Transcript
The following transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors in spelling and/or grammar. It is provided for assistance in note-taking and review.
Okay, so we’re at lesson two of riding through the wardrobe. We’re going to be talking today about on the one hand inversion and juxtaposition, by which I just mean the idea of presenting familiar ideas in an upside down way, in an inverted way.
And juxtaposition just means putting two things close to each other that don’t normally go close to each other. Okay. So inversion and juxtaposition for the first few minutes and then we’re going to talk about characterization for a little while in this lesson. And so we’re going to start with the idea of inversion which is such an important idea for Lewis. I touched on this in the last lesson, the idea that he’s always trying to give us another way of seeing what we’ve known all along, another way of–he’s always looking to unfamiliarize us with the things that are familiar to us. And he does that, I call it inversion, by giving us something that we think we already know and then he shows it to us upside down, right?
And by the way, I think it’s worth noting, because he is a Christian person, a Christian writer, one of the things he’s always trying to do is basically say, “You were born in an upside down world and so the truth looks inverted. The truth looks upside down. And so that’s kind of what he’s doing in chapter two of the Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe. I say in chapter two, throughout the Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, throughout Narnia, throughout his sermons and his essays. I mean, even the screw tape letters is this inverted vision of the spiritual life because we’re seeing what it looks like from the demon’s point of view. I mentioned that last lesson. This is one of the most famous and often quoted passages from C.S. Lewis. This is from a sermon he preached called “The Weight of Glory.” And think about how there is an inversion going on here. “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal. And their lifespan is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit, immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. Think how upside down that is, right? We think of our own lives as being short compared to cultures and nations and civilizations, right? And C.S. Lewis is saying, no, no, no. You’ve got it upside down. And so by inverting that, he’s actually showing us what’s true, right? By turning it inside out, it’s not that he’s showing us an inside out incorrect truth. He’s saying, “No, your vision has been incorrect and here’s the correct vision and it looks like it’s inverted.” And so that’s what I mean when I say inversion. How do you accomplish that kind of thing? Well, we’re going to look at some ways that Lewis accomplishes that very thing in Chapter 2 of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And before we do, I want to introduce an idea that you may or may not be familiar with, and that’s the difference between realism of content and realism of presentation. This is something that Lewis talks about in his book Experiment and Criticism. The idea is there’s two different, when we speak of something being realistic, we can mean two different things. Specifically when we talk about a story being realistic, we can talk about two different things. One is realism of content means are you telling the kinds of things, the kind of events that might happen in real life, the world where we live, the world God made.
And so, somebody like Flannery O’Connor, even Mark Twain, tends to write in terms of realistic content, right? There’s no dragons or elves in Flannery O’Connor’s stories or in–well, I take it back on Mark Twain because he does have Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur’s Court, right? He has time travel and that doesn’t count as realism of content. So a story like the Narnia books or Tolkien, those are not realistic in terms of content because they talk about things that can’t and don’t happen in our world. All right. So we don’t have, as far as I know, elves or dragons or orcs in our world. And so we don’t say that the Lord of the Rings is realistic in terms of realism of content. However, separate that from the idea of realization of presentation. When we talk about realism of presentation, what we mean is, once we– whether the content is realistic or not, whether we’re talking about what’s going on in Kentucky right now, which might be realism of content, or whether we’re talking about what’s going on in Narnia, Once you accept the premise that we’re in a world where there are fawns and a white witch and that kind of stuff, the next question is, once we accept that idea, then does it feel realistic, right?
Now that we accept that we’re in a world where you can walk through a wardrobe and end up in another world where there’s a white witch who makes it always winter and never Christmas. What about that world? Does that world feel real once we accept that idea? And the truth is, there are plenty of stories that are realistic in content that just don’t feel real, right? Certain kinds of genre fiction– I haven’t read a lot of romance novels, but you get the impression that maybe, even though there’s no wizards in a Harlequin romance, some of what happens in those stories just doesn’t– the texture doesn’t feel like real life. Maybe I shouldn’t pick on Harlequin romances because I’m not an expert. But the question is, are you really going to make your world feel real, whether it’s realistic or not? Does it feel real or not? And the example that I love from an experiment in criticism is Lewis talks about in Beowulf, there’s this moment where there’s a dragon snuffling along the walls, the outside walls of a castle. Now I don’t believe in dragons. I don’t believe that dragons exist in the world. But if dragons did exist in the world, that little detail of him snuffling along like a dog, that feels like the texture of real life, right?
