Laura Miller (15 page)

Perhaps that’s why Tiffany — even in her twenties, when she’d come to see the religious symbolism in the Chronicles as “jarringly” obvious — never rejected them as vehemently as I did. Like Pam, she saw deeper, and she could detect the better side of Christian belief, the one that I refused to acknowledge in my determination to detach myself from my church. “I always thought of Narnia as being this benign thing,” Tiffany told me after she’d heard my story. “I don’t recall ever feeling that sense of betrayal. It was more like, ‘Oh, well, thanks for hooking me up with this kind, sweet metaphor for Christianity. Wouldn’t it be great if all Christians were like this?’”

Chapter Ten

Required Reading

C.S.
Lewis lost his own faith sometime during what he calls, in
Surprised by Joy,
the “dark ages” of boyhood, between childhood and adolescence, when all seemed “greedy, cruel, noisy and prosaic.” He lists several causes. First, he had somehow gotten hung up on the idea that he had to “really think” about every prayer he said, which made praying a daily ordeal he became increasingly eager to jettison. Then there was what he describes as his “deeply ingrained pessimism.” This attitude was not, Lewis insists, a result of his mother’s early death, but rather a by-product of his thwarted and frustrating relationship to the physical world. He was hopelessly clumsy and had come to expect every object “to do what you did not want it to do.” He was no good at the sports that matter so much at school. And even though he’d learned to regard his father’s financial panics as overblown, the often gloomy mood at home completed the picture of a world too miserable and misbegotten to be the work of any respectable god.

At school, a kindly matron introduced him to “Occultism,” a hodgepodge of esoteric beliefs comprising Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and Spiritualism — precursors to today’s New Age movement — then all the rage in England and Ireland. There was also a dandified, theater-loving young teacher, worshipped by Lewis and his schoolmates, who contributed to his atheism in some unspecified way; perhaps he made piety seem uncool. Above all, Lewis studied the classics; his schoolwork consisted predominantly of reading and translating Greek and Latin texts. This curriculum, typical for boys of the time, introduced him to the pagan religions of the ancients. However much his teachers revered the classical authors, they made it clear that they regarded Greek and Latin religious beliefs as a “farrago of nonsense.” Lewis was not the first nor would he be the last young person to find this scorn disconcerting; no one bothered to satisfactorily explain to him why his own religion should be exempt from the same scrutiny.

Education and skepticism do seem to go hand in hand; “critical thinking” is what most of us say we want schools to teach kids. At the same age that Lewis was wondering why Jehovah got more respect than Jupiter, I was learning that a story is not always what it appears to be. Some books carry messages — not just morals, those pat lessons offered by books like
Elsie Dinsmore,
but a new, submerged level of meaning, accessible only to the initiated.

Finding that level of meaning is a skill most readers have to be taught, and American children of my generation learned how to do it by reading books like
Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies,
and
A Separate Peace
for school. This is a peculiar species of novel, as awkward and uncongenial as early adolescence itself. I wonder: Does any adult ever return with pleasure to the assigned reading of sixth grade?
To Kill a Mockingbird
may be the only exception. (I put
The Catcher in the Rye
in a different category. For years, and for all the obvious reasons, J. D. Salinger’s paean to youthful rebellion wasn’t included among the “serious” novels officially sanctioned by grammar school teachers. You can date the moment at which reading became officially considered endangered to the year when they got desperate enough to start assigning it.)

Animal Farm,
the ur-book of this type, comes closer to a true allegory, really, than
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe;
the fate of the farm animals who rebel against their human oppressors mirrors the rise and moral decay of the Soviet Union more closely than Lewis’s book follows the New Testament. Orwell’s fable is, like
Lord of the Flies
(another parable of ineradicable violence), deeply sunk in misanthropic gloom. That’s part of its allure for the kind of young reader who yearns to demonstrate his or her maturity; any book this depressing has to be very grown-up. At least, that’s what I thought.

