I get a lot of students writing about my work for degrees of one kind or another, and I thought it might be interesting to post them on this site, for the use of anyone else trying to do the same, or for anyone who is just curious.

Many thanmks to Josiah Jackson-Taylor for letting me post this first one. I should note that Dreamweaver doesn't transcribe formating in anyway, and any faults in this are due to me and not to Joe!

Have you felt about any of the books we have studied that you would not want a child to read them?

Until my teenage era I was raised in Bristol immersed in literature, as television was prohibited in our house. As a result 'The Chronicles of Narnia', imbibed in their entirety, provided a template to understand the world, the implications of which are only emerging to me today. The approach of Melvin Burgess is one far closer to the trend of explicit, episodic exposition in contemporary culture, and revealed facets to my home town that I was shielded from in my adolescent years. The vibrant agency of the child is central to both The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and Junk but execution of each text is vastly different. The most fascinating contrast resides in comparing the semantic concerns of the former with the structural features of the latter.

An approach that seems to generate a gravid insight is the application of psychoanalysis to work of C.S. Lewis, who at the time of writing 'The Chronicles of Narnia' held a scholarly post at Magdalen College, Oxford. Earlier in his academic life, as a student at his last school of Malvern, this restrained writer developed a taste for sadomasochistic fantasies evinced in personal correspondence. Letters to a friend detailed the names of certain women whom he had envisaged spanking, and he even signed this mail with the title "Philomastix" - meaning 'whip-lover' . The reason I highlight this potentially peripheral biographical detail is that revisiting the Narnia series revealed this fantasy world as one saturated with veiled adult investment, not only in regard to Lewis' didactic aspiration but also as an expression of the unconscious. It is of supreme importance to realise the role of the unconscious in the process of artistic creation. The association of thoughts, in psychoanalytic topology, is governed by unconscious purposive ideas; all that can be eliminated are recognised purposive ideas, therefore unknown purposive impulses channel the course of voluntary mental output. The unconscious "holds the association of ideas in abstract thinking as well as in sensuous imagining and artistic combination" (Freud, p.672) - it is the larger sphere of the unconscious that houses the machinations of the conscious. Thus emerges the realisation that the creative process is steeped in unconscious memory, which operates on a latent, insidious and, most significantly, preliminary level.

The unresolved sexual and emotional issues are consequently unconsciously incorporated and explored within the text as a subterranean stream, inaccessible to the conscious plane of thought - an "expression of impulses which are under the pressure of resistance [repression]" (Freud, p.774) which nonetheless exert a profound influence. A close appraisal of Peter's first battle proffers an illumination of this point: ostensibly drawing on various literary traditions including the heroic quest, the courtly romance and the violent fairy-tale, his combat inauguration is parturient with prurience. There are manifold layers to the etching of his initiation rights: he wins his spurs as a warrior, yet there is also the discovery of sexual physicality as "everything was blood and heat and hair" (Lewis, p.170). The carnal excitement evoked by this passage is unmistakeable, and it seems irrefutable to me that it is an instance of authorial cathexis, an investment of libidinal energy into a child's adventure: the paragraph ends with "He felt tired all over." (Lewis, p.170) The notion of a violent sexuality surrounding the slaying of the wolf is interesting in that it relates to the desire for authority: "Freud defines sadism as the impulse to master the world" (Bersani, p.87). Another element of the conflict has be ascertained that reinforces the notion of adult investment, phrased as "the uneasy juxtaposition of children and child-adults…what are we doing except in wish-fulfilment with a child who leads an army into battle?" (Manlove, p.123). The rhetoric here underlines the infusion of adult sensibilities and the disquieting construction of child; the suspicion slowly starts to envelop regarding authorial investment once these strong adult themes are disentangled from the carefully crafted narrative.

However, it should be pointed out that this sexual content is almost certainly inadvertent and perhaps this unwitting inclusion extends to the powerful adult themes of bravery and betrayal. I find this a little difficult to believe, although Lewis was 'untheorised' in his approach - unsophisticated in psychoanalytical terms. The writer embarked on his first fully sexual relationship as a middle aged don when he met Joy Gresham, and thereafter followed the period in the 1950's when he not only produced 'The Chronicles of Narnia' but also his autobiographical account of his conversion to Christianity, Surprised By Joy. Tragically, his wife died of cancer a few years into their marriage; the following excerpt from his reflections in A Grief Observed provides a glimpse of the man's metamorphosis during their relationship: "no cranny of heart or mind remained unsatisfied" (Lewis, p.167). In terms of psychological influences, the sexual awakening of the middle aged scholar seems to have seeped into the pages of his children's stories, as I have already propounded. Having already established himself as a writer of popular fiction and as a literary critic with such publications as the 'Space Trilogy' and The Allegory Of Love respectively, Lewis turned deliberately to children's fiction with 'The Chronicles of Narnia'. This presented the opportunity to utilise the tradition of figurative narratives to impose a moral message, a religious doctrination through allegorical didactics.

Consequently there emerges a Kleinian denigration of the wholly bad and the superimposition of the wholly good, as the children's adventure is distilled into Christian dichotomy with simplistic fairy-tale binary opposit