by Dish Staff
Lev Grossman praises C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as the “ground zero” of modern fantasy novels and “a powerful illustration of why fantasy matters in the first place”:
I bristle whenever fantasy is characterized as escapism.
It’s not a very accurate way to describe it; in fact, I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself. The magic trick here, the sleight of hand, is that when you pass through the portal, you re-encounter in the fantasy world the problems you thought you left behind in the real world. Edmund doesn’t solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they’re exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.
He continues, “The thing about the Narnia books, is that they’re about Christianity”:
I grew up in a household that not only lacked Christianity—there was very little Christianity in our house, even though my mom was raised Anglican—there was almost no religion of any kind. Religion was, and to some extent has remained to me, a totally baffling concept. I wasn’t experiencing the book in any way as stores about religion: I experienced them as psychological dramas. This sleight of hand in which an apparent escape becomes a way of encountering yourself, and encountering your problems, seems to me the basic logic of reading and of the novel.
(Photo of C.S. Lewis statue in East Belfast via Flickr user klndonnelly)
The Dish 