C. S. Lewis

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Guest Post: Narnia, Hogwarts, and Fantastic Beasts

June 9, 2009 in C. S. Lewis | 21 comments

All Star HogPro All-Pro on deck! Pay Attention! Thank you, Prof. Hardy, for sharing this brilliant survey of magical animals in the Hogwarts Saga and the Narniad.

Fantastic Beasts: C. S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, and the Menagerie of the Imagination

by Elizabeth Hardy, author of Milton, Spenser and the Chronicles of Narnia: Literary Sources for the C.S. Lewis Novels

Every author is influenced by what he or she experiences, believes, or learns. Authors are also profoundly affected by what they read. All authors weave into their own work that which they have read, from the great stories of the Bible or classical mythology, to the poems of childhood songs or nursery rhymes, to phrases or words caught in passing. Far from indicating plagiarism or unoriginality, such connections rather display the variety of influences, often unconscious, that an author may have had, while allowing the reader to notice the ways in which an author, both subtly and overtly, uses material from other sources, often by twisting it into strange and wonderful new forms. Read the rest of this entry »

The Personal Heresy: A Case Study

June 2, 2009 in C. S. Lewis, Hog Pro Notes | 16 comments

Last weekend I attended Book Expo America (BEA) at New York City’s Javits Center. One of the more interesting panel discussions I went to was on Book Clubs. I went to it, embarrassing full disclosure here, because I hoped I might learn how to get Zossima Press titles picked up by Book of the Month Club or Quality Paperback Book Club.

Whoops! The discussion was about neighborhood reading clubs, which proved to my delight to be much more interesting than what I expected to be hearing.

The relevant and disturbing thing I picked up that I’d like to offer here for your reflection and comments was the consensus of the five women on the panel and the moderator that what Book Club members really want to know — and what book club leaders are obliged to provide — is information about the author of the work the club is reading. Knowing that s/he lives in Long Island, is married with two children, graduated from Kalamazoo U, and has a dachshund and pet tortoise is not enough; a discussion leader is obliged to search and find personal data well beyond book cover blurbs. The home run is scheduling an appearance by the author at the club date — so members can ask him or her how much of the story reflects their personal lives.

These Book Club pundits weren’t uneducated women or desperate housewives, believe me. When an author in the audience pointed out, though, that better writers weren’t writing autobiographies in story they wanted readers to pick apart to discover the ‘real world’ referents, the panel seemed non-plussed. They weren’t endorsing or arguing that interpreting the books readers gathered to discuss in the light of an author’s personal history was good or bad; they were just saying it was certainly what members wanted to do, would do, and it was the business of the Book Club sponsor to foster this sort of literary gossip if s/he wanted a successful Book Club.

We see a lot of this in Potter Fandom, alas. Read the rest of this entry »

The Divine Mirror in Pilgrim’s Progress

January 29, 2009 in C. S. Lewis, Deathly Hallows Lectures, Jonathan Swift, Traditional Symbolism | 2 comments

Mirrors are a big part of fantasy literature in the English tradition. It starts in a big way with the Alice classics by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), an Oxford Platonist, Anglican clergyman, and mathematician, when he sends his heroine Through the Looking Glass and it echos through Goudge’s work (as we saw yesterday), Tolkien’s Mirror of Galadriel and Frodo’s Light which is essentially a phial of water taken from the pool-mirror, up to the Godfather mirror fragment that plays such a large part in Deathly Hallows.

The tradition of mirrors in fantasy fiction and its origin in the natural theology and logos epistemology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is discussed at length in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, chapter 5, ‘The Seeing Eye,’ so I won’t beat that to death again here. What I want to share today is what I think may be the first and what is certainly the most important pre-Coleridge use of a mirror that reflects the ‘I’ that is, as Lewis says, “a sacred name.” Read the rest of this entry »

Salon: ‘A Spy in The House of Narnia’

December 10, 2008 in C. S. Lewis, Hog Pro Notes, Traditional Symbolism | 12 comments

Certainly it would take days to unpack all the upside-down and almost exactly backwards ideas in this Salon article, A Spy in the House of Narnia, an interview with the Salon founder and author of the new title, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptics Adventures in Narnia. Long story short: child loves the Chronicles of Narnia until she learns they are largely allegorical. She returns to them years later to demonstrate they really aren’t Christian books but works of remarkable imaginative artistry.

Two quick notes: Read the rest of this entry »

C. S. Lewis: Requiescat in Pace

November 20, 2008 in C. S. Lewis | 7 comments

Saturday is the 45th anniversary of C. S. Lewis’ death. I can count on my ten fingers the writers and individuals who have most shaped my thinking and beliefs. What is good and true and beautiful in my life, what I learned from these men and women, though, is largely attributable to what I learned first from reading Lewis or what he confirmed or helped me understand in a different light.

I am out the door, if you will, for my dates in McKeesport this weekend (see below) or I would write more. Please share here, if you have a moment, how Lewis helped you understand or appreciate Ms. Rowling’s books in the boxes below. I know one man, for instance, who told me that he didn’t get literary alchemy until he read Lewis’ Perelandra on my recommendation. Lewis’ artistry, which this friend understood more clearly than I had, opened up the alchemical scaffolding and subtext of Rowling’s Hogwarts adventures for him.

