Religious and Historical Exempla
in C.S. Lewis’ City of Charn
The prequel to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Magician’s Nephew, acts as a genesis story to numerous themes of the series proper. Though the dying Charn, and its Queen’s persistence past the death of her own world, can be interpreted as the incomplete transition from a pagan, pseudo-Classical world to that of Christian Europe, its religious subtext is only one venue by which to investigate this space’s underlying symbolism. By additionally examining the novel’s descriptions of Charn which pertain directly to modern facets of our world, an overarching social criticism can be detected in the form of those political and cultural institutions that, when transposed into a realm of apocalyptic fantasy, cause a reevaluation of those societal institutions taken in our world for granted.
As a novel rife with religious subtexts, and which even recreates the Genesis narrative, The Magician’s Nephew is unique in that it presents a source of evil which is seemingly foreign from the world it corrupts and which even precedes both man and god. As the source of the series’ closest analogue to a biblical Satan figure, Queen Jadis and her home world of Charn warrant religious analysis, because, rather than being a creation of the godlike Aslan, Jadis is an invasive element in the paradisal Narnia that must be “brought” from elsewhere in order to explain the existence of evil in a consciously and benevolently created world (160).
What can be derived of Charn’s religious subtext is the sense of a patchwork paganism that draws from numerous pre-Christian traditions, and might thereby me most closely likened to the religious inclusiveness of the Roman Empire. The “temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges” establish Charn as an amalgamation of pre-Christian civilizations, for it suggests Egyptian “pyramids” and Greek “temples” in the same cityscape (68). Likewise, this world incorporates magic from occidental and oriental mythoi, reflected in Jadis’ demand for “a chariot or a flying carpet or a well-trained dragon” (84).
The parallels to classical society are made further explicit through Jadis’ barbaric catalogue of Charn’s “trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves, the thunder of chariots, and the sacrificial drums beating in the temples” (69). These depictions of tyranny and imperialism do not simply characterize Jadis’ personal cruelty, but in the context of their relation to Earth’s history and Narnia’s conception, they represent the larger injustices of a society predicated upon the worship of man rather than the worship of deities proper. Indeed, the only arguably religious oath Jadis speaks is “May the curse of the Powers rest upon her forever,” but it is never explained what these Powers are. It is possible that they are a vague pantheon of gods, but perhaps the “Powers” refer to nothing more than the inborn magical powers possessed by the royal family of Charn. Indeed, viewing the royal family of Charn as their own, self-proclaimed objects of religious worship would explain the existence of the Hall of Images—a temple devoted to themselves, with each successive generation enshrining themselves as “Powers”. Thus, these “images” are not merely images in that they are “like the most wonderful waxworks you ever saw,” but are more akin to the false images or idols condemned by the Judeo-Christian Bible, for they are monuments to the Charnish dynasty’s hubris (52).
For all its religious subtexts, there is as much evidence within The Magician’s Nephew to support a politically or historically focused reading of Charn, for one of the most common means by which the narrator describes Charn is by likening its characteristics to recognizable features of Polly’s and Digory’s modern Earth. The aspect of Charn “noticed first” by both the characters and the reader “is the light,” which is initially described in strictly negative terms, relating its qualities only by means of contrast. “It wasn’t like sunlight,” the narrator explains, “and it wasn’t like electric light, or lamps, or candles, or any other light they had ever seen,” a list which does not simply create a sense of otherness but which. For, by the very naming of these lights that Charn’s is not, the narrator inadvertently calls these very human lights—whether manmade or natural—to mind, before Charn’s fantastical luminescence is even described (46). Thus, from Charn’s earliest introduction, the reader has been deliberately lead to consider Charn not merely in a vacuum, but through association with its comparisons and contrasts with our own world, especially with those aspects, such as “electric light, or lamps, or candles,” that are the result of human industry (46).
Another direct comparison between Earth and Charn is found in the association of the “great pillared arches” with “the mouths of railway tunnels” (47). This unadorned simile seems at first to merely be a descriptor of the archways’ appearance, but a more literal interpretation places the children directly in the path of the metaphorical railway’s inevitable train, and we find also a secondary image of “blackly yawning…mouths” (47). By simultaneously associating fears of being run over by a train with fears of being swallowed by some monstrous mouth, the narrator seems to unfavorably relate the architecture of Charn to the turn-of-the century’s industrial revolution. Here, then, is a scene of the thriving technological advancements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, displaced onto a bleak and apocalyptic landscape, where structures such as railway tunnels are transformed into valueless ruins, which nevertheless seem also to embody a child’s primordial fear of being consumed.
