ABSTRACT
In the opening chapters of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Lucy’s great difficulty in convincing her siblings that she entered the land of Narnia through the wardrobe partly revolves around the issue of time. Bemused and worried by her claims, her brother and sister consult the professor, presenting the logical inconsistencies in Lucy’s claim to have spent hours in the company of a faun in the country of Narnia, while less than a minute of time had elapsed in the house the children were exploring. The canny professor interprets the seeming inconsistency as a mark of authenticity rather than deceit or madness ‘if, I say, she had got into another world, I should not be at all surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so that however long you stayed there it would never take up any of our time’ (Lewis, 1997 [1950]: 48). The prospect that other worlds operating under different regimes of time could exist startles, intrigues and captivates the children of Lewis’ imagination and the reader of this tale. But it is not just in the literary text that a suspension of disbelief around the axioms of time has been activated.
