The Last Battle (C. S. Lewis, 1956), the final book of the Chronicles, begins with an old ape called Shift and his simple, good-natured friend, the donkey Puzzle. One day a lion skin floats down the river into Caldron Pool. Shift has Puzzle fetch it, sews it into a costume and dresses the donkey in it. Then he announces that Aslan has returned, and that Aslan speaks through him. The false Aslan is shown only at night, by firelight, for a few moments at the door of a stable; the rest of the time Shift is his voice. In Aslan’s name, Shift orders the Narnians to work for the Calormenes, the neighboring empire; the talking trees are felled and sold as timber, the talking horses are sold into slavery, and the money goes to “Aslan’s treasury”, which Shift controls. With the help of a Calormene captain, Rishda Tarkaan, and the cynical cat Ginger, he declares that Aslan and Tash, the cruel Calormene god, are the same being: “Tashlan”. Shift grows fat on nuts and bananas, drinks, and dresses in human clothes. When the young King Tirian resists, the conspirators use the stable as a place of execution. In the end Tirian throws Shift himself through the stable door, where Tash, who has come in answer to his name, devours him.
// The theoryCrime as image and performance
Cultural criminology emerged in the 1990s, in the work of Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward and Jock Young, among others, as a reaction against approaches that treated crime as a mere response to structure or calculation. It focuses on meaning: how crime and control are represented, staged, consumed and felt. It studies the role of media images, the emotional “seductions” of transgression described by Jack Katz, the spectacle of punishment and the way groups use symbols and performances to claim power. In a late-modern world saturated with images, cultural criminologists argue, the boundary between the event and its representation blurs: what people believe they have seen shapes behavior and policy as much as what happened. A crime can be, above all, a performance, and its tools can be costumes, lighting and a story.
Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward and Jock Young, Cultural Criminology: An Invitation (2008)
Cultural criminology places crime and its control in the context of culture: as products of meaning, image and performance.
Controlling the stage
Shift’s fraud is a lesson in the power of staging, and every element of it is about controlling perception. The image: a lion skin is enough, if people already expect to see Aslan. The lighting: the false Aslan is only shown at night, by flickering firelight, at a distance. Scarcity: brief, rare appearances make each one more powerful and prevent close inspection. The spokesman: the image never speaks; Shift interprets it, so whoever controls the story controls what the image means. The merging of symbols: by declaring that Aslan and Tash are one, “Tashlan”, he empties the Narnians’ faith of content and puts it at the service of the occupier. Cultural criminology would recognize each of these techniques in modern frauds, propaganda and media panics. Shift does not need to convince anyone with arguments; he needs to show them, at the right moment and in the right light, the picture they already carry in their heads.
// The subjectA small crook who became useful to an empire
Shift is not a great villain in the sense of Jadis. He is a petty, greedy, lazy ape who has always exploited his good-natured friend, and who sees an opportunity in a lion skin. What makes him dangerous is that his fraud becomes useful to more powerful people. Rishda Tarkaan and the Calormene empire want Narnia’s trees, horses and land; Ginger the cat wants power and does not believe in anything. They let Shift think he is in charge while they use his staging for their conquest. His degradation is physical and moral: he dresses like a man, drinks, demands to be fed and grows bloated. His end is the novel’s grim joke: the con man who used the name of Tash as a mask meets the real Tash on the other side of the stable door.
Shift
Get the map of theories for free
Subscribe to the criminal archive —one case a week, no spam— and I'll send you The map of theories: the great currents of criminology on a single sheet.
// The crackNot every fraud is a cultural phenomenon
Cultural criminology has been criticized for being better at describing meanings than at explaining causes, and for sometimes celebrating transgression or focusing on spectacular cases while neglecting ordinary crime and its victims. Applied to Shift, it captures the mechanics of his deception very well, but his motives are simple: greed, laziness and the enjoyment of being important. A rational choice reading would note that the fraud succeeded because the costs were low, the gains high and the victims trusting; a critical reading would note that it worked because it served the interests of an empire.
There is also the context of Lewis’s story, which is a religious allegory about false prophets and the end of the world, and whose depiction of the Calormenes has been criticized for its echoes of stereotypes about the Arab and Muslim world. Within the fiction, Shift chose to exploit his friend, deceive a people and sell them to an invader. What cultural criminology adds is a vocabulary for the most modern part of his crime: the understanding that whoever controls the image and the story can make people serve the very thing that destroys them.
Staged authority
Frauds that exploit faith, trust and images are as old as religion and as new as deepfakes: false prophets, sects run by charismatic leaders, scams that impersonate trusted authorities, disinformation campaigns that use familiar symbols to push people towards ends they would never choose knowingly. Research on these phenomena keeps finding Shift’s techniques: controlled appearances, a single interpreter of an invisible authority, the merging of symbols and the exploitation of what people already want to believe. The defense the novel offers is Tirian’s and Jill’s: insisting on looking closely, in daylight, at what is being shown.
Three key ideas
- Cultural criminology (Ferrell, Hayward and Young) studies crime and control as matters of meaning, image, emotion and performance in a media-saturated culture, where what people believe they saw shapes what they do.
- Shift the ape dresses the donkey Puzzle in a lion skin, shows him as Aslan only at night by firelight, speaks in his name, merges Aslan and Tash into “Tashlan” and uses the fraud to sell Narnia’s trees and horses to the Calormenes. Tirian throws him into the stable, where Tash devours him.
- The crack: the theory describes the staging better than the simple greed behind it, and the novel’s Calormenes carry stereotypes. Even so, Shift chose to deceive a people and sell it to an invader.
Sources · further reading
- Ferrell, J., Hayward, K. and Young, J. (2008). Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. Sage.
- Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. Basic Books.
- Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. MacGibbon & Kee.
- Lewis, C. S. (1956). The Last Battle. The Bodley Head.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Shift?
Shift (“Truco”) is a villain from The Chronicles of Narnia, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. They only showed him at night, by firelight, for a moment, at the door of a stable.
Why does Shift (The ape) become a villain?
Shift and cultural criminology: in The Last Battle, a cunning ape dresses a donkey in a lion’s skin, shows him at night and from a distance, and in the name of a false Aslan puts the Narnians to work, fells the talking trees and sells the horses as slaves. Cultural criminology studies crime as spectacle and image. Shift stole nothing: he staged an apparition.
Which criminological theory explains Shift?
Shift's case is analysed through Cultural criminology. Cultural criminology (Ferrell, Hayward, Young) studies crime and its control as phenomena of meaning: images, rituals, spectacles and emotions, produced and consumed in a media-saturated culture. Shift, the ape of The Last Battle (1956), is its perfect literary villain: a con man who needs not force but staging. He disguises his friend Puzzle as Aslan, controls who sees him and when, speaks in his name, blends Aslan with the Calormene god Tash and turns a whole people’s faith into a business that sells Narnia to the invader.
