What Order Should I Read the Narnia Books in
(And Does It Matter?)
The internecine strife between Lewis aficionados about the order of the
Narnia books shows no signs of abating. In principle, both devout Chronologists
and sincere Publicationists both allow that people should read the books in
whatever order they chose. Yet both groups, in their hearts, believe that their
order is best. Fisticuffs can easily develop, and the first excommunications
and crusades cannot be far away. In an attempt to resolve this very serious
issue, I offer my own, definitive, take on the problem.
C.S Lewis's famous series of
children's stories were published between 1950 and 1956, in the following
order:
1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
2. Prince Caspian(1951)
3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
4. The Silver Chair (1953)
5. The Horse and His Boy (1954)
6. The Magicians Nephew(1955)
7. The Last Battle (1956)
All current editions of the books, however, number them in a slightly
different order:
1. The Magicians Nephew
2. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
3. The Horse and His Boy
4. Prince Caspian
5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
6. The Silver Chair
7. The Last Battle
This order reflects the chronological sequence of events in the books
themselves.
Lewis expressed a mild preference for this second, chronological order. In a
letter written in 1957 to an American boy named Laurence, he wrote the
following:
'I think I agree with your order {i.e. chronological} for reading
the books more than with your mother's. The series was not planned beforehand
as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any
more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be
any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the
last. But I found as I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in
which order anyone read them. I'm not even sure that all the others were
written in the same order in which they were published.
Quoted in "Letters to Children"
On this last point, scholars who have written about Narnia agree: the books
were not published in the order that they were written. The writing order
appears to have been
1: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
2: (Abandoned version of Magicians Nephew)
3: Prince Caspian
4: Voyage of the Dawn Treader
5: Horse and His Boy
6: Silver Chair
7: Magicians Nephew
8: Last Battle
The case for reading the books in chronological order is the self-evident
one: it makes more sense, particularly for children, to read a series of
stories in the order in which they happened.
The case for reading the books in published order includes the following:
1: The Lion is presented very much as the first of a series. It concludes
with the words 'That is the very end of the adventure of the wardrobe. But if
the Professor was right, it was only the beginning of the adventures of
Narnia.' The 'second' book, Prince Caspian, is subtitled 'The Return to
Narnia.'
2: The narrator of The Lion says 'None of the children knew who Aslan was,
any more than you do.' But if 'you' are supposed to have read The Magician's
Nephew, then you do know who Aslan was.
3: The charm of the opening of The Lion is spoiled if you already know, from
Magician's Nephew, that the wardrobe is magical; that the Professor has been to
Narnia, and why there is a street lamp in Narnia. Similarly, the 'shock of
recognition' in Magician's Nephew is spoiled if you don't know the significance
of the wardrobe.
4: Why should The Horse and His Boy, which happens during the final chapter
of The Lion, be set after it? Could an equally valid case not be made for
saying that it should be set after The Silver Chair where it is presented as a
story-within-a-story?
Given that most people read and re-read the books many times, does this sort
of nit-picking matter? Almost certainly not. However, I believe that argument
is not, in fact an argument about which order to read the books in, but about
which order to think of the books in. The reason that the discussion
occasionally becomes heated is that the camps are not merely arguing for a
particular sequence, but for a particular interpretation.
Any book—any work of art—is to
some extent the product of an interaction between the text and the reader.
Remembrance of Things Past is only a lot of black marks on white paper until I
bring my imagination to bear on it. This is not to say, as some literary
theorists do, that any book can mean anything we want it to—Mein Kampf is a
love story, Wuthering Heights a recipe for cheese. In fact, the better the
book, the more successful the author, the more likely it is that the book which
we create in our heads—the pictures we make out of the black marks on white
paper—will be quite close to what the original writer intended.
However, the circumstances around a book—the form in which it is
distributed, the things which are said about it—effect the way in which we read
it: effect the types of mental pictures and impression we feel permitted to
form. We read Hamlet subtly differently when we find it as part of a longer
book called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare than we would if it were
part of a browns-spined scholarly 'Early English Text Society' series, complete
with footnotes and obsolete spelling. A rather good romantic lyric about
Marilyn Monroe is changed forever when the author chooses to stick doggerel
words to it and belt it out in Westminster Abbey: the original song simply no
longer exists. We look at a piece of Victorian furniture differently if it
placed in a Museum from the way you would if it was sitting in some rich fool's
house.
This is, of course, part of the point of the modernists who put bricks into
art galleries. 'What would happen if you were to look at a brick, or a toilet,
or a picture of Marilyn Monroe as if it was a piece of art?' And that's a very
good question, even if it doesn't always yield very good answers.