Maybe for you it was one of the ideas we throw about here as ‘givens’ for conversation about literature, Potter, and thinking in general, say, chronological snobbery, instructing while delighting, training in the stock responses, sneaking past watchful dragons, baptizing the imagination, or “the Seeing Eye,’ the universe being mental via our participation in the cosmic Logos. Just writing out that list, it’s hard to miss the centrality of Lewis and his genius in our discussions of Ms. Rowling’s books’ meaning.

As an extra, here is Peter Kreeft discussing the three men who died on 22 November 1963, CSL, JFK, and Aldous Huxley, and the important differences in how each understood the world. Enjoy.

And don’t forget the three CSL book special offers at Zossima Press! Black Friday savings without the post Turkey Day blues, crowds, or driving through the woods in a one horse open sleigh…

‘Deathly Hallows’ and Penn’s ‘Fruits of Solitude’

October 13, 2008 in C. S. Lewis, Deathly Hallows Lectures | 17 comments

I hope you have been following the discussion in the separate post below of what constitutes Harry Potter canon. The topic is of no little importance to the work we do here at Hogwarts Professor, of course, but that thread is also an excellent example of what internet exchanges can lead to but rarely do. I think we have come to a point, after no little give and take, that we accept there are four ways to understand literary canon with respect to the Potter novels, four ways that overlap to one degree or another but which differ enough to be understood independently. That discussion is certainly not over and I encourage you to jump in on that thread if you disagree or have a quintessential position that will square the circle and resolve all the contrary thinking there.

Here I want to apply what understanding we have reached and make an explicitly “textus primus” argument for the fullest understanding of the William Penn epigraph that is part of Ms. Rowling’s opening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Ward on Prince Caspian, Mars, and CSL

May 18, 2008 in C. S. Lewis, Movie Thoughts | 25 comments

Hogs Head Tavern landed an interview with Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia, when he was in New York earlier this year and it is a WOW event. Of the many articles and reviews of the movie ‘Prince Caspian’ just released by Walden/Disney, all of which discuss the book as an aside or in lengthy comparisons, none of them captures what the book is about as powerfully as does Michael Ward in his answers to Johnny’s excellent questions at the Tavern. Read the rest of this entry »

Recovering the Medieval Imagination

February 13, 2008 in C. S. Lewis, Traditional Symbolism | 3 comments

“Isn’t Jupiter splendid these nights?” he exclaimed to one correspondent in 1938; “Do you ever notice Venus these mornings at about quarter past seven?” he asked his godson in 1946. “She has been terrifically bright lately, almost better than Jupiter.”

Sound familiar? How about Hagrid’s conversation with the Centaurs in Philosopher’s Stone? “Mars is bright tonight…”

But this isn’t a Centaur. It is C. S. Lewis. The quotations are from C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem, an excerpt taken from Dr. Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia in Christianity Today’s Books and Culture. I commend it to your attention for these reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

What Alchemy Does in Harry Potter

February 11, 2008 in C. S. Lewis, Literary Alchemy, Traditional Symbolism | 12 comments

Filit sent me a link to a livejournal posting by ‘Josef Djugashvili,’ Alchemy, What Might Have Been, in which post the writer and serious reader tries to assess the value of understanding alchemy (and specifically the stages of alchemy) in getting to the meaning of Harry Potter. The conclusion s/he comes to after examining the three stage process of black white, and red and a more involved seven stage process is that “IMVHO alchemy does not assist too much in our understanding of the Harry Potter series as it stands, whichever way one slices it.” S/He asks readers to “convince me otherwise.”

I’m pretty sure this kind of discussion doesn’t allow for premise-conclusion demonstrations that would convince any person of good will but I feel obliged to respond to the live-journalist (even if s/he has chosen Josef Stalin’s birthname as an alias; I should confess this choice sets my teeth on edge and has made writing this an exercise). Here are three talking points for HogPro conversation today: Read the rest of this entry »

John Speaking in New York City this Friday Night: Literary Alchemy and C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy

January 8, 2008 in C. S. Lewis | 6 comments

HogPro Alert! I have been invited to speak at the New York C. S. Lewis Society meeting this Friday night, 11 January 2008, and you are all invited. There will be no cover charge at the door and refreshments will be served after I talk (as good as those goodies are, the conversation is much better). If I run over time, I’m told, refreshments will be served during my talk.

The night’s topic is “C. S. Lewis and Literary Alchemy in the Ransom Trilogy” and I’m hoping to do three things in just under an hour: introduce literary alchemy as a stream in the river of English literature, explain why it is likely that Lewis was more familiar with the symbols and artistry of this tradition than any writer of the modern period, and, the big jump, that Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy or ‘Space Novels’ is an alchemical trilogy much as the Chronicles of Narnia are an astrological seven book set. I’ll be focusing on Perelandra, the second Ransom novel, both because it is the book in the set most readers I know remember clearly and because the alchemy of it is relatively transparent.

I hope you all will jump in your private jets and come! Here are the details from the website in case you can get there:

» Starting at 7:30 and breaking for refreshments at 9:00 pm
» At the Parish House of The Church of the Ascension,
» 12 West 11th St, Manhattan, NY
» Closest Subway: 14th St. Union Square
» On-street parking starts at 6:30 pm

If you cannot make it this Friday, you should make plans to come next month. I am really just the opening act for discussion of Lewis as hermetic artist; in February, Michael Ward, Read the rest of this entry »

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