Ceci n'est pas surtout de moi, mais de ce que j'essaie d'être pour mes lecteurs.
Je viens de recevoir un livre sur des poëtes comme Rimbaud et Baudelaire. Désolé, ça n'est pas du tout mon programme sur ces blogs. Qui veut ça devrait essayer tout un autre écrivain, pas moi. Par exemple Rimbaud et Baudelaire.
Quand à Verlaine, je lui dois le fait qu'il a inventé la strophe de Verlaine. Je connais ce fait à travers Alf Henrikson - un passable essayiste suédois, comme type d'écrivain définitivement plus mon style, si seulement il avait été Catholique. J'ai peur que s'il avait vécu en France il aurait écrit (quand c'était comme parfois pour des journaux) pour Le Monde ou Libération. Comme on peut deviner, mon style est plutôt PRÉSENT.
Autre Suédois, Frans Gunnar Bengtsson, un bon essayiste (je n'ai pas lu sa poësie encore), qui avait par contre le défaut de préférer Schopenhauer et Gobineau à St Thomas d'Aquin (il était aussi agnostique, le pauvre païen!).
Mais est-ce qu'un Catholique peut remplir un tel rôle? Regardez donc Hilaire Belloc et Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Mes modèles. Avec C. S. Lewis (lien à un compte-rendu de son argument contre le naturalisme).
Donc, ce que vous avez à attendre de la lecture de ces blogs. Si je réussis. Regardez par exemple (en anglais) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Homer (again) ou (en anglais aussi) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere [avec co-débatteurs, donc] : ... to Unbalanced Anti-YEC priest (?) and his defenders ou (en français maintenant) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Jean-Pierre Maury sur l'affaire Galilée ou gm b1 lou : Il n'a plutôt pas dit: "puisse le ciel agréer au moins l'humble obéissance du soldat!".
Pour l'autobiographique (si quelqu'un insiste), il y a La première cinquième du pélérinage (avec liens aux autres quatres cinquièmes, dont partie est déjà racontée, partie encore à raconter). Ou mes haïku. Pour les romans, qui ne sont pas autobiographiques, hélas ce n'est pas une œuvre qui soit déjà complète. Mais entretemps, essayez mes essais!
Hans-Georg Lundahl
BU de Nanterre / Paris X
St Jean de Capistran
23-X-2013
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est poetarum cognitio. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est poetarum cognitio. Afficher tous les articles
mercredi 23 octobre 2013
mardi 26 juin 2012
Three Generations of Fantasy
One may say with some confidence that the writing of what in bookstores and libraries and book reviews is called fantasy falls broadly into 3 generations : XIXth C. aestheticism is first, then the generation that knew the Cross, but not always the Cross of Christ, third is the generation of playing around with fantasy conventions.
Obviously there are overlaps. I would place Mervin Peake into the first two excluding only the third, and I would place Lloyd Alexander in the latter two, excluding only the first.
Now more typical products of the third are things like Xanth and Incarnations of Immortality, by Pierce Anthony, Good Omen and Colour of Magic (or all of the Discworld series) by Pratchett and, more than anything else today, outpassing even Dark Materials (which is untypical and in fact an atheist reaction to the second generation, more particularly CSL), Harry Potter by Rowling.
I happen to be personally allergic to Harry Potter. I am therefore not qualified to make a sober criticism of it, and especially of its magic content. I am allergic to it for quite other reasons than spells, and that is the fact that it is a boarding school story. A story in which people who are supposed to be good scheme to give some « rotter » a lesson he needs, and in which bad people, supposedly worse than the good ones, scheme to give lessons to someone who is in fact not a rotter. Maybe because he is not a rotter. And of course the mistake, good guys thinking they are giving a lesson to a rotter and finding out he is not a rotter (I read one such story before I went to boarding school, I think it happens to Harry Potter too, but since I am allergic to boarding school stories, I am not quite sure, I have not checked out. I think C. S. Lewis, who suffered even more, at least directly, at boarding school than I, would have understood my aversion quite well. Whether he would have shared it or not. I am quite as allergic to the story I read before going to boarding school, or to the boarding school stories of Enid Blyton, much as I love her Famous Five series or X of Adventure (for X insert island, mountain, river, ship … et c. in title). Since that is the case, I will NOT offer my opinions on Harry Potter and magic in those. Literarily, it belongs to the third generation, insofar as magic in it is often used for purposes of farce, of buffoonery.
I will tell you of stories I did read and partly enjoy which include spells. Earthsea. By Ursula LeGuin. The stories take spells much more seriously, I think, than Harry Potter, but do not divulge them. I read those, or the first two – Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan, I thought the third one was too bleak in outlook to really enjoy it. I will add I read those before my baptism. I have not reread them after with same relish.
It is basically about « the cross » or rather burden of being a shaman. It is in a way lived -according to that book – similarily to carrying the cross of very holy and snatching souls back from the devil kind of priesthood. Ged is harrassed, all through the first book nearly, by a demon « as much as » St John Mary Vianney and Padre Pio were. That is not true. The Christian priests suffered in more security, in a way, but they suffered much much more and longer. But Ged was harrassed, and his solution is very much other than that of the Christian men, indeed it is shocking. He got rid of demonic harrassment by renaming the demon Ged, his own name.
The Holy Curate of Ars and Padre Pio never finally got rid of demonic harrassment, until they died, but always could get rid of it as soon as needed by invoking Christ.
That said, Earthsea is clearly second generation, but Harry Potter third generation, insofar as my division has any validity. Before going into first and further into second generation, let is take what little I still have to say on third generation : Pratchett I never read, Pierce Anthony I ceased reading at my Catholic conversion. There are in any of his novels passages best described as pornographic, though one would politely call them erotic now, whereas pornography is now reserved for a cruder style which did not exist back when « erotic novels » meant novels about being in love without going graphic or explicit.
Now unto first generation. William Morris wrote on House of the Wolfings in a way, and Lord Dunsany much more so on Gods of Pegana, both of which count as fantasy, for the same reason that Rider Haggard and E. Rice Burroughs wrote on exotic and quasi-Babylonic places left standing in novels like She or Jewels of Opar, or for the same reason that Oscar Wilde wrote The Ghost of Canterville or salomé or that Jules Verne wrote about at the time not yet possibly high tech submarines manned by a heavily misanthropic but somehow still very wellclad and wellkemped Captain Nemo or similar steampunk and exploration novels. Lovecraft also clearly plays around with aesthetics, horror and ugliness being part of its subject. Miskatonic University verging on Cthulhu is as much a work of twisted art (the authors would not have minded the word twisted), as a Castle in Transylvania is for Bram Stoker.
