[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

There you're really, really reaching. One can be conceited about one's looks- but also about one's intelligence, wealth, athletic prowess, social status..... If Lewis were fixated on the physical he could have used, say, 'vain.' Nor would I equate 'self-confidence' with 'conceit.' The one is an excess of the other, which is perjorated and rightly so. By trying to force a feminist narrative of sexuality and female submission onto this (like your snark about 'keeping her head properly covered') you really make yourself sound like those old Freudian critics to whom a cigar was never just a cigar.

All Lewis was saying was that Susan had become self-absorbed, prideful, and obsessed with the 'things of this world' (by which is not meant the material, but rather the evanescent)- and thereby forgot and so lost Narnia. This is hardly radical or reactionary: even atheists will acknowledge that humility and selflessness are virtues.

Come on, it's really pushing it for an excuse when talking about a character who is said to be interested in 'lipstick, nylons and party invitations' - all shorthand for a young woman who is plainly interested in attracting men! If Lewis had been criticising conceit about intelligence he might have had a go at her Beatnik beret and clutch of shiny paperbacks by Sartre and Proust.

I wouldn't dare say you or any of us here would equate self-confidence with conceit, but Lewis plainly did. And I'm afraid that if someone makes a very odd and arresting comment about the nature of womanhood then it is an inevitability that women will wish to comment upon that. And we have every right to do so.

None of that alters the fact that in Vol III his storytelling collapses under the weight of his preaching: and however much he wanted his finale to evoke Blake and Milton, to me at least it's more like Act III of Faust as retold by William Burroughs. So it's disingenous of him to disclaim sermonising when he so plainly is. At least Lewis, love him or hate him, never denied writing Christian apologias.

Preaching or imagining? I'd say it rather collapses under his ambition and the whole weight of story comes down upon him here. This is something I've noticed in a lot of the best fantasy, that towards the finale the writer struggles, and sometimes just about 'loses' it. Tolkien did it, you can tell by the high falutin' language and the headlong rush of the narrative; Peake did it, with the sparse and weird third volume of Gormenghast; Rowling does it in the final volume of Potter which is seriously intense. Pullman does it too - he even loses his main protagonist somewhere along the way. What all of them have in common is that they have said things along the lines of they were 'trying to find out what happened'.

In the melee of Pullman's third book I rather found that the 'sermonising' was lost! There was so much in there that it's incredibly hard to find exactly what he is on about.

Where Pullman differs in essence to Lewis is that he does not deny that he has an agenda in there somewhere. We know some of what he's about. But not so with Lewis with his mumbo-jumbo about creating myths to lead people to something or other, which just doesn't work - and I am so not alone in thinking that!