Thursday, April 24, 2014

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: That Hideous Strength (part 2)

Jane and Mark Studdock are a recently-married couple living in the small college town of Edgestow. Mark has recently gained a fellowship at the local Bracton Colleges and has an opportunity to join a prestigious think-tank, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. Jane has been trying to pursue her own academic career, but has been troubled lately by disturbing dreams. On the advice of a former mentor, she decides to visit someone who might be able to help her.

Neither one realizes it, but both Mark and Jane will soon find themselves on opposite sides of a secret war for the soul of England.

Jane visits the Manor of St. Anne’s-on-the-Hill in hopes that they might help her about her dreams, but her first meeting with Miss Grace Ironwood is not encouraging. Miss Ironwood is a severe, intimidating woman. To Jane’s annoyance, she does not regard her dreams as a problem that needs curing. It’s not that she doesn't take them seriously, (a fear which has kept Jane from discussing her dreams with her husband); Miss Ironwood is convinced that Jane is a clairvoyant and that her dreams are extremely important. She wants Jane to put her talents to the service of her group and that the fate of humanity may depend upon it.
This is all too much for Jane. She doesn't want to get mixed up with vague conspiracies, she just wants the dreams to stop.

Mark, in the meantime, has gone to the town of Belbury, where the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, or the N.I.C.E., is headquartered. His friend, if you want to call him that, Lord Feverstone has arranged a meeting with Wither, the Deputy Director of the N.I.C.E.

The organization’s ostensible purpose is to put the money and resources of Government into the service of Science, and to put the disciplines of Science into the administration of Government. In many respects it sounds like a Charter School experiment placed on a governmental scale. It’s public face is a popular writer of science named Jules, whom most critics take to be a caricature of H.G. Wells. Jules has little to do with the story, though, and Mark quickly learns that he is largely a figurehead.

Mark has always longed to be an Insider, and much of his academic career has been devoted to getting into the In Crowd. At Bracton, this was a party in the faculty calling themselves the “Progressive Element”, but Mark’s acquaintance with Feverstone has revealed secret workings that he had been unaware of, and the lure of being one of the Elect Few who are In The Know is a powerful one.

He meets with Wither, a vague sort of man with a frustrating talent for speaking without saying anything definite. Mark assumes that he is going to be offered a job with the N.I.C.E., but although Wither soothes him with flattery and platitudes, he never says anything specific.

Mark is also introduced to “Fairy” Hardcastle, the tough-talking, cigar-smoking head of the N.I.C.E.’s private Gestapo, that is, security force. Lewis never calls her a lesbian, but he certainly intends her as a mannish, and therefore unnatural woman. Come to think of it, the forbidding Grace Ironwood with her austere manner and her masculine profession (we later find that she really is a doctor, which Lewis would have probably considered a male field) also has mannish qualities, but the Fairy typifies the worst in masculinity: she is crude, vulgar and sadistic and runs her department like a bully. Mark finds himself uncomfortable in her presence, but is impressed by her worldly and knowing attitude and flattered that she seems to be taking an interest in him.

He runs into another Bracton professor, William Hingest. “Bill the Blizzard”, as he’s known behind his back, is one of the few top-notch scientists on the faculty, a chemist with a high reputation among his peers. He’s considered one of the Progressive Element by virtue of being an atheist, although he has little use for academic politics. He too is being recruited by the N.I.C.E., but having looked around the place has decided to return to Bracton. He strongly recommends that Mark do the same.

Hingest is an interesting character, although he sadly gets little time in the story. Some Christians like to say that even atheists believe in something, which atheists regard as condescending and sanctimonious. Which it is. But Hingest at any rate does believe in something: he believes in scientific integrity. He’s seen enough of the N.I.C.E. to realize that these people are only interested in Science as window dressing for their greater agenda, and he wants nothing to do with it.

Mark still isn't sure he wants to join the N.I.C.E. No one will tell him what his job there is supposed to be, or even if he has a job; but they’re plying him with drink and pumping him on what great prospects he has with them. It’s assumed that he’ll spend the night at the Institute, and then that he’ll stay there for a day or two, or more. He finds that Feverstone has done him the favor of burning his bridges behind him at Bracton, which briefly causes him to panic; but the people at the Institute do a masterful job of keeping him off balance, alternating between flattering his ego and ambition, and quietly threatening him with the consequences of leaving. Every step of the way, it becomes easier for him to move forward and more difficult to move back. And so he takes the path of least resistance.

Jane is having problems at home. Her neighbors, her old tutor Dr. Dimble and his wife, have been evicted from their house. It belonged to the college and was part of the sale of land to the N.I.C.E. For the time being, Dr. Dimble can crash at the college, but his wife has to find a place to live. Ivy Maggs, the woman who comes in couple times a week to do cleaning at the Studdock home, has also been displaced, and Jane is having trouble finding a replacement.

A lot of people have been kicked out of their homes. The N.I.C.E. has bought Bragdon Wood, part of the Bracton property, ostensibly to build a new facility there. But the Wood is too marshy to build on. So the Institute is going to divert the river running through Edgestow in order to drain the Wood. A lots of the Edgestow residents are outraged, including members of the College who had voted for the sale, but by the time anyone realizes what is going down, it’s too late to stop it.

Jane has another dream, this time about a group of men stopping a car in the middle of the night and beating its driver to death. The next day she learns that Bill Hingest has been found dead and realizes that it was he whom she saw murdered.

She runs into Camille Dennison, a woman she had met at St. Anne’s, and her husband, who had been a close friend of Mark’s during their undergraduate days. They’re a nice, friendly couple with the rare talent of being able to correct each other without being annoying about it; and Jane takes an immediate liking to them. She wonders why Mark dropped Dennison in favor of his more recent crop of friends who strike her as being back-biting and unpleasant. The truth of the matter is that as Mark became more interested in climbing the greasy pole of faculty politics, he saw Dennison as more of a rival than a friend.

The Dennisons are part of the St. Anne’s group, a small community which has gathered around their leader, a Mr. Fisher-King. Readers with a background in Arthurian Romance will recognize the Fisher-King as a character from the Grail Legend, a king with an unhealing wound which can only be cured by the Holy Grail. Mr. Fisher-King is actually Ransom, from the previous books, who had changed his name for reasons that are somewhat contrived, but largely irrelevant.

They would like Jane to come and speak with Mr. Fisher-King, but they stress that this must be her own decision. This is a big difference between the St. Anne’s group and the N.I.C.E.: the one insists that Jane choose freely, the other uses mind-games and manipulation to force Mark to stay.

Jane’s dream of Hingest’s murder has convinced her that her dreams really are clairvoyant; and the good vibes she gets from the Dennisons do much to counter the earlier negative impression she got from Miss Ironwood. She decides to give St. Anne’s another visit.

Mark is still unsure what his position at the N.I.C.E. is, which is exactly how they like it. Since he’s a sociologist, he’s plopped in the Institute’s sociology department, although Fairy assures him that it’s only temporary and that there are bigger things in store for him. He is given the assignment of writing propaganda pieces. The N.I.C.E. needs to raze a village near Edgestow as part of its project to divert the river, and so Mark is directed to come up with talking points about how the village is unsanitary and unsightly and how better off people will be once the improvements have been installed. Next he is told to work on a series of articles and Letters to the Editor for the popular press to rehabilitate Alcasan, a French scientist who was recently guillotined for murdering his wife. This was the man Jane saw decapitated in her very first dream. Mark doesn't understand why the Institute is interested in Alcasan’s reputation and begins to have doubts about the N.I.C.E.’s politics
“Is it Left or Right papers that are going to print all this rot about Alcasan?” 
“Both, honey, both,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Don’t you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us – to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”
Finally Mark is assigned to write a couple pieces about a riot in Edgestow which hasn't happened yet.. With the displacement of the local population due to the N.I.C.E.’s extreme landscaping and the influx of workers who have come in to tear down the buildings and such, clashes are inevitable, and so the N.I.C.E. are going to engineer a riot in the next day or two that they can use to the Institute’s advantage. Mark is shocked by this, but the fact that they are trusting him with this information makes him feel like he’s part of their inner circle, and he agrees.

There is one hitch, though. In one of his meeting with Wither, it is strongly suggested that Mark bring his wife to Belbury. Mark can’t see Jane being happy with things there and so he kind of brushes off Wither’s hints and is dismayed to learn that his casual refusal has angered Wither. He little realizes that Jane is the real reason the N.I.C.E. cares about him at all;. They know about her dreams and want to use Mark as a tool to get their hands on her.

NEXT:  The Pendragon; Riot in Edgestow, and the Saracen’s Head.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Piers Morgan and The American Revolution

The Header for the show for host Piers Morgan.
To hear some of the television critics of Piers Morgan, his only flaw as an interviewer was being a bad interviewer.  It wasn't that he was a flawed human, just not good at these sort of jobs.  He seemed to not listen to guests, and the guests when able to speak, didn't seem to be making an impact on Morgan who seemed to be simply waiting for them to stop talking, before making a new, unrelated comment, or a political statement that was neither for nor against the guest, but Morgan's own views.  The standard for the time slot on CNN when it was occupied by Larry King, was perhaps not hard hitting interviews, but a chat between friends.  Perhaps Larry King grew forgetful or lacked the interest in making a guest uncomfortable, but he was always interested in the conversation.  Morgan never seemed interested in the guest outside how he might use them for further points on his political chalk board.

