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Puddleglums Stand - 'The Silver Chair' by C S Lewis

By Lisa Day, August 16, 2010

My father loves plums and one day went out to buy himself a plum tree. He went to the garden centre and selected a tree with ‘Plum tree’ written on it and drove home thinking about all the lovely plums he and his wife could eat, allow his children to eat and his grandchildren to eat. He got home and his wife dug a hole into which he planted the tree with lots of manure. In the spring one of his friends came visiting and he took her to see the plum tree that was now covered with blossom. ‘Stuart,’ said his friend, ‘this is a very rare and special plum tree and must be the only one in the world because unlike most plum trees, this one is covered in apple blossom.’

The story so far…

Eustace and Jill are not friends at their school, Experiment House, because Eustace is a bully and Jill is a victim. But when the pupils come back after a holiday Eustace is changed. He has stopped being a bully and now courageously stands up to ‘Them’ but has attracted their attention. He finds Jill crying behind the gym and she tells him that they have marked him out for ‘treatment’.

Jill cannot see anyway out of the horrible school but out of curiosity asks what has changed for Eustace and Eustace tells her about Narnia. Eustace went with his cousins to Narnia and travelled to the edge of the world with Caspian and after meeting Aslan became a better person. While he is telling Jill this they are discovered by Them and run to the door that leads to moor only to be called into Narnia.

Jill’s first meeting with Aslan is not the best. He has to intervene to prevent Eustace from being killed when Jill accidently knocks him from the cliff. He gives her water, grace and three signs to help her to find Prince Rilian who has been abducted.

In a nutshell, Jill goes to Narnia, meets Eustace, fluffs the first sign, the two are partnered with a marshwiggle called Puddleglum and travel into the wilds to find Rilian. As they do so they travel into the land of the Northern giants. One morning they meet a woman riding a horse with a Knight in a full set of armour. They discuss their mission with her and she advises them to go to see the gentle giants and to get special treatment to say, ‘that they had been sent by the Lady of the Green Kirtle for the autumn feast’. They stay with the Giants and discover to their horror that Man pie is a traditional meal for the autumn feast and flee. They flee into the ruined city of the giants where they had seen the second sign (and fluffed it) and hide under a rock which leads to Underworld.

In underworld they are immediately confronted by and arrested by Gnomes. The gnomes are ugly, sad and downright depressing. ‘Many sink down and few return to the sunlit lands’ is their catchphrase. They take the party to the castle where the Queen of underworld lives and leave them with the Knight. The Knight reveals himself to be a silly man, rational according to the premis’ he is accorded, but silly in comparison to the Narnians. He is unable to grasp the simple moral outrage of invading another realm, he is a prig and idiot. He reveals that he is subject to a curse which makes him go insane for an hour every night and can only be restrained in a silver chair. When the hour is upon them he is bound and goes insane but interestingly enough begins to talk sense. At last he demands that they release him, which they refuse to do until he does it in the name of Aslan which is the third sign. When they release him it is revealed that he is Rillian, and at that moment the Queen returns and she is not best pleased.

The Queen scatters sweet smelling herbs onto the fire and begins to play a musical instrument. She combines lulling magic with insipid deconstructive philosophy to prove to the Narnians that there is no Narnia and nowhere outside Underworld. A note on the philosophy is that it is entirely deconstructive and rational as far as you don’t look behind it. Eventually she is on the verge of proving her theory and the Narnians accepting that she is right until Puddleglum makes his stand.

Puddleglum does not attempt to argue with the Queen but rather steps out of the spell that she has created and simply points out that if Narnia were all a dream then that dream would be better than living in the Queen’s real world. As he stamps out the fire the spell dies and the Queen becomes a serpent to murder the Narnians. In the struggle the queen is dispatched and the Narnians now seek a way out of Underworld.

One of the problems that they face is the Gnomes who they assume would resist their attempts to escape. Other problems are the appearance of a volcano and the rising level of the underworld sea. As they travel they catch sight of the gnomes, patrolling like soldiers and watching them. Determined not to be thwarted they catch a gnome to discover what their plans are and discover that the Gnomes themselves were under the spell of the Queen and as unwilling slaves as Rillian had been. They rejoice at the death of the Queen and escape into Bison, the deep home of the Gnomes.