And that’s what we mean by realism of presentation. Another example I love is some, this is again from Experiment and Criticism, he talks about some little fairy tale with fairy bakers or elf bakers or something like that.
And they’re having to rub the dough off their fingers, alright. Again, I don’t believe in fairy bakers and elf bakers, but if I did, the idea of them having to rub the dough off their fingers, that feels like the texture of real life.
And so one of the things that’s amazing about Narnia and the way Lewis presents Narnia to us is he uses these really concrete details to make it feel like a real place, to make it feel just as real as London, or I guess it’s not London where they live, it’s the professor’s house, right? The world of Narnia feels as real as the world on our side of the wardrobe. So I want to look at how Lewis does that. This is just, this may actually be at the end of chapter one, I can’t remember, but it’s when Lucy first goes into Narnia. She began to walk forward, crunch, crunch over the snow and through the wood toward the other light. In about 10 minutes she reached it and found that it was a lamppost. As she stood looking at it, wondering what to do next, she heard a pitter-patter of feet coming toward her and soon after that a very strange person stepped out from among the trees into the light of the lamppost.
One thing I think about the way this is presented here we are in a fantasy land right and and yet this is all very straightforward stuff right.
There’s nothing fantastical about this and Lewis is making us feel that this is a real world the kind of place where there’s snow crunching under your feet. And she hears the pitter-patter of feet. The point I’m trying to make is, Lewis here is making sure we don’t float off into fantasy land. I mean, we’re in fantasy land. But he’s always making it feel just as much– again, realism of presentation is a matter of what are those little details that make this feel like a real world.
I think it gets even clearer here, because we’ve had the pitter patter, and it says a person is coming. And now we get to hear what that person is like. A person appearing doesn’t sound especially fantastical. He was only a little taller than Lucy herself and carried over his head an umbrella white with snow. All right, think how normal that is. A person carrying an umbrella, very average, And now things start to fall off the rails a little bit. From the waist upward, he was like a man, but his legs were shaped like a goat’s. The hair on them was glossy black. And instead of feet, he had a goat’s hoofs. He also had a tail, but Lucy did not notice this at first because it was neatly caught up over the arm that held the umbrella, so as to keep it from trailing the snow.
” And again, this is such a remarkable example of the use of just straight up concrete detail that’s just presented to us as a matter of fact. And it’s that matter of factness that feels like the inversion here. And we can also talk about juxtaposition, these two worlds being put together that don’t normally go together. And so I’m ready to believe this world because of these little details. I don’t believe in fawns, but if I did believe in– but once I accept the possibility that there are fawns, the idea that he would have his tail over his arm so as it won’t drag in the snow, well, that makes a lot of sense. And so Lewis is making us believe in this world that is– if I were to say to you, imagine that there was a world, that you walk through a wardrobe and go to another world.
Well, if you do that, if I ask you to imagine that way and make you do that work of imagining, that’s going to feel a little bit nebulous and a little bit abstract. But when we start talking about the snow coming down and a guy holding an umbrella who also, by the way, happens to have goat legs, now this He is feeling like a real place.
