Hello and welcome to chapter 4 of our
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
read-through. I'm Jem, the Reader at St
John's parish church in Beeston and
today we're going to be looking at the
chapter 'Turkish Delight' so if you
haven't read the chapter, scurry off and
read it, I'll wait.  Read from, '... but what
are you, said the Queen again, are you a
great overgrown dwarf that has cut off
his beard?' and read all the way to, '... come
on men, said Lucy, let's find the others
what a lot adventures we shall have now
that we're all in it together.'  So, as
before, I'll be noting the things that
particularly struck me as I read this
chapter and I'm sure there are things
which struck you that I'm not going to
mention, so please do leave your thoughts
in the comments. I was really interested
to hear them.  So at the beginning of the
previous chapter, as with previous ones
we've looked, at Lewis ends with a
cliffhanger. The white witch appears around
the corner, we see her and her sledge - not
quite explained who she is - and she
demands to know who Edmund is. 'And what, pray you?' said the lady, looking hard Edmund. ' I'm...
I'm... my name's Edmund' said Edmund rather awkwardly.  He did not like the way she
looked at him.  The lady frowned.  'Is that
how you address a queen?' she asked,
looking sterner than ever.  'I beg your pardon, your Majesty, I didn't know', said
Edmund.  'Not know the Queen of Narnia!'
cried she.  'Ha! you should know us better
hereafter.  But I repeat, what are you?'
'Please your majesty,' said Edmund,  'I don't
know what you mean.  I'm at school, at
least I was. It's the holidays now.'  That's
the end of chapter three, and at the risk
of of over reading that exchange
slightly - although, you know, what am I
doing in these chats if not over reading
Lewis madly? -  I'm really interested in the
way in which identity is defined at the
end of this chapter, and the beginning of chapter four, the one we're talking
about today.  In a previous episode I
talked about the sorts of identity that
were ascribed to Lucy or offered to her,
being a girl, a human, a daughter of Eve,  and
here Edmund is asked not who she is,
but what he is.  He's made into an
object rather than a person,  and he
doesn't quite understand what's being
asked of him, and he says, 'I'm at school'.
Obviously that to us is defining
his age, it's defining his stage in life.  He's a
boy so he goes to school, the same way
that Lucy was asked, 'are you a girl?'  But I think
there's a failure of Edmund here - one of
the long long list of failures where
apparently recognising in these chapters.
He defines himself by an institution,
specifically an educational institution.
And that is not a good thing in Lewis's
fiction!  In the Silver Chair we see
Experiment House, the left wing school
that Lewis dreams up of all the
things that he dislikes, and where
there's bullying and education doesn't
go on properly.  And we see in the Dawn
Treader Eustace, who again is very proud
of his school and it believes in
institutions like the British Consulate,
things that aren't going to save him.   I
suppose it's worth pausing because,
particularly this chapter, it strikes me
that the identity of this book as a war
novel really comes into focus.  That
might seem a slightly old way to define
it. But after all it does take place right
after the Second World War.   The
first sentences of the book refer to the
war and the plot involves a group of
children who've been evacuated. And I
think this really is worth reading
through the the lens of the Second World
War and the global politics of the mid
20th century because it gives us a sense
of what was going into this book and how
we might read it.  So Lewis's suspicion of
'institutional man', or in this case
'institutional boy', I think is rooted in a
suspicion of the political
millenarianism and the political
idealism of the early 20th century.  A lot
of British intellectuals obviously were
communists in the 1920s and 30s.  In the
Second World War, where Nazism and Communism clashed and
in the political situation that he was
writing in, where Nazi terror and Soviet
terror were being increasingly
discovered and discussed.  It's also a
theological equipment I think due to his
evangelical heritage intellectually.
