparently didn't look that different from the Romans) while red hair and blue eyes came mostly from Norwegian vikings and/or Anglo-Normans.
That's the problem with having read books about 50 times through as a child, but not recently.
Exactly! ;)
That is, it's a land for Men , with a capital M, obnoxious as the usage is, but neither Lewis nor Tolkien nor anyone else thought twice about it at the time or for several more decades...um, anyway, it's a land for Men to take care of in Aslan's name. As a song which was popular in my youth would put it
Now is the cool of the day...
Hmmm, perhaps I'm remembering that from the BBC version with the 4th Doctor as Puddleglum.
Commenting in chunks because my network is being very unreliable tonight. Verizon, we need to talk. Please excuse any double posts or garbles, because I don't trust it at all.
I was another who heard those names as vaguely Persian, or in fact, CIrcassian. It's the Caspian Sea, after all. I don't know that I'd have thought about it at all as a child, but I don't think I'd have thought of them as non-white.
(And according to 19th-century European racial theories, Circassians/Caucasians were considered the whitest of the white and the most objectively beautiful of all human types. For what that's worth.)
So I was very surprised to hear this Mediterranean origin story.
By coincidence, I've been dipping into Puck of Pook's Hill lately. It's full of that kind of thing:
I followed my Duke ere I was a lover
To take from England fief and fee
But now this game is the other way over
But now England hath taken me
And you know what? Well, I bet you do know: that book is set in PEVENSEY, the "Gateway of England," and I've heard theories that that's exactly why Lewis chose that name for his English protagonists who go back and forth through their own particular gateway.
I think a lot of the picturing the Telmarines as non-white comes from confusing them with the Calormenes, something I've seen quite often in online discussions of Narnia. There's no suggestion at all of them not being white and Western in the books, apart from the ambiguous origin story at the end of PC (and the pirates might have been European to start with, couldn't they?).
I wonder.
Just digging through the series via the search function in Calibre, I find:
1. Multiple references to white/pale skin in PRINCE CASPIAN.
2. A reference to many Telmarines having "blue eyes" in VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER.
3. A reference to Caspian's "yellow" beard in THE SILVER CHAIR.
I can't find anything to do with dark skin and Telmarines. Of course that doesn't mean they aren't still Spaniard or Persian -- there are blond-haired, blue-eyed people in Spain and Persia both -- and in text they are from the South Seas and native islanders, so there could still definitely be a NOT BRITISH racism element there in terms of Not Fit To Rule, but they definitely seem to be legitimately describable as "white".
I wonder if these books would be easier to parse if there was more overt physical description. Susan is described so meagerly that the BBC made her blonde and Disney made her brunette, and I'm pretty sure there's no way to say who is "correct". All the Pevensies could be red-haired, for all I remember that the text tells us.
'Course, that just makes NEXT week's post all the more interesting, because we actually are going to get hair described then -- possibly the first hair to be described in these books ever. (Unless you count Aslan's fur...)
Well, yeah, Caspian's privilege is based on his species, nationality and birth, not race. But figuring out what the hell Lewis thought he was talking about can still give me hours of entertainment. :)
Actually, Susan's hair we do have canon on, from the end of the first book.
"And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage. And she was called Susan the Gentle."
Heh. So either both the movies are wrong (blonde and brunette respectively) or her hair changed color between childhood and adulthood.
Not only that, but in Canada, like many other Commonwealth countries, we don't even bother with the expense of actually keeping up a monarch ... we just borrow another country's ("They won't mind! We'll pop her back after tea!!") and call her Queen of Canada (Totally different from the Queen of England) and return her in Mint-In-Box condition.
It's a beautiful system, really.
Building on what we saw in LWW, you would have
Animals (speaking) (good)
Animals (non-speaking) (neutral)
Animals that look like men, but aren't men (bad)
For all we know, she could have dyed her hair for formal court occasions in Narnia, once she'd grown up :D .
And, Myriad - It seems that way here, but Talking Animals aren't all good. Remember Ginger the Cat in Last Battle, to say nothing of Maugrim / Feneris Ulf. Of course, they could just be exceptions... but I prefer the theory that Mr. Beaver was just plain wrong.
This sort of thing has made me muse that perhaps the best setting for a traditional fantasy story would be, rather than a medieval world, a world where small autonomous villages are the norm.
> How did the Dwarfs' disguises manage to fool the
> Telmarines they were actually making babies with?
