Bananas in Narnia
“But isn’t everything right already?” said Puzzle.
“What!” cried Shift. “Everything right? – when there are no oranges or bananas?”
Shift’s exploitation of Puzzle (and his fruity outrage) raises some fascinating questions about the economy of Narnia and, indirectly, about the underlying ideology of the Chronicles.
One very obvious question is: where do bananas grow in Narnia?
Narnia is geographically situated in the North. In some ways, it is an image of what Lewis wanted England (or Britain or Great Britain and Northern Ireland) to be. So no banana groves.
But bananas clearly do exist in Narnia, though Shift is currently struggling to get his hands on them, so where exactly do they come from?
Lewis never spells out the answer but it seems likely that, in the background of the books, there is a lively international trading network in operation. That is certainly what Shift intimates when he sets out his manifesto for a brighter future for Narnia and Narnians. What he wants, in modern parlance, is to ramp out trade, not start it from scratch:
“There! You see!” said the Ape. “It’s all arranged. And all for your own good. We’ll be able, with the money you earn, to make Narnia a country worth living in. There’ll be oranges and bananas pouring in – and roads and big cities and schools and offices and whips and muzzles and saddles and cages and kennels and prisons – Oh, everything.”
“But we don’t want all those things,” said an old Bear. “We want to be free. And we want to hear Aslan speak himself.”
This darkly humorous concatenation of oranges and bananas with cages, kennels and prisons might suggest that Lewis was a romantic reactionary (and perhaps a Little Englander to boot) but I think we will find that the picture is actually more nuanced if we look closely at the whole series.
An obvious place to start is with The Horse and His Boy, the least Narnian of the chronicles. In fact, Lewis’s decision to set the book wholly outside Narnia is quite remarkable, as was his decision to include the Pevensies as only relatively minor characters in the story.
However, they are there, and where and why they are really matters. They have travelled to Tashbaan to discuss a possible marriage between Susan and the Calormene prince. Nor was this the first time Narnians and Calormenes had crossed each other’s borders, as Edmund points out, when he speaks about “the first coming of the Tisroc’s ambassadors into Narnia to treat of this marriage, and later when the Prince was our guest at Cair Paravel.”
Of course, the marriage never happens and the Narnians are shocked by what they find in Tashbaan, but the fact that the marriage could even have been contemplated is enough to suggest that the Narnians did not, and did not want to, live in a hermetically sealed country.
A better example, perhaps, can be found in The Last Battle itself where we find this narratorial aside:
There was no reason, of course, why one should not meet a Calormene or two in Narnia - a merchant or an ambassador - for there was peace between Narnia and Calormen in those days.
Which brings us back to bananas. What were the merchants bringing to Narnia? Certainly not whips and muzzles and cages, but quite possibly bananas and oranges. Narnia is clearly an idyllic place to live but even Narnians might sometimes want to eat exotic fruit.
Of course, we don’t think of bananas as exotic any more, but that is exactly how they would have been seen at the time of the book’s writing. One of my relatives, who was born during World War II, tells the story of the day a friend brought a banana skin to school - not the banana itself: she’d eaten that - and everyone crowded round to see the wondrous sight.
Hitler’s U-Boats had an impact on many aspects of English life, and one of them was the supply of bananas. (Another, of course, was the supply of sweets, including Turkish delight.) The shortage of bananas was a problem Lewis’s readers would have been very familiar with.
In other words, I think we can say that C. S. Lewis was both a more nuanced children’s author than he is sometimes given credit for and more attuned to the issues of his time than we might assume.
And it all begins with bananas in Narnia.
Thanks for this. I've just started to reread "The Last Battle ". I wonder if Lewis wasn't a prophet.