Lewis as we mentioned before has more
than a small streak of the
reformed evangelical tendency in his thought
and it's, there is a tradition certainly,
in that theological area of being
concerned about schemes for human
perfectibility not only because they
overlook things like original sin but
because they try to institutionalize and
systematize the gift of God. I think one
of the reasons why the the sale of
indulgences became such a focal point of
not only the the conflict of the
Reformation but the stories that we then
tell about the Reformation is first of
all this is this is a horrible thing to
do it's is it's clearly corrupt it's
clearly theologically questionable but
that it represented a lot of the things
that Reformed thinkers were suspicious
of in late medieval Catholicism. The idea
again of systematizing, of automating,
almost of building human systems around
the revelation and the love of God. So
that prospect seems quite a lot to read
just missed this small detail but I
think the the failure of Edmonds sense
of identity here is is quite serious
that he defines himself by institution
to which he belongs, rather than who he
is himself and the Queen responds by
misidentifying him in another way. 'But
what are you?' said the Queen again. 'Are
you a great overgrown dwarf that has cut
off his beard?' 'No your majesty' said
Edmund, 'I never had a beard. I'm a boy'. 'A
boy' said she, 'do you mean you're a son
of Adam?' and so on. So again it's striking
to me that she first attempts to
categorize him by saying 'are you a thing
that is larger than its type and do you
have less than that type?' - 'Are you a
dwarf that's grown too big and also had
something taken off it?' - taken its
beard.  That she in a sort of Aristotelian
or Linnaean categorization doesn't look
at him and who he is. She tries to fit
him in a sort procrustean way to a model
that he's both too big and too small him.
She assumes that he's failed to be
the type in this way, and also failed in
that way, and that she sort of both
stretching and dropping him. Again a
failure of attention, a failure of love
in its broadest sense. It's rather
different from the way in which Lucy
and Mr
Tumnus met, even if Tumnus then 
fell into moral failing later. I think
these two meetings are deliberately set
up like the meals that are also had in
these chapters, to show us a positive and
a negative image. So she discovers that
he's a son of Adam and again we
discussed earlier the way in which that
slots these children who are in a
children's book into a much longer and
much more glorious theological heritage
and indeed a cosmological map of who
they are and what's going on around them.
And then they have, as I said, a meal
but a bad meal. Where the meal between
Lucy and Tumnus was between Lucy and
Tumnus. So they shared food there was an
egg each, they had toast that was cut up
and they both ate it and they had both
the slices of cake, there was something
communal and and joyful about it. Here we
have a, literally a cold meal. It doesn't
take place within a lovely warm cave in a
domestic setting. It takes place outside.
It takes place the food being magicked
up, somehow unnaturally, and it's food
that doesn't satisfy Edmund. It makes him
want more and more and it seems
unwholesome somehow and there is
again I think definitely a distinction
being set up a little a little thesis
and antithesis being set up between the
two kinds of meal that these two
characters immediately engage in as soon
as they go into Narnia.
We're being showed that both sides of
the coin so to speak and as he's eating
she is talking and she's trying to
persuade him that he should bring his
brothers and sisters and bring him into
Narnia of course as we know so that she
can do something very bad to them and he
thinks that he's going to be established as a prince and his brothers and
sisters as courtiers. 'While he was Prince
he would wear a gold crown and he
Turkish Delight all day long and you are
much the cleverest and handsomest young
man I've ever met. I think I would like
to make you the prince someday when you
bring the others to visit me.' 'You
are to be the prince and later on the
king, that is understood, but
must have courtiers and nobles. I will
make your brother a duke and your sisters
duchesses.' 'There is nothing special about
them,' said Edmund, ' and anyway I could
always bring him another time.'  And the
plot continues, where she tries to
persuade him that he will have all the
things he wants - his prince ship and
his golden throne and his Turkish
delight - if he will only bring his
siblings to her. Again we see I think
Edmund indulging in Edmund's
characteristic flaws here. He likes
power, he's attracted by it .We've already
seen him castigating weakness and
leaping on weakness and using it to sort
of build up his own his own sense of
himself in his own power. Here we see him
meeting someone who is a tyrant and
falling in with their way of thinking,
falling in with their attitude to the
world, and when he gets the opportunity
to install his siblings as the royal
family he says, oh no, there's nothing
special about them, I don't see why they
should be as important as me. He wants to
be the the first amongst them.  He wants
to be the the the one who stands out the
only prince, even if they're going to be
duchesses and courtiers and whatnot.
