It Sort Of Works With The Fanon That Edmund Was Haunted By Certain Experiences - Tumblr Posts
on Edmund, sea serpents, and silence
so for a while now I’ve been meaning to do a little meta piece about the Dark Island and Edmund’s trauma, because Lewis has an interesting pattern of silence on difficult emotion and this is something that changes a lot in adaptation
the dark island the place where your dreams come true, in the most literal sense - if you have dreamed it, the island will make it real (sort of) - it has a line to your subconscious, to your worst fears. to this extent, the film was pretty much in line with the book
except in the book, it’s so much worse. Rhoop, the lord who was trapped there, is absolutely demented. the whole crew is terrified and row like mad to get out of there. Caspian orders them to flee because, he says, there are ‘some things no man can face’, and after it’s over he sends the crew to bed to recover
but what I really noticed last time I read it is that, once the Dark Island takes hold, we hear scraps from every major character about what they’re feeling/seeing - except one. you know who’s totally silent the whole time, and at no point says anything or is described?
Edmund.
literally not a word about him apart from Lucy wanting to be near him, after the Island starts to work on them. we don’t get anything at all about what he’s doing or saying or looks like, and we certainly don’t hear what it is that he sees - which is odd, given that he’s one of the most major characters.
In the film, they gave him a fear of sea serpents, which is fine I guess for an action sequence, but doesn’t feel right for Edmund to me - he’s known so much darker and more human horrors
the film briefly references his trauma with the Witch by having her appear, but it’s both short and a bit weird. the book - as covered - doesn’t mention what he saw at all, and that’s what I think is super interesting, because Lewis has a bit of a pattern of leaving gaps of silence on characters whose emotions are too difficult/dark/adult for a children’s book in a particular moment
the most major instance of this is Peter, Edmund and Lucy in TLB, when they tell Tirian that Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia. Edmund and Lucy are absolutely silent on the matter and Peter only gives a short statement of what has happened and doesn’t elaborate - all the other stuff comes from Eustace, Jill and Polly. And I always thought that into that silence you can read so much grief, and so much complex emotion that doesn’t really have a place in a children’s book
like when Lewis said in a letter that he thought of writing the story of what happened to Susan after TLB but it would be ‘too much like a grown-up novel’, so we know that he conceived of his characters as having ‘grown up’, adult emotional depth, but it’s not something he would put in his children’s books. and when there’s a moment in which it makes sense for one of the characters to be in an emotional situation that is too adult for a children’s book, he goes very quiet on them
hence why the complete lack of description of Edmund once the Dark Island begins to bring to life the crew’s worst nightmares sort of troubles me, because, in the context of Lewis’s writing, it hints at darker and more complex things for him there than Lewis would really go into, because, after all, that’s what makes sense for his character, having the past experiences that he does.