And this Bram Stoker, usually classed as « Gothic » rather than fantasy, brings us to the fact that the Cross of Christ was not quite unknown even in the XIXth C. Even after Darwin, Marx, Engels and Frazer changed the intellectual outlook of English Bourgeoisie on Christianity.
« Crux Christi sit mihi lux – Non draco sit mihi dux » is nearly the main theme of Dracula – a novel ending with the vampire receiving Communion, although it was post mortem and a few centuries late, and dissolving peacefully. Unfortunately – I will come back to it – it is not well executed. The other great non-Pagan was of course George MacDonald, a unitarian parson. Admired by G. K. Chesterton, by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and by C. S. Lewis.
If the novels of Gilbert Keith Chesterton are more alternative reality or even steampunk, except in reverse, as predicting a future with less steam engines and less big bureaucracies (a thing he fought to bring about in reality as an essay writer too), JRRT and CSL are clearly the second generation : the fantasy writers who knew the Cross. And, in their case, it is really the Cross of Christ that they knew. Accordingly, sorcerers, witches, anything dealing with spells are not looked kindly on in their novels.
Uncle Andrew is just possibly not as clearly damned, but that is because he was so failed as a magician. Anything that can be labelled necromancy is clearly and heavily damned and condemned in those works, as surely as contracts with the devil are so. Koriakin (Voyage of the Dawn Treader) is not a human, and he is doing penance. Merlin (That Hideous Strength) is risking his soul, and his life is theologically or at least canonically and pastorally speaking in ruins anyway. The solution is other than at the end of Shakespear's last play, where the mage – a human in the end – is saved by breaking his magic staff, but the spirit of it is the same : if there is public that finds reading about magic in stories exciting, let the magicians be anything except humans doing a good thing. Non-human, damned, risking damnation. And of course avoid all that can clearly be seen or used as instructions in magic.
Now, since magic is not the protagonist of either Narnia or Eriador, of either CSL or JRRT, what is ? Mortals and immortals, fighting evil on a cosmic as well as on a military scale. And whose moral failures tend to endanger the victory, and whose moral victories aid the victory of the good.
In a way though badly executed that is true of the novel about Dracula too. Every person who gets vampyrised by him endangers other persons further. Every person can also avoid being vampirised by staying in the state of grace. In that way, Bram Stoker furthers Catholic morality. But as he executes this badly, alas he does not : he makes Dracula so much more impressive than any protagonist, including van Helsing as he appears in the novel, that the reader risks getting vampirised morally.
Christ is the hero, but he is not shining forth, for most of the novel, he is so absent as a person : He appears on the Crucifix, He appears in the Host, but he is not quite morally present as our Loving Saviour. In a way that is a point : evil often looks more impressive and looms larger in our lives than God. And still there is another reason, which is known to those who wrote the novel : He is indeed the loving Saviour of Count Dracula.
After all, which is moral enough, Dracula wins nearly every battle, but looses the war. Though van Helsing is a bitter and twisted personality – he calls on Harker to kill Lucy Westenra, his former fiancée as vampire, and he uses hypnosis on Mina – and though his allies are weak, he defeats evil, or the evil of Dracula. Because, in an obvious sense, his light is the Cross and his leader is not the dragon : meaning he is a Christian believer and that he is not a Satanist. However, the means are not pure. In that sense he does not live up to the motto.
But still, Dracula is too glorious for the reader. And the eroticism of some scenes of vampirisation are no good to people who quite as much as Mina would have needed it, in their real lives need to stay clean of mortal sin.
Now, George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien do not make that mistake.
Sauron is impressive in his power, but stupid. The point is that evil is stupid. He lacks the imagination to see anyone « in the know » as not coveting what he covets. Saruman is impressive to a much lesser extent. His sophistication is shown for what it really is : vain stupidity in the case of his loathsome bragging about his goals as « knowledge, control, power … for good » and his kindness fares no better : « in Orthanc » – Orthanc is his castle – « friendship means slavery and help means ruin. » Those are the words in which a mere mortal reproaches the morals of that fallen angelic being.
That summing up is also fair about much of modern administration and business – and education. I did mention boarding schools and « giving lessons » to « rotters ».
Empress Jadis too (another figure of evil, like Sauron and Saruman) is out of her depth in London, where she is greeted as « Empress of Colney Hatch » – a locality which in 1900 was a wellknown mental hospital. Later in her carreer she behaves like Nurse Ratchett in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Turning people into stone because they feast ? Mistreating a poor guy who has enjoyed his first and only occasion of sexual intercourse with medication or electroshock, and starting that with intimidation ? Not very impressive characters, either of them. When they loose, they have it coming. And fantasy is superior to that film insofar as Empress Jadis really looses. Nurse Ratchett is more likely to be live and well.
Fairy tales are truer than reality, not in saying there are dragons, but in saying dragons can be defeated and killed, Chesterton somewhere said.
And in Tolkien and CSL, the good guys are not quite as awestricken with Sauron (except Pippin in a horrid minute or two, and Frodo when tormented by the Ring : unlike Lucy Westenra both are saved), nor, in the other story, with the White Witch : – « So she is the Emperor's hangman, and that is how she came to imagine she was Queen ? » said a beaver.
Yes, CSL and JRRT knew the Cross. They regarded History as being in the end a long defeat. Redeemed at just the last moment, when History will be over. Christ has not returned yet, nor will he before things get even worse in society than they are right now. And yet we must resist changes for the worse, even though here and now we sometimes, indeed often fail. Everything is in the hand of God : and so is the death of the righteous. Sometimes ignominous to earth. Whatever glory of bearing a load of suffering Satan may have got by getting defeated as a rebel, Christ overturned by being executed along with rebels, and persecuted Christians have it also – with the difference they face real tyranny and rise or stand up for real good causes – and some of them now look as lost causes. Satan regarded the presence of one better than he was himself and having a right to his adoration as « tyranny » – and is not courage, it is only very bad taste. Christ and the martyrs and heroes have a better one.
An aside on present issues : here in France we are celebrating 600 years since St Joan of Arc was born in Domrémy. She was tried as being an ally of Satan, but she was really a servant of God. She was burned on a stake symbolising the flames of Hell, but she was destined for Paradise. She fought in battles, and yet it is true generally that women should not.
Tolkien and Lewis both knew that. The War against the Kaiser of Berlin they both fought in trenches or on horseback on the side of the Entente. Here in France, if they had been of a poorer class, soldiers rather than officers, they would have been called poilus. The last of them died a few years ago. And poilus means their beard was growing wild. There were no ladies on the cavalry charges or in the trenches.
From the same war they also knew the Cross, heavily, they lost their friends and never more spoke with them on earth. Ursula LeGuin, whom I spoke of also earlier. She was daughter of an anthropologist who entertained in his house one Amerindian who was the last survivor of his people, the last Native Speaker of his language. I think they knew God, or at least CSL and Tolkien did – Ursula is still alive I think – because they knew the Cross. Like Dostoëvski. But unlike Dostoëvski, they wrote for people who are in another sense, hopefully than in a case like Dracula, afraid of the Cross.
