The Lion, the Witch and the dying fly

Greg Clarke | 19 January 2006

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Need more CS Lewis? Come to the ‘C.S. Lewis Today’ conference in May! Visit www.case.edu.au for details.

Read Dr Ivan Head's paper.

by Dr Greg Clarke

As Lucy approaches the wardrobe in the film of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the camera lingers on a dying fly on the window sill. I had wondered why the fly received a three second close-up, but then forgot all about it until Ivan Head, Warden of St Paul’s College at Sydney University, sent me his intriguing paper.

Ivan has spotted a possible visual reference to a poem by Emily Dickinson, in which this intense American poet of the 19th Century imagines a buzzing fly as an emblem for the journey through death into the presence of the eternal King. Here are a few stanzas:

“I heard a Fly buzz – when I died”
I heard a fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaven of Storm –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry-
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –

Ivan suggests in his paper that the screenwriters have been unexpectedly clever. They have not only satisfied the Lewis fanatics (who know that Lucy sees a dead blue-bottle fly on the window sill, presumably intimating that the room containing the wardrobe had been neglected for a long time). The screenwriters have also found a symbol for the transition from one world to the next, one that might readily recur in future Narnia films.

In the Dickinson poem, the buzz of the fly is the last sound the poet hears before she becomes aware that the King is in the room. She moves from the world of death, to the world of God’s presence, from England to Narnia in Lewis’s story. Whether or not the screenwriters had this poem in mind, we can look out in Prince Caspian (now in production) for the appearance of the fly to pitch the idea that the world of death is about to be left behind.

Furthermore, the fly does that wonderful job for which we need symbols—it generates ideas from experience. It helps us to remember that a death takes place in order that we might enter the world beyond. The death of Aslan satisfies the Deep Magic of atonement and ransom; the death of Jesus on our behalf ransoms us from slavery, in the language of Mark 10:45.

The fly, far from a pointless three-second sideways glance, deepens the significance of the journey into the wardrobe and (Ivan and I both suspect) provides an emblematic link to future films….if you notice it!

A different kind of pitch is underway at the suitably irreverent Christian humour site, The Wittenberg Door, who are auctioning off various ‘priceless’ Lewis memorabilia. Among the treasures you can secure are a wad of gum from a pub Lewis frequented, authenticated against dental records, and rare outtakes of Lewis’s BBC radio talks which became Mere Christianity, including CSL doing Bing Crosby covers in between sessions.

You can also bid on the original fly…