Unexpected treat; CS Lewis HP Lovecraft mashup

I actually have a grand plan in mind for the CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft series, wherein we delve into some wild theories about their inner mind and homosexual tendencies and all that spicy stuff, but before we do that I have to re-read the books again.  But before I do that, I believe it’s time for a mashup, wherein we attempt to tell a short story as if the two of them got together for some kind of literary retreat in 1925, when Lovecraft was falling apart financially and about to leave New York, and Lewis had just become a professor at Oxford. For the purposes of the mashup, in this scenario they get married. Why? Because it seems to me that the differences in the philosophies of the two of them would ordinarily make it extremely unlikely that they could ever willingly collaborate, but people tend to overlook all types of differences if they have romantic feelings for someone, so I believe they would have fall in love and get married in order for the mashup to happen. After getting married they live in England where Lewis can support them, since Lewis in reality had a far better job than Lovecraft did.
And they write a story together:

Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet
I write these sentences supine, lying in a bed in the Miskatonic University Center for Invalids and Convalescent Scholars. The daily effort to lift pen to paper drains the last vestiges of my waning strength, yet a fierce desire to warn the public of the threat from within, while seeking to protect and advocate for the furry peoples of Malacandra, impels me to my painful, remorselessly damaging daily toil.
For the Reader’s sake I will attempt to organize and cohere my tangled memories into an understandable narrative.
To begin: My name is Elwin A Ransom. I am a professor of linguistics at Magdalene College, Miskatonic Campus. Until recently, I had been immersed in my studies and my teaching duties, living my quiet, inoffensive life, writing the occasional short story about magic elves and sharing them with close friends and never dreaming that I would someday visit another world where I would meet ghastly aliens that turned out to be Anglicans and perfectly reasonable if you overlooked their tendency to be a bit judgmental and a kind of purposeful abtrusiveness that set me on edge at times but I’m not really a people person and I’ve come to terms with that.
My adventures began when I - against my better judgement - accepted an invitation for late tea from an old schoolmate who I ran into at a tavern whilst on a walking tour of New England. He claimed to live on an estate, which turned out to be true, with his friend , a genius named Weston, which turned out to be only partially true. The estate was an old mansion, filthy in a grand old way, one of those old houses that looks as if it had somehow enjoyed more weather than any of the houses around it. Weston turned out to be a sociopath, but not in an interesting-conversation-over-bottle-of-wine sort of way. I was drunk enough to misconstrue his offer to show me “the spaceship” and follow him into the backyard, where I passed out. I came to on the spaceship, on route to Mars, if you can believe it. Pretending to have Stockholm Syndrome to get their guard down, I cooked a delicious lasagne, with the unintended result that my old friend Devine developed reverse Stockholm syndrome and tried to set me free immediately, and Weston developed Oslo syndrome, consuming so much pasta that he could not fit through the kitchen doorway, in effect kidnapping himself. At this point Weston admitted that they had planned to sell me to the native Martians for meat, which is what atheists do. Devine said he was sorry and told me I could go and tried to push me into the airlock. We fought, but the ship crash landed on Mars at the exact moment that my knee liberated his front teeth. “Take that, Dicky!” I shouted, and regretted it instantly. I spent my first day on a new planet trying to think up a better line. Eventually I sought Devine out after dinner and shouted “Welcome to Mars, Dicky! Love, the Tooth Fairy!” I tried to kick his mouth again, but he dodged and heeled my instep, dropping me like a sack. We stopped speaking after that, except for making fart noises whenever Weston asked for help moving supplies. Weston eventually produced a pistol and motioned me into the nearby trees, where we met several inhumanly tall, monstrously countenanced creatures who intoned unnerving syllables in a ghastly, unknown language. Sensing that my end credits were commencing to roll, I resolved that my screams would haunt these abominations to the end of their unearthly days.

And so on... it’s a special thrill to read the collaboration of these Gand masters!

Hagenart comi 12/12/19

More on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft

So last week we began a series on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft
Usually when people publish a blog post on a topic, they draw upon years of professional experience and study, or upon painstaking research on the subject they wish to discuss. I’m saying this in a knowitall tone, as of if I’m an expert in these things, but I just recently found this out, in the last few days or so actually, because It did not occur to me to research the subject I wanted to write about until after I had attempted to write about it, that is until I re-read what I had written and found it to be paragraph after paragraph of utter nonsense without any discernible point. Appalled, I dug out the CS Lewis space trilogy and the Lovecraft compilation, and also searched the web to see what smart people had already said about CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft.  
I read some interesting stuff, all apparently written by Christians who ultimately disagreed with Lovecraft but still said nice things about his stories. Lovecraft depressed them, they all said, and then Lewis talked them away from the window. I completely agree with their immediate emotional reaction to reading Lovecraft, his stories will leave you with a feeling of queasy disquiet, and then Lewis inevitably reassures you. But his reassurance only works if you’re religious, it’s all about how god will take care of the scary stuff.  And so I have to wonder how come those religious people got depressed by Lovecraft at all. Don’t you have to find his point of view compelling to find it depressing and scary? 
If you believe in God, how can you be frightened of ghosts and spirits?   But if you believe in God, but are also frightened of supernatural gibberish, you may like to have protective mental walls around you, and Lewis paints a beautiful wall of stained glass with renaissance scenes all around the universe.  Wherever you go in his stories, you’re still in church. I do not personally like that feeling. My memories of church are of groaning inside while I  struggled to stay awake during the interminable sermons. No matter how compelling I find the imagery of his worlds, I find myself repeatedly disappointed by his mental cloistering of his own stories. But for a religious person, that is an intelligent religious person who reads and therefore probably thinks about things from time to time, I believe this cloistering is a comfort, a shelter. 
Lovecraft seems to completely understand the terror of ideas. His narrators often express a desire not to know what they have discovered. But Lovecraft was not his narrators, and he couldn’t possibly have agreed with that sentiment, since all the monsters in his stories came out of his own head.  What his narrators found horrible and uncanny, he may have found magical and beautiful.  His protagonists often end up embracing their monstrous, otherworldly fate. The narrator in Shadow over Innsmouth speaks euphorically of his future life as a grotesque fish-person, in the ending passages. The narrator in Mountains of Madness speaks of the Old Ones as fellow creatures, as “men, of a sort.”  And he waxes euphoric over the achievements and civilization of the “Great Race” in the Shadow Out of Time. It’s actually a little disturbing how sympathetic he is with aliens who switch minds with creatures against their will, but there’s an undeniable joy in his writing, a delight with the ideas for their own sake. I think Lovecraft secretly found the universe to be a much more wonderful place than he let’s on in his stories. But in his fiction he’s always speaking in character as the narrator, and his narrators are basically 19th century gentlemen, who see the world through a very moralistic lens.  Was that Lovecraft? It seems to be part of him, but he had an uncanny side, a side with tentacles dripping ichor and and scaly skin and multiple staring eyes.

Hagenart comic 12/03/19

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