If Bram Stoker wrote so as to incite sometimes to sin – sins of cynicism and of sexual fascination – and if Dostoëvski wrote incessantly inciting to penance, Tolkien and C S Lewis knew how to tell a story as a story before anything else.
And Lloyd Alexander – he might in a sense have been placed in the last generation, but he is chaster and has more depth – who came to Paris after its liberation in WW-II, who I think briedfly knew Gertrude Stein, he grew up under the shadow of Sister Saint Katherine Drexel, patroness of Drexel Hill. He died on the day of Ascension, 2007. Who grew up in poverty, like so many saints (Sister Drexel grew up in riches and chose poverty).
Funnily, when I look up Drexel Hill I also find Drexel University, founded by an uncle of Saint Katherine Drexel : its mascot is a dragon. And I have two dragon killers in my patron saints.
Hans-Georg Mikael E. Lundahl
Beauvais
St Anthelme of Belley
26 – VI – 2012
Obviously there are overlaps. I would place Mervin Peake into the first two excluding only the third, and I would place Lloyd Alexander in the latter two, excluding only the first.
Now more typical products of the third are things like Xanth and Incarnations of Immortality, by Pierce Anthony, Good Omen and Colour of Magic (or all of the Discworld series) by Pratchett and, more than anything else today, outpassing even Dark Materials (which is untypical and in fact an atheist reaction to the second generation, more particularly CSL), Harry Potter by Rowling.
I happen to be personally allergic to Harry Potter. I am therefore not qualified to make a sober criticism of it, and especially of its magic content. I am allergic to it for quite other reasons than spells, and that is the fact that it is a boarding school story. A story in which people who are supposed to be good scheme to give some « rotter » a lesson he needs, and in which bad people, supposedly worse than the good ones, scheme to give lessons to someone who is in fact not a rotter. Maybe because he is not a rotter. And of course the mistake, good guys thinking they are giving a lesson to a rotter and finding out he is not a rotter (I read one such story before I went to boarding school, I think it happens to Harry Potter too, but since I am allergic to boarding school stories, I am not quite sure, I have not checked out. I think C. S. Lewis, who suffered even more, at least directly, at boarding school than I, would have understood my aversion quite well. Whether he would have shared it or not. I am quite as allergic to the story I read before going to boarding school, or to the boarding school stories of Enid Blyton, much as I love her Famous Five series or X of Adventure (for X insert island, mountain, river, ship … et c. in title). Since that is the case, I will NOT offer my opinions on Harry Potter and magic in those. Literarily, it belongs to the third generation, insofar as magic in it is often used for purposes of farce, of buffoonery.
I will tell you of stories I did read and partly enjoy which include spells. Earthsea. By Ursula LeGuin. The stories take spells much more seriously, I think, than Harry Potter, but do not divulge them. I read those, or the first two – Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan, I thought the third one was too bleak in outlook to really enjoy it. I will add I read those before my baptism. I have not reread them after with same relish.
It is basically about « the cross » or rather burden of being a shaman. It is in a way lived -according to that book – similarily to carrying the cross of very holy and snatching souls back from the devil kind of priesthood. Ged is harrassed, all through the first book nearly, by a demon « as much as » St John Mary Vianney and Padre Pio were. That is not true. The Christian priests suffered in more security, in a way, but they suffered much much more and longer. But Ged was harrassed, and his solution is very much other than that of the Christian men, indeed it is shocking. He got rid of demonic harrassment by renaming the demon Ged, his own name.
The Holy Curate of Ars and Padre Pio never finally got rid of demonic harrassment, until they died, but always could get rid of it as soon as needed by invoking Christ.
That said, Earthsea is clearly second generation, but Harry Potter third generation, insofar as my division has any validity. Before going into first and further into second generation, let is take what little I still have to say on third generation : Pratchett I never read, Pierce Anthony I ceased reading at my Catholic conversion. There are in any of his novels passages best described as pornographic, though one would politely call them erotic now, whereas pornography is now reserved for a cruder style which did not exist back when « erotic novels » meant novels about being in love without going graphic or explicit.
Now unto first generation. William Morris wrote on House of the Wolfings in a way, and Lord Dunsany much more so on Gods of Pegana, both of which count as fantasy, for the same reason that Rider Haggard and E. Rice Burroughs wrote on exotic and quasi-Babylonic places left standing in novels like She or Jewels of Opar, or for the same reason that Oscar Wilde wrote The Ghost of Canterville or salomé or that Jules Verne wrote about at the time not yet possibly high tech submarines manned by a heavily misanthropic but somehow still very wellclad and wellkemped Captain Nemo or similar steampunk and exploration novels. Lovecraft also clearly plays around with aesthetics, horror and ugliness being part of its subject. Miskatonic University verging on Cthulhu is as much a work of twisted art (the authors would not have minded the word twisted), as a Castle in Transylvania is for Bram Stoker.
And this Bram Stoker, usually classed as « Gothic » rather than fantasy, brings us to the fact that the Cross of Christ was not quite unknown even in the XIXth C. Even after Darwin, Marx, Engels and Frazer changed the intellectual outlook of English Bourgeoisie on Christianity.
« Crux Christi sit mihi lux – Non draco sit mihi dux » is nearly the main theme of Dracula – a novel ending with the vampire receiving Communion, although it was post mortem and a few centuries late, and dissolving peacefully. Unfortunately – I will come back to it – it is not well executed. The other great non-Pagan was of course George MacDonald, a unitarian parson. Admired by G. K. Chesterton, by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and by C. S. Lewis.
If the novels of Gilbert Keith Chesterton are more alternative reality or even steampunk, except in reverse, as predicting a future with less steam engines and less big bureaucracies (a thing he fought to bring about in reality as an essay writer too), JRRT and CSL are clearly the second generation : the fantasy writers who knew the Cross. And, in their case, it is really the Cross of Christ that they knew. Accordingly, sorcerers, witches, anything dealing with spells are not looked kindly on in their novels.
Uncle Andrew is just possibly not as clearly damned, but that is because he was so failed as a magician. Anything that can be labelled necromancy is clearly and heavily damned and condemned in those works, as surely as contracts with the devil are so. Koriakin (Voyage of the Dawn Treader) is not a human, and he is doing penance. Merlin (That Hideous Strength) is risking his soul, and his life is theologically or at least canonically and pastorally speaking in ruins anyway. The solution is other than at the end of Shakespear's last play, where the mage – a human in the end – is saved by breaking his magic staff, but the spirit of it is the same : if there is public that finds reading about magic in stories exciting, let the magicians be anything except humans doing a good thing. Non-human, damned, risking damnation. And of course avoid all that can clearly be seen or used as instructions in magic.
