Chaucer, out of the mouths (et al) of babes.

Let it be known that 12-day-old Elizabeth is already developing literary opinions. She likes the Knight, is indifferent to the Squire, abhors the Shipman, dribbles at the descriptions of the Franklin's feasts and passes gas at the Cook. Most promising, she gets very excited about the Clerk, waves her arms enthusiastically at the idea of having more books in her room than pretty things and claps her hands to her mouth excitedly at the talk of buying books even without being able to get a benefice (tenure?). Let us hope she doesn't emulate him so far as to borrow money for books and forget to pay it back.

Reading to a child

This started out as a response to Wynken de Worde's post on re-reading, and the way one's perception of a book can change from childhood onwards. But then it got too big to politely be a comment, so it is over here.


When we were young, we used to go and sit in our grandmother's sewing room with our ears pressed to the speakers of her old record player, because you had to do that to hear the stories properly. One of my favourites was "Little Black Sambo", with the idyllic and very very simple idea of living in the jungle and playing with monkeys. I idolised him, like I did Mowgli, and was rather surprised when one day my mother made a pained expression and told me that it was actually terribly racist.

Now, for the first time, I'm preparing myself as an adult for the arrival of a new baby in the house, and making sure I have enough collections of all sorts of stories to read. And every time I think of reading a child one book or the other - Italo Calvino's volume of uncensored Italian fairy tales, or the Narnia books - I find myself tangling in the predicament of how one reads to a child.

Because I can read them to myself now and skip over all the bits that are potentially worrying if taken literally or to heart. But to read them to a child, without stopping to explain them away? Is a minor correction that a child wouldn't really understand about anyway worth breaking the spell of the story and all the good that brings in itself? Do you just trust a child to find the magic in a story now, and refind it differently the next year, when they see the world a little differently?

Or does one just read as many different stories from as many different cultures and viewpoints as possible, let the child keep the magic of all of them, and try to live and teach them by example in such a way that they learn to choose for themself?

Sir Launfal and the ubiquitous Veiled Homosexual Reference

So, I have been quiet again, for real life is intruding - in a good way, this time! The arrival of my formal offer letter from Ottawa University has precipitating a little fluffy of Things To Do, which leave little time for creative thought. Fortunately, one can still manage the more mathematical work of grammatical study and translation - so in addition to Latin, I am now having a lot of fun (re)teaching myself modern French[1], and trying not to get distracted by Anglo-Norman spelling patterns.

But we were reading through Sir Launfal today (using this online edition) and one thing struck me particularly.

For background: Guenevere, in this poem, is the traditional Evil Predatory Scheming Evil Seductive Evil Emasculating Threatening-Homosocial-Bonds Evil Female. She has already managed to get Launfal sent away from Camelot in shame (severing him from his masculinity, or at least the ideal proof of it, as Evil Predatory Scheming Females are wont to do). Now he has returned in glory, she tries another trick in the traditional repertoire of the Evil Predatory Scheming Female. She tries to seduce him - and when he (being a noble and virtuous knight, and also in love with someone else) refuses her, she goes to Arthur and cries rape[2]. However, before stalking off in a huff, she resorts to insult:

Sche seyde, "Fy on the, thou coward!
Anhongeth worth thou hye and hard! [Thou art worthy to be hanged high and hard]
That thou ever were ybore!
That thou lyvest, hyt ys pyté! [Probably, both 'that thou's should be read as dependent on 'it is pity'.]
Thou lovyst no woman, ne no woman the -
Thou were worthy forlore [to be lost/damned]!" (485-490)

Obviously, if one cannot lust after the beautiful Guenevere, one cannot lust after any woman, or so her logic seems to run. Certainly, given the consequent beauty contest, physical attractiveness (presumably as a metaphor for other noble/virtuous qualities) is at issue here. Launfal's reply confirms this:

The knyght was sore aschamed tho;
To speke ne myghte he forgo
And seyde the Quene before,
"I have loved a fayryr woman
Than thou ever leydest thyn ey upon
Thys seven yer and more! (491-496)

What concerns me here is the terms of her accusation. Firstly, she calls him a coward - a sore insult for a knight, but her phrasing suggests it's merely a throw-away line, subsidiary to and dependent on what follows. The primary accusation - which she holds as strong enough to damn him - is that he loves no woman, and no woman loves him.