> Even if the Telmarines were fooled, why would they
> be interested in living and interbreeding with a
> bunch of completely defeated, four-foot-tall natives,
> when they could just kick them all out of the country?
"About 3 things I was absolutely positive. First, Gloin was a dwarf. His cold, glittering, marble-like skin, hewn from the depths of the Undermountain, gave him utterly away. Second, there was a part of him---and I didn't know how dominant that part might be---that blamed me for the Telmarine genocide of his people. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love."
(I think, more realistically, that if the dwarves were sufficiently outnumbered, then assimilating a number of short, relatively untalkative travelers into scattered communities might not be impossible. It's not like the Telmarines would have to decide as a holistic community to marry the dwarves as a holistic community; you'd just have to have individual relationships start up under whatever model they start up under over time.)
You win ALL the Internets. Seriously, I feel like I should close down the blog and call it a day, because nothing I say will ever be a funny as this. LOL LOL LOL.
Also, I guess lady Dwarfs don't exist, or don't matter.
...What makes you think the lady Dwarfs weren't putting on high heels and shaving beards?
...What makes you think the lady Dwarfs weren't putting on high heels and shaving beards?
The text says that the dwarves pretended to be "men", and it's not capitalized. It's unclear whether Lewis meant HUmen or actual men-men.
Given that this is the second instance in this same book of men "marrying" into a society with little to zero thought put into how the women would feel about it (and the second instance -- that of the Telmarines marrying the native women -- is definitely presented as only men on the intermarrying side), it seems to be an on-going theme with Lewis that men do the passing.
Unfortunate Implications are also available if it's insinuated (I can't decide, for myself) that the men dwarves *prefer* human women.
You'd probably send in the tallest of the dwarves, those most able to pass as human, to marry in and bring back food or protection to their relatives living wild. If the dwarves could make stuff that the Telemarines couldn't (talking toys, anyone?), then their human-passing envoys could discreetly trade this stuff. And if they managed to become semi-prosperous merchants, their communities (and their spouses) would be more willing to look the other way.
Of course, the real question is why none of them were ever denounced during these periods. I'd imagine that either their whole villages were in on the deception ("Children, if any outsider starts asking about Burgermeister Pipin the Short, you tell them he was crippled in a childhood accident. Then you invite the outsider to hospitality in the village, and you run to tell your elders about this, so we can 'deal' with the situation."), or the wild dwarves had efficient roving murder squads to wipe out anyone who found out.
It makes me sad that (according to Dr Cornelius's tale) there must have been a falling out between "village dwarves" and wild dwarves, if they no longer speak to each other. Maybe the wild dwarves felt their half-breatheren were becoming too assimilated?
......... and now I want to read THAT story instead of Prince Caspian's. o.O
The text says that the dwarves pretended to be "men", and it's not capitalized. It's unclear whether Lewis meant HUmen or cis-gendered men.
Yes. But it's Doctor Cornelius speaking, so would Caspian have been able to tell if he was capitalising Men or not?
I have so thoroughly absorbed the Pratchett line of thought about dwarves that now I wonder how many of Tolkien's dwarves were male or female...
it seems to be an on-going theme with Lewis that men do the passing.
:-(
Actually the whole skin color thing can have a simple explanation. Remember, gTelmarines at this point löive in (world of) Narnia for 1500 years. Recent research indicates that via gene silencing, skin color can change relatively rapidly. Assuming Telmarines weren't really black to begin with (say, like spanish people) 1500 years may well be enough to make them more or less white. So they can be "white" enough to get pale, and still be descenden fom south European people.
This is also a big colutural difference between USA and Europe. In USA people with darker skin are often presumed to be part-african and thus less privileged. But in Europe, bronze-colored people (dark hair, brown eyes, slyghtly darker skin) come in all countries and are considered, for all intents and purposes, white.
Tolkien actually mentions this in one of his many Appendices. If I remember correctly, there were relatively few female Dwarves, and a relatively large number of them weren't interested in marriage and childbearing. Especially given Dwarves' (of both genders) predilection for loose-fitting cloaks, it was very hard for outsiders to tell male and female Dwarves apart. Nonetheless, there is a genealogy (attributed to Gimli, prepared for King Elessar), which says that all the named Dwarves showing up in the narrative are males. Of course, nothing says Gimli was telling the truth...
Re Dwar(f/ve)s and sexes, I've always been wondering about the bit in Silmarillion, where Aule makes the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves, and Durin is the only one who doesn't get a pair when they're set to sleep until the Elves awake... even given that it's an origin myth as much as accurate record of history, what does it mean to be saying about Durin's line? Maybe other tribes of the dwarves have a more balanced ratio between sexes and Durin's descendants tend to be predominantly male for some reason or other.