Our teacher explained to us that
Animal Farm
was really about politics — about communist Russia, no less! — and I and the other bookish students discussed its deeper meanings with the thrilling awareness that we were being initiated into a province of adulthood. Maybe we didn’t fully understand what communism was, but anyone could recognize the way that power and hierarchy crept into Orwell’s ostensibly egalitarian animal society. By age twelve, almost every child has some experience of “fair” situations that are actually unjust; it’s not such a great leap from that to the idea that some animals are more equal than others.

Not long ago, while writing a piece about the fiction routinely assigned to grammar school students, I reread
Animal Farm
and
Lord of the Flies.
The experience was claustrophobic, and at first I blamed this on my foreknowledge that most of the sympathetic characters in each book are doomed. But so, too, are the main characters in
King Lear
and
Tess of the D’Urbervilles,
and rereading either of those has never felt grim or dutiful to me. I decided, finally, that
Animal Farm
and its fictional cousins feel constricted for the same reason that they’re useful to teachers; their purposes are simple, and so are their meanings.

If literary writing has any distinguishing characteristic, it’s that the more you look at it the more you see, and the more you see the more you want to go on looking. It invites a plurality of interpretation. “A genuine work of art must mean many things,” wrote George MacDonald, the Scottish writer whom Lewis regarded as his master. “The truer its art, the more things it will mean.” The meaning of
Animal Farm
is fairly obvious, but what’s the meaning of
King Lear
? The question doesn’t even make sense, really; it’s like asking what I mean, or what
you
mean. Works of art, like human beings, are irreducible. This is why contemporary readers dismiss allegory, because it appears to lack the density of significance we associate with art. The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

I don’t mean to suggest that
Animal Farm
isn’t moving. Even as an adult, I found the novel terribly sad. I pitied poor Boxer the draft horse, who dies serving a regime that he can’t even see has betrayed him. I pitied him so much that I almost wept. But pity always contains a seed of superiority and therefore contempt. We pity those we regard as less than ourselves: animals or simpletons. As maddening as Lear and Hamlet can be, I don’t pity them. I’m too smart to make Boxer’s mistake, but Shakespeare’s tragic heroes err in ways that I can all too uncomfortably imagine succumbing to myself (if not in so grand a manner).

Nevertheless, to get to the point of being able to read — really read —
King Lear,
you must first serve an apprenticeship with more manageable books, like
Animal Farm.
So direct and clear-cut are Orwell’s intentions that the book can be used as a kind of primer for thematic analysis. A double meaning is far easier to recognize than an infinite one. There are better books for younger readers that couldn’t serve this purpose nearly as well.
Where the Wild Things Are
and
Harriet the Spy
are both better than
Animal Farm,
I’d say, and most of us could reread either one of them again and again with a gladness that
Animal Farm
will never invoke. But
Animal Farm
is nevertheless a good enough book, and, more important, it’s a fine book on which to cut your critical teeth.

It was with
Animal Farm
that my classmates and I learned to read fiction with a critic’s detachment. Up to that point, we experienced stories as truth, if not always as
fact.
It’s not that we believed that the events in, say,
The House at Pooh Corner
had actually occurred; rather, our limber imaginations let us occupy a world where made-up stories had the same legitimacy as reality. Like real events and real human beings, the characters and events in those stories didn’t stand for something else. They were what they were, and it’s only with great effort and fairly late in the game that a child can understand them as
created
rather than simply
existing
the way that the people and objects in the world around us do. If we love a story enough, as I loved
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
we might decide that it
has
to be real, that a place like Narnia is so necessary that it must be out there somewhere, as palpable as California or Boston (the fabled city my mother came from).

