Reflection on Chapter 1 of SC. Is it really not an allegory?
| URL | http://hedgepickle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-silver-chair-chapter-1-not-allegory.html |
|---|---|
| Creator | Ajnos |
| Description | Reflection on Chapter 1 of SC. Is it really not an allegory? |
Reflection on Chapter 1 of SC. Is it really not an allegory?
| URL | http://hedgepickle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-silver-chair-chapter-1-not-allegory.html |
|---|---|
| Creator | Ajnos |
| Description | Reflection on Chapter 1 of SC. Is it really not an allegory? |
“Passages like these give me the niggling feeling that perhaps Lewis wasn’t so anti-allegory when he wrote The Chronicles as he was later on in life (something I’ve suspected came from Tolkien’s outspoken dislike of it).”
He was never anti-allegory at all.
He has written an allegory, and if you want to know what CSL does when writing an allegory, simply read “The Pilgrim’s Regress”.
And his thesis in English LIterature was The Allegory of Love. One chapter about allegory. One about courtly love (which was a worse and adulterous thing than commonly thought these days). And one chapter for each of the allegories that deal with love.
Recent example of allegory : Pixar’s Vice Versa. I thought it was based on the Vice Versa story in which a father and a son change bodies and more or less ruin each other’s carreers for after the change back by ignoring codes of adulthood or having forgotten codes of schoolboyhood. No, no. It is an allegory where emotions of one same person take on the trappings of each being a person. THAT is allegory.
“Does this mean that The Chronicles do, in fact, have allegorical aspects to them (even if they are not full allegories of the kind like Pilgrim’s Progress)?”
The question whether a work is allegory or not is not whether there is a strong parallel, but whether it is kept out throughought the work, consistently. “Incipient allegories” that are not continued does not make a story an allegory.