It really depends on the composition of the Telmarine invaders, doesn't it? If the invasion of Narnia was essentially an expedition of conquest with civilian settlers coming over much later or not at all, then as you say there would definitely be plenty of lonely soldiers looking for native wives/concubines. On the other hand, if the whole population of Telmar was looking for somewhere new to live, the mostly-male army and army support might certainly have come first to secure the territory but would have been expecting the women to join them within a reasonable amount of time. There would still be men trying to sleep with native women, and possibly even some intermarriage, but not nearly as much - unless of course the invasion didn't actually start out as genocidal as we're being told.
Random thought #1: the shaving-and-wearing-high-heels strategy is obviously not going to work for full-blooded Dwarfs if the Telmarines know they exist and want to kill them, but it might very well work for half-breeds. Especially if the human parents are still around and willing to vouch for them.
Random thought #2: speaking of Martin and Dwarfs, I hope the Telmarines can tell the difference between a Dwarf and a human with dwarfism. Things could get awfully unpleasant for Telmarine Little People otherwise.
I like Makabit's interpretation; I think it makes a lot of sense.
As regards lady Dwarfs, it's not in the book of course but for what it's worth, in the movie Cornelius specifies that "my mother was a Black Dwarf from the northern mountains".
Actually the whole skin color thing can have a simple explanation. Remember, gTelmarines at this point löive in (world of) Narnia for 1500 years. Recent research indicates that via gene silencing, skin color can change relatively rapidly. Assuming Telmarines weren't really black to begin with (say, like spanish people) 1500 years may well be enough to make them more or less white. So they can be "white" enough to get pale, and still be descenden fom south European people.
Also, it seems that the Narnia world runs on medieval physics - that is, the kind of physics medieval people believed in. IIRC a few centuries ago it was believed that skin colour was mostly a direct result of climate conditions, so if white people lived in sub-Saharan Africa for long enough they would eventually turn black and vice versa. That could explain the darker skin of the Calormenes if you feel you need to accept Lewis' own (silly IMO) suggestion that they were descended from renegade Archenlanders.
This is also a big colutural difference between USA and Europe. In USA people with darker skin are often presumed to be part-african and thus less privileged. But in Europe, bronze-colored people (dark hair, brown eyes, slyghtly darker skin) come in all countries and are considered, for all intents and purposes, white.
I don't know if this has any basis in fact, but I've also heard it suggested that a lot of Americans tend to think of Mediterranean Europeans as darker-skinned than they actually (usually) are, from being used to see them portrayed by Mexican actors in films.
What makes you think the lady Dwarfs weren't putting on high heels and shaving beards?
Mostly that Lewis is who he is, and that the other Narnian humanoids all seem to have heteronormative sexual characteristics. I kind of doubt he'd take the same route as Pratchett did.
And lady Dwarfs may not actually exist; I believe all Dwarfs, Fauns and Centaurs mentioned in the books are male, in terms of pronouns and whatnot. Perhaps all three races couple with Nymphs to perpetuate themselves.
Of course, this suggests that Caspian IX, his wife, or both, knew that Dr. Cornelius was a dwarf, in which case, why doesn't Miraz know that he's a dwarf when he signs him up as Caspian X's tutor?
I would guess that Miraz isn't aware of any relationship between Dr. Cornelius and Caspian IX's court, or he wouldn't have hired Cornelius in the first place. It would be idiotic to have Caspian X tutored by an ally of the father Miraz murdered, Dwarf or not. (And we all know that Prince Caspian characters are never idiotic.)
If most of the Telmarine invasion was male (not uncommon for an invasion), it seems probable to me that the straight 90 percent of this contingent might have been on the lookout for someone they could have sex with in this new land. Think of the Moors in Spain, or the Spaniards in Central America, except this time, there are no obvious local people of your species.
I think this is a different kind of invasion, though. The early Moorish and Spanish invaders were relatively small groups of armed men, sent out by their societies to gain control over new territories so they could eliminate military rivals and funnel wealth back to the old country. The Telmarine invasion was apparently more like the great migrations of the Roman era. Virtually all the Telmarines--which presumably means women and children as well as men--emigrated from their homeland after famine left it unlivable, settled into Narnia and never went back (despite the fact that Telmar is actually pretty close to Narnia, on the other side of a fairly mundane forest). By Prince Caspian's day they don't even remember where Telmar is, and in later books doesn't seem to have a human population worth speaking of.
