Saturday, February 28, 2015
Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (22)
A CONTRADICTORY BACKDROP FOR C.S. LEWIS
MARTYRDOM VERSUS
EUGENISM
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
UNIVERSITÉ CATHOLIQUE DE LILLE
FACULTÉ DES LETTRES ET DES SCIENCES HUMAINES
Colloque C.S. LEWIS - 2-3
juin 2011
C.S. LEWIS & THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA
BBC REWRITING AND ADAPTATIONS
RADIO AND TV
And other films
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
All Amazon reviews of CS
Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles
and various adaptations for
TV and the cinema
A CONTRADICTORY BACKDROP FOR
C.S. LEWIS
MARTYRDOM VERSUS EUGENISM
I would like to say from the very start that I will only
consider The Chronicles of Narnia
in their seven volumes (1950-1956), and the four BBC adaptations. So I will not
consider the various cinema adaptations and the other works by C.S. Lewis
(1898-1963).The second thing I want to be
very clear about is that I am not going to psychoanalyze neither the
author nor The Chronicles.
It would be interesting to do so from a certain point of view. This is not mine
here.
I will concentrate on the political and ideological model that can
be found in The Chronicles. But I want to be clear
about one thing before starting. For me children’s literature is just as mature
as any other form and type of literature and it deserves to be analyzed exactly
the same way as any other fiction. We do not have to suspend our disbelief but
as C.S. Lewis says himself: “You cannot know, you can only believe or not.”
And I have chosen to believe what C.S. Lewis tells us, no matter how
creative and imaginative it may be. I will
start with the background I have chosen, i.e. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and H.G.
Wells(1866-1946).T.S. Eliot,
particularly in his play Murder in the Cathedral (1935) deals with the
question of martyrdom when a church official is confronted to an attempt
at limiting the church’s freedom from the state or any other institution.
This vision of martyrdom became a real backdrop for C.S. Lewis because of the play at the end of the 1930s in
the Canterbury Festival, then the film at the beginning of the 1950s and
finally the opera by Pizzetti in Italian and in German (for Karajan) at the beginning
of the 1960s, too late for The Chronicles.
H.G. Wells defends a eugenic vision of the
world and he is a backdrop for C.S. Lewis because of the vast and lasting success of his early novels like The Time Machine (1895) or The Invisible Man (1897) at the end of
the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century and
because of his commitment to eugenics all his life in many writings, in film
with his 1936 Things to Come by Alexander
Korda and William Cameron Menzies in which he envisaged the
end of the world we know by a universal war in 1940 and the rebuilding of a
truly human society.
The Time
Machine was
adapted a first time by George Pal in 1960, an adaptation that may have come
across to C.S. Lewis though too late for The Chronicles. Of course the second
adaptation by Simon Wells in 2002 does not
have to be considered, though the great-grandson of the author corrects part of
the eugenics of his great-grandfather.
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 8:03 AM 
