Hagenart comic 11/23/19

CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft

Several years ago I purchased an odd book by CS Lewis called That Hideous Strength. I bought it because I had read the Narnia series and enjoyed most of them, and I’d read some of his pro-Christian work like The Great Divorce and the Screwtape Letters, and enjoyed them even though I had long ago stopped going to church or even caring about it and CS Lewis didn’t convince me because once you’ve read Carl Sagan, any Religious apologist just sounds like someone who hasn’t read Carl Sagan. I just realized that Carl Sagan’s initials are “C.S.” Just now, because I was deciding how to refer to CS Lewis. 

I bought it in spite of the hideous front cover illustration which reminds me, looking at it now, of the old English Sci-Fi TV shows like Doctor Who with the great ideas and the terrible special effects that the filmmakers know are terrible and they know you know so they kind of do symbolic special effects that are like signposts that say “this guy is supposed to be an alien, use your imagination and pretend he looks like one.” That’s the cover of That Hideous Strength, with the colored ribbons and what looks like a metal screw plate bracket of some kind hovering over picturesque college-type buildings and phantom chess pieces and and a poster on an easel. The bracket looked like one of those brackets where the screw holes make it look like a face but it’s really just a bracket, but after reading the book I realized it was a actually supposed to be a spirit face, which I liked, and thought it must be representing the devil, because metal bracket faces with screw holes certainly don’t look friendly. But now I’m thinking it might be representing god, who is kind of a super alien in the book. I did a google search to obtain the truth about the cover and failed, but I did get to see some other covers that have been published with the book over the years, some of which I liked better and some of which, unbelievably, I did not. 

Anyway, I purchased the book and eventually opened the book and read it in spite of the cover, and just as you might expect from the hideous cover and the terrible title (really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), That Hideous Strength is mostly an unpleasant read. It covers a whole lot of academic politics stuff that almost nobody on Earth could find interesting, inner university doings that probably seemed important to CS Lewis and riled him up and comprised the emotional focus of a lot of his tea time musings but that I skimmed through with rising resentment and anger until I reached the interesting parts in the last few chapters. I would have given up on the book long before but I’d happened to read the author’s note, or the Author’s Lame Apology as I later referred to it, where CS admits that he purposely left the fantasy stuff out of the first part of the book on purpose because that’s the way old timey fairy stories used to be written but nobody notices because they use old timey words like “cottage” and “castle” that used to be normal everyday boring things but you young folk don’t get it because of TV. So after reading that intro I knew that something interesting might happen later, and it did, and it was interesting enough that I later purchased the other two books in the series, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, which I loved so much that I forgave CS for the first part of THS. 

I loved the other books because they’re fun and they don’t force the reader to endure multiple chapters of the most uninteresting college faculty in history, but also and mostly for Lewis’s big idea that makes it all worth it and makes you wish he’d not been such a subservient Christian with his stories and loosened up a bit with the Bible-validating that ruined a lot of his stuff. But back to the idea:

Any science fiction slash fantasy story needs one or more great, original, world changing ideas that makes the whole ridiculous and implausible storyline work, and the Space Trilogy, as I believe it is referred to by literary snobs, has the Macrobes, or the Eldils. I think he might have used “Macrobes” in THS, and only as spoken by Macphee, the terrific Scot Professor that made the book so much more bearable. (The only character in the book with an active heartbeat, as far as I could tell). The Eldils are superior alien beings, hyperdimensional energy creatures that Lewis takes great pains to make as non-humanoid as possible, and I found the idea of of angels (and also the gods of classical mythology) as alien superhuman energy beings (made of matter with ‘different movements’, as described in Out of the Silent Planet) to be a very fascinating idea, because it is also very terrifying. The terror makes the fascination. And Lewis seems to get that, because he describes something similar when he talks about the “numinous” in “The Problem of Pain”, the numinous being something that evokes awe and uncanny fear. But he also seems to kind of side step the truth about the feeling. In his passage describing “numinous”, he starts by referring to the fear a person feels when they hear there is a ghost in the next room. The “numinous” sensation is a magnified version of that fear, he describes it as the feeling you’d have if you heard it described as a “Great Spirit”, instead of just a ghost. Interestingly, he uses non-religious terms here to describe these feelings, which are instinctive, although he asserts that these are actually religious feelings. And this is one of those passages where you feel Lewis recoiling from his own mental imagery. Ghosts and spirits evoke uncanny fear in humans, but if you paste a religious doctrinal structure over them you remove the fear, and you also remove a lot of the fascination. Lewis does that with every vivid, spine-chilling, uncanny image he comes up with. So in the space trilogy, he says; “the angels are inhuman hyper dimensional energies, they are great spirits as far above you as you are from a mouse, these entities are also the beings that steer planets, they are called Eldils on other planets, where they rule alien creatures, but we have given them the names of gods. The greatest of them is called Maleldil, He’s a mysterious being with unimaginable...Don’t worry, he’s god. Just go to church”. Really? 

