Thursday, June 01, 2017
C.S. Lewis is like the Christian conscience of our times
We
are living an extraordinary time and many people don’t seem to see it. When the
Soviet bloc fell down the historical chute, Gadoosh!!!, the USA suddenly found
themselves alone as a super power since Russia was in the hands of a drunk and
China was just starting its emergence.
Today
nearly thirty years later things are so different that we definitely feel angst
and experience dizziness in the present fuzziness. And some politicians have
taken advantage of this situation to conquer power though they do NOT know what
to do with it, which is extremely dangerous: the populists are the worst war
mongers you can imagine.
The
USA should be the second economy in the world within one or two years and maybe
the third one within ten years or less. China will be first soon (though it is
already first in PPP, according to IMF). India will be second within a few
years. Sorry, USA, you will be third before the 2024 elections.
Trump
was elected on the myth that he could turn the clocks backward and make America
great again, that is to say #1 forever. And to do that he drops all
multilateral cooperation in the world and menaces all those he cannot drop,
isolating himself in the world and dragging the second populist hell, Great
Britain, down with him. Even Canada or Mexico cultivate their relation with the
European Community and China.
That’s
when C.S. Lewis becomes interesting since he imagines a world of cooperation
and unity instead of a world of competition and war. It is high time Trump and
Theresa May hear the call of the Lion Aslan, otherwise they will be the playthings
of the Witch in the wardrobe of in-between transmutation, sucking on their
Turkish delight, or Luqum since they prefer Sunni Arabs.
C.S.
Lewis is more present, alive and pregnant today than even in 1950 when he
brought Narnia out of his mind into the reality of the dream of a world without
dictators and wars, of a world out of the Cold War.
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 @ 12:16 PM 