So I'm doubtful that the Telmarines were all that male-skewed or desperate for sex partners when they arrived in Narnia. Both Aslan and Cornelius talk as if the modern Narnian humans are mostly pure Telmarine, with little admixture from Narnian natives, human or Dwarf. (The half-Dwarfs seem to still be culturally Dwarfish, by Cornelius' account--I don't think they identify as human in private.)
They hate and fear the natives, on principal, but all of them vaguely know in the back of their mind that Grandma was a LOT shorter than humans are actually supposed to be, and that those leaves growing out of Grandpa's hair aren't the kind of thing you ever see in picture books from Back Home Across The Sea.
That would be awesome, although a bit inconsistent with the fact that the younger Telmarines are supposed to be more favorable toward Old Narnia than their elders. But perhaps that's a peculiarity of this particular generation.
Actually, suppose we revise Cornelius' history so that hating and fearing the natives is a relatively recent thing? Caspian I really was a conqueror, but more in the Moorish or Norman style; the Telmarines weren't interested in genocide, but in ruling over the native Narnians and living off their taxes and products. They interbred freely, and a homogenized race of Dwarfish Nymphish near-humans gradually resulted. This race still identified as Telmarine and human, and was mutually hostile with the surviving pureblood Old Narnians, who were pureblood precisely because they'd become nomadic outlaws and terrorists rather than submit to Telmarine rule.
Eventually, to avoid the shame of sharing ancestry with their enemies, both sides constructed mythical histories in which the Telmarines were pure human and had never had any relationship with Old Narnia other than murderous hatred. Sure, they're extraordinarily short and tend to have a few leaves in their hair or constantly perspire fresh water, but that's just what pure humans look like, you know? The legendary Pevensie monarchs probably looked exactly like that too; you just can't see it in their pictures because ancient art was all stylized and stuff.
It is you Telmarines who silenced the beasts and the trees and the fountains...But the Telmarines are also the people who cultivated vast tracts of untamed, unpopulated forest along the Narnian coast, full of wild bears and shit, with trees that are sentient enough to be hostile to them.
Plus, the trees and lesser deities seem perfectly capable of taking out the Telmarine army when Aslan is there. I think we have to assume that his absence weakened them severely. The Telmarines occasionally mistreated trees and fountains that were already silent, and might have further weakened them in a ritualistic way just by being Unauthorized Rulers of Narnia, but otherwise did nothing at all to silence those particular Narnians.
Would Caspian have been told stories about dwarves being wicked and dangerous (as he obviously was!)
Ah, but wait a bit. The human brain may not do anything well, without training, except predict people who share your (tribal) environment and a lot of your genes. So maybe Caspian thought Cornelius would kill him because he knows his family would do that to anyone who oppressed the Telmarines.
Of course, this means he should think of some of what we've said about the tutor's actual motives. Especially since Cornelius confirms part of it explicitly. The fact that Caspian goes along with this makes him either very perceptive (for correctly judging his tutor's character) or very naive. He never seems to consider the Galen-from-Bujold possibility, namely that the Narnians might intend him to divide the Telmarines and weaken them before an uprising that kills all of them.
Ah, but wait a bit. The human brain may not do anything well, without training, except predict people who share your (tribal) environment and a lot of your genes. So maybe Caspian thought Cornelius would kill him because he knows his family would do that to anyone who oppressed the Telmarines.
I'd say it's much simpler than that. He knows enough of what his people did to the Narnians not to expect anything other than immediate homicidal hatred from an Old Narnian, or to believe that said homicidal hatred is inappropriate.
In this chapter, we are told that "This castle is a thing of yesterday. Your great-great-grandfather built it." So that means the Telmarine royal castle is about 120 years old (guesstimating a generation at roughly 30 years). Going by the official timeline, that's less than half the time the Telmarines have ruled Narnia.
So from where did the earlier Telmarine Kings reign? There's an obvious answer if we assume, as Anton_Mates did above, that the Telmarines started out as "normal" conquerors and not as madmen intent on genocide. They reigned from Cair Paravel itself, in the style of the Narnian Kings of old. No doubt they did everything they could to establish their legitimacy, citing the Old Ways as justification. After all, didn't Aslan himself ordain humans as kings and queens? They would have tried to co-opt the Old Narnian elites into their regime. Old Narnians who were biologically compatible with humans (dwarves, nymphs, river-gods) would have intermarried with the Telmarines.