Now, since magic is not the protagonist of either Narnia or Eriador, of either CSL or JRRT, what is ? Mortals and immortals, fighting evil on a cosmic as well as on a military scale. And whose moral failures tend to endanger the victory, and whose moral victories aid the victory of the good.
In a way though badly executed that is true of the novel about Dracula too. Every person who gets vampyrised by him endangers other persons further. Every person can also avoid being vampirised by staying in the state of grace. In that way, Bram Stoker furthers Catholic morality. But as he executes this badly, alas he does not : he makes Dracula so much more impressive than any protagonist, including van Helsing as he appears in the novel, that the reader risks getting vampirised morally.
Christ is the hero, but he is not shining forth, for most of the novel, he is so absent as a person : He appears on the Crucifix, He appears in the Host, but he is not quite morally present as our Loving Saviour. In a way that is a point : evil often looks more impressive and looms larger in our lives than God. And still there is another reason, which is known to those who wrote the novel : He is indeed the loving Saviour of Count Dracula.
After all, which is moral enough, Dracula wins nearly every battle, but looses the war. Though van Helsing is a bitter and twisted personality – he calls on Harker to kill Lucy Westenra, his former fiancée as vampire, and he uses hypnosis on Mina – and though his allies are weak, he defeats evil, or the evil of Dracula. Because, in an obvious sense, his light is the Cross and his leader is not the dragon : meaning he is a Christian believer and that he is not a Satanist. However, the means are not pure. In that sense he does not live up to the motto.
But still, Dracula is too glorious for the reader. And the eroticism of some scenes of vampirisation are no good to people who quite as much as Mina would have needed it, in their real lives need to stay clean of mortal sin.
Now, George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien do not make that mistake.
Sauron is impressive in his power, but stupid. The point is that evil is stupid. He lacks the imagination to see anyone « in the know » as not coveting what he covets. Saruman is impressive to a much lesser extent. His sophistication is shown for what it really is : vain stupidity in the case of his loathsome bragging about his goals as « knowledge, control, power … for good » and his kindness fares no better : « in Orthanc » – Orthanc is his castle – « friendship means slavery and help means ruin. » Those are the words in which a mere mortal reproaches the morals of that fallen angelic being.
That summing up is also fair about much of modern administration and business – and education. I did mention boarding schools and « giving lessons » to « rotters ».
Empress Jadis too (another figure of evil, like Sauron and Saruman) is out of her depth in London, where she is greeted as « Empress of Colney Hatch » – a locality which in 1900 was a wellknown mental hospital. Later in her carreer she behaves like Nurse Ratchett in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Turning people into stone because they feast ? Mistreating a poor guy who has enjoyed his first and only occasion of sexual intercourse with medication or electroshock, and starting that with intimidation ? Not very impressive characters, either of them. When they loose, they have it coming. And fantasy is superior to that film insofar as Empress Jadis really looses. Nurse Ratchett is more likely to be live and well.
Fairy tales are truer than reality, not in saying there are dragons, but in saying dragons can be defeated and killed, Chesterton somewhere said.
And in Tolkien and CSL, the good guys are not quite as awestricken with Sauron (except Pippin in a horrid minute or two, and Frodo when tormented by the Ring : unlike Lucy Westenra both are saved), nor, in the other story, with the White Witch : – « So she is the Emperor's hangman, and that is how she came to imagine she was Queen ? » said a beaver.
Yes, CSL and JRRT knew the Cross. They regarded History as being in the end a long defeat. Redeemed at just the last moment, when History will be over. Christ has not returned yet, nor will he before things get even worse in society than they are right now. And yet we must resist changes for the worse, even though here and now we sometimes, indeed often fail. Everything is in the hand of God : and so is the death of the righteous. Sometimes ignominous to earth. Whatever glory of bearing a load of suffering Satan may have got by getting defeated as a rebel, Christ overturned by being executed along with rebels, and persecuted Christians have it also – with the difference they face real tyranny and rise or stand up for real good causes – and some of them now look as lost causes. Satan regarded the presence of one better than he was himself and having a right to his adoration as « tyranny » – and is not courage, it is only very bad taste. Christ and the martyrs and heroes have a better one.
An aside on present issues : here in France we are celebrating 600 years since St Joan of Arc was born in Domrémy. She was tried as being an ally of Satan, but she was really a servant of God. She was burned on a stake symbolising the flames of Hell, but she was destined for Paradise. She fought in battles, and yet it is true generally that women should not.
Tolkien and Lewis both knew that. The War against the Kaiser of Berlin they both fought in trenches or on horseback on the side of the Entente. Here in France, if they had been of a poorer class, soldiers rather than officers, they would have been called poilus. The last of them died a few years ago. And poilus means their beard was growing wild. There were no ladies on the cavalry charges or in the trenches.
From the same war they also knew the Cross, heavily, they lost their friends and never more spoke with them on earth. Ursula LeGuin, whom I spoke of also earlier. She was daughter of an anthropologist who entertained in his house one Amerindian who was the last survivor of his people, the last Native Speaker of his language. I think they knew God, or at least CSL and Tolkien did – Ursula is still alive I think – because they knew the Cross. Like Dostoëvski. But unlike Dostoëvski, they wrote for people who are in another sense, hopefully than in a case like Dracula, afraid of the Cross.
If Bram Stoker wrote so as to incite sometimes to sin – sins of cynicism and of sexual fascination – and if Dostoëvski wrote incessantly inciting to penance, Tolkien and C S Lewis knew how to tell a story as a story before anything else.
And Lloyd Alexander – he might in a sense have been placed in the last generation, but he is chaster and has more depth – who came to Paris after its liberation in WW-II, who I think briedfly knew Gertrude Stein, he grew up under the shadow of Sister Saint Katherine Drexel, patroness of Drexel Hill. He died on the day of Ascension, 2007. Who grew up in poverty, like so many saints (Sister Drexel grew up in riches and chose poverty).
Funnily, when I look up Drexel Hill I also find Drexel University, founded by an uncle of Saint Katherine Drexel : its mascot is a dragon. And I have two dragon killers in my patron saints.
Hans-Georg Mikael E. Lundahl
Beauvais
St Anthelme of Belley
26 – VI – 2012
vendredi 17 février 2012
Claudel avait tort sur Shakespear.
La mémoire de Hyam Maccoby (University of Leeds) exige qu'on mette un peu les points sur les i.
