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More on Jack
Jan. 19th, 2014 03:59 pmMuch of my January writing meme has been less than perfectly coherent. To some degree I'm just trying to give a picture of things that interest me, as a way of revealing more about my interests than I would just saying "hm" in the background. But I feel like I'm spending so much time dredging up old memories, or just describing things in an awkward and cursory fashion, that I'm not writing much analysis, nor much interesting, nor much that coheres as a whole essay.
In yesterday's post about C. S. ("Jack") Lewis I forgot something critical I have recently realized and really wanted to say:
Jack had a tendency to write his works with a fair bit of Throw It In, and sometimes I suspect He Just Didn't Care. More precisely, a lot of his fantastical work seems driven by coming up with a novel scene, image, relationship, or other concept, and using it, whether or not it was consistent with the rest of the larger work.
This can be a good thing. Narnia's world is hugely diverse, because Jack kept throwing new creatures in. It can be annoying, as when ideas that fit into an End of the World story led to The Last Battle, so we can have images like Stars falling from the sky. Never mind that he's closing the book on further stories, he has a cool image!
The first Narnia book treats Narnia as a land of Talking Animals who know not Men, contrasted to England as a land of Men who know not Talking Animals. The later books take this concept and show lands of Men who know not Talking Animals outside Narnia but in the same world (The Horse and His Boy) or within Narnia itself (Prince Caspian), thus making Narnia oddly curious in its own world. But that was what he wanted to do there. The Caspian-era books almost make Narnia a human kingdom in a fantastic world. And the timeline of Dawn Treader's backstory still seems confused to me. But it's Throw It In.
Similarly, the line in Perelandra which bugged me so much. Jack thought of that bit of "logic," so he put it in a character's mouth, because it occurred to him, never mind philosophical consistency.
It's different from a writer who worries and worries at things to make them more consistent. It does however mean that those following on, fans and ficcers, get stuck with what one threw in.
In yesterday's post about C. S. ("Jack") Lewis I forgot something critical I have recently realized and really wanted to say:
Jack had a tendency to write his works with a fair bit of Throw It In, and sometimes I suspect He Just Didn't Care. More precisely, a lot of his fantastical work seems driven by coming up with a novel scene, image, relationship, or other concept, and using it, whether or not it was consistent with the rest of the larger work.
This can be a good thing. Narnia's world is hugely diverse, because Jack kept throwing new creatures in. It can be annoying, as when ideas that fit into an End of the World story led to The Last Battle, so we can have images like Stars falling from the sky. Never mind that he's closing the book on further stories, he has a cool image!
The first Narnia book treats Narnia as a land of Talking Animals who know not Men, contrasted to England as a land of Men who know not Talking Animals. The later books take this concept and show lands of Men who know not Talking Animals outside Narnia but in the same world (The Horse and His Boy) or within Narnia itself (Prince Caspian), thus making Narnia oddly curious in its own world. But that was what he wanted to do there. The Caspian-era books almost make Narnia a human kingdom in a fantastic world. And the timeline of Dawn Treader's backstory still seems confused to me. But it's Throw It In.
Similarly, the line in Perelandra which bugged me so much. Jack thought of that bit of "logic," so he put it in a character's mouth, because it occurred to him, never mind philosophical consistency.
It's different from a writer who worries and worries at things to make them more consistent. It does however mean that those following on, fans and ficcers, get stuck with what one threw in.
