That Hideous Strength
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 First edition cover |
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| Author | C. S. Lewis |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Space Trilogy |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | The Bodley Head |
| Released | 1945 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 384 pp |
| ISBN | NA (orig.) & ISBN 0-684-82385-3 (recent edition) |
| Preceded by | Perelandra |
That Hideous Strength is a 1945 novel by C. S. Lewis, the final book in Lewis's theological science fiction Space Trilogy. The events of this novel follow those of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra (a.k.a. Voyage to Venus) and once again feature the philologist Elwin Ransom. Yet, unlike the principal events of those two novels, the story takes place on Earth rather than in space or on other planets in the solar system.
The novel was heavily influenced by the writing of Lewis's friend Charles Williams and is markedly dystopian in style.
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[edit] Plot summary
This final novel in the Space Trilogy is set in post-war England in a small university town, in which The National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, the N.I.C.E., led by fallen eldila, attempts to alter the true nature of mankind through an exploitation of its members' pride and greed. The goal, if mankind continues down its current path, is the conquering of the last remaining piece of nature – human nature – making true man a lost memory. Dr. Ransom represents the watchful Christian, willing to do God's bidding in order to foil the N.I.C.E. And the re-awoken Merlin, as a conduit of 'angelic' power, shows that only through the divine can the battle against the forces of darkness end in victory.
The story centers around the young university don Mark Studdock, a college fellow at a fictional university, and his wife Jane. The don is targeted for recruitment into the "inner circle" of researchers who associate directly with a vague diabolic intelligence in the N.I.C.E. He ambitiously assumes that his recruitment is an invitation into the powerful elite that he has always desired, and deserved. The N.I.C.E.'s true reason for recruiting him is to gain control of his wife, who is plagued by disturbing, clairvoyant dreams which she at first is unable to interpret. Yet Jane is eventually driven (partly by the Institute's failed attempt to arrest her) to join a small community who oppose the N.I.C.E.
The community at St Anne's is nominally led by Ransom, who still suffers from the wound he received from Weston in his climactic fight on Venus. Here he appears as the "Pendragon", the modern inheritor of the role of King Arthur. His Masters' plan is to use a mortal as a conduit for the divine power necessary to stop the Institute. So, Ransom must recruit an older and more ambiguous agent, who has previously dealt with supernatural powers: the reawakened wizard Merlin, whom N.I.C.E. originally also sought with an intention and expectation to make malevolent use of his magic. The St Anne's community is all that holds the hope of Logres, the true England.
Ransom's encounter with Merlin is a reversal of roles from "Perelandra". In the earlier book, a Divine Voice spoke to Ransom and ordered him to engage in battle with the Satanic Weston. A reluctant Ransom at first balked and tried numerous counter-arguments, but they were all thrust aside by the Voice and finally Ransom accepted his mission. In this book, it is Ransom himself who orders the reluctant Merlin to do battle with the Satanic N.I.C.E., and who thrusts aside all of Merlin's counter-arguments until the wizard consents to take up the mission.
[edit] Characters in "That Hideous Strength"
- Mark Studdock- Protagonist; sociologist, obsessed with reaching the "inner circle" of any social environment.
- Jane Studdock- Wife of Mark and clairvoyant dream-seer.
[edit] The N.I.C.E. (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments)
- Francois Alcasan - "The Head", a French scientist executed for murder early in the book. His head is recovered by the N.I.C.E. and appears to be kept alive by the technology of man. In reality the Head has become a communication mechanism for the "Macrobes", the fallen eldila.
- John Wither- Long-winded bureaucrat and "Deputy Director" of the N.I.C.E. He is the true leader of the N.I.C.E., and a servant of the Macrobes.
- Professor Frost- A psychologist and assistant to Wither, he is the only other N.I.C.E member who knows the true nature of the Head, and of the Macrobes.
- Miss/Major Hardcastle (a.k.a "The Fairy") — The sadistic head of the N.I.C.E. Institutional Police and its female auxiliary, the "Waips". Torture is her favorite interrogation method, and she takes special pleasure in abusing female prisoners.
- Dr. Filostrato — An Italian physiologist, who has seemingly preserved Alcasan's head. However, he does not understand the Head's nature, believing it to be truly Alcasan. His ultimate goal is to free humanity from the constraints of organic life.
- Lord Feverstone (Dick Devine) — The politician and aristocrat who lures Mark into the N.I.C.E. Feverstone was one of the two men who kidnapped Ransom in Out of the Silent Planet.