Que dans la scène de justice, Shylock représente le diable et Portia la Sainte Vierge il n'y a pas de doute. Great minds think alike.* Sa maison représente cette synagogue de Satan dont Jessica sort. Il convient de préciser que Jessica en Hébreux, Yiskah=lumière. Une allusion à ce que dit Notre Seigneur à la Samaritaine dans l'Évangile de Saint Jean? Je l'ai cru dans mon analyse.
Dans la finale, Shylock lui-même sort de la synagogue. Car un personnage de cette pièce peut avoir des significations diverses selon les diverses scènes: Antonio commence comme Jésus, faisant la critique à haute voix des Pharisiens, en occurrence de Shylock usurier, continue comme Jésus Notre Sauveur qui se met en gage pour notre dette (il donne sa chair en gage pour Bassanio), mais dans la scène de justice il ne représente que le simple chrétien (ou son âme au jugement particulier), menacé par le diable qui reclame les dettes mais ayant la Sainte Vierge pour avocate. Et Portia mariée à Antonio (après la scène de justice, pendant laquelle elle reste encore vierge) n'est peut-être pas la même chose non plus que la Vierge, néanmoins ce n'est pas une mauvaise chose non plus.
Plût à Dieu que Hyam eût suivi, non pour le menace de la mort bien méritée, mais par bon sens, l'exemple final de Shylock. Autrement il est célèbre pour une œuvre appelée Paul et l'invention du christianisme (The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity) - dont je viens de faire comprendre l'irréalisme dans le message anglais d'il y a dix mois:
What a blooper, Dan Barker from Atheist League!
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-blooper-dan-barker-from-atheist.html
ou http://o-x.fr/rrxn
Il y a un autre sens de Shylock dans cette pièce: le père rigoureux et Puritain, comme il l'est vis-à-vis Jessica. Vu que Shakespear vivait dans un temps où le Puritanisme avait le vent dans la poupe là où il vivait, il est compréhensible si, ne souhaitant pas de finir trop tôt sur Tyburn, Shakespear se soit un peu tu sur ses convictions religieuses, qu'il se soit exprimé avec un peu de - prudence?
Là où la prudence ne l'exigeait pas, sa théologie morale et son droit canonique s'identifient assez bien aux Catholicisme pré-Tridentin. Pourquoi pré-Tridentin? Parce que le Father Laurenzo en Roméo et Juliette (une autre pièce comme la sait tout le monde) considère possible et valide un mariage clandestin, contrairement à la Réforme Tridentine.
Donc, non, on ne peut pas prétendre que Shakespear eût été un payen. Même au risque de contredire Claudel. Les Catholiques français ont eu une vraie assistance intellectuelle par les Anglais, même les mal informés, puisque quand même mieux informés que les Français de la Gauche, donc ils risquent de négliger un peu les bonnes informations - notemment sur Angleterre.
Effectivement, les Puritains, que Claudel avait copiés dans son jugement global sur Shakespear, considèrent celui-ci comme un payen. Après qu'il les avait persiflés dans le personnage de Shylock, c'est peu étonnant. J'espère que Claudel ne soit pas coupable d'avoir trouvé ça par ses propres efforts de pensé, qu'il soit excusé en suivant une source anglaise peu limpide.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI Georges Pompidou
17-II-2012
*Moi je l'avais écrit, Hyam Maccoby aussi.
Que dans la scène de justice, Shylock représente le diable et Portia la Sainte Vierge il n'y a pas de doute. Great minds think alike.* Sa maison représente cette synagogue de Satan dont Jessica sort. Il convient de préciser que Jessica en Hébreux, Yiskah=lumière. Une allusion à ce que dit Notre Seigneur à la Samaritaine dans l'Évangile de Saint Jean? Je l'ai cru dans mon analyse.
Dans la finale, Shylock lui-même sort de la synagogue. Car un personnage de cette pièce peut avoir des significations diverses selon les diverses scènes: Antonio commence comme Jésus, faisant la critique à haute voix des Pharisiens, en occurrence de Shylock usurier, continue comme Jésus Notre Sauveur qui se met en gage pour notre dette (il donne sa chair en gage pour Bassanio), mais dans la scène de justice il ne représente que le simple chrétien (ou son âme au jugement particulier), menacé par le diable qui reclame les dettes mais ayant la Sainte Vierge pour avocate. Et Portia mariée à Antonio (après la scène de justice, pendant laquelle elle reste encore vierge) n'est peut-être pas la même chose non plus que la Vierge, néanmoins ce n'est pas une mauvaise chose non plus.
Plût à Dieu que Hyam eût suivi, non pour le menace de la mort bien méritée, mais par bon sens, l'exemple final de Shylock. Autrement il est célèbre pour une œuvre appelée Paul et l'invention du christianisme (The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity) - dont je viens de faire comprendre l'irréalisme dans le message anglais d'il y a dix mois:
What a blooper, Dan Barker from Atheist League!
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-blooper-dan-barker-from-atheist.html
ou http://o-x.fr/rrxn
Il y a un autre sens de Shylock dans cette pièce: le père rigoureux et Puritain, comme il l'est vis-à-vis Jessica. Vu que Shakespear vivait dans un temps où le Puritanisme avait le vent dans la poupe là où il vivait, il est compréhensible si, ne souhaitant pas de finir trop tôt sur Tyburn, Shakespear se soit un peu tu sur ses convictions religieuses, qu'il se soit exprimé avec un peu de - prudence?
Là où la prudence ne l'exigeait pas, sa théologie morale et son droit canonique s'identifient assez bien aux Catholicisme pré-Tridentin. Pourquoi pré-Tridentin? Parce que le Father Laurenzo en Roméo et Juliette (une autre pièce comme la sait tout le monde) considère possible et valide un mariage clandestin, contrairement à la Réforme Tridentine.
Donc, non, on ne peut pas prétendre que Shakespear eût été un payen. Même au risque de contredire Claudel. Les Catholiques français ont eu une vraie assistance intellectuelle par les Anglais, même les mal informés, puisque quand même mieux informés que les Français de la Gauche, donc ils risquent de négliger un peu les bonnes informations - notemment sur Angleterre.
Effectivement, les Puritains, que Claudel avait copiés dans son jugement global sur Shakespear, considèrent celui-ci comme un payen. Après qu'il les avait persiflés dans le personnage de Shylock, c'est peu étonnant. J'espère que Claudel ne soit pas coupable d'avoir trouvé ça par ses propres efforts de pensé, qu'il soit excusé en suivant une source anglaise peu limpide.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI Georges Pompidou
17-II-2012
*Moi je l'avais écrit, Hyam Maccoby aussi.
samedi 15 octobre 2011
Oh my, what a difference!
Going from Prince Caspian by C S Lewis to Prince Caspian by Walden media is like going very much further than Electra from Choephoroi.