While interest and concerns over locomotives and automobiles had likely been an ongoing cultural phenomenon throughout Lewis’ life, having lived to see the invention of the motorcar, innovations in surveillance techniques were also surfacing by the time of this book’s publication, perhaps explaining why the children “were afraid of somebody—or something—looking out of those windows at them when their backs were turned” (48). The way that “the two children kept turning round and round to look at the different sides of the courtyard” evokes recollections of the panopticon. Yet for all its similarities, the structure of the panopticon is here subverted, as the children are exposed in the center of the courtyard and are surrounded entirely by windows that may or may not be hiding unseen watchers (48). From the “many great windows…windows without glass, through which you saw nothing but black darkness,” the position of the prisoners has become that of the watchful guard, and thus these windows appear to project a modern suspicion of governmental surveillance onto the windows of Charn’s royal palaces (47).
Once the children enter the Hall of Images, the secular correlations between our world and Charn become, arguably, significantly less subtle, moving from submerged concerns of industrialism and surveillance toward allegories of modern history and government. The “figures” themselves, explained only as “the images of [Jadis’] ancestors,” exhibit a visually self-contained history, tracing the House of Charn’s advent under “kind and wise” rulers to those who were “solemn,” then “cruel,” and in their last days “despairing” (54). Perhaps C.S. Lewis is, in a sense, is experimentally considering an ideological alternative to the study of a nation’s history, for the Hall of Images preserves neither the political nor the material trajectory of Charn’s reign, but instead preserves an almost childlike belief that a person’s character can be found in their physiognomic facial features. In the deteriorating expressions of the images, the trajectory of Charn’s fall is summarized more succinctly than any verbal or written history. Jadis herself evokes this belief to further her people’s elitist agenda when she looks in Digory’s face for “The Mark” of a “magician,” signaling the sort of mindset which had prompted the preservation of the Charnish images despite the evidence of corruption and moral decline from their benevolent beginnings (63).
Out of all of the potential political and historical underpinnings in Charn, the aspect which has received the most attention is the Deplorable Word. Though such a “secret of secrets” would be a fantastical notion to the Edwardian protagonists, the book itself, published in the midst of the Cold War, cannot be analyzed without considering the very palpable correlations between the magical “secret of the Deplorable Word” and the scientific achievement of the nuclear bomb (70). Described as “a certain word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the ones who spoke it,” its parallel to the unequaled destructive capabilities of the nuclear bomb is not difficult to detect (70). The use of the Deplorable Word, and its eventual destruction of Charn, is reintroduced near the novel’s end as a “warning” to “the race of Adam and Eve” (212). Just as the faces in the Hall of Images grew gradually more cruel, Aslan tells Polly and Digory that their modern society is “growing more like” the world of Charn, and quite clearly alludes to the nuclear bomb when he admits that “it is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as the Deplorable World and use it to destroy all living things” (212). Written, as this book was, amidst the Cold War, it should not be surprising that Aslan predicts in this prequel that “great nations in your world will be ruled by tyrants who care no more for joy and justice and mercy than the Empress Jadis” (212). Thus, Charn is not merely evocative of the world in C.S. Lewis’ time, but is a prediction of the apocalyptic culmination of mankind’s cruelty in any era, a cautionary exemplum of the ultimate punishment for a “world [that has] ended, as if it had never been” (212).
Through the development and characterization of that dolorous place called Charn, C.S. Lewis creates an area of richly symbolic space that is simultaneously a grim reminder of our world’s past mistakes, as well as a cautionary prediction of its potential future. This intersection of past and future is manifested through the conventions of both fantasy and science fiction, combining witches and magic with a doomed planet under a dying red sun. Both of these temporally disparate genres are linked, and subsequently brought to bear on the reader’s own world, through ample comparisons to the governments, surveillance, industrialism, science, and warfare of modern Earth. Thus, the remnants of ancient and evil Charn inexorably linger through Jadis within the fresh and otherwise untainted realm of Aslan’s Narnia. This dynamic creates a push and pull between past and present, not unlike the vestiges of paganism exhumed into a Christian utopia. Likewise, Charn's rise and fall reflected contemporary anxieties that persist into the modern day and beyond. Seamlessly blending the series' fantasy framework with elements of science fiction gave Lewis the narrative freedom to imagine the natural foil to the magical realm of justice and light that was Narnia: a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world caused by mankind's misdeeds. This is one cautionary tale that is never too far from the here and now.
Works Cited
Lewis, C. S. The Magician's Nephew. New York: HarperTrophy, 1994. Print.