But at some point about 120 years before the events of Prince Caspian, things went wrong. Primogeniture doesn't guarantee that the heir to the throne will be smart, competent, or even sane. So at some point, a truly evil and crazy King inherits the throne of Narnia. This King decides (either on his own or by seizing ideas that were in the zeitgeist at the moment) that Humans are superior to all other sentient races. He not only launches a campaign of extermination against Old Narnians, but also moves the Telmarine seat of power to a new castle as far away from Cair Paravel as possible, and orders all the old history books burned. Travel to Old Narnia, or interaction of any sort with Old Narnians, is forbidden to Telmarines on pain of death. Our hypothetical evil King is therefore basically a Narnian Pol Pot crossed with the worst aspects of Hitler's racism. Thanks to his actions, by the time Prince Caspian is born, the true history of the Telmarines has been almost forgotten even by them.
Unfortunate Implications are also available if it's insinuated (I can't decide, for myself) that the male dwarves *prefer* human women.
Of course! Everyone wants human women.
TRiG.
C.S. Lewis was, by all accounts, very Irish. He loved Ireland. He loved the scenery, the land, and the people. He grew up in the north, though well before (watch out for my own biases in this next word) partition.
So, yes, the idea that the Telmarines are the Anglo-Irish suddenly makes an awful lot of sense to me.
TRiG.
The first time I read this book as a small child, when I got to the part where Aslan reveals that the first Telmarines were the descendants of pirates and Polynesians, my mind was blown. I suddenly had to reread the whole book, right then, that instant, because that was the first time I had ever read a story in which the protagonist was not white like me and yet the not-whiteness was not The Thing about the character. That sudden realization stuck with me even though I couldn't articulate it for years. It was all mixed up with the invisible lines drawn between people everywhere I looked and the vaguely understood headlines in the news. So you might say Lewis laid the groundwork for my consciousness of Othering.
Then I got to the nauseating passage in The Horse and His Boy in which Shasta is called unusually good looking because he is white, by a native Calormene. Darn it, Lewis!
This is one of more unfortunate aspects of Lewis'position. Lewis believed in a "rightful" plivilege. This means that, in some aspects, some humans are inherently better than others. Especially thuis means, for example, that no matter what Caspian does, when Peter is around Caspian should be subordinate to him (the High King). Unfortunately this also means that boys generally fight better than girls, and that whiter people are better than darker. The privileged position of humans in Narnia means that while bad humans can and will be punished, The fact that a human is the king remains unopposed.
I find it interesting that it appears that the rule of the Ts has been much, much worst than the rule of the White Witch yet she is apparantly the personification of evil in Narnia. Her "crimes" seem to be quite minor in comparison. A lot of it seems to be her being sneaky and bad tempered. Also I wish I could be sympathetic concerning King Miraz offing Prince Caspian's parents, esspecially his father. But since it involves the murder of a genocidal criminal I can only "clap, clap". In fact if King Miraz had not turned out to be a just another genociadal madman, but had upon taking the throne had ended the slaughter. I would for run heatidly above of him offing Prince Caspian's parents. But has it is it is just one blood soaked butcher being replaced by another.
What also fascinates me is the question of just how our hero Prince Caspian would have turned out if Mom and Dad had lived. I suspect the strong likelyhood that Dad and Mom would have turned him into another genocidal maniac. Being berefit of parents and growing up loveless seemed to have made him able at some level to emphathize with the "other" and not think of extermination has "normal".
On a completely different issue. When I was a kid and read Narnia for the first time I can't say I liked the way the books fit together. The White Witch and Jadis (Supposidly her real name.), just didn't quite mesh. I found it hard to believe at times that they were supposed to be the same person. I also was more than a bit annoyed that so to speak Jadis never comes back after The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. After all Jadis is suppossed to be the personfication of evil, i.e., the Devil, and can she really die? There are hints in later books of her coming back via magic. And in the Silver Chair the Lady of the Green Kirtle reads to me like Jadis. However despite a character sketch in some editions describing her as Jadis. this appears to be a mistake. The problem for me is that the Lady etc., is descriped as Queen of the underworld and very evil. Sounds like a Satan figure to me and very Jadis. (Remember Jadis pulls a temptation in the Garden thing in The Magicians' Nephew.). So I think its possible Lewis originally wanted the Lady etc., to be Jadis and then changed his mind.