In CSL, Lucy is having visions, like Lucy of Fatima, later sister Lucy. She is having visions and all the trouble the Fatima children had of making heavenly orders heard by the concerned. Film makers reduced that to a moment or two that the public never sees as a vision, and a dream that she wakes up from. That is about as far more human far less divine action than the novel as Electra is less divine and more human than Choephoroi.
But, apart from a humanistic undevout angle, Sophocles respects the stages of the plot in Aeschyl. Not so Adamson with C S Lewis.
Let us forget all and sundry changes in story line, and look at how Telmarines are protrayed, I am quoting wikipedia, that is information from consecutive as good as anonymous contributors, but the article has a good deal of fottnotes to links, I think it might be trusted:
Skin colour can go, no problem. The Pirates took native women. That would make Telmarines a European with South Sea mixed race, no problem, no offense, nothing wrong if a little darker. But the story is so reminiscent of Pitcairn, I find it hard to believe C S Lewis must have excluded English from the role as pirates. I mean, being Irish, though an Oxford man, he might have seen in some moods English as such.
Conquistador cruelty in Perú or Mexico has very little to do with Telmarine idiocy, superstition, and cruelty against Narnians. It has nothing to do with pirate origins - remember Telmarines descend like pirates from the South Sea - either.
Fascism - especially Spanish such - is very unlike the mood of the Telmarines.* I mean Cara al Sol as sung by Franco's men means they were looking forward to peace, not just to extermination of anyone or anything. And to dying with honour, if they die before the end of the war, not just serving the general for fear. They were, often enough, defending someone against getting killed by the reds. Telmarines, now there is traditional animosity, a bit like between the two sides of the Irish conflict (that has been going on between Battle of the Boyne and Good Friday agreement, some three hundred years), and there is also Miraz' tyranny.
The fact that C S Lewis did not get that point about Spanish fascism* - confer JRRT's letter about Roy Campbell and Spanish War - does not mean C S Lewis based Miraz (though the name is a Spanish place name, and the acors in the film use the spanish name's accent, on final syllable!) on Spanish contemporary history. I mean, he was not the kind of writer to be overly topical on recent newslines. And he does not - apart from Miraz, which is a Spanish name, but not a very typical such any more than a typical Telmarine onegive them names like Caspiano or Caspián, but rather Caspian, with a clearly English tilt of the accent, though syllables may have been chosen in Spanish-French style.
The closer model for Miraz' tyranny are more like the Communist take overs in Eastern Europe leading up to the Cold War. OK, Miraz was hereditary monarch, but Communism had its personal cult too. It is very much a remake of Peter the Great's monarchy with "rational" reforms. A "rationality" that does not square with believing in God and Jesus Christ (Communist case), or in Aslan. A "rationality" that does not square with being fair to the other side, but blackwashes it (Chesterton said whitewashing may be ok, provided there had arguably been a blackwashing), a "rationality" that does not square with being true to history, either national or personal:
That was a history lesson, going on in the book version - i e the original - of Prince Caspian. The scene ends with the school mistress being turned into a tree and the school girls getting a holiday, along with Bacchus and Silenus. In the film, satyrs were only there to be a feature in battle scenes, Bacchus and Silenus were gone.
Indoctrinating false history was indeed as much a Communist as a Miraz priority, and so was - therefore obviously - school compulsion. In Telmarine Narnia, there being no industrialism that made very young apprentices very unpractical in very many and especially big workplaces, and therefore the need to keep school age children somewhere else than in liberty, the only applicable motive for enforcing school obligation was thus indoctrination. In Communism school obligation was enforced also in rural areas, showing it was their chief motive. By contrast, Fascist Spain and Italy come across as pretty free countries in this respect: there was no compulsary school under Franco (I had blamed him for enforcing a school obligation on children of the beaten side, thus humiliating them, but in reality if they did want their children to be proud of them having fought for Azaña, they had no obligation to send them to Franco's and the Church's schools), and in Italy at least it was not very much applied under Mussolini.
Miraz after murdering his brother Caspian IX, like the Communist new rulers, also felt a sting about just criticism from just people - so much that both resorted to sham trials. Aloizije Stepinac was found guilty of forcing Serbian Orthodox priests to convert to Catholicism or else kill them - although the Franciscan heading Jasenovac was in fact excommunicated both by Franciscan order and by Roman Catholic Church and Stepinac was not at all giving him any orders. The sham trials under Stalin are another example, though there I do not know who were the victims, except they included Communists who had remained enthusiastic for Stalin's previous plan or for the plan previous to Stalin. No one is to my knowledge even pretending that Franco, when trying people for war crimes like Paracuellos massacres or Carcel Modelo massacres or raping nuns or pillaging Churches was conducting sham trials. These facts are pretty acknowledged on the other side too.
Danger and tyranny do come in many varieties, and replacing one variety with another completely changes the atmosphere. When King Solomon's Mines the book by Rider Haggard had a long dark suffocation threatening and the film replaced this with a more urgent volcanic eruption, this annoyed C S Lewis so much. The tyranny of Miraz is not the same kind of tyranny. C S Lewis was not concerned so much with militaristic tyranny as with lying, sham trials, indoctrination of school boys, lack of civil courage becoming a condition for survival. And though Miraz is contributing to that by being thin skinned about truth, he is not the only one. In the film, he comes out as the chief reason for the rule of treason over reason. In the book there were such a lot of Iagos, not unlike the abetters of Henry VIII and Elizabeth during the Reformation and loot of Church property. Or, of course, Communist politruks. Or, again, Nazis, who were in that respect closer to Communist mores than to Spanish fascism (confer "Night of the Long Knives" 1934 in Germany - which has parallels as bloody in Soviet Russia, but not anymore than peaceful régime shifs - within Franquismo - between 1939 and 1975 in Spain).
Soldiers in the books are pragmatics. Soldiers in the film are bossed about in a way reminiscent of Hollywood filmography featuring WW-2 Wehrmacht or SS soldiers.
Miraz in the film is less of a Communist and more of a Fascist. He is also more lovable in the film than in the book - unlike most other characters. His wrath in the film version is snappy, and a version of his general poisonous attitude. In the book, he merely becomes furious when deciding to take the duel. In the film he "rails" in the French and probable older English sense of "railler" - taunt. In the book he really rails in the modern English sense close to "râler" (I have spelled it rale, believing this to be the real spelling) - lose one's temper and start cussing. In the book also, King Edmund is not one taunting him with cowardice without saying the word, he is taunted by only his own, who have planned to have him killed (really or apparently in the duel) and break the promise to the Narnians.
Caspian has arguably suffered more than any other character. There is the scene where he wants Miraz to tell the truth - in the book he is informed about it by Dr Cornelius - and there is the quarrel with High King Peter (tranferred from a lesser quarrel between Trufflehunter and Nikabrik in the book, whether Caspian was good or bad at commanding, and the Pevensies had no part in the failed battle). There is also a longer hesitation on his part before rejecting the Witch-Craft offered by Nikabrik's "friends".
