But ironically, it increases boredom. Just as drug addicts have to keep taking bigger doses to get high, we must have more and more stimulation to keep us interested. This is also why our popular entertainment has to keep getting more extreme—more shocking, more gruesome, more pornographic—to break through our growing insensibility.
And when the bombardment slows—when we have to endure silence, when we have to do something that is not fun but necessary, when we have to attend to someone other than ourselves—we can hardly handle that at all. And it is seldom the fault of the wife when her husband no longer appreciates her. Nor is it the fault of the church that our hearts are dulled to the point that we are oblivious to the presence of Christ. Many churches, ironically, try to play the same game of hyperstimulation with action-packed services and numerous activities, oblivious to how they are contributing to the problem.
This dull insensitivity to life and to God is a moral and spiritual problem. But his is also a failure of imagination. Shklovsky believed that art, by presenting its subject from an unusual point of view, defamiliarizes the routine. The formal structures of art and the different contexts it creates increase our perception.
Most people never take a second look at the bowl of fruit in their kitchen, but take that bowl of fruit out of the kitchen, put it into a painting, and hang it on a museum wall—as in a Dutch Master still life—and people will marvel at its beauty. They will appreciate the texture of the orange peel, the bruises on the apple, and the light reflecting off the bowl. Ironically, the beauty in the painting is the same beauty as in the kitchen. But we never notice the fruit in the kitchen, because it is so familiar.
The painting, though, causes us to pay attention to these forms and colors, appreciating their aesthetic impact. For instance, a man might, through many years of familiarity, take his wife for granted. As he reads and contemplates this imaginary relationship, he might learn to notice and appreciate his own wife once again.
Art and literature can enrich our daily routines, and they can help us become more sensitive to the subtle beauties of our own lives by defamiliarizing what we might otherwise overlook. But art and literature do not always have this effect. A disturbing trend has grown in the world of virtual gaming in which people are now able to create online alternate realities where they can live out their lives as completely different people. In theory this might sound like fun, but in actuality things like this only serve to increase dissatisfaction and magnify boredom.
Similarly, the married man above could read a novel that promotes an escapist sexual fantasy in his mind, motivating him to divorce his real wife in search of an idealized storybook woman who does not exist. The path toward a greater appreciation for the things in your life does not include forgetting them entirely.
Shklovsky said that the way art defamiliarizes is by its aesthetic form, which makes perception more difficult. It takes work of the imagination to decipher, interpret, and contemplate a good novel, drama, or painting. Some works of art, however, have little aesthetic form. They are immediately accessible, make no demands, and do not cause the reader to think.
These works of poor aesthetic quality seldom defamiliarize their subjects. Instead of possessing their own aesthetic forms, they tend to be conventional, following the same plots and employing the same character types as every other example of their genre.
They are, in short, familiar , works of mere entertainment that end up contributing to boredom. Soap operas and romance novels might, through their fantasies, tempt a spouse to commit adultery. A bad use of the imagination can indeed lead us astray, but the good use of the imagination can help us stay on the right path.
Thus our aesthetic taste has a moral dimension. This does not have as much to do with the content whether or not a work contains violence or sexuality as it does with how that content is presented—that is, its form.
Works of art that are true and good and beautiful can defamiliarize our lives. This entails not just staying in the imaginary realm, but bringing back its lessons to illuminate the real world, as Lewis did in The Chronicles of Narnia. Bringing theMessage Back to Life C.
As we discussed elsewhere,13 Lewis, who became a Christian as an adult, marveled at the way the astonishing, breathtaking truths of Christianity—that God became Man, that He bore the sins of the world and paid their penalty, that limitless joy awaits us after death—have somehow, to believers and nonbelievers alike, become humdrum and mundane.
He remembered being taken to church as a child and leaving with little impression made. Lewis blamed this on the fact that adults would tell him how he was supposed to feel about Jesus and the artificial reverence with which he was supposed to approach Bible stories.
But surely the problem was not with Christianity itself, but with what Victor Shklovsky described earlier: For young Jack Lewis, the Christianity of his childhood—apparently presented in an inept way—was just another habit. It became so familiar that he never thought about it. And when he wanted to escape his overly familiar, mundane life, such as when he went off to school and university, Christianity was one of the many dull things he left behind. This is probably true not just for a young C.
Lewis, but for many of us who were raised in the church. The ramifications of our beliefs are still present in our moral assumptions, our laws, and our institutions, but few people notice them anymore. Thankfully Lewis decided not just to give us another set of reasons to believe Christian dogma, but rather he chose to show us how faith in Christ can be exhilarating.
He presents Christianity from a fresh point of view, causing us to notice the wonder of what it has always been. Sometimes his use of logical reasoning is one of these fresh approaches, since our culture has long forgotten the intellectual dimension of Christianity.
But he also uses imaginative and artistic devices to open our eyes to what the old-time religion is actually saying.
Consider this famous passage from Mere Christianity:. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.
He did not intend to. The argument itself is an old one, a classic defense of the deity of Christ. Aslan represents Jesus Christ, Peter and Caspian represent knights in the European Christian tradition, and Lucy's struggle with faith is a quintessential Christian struggle.
For some, including J. Tolkien , this amount of allegory will be a little too much. For others, it'll be just right. The Telmarines aren't given a religion of their own, making it difficult to read the war as a conflict of religious interests. Peter and Susan's exclusion from Narnia definitely has religious undertones—especially given Susan's controversial fate at the end of The Last Battle.
Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. Previous Next. Religion Probably no surprise to see religion rearing its head in Prince Caspian , is it? Many people today deny the ancient stories of the Bible. They consider the record of Jesus Christ to be a myth, a made-up series of implausible accounts that were embellished with miracles long after His death.
Many people today. Facebook Twitter. We did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty 2 Pet. Prince Caspian illustrates different attitudes toward truths contained in an ancient but imperishable story. How individuals respond determines their destiny.
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Chapter 9 Prince Caspian. Narnia: The Fantasy World of C. Lewis 2. The Man Behind the Stories 3.
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