C-Essay on Lewis' Space Trilogy, part 2

[Bengt-Ove]

The Fall.

Although Perelandra in likeness with the other books in the Space Trilogy contains mythology that is Lewis’ own (Deep Heaven), it is certainly the one with the clearest references to the Biblical story. At the same time in writing the trilogy Lewis, as mentioned, tried to retell Biblical themes without stained-glass and Sunday-school associations with a clear aim at the sceptical man. Lewis is thus forced to contend with the problem of striking a delicate balance: To reach the sceptics he must deal with intrinsically theological issues without using the normal theological terminology. Yet in Perelandra Lewis at times uses direct allusions to the Bible, like when the Un-man refers to the Crucifixion:

“The creature suddenly threw back its head and cried in a voice so loud that it
seemed the golden sky-roof must break, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.’ And the
moment it had done so, Ransom felt certain that the sounds it had made were
perfect Aramaic of the First Century. The Un-man was not quoting; it was re-
membering.” (p. 140)

But the key issue for Lewis in Perelandra concerns the Fall. In mythologized form he raises two questions: 1. What was the temptation in Eden really like? 2. What if man had not fallen? and was the temptation of Adam and Eve “an accident”, or was it indeed something that occurred with the approval of God; a trial that the would be emperor and empress of Earth must pass before they could truly ascend their thrones?24 It would then correspond nicely to the biblical account of Christ having to pass the trial of temptation before truly taking up his mission. As the fall of man is recorded in Genesis 3 in just six verses, there is much room for speculation. The mainstream theological view of the Fall has been that of the almost immediate succumbing of the first woman to the beckoning of the serpent: “Ye shall not surely die; for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:1-6) Compare this to the Un-man´s appeal to the Green Lady:

“...only the very great, the very wise, the very corageous should dare ... to go on – out of this
smallness on which you now live – through the dark wave of His forbidding, into the real life,
Deep Life, with all its joy and splendour and hardness.”
(Perelandra, p. 124).

But there is in the Biblical text nothing to indicate the length of the process, nor for that matter, to account for the absence (?) of Adam. Really very little has been written by theologians about the nature of the temptation, especially if one considers the momentous importance this event has for all the rest of the Biblical story. Lewis also found describing plausibly the unfallen Green Lady difficult work. He writes:

“I may have embarked on the impossible. This woman has got to combine charac-
teristics which the fall has put poles apart; she’s got to be in some ways like a
Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin. But, if one can get even
a fraction of it into words, it is worth doing.” (Letters of C.S. Lewis, p. 195.)

Lewis' view of the purpose of the forbidden fruit is voiced by the Green Lady after the temptation of the Un-man has been foiled:

“The reason for not yet living on the Fixed Land is now so plain. How could I wish to live there except because it was fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure – to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me. It was to reject the wave – to draw my hands out of Maleldil’s, to say to Him, ‘Not thus, but thus’ – to put in our own power what times should roll towards us ... as if you gathered fruits together for tomorrow’s eating instead of taking what came.” (Perelandra, p. 192.)

There is of course a close parallell here to the Israelite’s gathering of manna in the wilderness on their 40 years long trek to the Promised Land: They were only allowed to gather manna for the present day, and anyone who tried to hoard the Godgiven food found that it rotted after the first day. The first lesson of mankind then, would be to put their trust completely in their Maker – to “flow” with the waves of Maleldil. It is important to observe, though, that the Green Lady says “not yet”. Mankind come of age, having successfully passed through the trial, is now ready to ascend the throne as true vassals to their Maker, emperor and empress of their world, and to them nothing is now forbidden. Even the ruling spirit, the Oyarsa, now defers to them: “It lies in your bidding, Tor-Oyarsa,” said Perelandra, “whether I now converse in Deep Heaven only or also in that part of Deep Heaven which is to you a World.” (Perelandra, p. 191.)


As for the second question: What if man had not fallen? Perelandra is Lewis´ way of looking back along innumerable roads branching away through the history of mankind, to a particular crossroad that will never again be travelled, at least not in the same way as the first men could have. Still Lewis tries to give the reader an inkling of an idea of what our world might have been like. In the last two chapters of Perelandra, Ransom is present as the Green Lady and her spouse are crowned and given the new world to rule by the Archon/Angel of Perelandra. The splendour and innocence of these unfallen human beings in an unfallen world makes Ransom exclaim: “I have never before seen a man or a woman. I have lived all my life among shadows and broken images.” (Perelandra, p. 190). Lewis’ thoughts on the nature of an unfallen Adam and Eve or earth are also seen in Preface to Paradise Lost:

“To you or to me, once in a lifetime perhaps, would have fallen the almost terrifying
honour of coming at last ... into the very presence of the great Father, Priest and
Emperor of the planet Tellus; a thing to be remembered all our lives.”
(Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 118).

It is only after successfully having withstood the temptation to turn from the Creator that the Green Lady and her spouse are crowned as the emperor and empress of the new planet in the role of Oyarsa’s vassals. Lewis seems to suggest that the temptation on Earth was actually not a result of unwatchfulness on the part of God, but perhaps something even necessary – the final exam to pass before man could assume his stewardship over Earth.

How then, according to Lewis, does the unfallen world of Perelandra compare to the fallen, but redeemed, world of Earth, the Silent Planet? This problem centers on the validity of the interpretation that sees the Fall as fortunate. Lewis’ view on this interpretation can be gleaned through the discussion between Weston and Ransom before the Green Lady:

“He (Ransom) has not told you that it was this breaking of the commandment
which brought Maleldil to our world and because of which He was made man.
Dare he deny it?” Ransom must answer: “Whatever you do, He will make good of
it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. That is lost
forever. The first King and the first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing;
and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good; and what
they lost we have not seen.” (Perelandra, p. 110.)

The argument of the Un-man is indeed voiced by many today, who look on the Biblical story of the Tree of Knowledge as an allegorical retelling of Man’s evolution from pre-human to a moral, sentient creature; that taking and eating the Forbidden Fruit was the only course open to Man lest he stay innocent and ignorant, and that Man’s only way of gaining knowledge of good and evil was by succumbing to temptation. Lewis anticipated and refuted this argument also in the King’s words to Ransom:

“We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep. ... But Maleldil has brought us out of the one ignorance, and we have not entered the other.” (Perelandra, p. 193.)



Critics on Perelandra.

Leonard Bacon wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature, 29 (25 May 1946): “Perelandra” is the result of the poetic imagination in full blast and should never have been written in prose, however excellent ... The reader is taken into an Eden with the dew on it, where not unnaturally the only rational inhabitants are a thoroughly interesting Eve and perhaps the only endurable Adam in literature.”

John Gilland Brunini said in The Commonweal, 40 (2 May 1944): The book can be ranked high in the fields of creative imagination, speculative theology and engrossing adventure … It is writing of the highest order. Definitely in the Wellsian vein, “Perelandra” is, from all standpoints, far superior to other tales of interplanetary adventures.”

Victor M. Hamm (“Mr. Lewis in Perelandra” , Thought, 20 (June 1945), lauded Lewis’ description of the Oyarses of Mars and Venus: “The substance of this wonderful scene… which culminates in a grand chorus of praises to Maleldil [is] an inspired litany of love and homage. Blake should sound like this, in the Prophetic Books, but somehow he never does; there is in them too much of the Ossianic vagueness and verbiage. Keats does, in Hyperion, but his allegory is unintelligible. Dante is the man: in the sweep through the gyres of Heaven, to the crowning visit of God as the point that moves the sun and all the stars, he is loftier, of course, and more sustained, and he writes poetry instead of prose; but read and see whether the prophetic imagination is not in Lewis too, and something or the high style as well.”

Charles Moorman, in Arthurian Triptych (1960), describes Lewis’ attempt to strike a balance as both a strength and a weakness. Its strength, he feels, lies in the fact that it makes the reader bring forward his traditional responses to the crucifixion of Christ, and because of this, sharing in Ransom’s horror. But he also says:
“Yet this calling forth of stock responses has serious disadvantages. The stock re-
sponses attached to usual Christian terms may very well repel the very people
whom Lewis is trying hardest to reach.” (Arthurian Triptych, p. 127).
He goes on to say that it is Lewis’ seemingly non-religious point of view in the novels that is one of his main sources of strength.


Humphrey Carpenter remarks in The Inklings (1978) that Ransom’s fight with the Un-man is: “though splendidly written in itself, the intellectual battle of Paradise Lost reduced to fisticuffs.” (The Inklings, p. 220). He also poses the question whether it could not be argued that the whole Space Trilogy are really children’s books in disguise:
“The unfallen worlds of Malacandra and Perelandra are largely characterised by the
fact that their inhabitants include furry animals who can talk. ... The Un-man´s
grossest crime is not his tempting of the Eve of Perelandra but his wanton destruc-
tion, schoolboy fashion, of the frogs which inhabit the floating island.”
(The Inklings, p. 220).
At the same time Carpenter also questions on what grounds maturity in an author can be judged, and holds that Lewis´ best and most characteristic work sprang from this very boyishness. Lewis himself for many years considered Perelandra to be his best work of fiction, and Tolkien shared his high opinion of it, telling his daughter that he thought it to be a great work of literature. 25



THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH

The third part in the Space Trilogy takes place six years after Ransom’s first interplanetary travel and, seemingly paradoxically, on earth. But from Lewis’ point of view there is no paradox since, in the mythical framework laid down in the two previous parts, earth is just one of many created worlds, even “the silent planet” and there are hints in both previous books that earth will be the stage for The Bent One´s next attempt to thwart Maleldil’s plans:

“... the heavenly year we are now in ... has long been prophesied as a year of
stirrings and high changes and the siege of Thulcandra may be near its end.” (Out of
the Silent Planet, p. 166). “And as Maleldil Himself draws near, the evil things in
your world shall show themselves stripped of disguise...” (Perelandra, p. 197).

As Mars and Venus, two of the worlds in Deep Heaven, are used as stages for the universal struggle between good and evil, it is no more than logical that earth, a third, is treated in the same fashion as these. Lewis boils the plot down to a conflict of grace and Nature against anti-Nature (modern industrialism, “scientism”, and totalitarian policies).

The source of the book’s title is given by Lewis on the title page:

The Shadow of that hyddeous strength
Sax myle and more it is of length.

This is a description of the Tower of Babel, taken from the Scottish poet Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour, better known as The Monarchie (1554).



Synopsis of That Hideous Strength.

The main character in this final part of the trilogy is not Elwin Ransom, but rather a young couple, Jane and Mark Studdock. The unfolding of the story centers on the small idyllic university town of Edgestow, the sprawling mansion of Belbury, home of the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), and the vicarage St. Anne’s. Married for just six months, Jane already feels pent in, trying fruitlessly to complete her academic work, a dissertation on John Donne. She is haunted by strange disconcerting dreams; one concerning a talking bodiless head, and another about the unearthing of an ancient, British, druidical kind of man. It is implied that her psychic nature is due to her descent, the Tudors, who were supposed to share this gift. She reads of the very same “head” in the newspaper, that of a man guillotined in France for poisining his wife. She confides in her tutor and his wife, the Dimbles, who perceive that her dreams are visions of real events and persuade her to go to St. Anne´s to see Grace Ironwood, a stern but sympathetic elderly lady who appears to be a psychiatrist. Though she is assured that her dreams are real and will not go away, Jane is still afraid of becoming involved and returns home, trying to forget the whole affair.

Her husband Mark is a fellow in sociology at Bracton College in Edgestow. Even from boyhood always anxious to be “on the inside,” he is pleased to be numbered among the dons of the ruling “inner ring” at Bracton. The mighty organisation N.I.C.E. is working for a fusion of state and applied scientific research; selective breeding, scientific conditioning of man, secretly even freeing from the body, and in the end placing man on the throne of the universe. N.I.C.E. is planning to buy Bragdon Wood from the financially poor Bracton College, allegedly to build there the national centre of N.I.C.E. but in reality to gain access to what is believed to be the restingplace of Merlin, the fabled 5th Century druid and mentor of king Arthur. Their end is to re-animate Merlin, who according to legend did not die but is asleep, and to utilise his powers. Through a fellow member of the college, Feverstone (Devine of Out of the Silent Planet), Mark is offered a nebulous position at N.I.C.E.. At the thronging Belbury he meets Wither, the Deputy Director, and attempts futilely to find out exactly what he is to do there. He is in fact merely a means for N.I.C.E. to get hold of Jane, whose visions would be invaluable to them. N.I.C.E. has its own Police Force, which is soon found to work outside the law as well as above the national Police. N.I.C.E. begins its gradual takeover of Edgestow, tearing down houses and turning out people, among them the Dimbles. Mark, whose job at N.I.C.E. is to write propagandistic lies for the newspapers, is torn between his feelings for Edgestow, his university and Jane, and the desire to be a member of the innermost circle of people.

Meanwhile, Jane has another, terrifying dream about Merlin and Frost, one of the top men at Belbury whom she also encounters in the street. She flees back to St. Anne’s where the Dimbles now live together with some other people and some tame animals, among them a bear. She learns that they are the members of a “company” under the leadership of a Fisher-King, who are to fight a danger hanging over the human race. She meets Fisher-King, a seemingly ageless man who suffers from a bleeding heel. The sceptical MacPhee, a valuable member of the company, relates to her the story of Fisher-King, who is also named Elwin Ransom. The same man who once went to Mars and Venus is now directing a campaign against evil eldils under orders from his Masters, the good eldils from outer space. He is the Pendragon of Logres, who will never die of age. Ransom fears that Belbury will join forces with the magical powers of Merlin. He also suspects that dark eldilic powers are behind the work of N.I.C.E.

On her way home Jane is arrested by the N.I.C.E. police and interrogated and molested by their female Chief of Police. When the car taking them to Belbury is stopped by riots in Edgestow engineered by N.I.C.E. Jane is able to escape and seek refuge at St. Annes. Meanwhile Mark is becoming more and more disenchanted with N.I.C.E.. In preparation for being initiated into the very inner ring he is taken to a secret room and before the Director, which is the decapitated head of Jane’s dreams supposedly kept alive by scientific means, and with its brain likewise enlarged. Now with deep misgivings, Mark hurries home, only to find Jane gone. He seeks out Dimble, who chastises him, yet offers to help him to the “right side.” On the way back to Belbury, Mark is falsely accused of a murder and arrested by N.I.C.E. police.

Jane has a further vision of the unearthing of Merlin, and is sent out together with two of the company to find Merlin first. Merlin has indeed awoken and comes to St. Annes late at night of his own accord, asking for the Pendragon, Ransom, before whom he kneels. Merlin is forbidden to use his ancient white magic, even in service of Maleldil, and submits to instead being a vessel for eldilic powers, something no ordinary man can do and live. Mark, inprisoned, is faced with the choice between on the one hand initiation into the inner ring and submission to the dark eldilas whom Wither calls “macrobes”, to become truly “objective”, and on the other hand the possibility of death. Mark finally revolts, recognising he has been a fool all his life, forsaking friendship and all the things he really liked, always yearning to be a member of “the inner ring.” He will not be drawn in. Meanwhile, N.I.C.E. has got hold of an old tramp, mistaking him for Merlin. Mark is appointed to wait on the supposed Merlin who, uttering no words in front of the N.I.C.E.-people is content with the charade, being royally treated.

Merlin, “invaded” by Eldils, appears at N.I.C.E. as a Basque priest and expert in language, casting the tramp into a hypnotic trance and acting as his interpreter, thereby gaining entrance into the heart of Belbury. At a grand dinner-party he casts a spell not unlike that recorded in Genesis 11 concerning the tower of Babel, confounding speech into gibberish. He also lets loose the many caged animals being subjected to unspeakable experiments, and they wreak their own revenge on their tormentors. Amid the tumult, Merlin sends Mark on to St. Anne´s. Controlled by the Macrobes the deputy director and two other leaders of N.I.C.E. go before the head to bow down in worship. The head, now animate without any scientific means, requests more human sacrifices. The three men are all killed before the house is set on fire. Finally even the aloof and casual Feverstone is drawn into the cathaclysm as he is caught in an earthquake just outside Edgestow. As the threat against humanity in the form of N.I.C.E. is defeated, the “company” at St. Anne’s have a final dinner before being disbanded. They learn that Ransom, his task fulfilled, is to return to Perelandra to be at last healed of his wound. Mark and Jane are reunited, both with a new appreciation of life and a stronger love for each other.

Arthurian Mythology in That Hideous Strength.