A kind of flirting with Queen Susan - less to her credit than to his - debases his marital fidelity in the future romance with Ramandu's daughter. Narnian or Narnian English couples, where both names are known, are totally faithful ones, though not necessarily quarrelfree: Digory and Polly, Shasta and Aravis, Caspian and Ramandu's daughter, Mr and Mrs Beaver, Frank and Helen - the "Adam and Eve" of the Narnian world, nearly - none reconstituted couples. Even in respect to mere romance. Not even an Eowyn loving Aragorn before meeting Faramir in sight. Film makers blew that. Not that Anne Applewell and Ben Barnes are not pretty, but actually they are too old for the roles in Prince Caspian. If Lucy was 9 in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, she was 10 in Prince Caspian. Georgie Henley was 10 in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and 13 - probably the precise age of Queen Susan, or even High King Peter - in Prince Caspian. Peter and Susan actors were too old already in the first cast. Caspian became that too.
In the Dawn Treader we should be meeting Edmund age thirteen and Lucy age 12 taking a farewell from the Narnian world. Aslan is basically telling them, once they get back they must get going to Catechism and meet Him again in the Eucharist (if they had been Roman Catholics after Pope Pius X, this scenario would not have made sense, but Anglican and Lutheran Protestants generally approach the altar when leaving childhood, unlike Romans now, who do it when entering school age, or Greeks and Russians, who do it right after Baptism, as eight day old babies). Hence, Peter 14 and Susan 13 would be the right age for Prince Caspian. In the film, the two and Prince Caspian and Edmund are closer to full grown young adults, with Lucy 13.
Here, as with abolition of the two school scenes - the one alluded to and the mistress plagued by idiotic and ill behaved school boys - we face a Hollywood with mores relating to childhood, school age, quite other and more responsabilist than those of C. S. Lewis.
Could it have something to do with a Red Star over Hollywood? More probably, the Hollywood sense of ethics is ingrained so much that it is shared by even "Conservative Christians" over there, by now. Although the real conservative Christian was C. S. Lewis.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou library
16th of October, Sunday
Memory of Queen Marie-Antoinette
Year of Our Lord 2011
*This malpractise of adopting children away against their parents wishes without their knowledge is of course very much more like Miraz. It also involves Apostasy on part of Catholic religious (at least from Christian morals, since the commandment says "thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother" - as in thy own, not someone else). But it originates from well after the properly so called fascist period of Franco, I hope. It is probably taken over from Argentina or Chile, when Franco was looking abroad for inspirations relating to Hispanidad ...
In CSL, Lucy is having visions, like Lucy of Fatima, later sister Lucy. She is having visions and all the trouble the Fatima children had of making heavenly orders heard by the concerned. Film makers reduced that to a moment or two that the public never sees as a vision, and a dream that she wakes up from. That is about as far more human far less divine action than the novel as Electra is less divine and more human than Choephoroi.
But, apart from a humanistic undevout angle, Sophocles respects the stages of the plot in Aeschyl. Not so Adamson with C S Lewis.
Let us forget all and sundry changes in story line, and look at how Telmarines are protrayed, I am quoting wikipedia, that is information from consecutive as good as anonymous contributors, but the article has a good deal of fottnotes to links, I think it might be trusted:
The filmmakers interpreted the Telmarines, including Caspian, as being Spanish because of their pirate origins, which producer Mark Johnson noted made Caspian "a contrast to the lily-white [Pevensies]".[60] Production designer Roger Ford originally wanted the Telmarines to be French, as they had a confrontational history with the English, who are represented by the Pevensies. This was scrapped as the crew were unable to shoot at Pierrefonds Castle, for Miraz's lair, so they went for the Spanish feel.[61] Weta Workshop created masked helmets for their army, and faceplates for the live horses on set. The stunt soldiers wield two-hundred polearms in two different styles, two-hundred rapiers of varying design, over a hundred falchions, two-hundred and fifty shields and fifty-five crossbows. Caspian's own sword is a variation of the Royal Guard's weapons.[59] Costume designer Isis Mussenden looked to the paintings of El Greco to inspire the Telmarines' costumes.[51] She wanted to use colours that looked "acidic and hot and cool at the same time", unlike the red and gold seen in the Narnian soldiers.[31] Their masked helmets are based on conquistadors and samurai.[62] She visited the armour archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for inspiration.[35] An eagle emblem was incorporated into the characters' lairs to make them feel fascist.[63]
Skin colour can go, no problem. The Pirates took native women. That would make Telmarines a European with South Sea mixed race, no problem, no offense, nothing wrong if a little darker. But the story is so reminiscent of Pitcairn, I find it hard to believe C S Lewis must have excluded English from the role as pirates. I mean, being Irish, though an Oxford man, he might have seen in some moods English as such.
Conquistador cruelty in Perú or Mexico has very little to do with Telmarine idiocy, superstition, and cruelty against Narnians. It has nothing to do with pirate origins - remember Telmarines descend like pirates from the South Sea - either.
Fascism - especially Spanish such - is very unlike the mood of the Telmarines.* I mean Cara al Sol as sung by Franco's men means they were looking forward to peace, not just to extermination of anyone or anything. And to dying with honour, if they die before the end of the war, not just serving the general for fear. They were, often enough, defending someone against getting killed by the reds. Telmarines, now there is traditional animosity, a bit like between the two sides of the Irish conflict (that has been going on between Battle of the Boyne and Good Friday agreement, some three hundred years), and there is also Miraz' tyranny.
The fact that C S Lewis did not get that point about Spanish fascism* - confer JRRT's letter about Roy Campbell and Spanish War - does not mean C S Lewis based Miraz (though the name is a Spanish place name, and the acors in the film use the spanish name's accent, on final syllable!) on Spanish contemporary history. I mean, he was not the kind of writer to be overly topical on recent newslines. And he does not - apart from Miraz, which is a Spanish name, but not a very typical such any more than a typical Telmarine onegive them names like Caspiano or Caspián, but rather Caspian, with a clearly English tilt of the accent, though syllables may have been chosen in Spanish-French style.
The closer model for Miraz' tyranny are more like the Communist take overs in Eastern Europe leading up to the Cold War. OK, Miraz was hereditary monarch, but Communism had its personal cult too. It is very much a remake of Peter the Great's monarchy with "rational" reforms. A "rationality" that does not square with believing in God and Jesus Christ (Communist case), or in Aslan. A "rationality" that does not square with being fair to the other side, but blackwashes it (Chesterton said whitewashing may be ok, provided there had arguably been a blackwashing), a "rationality" that does not square with being true to history, either national or personal:
And the history in the textbooks was as boring as the most truthful history you know, and as made up as the most exciting story you ever read.
