When Digory refused to listen to the witch, it was because he had promised. He had learned certain things that little boys always ought to learn, and this includes little emergent boys. Not only had he learned that you should keep your promises, he had also learned not to steal, which had come in handy a few pages earlier. “But I think Digory would not have taken an apple for himself in any case. Things like Do Not Steal were, I think, hammered into boys’ heads a good deal harder in those days than they are now” (The Magician’s Nephew, pp. 173-174).
And why? Well, according to some, it is because the late Victorian era was beholden to Enlightenment categories, with their false notion of what absolute has to mean. I mean, look at this: “Digory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn’t even sure all the time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan’s eyes he became sure” (pp. 178-179).
Okay, so let’s deconstruct this baby, and see what it is really saying.
“Digory never spoke on the way back, because what is it to “speak” anyway? The others were shy of “speaking” to him as well, for they had read the same articles on the Internet about the matrices and contours of intertextuality. He was clinically depressed, and wasn’t even sure all the time that he had done the “right” thing, because “right” and “wrong” invariably invoke the idolatrous absolutes of modernity, but whenever he remembered the contextless abstractions that been hammered into his head by some behaviorist with a ruler and a long dress, quite outside the boundaries of postmodern relationality, he was sure. Or as sure as one can be. What is certainty anyhow?”
Even though it is a different book, what we need around here is a marshwiggle to come and stomp on this particular fire before it emerges any further. I consistently prefer burnt marshwiggle to our new scented and blow-dried apostles of uncertainty. For all their emphasis on narrative, you would think these people would learn how to glean wholesome absolutes from a wholesome story. Here are a couple. Don’t listen to the dragon. And you don’t listen to the witch. How’s that for some narratival contours? Not even when she is thrumming an instrument after putting suspicious powder on the fire. Or even if she is eating apples with a resigned and existential courage, and reasoning on a graduate level with great subtlety. “Digory, when you say you promised, what can this possibly mean exactly?”
To say it again. There is no antithesis between Digory remembering to do the right thing because he had been taught an absolute rule as a kid and Digory’s relationship with Aslan himself. To present them as being necessarily at odds is to accept a false antithesis. And to accept this false antithesis is to listen to the witch. And witches are bad, at least here in Narnia where I live. I like to live here because Narnia didn’t have an Enlightenment.