And that love for power causes him to
betray his family, only in a small way so
far, but in the same way that he turned
on Lucy because she seemed weak and
he could sort of taunt her and torment
her, here we have a situation where his
his desire and his interest in power
causes him to slight his family, to turn
his back on them - even in this imagined
world to say, oh no, I don't think they
should be as important as me. Well I
talked previously about Lewis's moral
psychology and his interest in pettiness
that's selfishness as the root of sin
and I think we have something similar
here. Those small givings in to bad
feeling, to selfishness, to self
aggrandisement, to ego, that are making the
next scene easier. There's a sense in
which Edmund both has this flaw in his
character but it's a flaw that he's
indulging and it's taking him over
somehow so that when it comes to greater
betrayals it won't be quite so difficult.
It will seem a natural, reasonable thing
for him to do, to him at least. And so
we're getting we're getting small
betrayals seeded all the way through
this story. There's obvious parallel
obviously between
the role Edmund plays in the story and
the role of Judas in the passion
narratives but this is a a much longer
and more psychologized journey I think for Edmund.   And Edmund, as I say, we can
sometimes feel as if Edmund's being set
up by the author, as if the author needs
a scapegoat - a good good passion narrative
word -
and Edmund is is being arranged to be
the most evil character possible and so
we can all we can all sort of curse
and condemn him.  But Edmund is an
interestingly inflected character in
this book I think. I've talked about his
hypocrisy and the way he seems to be
often doing something outwardly that
doesn't accord with what he actually wants. But
that does give him a level of
psychological depth that's not
always accorded to the other characters.
We see something of the human
struggle I think in Edmund that we don't
necessarily see in the other Pevensey
children and I think we can recognize
some of his, if not dilemmas, some of his
failings and some of his moral
complexities in ourselves.   And it's
really interesting to me that Lewis
chose to build that into the the Judas
character essentially as the betrayer,
but perhaps the most psychologically
identifiable character in the entire
novel is Judas.  Now that's interesting
too that.  You might think it
would be the equivalent of Paul or
Peter.  But no.  For Lewis's account
of the little narrative it's Judas.  And
what he eats of course is Turkish
Delight.  The title of this chapter and
the subject which a lot of people
remember about about this novel.  There
are a few things I'd like to say about
Turkish delight.  First of all the
debate continues whether authentic
actual Turkish Delight from that region
the world is nicer than Fry's Turkish
Delight and that's not a not a debate
that I think we're going to settle today.
But also that Turkish delight brings
again this novel into focus for me as a
war novel. Stay with me here,  I swear
there's a reason for that.  Because the
giving of sweets to children I think, for
us, might immediately summon up the idea
of child exploitation.  Of kidnap.  Again, you know,
Lucy has already met someone who says, I
I kidnap little children, and there's
a genuinely frightening moment
there for her.  I think that sweets are
implicated in a larger moral economy
here. Than perhaps the
image Lewis brings to our mind.  After all
this is being written in the late
1940s, published in 1950.
Rationing is still in force quite
strictly in Britain.  Certainly we've also
been through the period of the war where
rationing was even stricter and access
to things like sweets
comics would seem to be both luxurious
and potentially forbidden in this area
in this era of children. Certainly an
abundance of these things.   We watch
an episode of Dad's Army and there are,  you know, jokes
about American servicemen, or Private
Wilkins, who can get you gin and
stockings and petrol coupons and all
these kind of things. Because you should
only have a sufficiency of those things.
You shouldn't be able to access luxury
goods and lots of them, because this is the war effort overall.
