The Hall of Statues on Charn

lillyanyway

lillyanyway

"Come further up, come further in!
We know that Jadis was all bad, so much so that she destroyed her own world just to beat her sister, who was most likely also a villain . But we know from the hall of statues that this wasn't always the case in Charn. The rulers started out well, but took a terrible turn.

"You could walk down and look at the faces in turn.
'They were nice people, I think,' said Digory.
Polly nodded. All the faces they could see were certainly nice. Both the men and women looked kind and wise, and they seemed to come of a
handsome race. But after the children had gone a few steps down the room they came to faces that looked a little different. These were very
solemn faces. You felt you would have to mind your P's and Q's, if you ever met living people who looked like that. When they had gone a little
further, they found themselves among faces they didn't like: this was about the middle of the room. The faces here looked very strong and
proud and happy, but they looked cruel. A little further on they looked crueller. Further on again, they were still cruel but they no longer looked
happy. They were even despairing faces: as if the
people they belonged to had done dreadful things and also suffered dreadful things."

Excerpt from The Magicians Nephew. Chpt 4, The Bell and the Hammer.

The question I'm posing is: What do you think happened to the rulers of Charn?

Was it prosperity which spoiled them? The power? Complacency which soured them? Maybe a catastrophe which brought about harder times and harder people? Or perhaps something less common, a magic spell cast by a jealous enemy? Or a toxic gas leaching, unknown, from the depths of the world which sullied mens minds? A burrowing insect or an alien species which takes over the mind in a parasitic symbiotic relationship?

There is no outlandish suggestion. What can we come up with, what happened to the rulers of Charn?!
 
Every society has human rights. Some, like Belgium, invest those rights almost exclusively in individual people. Others, like China, invest those rights with the state, which must survive at all costs. So the question is, is the state great because it is made up of good people, or is it like Nazi Germany where your greatness comes from being a citizen of a good state? I advocate for balance myself. When you start saying that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, you begin to form a human economy where all people are cheaper because all people could theoretically be killed for the good of their neighbors. Perhaps it is best summed up in what Jadis often said...that hers is a high and lonely destiny. In other words her evils are justified by the effect they have on the state and she is not troubled by the effect they have on individuals.
 
Most members here are presumably acquainted with the distinction between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil. Lawful-evil persons want to believe themselves to be good, even if it takes gigantic self-deception to convince themselves that they're good. Chaotic-evil persons don't care squat about pretending to be moral, unless it becomes necessary in a short-term way for their own safety. At heart, chaotic villains just want what they want when they want it.

The progression in the statue faces argues for the past rulers of Charn having fallen into lawful evil rather than chaotic evil. It could be that they once were compelled to fight and defeat a force of lawless chaos, and so they over-reacted in the direction of harsh legalism. Or they might simply have become drunk with power.

I am reminded of something Mister Tolkien once remarked, in a letter to a fan as I recall. Gandalf can be considered lawful-good; and Tolkien imagined that Gandalf would have turned to lawful evil, if he ever went bad at all. If taking the One Ring for himself, Gandalf actually could have slain Sauron; and, as part of a change to lawful-evil alignment, he would then have convinced himself that WHATEVER he did from then on would be for the good of all people. He would never have become a wanton murderer; he would never have enjoyed killing or hurting people for its own sake; but he would have become the ultimate micro-manager. He would have been constantly telling people how to do things, and punishing anyone who argued with him.

The regime of a corrupted Gandalf would have been what Mister Lewis described as "a tyranny exercised FOR THE GOOD OF its victims." As if a dentist insisted that all of your teeth needed to be extracted and replaced with dentures, even though YOU knew your teeth were healthy.
 
I see what happened in Charn as a sort of cold war. Think of a cold war between two nuclear powers (not hard if you use your imagination...) Each side could destroy the others...it's like mutually assured destruction doctrines that kept the US and USSR fighting proxy wars in jungles like Vietnam and Korea. Only in this war someone actually pushed the big red button.
 
Not sure, but what could be so deplorable about a word undone by ringing someone up on Ma Bell? ;-) At the very least it does bear some resemblance to the way nuclear weapons didn't produce so much peace on earth as a deadlock? I am reminded of how the Soviet Union built strategic factories and installations in several small buildings rather than single large ones and used other methods of industrial hardening because they were sure it was POSSIBLE THOUGH UNDESIRABLE to survive a nuclear holocaust and emerge as the last man standing. No deadlock is ever foolproof.
 
Copperfox said:
The progression in the statue faces argues for the past rulers of Charn having fallen into lawful evil rather than chaotic evil. It could be that they once were compelled to fight and defeat a force of lawless chaos, and so they over-reacted in the direction of harsh legalism. Or they might simply have become drunk with power.
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I can appreciate the concept of the lawful evil vs the chaotic evil.