The Announcement of the Stamp Act
Obviously with the title of this article I believe that Morgan was more than a bad interviewer, but rather, a person who had no connection with the audience who the show was primarily aimed at, the US audience.  The Americans watching grew less enchanted with Morgan with every utterance against the American ways of doing things, right or wrong.  And it is in that that I believe you see that he was not even, perhaps interested in winning the argument he made, so much as using his podium for however long it was offered, to show is disgust and disdain for the US.

Particularly for Morgan was his out spoken and strident conversation on the show about guns in America.  Now, FYI I am not an American who likes guns.  I don't claim never to have fired a gun, but I am not interested in doing so again, and I believe the gun debate on both sides of the battle lines is generally feeding upon the frenzy and not reality.  However, most Americans accept that there will be guns in the United States.  So both sides are arguing the limits therein rather than the legality of ownership or sale.  Citizens in the United States have long debated the issues of gun rights, with advocacy groups on both sides trying to score protections or limits on the use and ownership of types of guns rather than all of them.

All pics taken from Public domain or Fair use sources

However, Piers Morgan doesn't agree with ownership of guns, and believes Americans are wrong for allowing it.  As such he is massively out of step with common thought in the United States.  But we tolerate people with different ideas, even accept that they are part of free speech.  The problem isn't that Americans disagree with Morgan on the subject, it is that he seemed to refuse to see any truth in any view, outside of his own experience.

Valley Forge was to test the American will.
When I get into disagreements with people over issues that I am moved by, such as Abortion, I do not get angry, I simply move on.   You cannot change a person by yelling at them.  Nor do you make your point better by going on for hours saying the same thing.  Morgan could have gained by doing so regarding guns. Piers Morgan didn't make every episode of his show about guns, but every time he espoused a view that was out of step, people were reminded of the times he did make it about that.

Washington crossing the Delaware River while standing in a boat which might be dangerous, you know.
Beyond that, there is one great issue with his views for the show he was hosting.  Americans know that guns and the fear of the overarching state are part of the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.  Rightly or wrongly, Americans believe, commonly, that the gun, whether pistol, rifle or otherwise, saved them from incursions from foreign powers, and from domestic invasions of privacy.   The United Kingdom last fought a battle against a foreign opponent on its soil centuries ago.   As such they might have a disconnect between their homeland being threatened and the weapons used to do that.  The state, the all powerful state that monopolizes violence in the UK does so from the top down.  Rights and freedoms were granted from the Crown and the governmental state, not from the citizens fighting to achieve it. 

The United States was born in revolution, and it is upon that backdrop that Piers Morgan fails.  He comes from a different culture, where freedoms are not an expectation but a grant.  The Americans who hold guns dear do not love the state, they do not love the idea of big governments and powerful armies.  The believe themselves to be the backbone of the American people.  And the freedoms they believe in, to them, flow from the gun.  Do I agree?  It doesn't matter.  Piers Morgan was telling a country that is fully armed that they were wrong and foolish to own guns.   The American people, however flawed, saw the debate as being our former master telling us we shouldn't be arming ourselves, it might lead to independent thinking.

I'll be called a Libertarian for this, by some, but they should know, my political voting record has seen more votes for Democrats than Republicans, and more third party than either of those, and almost none were cast in a one party ballot.   My point here is to say CNN's audience was rubbed wrong, repeatedly.  I didn't care for his imperious nature, but didn't, honestly, have an issue with his anti-gun fetish.  I knew, however, that he would hang himself with his own noose by saying what he did.


Thursday, April 17, 2014

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: That Hideous Strength (part 1)

The title is taken from a line by the 16th Century poet Sir David Lyndsay (no relation, as far as I know, to the author of A Voyage to Arcturus):
The shadow of that hyddeous strength
Sax myle and more it is of length.
The  word “strength” here is used in its original meaning of a stronghold or a fortress and refers to the Tower of Babel, that dreadful monument to pride which according to some traditions was the citadel of the first world-conquering despot.

Each of the volumes of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy is its own animal; each written in a different style and evoking a different theme. Out of the Silent Planet was an admitted and unashamed pastiche of the scientific romances of H.G. Wells. Perelandra, on the other hand, drew it’s inspiration from medieval fantasies. Lewis’s third book, That Hideous Strength, is literally more down-to-earth, set in the most mundane location imaginable: a small university town.

Which is why Lewis subtitles his book “A Modern Fairy-Tale.”
If you ask why – intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels – I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairy tale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories.
But Lewis’s real inspiration here is not the Brothers Grimm, but his friend Charles Williams, who perhaps is best-known today for his connection with the Inkings, a circle of Christian writers which included by Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but who was a highly-regarded poet in his day and the author of fantasy novels which brought magic into the modern age. Lewis tries to adopt a style similar to Williams’s in this book and the theme of magic encroaching on the mundane 20th Century is one that Williams liked to use.

Mark and Jane Studdock are a not-exactly-happily-married couple. They’re not exactly un-happily-married, but their relationship, after less than a year of marriage, is already showing strains. Mark has just gained a fellowship at Bracton, a small college in the town of Edgestow and Jane is trying to finish her dissertation for her Master’s Degree from an neighboring woman’s college.

The relationship between Jane and Mark form an important subplot in the book and is both one of the novel’s strengths and its weaknesses. It’s a strength in that it gives the work an emotional grounding that the previous, more fantastical novels lacked. It’s a weakness in that Lewis’s experience with marriage was almost entirely academic and based on his observations of his married friends.

In the movie adaptation of William Nicholson’s play Shadowlands, based on the relationship between Lewis and the American poet Joy Gresham, a friend teases him that he’s a writer of children’s books who has never had children and a lecturer on marriage who has never known a wife. There’s some truth to that gibe. Lewis did not marry until very late in his life and spent most of his time in the almost exclusively male company of his Oxford colleagues.

The novel begins with Jane bitterly quoting words from the Anglican marriage service and musing on how little the liturgical ideal matches the reality. I suppose it’s appropriate that Lewis starts with words from the liturgy, because he never strays far from church orthodoxy as his characters discuss marriage. The service also contains the words “Love, Honor and Obey”, and part of Jane’s subplot is how she comes to terms with the command “Wives, submit your husbands.” This is one of several things modern readers find annoying with this book.

But St. Paul’s admonition has a flip side which is often overlooked. As wives are obliged to defer to their husbands, Paul also requires husbands to be deserving of that deference. It’s not a perfectly balanced reciprocation, perhaps, but then neither is it an entirely one-way street either. This is a lesson Mark needs to learn. He has been preoccupied with his own career and climbing the greasy pole of faculty politics at Bracton and had been frankly taking his wife for granted.

Unfortunately, although we see Mark and Jane grappling with their relationship separately, and in conversations with others, we rarely see them talking to each other. Granted, this is a big part of their problem; but since we don’t actually see them working things out, their eventual reconciliation rings a little hollow.

Jane has been suffering from disturbing dreams. She has one of a man in a prison cell receiving a visitor who unscrews his head and carries it off, and about a sleeper buried underground. They bother her, but she doesn't know what they mean.

She winds up describing her dream to her neighbors, Dr. Dimble and his wife. Dr. Dimble had been her tutor when she had been an undergraduate, and she had remained a close friend. Lewis had a great affection for his own tutor when he was a young man, and tutors in his stories are always good people. Dr. Dimble thinks her dreams are significant, but doesn't seem to think she needs a psychiatrist. “I’m not going to give you any advice. But if you do decide to go to anyone about that dream, I wish you would first consider going to someone whose address Margery or I will give you.”

With his fellowship, Mark has become a full-fledged member of the “Progressive Element” at Bracton College, a faction that seeks to modernize the college and opposes the calcified policies of the faculty’s Old Guard.

Lewis, ever the Medievalist, was no fan of Progress. To a large extent, I suppose, this was due to his traditionalist religious beliefs, but I suspect his love for old things, especially the old Norse sagas, which preceded his conversion to Christianity has something to do with it as well. And perhaps, although he rarely speaks of them, his experiences in the trenches, where the promise of 20th Century science quickly turned to more efficient ways of killing.

In any case, I think that Lewis’s rejection of Modernity is only partially a reactionary dislike of Change; he is also reacting to an attitude prevalent in his era and still common today, although under a different name, about Progress as a Sacred Thing. After all, You Can’t Fight Progress. His friend J.R.R. Tolkien touched on something similar once when he drew a distinction between the Scientific Theory of Evolution, which is, he said, about Change, and the Popular Myth of Evolution, which is about Improvement. When, in one of the Narnia books, the corrupt governor of a distant island defended his policy of permitting the slave trade, he did so on the grounds that it was “Progress”. Prince Caspian replies that he has seen the same in an egg. “In Narnia we call it ‘going bad.’”

But back to Bracton. The college is considering selling a piece of property known as Bragdon Wood to the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, or the N.I.C.E.; a kind of think tank ostensibly devoted to applying the latest in Science to Government and Social Planning.
The N.I.C.E. was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints – “red tape” was the word its supporters used – which have hitherto hampered research in this country.
I have to say, Lewis does a lovely job with the names in this book, and the N.I.C.E. is wickedly ironic. Conservatives no doubt would call the N.I.C.E. an example of Evil Big Government, but Lewis is rather vague about this. The line about “red tape” suggests the opposite to me, and the Institute's supporters sound to me very much like some of the present-day boosters of Charter Schools. As the story progresses we see the N.I.C.E. establishing its own parallel government which winds up absorbing the existing government of the city.