As it is I find it deeply unsatisfying the way Jadis is not used in the books after LTWW, this is of course taking in account of the fact TMN takes place before LTWW. It feels like the great antogonist is not there. Oh and I founf Jadis in TMN to be a bit of a let down from the White Witch. In The Last Battle, astoundingly and remarkably the White Witch, Jadis does NOT RETURN!! Instead we get a substitute Devil. What gives!! The great villian disapears completely. As a kid I was so disapointed. And remember we're told at least once in the books that witches can't "really" die.
I'm so tempted to just write a Narnia tale with the returned White Witch.
I can't speak to the movie, as I haven't seen it. But yes, that is odd and, as I said, certainly problematic in the modern era (to say the least).
That being said, I can't fault Lewis from a historical perspective for not recognizing the privilege he's marinating in. From his own perspective, he's SUPPOSED to have that privilege. That privilege is his right and just due because ALL white Christian dudes are SUPPOSED to have that privilege. And that's pretty much my point. Ana commented that she had a problem with the text never recognizing Caspian's very obvious privilege; I just want to know why she thinks that it should.
Regarding this: "It's not about "white Christians are supposed to own the world;" it's about how human beings in general are supposed to treat the world. It's not White Caspian educating the rest of the world: it's the rest of the world educating Caspian about what his responsibilities are."
If you compare this, and note what was said upthread about the fact that in the PC movie, Caspian was brown skinned with a Spanish accent, and by VDT he was white skinned with a British accent, doesn't it start to look like 'the rest of the world' is educating Caspian on how to be a White Christian? They're taking him out of the milieu of Telmarine society and raising him up to the level of the British Pevensies. It's perfectly acceptable, and even natural, for him to be the White Overlord of the Others once he learns how to properly be White and Christian/follower-of-Aslan. This strikes me as similar in many ways to the way that "Saracen" characters are often converted to Christianity in early medieval literature. Once they're converted, they're eligible to take a place among the ruling class as a knight or a knight's wife.
And, you know, maybe I'm wrong. That happens a lot, too. :)
If you are going to comment here, please be aware of the comment policy and why the site tagline is what it is. This deconstruction is about me having a conversation with modern society, not a conversation with a dead author.
Repeatedly insisting, as you have twice now, that I show up and explain to you why I think an author "should" have done something when I made no such statement is not appropriate here. Kindly stop it.
I beg your pardon. I was under the impression that the comment section was meant for your readers to engage with you. I deeply apologize for offending you by asking you a question about your reasoning. You may be certain that I will not make that mistake again.
Yes, it is an issue within the text, as you yourself have pointed out. However, I have no interest in arguing whether any author was better than they should be, so to speak. That is a black hole of character aspersions, armchair psychoanalysis, and historical bickering that interests me not at all, hence the referral to the comment policy.
So if it seems I am saying "should", then there has been a misunderstanding. :)
Please also be aware that for a number of Real Life reasons I cannot personally answer all questions posed in the comments, and that the comments are for group conversation as much as questions. Thank you for your understanding.
As a Native American, I'd have to point out that non-Native Americans - ok, mainly white folks - only romanticize DEAD Native Americans. For dead Natives from long ago are easily reimagined to fit any and all daft stereotypes and fluffy notions. But living, breathing Natives? We hear a lot of stupid crap - sometimes because we in no way fit in with the romantic notions of what they think a real Indian is, often cuz we are a pain exercising or pushing for some right (gathering, fishing, owning a casino) that is regarded as Wrong In 2012 'Merka.
That said, Lewis, being a Brit, most certainly was thinking more of Irish history rather than that of "Red Indians" of the Americas for his stories. (I always thought it was funny people in the UK call us even yet 'red Indians'.)
I'm curious why you would expect it to. From Lewis's perspective, it was the God-given DUTY of white Christians to go into other parts of the world and *educate* the less-fortunate (read: non-white non-Christians) about the One True Religion and why white Christians are supposed to own the world.
Lewis saw it as a Christian's mission to spread the word of the Gospels, yes, to everyone. I can see that in all of his writing that I've read. What did he say or write that would suggest that he believed white Christians were supposed to own the world, or that he believed in evangelizing specifically to non-white people in other parts of the world? I did a quick search, but have not read much of his religious work beyond the standards everyone picks up.
his aunt, who had red hair and was called Queen Prunaprismia.
Wait. I vaguely recall something about "pruna" being Latin for coal. *looks up* More like "ember", which I guess is why he thought fit to mention the red hair. She's named after it.