So I think having access to unlimited
sweets, which is something that we can
see popping up perhaps even in the Harry
Potter novels, the idea of it just a a
childhood dream, of what if I could have
all the bangers and mash in the world,
what if I could fly on a broomstick,
has a more particular moral and
political weight in this story.  Because
someone who can offer you unlimited
sweets is doing wrong on quite a grand
scale. They are someone who is
breaking the war regulations. breaking
the Defence of the Realm Act, possibly
involved with gangsters and certainly
you might call them unpatriotic.  You
might say they are people who are,
certainly in the terms of government
propaganda, strengthening the hand of the
German war effort and weakening their
own nation.  Whether that was the case on
an individual level that's another
matter.  But I think presenting a child in
this period with the image of unlimited
sweets if they will only betray their
people,
is a microcosm of the general
moral discourse about what was going on
in Europe and indeed the world at the
time.  So I think that both focuses this as specifically a
a war and a post
war novel, and also makes Edmund's choice
and the way he slips into betraying
his people, his family
much more sinister and much more loaded
for us. The other thing, the other theory
I have about Turkish Delight in this
novel - and it may not be a very good
theory - is its possible
connection with Dorothy Sayers.
We know Sayers and Lewis read each
other's works, and indeed admired each
other's works, and commented on each
other's works in public, and wrote
private letters to each other. And
Turkish delight is of course a
significant feature in Sayers' novel
Strong Poison, and I'll read you a
passage from that novel now.  It's
towards the end - I'm afraid this will be
a bit of a spoiler for those of you who
haven't read the novel and intend to so
perhaps rush on a few minutes...
Chapter 22, Strong Poison.
'Thank you,' said Whimsey,  'do sit down. You have dined of course. But you will have a cup of coffee. You prefer the Turkish variety, I fancy. My man bruised it rather well.'
Mr Urquhart accepted the offer and
complimented Bunter and having achieved
the right method of concocting that curiously syrupy brew so offensive to
the average Occidental.  Bunter thanked
him gravely for his good opinion and
proffered a box of that equally
nauseating mess called Turkish Delight,
which not only gluts the palate and
glues the teeth but also smothers the
consumer in a flowery cloud of white
sugar.  Mister Urquhart immediately
plugged his mouth with a large lump of
it, murmuring indistinctly that it was
the genuine Eastern variety.'
Those of you who
know that novel will know, that Mr.
Urquhart - again go forward if you don't
want spoilers -
Mr Urquhart is the murderer, who has
given arsenic to another character in
order to kill them and who has built up
his own resistance to arsenic. Now, Whimsey
is going to tell him, in a few pages time,
I know you're resistant to arsenic
because all that floury sugar on the
Turkish light is in fact arsenic powder.
And you should be dead if
you hadn't got an immunity to arsenic.
And Urquhart's going to freak out and call him
all sorts of names and gnash his teeth and
say his murder has been discovered.
Now it just strikes me as a really interesting parallel
that the one novel
ends with a character eating what is
apparently poisoned Turkish Delight - though of
course it isn't, actually. Whimsey hasn't
actually risked murdering the
solicitor.  But that novel ends with that
way, and he's incidentally killed a
member of his own family in order to
divert money
within the family in this novel.  And then
later Lewis's novel begins with a man - or
a boy - eating nauseous, glutinous Turkish
Delight and it poisoning him.  It having a
toxic moral effect on him. The idea
that this Turkish Delight is rotting him
somehow, it's making him less than he was
and it's turning him against his family
of course. Now, I don't have a lot of
backing up for this theory, and it's
possibly undermined by the fact that
Lewis said in one of his essays that one
of the forms of popular fiction that he
didn't have a passion for was detective
fiction, that he didn't tend to read it
and he preferred science fiction.  So it's
not great theory, I'll admit, but we know
he did read Dorothy Sayers, and did
really admire her work. So I'm just
tempted to think that he got that image
of poisonous Turkish Delight being eaten
by a traitor to a family and it found
its way somehow into Narnia and
became this this inciting incident for
the Edmund storyline, and the much
larger passion narrative that's going to
come.
So, those are my thoughts, as I say, I
hope you might leave some of your
thoughts in the comments.  The next
chapter we're going to discuss is called,
'Back on this side of the door'
and it runs from, '... because the game of
hide-and-seek was still going on it took
Edmund and Lucy some time to find the
others...' and it runs all the way to '...Peter
held the door closed but did not shut it
for' - and you can probably guess what's
coming - '...for of course he remembered as every sensible person does that you
should never, never shut yourself up in a
wardrobe.'  Well I hope you won't be
shutting yourself up in a wardrobe in
the meantime but I look forward to
speaking you about it soon.