Novels like
Animal Farm
and
Lord of the Flies
are usually given to children with a specific, if unspoken agenda:
Animal Farm
was meant to inoculate us against communism, and
Lord of the Flies,
I’ve always been convinced, was intended to warn us off the naive Rousseauian idealism then running rampant in the counterculture. But above all, these books were supposed to teach us how books work, to show us how what seems to be a story can actually be an argument about ideas or beliefs or the best way to run a country. Stories can be enlisted to serve a rational cause, such as a political ideology, and this, we are led to believe, elevates the fiction, making it useful and worthy in a way that a mere pastime or diversion could never be. According to this formula,
Animal Farm,
which takes up the weighty responsibility of critiquing totalitarianism, is naturally a more substantial and worthy book than
Harold and the Purple Crayon,
even if we don’t enjoy it as much.

In sixth grade, when I first studied
Animal Farm,
I felt that I had embarked upon a journey of great consequence, and I was right. I was making a momentous transition, and I’m surprised to find that few writers have ever attempted to describe it. Even
Surprised by Joy,
the memoir of a consummate reader, doesn’t. What Lewis does write about is a period, during the dark ages of boyhood, when he briefly gave up reading fairy tales and switched to school stories and fat bestsellers in the sword-and-sandals vein —
Quo Vadis
and
Ben-Hur
— “mainly rubbish,” as he characterizes them. This change, he felt, marked “a great decline in my imaginative life.”

It didn’t last, fortunately, and he would return to the old, resplendent inner life when he rediscovered Norse mythology in his early teens. Literature, it seems, was about the only aspect of his life that Lewis didn’t second-guess during his adolescence. But then, reading English poetry and prose was for him an almost entirely independent, extracurricular activity, and as a result, his teachers rarely set him to analyzing the kind of books he liked to read for pleasure. Reading remained part of his untouchable private world. “Never in my life had I read a work of fiction, poetry, or criticism in my own language except because, after trying the first few pages, I liked the taste of it,” he wrote of the years before he was sent to Malvern College in Worcestershire at the age of fifteen.

At Malvern, the last of the series of boarding schools he attended in England, Lewis was, by his own report, transformed into a “prig.” The term as he used it has a meaning more akin to “intellectual snob” than it does today, when it’s often regarded as a synonym for “prude.” But used either way, it indicates a disdain for other people’s pleasures. Lewis learned that he was not the only person who harbored a secret ardor for poetry, but with that knowledge came what he described as “a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost.” His once-pure love for certain books and authors became a justification for looking down on the philistines who didn’t share it.

For my part, I never really much liked
Animal Farm,
but that seemed beside the point. Here, for once, my experience of religion and my reading life converged. The Church had instructed me that the holiest activities were necessarily the dreariest ones, and now school was teaching me that the delight I took in a story was not the only — not even the best — criterion for judging how good it was. If anything, the more I enjoyed a story, the less likely it was to be serious, worthwhile literature.

Still, learning has a pleasure all its own; for some people, taking a car apart can be as much fun as driving it. I found that I wanted to figure out how books worked, almost as much as I wanted to feel them work on me. I also wanted, very much, to grow up, and studying books like
Animal Farm
was the sort of thing grown-ups did. And I
was
learning. Through Orwell’s novel, I gained a perspective on political power and how easily it can be misused. I also could see the way that good writing draws a collection of vague impressions into a coherent pattern until you both recognize your own experience and see it clearly for the first time. And beyond all this, I had come to recognize stories as made things, rather than as given phenomena of the universe, like the wind, a tree, or my brothers and sisters. If
Animal Farm
had a purpose, it could only be because somebody had created it to achieve that purpose — a writer, the author, George Orwell.

To me, the reality of authorship — the origin of every story in the imagination of a flawed human being — was both liberating and dispossessing. The presents you find under the tree on Christmas morning aren’t any less desirable because they’ve been left there by your parents instead of by a jolly fat man in a red suit who came down the chimney, but some of the thrill has gone out of receiving them all the same. Still, discovering that there is no Santa Claus has its compensations. You have been trusted with secret information that younger, greener children aren’t allowed. And you recognize that more of the world is under merely human governance than you had once thought; it’s a relief to know that a supernaturally industrious stranger at the North Pole isn’t really documenting how well you behave over the course of the year.