The editors of this edition read this, without a 'maybe', as a barely-veiled accusation of sodomy. The equivalent tale by Marie de France has, at this point, a much more open accusation: Launfal prefers boys to women. Yes, dramatic, shocking, scandalous, and most delectably convenient to modern sensibilities. But..?

That's not what she says. I don't deny that the accusation of homosexuality[3] is present, or the threat of theological damnation for the act (or preference) of sodomy. But I feel that her primary concern is with exactly what she says: Launfal is apparently opting out of the intricate social game of courtly love. Whether that be in the interest of celibacy or chasing pretty boys is beside the question. Guenevere is out to emasculate Launfal; and, in this poet's view, stepping out of that ultimate knightly game of courtship and stylised self-elevating self-degradation, the theoretically bloodless game with its rules as intricate as those of any tournament sport, is as damning in social terms as sodomy itself may be in theological ones. This accusation is, and should be, enough. If Launfal cannot prove his manhood in courtly love - not because he fails in it, but because he chooses to avoid it - then there is no man to be proven. The potency of the venom lies in the central accusation, which is exactly what she says: "Thou lovyst no woman, ne no woman the".

The occasional (or habitual) act of sodomy may be a corollary to this, but I think it is imposing modern sensibilities too far to say that this is the heart of Guenevere's accusation. Rather, she is accusing him of opting out of the primary activity[4] of the homosocial network that proves his knighthood (or masculinity, if you prefer), thereby revealing himself to be less than a man[5].

And Launfal, tellingly, responds to the accusation in kind. He protests not that "I love a woman, she is definitely female, so there", but "I love a woman more beautiful than you have seen in seven years" (or possibly "I have loved a woman for seven years who is more beautiful than any you have ever seen"). Like Guenevere, he ties the issue back to feminine beauty - which is, of course, one of the most potent points-scorers in the Courtly Love game (along with Difficulty Of Attaining Maiden, Brutishness Of Beast Threatening/Wooing Her, Length Of Years Spent Wandering In The Wilderness / Locked In A Dungeon Before Attaining Her and Mystical Virtue-Affirming Objects Attained In The Process). Is there any solemn tale of courtly love in which the beauty of the objet desire (object in every possible sense, of course) is not extolled above all others[6]? Launfal replies in the terms of the game, asserting that not only does he participate, but he excels - as, of course, the subsequent contest will prove. Women are scorepoints, the higher the better; and the player who doesn't bother moving his little character across the screen to chase the points won't end up on the high score table.

I've nothing against reading gay theory into literature, of course. It's certainly necessary, and we've an awful lot of re-writing to do over centuries of phobia and repression. But it does concern me that it becomes a fad and an obsession - that we see OMG GAY SEX and focus on that to the exclusion of what might actually have been meant. It's as if, at work, I were to see two women or two men walk in hand in hand, and be too busy jumping over the counter to say I AFFIRM YOUR RIGHT TO HAVE SEX WITH EACH OTHER, GO TO IT, HOORAY FOR NON-HETEROSEXUAL CHOICES to hear them say, "Um, hey, actually, I just wanted a latte".


[1] My modern French is weird and erratic. I can read an academic article with no trouble, needing little more concentration than I do to read Italian - but then, the thought pattern for reading that form of writing is familiar, and the English vocabulary for formal writing is largely French/Latin-derived anyway. I'm lost in a French chat forum, where you'd expect the language to be simpler. And I can read a letter to a neighbour in Anglo-Norman, eye an unfamiliar verb with an odd collection of vowels and say "that looks like an early form of the French equivalent of this verb, and that is either the subjunctive or the imperfect, third person plural", which makes it very easy to locate the right form in a verb table to cross-check. But ask me to form the subjunctive or imperfect of any given verb in any form of French and I'd be stumped. It's all intuitive leaps and no recitable verb tables. And of course, my accent is terrible and my ear is quite untrained in following a modern French speaker at normal conversational pace.

