From Narnia to Malacandra

Having finished reading Narnia and started onto the Space Trilogy, I find it very interesting how much more real Lewis’s science fiction world seems to me than the stories of Narnia. Somehow I find it far more easy to believe that there might be a fantastical world where angels dwell on Mars than there’s an equally fantastical world that might be accessed from various closets, caves, and paintings where animals can speak. Partially, I think this is because Out of the Silent Planet is narrated in such a manner that it’s trying to relay incredulous facts in the form of fiction to an understandably skeptic viewer, while Narnia has the feel of a story about it. And while that is not to cast doubt upon the truth that stories carry, it must be admitted that stories are true in different ways than what might be commonly regarded as facts are true. Although some of you may disagree with me on that.

Come to think of it, I cannot help but wonder if the way the events of Ransom’s journey to Malacandra is relayed to us mirrors our own discussions in class about the nature of truth and whether or not it can be found in myths. It is a very mythological story, to be sure. C.S. Lewis certainly believes that there is a type of truth that can only be told through stories, and he has the narrator of the story say nearly as much at the end of the book: “It was Dr. Ransom who first saw that our only chance was to publish in the for of fiction what would certainly not be listened to as fact.”

Both Narnia and Out of the Silent Planet are filled with wonders of exploration, and doubtlessly I enjoyed the wonders of Malacandra as much as I did in Narnia - though perhaps not as much as the ocean at the end of the world from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I found myself frustrated with Lewis’s descriptions of Malacandra, mainly because he tried to instill them with so much wonder that he went on to write, in the form of Ransom speaking authoritatively about the events the story portrays about his life, that all those descriptions used in the story aren’t apt at all and don’t touch upon the experience at all. I felt like that cheapened my prior engagement with his world, because he said all the descriptions of that world were, while not meaningless, mostly incomprehensible to us earthly readers.

Something that I noticed when idly flipping through the book is that there seems to be direct references to Satan in the later books (I was reading out of a compendium). While the religious subtext in Out of the Silent Planet becomes less subtle as it continues, it wasn't explicitly Christian. I wonder what's caused the change in the later books? Regardless, it is another marked difference between Narnia and The Space Trilogy if the later books have Ransom engaging in an explicitly Christian cosmic struggle.

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