(being a prince) he had wonderful toys that would do almost anything but talk
None of his many toys talk? At all? Even if you want them to? You can tell he's living in Medieval Fantasy Land.
(I get the feeling this isn't how I was supposed to react.)
It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts.
Am I the only one who thinks "gods" is conspicuously uncapitalised?
He's making all the horrors of the past about himself and expressing how it makes him feel.
Kind of like Edward?
Huh, as a kid I never read Caspian as white. Because he had an uncle Miraz, which sounds a lot like Mirza which is Persian for Prince, I always assumed they were Persian. Also Caspian reminded me of the Caspian sea, which is in the middle East, so that was why 7 year old me didn't think of any of the Talormenes as white.
It seems an odd coincidence that Caspian would have half-dwarfs as both his nurse and his tutor. So I just came up with an alternate theory.
The Old Narnians know that they don't have the power to overthrow the Telmarine invaders. If the humans are united against the Old Narnians, the Old Narnians loose.
But the Old Narnians know that if there is a power struggle in the Telmarine leadership, the majority of ordinary Telmarine humans will simply wait and watch. They aren't living in a democracy, or even with the concept of democracy. A palace coup makes little difference in their lives.
So, when Miraz overthrew Caspian IX and claimed the throne, an Old Narnian underground faction began grooming the child Caspian X to be their pawn in a future coup and/or a future sympathetic Temarine leader if Miraz died without his own heir and Caspian X inherited.
The Old Narnians used what little power and influence they'd managed to establish within the Telmarine system to manipulate the choice of Caspian's nurse and tutor. And the people they chose to place in these jobs, undercover, at great personal risk, were chosen because they were friendly and charismatic and excellent story tellers. And they deliberately filled Caspian's head with the most romantic, idealized stories of Old Narnia. They also used their positions, which gave them a great deal of control over Caspian's life, to keep him isolated from other Telmarine humans, so that he had few or no friends or political allies within the Telmarine aristocracy.
Then, when Miraz's son is born, they strike. They seize Caspian in the middle of the night, when he's tired, confused and disoriented. His tutor sets him in a panic over the new situation, and sets Caspian running before he can think of an alternative tactic or contact any Telmarine friends/allies he might have. They establish, in Caspian's mind, that he has absolutely no Telmarine friends, and that his one hope for survival is to take Old Narnian allies, overthrow Miraz, and rule in a pro-Old-Narnian way.
At the same time, this Old Narnian faction has been focusing on the Telmarine educational system, placing teachers where they could to teach Telmarine children stories about Old Narnia, to try to undermine the fear and prejudice by creating a fascination with a romanticized ideal of what Old Narnia was. I'm thinking of a t tactic similar to the "Superman vs. the Klan" radio stories in the US, and the long-term role they played in undermining the Klan. A generation of children including white children whose parents were Klan, saw the Klan treated the same as Lex Luthor and Nazis - enemies of Superman and America. And a reporter who was undercover in the Klan leaked passwords and secrets about the Klan to the writers, so that the Klan members not only saw their kids playing about Superman stopping the Klan, they saw their carefully kept secrets becoming public knowledge and elements of these games.
To be clear, I read your comment as saying that Lewis' romanticization of the Irish would be less bad than, say, his romanticization of the Native Americans, and my comment was that, no, it's all bad. If that's not the context you were trying to convey, then it seems reasonable that my comment will not make a whole lot of sense.
Americans tend to say things like that. I try not to hold it against you.
I would prefer that you look at my quote in full context. I definitely see differences in the overall situations, but not in the context of "privilege and romanticizing and appropriating marginalized peoples' pasts". By which I mean there isn't a difference in the sense that they're both really, really problematic things to do.
I.e., romanticizing Irish is not better than romanticizing Native Americans.
(And if that wasn't what you were trying to say, then I apologize for the misunderstanding. But I saw this happen online just this week and so it's In My Head.)
I think we can agree that it is more likely that C. S. Lewis was thinking in terms of Ireland than of America.
I think we cannot agree on this, largely because I have no idea what C.S. Lewis was thinking when he wrote a tale about 300 years of concentrated genocide to the point of near-extinction of (for an in-text example) all Talking Beavers. Personally, I would presume that a man writing in the 1950s could be drawing from any number of available allusions.
It's looking like Prince Caspian is going to be an opportunity for all kinds of fun verisimilitude analysis.
Going back through the thread...
Kind of like Edward?