So: I have the vocabulary, and the instinct, and just need to cement my grammar and build my aural skills. Easily done - that is, after all, what online resources are for!


[2] Actually, what she says is 'he propositioned me, and ALSO HE INSULTED MY BEAUTY, HE MUST DIE'.

[3] Or homosexual preferences, or homosexual acts. Caveat lector, homosexuality being an anachronistic concept, etc, though I'd dispute the absolute generalisation that sexuality was completely defined by the act in the middle ages and that there was no concept of sexual preferences - witness this accusation, if nothing else. If one reads this passage as being primarily concerned with OMG GAY SEX, as the modern reader is conditioned to, Guenevere does appear to be referring to an established preference: a lifestyle choice, in modern terms. But I think that is only secondary to her main point.

[4] Well, yes, there's also fighting. But this is courtly romance we're talking about, and the hero is always good at fighting: it's the courtly-love half of the two primary strands of knighthood that causes the problems and requires most intricate and difficult proof.

[5] And earlier in this scene, she actually stepped between him and Gawain, thereby symbolically cutting him off from the epitome of English knighthood and manliness! The wiles of women know no end. He should just hand her a cleaver and be done with it. And then go and exchange sob stories with Erec and Yvain about losing his precious Gawain because of a woman.

[6] The Grail legends may, at this point in the argument, be read as a tale of courtly love, if you so desire, or the courtly love paradigm read as a metaphor for the Grail hunt. Either works. The Grail is shiny and pretty.

Musings on the Canterbury Tales and double-narration

The problem with the Canterbury Tales is that it’s impossible to know, in any given tale or exchange, to what extent Chaucer is being serious and to what extent he’s subverting what he appears to be serious about. Is The Knight’s Tale a straightforward solemn tale of chivalric values and nobility, or is it a complete parody of those tales, the characters it portrays and the society that spawned them? Are we meant to take the Prioress’ virulent anti-Semitism completely seriously, or believe that Chaucer was poking fun of the prejudices of his own society and actually thought Jews were rather nice? I think most critics today would agree that the answer falls somewhere between these two extremes, which would render any attempt to come up with a solid, consistent interpretation rather futile. The difficulty is not just that each tale carries multiple meanings but that those meanings often seem to be mutually exclusive, as if there were two voices constructing the tale, competing for dominance, each contradicting the other in what they want the audience to believe.

Well, but there are, aren’t there? The Miller tells the story to the pilgrims, but who tells it to us?

The Miller’s Tale is indisputably a fabliau, however you choose to define that genre. It contains sex romps, lascivious descriptions of the female body, explicit language, fools being duped, savoir conquering avoir, subversion of the regular social order, and of course farting. As such, it’s exactly the sort of tale the drunken Miller would tell, particularly in the context of “quiting” the Knight’s tale of chivalry and nobility. The trouble is, the tale we actually have is beyond the capabilities of that man "that for dronken was al pale, / So that unnethe [hardly] upon his hors he sat" (I A 3120-21). On the most literal level, he’s far too drunk to consistently rhyme a long poem to that standard. If you protest that ‘twere to consider too curiously to consider thus, do we believe the Miller has the vocabulary to discuss in such detail the workings of alchemy? or the university learning to give us Nicholas’ speeches and quote Solomon? Most seriously, the subtle little moments that warn of distant judgement and remind us of morality and sin could never have come from the Miller, to undermine the characters whose antics he seems to relish so.

And thus lith [lie] Alison and Nicholas
In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas,
Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge,
And freres [friars] in the chauncel gonne [began to] synge. (I A 3653-56)

The passing of time during their bedroom frolics could be described or marked in any number of ways, but this and the continual glancing references to the social presence of religion (Absolom first sees Alisoun at mass, etc) shape a subtle commentary to the decidedly profane actions in counterpoint to them, well beyond the abilities - or interest - of the Miller.

