Tolkien Tuesday: Reading "The Magician's Nephew--Chapters 4-6"
Polly and Diggory journey to the dead city of Charn, where they encounter--and liberate--Jadis, one of the best and most terrifying villains in fantasy literature.
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Welcome to Tolkien Tuesdays, where I talk about various things that I love about the lore and writings of Tolkien, whether in a chapter reading or a character study or an essay or even writings about other, related authors (such as C.S. Lewis). I hope you enjoy reading these ruminations as much as I enjoy writing them and, if you have a moment, I’d love it if you’d subscribe to this newsletter. It’s free, but there are paid options, as well, if you’re of a mind to support a struggling writer. Either way, thank you for joining me!
We resume our reading of C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew with a trio of chapters that introduce us to one of the most famous and compelling of all of the author’s creations: Jadis, who will go on to become known as the White Witch. As both Polly and Diggory learn, much to their chagrin, she is a force to be reckoned with and, though her home world might have been destroyed–by her own actions, no less–this only sets her free to wreak havoc on their own world and every other one that she encounters.
There’s something haunting and powerful about the way that Lewis describes the city of Charn. This is a city, and a world, that has come near to the end of its existence, as its blood-red and weary sun makes abundantly clear. For all that Lewis is often a slightly whimsical writer, the passages describing the dead city show that he had a keen eye for the unsettling and the terrifying, too. You can almost feel the dry, desiccated air and see the empty, crumbling grandeur of a city brought low by its own cruelty and by its most powerful scion.
It all leads up to the moment in which Polly and Diggory enter the room of statues, where Diggory–showing a bit of his uncle’s thoughtlessness–decides to ring the magical bell rather than leaving well enough alone. Up til now we’ve been led to see Diggory as very different from his uncle, in that he has a sense of decency and moral clarity that his elder lacks. Here, though, we get another indication that this might not be as clear-cut as we might like to think. Obviously Diggory would never go to the same lengths as Uncle Andrew in his pursuit of knowledge, but it’s just as clear that he’s not nearly as different from him as he would like to believe.
For her part, Polly shows herself to be a young woman of formidable good sense. She is, in her own way, just as adventurous as Diggory, but she tempers this with the kind of restraint that he would do well to heed. In that sense, she offers a bit of a counterpoint to Diggory’s latent sexism, and she joins the ranks of those other female characters in Lewis’ oeuvre who are far more sensible than their male counterparts. One can’t help but wonder just how different things might have been–particularly for Narnia–had Diggory not fallen prey to that human curiosity that has so often led mortals astray. Much like Eve, Diggory is tempted by the allure of knowledge and, once a powerful force like Jadis is released from her slumber, there is no putting her back.
I’ve been fascinated–beguiled, even–by Jadis since the very first time I saw her brought to life in the BBC adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Unlike, say, Sauron of The Lord of the Rings, she is very much a being of flesh and blood and, just as importantly, presence. She is right there, front and center, from the moment that she comes to life to the moment that she has a fateful confrontation with Uncle Andrew and Aunt Letty. For all that she is obviously evil and cruel and capable of great destruction–this is a woman who inflicted a total cataclysm on her home rather than face the reality of losing to her sister–you can’t help but be drawn to her. She is, as Uncle Andrew so patronizingly puts it, “a dem fine woman.”
Most of us know that, unlike Tolkien, Lewis was a huge fan of allegory and that he used it often. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to see a shadow of the atomic bomb in the phenomenon of The Deplorable Word, the charm that Jadis used at the last to ensure that she had the ultimate victory over her sister. Such is Jadis’ desire for domination, and such is the rigidity of her rational frame of mind, that to her the use of such a destructive power was literally the only thing she could have done in the circumstances. Moreover, as she says to Polly and Diggory–though mostly to the latter, since she doesn’t see Polly as worthy of any recognition at all–her decision to do so was a matter of State. Since, in the fashion of Louis XIV, she was the state, her people were all there to do with as she chose. Much like those in control of the atomic bomb thought they could play God, so Jadis believes that her absolute power is to do with as she chooses. And, also like those who had the control of atomic weapons, her power was also her greatest weakness, for who could respect a queen who ruled over a mass grave?
Time and again, we see just how frightening Jadis is and how far her rational mind has led her down the path to darkness and destruction. We tend to think that rational thought is a good thing, that it’s what keeps the unsettled tides of emotion from overwhelming us and causing chaos in the world. As Lewis makes clear, however, rationality and reason, when taken to their furthest extremes, can be destructive in their own right. It makes sense that Lewis would bring all of this into his fiction, given that he was a man who had lived through not one but two world-shattering conflicts and seen the scientific development of a weapon capable of horrendous destruction. After all, what else is the atomic bomb but the very embodiment of technology and modernity and humanity’s unquenchable thirst for domination, no matter the cost?
For all of that, the chapter “The Beginning of Uncle Andrew’s Troubles” makes it abundantly clear that neither Jadis nor Uncle Andrew are quite as all-powerful as they like to think. Like Magicians everywhere, they are led astray by their own hubris. And, just as Uncle Andrew is the height of ridiculous–particularly in his misbegotten belief that he could actually be of romantic interest to Jadis–so Jadis will ultimately find that she isn’t nearly as powerful or as mighty as she might like to believe. There are forces in the worlds that are far greater than she could ever be.