Lewis brought into the final part of his trilogy a strong element of traditional Arthurian mythology, adding some personal touches. In all probability the historical Arthur was a Romanized Briton war-leader and nobleman in the sixth century, who won renown by checking the Saxon conquest. But as written records from that time are meager or non-existant, few details are known.

The Arthurian legend itself may originate as far back as the Welsh Mabinogion, which simply mentions a man going to someone named Arthur for help. A sixth-century priest named Gildas wrote that the Britons fought under an Ambrosius Aurelianus at the siege of Badon Hill, where they won a great victory. In 800, Nennius in his History of the Britons filled in the details of this battle and states that the Briton commander was “magnanimous Arthur.” Throughout the centuries the history of this warleader became embellished with many fanciful tales of magic, miracles and monsters, and Arthur emerged as a national hero of mythical proportions. One of the historians who helped in this was Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of England (1150). Another thing that lent support to Arthur as an historical High King was the claim around 1200 by the monks at Glastonbury to have found, while repairing the abbey, the remains of Arthur and his queen Guinevere. This was especially significant since Glastonbury has commonly been identified as that “Isle of Avalon” where Arthur was supposedly taken after his deadly encounter with the usurper Mordred, his son by incest. But the most famous source of the Arthurian legend is Sir Thomas Malory´s Morte d'Arthur (1470), one of the first works to be distributed with the help of Gutenbergs printing-machine.

The Realm of Logres and the Pendragon.

Logres comes from the Welsh “Lloegr” which was either a fairy-land within Britain, or another name for Britain itself.26 The twelfth-century poet Chretién of Troy was possibly the first to use the term as a name for Arthur’s kingdom, in his Lancelot. Lewis has it represent also God’s rule on earth, while Britain is the opposite of Logres, representing the secular will of man, apostasy, and chaos.27 This concept was borrowed from the epic Arthurian poem Taliessin through Logres by Charles Williams, a sometime Inkling and a close friend of Lewis’. In That Hideous Strength then, Logres is represented by Ransom and his small “company”. There “has been a secret Logres in the very heart of Britain all these years, an unbroken succession of Pendragons.” (p. 440). Pendragon is the British or Welsh word meaning “dragonhead”, which represented the King of Britain.28

Ransom tells of how he a few years earlier was called to the deathbed of an old man in Cumberland who was the seventy-eighth Pendragon. He gives Ransom the office and blessing. After Ransom leaves, another of the company, Arthur Denniston, will take up the leadership which will in turn be handed down to his son; his wife is told that she carries the future of Logres in her body. It is the office of the secret Pendragons of Logres to try and avert England from the outrages into which Britain has tempted her:

“Something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call
Logres. Haven´t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a
Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell. England is the swaying to and fro
between Logres and Britain." (p. 412).

The Fisher-King, and Ransom.

The name Fisher-King is associated with King Arthur through the legend of the Holy Grail: After Christ’s crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea was said to have received from Pilate the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. He used this cup to catch some of Christ’s blood. Joseph brought the cup with him to England, where it was passed onto Bron, Joseph´s brother-in-law, whose title was Rich Fisher.29 The Grail passed into the Arthurian legend, giving it religious significance: Arthur´s knights went on many a quest for the Grail; only the knight most pure at heart could find it.

The idea of a Fisher-King is traceable all the way back to Welsh myth, but Chretien of Troyes is among the first to tell the story of Percival, one of Arthur´s knights. He is one day directed by two fishermen to a castle. In a great hall he finds an old man, the Fisher-King, sleeping on a couch. He has been wounded by the spear that pierced Christ´s side. This Fisher-King is keeper of the Holy Grail and master of the knights. There is also a connection between the name Fisher-King and the Christian fish (Ichtys) anagram which would come to symbolise Christ and his followers as “fishers of men.”30 The wound in the thigh of the Fisher-King comes then to symbolise the fall of mankind.

The symbolism in Perelandra making Ransom a Christ-figure of sorts, is further emphasised in That Hideous Strength, now identifying Ransom as the Fisher-King. According to this tradition, the Fisher-King is lord of the land and received a thigh or foot wound, the “dolorous blow.” He lives in an isolated room of the castle, subsisting solely on the Sacred Host brought to him in the Grail by a woman. Ransom is found by Jane Studdock in an isolated room of the big house, reclining on a couch and living solely on bread and wine brought to him by a woman-member of the company.31 The bleeding heel wound was inflicted by the Un-man during their battle on Perelandra. As a Christ-figure, Ransom was wounded trying to “save” the Green Lady, the wound symbolising those of Christ in ransoming man from sin. The name Fisher-King that Ransom bears is not purely symbolical. It was bequeathed to him by his sister of that name, in her will. She leaves Ransom a fortune on the condition that he take her name, and tells him that a company will form around him to ward off a deadly danger hanging over the human race.

Merlin.

One of the most memorable figures from the Arthurian legend is Merlin. Merlin comes partly from Nennius’ account of a boy named Ambrosius who was both a seer and a prophet. But more essentially he is a creation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, building upon a prophet named Myrrdin from Welsh poems.32 The portrait of Merlin that has survived in legend is that of a wizard, Arthur´s teacher, and a prophet that came to a strange end. According to some versions including Malory, Merlin became enamoured of a young maiden named Niniane who tricked him into teaching her a spell which would leave him not dead but in a permanent state of enchantment. Later she used the spell, casting him into a sleep in a cave in Broceliande forest. Lewis uses this, making Broceliande into Bracton wood in the sleepy university town of Edgestow.

Lewis said that since no one really knows much about Merlin, an author has a free hand in portraying him.33 So he takes elements from this background and creates his own character; a fifth-century druid and member of an ancient Celtic religious order who knows about the Grail. With Lewis, Merlin is monstrously tall and very fat, almost a giant, with a red-gray beard and hair, he was “like something that ought not to be indoors. A sense of mould, gravel, wet leaves, weedy water hung about him,” (That Hideous Strength, p. 317) Some biographers feel that Lewis´ Merlin was inspired by the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, whom Lewis met twice in Oxford as a young man: “We were shown up a long stairway lined with rather wicked pictures by Blake – all devils and monsters – and finally into the presence chamber, lit by tall candles, with orange coloured curtains and full of things I can’t describe because I don’t know their names. The poet was yery big, about sixty fears of age; ‘aweful’ as Bozzy says. When he first began to speak I would have thought him French, but the Irish sounds through after a time. … I lost my morale. I understood how it is possible for a man to terrify a room into silence” (Letters …, p. 56).

Having been thrust 1500 years into the future Merlin experiences culture shock and is perplexed by the running of the household, the government (he is shocked to learn that the Roman empire has fallen altogether), and everything about twentieth century life. He is said to have used magic before it became “black”, in a time when the relationship between mind and matter was different from now. He is said to represent

“the last trace of something the later tradition has quite forgotten about, something
that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were
either white or black, either priests or sorcerers.” (p. 313).

Merlin tells Ransom that they need his kinship with the earth and the water in order
to heal Logres. But Ransom forbids him to use any kind of magic, even white; “It
was never quite rightful, even in your own days. ... In this age it is totally forbidden.”
(p. 318). Lewis’ point is clear: With the passing of time nearer and nearer to the liberation of the Silent Planet, there is no longer any neutral ground and what was grey must eventually become either black or white, either Light or Darkness.

Lewis’ Use of Arthurian Symbols.

Lewis abstracts from the Arthurian myth these leading symbols – the Fisher-King, Merlin, the remnant of Logres, and the battle between Logres and “mere Britain” – and uses these to suggest a comparison between the Arthurian world and his own age. Yet there is a significant difference between Lewis´ technique and other interpreters of the Arthurian myth. While others have recreated the entire myth, Lewis writes a story of his own time into which he introduces elements of the Arthurian myth. Charles Moorman says that by doing this Lewis elevates the story of two modern people into an allegory of the cosmic and universal battle between Good and Evil:

"By using elements of the Arthurian myth, Lewis gives to the fictional situation of
That Hideous Strength the high seriousness and order inherent in the structue of
the myth." (Arthurian Triptych, p. 152).

The Tower of Babel, and the Myth of Deep Heaven in That Hideous Strength.

The myth of Deep Heaven and earth, the Silent Planet, that Lewis introduced in the previous two parts of the trilogy also plays a major part in this the third part. Ransom´s masters who at times visit him in his room at St. Anne´s are those same eldils (angels) that he met on Mars and Venus; emissaries from Deep Heaven – and lastly from Maleldil (God) – down to the planet still under siege from the Bent One (Satan). N.I.C.E. is here an instrument of the Bent One, like Weston in the two preceeding novels. The Edwardian mansion that houses the N.I.C.E. is fittingly named Belbury by Lewis; Bel being the Babylonian form of Baal – a local fertility and nature god worshipped by ancient semitic people, and traditionally the antithesis to the Hebrew God, while Bury means to hide or conceal.

The story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is also paralleled by the great mansion of Belbury, where the goal is to place “Man Immortal” on the throne of the universe, without regard for the rest of creation. One of the top executives says to Mark: “Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.” (That Hideous Strength, p. 304) As God confounded the speech of the people of Babel who would make themselves immortal by reaching unto heaven, and scattered them, the proud plans of the N.I.C.E. end in a similar way; at a great reception to celebrate their accomplishments, speech is suddenly confounded, panic breaks out and the leadership of N.I.C.E. are killed or scattered. At one point in That Hideous Strength Lewis actually ties together all the myths found in the trilogy. This is when he lets Merlin on his arrival ask Ransom as to the present whereabouts of King Arthur, and is answered that Arthur is dwelling in the House of the Kings in the land of Abhalljin (cf. Avalon) on Perelandra together with Mose, Enoch and Ellijah who, according to the Biblical tradition, were taken up to heaven without tasting death.34

Critics on That Hideous Strength.

In a letter of January 1946 Lewis lightly observed that his latest book, That Hideous Strength, had been “unanimously damned by all reviewers.” (Letters of C.S. Lewis, p. 209). This was certainly an exaggeration, but the reception of this the final part of the trilogy was bland among the critics. The difficulty lay of course in the way Lewis mixed a number of styles; science-fiction, the Arthurian legend, and thriller with supernatural elements.

Humphrey Carpenter thought that That Hideous Strength was both the worst and the most enjoyable book of the trilogy:

"Worst because its central action around the Inner Ring at Belbury is Lewis´ working out his
resentment of bullies, and most enjoyable because it is on a full-bloodedly schoolboy level, and this is
the level at which Lewis is at his best."
(The Inklings, p. 220).

Carpenter characterised the book as a celebration of everything that had happened in Lewis´ life up to that point. His beloved tutor Kirkpatrick is there: as MacPhee, the sceptical Ulster Scot. The Bloods of Malvern are in it: as the Inner Ring at Belbury. The politicking among university dons, which Lewis had found repulsive, is in it: in the description of Edgestow University. His love of Arthurian myth is in it and even Tolkien´s mythology of Middle Earth can be found in a reference to the island of ‘Numinor’, whence Merlin´s art was supposed to have come.35

Graham Greene wrote in the Evening Standard (24 August 1945), p. 6: “Mr Lewis writes admirably and excitingly when he is describing the Institute, with its sinister muffled life under a Deputy Director who talks as a crab walks, but I found Professor Ransom and the ‘good’ characters peculiarly unconvincing. The allegory becomes a little too friendly, like a sermon at a children’s service, or perhaps like a whimsical charade organized by a middle-aged bachelor uncle.”

Leonard Bacon wrote in The Saturday Revieiv of Literature, 29 (25 May 1946), pp. 13-4: “When Mr Lewis, harking back to the world of Merlin, says that the mysterious Land of Logres, or ‘Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore’, far away in the beginning of time, is what keeps England from degenerating into Great Britain, he says what is fundamentally true and so magnificently full of important implications that it would take common clay a month to ferret out the full bearing of the observation.”

Orville Prescott (The New York Times, 21 May 1946) wrote: “That Hideous Strength is a parable on much the same theme as was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – the degeneration of man which inevitably follows a gross and slavish scientific materialism which excludes all idealistic, ethical and religious values. But when Mr Huxley wrote his bitter books his mood was one of cynical despair. Mr Lewis, on the contrary, sounds a militant call to battle.” The reviewer in Time, XLVH, No. 23 (10 June 1946), p. 36, wrote: For Christian readers, Lewis’ allegory adds up to an elaborate modern version of an old story which atomic man may well paste in his hat: The Tower of Babel.”

Joseph McSorley reviewing it in The Catholic World, 163 (June 1946), pp. 277-87 wrote: The plain fact is that Mr Lewis has too many exceptional gifts. They sprout all over his latest work, draining away strength from a story which drastic pruning could have made timely and rousing.’

William Ready (The Tolkien Relation, 1968) was highly critical of Lewis´ Christian morals in letting N.I.C.E. be violently destroyed at the close of That Hideous Strength:
“There is an ugly atavism in Lewis´ account of their defeat, as if, when prayer fails, recourse to violence is justified.” (p. 29). The violent close of the book where immoral scientists and politicians become subject to the revenge of the tormented beasts from the Belbury laboratory certainly has an Old Testament feeling to it. But William Ready´s charge hardly seems well warranted if one remembers that this bloody end for Belbury was not the company´s doing, but rather the destructive forces controlling N.I.C.E. turning on their own.

But the most severe charge against That Hideous Strength and the two previous parts of the trilogy was levelled, not unexpectedly, by professor J.B.S. Haldane. Haldane, who was a famous scientist, philosopher and Marxist, had been easily recognisable in Lewis’ portrait of Weston, the personification of science void of ethics. In his article Auld Hornie, F.R.S. (Modern Quarterly, No. 4, 1946), Haldane accused Lewis firstly of getting the science in his books wrong, and secondly of attacking scientists and scientific planning. Lewis later wrote but did not then publish A Reply to Professor Haldane, which was posthumously published in Of Other Worlds, 1966. Lewis there willingly admits to erring in his descriptions of e.g. space-travel and the solar system in his romances but holds that this is beside the point since he never intended for anyone to take these descriptions seriously anyway; his books were fantasies and he needed for his purpose just enough popular astronomy to create in the common reader “a willing suspension of disbelief”. (p. 76).

Haldane’s second charge was that he felt Lewis was traducing scientists and scientific planning: “Mr Lewis’ idea is clear enough. The application of science to human affairs can only lead to Hell.” (p. 79). Lewis’ retort was that his novels were certainly an attack, but not on science but rather a certain view about values that he calls “scientism”; based on the belief that the perpetuation of our own species is to be pursued at all cost even if all human values are lost in the process. He goes on to say:
“Under modern conditions any effective invitation to Hell will certainly appear in the guise of scientific planning, as Hitler’s regime in fact did” (p. 80). Haldane also suspected that Lewis was not a democrat but a propagator of theocracy.

Lewis affirms that he is a democrat because he believes that “no man or group of men are good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others.” (Of Other Worlds, p. 81) Lewis goes on to say that the nearer to theocracy any government approaches, the worse it will be, this in clear reference to the picture he paints in That Hideous Strength of a society where powerful institutions with the state’s approval assume the role of God in scientifically determining the future of mankind. He goes on to deplore Haldane’s choice of target for his charges, pointing out that the preface to That Hideous Strength clearly states that the doctrines behind the romance could be found stripped of all fictional disguise in his short volume The Abolition of Man, and wonders why Haldane did not choose to discuss this instead of holiday fiction.

The Abolition of Man.

This short volume (published in 1943) was the quintessence of three lectures that Lewis held at Durham University. Here he discusses what he saw as tendencies then present in Upper Form English education, aimed at debunking emotions and moral values. He feared that in the guise of English education, pupils were being conditioned to regard morals and emotions as subjective and trivial. “It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption which ten years hence ... will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognised as a controversy at all.” (p. 9).

He further claims that every culture has a natural law, an objective basis for all values and judgements, and if we abandon external standards of value, we are forced to turn to constructs built on man´s assumptions, with a resulting loss of objectivity.36 Lewis says that Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the “spirited element”: “The head rules the belly through the chest.” (p. 19). He feared that the result of the aforementioned tendencies would be “men without chests”; people with desires and intellects but lacking ethics and morals to keep their desires in check. He exemplifies:

“I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but
bred to believe that a gentleman does not cheat, than against an irreproachable
moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.” (p. 19).

In view of the Space Trilogy, Lewis clearly felt that Men without Chests in charge of education and applied science are a very real danger, and not only in Nazi-Germany.

The Missing Part.

