Chapter
15 gave me an uneasiness that I never expected to feel from The
Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a
children's novel. At best I figured that I had reached a level of
academic objectivity that something crafted to entice the juvenile
mind would not have the gravity to evoke a mature feeling in me. I am
shook by strong rhetoric and astute diction and an authorial acumen
sharp enough to shave your hair off. McCarthy. Faulkner. Heller.
Those whose command of language is only rivaled by their insight. And
yet, this unassuming moral didactic inspired something that—though
not as powerful—I only ever thought I would feel as a consequence
of a work much more grand in scope.
Lewis
worked with what he had, and the book spoke modestly. He created this
rich fantasy world full of all that makes our own world real to us
and he throws the reader into it. Perhaps children experience this
differently by holding looser connections to the world and an
eagerness to retreat to a “secret country.” Most of us, I would
imagine, understood what it was going in and were complacent
in our willingness to engage. We let the world come easy but we can't
help but to keep it at arms length; I did so, anyway.
When
we reach the penultimate chapter, Lewis has already set in motion his
universe from page one and it persists. The characters, the places
and the interactions exist separate from our world but still feel
bound to an order and a fantastic rationality. We learn to live in
this world as Eustace does, we do as the Narnians do, and it reaches
a state of familiarity—and more importantly, consistency. Dragons
can be introduced in chapter 6 and it gels with our understanding. We
can begin to expect these things to come. As I am sure others can
testify to (as I unfortunately have no real experience of this
myself) traveling abroad and being thrown into something foreign begs
you to assimilate. The society has its way of doing things and they
are far larger than any attempt to go against the grain.
By
constructing a system that is consistent and to a certain extent
understandable with a suspension of disbelief, Lewis sets up the
tonal shift in the climax of the novel occurring specifically in
chapter 14, appropriately named “The Beginning of the End of the
World.” The crew reaches Ramandu's island and it maintains the
facade of fantasy for a short while. However, it is in this chapter
that Lewis breaks from his consistency and we are given a jarring
glance behind the curtain. Caspian inquires into the reasons for
Coriakin's change in cosmic nature, and Ramandu replies “it is not
for you, a son of Adam, to know what faults a star can commit” (p.
I left my book in class). Leaving aside the religious allegories at
the heart of the novel, this sentence comes from beyond the story,
presenting two allusions that break away from the character of the
narrative. Lewis explicitly invokes Adam of the book of Genesis and
the “Morning Star” Lucifer within the same sentence and it flies
completely over our protagonists heads by not garnering even a single
puzzled look from the conversation's participants; the allusions
shoot straight past them for the reader.
This
hiccup is the literary equivalent of holding a conversation in French
in the heart of Paris and having the person excuse their sneeze in
English before continuing on without skipping a beat. Lewis creates
the rules and then bends them, and it plants a disconcerted feeling.
We have traveled into his world, and we think we know how it works
until he starts tweaking it. It is this reason, I believe, that is
the root for the tension and uneasiness in the succeeding chapter.
The crew departs from the island and though we have come to believe
that we are still under the jurisdiction of Narnia, we watch the
rules change around us. Lewis literally writes, “All was different.
For one thing they all found that they were needing less sleep. One
did not want to go to bed, nor to eat much, nor even to talk except
in low voices” (p. ). The characters are reacting to these changes
and this does not conflate with our understanding of the mechanisms
of Narnia. Something is off, dissonant. Cue tension.
Most
uncomfortable of these passages is Drinian's observation of the
weather. It is not magical; it's haunting. “Drinian said: 'I can't
understand this. There is not a breath of wind. The sail hangs dead.
The sea is as flat as a pond. And yet we drive on as fast as if there
were a gale behind us'” (p. ). Eustace's sensation of “'Hurry,
hurry, hurry'” (p. ) has returned and now our surroundings exist in
something akin to an orderly chaos. Drinian is describing something
that is not natural or comfortable, even for a world of fantasy. It
very much reminds me of the same sensation I get from a bout of
several consecutive hours of reading literature in hours of the
morning that no one should ever see. The book then rides this stream
of uncertainty to its conclusion, where even Aslan sheds his familiar
appearance.
Lewis'
writing never quite makes an about-face, and I don't think he was
intending that. It changes in just slight enough of a fashion to
generate emotions certain readers were not expecting to feel by the
same devices that a good horror genre uses to slowly bend, twist and
finally unravel. Indeed, this doesn't have to be exclusive to
literature. Any art is subject to these nuances of perspective and
life as well, seeing that the former is just a reflection of such. I
wish I had a story to share about being taken out of place in a
foreign environment as drastically as Lewis does at the end of Voyage
of the Dawn Treader. Oh well, in
the meantime I have my books.
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