So, let us hypothesise the presence of another author/narrator here, and let us call him... Geoffrey?

The Canterbury Tales is presented as a recounting of pilgrim-Chaucer's journey and the tales the pilgrims tell to each other. But are we meant to be experiencing it as pilgrim-Chaucer does - hearing the words of the others just as he does - or are we supposed to be reading his later retelling of it, reshaped through the poet's pen into the form of verse? One narrator, laid over the other, doubling and reshaping what the first has given us? I'm probably considering too curiously again, but distinguishing between the Miller and pilgrim-Chaucer would imply a division, and possibly contention, between type/content and form/detail of the poem. This double-narrator effect would account for the internal contradictions, and the impression the tale gives of mocking itself.

The same theory could then be extended to The Reeve's Tale, in which the malicious delight of the narrator in tearing down the miller and seeing his wife and daughter raped/seduced is underminded by quiet details of the characterisation of the students, the women, and the narrator himself. The solemn, high tone of the Knight in telling his tale is undercut by the bickering of Palamoun and Arcites, by the initial uncertainty of the narrator, by Theseus' possibly self-serving attitude to ruling, and the Prioress' self-righteous hysteria by the tiresome depiction of little Hugh and the extravagance of the Jews' eviler-than-Dr-Evil evilness.

The same quietly sardonic voice undercuts the apparent tone of all those tales, and it's tempting to ascribe it to Chaucer. It's tempting to use the double-narrator idea to read, dissect, pin down, all the tales and the intermediary scenes. But it doesn't really hold up as a consistent theory.

Firstly, which Chaucer are we talking about - Chaucer-the-pilgrim or Chaucer-the-poet (and is there really any point distinguishing between them)? If the first, can we believe that the wide-eyed, eager pilgrim of the Prologue and the bombastic poet of Sir Thopas could slyly undermine the stories he retells in this way? If the second - well, we knew Chaucer was the poet anyway, so ascribing the retelling to him demolishes the whole point of the double-narrator theory altogether.

Secondly, the same sardonic voice is present in every other poem of Chaucer's that I've read, despite the lack of narrator-layering. In fact, Chaucer's ability to simultaneously construct and demolish is (to my mind) one of the most characteristic things about him.

Thirdly, the theory itself is mostly an extension of an assumption which rests on taking the characters entirely too literally, as real people rather than poetic creations in themselves.

But surely we're supposed to believe in these characters? If not, where's the story? And if so, surely by the same token we are meant to take the Knight seriously, and feel the same lasciviousness regarding Alisoun as the Miller does in describing her, and want to see and enjoy the Friar's Summoner getting his come-uppance, as all summoners we know deserve. We have to be involved on an emotional level with the ostensible intent of the story, not only because it makes the subtle questioning more effective and potent if we feel ourselves morally implicated as well as the characters, but because it simply makes a better story that way.



Quotes from the Canterbury Tales taken, of course, from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Being Taken In

“Do you think I care if Aslan dooms me to death?” said the King. “That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.”
“I know,” said Jewel. “Or as if you drank water and it were dry water. You are in the right, Sire. This is the end of all things. Let us go and give ourselves up.”
“There is no need for both of us to go.”
“If ever we loved one another, let me go with you now,” said the Unicorn. If you are dead and if Aslan is not Aslan, what life is left for me?”
They turned and walked back together, shedding bitter tears. (C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, 1956. London: Bodley Head, 1972. 31)

The Last Battle is not popular. People who enjoy Lewis’ other Narnia books, who find they can excuse all that Christianity nonsense in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or ignore it in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, tend to find themselves stumped by The Last Battle. Lewis is accused of being heavy-handed, offensive, dreary, of having an axe to grind, of sacrificing plot to religious allegory that is too ponderous to be affecting and too overt, dark or naïve for a childrens’ book.

Well, perhaps. But then why does it still invariably reduce me to tears?

