Got the annotated version, myself, of course.

Of course.

Don't much like it.

Don't especially like Narnia, either, though I make allowances, seeing how it's for kids.

Ok. World is back to normal. Father may relax.

Narnia isn't an allegory. Thus I doubly disagree with gherkin

Yeah, but if one of the giants was named Despair, it might be an allegory. If he was named Rumblebuffin, probably not.

But one needn't find it an allegory to dislike it.

It certainly is.

Lewis said it wasn't.

He made some relevant remarks in a 1958 letter, which appear, from the context, to be a continuation of similar points in the unfinished essay "On Criticism" printed in OF OTHER WORLDS. That ends with a para on allegory, and the letter is a natural continuation. He distinguishes between allegory and supposition/suppositional, and other things.

He convinces me.

He was wrong.

It's obviously not quite as simplistic an allegory as Pilgrim's Regress, but it's still clearly allegorical in some sense. Note that my allusion to Tolkien speaks of allegory in all its forms. Lewis, needless to say, had a highly developed view of the nature of allegory and speaks about it as an academic specialist. Very worthwhile. Very interesting. At the technical level, he's probably right. I wasn't speaking at that level. Aslan is Christ, says Lewis. Allegory says I.

If you want to really fight hard about the word choice, then I'll grant the point and say that I cordially dislike art that builds upon such simplistic one-to-one correspondences and hence invites people to make those connections, thus solving the symbolic puzzle the art is reduced to.

Note, once again, that I am admitting I'm pushing harder on the point here than perhaps is entirely warranted in order to attempt to correct for our current hyper-obsession with reductionism about art and everything else.

I do think Lewis intended people to make connections. I also think that the story was the primary motivator for him, which is not the case in any form of allegory (sez I).

I think Lewis thought allegory should not be treated reductionistically, and I think he's right about that normative claim. I just think that the modern mind is so hyper-reductionistic that when you invite reductionistic treatment, you're sure to get it. Allegory worked well, I take it, with the medieval mind, which was anti-reductionistic. Not so with us. What was Lewis's line about the need for the educationist to irrigate deserts rather than to tame jungles?....something like that.

Careful with this "our" and hyper-obession. I'm rarely reductionist on anything.

What Lewis says, in part, in the letter mentioned was "If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, "What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?" This is not allegory at all...". And goes on for another page (COLLECTED LETTERS OF C.S.LEWIS, vol III, ed. Hooper, HarperCollins, 2007, p.1004).

It is, as he calls it a supposition.

And.... I was going on to type in more from the letter, and add stuff, when I haven't even had coffee yet, and then I googled the next para of the letter and found this:

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blog ... legorical/

Much better. Agree or not, but it is a position taken by the author. On principles related to literary concepts he is certainly qualified to have an opinion on.

Convinces me.

(The authors of the text Lewis is discussing) "...misunderstood the pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda—they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental—and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts...."

Lewis, ABOLITION OF MAN, Macmillan Co, 1st US ed., 1947, pp. 8-9)

The 'our' refers to the culture, not necessarily to each person within it.

As I say, Lewis, writing as an academic specialist, has a well-developed (and somewhat idiosyncratic, but that's OK) view of allegory, and according to his view, Aslan isn't allegorical. I think he's got it wrong, but as I also say, I'm willing to concede the terminological point in order to leave the substantive one. Which the Lewis quotation you kindly provided sheds great light on.

Ok.

Suppose I was speaking allegorically when I wrote that?
What I really meant was that I'd gotten a collection of loose pages out of sort and was looking for page sequences, naturally.

Oh. Numbers.

As is well known, I can't do numbers.

Numbers, like whisky, are the devil.