David simon selfless art k. williams9/12/2023 ![]() ![]() The Others have scimitars and pointy helmets and talk peculiarly in an Arabian Nights style. It's part of an unthinking cultural set of attitudes which pretty well every writer of the period would have affected: a pseudo-medieval crusaders-and-saracens sort of thing. I think the racism is very difficult to acquit Lewis on. Notoriously, at the end of the Narnia stories, Susan appears to be punished for entering adolescence and developing an interest in lipstick by exclusion from what in the Narnia mythos passes for heaven.Īnd the Calormenes are, says Williams, described as "dark skinned and a bit peculiar. The twin taints of racism and sexism attach to them – as they do to other Lewis works. Many, including Lewis's friend JRR Tolkien, found them incoherent, sentimental and unsatisfactory. Opinion varies starkly on the value of the Narnia stories. Philip Pullman says he finds the Narnia books 'very dodgy and unpleasant'. The 2005 film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. ![]() Lewis's great gift as a writer about Christianity was not as an academic theologian, says Williams, but "in what you might call pastoral theology: as an interpreter of people's moral and spiritual crises as somebody who is a brilliant diagnostician of self-deception and somebody who, in his own book on bereavement after his wife's death, really pushes the envelope – giving permission, I suppose, to people to articulate their anger and resentment about a God who apparently takes your loved ones away from you." He says the last five years have seen Lewis given "serious academic attention – and attention from people who are not just in the evangelical camp". "Wheaton College in Illinois bought his wardrobe and, even though it's a non-smoking campus, they bought his pipes, to be kept in a sort of reliquary."Īccording to Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lewis "is coming up the agenda again". Mere Christianity – a book based on a series of BBC radio talks Lewis gave during the second world war – sells in vast quantities in the US and is regarded as "almost a sort of summa theologica of the Protestant world", says Wilson. In the latter department, Lewis's work teams a direct, companionable style with sinewy reasoning: an appeal to the heart by way of the head. But the two Lewises that command the biggest followings are the author of the Narnia stories, and (in something of an overlap) the writer of Christian apologetics. As well as a children's writer, he was novelist, memoirist, essayist, critic, broadcaster and apologist. Almost too much: his posthumous reputation is disconcertingly various. Lewis has much more than poetry to offer, though. There's a very bad 'poem' by Lewis about reading The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and it just shows how stupid he was about modern poetry." "He hated all poets because he was a failed poet," says his biographer AN Wilson. The tribute might have pleased him, but it's an odd one: as a poet, Lewis is usually regarded as pretty useless. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |