Hello all, I'm sorry it's been so long since updating this series. In my defense, this book is one of the more "miserable" of the seven, as Mari Ness points out in the first paragraph of her blog post here. There are good reasons for this in the planetary scheme of things, and I'll get to them below. Hopefully, this post will be short, since there wasn't much in Ms. Ness' article that I disagreed with. (And I CAN'T WAIT to get to HHB, which is my absolute favorite and will take two full posts at least!) Again, please read the original post, since I will (as usual) be responding without repeating.
The Silver Chair has as its presiding planet what we consider not a planet at all: Luna, or the moon. But when you think about the original meaning of the word "planet" (as Lewis was wont to do with many words), the name might be more fitting than we think. "Planet" means "wanderer", and is there any heavenly body in our terrestrial sky that wanders more than the moon? The stars remain in their positions as the sky turns, such that one can find them in the same configuration any day of the year. The planets move much more freely, but still show up predictably and generally stick to the same course. The sun, of course, defines days and seasons, rising faithfully every morning and setting every evening. But the moon seems to be all over the place, waxing and waning and showing up in the daytime sky and getting closer to and further from the earth. Granted, we can predict a lot of that now, after millennia of study. But it's hardly a surprise that the changeable, wandering moon was associated in the medieval mind with wanderlust, fickleness, and insanity (or "lunacy"--moon pun!). Hence, "the first and only quest tale of the Narnia series", where the destination is uncertain, leading the characters to wander a great deal with confusing or "not always clear instructions."
But there's another important reason why the instructions are not always clear. Luna, in the medieval model of the universe, was the boundary marker of our fallen world. All the other planets' spheres (between one orbit and another, their territory if you will) were in heaven; or more accurately, were "the heavens". Out beyond the moon, everything was clear, orderly, and perfect. Confusion, or indeed evil itself, only existed below the moon, in our terrestrial sphere. Aslan makes this difference part of the story when he tells Jill before blowing her into Narnia, "Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly; I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind." And in Planet Narnia (pp. 128-129), Michael Ward points out that this is not the only Lunar-esque divide in SC: first there's Aslan's mountain, where everything is perfectly clear; then there's Narnia and Ettinsmoor, where things are not always what they seem and Jill and Eustace "muff" the signs; then there's Underland, where you can barely see a thing and the witch's deception rules. (And then there's the deeper land of Bism, but we see so little of it that it's hard to comment on.) Thus, the answer to the question I posed at the end of my last post is that in the system of Narnia and Lewis' wider imagination, it's this side of the moon that is truly "dark".
As Ms. Ness astutely points out, the northern lands beyond Narnia are "very wet", and this is yet another aspect of Luna's influence. By association with the tides and by its fluctuating nature, the moon was closely tied to water in the medieval mindset. And I am very impressed by how C. S. Lewis manages to make the landlocked journey of SC atmospherically wetter than the sea voyage of the preceding VDT. The overwhelming aesthetic of VDT, despite taking place on a large body of water, is light, glowing, shining, white and gold. Jill and Eustace's journey with Puddleglum (whose very name seems to drip) is overwhelmingly cold and wet and dim and gray. And that's the above-ground portion. Even in England, the laurels are dripping, and Eustace can't sit down for the wet grass.
Regarding the underground portion, just a personal note: I was never scared of underground places like Jill and Ms. Ness. I'm more on Eustace's side, being afraid of heights. Enclosed spaces, to me, feel safe and cozy. This is why I was so content to live in basement apartments for about two and a half years. But, moving on...
The question is raised of why Aslan doesn't just rescue Rilian himself, since he obviously knows where he is and how to get there. I struggled a bit with how to answer this, until my husband said succinctly, "Why don't I do my child's math homework?" It's because the point isn't only to get the right answers, or in this context, the point isn't just to rescue Rilian. It's important for the person experiencing it to learn how to solve the problem, to make mistakes and struggle and grow. Given Ms. Ness' praise of how Jill does just that, I doubt she would really want to take the opportunity away from her. (Not to mention Eustace and Puddleglum, but we don't see their growth as much.)
This educational aspect of the story might also help to shed some light (moonlight, naturally) on one of the most controversial scenes in Narnia: the corporal punishment of the bullies at Experiment House at the hands of Jill, Eustace, and Caspian, abetted by Aslan. As Ward explains in Planet Narnia, "the Moon was associated with grammar", one of the "seven medieval arts". Grammar could be extrapolated to mean an entire educational system, and discipline was a huge part of that. At Experiment House, though, discipline is nonexistent. Anyone who gets caught in wrongdoing is deemed an "interesting psychological case" and brought in for a conversation in which manipulation is easy for those who know what grown-ups like to hear. Very little real learning is going on in their ostensible subjects, because real learning involves effort. It involves difficulty, struggle, and hard work. The poor victims are already expending all their energy in staying safe, and the bullies (this is important) are skating by on their forceful personalities, never facing anything difficult, anything that might hurt them in any way. Not only is this unfair, but it's harmful to the bullies themselves. When they get outside the school environment, where such things as math and reading and science--and diligence and perseverance and recovery from failure--actually matter, they'll be completely unprepared. This is a wake-up call to them and to the adults who have made this situation possible. Appropriately, the Head is found "behaving like a lunatic" (moon pun!) after the incident.
Now, briefly, to respond to the penultimate paragraph: why enchant Rilian to be such an obnoxious person? This isn't answered in Planet Narnia, but I think I can make a guess. The witch didn't want to hang out with him for the rest of her life, despite what she might have told him. After she used him to take over Narnia, giving its inhabitants a large dose of bitter irony, her plan was probably to get rid of him and just rule it by herself. Perhaps she would have allowed him one moment of clarity before the end, just to make him suffer with the knowledge of what he had done. But in the meantime, his grating personality was likely to drive away potential rescuers, as even the Aslan-sent party is heartily sick of his company after one dinner.
That's all I have for now, but next comes (drum roll, please)...The Horse and His Boy! And this will be tons of fun, because it contains one of my favorite plots as well as some of my favorite scenes and characters. Under analysis, it also revealed plenty of deeper meanings and fun connections, so I'll probably take two posts to discuss everything I found. :)
See you then!
