prince corin and the multiverse of matter
Brand new Narnia art and a rambling on the "revelational potential" of the material realm
This post is going to be a bit all over the place. I feel like a narrator “head-hopping” his way through a novel, only to discover at the end that he keeps hopping back into the same head. And each time, there’s a wholly different but equally obsessive train of thought hurtling down the track.
Mostly, I want to introduce some fantastic new Narnia art by an artist and friend and talk about how it came to be and why stuff matters in our pursuit of Joy.
little scraps everywhere
Whenever I write something, scraps end up everywhere: ideas, quotes, little asides. Things I thought I would include but didn’t. I try to be tidy and clean up when I’m done. But some Post-Its get stuck under the couch, and I rediscover them later.
A little more than three years ago, I re-read The Chronicles of Narnia—all seven of them one after the other as fast as I could—and wrote a reflectional essay on each one as I finished it. It was an experiment in immersing myself in something I’d first experienced over a decade earlier and seeing if the books (and the author) remained worthy of the high opinion I’d maintained. (Spoiler alert: they do and he does.)
Within the space of that experiment, I turned Narnia-tinted lenses on my own experiences and perceptions of the world. I realized that there was so much there there. So, I decided to write a book and expand (massively) on the essays.
This is where Prince Corin comes in because, even though he’s just a minor character in one of the stories, he’s my favorite character over all, and I wanted to figure out why. So, I outlined and titled a chapter for Prince Corin, not knowing what I would write when I got there. But I trusted the spirit of the enthusiastically rebellious prince would find me when the time came. And he did not disappoint.
I finished the first draft of the book last year, finished the first rewrite early this year, and am currently three chapters shy of what I hope will be the final rewrite.
When I rewrote the chapter about Prince Corin for the first time, I got so excited that I wanted to share it with people immediately. So I asked Prof. Brenton Dickieson—a lecturer on literature and theology at Maritime Christian College and The King’s College—if he would like to publish it on his blog, A Pilgrim in Narnia. And he said yes. It’s called Wherever I Go, That’s Where the Party’s At: Prince Corin as C.S. Lewis’ Harbinger of Joy, and you can read it here.
He had previously published another (and much longer) essay of mine on The Horse and His Boy called There Are No Cruel Narnians, and you can read that one here.
(Even after those two, I still had Corin-inspired scraps lying around; that’s why there’s a much shorter article called The Clique of Heaven in Fathom.)
During the back-and-forth in the run-up to publication, Prof. Dickieson remarked on the difficulty of finding art depicting Prince Corin. And I told him I might know someone who could solve that problem.
coming soon to a window near you
I hit up my friend Hannah who is a brilliant fantasy artist (among other things). She’s on Instagram @bhreemfoxxe and has a portfolio here.
We went back and forth about what it would look like to make this happen. The back-and-forth was mostly my fault because I am very bad about putting the pictures in my head into words—despite it being the one thing writers are supposed to be good at. And I am also very much an I can’t tell you what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it kind of person.
But Hannah was game and said I can do it, but it’ll be a minute. And I was like cool, it’s no rush.
It’s about two and a half months later now, and there are two three new and dynamic pieces entering the canon of Narnia artwork featuring our favorite cheerful prince.
The Digital Piece… “Prince Corin, the Icon”
I love the energy of this portrait and the happy invitation in Prince Corin’s face. I couldn’t imagine any better, or more iconic, image. It captures how he bursts into the story and his posture throughout the rest of it. He is larger-than-life and always on the edge of getting into something.
The Watercolor… “A Gift for Susan”
Hannah had the idea of presenting Corin as a tourist or explorer—an adventurer taken up with something he’s found in his new surroundings. And I think that’s beautiful and fitting!
Also, I’ll let you in on a secret. Between Hannah and I, this is Corin in one of the markets of Tashbaan buying a wedding gift (earrings) for his bestie Queen Susan, blissfully unaware that Prince Rabadash’s marriage proposal is about to go south. Or should I say “north” since that’s where Narnia is and where Rabadash will attempt to ride to kidnap his bride? (One gets the idea that Corin is unaware of the intricacy of international relations. He’s a big-picture kind of guy.)
There’s some other headcanon between these images that we think is really cool, but that’s enough secrets for one day.
I can’t say enough about how lovely this idea turned out or how amazingly talented Hannah is! Check out her other work. It’s all absolutely gorgeous!
a multiverse of stuff that matters
You’d think, after all this, I’d be done with Prince Corin. But he’s not done with me yet. There are scraps I picked up off the cutting room floor just this morning. These scraps didn’t make it into either of the Corin-related essays. They were in the book, but I took them out during rewrites, and they probably won’t go back in. But I don’t want them to go to waste, so I will clumsily incorporate them now and hope and pray they are still as inspiring as when I first cobbled these bits together…
I’ve said a lot about Prince Corin as the icon for C.S. Lewis’ search for Joy. And I fully endorse a wild abandonment to that pursuit. But perhaps the ancient Greeks were on to something when they cast Euphrosyne, the goddess of Good Cheer, Joy, and Mirth, as the offspring of the primordial manifestations of Darkness and Night.