And this is what I mean by inversion. I think about what Lewis said in “Mere Christianity.” We take reality as it comes to us. There’s no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like. And that’s what he’s doing here, right? He’s just presenting us this world and saying, “Here’s this world. Take it or leave it.” Which is, by the way, how we experience the real world where we live, right? And when you’re a child and you come into the world, this is a pretty crazy place, this world where we live. And a child just accepts it for what it is. You know, you tell me that pearls come from a little piece of sand stuck in an oyster. Well, that seems pretty outrageous. That seems pretty fantastical, right? But it’s the way it is. It just happens to be the way it is. And one thing I love about Narnia is that it awakens us just how fantastical our own world is. And so by making Narnia seem normal, in a minute we’re going to see how to Narnians our world seems pretty wonderful and pretty fantastical. “Good evening, good evening,” said the faun. “Excuse me, I don’t mean to seem inquisitive, but should I be right in thinking that you are a daughter of Eve?” “My name is Lucy,” said she, not quite understanding him. “But are you, forgive me, are you what they, but you are, forgive me, you are what they They call a girl, ask the fawn.
You see what’s going on here? We to the Narnians seem more fantastical than the Narnians seem to us. And that inversion gives us another way of thinking about our own selves and our own place in the universe. Doesn’t it? And I love the way in Tumnus’ misunderstanding of what she’s saying. Look how ready he is to turn human beings, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, into these fantastical creatures. Daughter of Eve from the far land of Sperum where eternal summer rains around the bright city of wardrobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?
This juxtaposition, this putting together of two things that don’t seem to go together, this little girl is being treated as if she were a, well as I said, a fantastical figure because she is, in Narnia, a fantastical figure and a figure of myth.
And so he mishears what she’s saying and it turns into some kind of mythical, legendary thing and then the sentence ends with, “Would you come have tea with me?” This very normal thing. I love what he’s–what he–C.S. Lewis and also what the judge–the tumnus is doing. Here’s–such an important concept in storytelling is to engage the reader’s judgment. And what I mean by that is our narrator in this chapter is not coming to us and saying, “Okay, here’s some things you need to know. You know, this is a fantastical world where people are, you know, can be turned into stones and, you know, it’s not that nobody is telling you that this is a fantastical world.” What happens is that narrator presents to you some facts and then you’re left to go, “Wow, that’s a fantastical world. Here’s a world where there’s a fawn and eventually we’re going to know some other things. There’s a witch involved and it’s always winter and never Christmas. We’re going to hear all these things.” But the narrator, by just presenting the facts, what that narrator is doing is saying to you as a reader or allowing you as the reader to pass your own judgment on this.
Okay, so think about if the narrator said to you, “This was a magical world and a wondrous world.” Whatever adjectives that narrator might have come up with, it doesn’t make you feel, it doesn’t inspire wonder in you. If I tell you, “It was a wonderful world, It was a magical world. That doesn’t make you feel wonder. What makes you feel wonder is when you are placed in a world where a faun comes by with his tail over his thing, you know, over his arm, and it’s just presented to us as fact. And it’s your judgment that tells you that this is a magical world and a wonderful world. And yet it feels strangely familiar. All right, all that stuff that’s going on here that you felt when you read this, right, in this previous thing, your judgment is at work here. You as a reader. And if you as a writer can engage your reader’s judgment instead of telling them how they should judge it or how you judge it, some really good things are going to happen in your storytelling.
And so ask yourself, whatever it is that you want your reader to feel. In this case, let’s just say to feel wonder, but also with a little bit of familiarity. I’m turning into a literature teacher now, right? We’re moving out toward the abstract, but bear with me for a minute. If you as a writer want your reader to feel wonder and familiarity, you can tell the reader it was a wondrous land which also felt strangely familiar, but they’re not going to feel that. It’s ironically, it is the cold hard facts here that make you feel that. And that’s because you as the reader are engaging your judgment because that’s the way we experience the world, right? There’s not a… When you feel fear, let’s say there’s a dog, you know, barking, a strange dog running towards you and barking and you feel fear. You don’t have a narrator in your head going, This is a very fearful situation, right? You see the facts. There’s a dog running toward me and I don’t see his owner and I don’t know. And so those facts come into your brain and then you pass judgment and then you have feelings. That’s the way life works. And if you can do that in your storytelling, instead of telling your reader what to feel, rather presenting it to them and then letting them feel it, well, good things are going to happen in your storytelling.