That was a history lesson, going on in the book version - i e the original - of Prince Caspian. The scene ends with the school mistress being turned into a tree and the school girls getting a holiday, along with Bacchus and Silenus. In the film, satyrs were only there to be a feature in battle scenes, Bacchus and Silenus were gone.
Indoctrinating false history was indeed as much a Communist as a Miraz priority, and so was - therefore obviously - school compulsion. In Telmarine Narnia, there being no industrialism that made very young apprentices very unpractical in very many and especially big workplaces, and therefore the need to keep school age children somewhere else than in liberty, the only applicable motive for enforcing school obligation was thus indoctrination. In Communism school obligation was enforced also in rural areas, showing it was their chief motive. By contrast, Fascist Spain and Italy come across as pretty free countries in this respect: there was no compulsary school under Franco (I had blamed him for enforcing a school obligation on children of the beaten side, thus humiliating them, but in reality if they did want their children to be proud of them having fought for Azaña, they had no obligation to send them to Franco's and the Church's schools), and in Italy at least it was not very much applied under Mussolini.
Miraz after murdering his brother Caspian IX, like the Communist new rulers, also felt a sting about just criticism from just people - so much that both resorted to sham trials. Aloizije Stepinac was found guilty of forcing Serbian Orthodox priests to convert to Catholicism or else kill them - although the Franciscan heading Jasenovac was in fact excommunicated both by Franciscan order and by Roman Catholic Church and Stepinac was not at all giving him any orders. The sham trials under Stalin are another example, though there I do not know who were the victims, except they included Communists who had remained enthusiastic for Stalin's previous plan or for the plan previous to Stalin. No one is to my knowledge even pretending that Franco, when trying people for war crimes like Paracuellos massacres or Carcel Modelo massacres or raping nuns or pillaging Churches was conducting sham trials. These facts are pretty acknowledged on the other side too.
Danger and tyranny do come in many varieties, and replacing one variety with another completely changes the atmosphere. When King Solomon's Mines the book by Rider Haggard had a long dark suffocation threatening and the film replaced this with a more urgent volcanic eruption, this annoyed C S Lewis so much. The tyranny of Miraz is not the same kind of tyranny. C S Lewis was not concerned so much with militaristic tyranny as with lying, sham trials, indoctrination of school boys, lack of civil courage becoming a condition for survival. And though Miraz is contributing to that by being thin skinned about truth, he is not the only one. In the film, he comes out as the chief reason for the rule of treason over reason. In the book there were such a lot of Iagos, not unlike the abetters of Henry VIII and Elizabeth during the Reformation and loot of Church property. Or, of course, Communist politruks. Or, again, Nazis, who were in that respect closer to Communist mores than to Spanish fascism (confer "Night of the Long Knives" 1934 in Germany - which has parallels as bloody in Soviet Russia, but not anymore than peaceful régime shifs - within Franquismo - between 1939 and 1975 in Spain).
Soldiers in the books are pragmatics. Soldiers in the film are bossed about in a way reminiscent of Hollywood filmography featuring WW-2 Wehrmacht or SS soldiers.
Miraz in the film is less of a Communist and more of a Fascist. He is also more lovable in the film than in the book - unlike most other characters. His wrath in the film version is snappy, and a version of his general poisonous attitude. In the book, he merely becomes furious when deciding to take the duel. In the film he "rails" in the French and probable older English sense of "railler" - taunt. In the book he really rails in the modern English sense close to "râler" (I have spelled it rale, believing this to be the real spelling) - lose one's temper and start cussing. In the book also, King Edmund is not one taunting him with cowardice without saying the word, he is taunted by only his own, who have planned to have him killed (really or apparently in the duel) and break the promise to the Narnians.
Caspian has arguably suffered more than any other character. There is the scene where he wants Miraz to tell the truth - in the book he is informed about it by Dr Cornelius - and there is the quarrel with High King Peter (tranferred from a lesser quarrel between Trufflehunter and Nikabrik in the book, whether Caspian was good or bad at commanding, and the Pevensies had no part in the failed battle). There is also a longer hesitation on his part before rejecting the Witch-Craft offered by Nikabrik's "friends".
A kind of flirting with Queen Susan - less to her credit than to his - debases his marital fidelity in the future romance with Ramandu's daughter. Narnian or Narnian English couples, where both names are known, are totally faithful ones, though not necessarily quarrelfree: Digory and Polly, Shasta and Aravis, Caspian and Ramandu's daughter, Mr and Mrs Beaver, Frank and Helen - the "Adam and Eve" of the Narnian world, nearly - none reconstituted couples. Even in respect to mere romance. Not even an Eowyn loving Aragorn before meeting Faramir in sight. Film makers blew that. Not that Anne Applewell and Ben Barnes are not pretty, but actually they are too old for the roles in Prince Caspian. If Lucy was 9 in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, she was 10 in Prince Caspian. Georgie Henley was 10 in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and 13 - probably the precise age of Queen Susan, or even High King Peter - in Prince Caspian. Peter and Susan actors were too old already in the first cast. Caspian became that too.
In the Dawn Treader we should be meeting Edmund age thirteen and Lucy age 12 taking a farewell from the Narnian world. Aslan is basically telling them, once they get back they must get going to Catechism and meet Him again in the Eucharist (if they had been Roman Catholics after Pope Pius X, this scenario would not have made sense, but Anglican and Lutheran Protestants generally approach the altar when leaving childhood, unlike Romans now, who do it when entering school age, or Greeks and Russians, who do it right after Baptism, as eight day old babies). Hence, Peter 14 and Susan 13 would be the right age for Prince Caspian. In the film, the two and Prince Caspian and Edmund are closer to full grown young adults, with Lucy 13.
Here, as with abolition of the two school scenes - the one alluded to and the mistress plagued by idiotic and ill behaved school boys - we face a Hollywood with mores relating to childhood, school age, quite other and more responsabilist than those of C. S. Lewis.
Could it have something to do with a Red Star over Hollywood? More probably, the Hollywood sense of ethics is ingrained so much that it is shared by even "Conservative Christians" over there, by now. Although the real conservative Christian was C. S. Lewis.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou library
16th of October, Sunday
Memory of Queen Marie-Antoinette
Year of Our Lord 2011
*This malpractise of adopting children away against their parents wishes without their knowledge is of course very much more like Miraz. It also involves Apostasy on part of Catholic religious (at least from Christian morals, since the commandment says "thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother" - as in thy own, not someone else). But it originates from well after the properly so called fascist period of Franco, I hope. It is probably taken over from Argentina or Chile, when Franco was looking abroad for inspirations relating to Hispanidad ...
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