C.S. Lewis Slimed in the NY Times
Remember the way the media came after Mel Gibson before The Passion of the Christ was released? The smearing, the sliming, the lies and half-truths told about him and the film? Well, with the upcoming Narnia film, it's happening again to C.S. Lewis. Bunnie Diehl does a great job picking apart the New York Times article.
I've been listening to the audiobooks of the Narnia series and I don't at all see them the way the writer of the NY Times article and Lewis' critics see them. The writer (Charles McGrath) seems to have a problem with the lack of liberal sensibilities in the books:
And by the standards of political correctness, they commit a host of sins. They're preachy, they're sometimes gratuitously violent and they patronize girls. The villains, moreover - the Calormenes, who dwell in the south - are oily cartoon Muslims who wear turbans and pointy-toed slippers and talk funny.
Oh dear...crimes against political correctness! We can't have that! Actually, the main female characters are, from what I can see, strong and intelligent. And I didn't see the violence as being gratuitous or even explicit.
McGrath also describes the books as having a "stodgy" message. Perhaps the message just flies right over his modern, oh-so-liberal head.
One more thing...much is made of C.S. Lewis' private life in this article -- particularly things that happened before he became a Christian. Like a lot of people, he apparently had some difficult, mixed-up family and personal relationships. Big deal.
Note: Edited for clarity.
Update: Gene Edward Veith posts this take-down of both the NY Times article and Phillip Pullman, one of Lewis' most obsessive critics. (Via Bunnie Diehl.) Here's more about Phillip Pullman from Peter Hitchens. (Via Veith.)
Update 2: I should have known that Get Religion would have a good post on this as well. Also, via the trackbacks in that post, this commentary by Michael Spencer.
Posted by Susan B. at 12:08 PM to Books
I'd say Hollywood right now is the embodiment of "mixed-up family and personal relationships." Can anyone say Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt? But everything's okay if you're a liberal.
I did want to point out that not all Lewis scholars agreed about the "take care of each other's mothers for life" pact. Although even the serious scholars who are not sure that pact occurred see anything remotely like what this article proposes.
Annoyingly, though, there are some Christians who like Lewis' work but who also think The Chronicles are chauvanistic towards women and dislike the similarities of Calormen and Muslim cultures. Reading the books as a young girl, I always thought the girls were realistic characters. Also, it is a girl, after all, who seems to fill the role of the "beloved disciple": Lucy. And I always found the Narnian culture very refreshing to the Calormen. But all cultures are supposed to be equal, right??
Lastly, these critics remind me of the Dwarves in the Last Battle who were sitting in Paradise with good things all around them, but still preferred to believe they were sitting in a cramped, dark, smelly stable.
Can you tell how deeply these books resonated with me? :)