I went to the Prince Caspian Church Leader Event at my local Family Christian Store. The craziest thing happened there. I watched the DVD with about 6 or so others, and as I was watching it, someone in the video looked strangely familiar. Then, afterward, a woman turned to me and said: my husband is in the video and he hadn’t even seen it yet. Then he turned around. There, in front of me the entire time was Dr. Michael Stevens. He told me how they actually recorded the interview and other things like that. I got his contact information, and I have a feeling that we’re going to be hearing more from Dr. Stevens in the future here on NarniaFans.com! He was a very easy to talk to person and very knowledgeable about Lewis. Anyway, here’s a bit of a recap of parts of the DVD. We’ve also got some video of the event, and we’re going to try to get it online soon.
Storytelling in Prince Caspian
Douglas Gresham: C.S. Lewis’ story of Prince Caspian has inspired generations of readers around the world with its themes of courage, loyalty, faith, perseverance, compassion, and forgiveness wrapped in an epic tale of adventure. Through stories, C.S. Lewis strove to exalt his readers with the most sublime qualities of our shared humanity. With Prince Caspian as a starting point, let’s explore the way that stories, with their extraordinary ability to speak to the heart, can ennoble and enrich our souls.
Georgie Henley: The good thing about stories is that they carry you to another place which you’ve never been. It gives you a secure environment and you feel like you’re just enveloped by the book and the characters and everything that is happening. Narnia is almost our complete imagination; we can interpret however we like. C.S. Lewis says that Aslan is big but he doesn’t describe him a lot. So for people who like dark gold lions it can be dark gold, if you like white lions it can be a white lion, and he’s completely different in everybody’s imagination. That’s the beauty of all the Narnia books.
Mark Johnson: C.S. Lewis did such a wonderful job setting up the world of Narnia and the characters either within Narnia, or the characters from war-torn England and taking them into Narnia. And what he’s done, unlike a lot of writers who are very specific from what he/she is wearing to what he/she is thinking, Lewis allows you to complete it. The beauty of all the Narnian Chronicles is that, it’s like Shakespeare: The stuff of great stories are embedded in these seven books with wonderful morals and adventures and character decisions and character tests that have to be achieved along the way. Story-telling may be our most original and romantic impulse. That is, to be told a story or to tell a story. You look at the cave drawings, and they’re all about telling stories and depicting something.
Dean Wright: It’s a struggle of good against evil. It’s a story of these kids who are put into a world where they have to make a difference or really bad things can happen. And as a moviegoer, you can watch that and identify with that.
Douglas Gresham Interview Video
Dr. Michael Stevens: I know that Jack maintained that his Chronicles of Narnia were not meant to be allegorical. Do you think people make to much of what Jack is trying to say in these books?
Douglas Gresham: To start with, I think you have to realize that in the days that Jack was writing and speaking, the word ‘allegory’ meant something very different from what it means today. Allegory today is anything that might possibly symbolize or be similar to anything else. This is a corruption of the original meaning of the word. If “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was to be an allegory of Jesus Christ for example, you would have to have the lion born into the lowest race of the creatures of that world, in terms of a carpenter’s son. He would have to live and minister for thirty years, then tortured to death and resurrected on the third day and so on and so forth for it to be an allegory. They are not allegorical works in the strictest sense of the word. And yes, people do go out of their way to try to find all kinds of hidden meanings. We seem to be a species that loves conspiracy theories: “There has to be a hidden meaning, there has to be a hidden structure.” A very nice man and a friend of mine, Michael Ward, has recently written and published a book all about how Narnian Chronicles are all based on the seven planets of the medieval astronomical system. I like Michael enormously, but I think his book is nonsense.
Dr. Michael Stevens: I know Jack was a classical scholar and it seems to me he was very interested in the parallels of virtues and vice. Is there a way you seem him, throughout the Chronicles, elaborating on virtues and vices and using that as a thematic element?
Douglas Gresham: To some extent, but only to some small extent. I think Jack realized quite early in his vice is in fact virtue corrupted. The devil cannot create, he can only corrupt things that God has created. And therefore, all of the vice we look at around our world today is in fact great things that God created that the devil has corrupted. I think that’s what you see in Narnia. You see the forces of evil corrupting great things. Cair Paravel was a beautiful castle; Miraz’ castle is a dark nasty place. If you take any of the true philosophies of man and corrupt them, you get evil. So it is simply a matter of comparing virtue and vice by realizing that vice is virtue corrupted.
Dr. Michael Stevens: Do you think there’s a way in which you can read Prince Caspian as a test case for the three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love being worked out in characters’ lives. And do you think faith, hope, and love play a central thematic role throughout the Chronicles?
Douglas Gresham: Yes, I think you can because in “Prince Caspian,” we see what happens to the Telmarine people as a result of doing away with all the great things like faith, hope, and love and so forth. You wind up with a dictatorship under a cruel and merciless king, a murderer. You wind up with a dark, depressing, dreary world in which there is no joy. And when you return to the faith, which the Narnians were born to and made for, it all comes back to being what it should be. There is joy, there is happiness, there is rejoicing, there is freedom. All of these things are part of the return to faith after the many years of corruption.
Dr. Michael Stevens: So are there ways that Narnia is like our world, and the lives led in Narnia are like our lives here and now?
Douglas Gresham: Narnia is not like our world, quite deliberately, until evil gets into it. And we bring it there. In “The Magician’s Nephew,” it was Digory Kirke who brought the White Witch to Narnia. It was a pure beautiful country until Digory brought evil to it. It is very interesting, Jack’s concept in the science fiction trilogy and the Narnian Chronicles. At the time that Jack was writing these books, science fiction writers were writing they still do today, writing stories about going off into space and finding some aliens who are always evil and out to kill us and so forth. Jack turned that on its head. We go out into space to another place and we are the evil monsters, and they are the pure creatures that we should be leaving alone. I think that’s something we really need to pay attention to. In his book “Out of the Silent Planet,” this is the silent planet because we are the fallen species; we are the bad guys. And we need to learn if we ever do go out into space and meet a new alien species, chances are 50/50 that we will be the bad guys.
If you missed it, you can register for the second run of the program on April 22 at Family Christian Stores.