Partly it’s the quality of the prose, pure Lewis. Simple, direct vocabulary, but with a beautifully resonant rhythm that pulls you right in:

The Bear lay on the ground, moving feebly. Then it mumbled in its throaty voice, bewildered to the last, “I – I don’t – understand,” laid its big head down on the grass as quietly as a child going to sleep, and never moved again. (122)

And partly it’s that combined with his ability to state a common experience, simultaneously evoking it in such a way that the moment becomes my defining literary experience or memory of that feeling:

Then Tirian realised that these people could see him; they were staring at him as if they saw a ghost. But he noticed that the king-like one who sat at the old man’s right never moved (though he turned pale) except that he clenched his hand very tight. Then he said:
“Speak, if you’re not a phantom or a dream. You have a Narnian look about you and we are the seven friends of Narnia.”
Tirian was longing to speak, and he tried to cry out aloud that he was Tirian of Narnia, in great need of help. But he found (as I have sometimes found in dreams too) that his voice made no noise at all.
The one who had already spoken to him rose to his feet. “Shadow or spirit or whatever you are,” he said, fixing his eyes full upon Tirian. “If you are from Narnia, I charge you in the name of Aslan, speak to me. I am Peter the High King.” (49-50)

But to a large extent it’s that I love the book, and have done since childhood, and that, of course, affects and informs my experience of reading it now. That love can be rationalised and explained in many ways – the two examples above for a start – but is also in itself also a factor in how I respond to the book. I remember when we were quite young we had a series of audio tapes of several of the Narnia books – not dramatised, just read aloud, with incidental music at appropriate moments. And the score for The Last Battle was so moving, so noble and sad (two of Lewis’ favourite adjectives, of course), that I was always sobbing through the final battle in the stable door. You wouldn’t stop to question the xenophobia, the absolutism, the religious agenda, to mock the pretensions of Peter and Tirian and Jewel, because you didn’t want to. You wanted to believe the story.

"But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reason of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash that his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, child?” (166)

Reading the story now, I want it to remain the Narnia I remember and love; and so it does. The elements that made me love it are still there. I have changed, not the book, but I can choose to see it primarily with the eyes of a child, and not any of my sets of adult eyes: the ones I closed and turned away from the priest in Saint Francis Xavier Cathedral when I stood in the choir loft, wondering why the rest of the congregation couldn’t see certain of his words for the propaganda and mass manipulation they were; or the ones with which I would read Chaucer, detached from its emotional context, only to analyse; or the ones with which I would read a Harry Potter book, impatient with Rowling’s inability to notice her own moral grey areas (a group of kids being obnoxious at school does not mean they will all be irrevocably evil and should therefore be ostracised by all right-thinking people for the rest of their lives).

So I can see the shortcomings in Lewis’ writing, and the potential offensiveness of his preaching, but when I read it I choose not to see it. I choose to immerse myself in it and take it at face value, just as I believe in trawþe for Gawain’s sake when I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Not being a Christian, I take ‘Aslan’ purely on his Narnian terms, isolating Lewis’ version of right and wrong from the real world. But others prefer to take a more active approach in their reading.

Most famously, Neil Gaiman wrote a short story in 2004 criticising Lewis’ treatment of Susan, excluded from Aslan’s country for her love of “nylons and lipsticks” (Last Battle 138), left behind in England to mourn all three siblings and her parents. And I’m currently following the writing of a fanfic author, bedlamsbard, who regards The Last Battle as we have it as effectively an Apocalypse myth (and refuses to admit The Magician’s Nephew as canon at all). Her Dust in the Air picks up the story five years after Jill and Eustace are sent to Narnia, with Narnia in Calormene control and resistance reduced to fitful guerilla warfare in the outlying forests. Tirian is perhaps as much a fugitive from the angry Narnians as from the Calormenes, Cair Paravel and the surrounding city are a New Orleans-style melting pot of different cultures, languages and styles, every race and culture and family has its own motivations and opinions which necessitates a good deal more political negotiation than just waving a sword and crying “For Aslan!”, and the Pevensies (all four of them) are rather surprised to be summoned back to Narnia by a dark magic ritual (involving Susan’s horn and the life’s blood of a willing Centaur) performed by a group of religious fanatics who are convinced the kings and queens of old are demigods.

