‘연대기적 속물주의’, ‘심오한 주문’, 그리고 시간 —『나니아 연대기』가 천착하는 과거의 중요성

Abstract

This essay attempts to show that The Chronicles of Narnia is a fictional embodiment of C. S. Lewis's unique conception of time in which the past overrides the present as the dominant referential locus of truth. To Lewis the present as opposed to the past was potentially deceptive. This deep trenched suspicion of the present with its ethos being best captured in those words “chronological snobbery” was like a life-long mantra for Lewis and is pervasive throughout many of his writings and memorably in Narnia. In order to give a solid shape to his extraordinary re-envisioning of the cherished past, Lewis integrated into the novel diverse elements of Norse and Greco-Roman mythologies, biblical stories, and some of the ancient philosophical perception of the world within an extremely complicated and confusing time-scheme. And he highlighted the strong political implication of Narnia: the present regime is wicked and thus ultimately subject to recuperation under the guidance of Aslan. The apparently radical, bewildering end of the story in which the authenticity and integrity of Narnia is declared as being eternal in its totality, regardless of its visible physical destruction, is hardly reductive. Rather, it suggests that it was a final maneuver on the part of the author not only to cut off the tiring, if not vicious, circle of corruption and restoration, wickedness and goodness but also to perpetuate the glorious past into the future, a terminal blow on the ugly face of the deceptive present.