III. The Last Battle
The final destination of Aslan’s followers, the garden eternal at the end of The Last Battle, includes the most powerful and intense imagery of all Narnian gardens. It is the “real” garden. The old Narnia is destroyed, leveled with water and blighted by total darkness. All Narnians, including the Pevensie children, are actually dead in the human sense, and so are liberated from time and space, ready to enter Aslan’s real country if they believe in him. The celestial garden is an analogue of the Christian heaven, although it has no specific geometrical shape, nor is it symbolically orientated like the four-square biblical City of God with its jeweled streets, or like the Pearl poet’s vision of Heaven, for example.[7] It is not an artificial garden like that in Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, but more like the enclosed garden of de Meun’s Roman, where there is no deceit, misery, or death, and nature is whole and more beautiful than ever. It is fluid, ever-changing, for Lewis’s purpose is to present this garden as a dynamic, mystical experience, unfolding in Aslan beyond space and time. So there is some distortion and confusion in geography and location since the focus is on Aslan’s followers’ entry into a true union with him as Christians are “in-Godded” when they are transported into God and enter His garden.
To encourage his followers to submit to a mystical, transcendental experience, in a Narnia-within-Narnia, Aslan, like God or Christ, takes on the proactive role of a gardener, as he had done earlier in Magician’s Nephew and Dawn Treader, bent on cultivating the souls of his followers. As God intervenes in miraculous events for the good of his people, so does Aslan. He acts as an inspiring, charismatic leader, plans his followers’ journey to the garden, and arranges the path according to a specific principle. Before Aslan appears, Aslan’s followers are treated to a feast of fruits that are the juiciest with a taste that cannot be described. As a garden motif, the fruits appeared in Magician’s Nephew and are found also in Pearl and Paradise Lost, where their scent is deemed refreshing. They signify in both Pearl and The Last Battle the Eucharis but bear no association to the forbidden fruit of Magician’s Nephew. No White Witch or Satan inhabit this garden of perfection. As usual, Aslan appears in a flash of light, and while his followers are kneeling in a circle around him, he bends down to touch them with his tongue. He extends his love even to Emeth, the pious Calormen who was seeking Aslan in the false god Tash, by touching his forehead with his tongue and breath. This is another example of the inclusiveness Lewis associates with Christianity as discussed above in relation to Dawn Treader.
Aslan then takes his followers on what appears to be a surrealistic journey. There sense of vision heightened, they are bombarded, to a greater extent than in the finale of Dawn Treader, with exquisite imagery at a high speed by an author whose major talent lies in creating verbal tableaux. One exquisite tableau after another cross in front of these travelers’ eyes: “[t]he Country flew past them as if they were seeing it from the windows of an express train” (Battle 214). Moreover, the colors of the images are so intense that the children understand they are entering a new world. Eustace exclaims, “I bet there isn’t a country like this anywhere in our world. Look at the colors! You couldn’t get a blue like the blue on those mountains in our world” (209). For they are entering the real Narnia, as different from the old one “as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream” (212). As Lewis further states, “[t]he new [Narnia] was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more” (213). Lewis, I believe, is suggesting not just that God’s garden is not of this world, though there is a path to it from this world, but also that true art (and mythopoetic creation in general) can suggest Reality better than everyday life experiences. Indeed, Lewis describes the real Narnia as a looking-glass that intensifies a scene’s beauty for its viewer (212), and certainly not like the mirror perilous of Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” nor like the reflecting fountain in Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, “angled both to dazzle and to blind the dreamer” (Pearsall and Salter 88). Lewis always believed in the significant role of mythopoeia in revealing the Christian truth and hoped that his ekphrastic tableaux in The Chronicles would link his fiction with his Christology.
However, although the imagery of the landscape surrounding the garden in Last Battle is fluid, it is far from chaotic. It is carefully organized by Lewis according to the major principle of “further up and further in,” suggesting a movement of elevation towards a center-of Narnia, of all “real worlds” and communities (including the church), and of the soul. For paradisal states culminate in a state of unity of the soul with God pursuant to its degree of activity and reception of His bounty and grace. Aslan, with the help of Jewel, the unicorn (an emblem of Christ) and Farsight, the eagle, urges the voyagers on toward the garden which is situated high (further up) and in the center (further in). Lucy and the Faun, the most philosophical of all Talking Beasts, apprehend the ambiguous structure of this quest early on but can only explain it in paradoxes. It is like an onion, says Tunmus, where “each circle is larger than the last” (Battle 225) or like the Stable, concludes Lucy, where “it is far bigger inside than it was outside” (224). The movement towards the garden is a physical and spiritual elevation like Jacob’s vision (Genesis 18:12) or the lifting up of St. Paul on the road to Damascus.