Now, we may look at the Venus De Milo differently in the Louvre than we
would if it was, say, in a church, or in a restaurant. But it is still pretty
much a fixed object with a fixed shape. You can't change the thing itself. But
books are more complicated. You can—you expect people to—change the cover, the
typeface or the binding from time to time. We don't blame editors for updating
spellings in very old books. We certainly expect them to take hand-written MSS
and correct spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, minor inconsistencies—to
turn The Thing The Author Wrote into A Book.
When we sit down to read a book, somewhere, in our minds, we have an idea of
'what kind of a book this is', and that affects our reading of it. Our answer
is partly conditioned by the decisions that editor has made.
Let us imagine two innocent readers, sitting down to approach 'Narnia' for
the first time.
One takes down from the shelf a big, leather bound edition, with illuminated
capitals and line numbers. The big red book is entitled The Chronicles of
Narnia. There is a contents page listing 'Vol. 1: The Magicians Nephew, Vol.: 2
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' and so on. On hardback pages, the book
would be shorter than Lord of the Rings or David Copperfield. Our reader would
be quite clear that what he was embarking on was one long story, telling the
story of an imaginary world from beginning to end.
Another virgin reader goes to a second hand bookshop and picks up a cheap
paperback edition of Prince Caspian. There is an appalling, lurid fantasy
picture on the cover, by someone who has obviously never read the book. The
opening pages imply that it is a sequel of some kind, but he happily finds that
it is quite self-contained. He goes back to the bookshop, and finds another
book, a hardback, in a non-uniform edition. This is The Silver Chair. He comes
away with the impression that Lewis wrote a number (he does not know how many,
maybe thousands) of fairy stories, all nominally in a linked world and with a
recurrent motif (Aslan) but otherwise, not very closely related. He gradually,
and out of order, reads the whole lot—although he himself does not know that he
is finished because he does not know what Lewis wrote.
It seems to me that these two people have had different reading experiences.
They will be inclined to interpret the books in different ways.
Now, to my mind, every attempt to say 'you should read the books in this
order, you should read them in that order' is an attempt to hierarchise the
types of reading-experience, and thus to encourage a particular interpretation.
If you start out peering through the wardrobe into the snow, and are led
across Narnia by the wonderfully anachronistic Mr Tumnus; if you first learn of
Aslan from Mr and Mrs Beaver over high-tea and a warm fire, then you are likely
to think of Narnia as 'that place that started out as a slightly whimsical
fairy tale and gathered more and more religious significance as it went on'. If
you first learn of Narnia during its creation, and first see Aslan when he is
singing the world into being, you are more likely to think of it as a primarily
theological, mythological narrative.
The very project of calling it The Chronicles of Narnia is bringing
something outside of the text to bear on our readings. 'Read this,' it seems to
say 'as the history of an imaginary world, not as a collection of fairy tales
with a linked background.'
I do not say that the version of Narnia implied by The Chronicles and the
sequential numbering is wrong: I say only that it is not neutral; it
presupposes a theory about what Narnia is.
My own opinion? One of the things that Narnia 'is' is Lewis's own internal
never-never land. He sends child-versions of himself into a landscape (not
really a 'world' in Tolkein's sense) which is full of every image, every theme,
every thing, he ever loved as a child: dressed animals and mythology and
knights in armour and sea voyages and 'joy' and the hatred of school and a
slight undercurrent of cruelty and hovering at the edges, working his way in,
and finally becoming the central, unifying motif, Jesus Christ. To read it as
strict allegory loses that. To read it as imaginary history, looses that. I
think that what the 'Publicationists' are saying is that you should allow
yourself to read the books in that way—that is part of their charm. I think
that what the 'Chronologists' are saying is that you should it as history and
allegory—that is part of their charm.
And they are both right. The 'publicationist' tends to make the books more
arbitrary, more contradictory, less 'sub-creationist' than they actually are.
The 'chronologist' makes them more unified, more consistent, and more strictly
allegorical than they really are.
Indeed, there is a similar problem with applying the word 'allegory' to
Narnia in the first place. Saying 'Aslan is Jesus' misses the point of the
books: Aslan works precisely because he is not Jesus—because there are no
stained glass windows and teachers and stupid hymns telling us we ought to love
him. Saying 'Aslan is not Jesus, its just a story, just a fantasy, just
entertainment' (as one contributer to the C.S Lewis usenet group did) misses
the point in just the opposite way. Aslan both is and is not Jesus; the books
both do an do not have order.
Books—all books—are complicated things, muttering at us in different contradictory voices, refusing to stay the same when we go back to them. Tying them down too much robs of them of the magic.