At the moment, the N.I.C.E. wants to buy Bragdon Wood, a small wooded parcel of land enclosed by and old wall with legendary connections to the time of King Arthur, for a new facility and it is looking to create a partnership with the college. This of course is too great an opportunity to pass up, and the Progressive Faction rigs the order of business at the College Meeting to ensure that it goes through.

At one point we have a bit where Lewis unexpectedly indulges in a bit of the prophecy which Science Fiction is supposed to provide. A couple professors are discussing the benefits which a partnership with the N.I.C.E. will bring to the college. One describes an “Analytical Notice-Board” which will compile and display all the research done by various departments in real-time, sounding very much like a localized version of the Internet. Then another administrator puts it all in perspective by gushing about the new up-to-date toilets the N.I.C.E. plans to install.

After the meeting, Mark is introduced to another of the college fellows: Lord Feverstone, who turns out to be our slimy friend from Out of the Silent Planet, Dick Devine. He has done well for himself since his trip to Malacandra and has somehow acquired a title. Mark has always considered the Progressive Element to be the “Inner Circle” of the college and his ambition had been to join it; but in talking to Feverstone, he realizes that the faculty administrators he had jealously sought to join were themselves minor players. Feverstone he confides that he has been watching Mark’s career with interest and would like to recruit him for the N.I.C.E.

Mark has always wanted to be an insider, and this is his chance. At Feverstone’s urging, he agrees to visit the N.I.C.E. headquarters to speak with its director. At the same time, Jane makes up her mind to see the person the Dimbles have recommended about her dreams.

Without realizing it, they are choosing sides in a cosmic conflict.


NEXT:  Belbury and St. Anne's

Friday, April 11, 2014

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: Perelandra (part 2)

Christian Doctrine is never far from the surface in Lewis’s writings, and Perelandra is, I think, the most overtly religious of his Space Trilogy. It imagines the planet Venus, or Perelandra in the Old Solar tongue, as an unfallen Paradise, a second Eden. Dr. Elwin Ransom has been sent to Perelandra by the Oyarsa of Malacandra, the angelic spirit which rules the planet Mars, in order to foil an attack on that planet by the Dark Archon of Tellus. Ransom has met Perelandra’s equivalent of Eve; and where there’s Eve, you just know a Serpent is going to show up.

Weston, the belligerent physicist from Out of the Silent Planet, has rebuilt his spaceship and has now arrived on Venus. When we saw him last he was a pompous materialist, a caricature of the Late-Victorian Scientist, much like Professor Challenger from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, only without the more endearing foibles. Since then, Weston has had what one might call a religious experience. He has come to believe in a Higher Power; in fact, he claims that he has been in contact with this Power. But the Power he now believes in is not what Ransom would exactly call God.
“How far does it go? Would you still obey the Life-Force if you found it prompting you to murder me?” 
“Yes.” 
“Or sell England to the Germans?” 
“Yes.” 
“Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?” 
“Yes.” 
“God help you!: said Ransom.
I've always found this a significant exchange. The old Weston, caricature though he was, still possessed a certain code of morality. He embarked on his original trip to Mars not for wealth (unlike his avaricious partner Devine) or even fame, but rather to benefit humanity. Although he was willing to hand Ransom over to the (supposedly) blood-thirsty sorns, he felt some scruples about it – not because of any qualms about murder, but because he felt that an educated man like Ransom was more valuable than a common illiterate plebe. Even Oyarsa, in passing judgment upon the Earthmen, perceived that Weston was not “broken” like Devine, an amoral creature driven by solely by greed, but merely “bent”; possessing at least some sense of ethics.

But now he has renounced what moral code he previously had. Ransom’s questions in that passage are an ironic escalation in seriousness. Most of us would consider murder a greater crime than lying, but the old Weston, the scientific materialist, regarded Science – real Science, not the fuzzy humanities crap that Ransom studied – as a Supreme Calling. That he would now gladly murder an acquaintance is unsurprising; that he would betray his country more disturbing, (keep in mind, this novel was written during the Second World War); but that he would debase his own profession by peddling falsehood in journals dedicated to the discovery of scientific Truth shows how far he has fallen.