So for this author, reading Lewis provokes the desire both to explore the world farther, and to amend it. Reading Dust, and her simultaneous reflections on writing it, is an exercise in reconsidering points of Lewis’ writing that could have been handled differently if he had chosen to engage with his own world on a deeper, more realistic level, rather than light fantasy and heroism. For example, living back and forth across two worlds, ageing and returning to childhood, has tipped Bedlam’s Pevensies much closer to the edge of sanity than Lewis’ idealised English children. If the world held no interest for her, provoked no love, there would be no motivation to engage with it on that deeper level; but if it were perfect, if she were happy to be entirely that audience Lewis portrays and no more, to take him entirely at face value and let his views shape hers – to be, effectively, constructed by him – she would have no reason to write her own version.

So she constructs him instead - more directly than any critic. She makes her own Narnia, her own Last Battle, writing her own reading of the text.

But she found, a few days ago, that some anonymous reader has been through the fiction she’s posted on her journal over the last two years, and written a series of comments on how she’s ‘got Lewis wrong’.

So this begs the question of which party in the experience of reading ought to be prioritised: the author, or the reader?

It’s not a novel question at all (pun intended after the fact): it’s one that most literary critics have had to grapple with at some point in the process of defining their critical approach in general. For example:

It does not follow for Hirsch [in Validity and Interpretation (1967)] that because the meaning of a work is identical with what the author meant by it at the time of writing, only one interpretation of the text is possible. There may be a number of different valid interpretations, but all of them must move within the ‘system of typical expectations and probabilities’ which the author’s meaning permits. Nor does Hirsch deny that a literary work may ‘mean’ different things to different people at different times. But this, he claims, is more properly a matter of the work’s ‘significance’ rather than its ‘meaning’. The fact that I may produce Macbeth in a way which makes it relevant to nuclear warfare does not alter the fact that this is not what Macbeth, from Shakespeare’s point of view, means. Significances vary through history, whereas meanings remain constant; authors put in meanings, whereas readers assign significances.

This is all well and good, so long as all we want to do with a text is seek the author’s purpose. But it a) presupposes that the author had one (only one?) finite purpose and b) that it can be discovered, which, by its own argument, it can’t: anything I discover about the text is a significance, even if I discover it while in pursuit of meaning. If meanings remain constant, they resist historical change, and sorry, but history has changed. I am not living in Lewis’ world, or Chaucer’s, and more than that, I am not living in their minds. Seeking to construct the author’s thoughts is a futile exercise because, as Hirsch admits, we will never be in a position to know what those thoughts were, even if we do hit on the right meaning. ‘Meaning’ therefore becomes everything general or unarguable that we can deduce about a text, without allowing us to probe further. Or rather, we can – but anything we come up with is automatically subordinated by being assigned the label ‘significance’. Essentially, reader is completely subordinate to author. Or to what we perceive the author to be. It’s a circular argument, and the only way you can get anywhere within it is to decide what is, overall, most likely to be the author’s intention – or submit to the opinion of some great authority on the subject – then make everything else fit that. Which leads eventually to something like this:

“And now there’s another thing you got to learn,” said the Ape. “I hear some of you saying I’m an Ape. Well, I’m not. I’m a Man. If I look like an Ape, that’s because I’m so very old: hundreds and hundreds of years old. And it’s because I’m so old that I’m so wise. And it’s because I’m so wise that I’m the only one Aslan is ever going to speak to. He can’t be bothered talking to a lot of stupid animals. He’ll tell me what you’ve got to do, and I’ll tell the rest of you. And take my advice, and see you do it in double quick time, for He doesn’t mean to stand any nonsense.”
There was dead silence except for the noise of a very young badger crying and its mother trying to make it keep quiet. (35)

And of course, I’d rather have the freedom to do many more things with a text than simply seek the author’s purpose. That has its place, of course, but too much of it and not only do you cease to think for yourself, you cease to enjoy: in fact, you lose the text.