The darkness is immense, and the night is black. We know this.
Joy, good cheer, and delight seem far-off and forgotten. They seem futile in the face of so much pain.
The clichéd painting of the robin nestled peacefully in the eye of the storm reminds us that we find our robin-ness in the middle of the darkness. In the middle of the night, we turn on the lights. As we remember our mortality, we grasp what it means to be immortal. Or, as Dream of the Endless would say, “What power would Hell have if those here in prison were not able to dream of Heaven?”
Lewis’ unconscious sense of immortality (to borrow Freud’s descriptor) was not something that needed to be suppressed or reasoned against. This eternity-awareness was crucial to his philosophy of life and was part of the pursuit of Joy. It was his connection to “the Absolute,” the “utter reality” that exists beyond our five senses. He not only considered himself to be simply connected to that “Absolute,” but a part of it. He wrote in Surprised by Joy:
We mortals, seen as the sciences see us and as we commonly see one another, are mere “appearances.” But appearances of the Absolute. In so far as we really are at all (which isn’t saying much) we have, so to speak, a root in the Absolute, which is the utter reality.
And that is why we experience Joy: we yearn, rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called “we.”
Don’t discount Joy. Our feverish and finite experiences of it are not misnomers. While Corin expresses a consistent exuberance that may defy the shape our lives have taken, our encounters with Joy, however fleeting, are important. Lewis’ first brush with Joy came in the form of a miniature garden made from a tin cookie box presented to him by his brother Warnie.
…my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colours but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. I do not think the impression was very important at the moment, but it soon became important in memory. As long as I live, my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden. (Surprised by Joy)
Nearly every moment of enjoyment is a foretaste, a reminder, of what we seek—permanent incorporation of ourselves with Joy itself.
These moments of enjoyment aren’t just immaterial and transcendent. They can be triggered by mortal instruments—like Warnie’s toy garden. In his conclusion to Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, James K.A. Smith argues that “the whole realm of the material has a revelational potential.” He agrees with the political and social activist George Weigel who says a “sacramental imagination” is crucial to seeing the material world as flush with this potential—the potential to arrest for us the experience of Joy.
Weigel sees this sacramental imagination unfolded for us in G.K. Chesterton’s old haunt, the Cheshire Cheese pub in London, where we find the rotund apologist enjoying the very material blessings of food and ale. As Weigel puts it, Chesterton’s delight in the material world illustrates “the bedrock Catholic conviction that stuff counts.”
Indeed, Weigel makes the radically orthodox claim that only a catholic account of the world can really affirm materiality: “Catholicism takes the world, and the things of the world, far more seriously than those who like to think of themselves as worldly.”
Smith concludes: “…only those who affirm the paradox of the incarnation can see the world with a sacramental imagination.”
Ultimately, matter matters.
Matter, in all the shapes and forms it takes, carries the whisper of Joy, of eternity. In this sense, the paradox of the incarnation is not so much a paradox but a repeating pattern in the universe.
God transcends into the human plane. The word transcend comes from two Latin words:
trans: across
scandere: climb
He climbs across, from his world into ours. Takes our matter (our stuff) as his own. Our flesh and our blood, our sweat and our piss. And leaves himself behind. And then transcends again, climbs back across, onto his plane, leaving the window open behind him.
We have not yet transcended. But through the open window, we receive messages and visitations from that other plane. Joy. Abundance. Eternity. Exuberance. Peace. They come to us embodied in stuff and matter. Art and other people. Like Warnie’s toy garden. Like Corin’s earrings for Susan. Like Hannah’s art. We are, to paraphrase from Lewis, saluted with a hundred images of Joy all around us.
We understand a language that we do not yet speak. Lewis writes (and I have edited so it reads present-tense):
Joy is not a deception. Its visitations are rather the moments of clearest consciousness we have, when we become aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature and ache for that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we’ve had, but that we are, a dream. This seems quite satisfactory intellectually. Even emotionally too: for it matters more that Heaven should exist than that we should ever get there.
And while we wait on getting to Heaven, we ought to pursue every expression of it—every Joy and enjoyment—while we can.
Bonus!
The thing about art based on other things (like books or real life) is that, fundamentally, the point of the art is to communicate the feeling of the original. An illustration can very well follow a written description to a tee but completely miss the feeling of whatever it’s attempting to illustrate to the viewer.
And that’s what Hannah and I were trying to do with Prince Corin, the Icon and A Gift for Susan—convey the feeling of Corin. His energy, his sense of being, his vibes. And I think we did that. The art feels right.
But for the purists out there! Yes, we know Corin makes his introduction in The Horse and His Boy by clambering into a window (and knocking over a “costly porcelain vase”) after being out on the town beating people up (because they were making jokes about Susan) and getting beat up and arrested and buying wine for the people who arrested him. “He had the finest black eye you ever saw, and a tooth missing, and his clothes (which must have been splendid ones when he put them on) were torn and dirty, and there was both blood and mud on his face.”
Digital… “Corin, Dark Prince Edition”