Ransom desperately tries to find some point of common ground in order to persuade Weston to see reason, but this only makes Weston angry. He replies with a rant that to me recalls some of the teachings of Ayn Rand. I don’t know if Lewis read any Rand; he was more likely referencing the popular view of Nietzsche, but I’m not familiar enough with him to say for sure.
“Idiot,” said Weston. His voice was almost a howl and he had risen to his feet. “Idiot,” he repeated. “Can you understand nothing? Will you always try to press everything back into the miserable framework of your old jargon about self and self-sacrifice? That is the old accursed dualism in another form. There is no possible distinction in concrete thought between me and the universe. In so far as I am the conductor of the central forward pressure of the universe, I am it. Do you see, you timid, scruple-mongering fool? I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that Force into me completely . . . .”
Weston gets his wish. At this terrible blasphemy, his body convulses and he becomes possessed by his Higher Power, the Bent Oyarsa of Earth. Lewis never directly identifies this being as Satan, but that’s who it is, and now he sets out to corrupt this world’s Eve as he did the one on ours.

Maleldil, the Ruling Entity of the Cosmos, (spoiler alert: Maleldil is really Aslan), has given the first Man and Woman of Perelandra only one command. You might remember that in Eden it was something about trees and fruit. In this case the command involves the Fixed Land. Most of the islands of Perelandra are floating masses of dense vegetation, but there are solid islands in the great planet-wide ocean. The Man and the Woman are permitted to visit the Fixed Lands, but not to settle and stay there.

Why? It seems pretty arbitrary to Ransom too; but since that is Maleldil’s command, Weston devotes his energies to persuading The Green Lady, this world’s Eve, to defy the command and spend a night on the Fixed Land. Ransom finds himself at a disadvantage. He can’t very well tell her that Weston is Bad or Evil or even Untrustworthy because the Lady has no frame of reference to understand what these things mean. And, she greatly desires to gain wisdom, to “grow older” as she puts it. Ransom must marshal the best counter-arguments he can.

This debate, which Lewis tells us continues off and on over the course of several days, forms the core of the novel; and in it, Lewis recasts just about every argument ever made on the subjects of Disobedience and Free Will. Ransom frequently finds himself in over his head. Fortunately, the Green Lady has a short attention span and tends to get bored when Weston and Ransom’s wrangling get too academic. Well, that’s probably unfair. The fact is that the World is so wonderful and new to the Lady that Theology is really low on her priority list of things to explore and discover.

It is when the Lady wanders off and leaves Ransom and Weston alone that the horror begins. Many critics have held that John Milton, when writing Paradise Lost was “of the Devil’s camp without knowing it.” Milton’s Lucifer is suave and charismatic and compelling, much more interesting that the stiff, uptight angels. Lewis disagrees, and portrays the Tempter here as someone who can be intelligent and charming when it suits him, but who regards these qualities merely as tools.

When he’s alone with Ransom, he doesn't bother with philosophical sophistries or cunning persuasion; he doesn't even bother with human posture. The personality he had displayed before goes off like a light switch, and although Ransom can’t put his finger on exactly what is wrong, Weston no longer seems human at all. He says nothing to Ransom except to simply call his name from time to time, and when Ransom replies, the Un-Man, (as Ransom now thinks of him), simply says: “Nothing.” The Un-Man does that all night – unlike Ransom, it doesn't need to sleep. “Ransom… Ransom …” “What the Hell do you want?” “Nothing.”

In another, disturbing passage, Ransom comes across a small, mutilated frog-like creature. He realizes that the Un-Man has done this, and has left a trail of maimed amphibians all along the beach. He’s mutilating frogs for no real reason at all – not even for fun. He’s just doing it – literally – for the Hell of it. Ransom attempts to put the creature out of its misery, but the poor thing proves dreadfully hard to kill and he winds up torturing it even more in his efforts to end its suffering.

This, Lewis says, is the nature of Evil. It’s not the grand, tragic Lucifer defying Heaven in blank verse; it is a bratty little kid doing petty, pointless, mean stuff just to be annoying.

As the daytime debates with Weston drag on, Lewis finds himself despairing. The Lady has not succumbed to the Tempter’s persuasive arguments –yet. But can she hold out forever? Can Ransom hold out running interference and trying to counter Westons’s arguments? Is it fair that Ransom alone bear the responsibility of battling the Prince of Darkness?

Does this battle solely exist on a moral, philosophical plane? What if an elephant had stepped on the Serpent in the Garden of Eden? Is Ransom expected to take on Weston physically? Ransom at first rejects this idea, but as he argues with himself and second-guesses himself through the night he keeps coming back to it. His own experiences during the First World War were so different from his boyhood notions of battle that he has a dubious opinion of his own courage. “When did I ever win a fight in my life?” On top of that, he is a middle-aged, sedentary academic, hardly up to punching out Satan.

Then again, so is Weston.