So do we have a third party in this equation – author, reader and the text itself? On either end there is an absolute (more or less) – the author’s intention and the reader’s reception – and in the centre there is the nebulous thing itself. I rather like the analogy of text as performance: actor, audience and that space between them that comes to life. The actor has something he[1] wants to convey, the performance is rarely exactly what he had in his head, and what the audience sees is going to be different again. I went to see The Merchant of Venice some years ago, and there is a terrible moment in the judgement scene when the tables have turned completely on the once-triumphant Shylock, and Antonio asks the Duke to be lenient and spare his life. Just one thing more: “that for this favour, he presently become a Christian”. And that is a line that makes me cringe; but many people in the audience laughed. There was a question and answer session with the cast after the play, and I asked the Antonio what he thought of that moment – did he believe Antonio was trying to be merciful, save Shylock’s soul despite him by forcing his conversion? And he said no – his Antonio was being purely malicious, purely vengeful. So what I saw in that actor’s portrayal of Antonio (which was a moment of horribly wrong-headed nobility) differed from what the actor saw, and from what the rest of the audience saw (which somehow found a way for that to be funny).

So we have at least three interpretations in the theatre – but of course, they were none of the disinterested. The members of the audience who laughed were predisposed to respond with laughter because the rest of the play was acted as a light comedy, even if they appreciated the darkness of that moment. I know the play well and love it, knew that line was coming up, and expected to find it appalling because I always do: and therefore, I did. And the actor has just been up on stage wholely immersed in portraying a man who is about to have his heart cut out and now has a chance to get his own back – it’s hardly surprising that he sees it as Antonio’s revenge and thinks it’s fully justified. And between them all, playing a game of cause and effect with each point of view but being wholly defined by none of them, is that thing called the performance. And I also, in different times and contexts, will respond to that line differently – in the theatre with the gut-wrenching emotional response, in narrating it to a friend with irony and amusement, in writing critically with detached evaluation.

So, thanks but no thanks to that anonymous commenter – there is no right way. My way of reading is not your way and not Lewis’ way and, most of all, I reserve the right to change my way. I want to feel free to say, on some days, “So what on earth do all those leopards and tigers in the Narnian army eat? I hope they’re vegetarians, or some of the herbivores are going to be finding those living conditions in Aslan’s How very cramped. And also, Lewis, I reserve the right to decide that people are not evil just because they spread oil on their bread instead of wholesome English butter”. But on other days I will read The Last Battle, or Pride and Prejudice, or the Odyssey, with whole-hearted emotional immersion, believing in it and living in it. If the text is good, I want to have faith in it, even if I don’t agree with it. It deserves that. And it's as much a challenge as the other, really, because to believe in cultures and ideals that aren't yours is hard work.

I shall let Lewis have the last word, on the condition that he and I agree to disagree to a certain extent, on the subject of How the Dwarfs Refused to be Taken Into the Text.

“Look out!” said one of [the dwarfs] in a surly voice. “Mind where you’re going! Don’t walk into our faces!”
“All right!” said Eustace indignantly. “We’re not blind. We’ve got eyes in our heads.”
“They must be darn good ones if you can see in here,” said the same Dwarf whose name was Diggle.
“In where?” asked Edmund.
“Why you bone-head, in here of course,” said Diggle. “In this pitch-black, poky, smelly little hole of a stable.”
“Are you blind?” said Tirian.
“Ain’t we all blind in the dark!” said Diggle.
“But it isn’t dark at all, you poor stupid Dwarfs,” said Lucy. “Can’t you see? Look up! Look round! Can’t you see the sky and the trees and the flowers? Can’t you see me?”
“How in the name of all Humbug can I see what ain’t there?”
...
“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.” (146-150)

[1] Yes, I know, but I’m using the male pronoun for a reason – or rather, using the fact that I’m about to talk about an example involving male actors as an excuse to avoid that ugly s/he business.