Having read the three novels comprising Lewis´ Space Trilogy, it may be a point of interest that after finishing Out of the Silent Planet Lewis started working on an unfinished sequel. He wrote about seventy pages of this story, named The Dark Tower. This story concerns itself, not with other worlds in the known universe, but with time-travel, and possibly travels to other dimensions. His mind was clearly already on this subject when he wrote his Malacandrian adventure, as hinted by the closing lines of that novel where Ransom states: “If there is to be any more space-travelling, it will have to be time-travelling as well...!” (Out of the Silent Planet, p. 187). The Dark Tower was about the invention of a device by which it was possible to rend open the fabric of time and see, as with a film projector, into time passed. Or was it perhaps into the future? Or maybe another dimension altogether? The answer would not be clear since the scenery viewed seems totally alien and strange with one exception: a perfect replica of the clock tower at Cambridge!

The story takes place partly in Cambridge in the rooms of a fellow don of Ransom’s. Ransom is in the story as well as Lewis himself and MacPhee. A young don, Scudamour, who recognizes himself – or a replica of himself – in the projected otherworld, throws himself at the projected image and finds himself transported into the body of his double in that other world. He tries to call to God in his exasperation, but finds that there is no word for God in that other world, nor any conception of a God. He finds the society there to be reminiscent of a bee-hive, and the people are automatons. He also finds that the scientists in that world have been experimenting, trying to find a channel to our world, which they would venture to remake in the shape of their own. Scudamour’s automaton double has meanwhile been transported into Scudamour´s body in the present world, and a hunt ensues.

The manuscript was found in the 70s by Lewis’ editor Walter Hooper and published in its unfinished form. It was not known why Lewis abandoned this project. In recent years, however, Lewis’ authorship of this unfinished novel has been the object of some controversy. In the 1980s, Kathryn Lindskoog, author and Lewis afficionada, published a book, “The C.S.Lewis Hoax”, where she claims that the excerpts from the novel differ markedly in style and quality from Lewis’ other writings. She puts forward the theory that the author is in fact Walter Hooper. In the early 90s an examination was undertaken to examine the truth to this claim, and the findings of the examination were that The Dark Tower was indeed written by C.S. Lewis. However, the examination has been critizised as being too hurried and biased. The charges of Kathryn Lindskoog have garnered support from a number of notable writers, and in 1991 a petition was written, demanding a more thorough investigation into the authorship of The Dark Tower and other works purportedly written by C.S. Lewis. The petition was signed by such notable writers as Lloyd Alexander and Arthur C. Clarke.

Critics on The Dark Tower

When published in 1977, although in an unfinished state, The Dark Tower received favourable reviews in England. Tim Lenton, writing in the Church of England Newpaper (7 April 1977), p. 809, said: “’The Dark Tower’ … is as good as anything he wrote, and it is a tragedy for Lewis-addicts that it is incomplete. Even so, it is well worth reading for its original ideas on time and memory, and for sheer enjoyment for the clear, compelling style which was the author’s hallmark.” Ian Stewart in The Illustrated London News, 265 (April 1977), p. 59, said: “The best of these stories, The Dark Tower, is also the longest, though left unfinished … Lewis takes his readers from the cosy world of speculative talk into the lurid realm of science fiction … we … can only regret that so inventive a storyteller did not complete his tale.” The Spenser scholar, Dr Alastair Fowler, wrote in The Times Literary Supplement (1 July 1977), p. 795: “In its present state ‘The Dark Tower’ has flaws of clumsiness that would doubtless have been removed in a final draft. Yet it has the same holding power, the same compulsive readability, as the other parts of what I suppose we should now call the interplanetary tetralogy … ‘The Dark Tower’ is the least literary of all Lewis’s fictions. Certainly it is the farthest from allegory and even from paraphrasable meaning. Consciously or unconsciously it approaches an area of mysteriously strong negative feelings and conflicts, untouched elsewhere in his work. Finished, it might have been his best.”


Conclusion.

C.S. Lewis has been called by some “an apostle to the sceptics,” by others “an un-orthodox propagator of orthodoxy.” As I may have shown; the romances comprising the Space Trilogy will not be easily classified. Lewis was a man of strong moral convictions and with a fertile imagination. He created his own myth of Deep Heaven, blendning it with Biblical sources as well as classical myth, lending a mythical quality to the stories themselves.

For an understanding of Lewis’ point of view in these romances, it must be remembered that he believed the spritual world to be as real as the material one. The question of the fall of mankind for instance, was a very real issue to him. He used Ransom, an intellectual, to cross the border and delve deep into the spiritual world to witness the struggle between Light and Darkness that Lewis believed is carried on through the ages even in our midst. The strange worlds of Mars and Venus, though elaborately described, were not created by Lewis primarily to create in the reader a longing for Space or other planets, but mainly to tell the reader something about ourselves. He lets earth and human history be viewed from an interplanetary viewpoint, and he lets 20th century English society be seen through the eyes of a 5th century druid. He does not take the reader to enchanted worlds as a means of escape from a dull and grey material world; but rather to make the reader see even this ordinary world as a bit enchanted.

Lewis used the same mythology that had given him a longing for the unattainable – together with some of his own making – to perhaps instil in some of his readers that same longing, his romances becoming signposts for a generation of sceptics who were in his view immunised against faith and belief in the supernatural, just as he had been. He also used romance as a guise to make a statement about current trends in science, sociology and education. With Lewis’ didactic purpose in mind, it is a point of interest that the process of writing these romances seems to have been rather the reverse from what one might expect: his writing beginning with seing mental pictures; then ensuing the process of creating a possible environment, and the message or moral coming only after that.

