Mortals Call Their History Fable:Narnia and the Use of Fairy Tale Frank P. Riga (bio) "I call our world Flatland," says Edwin A. Abbott's hero, "not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, . . . who are privileged to live in Space" (Flatland 3). In this Romance of Many Dimensions, the Flatland hero travels from his world of two dimensions to Lineland, a world of one dimension, and then to Spaceland, a world of three dimensions. Because of his wide experience, he knows to use the dimensional language of Spaceland when addressing its inhabitants, but in his tale, he also makes it clear that the third dimension is inherent in Flatland, though Flatlanders have no untutored way of perceiving it. So after assimilating the experience of three dimensions, the hero tells his host in Spaceland that he is now ready to experience the fourth dimension. His announcement is greeted with derision, for surely he must know there are but three dimensions. By this pattern of regression/progression, Abbott is, of course, satirizing human limitation, the arbitrary and contingent nature of human awareness. The whole of his fable attempts to compensate for this limitation by encouraging growth in the human imagination. By allowing the reader to enter several worlds of different dimensions and to aspire to others, this enlarged imagination enriches the commonplace world and indicts intellectual pride. The gift of modesty, or humility, promotes further knowing. As the hero explains, "even I—who have been in Spaceland, and have had the privilege of understanding for twenty-four hours the meaning of 'height'—even I cannot now comprehend it, nor realize it by the sense of sight or by any process of reason; I can but apprehend it by faith" (Flatland, Preface to 2nd. ed., n.p.). The shifting perspectives on reality offered by the several worlds of Flatland parallel the reader's shifting perspective in the Chronicles of Narnia. C.S. Lewis, who knew and wrote about Flatland in several places, may not have been influenced by Abbott directly, but his imaginative world proceeded from a similar, though not the same, multi-dimensional viewpoint. Like Abbott, who gives Flatland as the world of commonplace reality from which he can regress to a simpler and then progress to a more complex world of reality, Lewis takes us from our own world to the story world of Narnia and then, at the end of the Chronicles, from Narnia to the true Narnia and the Land of Asian. And like Abbott, whose fable allows us to imagine "other worlds" that shed light on our understanding of this, Lewis helps us re-imagine this world by creating Narnia. But his purpose does not end here. He wants to insist that, in re-imagining our world, we must include another dimension that validates all the rest. As Lewis argues in his essay, "On Stories," "to construct plausible and moving 'other worlds' you must draw on the only real 'other world' we know, that of the spirit" (On Stories 12). Two passages tell us how to dispose our imaginations in order to participate in the fictional world of Narnia. The first passage is from Prince Caspian. Here, Peter comments that he can hardly believe they were drawn into Narnia by a blast from Susan's horn: "I don't know why you shouldn't believe it," said Lucy, "if you believe in magic at all. Aren't there lots of stories about magic forcing people out of one place—out of one world—into another? I mean, when a magician in The Arabian Nights calls up a Jinn, it has to come. We had to come, just like that." "Yes," said Peter, "I suppose what makes it feel so queer is that in the stories it's always someone in our world who does the calling. One doesn't really think about where the Jinn's coming from." "And now we know what it feels like for the Jinn," said Edmund with a chuckle. "Golly! It's a bit uncomfortable to know that we can be whistled for like that . . ." (96) By this deft reversal of the ordinary way we...