Jackity Jack, don't talk quack

Somehow, that title is supposed to indicate that I don't think Lewis wrote allegories.

I just finished a paper and presentation on allegory and Lewis. There is a prevalence of opinion that we may suck the marrow out of Lewis' fiction with the sucker of allegory. I hold no truck with this opinion.

One Wheaton scholar I recently heard averred that Narnia is not an allegory but it is allegorical and allegorizing. Actually he said that Lewis denied Narnia was allegorical, but Lewis must have changed his mind because [Scholar X] could tell how allegorical Narnia is.

I suppose if Lewis hadn't written the 20th century benchmark on allegory and love we might consider this. But Lewis did in fact write The Allegory of Love and maybe he knew what he was talking about when he described his own fiction. Or so I think. At the end are selected quotes from AoL.

If Lewis wrote allegory he did it badly. The allegory too rapidly starts to break down. He omits really obvious elements. He ignores blatant conventions of allegory.

Pretty much, Lewis wouldn't do that.

My thesis was that Lewis fiction is to fire the imagination and highlight universals. Per the quote below we are perhaps dealing with a sacramental symbolism where an alternate world gives other sacramentalism for the sake of illuminating the ethereal. This is different from sticking up a mirror to reflect Christianity on Earth.

Maybe The Great Divorce is allegorical. I'm not sure.

I think that at the end of The Dawn Treader Lewis thumbs his nose at an allegory when Lucy sees through the surface of the ocean to a world upside down and mirroring what is above. It's sort of like saying, "There's an allegory, I'm not writing about it."

That's what I think. Now please, everybody stop telling me Aslan is really Jesus.

***
Allegory of Love, 44ff.
It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms... This fundamental equivalence between the immaterial and the material may be used by the mind in two ways… On the one hand you can start with an immaterial fact, such as passions you actually experience, and can invent visibilia to express them…This is allegory… But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism… The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archtype [sic] in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism… The difference between the two can hardly be exaggerated. The allegorist leaves the given – his own passions – to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real… There is nothing ‘mystical’ or mysterious about medieval allegory; the poets know quite clearly what they are about and are well aware that the figures which they present to us are fictions. Symbolism is a mode of thought, but allegory is a mode of expression. It belongs to the form of poetry, more than to its content, and it is learned from the practice of the ancients.

Perelandra Opera?

Hark! I have just learned there was an attempt to create Perelandra as an opera. Doesn't seem to have gone too far.

One Link: http://www.donaldswann.co.uk/operas.html

Hey Biola Conservatory, are you paying attention?