One lasting impression is that these romances make up, the didactic purpose aside, a celebration of all the persons and things – real or mythical, good or bad – that had played some part in the life of this scholar and man-child. It is perhaps not a wild guess that writing these stories provided a welcome release for his fertile imagination from the more dull and academic side of university life. Lewis’ boyish side often reveals itself in the many humorous passages, and also in the mixture of the homely (e.g. the snug and cosy life at St.Anne’s), and high, reckless adventure. For the reader who shares Lewis’ boyish love of the fantastic, which in my view is indispensable for an appreciation of anything in the vein of Fantasy or Science Fiction – the books comprising C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy together make up a milestone in 20th century imaginary fiction. This reader, for one, readily confesses to belonging to that category or readers.


Notes

1. Letters of C.S. Lewis, 1.

2. Lewis, C.S., Surprised by Joy (SPJ), 62-63.

3. Lewis, SPJ 70-72.

4. Lewis, SPJ 110.

5. Lewis, SPJ 144-145.

6. Sammons, Martha C., A Guide Through C.S. Lewis´ Space Trilogy, 102.

7. Lewis, SPJ ch xiv.

8. Christensen, Michael J., C.S. Lewis on Scripture, 22.

9. Vanauken, Sheldon, A Severy Mercy, 144.

10. Carpenter, Humphrey, The Inklings, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles
Williams and their friends, ch lll.

11. Lewis, On Stories, in Of Other Worlds, 18.

12. Letters of C.S. Lewis, 22-24.

13. Sammons 72-73.

14. Carpenter 139.

15. Carpenter 140.

16. Lewis, C.S., A Reply to Professor Haldane, in Of Other Worlds, 78.

17. Sammons 42-43.

18. Sammons 17-18.

19. Of Other Worlds, 87.

20. Of Other Worlds, 89.

21. Revelation, 12:9.

22. Revelation, 19, 20.

23. Sammons 114.

24. Sammons 114.

25. Carpenter 182.

26. Sammons 61.

27. Sammons 61.

28. Sammons 64.

29. Sammons 66.

30. Sammons 66.

31. Lewis, C.S., That Hideous Strength, 172.

32. Sammons 67.

33. Sammons 68.

34. Lewis, C.S. That Hideous Strength, 324.

35. Lewis, C.S., That Hideous Strength, 344.

36. Lewis, C.S., The Abolition of Man, 38.




Works examined

Lewis, C.S., Out of the Silent Planet (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1938;
Pan Books Ltd, 1952)

Lewis, C.S., Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1943.
Also published as Voyage to Venus, Pan Books Ltd, 1953)

Lewis, C.S., That Hideous Strength: a modern fairy-tale for grown-ups
(London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1945; Pan Books Ltd, 1956)


Other books and articles quoted or referred to

Bacon, Leonard, in The Saturday Revieiv of Literature, 29 (25 May 1946), pp. 13-4; 29

Bernardus Silvestrus, De Mundi Universitate, edited by Carl Sigmund Barach and Johann Wrobel (Innsbruck, 1876),

The Bible, King James translation

Brunini, John Gilland, in The Commonweal, 40 (2 May 1944)

Carpenter, Humphrey, The Inklings (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends) (London: Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1978)

Christensen, M.J., C.S. Lewis on Scripture (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980)

Fowler, Alastair, in The Times Literary Supplement (1 July 1977), p. 795

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini (c. 1150)

Greene, Graham, in the Evening Standard (24 August 1945), p. 6

Haldane, J.B.S., Auld Hornie, F.R.S. in Modern Quarterly no: 1, 1946, quoted in Of Other Worlds: essays and stories, edited by Walter Hooper, 1967

Victor M. Hamm, (Mr. Lewis in Perelandra, Thought, 20 (June 1945)

Lenton, Tim, in The Church of England Newpaper (7 April 1977), p. 809

Lewis, C.S., The Abolition of Man (Oxford University Press, 1943; Collins, 1978)

Lewis, C.S., A Reply to Professor Haldane in Of Other Worlds: essays and stories, edited by Walter Hooper.

Lewis, C.S., Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdman´s Publishing Co., 1967)

Lewis, C.S., The Dark Tower (1938) in The Dark Tower & other stories, edited by Walter Hooper, (London: Collin, 1977)

Lewis, C.S., The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964)

Lewis, C.S., God in the Dock, edited by Walter Hooper, (London: Collins, 1979)

Lewis, C.S., It All Began With a Picture (1960) in Of Other Worlds: essays and stories, edited by Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966)

Lewis, C.S., Letters to an American Lady (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1967)

Lewis, C.S:, On Stories, in Of Other Worlds.

Lewis, C.S., The Pilgrim´s Regress; An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (London: 1933. Collins, 1977)

Lewis, C.S., A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942)

Lewis, C.S., Surprised by Joy (London: 1955. Fount, 1977)

Lewis, C.S., Letters of C.S. Lewis, Edited, with a Memoir, by W.H. Lewis (London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966)

Lyndsay, Sir David, Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour, better known as The Monarchie (1554).

Mascall, E.L., in Theology (April 1939), p. 304

McSorley, Joseph, in The Catholic World, 163 (June 1946), pp. 277-87

Milton, John, Paradise Lost in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Fifth Edition, The Major Authors (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987)

Moorman, C., Arthurian Triptych: mythic materials in C. Williams, Lewis and T.S. Eliot (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960)

Prescott, Orville, (The New York Times, 21 May 1946)

Ready, W., Understanding Tolkien (New York: Warner, 1968)

Reynolds, Horace, in The New York Times Book Review (3 October 1943), p. 16

Sammons, Martha C., A Guide Through C.S. Lewis´ Space Trilogy (Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980)

Stewart, Ian, in The Illustrated London News, 265 (April 1977), p. 59

The Times Literary Supplement (1 October 1938), p. 625

Vanauken, Sheldon, A Severe Mercy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977)