I certainly didn't plan it, but yes there's definitely similarities there. :D
Ooh, I like that one Ursula. Let's see how long we can keep that canon with the book version. Cause I'm sure it's more interesting than what we'll get.
"I don't see a lot of difference between the Americans and Ireland, if we're talking about privilege and romanticizing and appropriating marginalized peoples' pasts."
I am Irish, so I don't need to have white guilt or appropriating other marginalized people's pasts at all! :)
You know, a lot of this stuff is muuuuuch bigger in Lord of the Rings. I need to look back on some of that...
Wow, I'm reaching for things to talk about here, aren't I?
Eh, I'm sure I'll be able to form a coherent idea about this eventually. Maybe before the next update even.
I'm curious why you would expect it to. From Lewis's perspective, it was the God-given DUTY of white Christians to go into other parts of the world and *educate* the less-fortunate (read: non-white non-Christians) about the One True Religion and why white Christians are supposed to own the world.
I'm certainly not denying that this would be intensely problematic, if not downright racist and other-ist and all sorts of other -ists if it had been written and published today, but you also have to remember to look at this kind of thing in historical perspective.
But the thing is, in this particular book Caspian's ancestors are the ones who are trying to stomp out the One True Religion. Caspian's ancestors are the infidels who took Jerusalem from the faithful. And, having taken it, were bad stewards of it-- which is even more of a problem than the original theft.
It is certainly very odd and problematical that the movie apparently portrays Caspian as white and British with all of his close relatives being some sort of darker-skinned "Mediterranean" types, but you can't blame dead-and-gone Lewis for that.
And Lewis wasn't writing all that long ago. Plenty of people, including white Christians, were thinking and writing about colonialism and its effects in the 1940's and 50's. I have no idea what Lewis thought about those issues, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't writing about them in this book. It's not about "white Christians are supposed to own the world;" it's about how human beings in general are supposed to treat the world. It's not White Caspian educating the rest of the world: it's the rest of the world educating Caspian about what his responsibilities are.
Now, when we get to "The Horse and His Boy," that's a, um, horse of a different color entirely.
I find it interesting that it appears that the rule of the Ts has been much, much worst than the rule of the White Witch yet she is apparantly the personification of evil in Narnia. Her "crimes" seem to be quite minor in comparison. A lot of it seems to be her being sneaky and bad tempered. Also I wish I could be sympathetic concerning King Miraz offing Prince Caspian's parents, esspecially his father. But since it involves the murder of a genocidal criminal I can only "clap, clap". In fact if King Miraz had not turned out to be a just another genociadal madman, but had upon taking the throne had ended the slaughter. I would for run heatidly above of him offing Prince Caspian's parents. But has it is it is just one blood soaked butcher being replaced by another.
What also fascinates me is the question of just how our hero Prince Caspian would have turned out if Mom and Dad had lived. I suspect the strong likelyhood that Dad and Mom would have turned him into another genocidal maniac. Being berefit of parents and growing up loveless seemed to have made him able at some level to emphathize with the "other" and not think of extermination has "normal".
On a completely different issue. When I was a kid and read Narnia for the first time I can't say I liked the way the books fit together. The White Witch and Jadis (Supposidly her real name.), just didn't quite mesh. I found it hard to believe at times that they were supposed to be the same person. I also was more than a bit annoyed that so to speak Jadis never comes back after The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. After all Jadis is suppossed to be the personfication of evil, i.e., the Devil, and can she really die? There are hints in later books of her coming back via magic. And in the Silver Chair the Lady of the Green Kirtle reads to me like Jadis. However despite a character sketch in some editions describing her as Jadis. this appears to be a mistake. The problem for me is that the Lady etc., is descriped as Queen of the underworld and very evil. Sounds like a Satan figure to me and very Jadis. (Remember Jadis pulls a temptation in the Garden thing in The Magicians' Nephew.). So I think its possible Lewis originally wanted the Lady etc., to be Jadis and then changed his mind.
As it is I find it deeply unsatisfying the way Jadis is not used in the books after LTWW, this is of course taking in account of the fact TMN takes place before LTWW. It feels like the great antogonist is not there. Oh and I founf Jadis in TMN to be a bit of a let down from the White Witch. In The Last Battle, astoundingly and remarkably the White Witch, Jadis does NOT RETURN!! Instead we get a substitute Devil. What gives!! The great villian disapears completely. As a kid I was so disapointed. And remember we're told at least once in the books that witches can't "really" die.
I'm so tempted to just write a Narnia tale with the returned White Witch.
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