Okay, I want to say something real quickly. We need to keep moving because I don’t want this lesson to get too long. But there’s that scene in chapter 2, this scene as a matter of fact, in which Mr. Tumnus — remember we’ve got Lucy who takes a little nap, probably, I guess she’s been sort of charmed to sleep. And when she wakes up, Mr. Tumnus is crying and she’s, you know, telling him, “Stop crying. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And he says, “Oh, I’m a bad fawn.” And this is another moment of those in the story where we are called upon to judge, right? We are called upon to take the facts as they’re presented to us and try to understand what’s going on. And our narrator isn’t explaining things to us. Our narrator isn’t saying, “Dear reader, here’s what’s going on here. Our fawn turned out to be a kidnapper after all.” We find out all that stuff the same way Lucy finds that out. And this is another, I talked in the last lesson about close narration. Our omniscient narrator is nowhere to be found here. Our narrator’s just letting us find out things the way Lucy finds those things out. And just as she’s having to pass judgment and sort of make sense of these facts that she’s hearing, which are trickling out, like she’s been deceived, we’ve been deceived, right? We thought Tumnus was a nice guy because he has an umbrella and he’s carrying his packages to the post office or whatever. The narrator let us be deceived and now the narrator is letting us, you know, judge this Fawn’s character. And in doing so, the point I’m trying to make here is storytelling is not just about giving information, it’s also about withholding information. And it’s often about deceiving the reader, not just enlightening the reader. And that’s what has happened in this scene with Tumnus and Lucy, is that we have been tricked into believing that Tumnus is harmless. For crying out loud, he’s got his little umbrella, he’s got his packages and then he’s got this house that looks just like a regular British house and he makes tea and all this kind of stuff. And we’ve been deceived and now we’re getting some information that we are allowed to judge. And so remember, it’s really important when you’re telling stories to let your reader, extent you can, let them make judgments based on the facts that you give them, not explaining everything and making things too easy for your reader.
So we have been wrong about Tumnus just the way that Lucy was wrong about Tumnus because of the way the narrator has withheld information to us and given information to us.
I think we’re going to get back to this idea, you know, in about ten lessons from now, but I just wanted to touch on it. OK, as I said, in storytelling, the way you withhold information is just as important as the way you provide it. OK, let’s move on to characterization for a minute. And characterization, all we mean by characterization is the ways that you let your reader know who your characters are and also the way your characters change.
So how do we know what characters are like? Well, there are lots of ways, lots of methods and modes of characterization. I’m going to run through a few of those here. And I’m not going to finish talking about characterization. This is kind of a basic introduction to characterization. But we’re going to spend a lot more time talking about characterization, and especially Edmund, in subsequent lessons. But I just wanted to sort of give you this information for now so that you’ll be ready to get more in-depth in later lessons. So here are some ways that we know what characters are like. Just description of physical traits, right? What does your character look like? And here is our first look at Mr. Tumnus. He had a strange but pleasant little face with a short pointed beard and curly hair, which sounds pretty normal so far. Down to the hair, there are stuck two horns. Sorry about that misspelling there. It should be T-H-E-R-E. Oops. There are stuck two horns, one on each side of his forehead. OK. I love that description because you’re just going along thinking it’s a normal description, but then he’s got these horns sticking out. OK, so description of physical traits. Also, just a person’s clothes and personal effects. And here we’re continuing– I think this is actually the very next sentence is in our description of Tumnus. “One of his hands, as I’ve said, held the umbrella. In the other arm, he carried several brown paper parcels. What were the parcels in the snow? It looked just as if he had been doing his Christmas shopping.” So that’s not really his physical appearance, but it is the stuff he has with him. And I should note, and you will notice, that this description of Tumnus is actually deceptive, right? I mean it’s true insofar as that’s what he really looked like. He was carrying his parcels, but it makes him look a little more innocent than he really is. This doesn’t look like a kidnapper, does it? But again, that’s how this whole chapter two works. We’re introduced to this faun, he’s friendly, he’s welcoming, he