My Son's Reaction to Times Piece on Lewis and Narnia

My son, P-Diddy around here, is a twenty-four year old who recently received undergraduate degrees in History and Philosophy. His plan is to begin graduate school in Fall, 2006. The other day, he composed a response to this New York Times article and has given me permission to present what he wrote here:

Wow. Not to ruin this article for everyone, but I REALLY disagree with this guy. I think he totally misses the point. He is so concerned with making Lewis into some hypocritical apostle for middle-class, bourgeois Christianity that he fails to give Lewis a fair hearing.

He doesn’t try to understand things from Lewis’ point of view, but instead plunges ahead with what he believes the vast majority of readers of this book think.

What did he like about these books anyway? He keeps saying he likes Narnia, but cuts everything down.

Meanwhile, he is attacking Lewis’ life. He does this while only presenting a few people’s viewpoints and only focusing on what he appears to want to hear about.

Okay, fine, I’ll do a little critique of his work. For starters, he wrote “a homage” instead of “an homage” and he ended at least two sentences with prepositions. Why do I bring this up? Because it doesn’t mean a thing to his over-all critique. However, to him, it probably would if Lewis had written it.

Then, he compares Lewis to other children's authors. He states that Lewis is sub-par compared to the likes of Rowling and Philip Pullman. I don’t know about Pullman, but you can’t compare Rowling and Lewis. They have totally different styles. Its like comparing Hemingway and Dickens, or Neil Simon and William Shakespeare. Different people have different styles and we like the work equally because of those different styles. We’d get bored if everyone wrote the same. This is not a cop-out. I like Rowling and Lewis in different ways. Rowling can lead you through twists and turns. She can bring to life magical things. Lewis, on the other hand, brings his characters’ motivations to life. He understands the gradations of sin, the nature of redemption, and all the real stuff of life. His imagination is not so much in the physical make-up of Narnia and its people, but in their psychological make-up.

Reading his work is like reading Hemingway or Shakespeare. It is concise, clear, and so beautiful. It doesn’t muck around with pretty “darling sentences” and long-winded monologues. It cuts quick and deep. It allows the reader the freedom to imagine. In an era of TV-raised brain sponges, Lewis is a breath of fresh air. He lets people commune with his books and without showing them everything.

Also, Mr. McGrath fails to see that Lewis is not talking about Susan Pevensie, one of the main characters in The Lion, the Witch, and Wardrobe, being interested in grown-up things like nylons and lipstick to demonstrate that she was more adult. He is making a comment about the postmodern view that girls are to become shallow women in training.

My gosh, has this guy been living under a rock? Has he missed sociological discussions about the problems in the rise of this subculture of encouraged female shallowness?

Sociologist Douglas Rushkoff calls these girls “midriffs”. He states, “The ‘midriff’--the character pitched at teenage girls, is the highly-sexualized, world-weary sophisticate that increasingly populates television shows such as Dawson's Creek and films such as Cruel Intentions.”

Mr. Lewis anticipated this problem and offered a solution to one of the greatest threats in our current Western culture, the over-commercialization of a generation.

And the only real cure, concludes Lewis, is a right relationship with others and God. The alternative is a shallow and lonely life in pursuit of elusive, superficial happiness. It's a kind of happiness, dubbed by the philosophical community as psychological happiness. And it's a happiness widely regarded by that field as being substandard. Rushkoff agrees with this critique and also adds that his greatest fear about the post-modern youth culture isn’t its violence, but its ubiquity.

Thus McGrath, in an attempt to show a problem with Lewis’ work, demonstrates his own inability to understand contemporary sociology and philosophy and Lewis’ genius for hitting the nail directly on the head.

Meanwhile, the ad hominem fallacies in McGrath's piece were a bit much. Focusing on possible sexual relations that Lewis may have had or with assertions that Lewis was a bit of a stuffed shirt as a way to discredit Lewis’ stories, only demonstrates that if Mr. McGrath wants to take on one of the foremost intellectuals of the twentieth century, he ought to be better prepared to take him.

So, did I like the article? In a phrase, “Its nice to hear another side even if I don’t agree with it.” But, to be perfectly frank, I’ve heard better arguments from high school freshmen.