That Odd Professor

            Re-reading this story for the first time in a couple of years, I was particularly struck by the character of the Professor. By “struck,” I don’t mean “impacted” as much as “baffled.” He’s such an odd character and, I would argue, one of the most unique in the novel because he’s not so easily categorized into an allegorical role as, say, Aslan or the Witch or Edmund. We know who he is from The Magician’s Nephew, but who is he in this story specifically?

            The narrator says that when Peter and Susan first speak to the Professor, he does not interrupt them, but waits until “they had finished the whole story.” This is a very telling moment. He listens. He doesn’t tell them to stop wasting his time with silly children’s stories. In fact, his response, which he does not give until thinking for “quite a long time,” is to ask how they know that Lucy’s story is not true. This seems completely counter-intuitive. After all, we expect the adult, and the professor at that, to be the “voice of reason.” Well, this is exactly what he is supposed to be, with all of his talk about logic, and yet his response to the idea of an other world is “Why not!?” (We know from The Magician’s Nephew that he has actually been to other worlds himself.) So logic=belief in Narnia? Apparently so.

            The Professor goes on to ask some follow up questions, which eventually leads Susan to admit that she and Peter are afraid there might be something wrong with Lucy. He says, “One has only to look at her and talk to her to see that she is not mad.” What? This does not seem to fit in the Professor’s insistence on using reason to draw conclusions, but it does fit with other patterns in the story. There are several moments in which the narrator and other characters make judgments about things and individuals based on looking at them, like they’re exuding some kind of aura.

            In the end of the novel, the Professor again believes the children’s story without question, and he gives them a bit of advice for telling their story. He says, “And don’t mention it to anyone else unless you find that they’ve had adventures of the same sort themselves. What’s that? How will you know? Oh, you’ll know all right. Odd things they say—even their looks—will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open.” So was it logic that made him believe in Narnia so easily or his own experience? Again, we see the intuitive interpretation of one’s look and speech as indicative of some kind of difference from “other” people. But the children and the reader are never told what looks and speech are supposed to make this distinction. We're supposed to just know. 

             So who exactly is the Professor? Voice of reason? Agent of mystification? Whoever he is and whatever he does, I think that he is at least a depiction of the reader Lewis references in the dedication to Lucy Barfield. He experienced fairy-tale in his childhood and still listens to fairy tales in his adulthood.