And that brings me full circle to HP Lovecraft, CS Lewis’s twisted American cousin (I can say full circle because I mentioned Lovecraft in the title, so don’t even comment on it. Please? Kidding, I really don’t care about commitment...I mean comments! That was autocorrect!). I could list all their similarities like you do with Lincoln and Kennedy, but I’ll leave that as a game for crazy people (hint: start with similarities in their names). I’ll summarize my opinion by saying that whereas CS Lewis, at his best, starts with an eery and compelling image in his mind and labors to describe it to you, and sometimes, unforgettably, succeeds, Lovecraft begins with an eery idea that he hints at, and never even tries to describe, leaving it entirely up to the reader’s mind to evoke. Because he knows that no monster could ever look as terrifying as his central tenet, the big truth of his writing; We are small, and the Universe is old and vast and unfriendly. 

If Lovecraft had written the Space Trilogy, you wouldn’t get the marvelous images that Lewis conjures, and Maleldil would not end up as a Sunday school story. Ransom might survive Out of the Silent Planet with sanity intact, but he would have been a shattered, neurotic mess in the Perelandra, which would have ended with the Un-man in charge of the planet, or possessing the Queen. The creatures of Malacandra might look like Lewis imagined, but they wouldn’t be boring noble savages anymore, and the book would most certainly end with a ghastly sacrifice that the reader would hear about second hand, because of course, it would destroy the sanity of the narrator to describe it. Interestingly, Lewis does describe, vividly of course, a rather horrible possession in the next novel, by no less than the devil himself. But here’s the difference; In Lovecraft’s universe, there’s no god above the devil, refereeing the story and making sure it all ends okay. Lewis makes it clear that his “dark lord” is a rebel against the just and all-powerful Maleldil/God. Lovecraftian gods are completely opaque if not malevolent. We would never know if one was rebelling against the other, and all their actions would appear inscrutably horrifying to the narrator. 

I would enjoy reading Lovecraft’s version of the Space Trilogy, but after I started writing this post, I of course decided to re-read the Space Trilogy, and I realized that it was possible that Lewis might have read Lovecraft, and that his Space Trilogy might be seen as a reply to Lovecraft, a Christian mashup of the Chronicles of Narnia and the call of Cthulhu. He describes very inhuman, hyper-dimensional entities with vastly superior intelligence to ours, and describes alien creatures and landscapes. But every time his protagonist, Ransom, experiences a pseudo-lovecraftian horror to the aliens, it’s analyzed and dismissed as a parochial, simple-minded response by Ransom, and 

he suddenly sees the reality of the alien creatures as beautiful in their own way. 

Lovecraft says “we are small, the universe is vast and horrible and malevolent.”

Lewis replies “Its okay to be small, God’s in charge and he’ll take care of you. The universe is a big beautiful garden of wonder”. 

Lovecraft never got a chance to reply. He died under fairly miserable conditions before the space trilogy was published. I would feel sorry for him, but he said a lot of awful racist things in his lifetime, and fully believed what he said. But he was also miserable and crazy and pathetic. Lewis actually might have been somewhat racist too, actually. He was a friend of Tolkien.  But more later... writing in blogger on an iPad is inscrutably unpleasant 

Hagenart comic 11/10/19