looks pretty normal and turns out he is a kidnapper. One thing I love about that chapter is he repents of kidnapping before we ever realized he’s a kidnapper. You know, I think that’s pretty neat. But he’s not — so he turns out to be a good guy, of course, but he’s not a completely safe person because he’s a kidnapper. All right, he’s a reformed — you know, a reforming kidnapper, let’s say that. Okay, gesture. We know what characters are like just by their gestures, postures, expressions, that kind of thing. And I like this detail about Edmund. He wanted to laugh and he had to keep on pretending he was blowing his nose to hide it. You see that about Edmund and you know something about that guy, don’t you? He’s not as respectful as he ought to be. He is a little deceptive. So that’s a great example of how you can use gesture to show what a character is like. And we’re going to see lots of–we’re going to spend lots of time on Edmund and his characterization. dialogue, the way a character talks. Now remember, dialogue– the most important thing about dialogue is not the fact that these characters convey information to one another. It’s more the way they interact with one another. And so think about this dialogue, this utterance from Edmund. “Trying to talk like mother,” said Edmund. “And who are you to say when I’m to go to bed? Go to bed yourself.” That one utterance tells us a whole lot about Edmund and his relationship with his sister. And then the way other characters react to a character is a really, really important kind of characterization. And so, “Of course it will be raining,” said Edmund. “Do stop grumbling, Ed,” said Susan. “10 to 1, it’ll clear up in an hour or so.” All right, so we’ve got Susan, who’s responsible and mature, and Edmund grumbling. And it’s her– when she says, “Do stop grumbling,” that tells us something about Susan, but it also tells us something about Edmund, doesn’t it? There’s a great moment in The Hobbit, where this is shortly after Gandalf the wizard disappears. And Bilbo– now I can’t remember. Basically, he takes– oh, it’s when he kills the spiders, I think. And we as readers understand that he grown in some ways. But what’s really interesting is that after we, the reader, judge, again, we engage our own judgment and see, “Oh, wow, he’s really kind of coming into his own.” Because up to that point in the story, every time he gets out of trouble, it’s somebody else getting him out of trouble. It doesn’t get himself out of trouble. And so we see that he’s growing. And then the next time he sees the dwarves, the dwarves all notice that he, and the dwarves all admire him. And it’s by seeing the dwarves admire Bilbo that we as the readers are confirmed in our judgment that he is indeed, you know, growing up and growing into his own courage and bravery.
Let’s see what else we got. Oh, so you always have the option as a writer when you’re trying to show your reader who your character is just to eavesdrop on the character’s thoughts and feelings. Just like a girl said Edmund to himself, sulking somewhere and won’t accept an apology. He looked around him again and decided he did not much like this place. So we know something about Edmund just because our omniscient narrator eavesdropped on his thoughts and feelings and let us think about it. don’t forget to talk about what they like and what they don’t like. The fact that he looks around at Narnia and doesn’t like it, well that says more about Ed than it says about Narnia, doesn’t it? And I think this is the last of my slides. You can also just say he was the kind of person who, right? And in that famous opening line of The Voyage of the Don trade, I think it’s the opening line, it is. There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it, right. That’s just the narrator saying he was the kind of person who blank, right. So that’s another way to characterize, to develop a character. Now let me say one word about this little trick. You are of course as the writer, as the storyteller, you are free if you want to, to say this was the kind of person who, but let me say if you do say this is the kind of person who, you’re in total telling mode, your reader’s having to take your word for it, you then need to show, right? I want to know, now one thing I love about that sentence, that first sentence of the book is I’m eager to see how it is that Eustace Clarence Scrubb deserved such a rotten name. And Lewis continues in that story to show us this guy’s a little rotter and he does deserve that name or almost deserved it. So feel free to tell your reader what your character is like, but then you’ve got to show them too. And so if this sentence weren’t then followed up with a lot of actions and dialogue and likes and dislikes, this wouldn’t be nearly as effective of a description of Eustace Clarence scribe, right? Okay. Alright, that brings us to the end of lesson two. In lesson three, we’re going to be talking about, I’ve already started talking about a little bit, showing and telling and describing. So, I’ll see you there.