Further Up and Further In Tries to Be Different
Further Up & Further In: Understanding C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
CBN.com I wanted in writing Further Up and Further In to provide both novice and experienced readers something that will increase their enjoyment every time they come to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (or the movie made of it). Further Up and Further In won’t explore every possible detail you may want to know about Narnia because that is not its design, and there is plenty to be discovered that this small volume could not possibly include. I had no incentive to provide encyclopedic coverage of each jot and title because Paul Ford’s wonderful volume Companion to Narnia (cited later in “For Further Reading”) already does that.
The truth is, literary encyclopedias provide a specific service and are useful particularly after we have put the book down. They represent an “outside-in” approach—forging facts and compiling connections exterior to the text and using them to interpret and elucidate what you have already read long after you have left the intimate setting of the book itself. They draw you naturally outside the world the tale has created; they occupy you with things and ideas and people the book points to and try to answer nagging questions you may have. And then, at their best, like Ford’s Companion to Narnia, they will send you back to the text for more interaction with Aslan and his creation. But at their worst—and I am afraid this is what most encyclopedias do—thy may take you “further out and further away” and, in this case, force you to remain an outsider to the continuing experience of Narnia. (One can become an “expert” on Narnia, so to speak, without ever living there. What a pity!)
A large part of what makes Narnia terrific, engrossing, and life-changing is its ability not only to deliver a world that is strange and compelling but also to make our own world strange and compelling as well. Its genius, if you will, is its ability to make us long for a world like Aslan’s and then to help us discover in ours the evidence that aslant has been here too, and to motivate us to uncover the implications of that visit. A Narnian sojourn makes us dissatisfied with our world for all the right reasons and then points us to a pathway to our true home and our true identity. Indeed, that is what any reading of The Chronicles ought to evince and maybe even what a book about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe should do as well!
That indeed is my challenge in Further Up and Further In. I am attempting what I call an “inside out” approach, designed to increase your appreciation for the strangeness and oddness of what is going on inside Aslan’s story on several levels while we are inside Narnia, not outside of it. I don’t want you to spend a minute more outside the text thank you have to because our time in Narnia is too precious to waste in search of external sources. The Chronicles tell a simple story on the surface but one that is actually clever and complex and thus one that repays many visits and rereadings. At the same time, because of those very revisits, our experiences threaten to become commonplace and ordinary. My job is to help you keep coming back to Narnia and finding it as exhilarating and as disarmingly fresh as the first time you visited it. A tall order, yes, but one worth the risk. Fortunately, Lewis has written just the sort of work that enables us to enjoy that freshness every time!
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Dr. Bruce Edwards is professor of English at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. He is a preeminent scholar on C.S. Lewis, having authored several books and many scholarly articles on his life and works, including, A Rhetoric of Reading: C.S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy and The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C.S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer. He is a contributor to collections of essays about Lewis and the Inklings, and has for many years maintained a popular Web site on the life and works of C.S. Lewis. This fall, Edwards is a keynote speaker with “Narnia on Tour,” a traveling lecture series by leading Lewis scholars. Learn more at www.narniaontour.com. Edwards graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Missouri-Rolla, and received his Master’s Degree from Kansas State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Literature and Rhetoric from the University of Texas at Austin, writing his dissertation on the literary criticism of C.S. Lewis. You can contact him by e-mail at edwards@bgsu.edu.
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