My brain is spinning off of this idea into the source of the lawless chaos they theoretically had to fight.

I'm seeing a cult or group of zealots, determined to bring about an age of anarchy on Charn by any means neccessary, possibly in response to an imagined or exaggerated wrong perpitrated by the Crown, possibly for the simple sake of seeing chaos and destruction where there was once peace and benevolence.

And what started as a "holy war" to preserve Charn, amalgamated slowly into a brutal autocracy which stomped out all "rebellious behaviors " which raised its head against the absolute power and control of the reigning ruler.

I'm for it.😏
 
EveningStar said:
Perhaps it is best summed up in what Jadis often said...that hers is a high and lonely destiny. In other words her evils are justified by the effect they have on the state and she is not troubled by the effect they have on individuals.
Click to expand...

That would certainly account for her apparent lack of remorse for the utter destruction of her world, and it plays well with the storyline I'm forming in my head based on Copperfox's suggestion of a gradual decline which began with a just cause.

We can justify anything, but find it even easier to do so when there is a grain of truth or a root of nobility in our cause.

If the burden of infallibility is on our shoulders, everything is justified.
 
Or Jadis could be like Hitler and decide these fools muffed their one chance at true greatness, therefore they did not deserve to live. Burn everything. If we can't live on our own terms, we'll die on our own terms.
 
"what could be so deplorable about a word undone by ringing someone up on Ma Bell?"

EveningStar, the deplorable word destroyed all life on Charn. Ringing the bell did nothing to bring any life back, all it did was to break Jadis out of the spell she put on herself that basically kept her in suspended animation.
 
As a child, I wondered what the deplorable word was, then I soothed my nervous brain by deciding it would probably be unpronounceable on Earth so there would be no way we could stumble upon it unwittingly!😆
 
Sounds Kabbalistic to me, as in the relationship between sound and creation you saw at the beginning of The Magician's Nephew. Jewish mysticism (meaning don't search the Old Testament for it, it's superstition) related that certain sounds affect nature, which accounts for God saying "Let there be light," where instead of words in a language, they were sounds in a periodic chart that constitute light. Perhaps the deplorable word was something similar to לְהַפְסִיק.
 
EveningStar said:
Sounds Kabbalistic to me, as in the relationship between sound and creation you saw at the beginning of The Magician's Nephew. Jewish mysticism (meaning don't search the Old Testament for it, it's superstition) related that certain sounds affect nature, which accounts for God saying "Let there be light," where instead of words in a language, they were sounds in a periodic chart that constitute light. Perhaps the deplorable word was something similar to לְהַפְסִיק.
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I like that too.

Perhaps the deplorable word isn't a word per se, but a sound, or chord, or a series of representative sounds like, as you mentioned, Aslan singing Narnia into existence or the Valar singing the world into existence at the behest of Iluvatar in The Silmarillion. A different kind of word altogether.

Or something more primal and complicated; a complex sound or frequency even. The word had to be "spoken with the proper ceremonies ", and she learned it in "a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it." Maybe to ability to even say it cost her something physically as well as mentally, such as the preparation needed to even make the sound or say the word destroyed parts of her vocal chords or frequencies of her hearing.

So many options, I'm just letting the concept permeate and fleshing out ideas.
 
Copperfox said:
Are you conjecturing that Jadis' sister also knew the Deplorable Word, but refrained from using it?
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To be fair, we don't exactly know much about Jadis' sister, save for what the Witch tells us. And you know for some reason, I don't consider Jadis to be the most reliable source of information. To that end, her sister very well could have known it, but her Jadis beat her to the punch.
 
I believe that the vow to not use the deplorable word, has altered the generations as they made this protection from fear.

Creating from fear creates a root to what we call evil.

I remember a mentioning.. i cannot recall exactly where in the book.. that if the apple was planted in order to protect because of fear, it would yes bring protection, but be a cause of evil. This was explained when the apple was planted for the protection tree.

Also, side note, I believe Jadis was never the evil to cause the 100 year winter or being the evil that entered the first day of Narnia. Mind, a group was there when Narnia was still to be created and they were all part of a world, a story, which caused to carry experience into the existence before existence. Aslan called 'the evil entered' but the animals had no idea what evil was, they called it neevil and by their innocence they conducted 'evil' to the weak wizard who was too instilled by fear to feel the warmth and goodness. Also the elephant who took the lead to deal with "the neevil" never appeared again in the books, no elephant at all, but there is a dead elephant in death water in the book Voyage of the Dragon Treader.

I believe the Narnians collectively started to believe they were no good and is why bad things happened "Im such a bad faun" and why it prevented for father christmas to enter the realm of narnia.
 
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