As he argues with himself a Voice comes to him in the night, telling him “It is not for nothing you were named Ransom.” This boggles him. He’s a philologist and he knows the derivation of his name, (it’s “Ranolf’s Son” and has nothing to do with the English word "ransom”) The thought that all of this, even a thing as trivial as his name, is a part of something which had been foreseen and planned for centuries or more in advance gives him a deeper sense of the gravity of the whole situation. The Voice adds “My name also is Ransom.”

Ransom makes the decision and steels himself to act. The Tempter can only continue his campaign as long as it has the use of Weston’s body. So Ransom must kill Weston.

I always found this direction a peculiar one, that I’m not entirely comfortable with. But keep in mind, Lewis wrote this novel during World War Two, in which British soldiers really were physically taking arms to battle the Forces of Evil, which probably had a profound influence on his thinking. In any case, Ransom confronts the Un-Man. When he realizes that Ransom seriously means to harm him, the Un-Man flees.

There follows an epic chase and running battle which takes the two across the ocean to the Fixed Land. At one point, Weston’s own personality comes to the surface – or is it only another mind-game by the Un-Man? Ransom cannot tell – and gibbers nihilistic despair about the nature of reality. It gives a glimpse of Lewis’s view of damnation; not the horrific tortures of Dante, but a loss of self. Lewis’s Hell is a diabolical melting pot in which individuals lose their identities to merge with their Master. In a similar way, in his book The Screwtape Letters, Lewis has a demon describe the souls of the damned as delicacies to be devoured.

Finally, deep in a cavern beneath the Fixed Land, Ransom and the Un-Man have their final confrontation. Ransom bashes his Enemy’s face in with a rock: “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, here goes – I mean, Amen.”

Now that it’s dead, Weston’s body no longer seems inhuman. The evil force animating it is gone. Ransom casts the body into a volcanic crevice to bury it and then, feeling an obligation to commemorate the passing of what once had been a great man, he carves a memorial inscription. “That was a tomfool thing to do,” he admits when he has finished it, “But there ought to be some record.”

Ransom emerges from the caverns and meets the Oyarsa of Malacandra and his Perelandrian equivalent. Here we get another of Lewis’s idée fixes: that gender is something that transcends biology. Although the eldila are angelic beings without sex in the biological sense, they nevertheless have qualities, the one of masculinity and the other of femininity. This also comes out of his theme that the ancient legends of gods and goddesses are kind of racial memories of the Cosmic Order: The god Mars is an echo of the Oyarsa of Malacandra; the goddess Venus an echo of Perelandra.

He also meets again the Green Lady, who has finally been reunited with the King, this world’s Adam. Whereas on Malacandra, the sentient races are subordinate to a ruling Oyarsa, on this world rulership is being handed over to the King and the Queen – as should have happened on Earth had things not gone wrong. The King, whose name is Tor, comes off not nearly as interesting as the Lady, but then again we see very little of him. It does strike Ransom as somewhat unfair that she had to resist temptation and he didn't have to do anything, but Tor had his own struggles. In a secret place, he was shown what was happening with his Lady. It occurs to me that perhaps Tor’s temptation was to intervene in his Lady’s temptation and prevent her from deciding on her own, but Lewis does not specifically say this.

Ransom witnesses the great ceremony crowning Tor and Tindril the King and Queen of their world. It is only now that Ransom notices that his heel is bleeding where Weston bit it during their battle. But it is now time for him to return home. Another white casket-like box has been prepared for him in which he will be carried back to Earth.

At their parting, Tindril unconsciously echoes what Weston said during his brief moment of lucidity during the earlier battle. He said life was like a rind one was sinking through, and past that rind was oblivion. The Lady also compares life to the thick rind of a fruit, but beyond that skin lies sweetness.

With that, and with the blessings of the King, Ransom is carried off back to his home.


NEXT:  We visit the strangest planet of all, Earth, which lies under the shadow of That Hideous Strength. Have a NICE day!

Thursday, April 3, 2014

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: Perelandra (part 1)

Erich von Däniken speculated that the stories in ancient myth and legend about gods angels and miracles were actually distorted accounts of space aliens. C.S. Lewis anticipated this idea and inverted it. In Lewis’s cosmos, space aliens are actually angels.

Elwin Ransom, a mild-mannered professor of philology, knows about these heavenly beings first-hand, having been taken to the planet Malacandra (known to terrestrial astronomers as Mars), by a pair of unscrupulous scientists, and having met Oyarsa, the ruling intelligence of that planet. He has learned that each planet has its own such planetary genius, but the Oyarsa of Earth rebelled against Maleldil, who rules over all, and waged war against his fellows. As a result, Earth has been quarantined from the rest of the Solar System.