The Narnians continue on their way and all comes good. Aslan calls the children back to his land and they meet the dead Caspian who is restored into youth. He asks Aslan if he can see the world where the Children came from and Aslan allows him not only to see it but also to be involved. Along with the children he confronts the bullies and sets in action a chain of events that changes Experiment House forever.

Analysis

This is a book about freedom. This is a book about joy. This is very much a book about CS Lewis himself. One of the reasons why Lewis was such a skilled author is that he put so of himself into his work. In the ’Magician’s Nephew’ he wrote about his grief for his mother and in “The Silver Chair” he wrote about himself.

Lewis’s autobiography is one of the most enlightening books for understanding his work. In it he describes his journey to Christ and how Christ changed him from a ‘20th century prig’ into the man who wrote so many books that influence so many Christians and repulse so many atheists. As he slowly moved from being an occultist, atheist, materialist towards the joy of Christianity he once had an impression as he rode a bus that he was wearing a suit of armour. This armour prevented him from feeling joy, from having true feelings and from being anything more than a clanking toy soldier and he knew that he had a choice he could remain in the armour and the Lord would not bother him again OR he could step out of it into joy. The Silver Chair is a story about this. The Queen’s insipid philosophy insulates the Narnians from the Joy of real life.

A recurring theme in the book is the lying nature of evil. Just like my father’s plum tree the Lady of the Green Kirtle is not what she appears to be. The Queen of Underworld might wear green a colour associated with life, joy and fertility but when she sends the Narnians to become man pies she reveals herself to deal in death not life. When she meets them in the throne room her magic is based not on forcing the Narnians to change their minds but by encouraging them to change their minds using logical arguments which are based on a false premise. This premise is that there is nothing except her world and everything that they argue needs to be related to her world and the experiences therein. She ‘proves’ that Aslan does not exist by suggesting that a lion is merely a imagination created after the children saw a cat, the sun is merely the children’s imagination after seeing a lamp and the sun cannot possibly be because what would it hang from? If there was sky! This is exactly the kind of reasoning used by secularists and humanists in the world today. They argue that the only kind of reasoning that should be accepted is that which can be gained from, ‘Experience, science and logic’ and specifically they exclude the supernatural. The problem that they face is that they are now confined to the world and what they can, or people they trust, can experience. If you confine yourself to the material around you then you can make significant intellectual gain but you can only go so far and some of the greater concepts of the world begin to collapse. In the world of natural selection where is love? In a world of logic and authority where is justice? Love, justice and the other virtues that make the world worthwhile, real and vibrant come from GOD and if you exclude him then you exclude everything that makes the world worth living in.

“The Silver Chair” is a battle between two paradigms. The first is the Narnian paradigm, joy, pageantry and muscular Christian values. The second is the real which masquerades as real but is merely a construct that denies anything other than the material world. The Queen of this is realm is not only content with ruling the underworld but wants also to extend her domain into Narnia. Just like modern atheists who are not content to reject GOD but demand that everyone else rejects GOD also.

It is very telling that the watchwords of the Gnomes is “Many come down from the sunlight lands and few return” because this is true. Some fall, some explore and others are captured but once you descend into materialism it is near impossible to escape.

But the Queen’s realm is not restricted to the underworld of Narnia. It is clear that it is mirrored at Experiment House where Eustace and Jill are students. Jill and Eustace, before either of them met Aslan, were unbelievers who corresponded perfectly to their environment, unbelief is a rational response to an environment where belief is not encouraged. But what is not rational would be for people who conform to their environments be unhappy. Both Jill and Eustace are unhappy characters who find joy in Narnia.

What is telling is that Aslan knows all of this. He knows that the King’s son is being kept hostage, that the Gnomes are enslaved, that Narnia is under threat and that Experiment House is an unpleasant place to be and he is willing to intervene. When Lewis wrote about Aslan he wanted to imagine what Jesus would have been like if he was in Narnia. So Aslan is accorded all of the passion, ruthless love, concern and joy that we find in Jesus. He comprehensively intervenes, rescuing the Gnomes, the Narnians and the children from the banality, oppressiveness and evil of real life.

Jesus wants you to have joy. He came so that we could have life and have it abundantly. The materialistic life, the cold darkness of atheism and the impossibility of humanism is not for us. If all they can offer is the world then I would rather have a dream, I would follow God even if there was no God and be a citizen of heaven even if there were no heaven. If you want God to rescue you from materialism all you have to do is ask him, and he will do it personally.

Dominic Russell