Reading Wednesday

[troisoiseaux]

Recently read

Finished The French Revolution by Ian Davidson, which was... fine? Fine/meh cusp? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I found myself wishing for more depth and a slightly less self-righteous tone, but credit where credit's due to Davidson for looking at the impact of the Revolution outside of Paris— I learned new information about both the war in Europe and the uprisings/ civil war elsewhere in France.

Read C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I feel like I must have read as a kid (I may have only seen the 2005 movie?) and Prince Caspian, which I definitely didn't. Overall, I enjoyed both - especially Lewis' scene-setting/descriptions of Narnia - although hoo boy This Whole Thing Smacks of Gender (and also Imperialism, and Christian Allegory).

Currently reading

Currently reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I'm enjoying somewhat less, because I'm not sure which is more grating, Eustace Scrubb or whatever point C.S. Lewis was trying to make here, which I suspect is a 1950s version of complaining about liberal snowflakes...?

Continuing to make progress on Anna Karenina, although I'm definitely missing the historical context necessary to make sense of Levin's whole peasant land-reform thing.

Comments

[kore]

It's very "LOL liberal snowflakes," down to the mocking of health stuff, which has uh not aged well!

I think I just powered through most of the peasant stuff in Anna K, not skimming exactly, but kind of like when you eat something you don't like fast to get it over with.

[troisoiseaux]

It's very "LOL liberal snowflakes," down to the mocking of health stuff, which has uh not aged well!

I'm most gobsmacked by the part where he painted "no corporal punishment in schools" as a bad thing. Wtf, Clive.

[kore]

Especially given how he writes about schools in his autobiography!

[osprey_archer]

IMO in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Lewis is trying, simultaneously, to work out his own bad feelings about his experiences in traditional (horrible, Dickensian) boarding schools and also mock progressive trends in education that he dislikes and these two things meld into something very odd.

I also once saw someone respond to the book's first line ("There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it") with "Bold words from a man named Clive Staples Lewis," and ever since then I've had a sneaking suspicion that Eustace is a little bit a self-insert.

[kore]

Oh I love the idea of Eustace as a self-insert! That goes along with him being a dragon and having his scaly hide peeled off by Aslan (hello conversion narrative) too. Especially since old Jack looked back at young Jack with not a small amount of horror.

I feel guilty about admitting it these days now that people dislike the nastiness at the beginning, but Voyage is my favourite Narnia book and always has been. I'm just a giant sucker for journeys.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, exactly. And the ways Eustace is horrible are the ways old Jack thought young Jack was horrible, too: he's skeptical and priggish. (But I think old Jack has a sneaking fondness for them both, too, given that Eustace goes on to become the hero of the next book.)

[oursin]

Yeah, Lewis's take seems to be that if you don't keep the pupils on the hop as much as possible with lessons and compulsory games, there will be nothing but bullying all the time - because of Fallen Human Nature, or something?

I will cautiously admit that progressive schools did tend to have a problem in that many parents were likely to send their children there only when more conventional establishments had already, sometimes several times, expelled them as intractable. But I don't think Lewis is making any sort of nuanced case!

[osprey_archer]

It might be Fallen Human Nature or just The Nature of Schools. Either way I think it's pretty clear that Lewis views schools as intractably miserable places.

[legionseagle]

I've always wondered how far Experiment House = Dartington Hall. He was in correspondence with a woman who taught (or had some admin post) at Dartington Hall who was in a bad marriage, and since we do get the moorland setting (which would rule out Bedales - and people I knew who'd been at Bedales looked on Dartington Hall as the place where one went when one had with extreme ingenuity made Bedales too hot to hold one) and the very laissez-faire attitude.

But nuance and Lewis in this instance were not on speaking terms.

[oursin]

And then you finally ended up at Summerhill with AS Neill...

[troisoiseaux]

his own bad feelings about his experiences in traditional (horrible, Dickensian) boarding schools

I think we get a little bit of that in both The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (with the line about how Lucy's magical healing potion not only heals Edmund's wounds from the final battle but "he looks more like himself than he had since before he went to that awful school" or something) and Prince Caspian (when Aslan and Bacchus are running around freeing Narnia, they liberate both a girls' school and a young teacher at a boys' school) as well.

I've had a sneaking suspicion that Eustace is a little bit a self-insert.

...huh.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, exactly. Schools are inevitably horrible in the Narnia books; Lewis seems to believe that school is so axiomatically awful that progressive schools can't possibly be any different, and so the fact that they supposedly ARE different is grounds for suspicion in itself.

[troisoiseaux]

The inside of C.S. Lewis' head feels like an exhausting place to be.

[oursin]

One almost feels he would have sympathised with Pink Floyd!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG1fgCHvDNQ:
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone
All in all it's just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall

[legionseagle]

I tried to use that in a school assembly. It got shot down rather quickly.

[oursin]

It's like, 'these are the awful people who were responsible for the 1945 Labour Government, the NHS, the Welfare State, the 1944 Education Act, and The Fall of Civilisation As We Know It!' (My personal head-canon is that of course Alberta is a pillar of the local family-planning clinic, o, the horror...)

My current research project, or one of them, is pretty much on the kind of people the Scrubbs were, and yay for them, too, even with the sometimes sillinesses.

[kore]

Alberta is a pillar of the local family-planning clinic, o, the horror

Someone should write that fic!

[troisoiseaux]

It's like, 'these are the awful people who were responsible for the 1945 Labour Government, the NHS, the Welfare State, the 1944 Education Act, and The Fall of Civilisation As We Know It!'

It's definitely reminiscent of Screwtape Proposes a Toast.... at least he's consistent?

[legionseagle]

You mean she's Charis Frankenburg?!?

[oursin]

Rather further to the left, I think!

[legionseagle]

Oh, yes, I've always assumed the "foreign schools" were in the USSR.

[legionseagle]

And don't forget the nationalisation of the railways!