At the end of Out of the Silent Planet, Oyarsa hints to Ransom that great changes will be coming to the Solar System in the near future and the long “Sitzkrieg” of Thulcandra, the Silent Planet (as Earth is called), may be coming to an end. Perelandra begins with Ransom preparing for another journey into space, this time as an agent for the divine eldila.

In some of our previous looks at Old-School Science Fiction, I’ve invoked the Nebular Hypothesis, the theory that the sun and planets coalesced out of a great cloud of interstellar gas which is the basis of our current understanding of the origin of the Solar System. When the theory was first proposed, it was assumed that the outer parts of the cloud would have coalesced first, and that therefore the outer planets are older than the ones closer to the Sun. We’ve seen how this assumption colored the depiction of the planets in science fiction for much of the 20th Century: Mars was usually presented as an ancient, dying world, such as perhaps Earth will be in several million years; and Venus as a young, primeval world, similar to what Earth was like in prehistoric times. Pulp writers portraying Venus were often tempted to forest it with Paleozoic jungles inhabited with antediluvian monsters.

C.S. Lewis, drawing on some of these ideas for his Space Trilogy, followed the tradition of making Venus, or Perelandra as he called it, a young planet; but he went past the Antediluvian, all the way to the Edenic.
Lewis’s Perelandra is an unfallen world, a sinless paradise. The dark archon of our world wants to change that. Hitherto, he has been unable to cross the orbit of Earth’s Moon, due to the cosmic interdiction of Maleldil; but Weston’s space ship has changed everything. The quarantine has been broken and the terrestrial forces of Darkness are about to stage an assault on Perelandra, to corrupt it as Earth has been corrupted. Oyarsa has recruited Ransom to go to Venus to prevent this from happening.

Lewis used the writings of H.G. Wells, particularly The First Men in the Moon, as his inspiration for Out of the Silent Planet, but Perelandra draws more from fantastic literature of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. As Lewis himself later put it, “I took a hero to Mars once in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus". It’s typical of Lewis that he found angels to be more believable than Weston’s technobabble.

Arriving on Perelandra, he finds it covered completely with water, which seemed a plausible conjecture before the Mariner space probes gave us a better look at Venus. The oceans of the planet are sweet, which both symbolizes the world’s uncorrupted state and on a more prosaic level makes sense assuming that the planet is several million years younger than Earth. Ransom encounters floating islands, composed of densely-matted vegetation, upon which trees grow and animals dwell. Lewis does a wonderful job of describing the strange, lush world that Ransom finds.

It is on one of these islands that Ransom, anticipating James T. Kirk, meets a green-skinned space babe. She is the Eve of this Paradise, this world’s First Woman. Ransom is able to speak with her, because the language he learned on Malacandra turns out to be a lingua franca of the Solar System, (and the fact that he already knew “Old Solar” was the reason he was chosen for the mission); but he is puzzled that, apart from the color of her skin, the Lady seems perfectly human. Human-looking aliens in science fiction are usually explained by things like Parallel Evolution, or a Common Ancestry from a Precursor Race, or Cheap Make-Up Budgets, or in many cases Lazy Writers. Lewis, naturally, gives a reason fitting with his theology: the natives of Perelandra have a human form because that is the form Maleldil assumed when he became a mortal on Earth.

It occurs to me in this reading that the color of the Lady’s skin might be symbolic both of her innocence and of the unfallen nature of her world, full of life and potential. I hadn’t thought of it before simply because, well, green-skinned aliens are something of a cliché. But I think it might be significant here, if for no other reason the comparison with Ransom’s own skin. He was carried to Perelandra in a box of a translucent material; as a result, half of his body has a bad sunburn from the solar radiation and the other half remains British pasty white. The Lady calls him Piebald Man because of his half-and-half appearance, which she found amusing when she first saw him; but this appearance might also signify Ransom’s own imperfect nature: good intentions mixed with uncertainty and doubt; the desire to do what’s right conflicting with sinful impulses.

Sex does not seem to be one of those impulses. He arrived on Perelandra naked, and the Lady is naked as well; but he is so self-conscious about his own appearance – he is, after all, no Adonis: a sedentary, middle-aged college professor with a ludicrous sunburn to boot; and she, despite her peculiar coloring, is overwhelmingly beautiful – that desire does not come into the picture.

We do not learn until the very end of the story that the Lady’s name in Tinidril. It’s possible that, being this world’s first woman and newly-created, she has not yet felt a need to take a name or to be given one. In any case, Ransom thinks of her as The Lady, and as she is this world’s Eve, I suppose she cannot avoid being an Archetype. She is innocent, but not unintelligent, and has a great desire to learn. She and Ransom have several conversations in which he learns as much from her as she from him.

But eventually, you know the Serpent is going to show up.


NEXT:   Enter Weston; a Belief in Higher Powers; the Terror of the Un-Man and Moral Conflict