- Reverend Straik - "The Mad Parson". He believes that any sort of power is a manifestation of God's will. This belief, along with other garbled beliefs, makes him a suitable candidate for introduction to the Macrobes. "He was a good man once", but became deranged by the death of his daughter.
- Horace Jules - A novelist and scientific journalist who has been appointed the nominal Director of the N.I.C.E. His minimal understanding of science allows him to be unaware of the true nature of the Institute. He has a strong anti-clerical bias, and objects to Wither appointing "parsons" (such as Straik) to the Institute.
[edit] St. Anne's
- Dr. Elwin Ransom - sometimes called "The Pendragon" or "Mr. Fisher-King". He alone communicates with the good eldila. Back from Perelandra, Ransom is a kingly figure among his small band of followers, and is usually referred to as the Director.
- Grace Ironwood - The seemingly stern psychologist and doctor who helps Jane interpret her dreams.
- Dr. Cecil Dimble - Another don, an old friend of Ransom and close advisor on matters of Arthurian scholarship and pre-Norman Britian.
- "Mother" Dimble - Mrs. Dimble; She and Mr Dimble have no children, much to their sadness, but have compensated by their kindness to students. Very maternal.
- Ivy Maggs - Formerly a part-time domestic servant for Jane Studdock; now driven out of the town by the N.I.C.E. and living at St. Anne's. Jane is puzzled at first by her status as an equal at the house. Ivy's husband, incidentally, is in prison for petty theft.
- Merlinus Ambrosius — The wizard Merlin, awoken and returned to serve the Pendragon and save England. Receives the powers of the eldila. He has been in a deep sleep since the time of King Arthur, and both sides initially believe he will join the N.I.C.E. It is a shock when he appears at St Anne's.
- Mr. MacPhee — A scientist, skeptic, and rationalist, and close friend of Dr. Ransom. Wants to fight the N.I.C.E. with human powers. An argumentative character who claims to have no opinions, merely stating facts and illustrating implications. The awoken Merlin believes MacPhee to be Ransom's "fool" (i.e. jester), because MacPhee is "obstructive and rather rude...yet never gets sat on". (The character may have been based on William T. Kirkpatrick, former headmaster of Lurgan College and an admired tutor of the young Lewis.)
- Mr. Bultitude - Last of the seven bears of Logres, he escaped from a zoo and was tamed by Ransom, who has regained man's pre-fallen authority over the beasts.
[edit] Major themes
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[edit] Materialism and nihilism
The novel's central theme — that pure materialism is incompatible with ethics and, ultimately, human life — is, as Lewis stated, based on his own treatise The Abolition of Man. An extreme example of this theme is his portrayal of the leaders of N.I.C.E., two of whom (Frost and Wither) have become nihilists with no recognizably human motives as a result of their quest for a purely objective mode of thought. Furthermore, Lewis portrays their materialism as having, perhaps inevitably, degenerated into a false front: a disgust with physical life and a fascination with the esoteric and occult have turned them in fact into avid gnostics. Genuine scientific materialism of the Victorian type is portrayed as comparatively innocent, and is represented by Ransom's "official sceptic" McPhee and by the chemist Hingest, who breaks with the N.I.C.E. on discovering that it has "nothing to do with science".
[edit] Political conservatism
The novel is Lewis's most overtly political fiction, illustrating how the alliances of state, industry, and academia and the manipulation of the mass media might move England towards fascism.
In the novel Lewis writes critically of Mark and Jane when describing their use of contraceptives. He attacks feminism and defends the family and traditional marriage. He attacks what he considered sexual perversion: Fairy Hardcastle, a prominent villain, is an implied lesbian and sadist (and veteran of Mosley's British Union of Fascists), who forces her attentions on non-consenting "fluffy" female captives.
Lewis portrays in a negative light the trend of relativistic non-traditional teaching of children, using the author's voice at one point to observe that while performing experiments on children would be met with outrage, for some reason sending them to "experimental schools" was considered progressive. He also attacks in passing the "Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" as an infringement of the human rights of the criminal: if punishment is intended to be therapeutic rather than retributory, there is no clear end point at which the offender has paid his debt to society.
[edit] Cecil Rhodes and imperialism
That Hideous Strength also briefly criticizes Wynwood Reade, a secular humanist philosopher and the author of The Martyrdom of Man. Lewis also makes one negative reference to English South African businessman, politician and colonist Cecil Rhodes, calling Britain the home of Arthur and of Mordred, of Sydney and of Cecil Rhodes. Arthur was the ancient who nobly defended Britain against the Anglo-Saxons, Mordred was the traitor who overthrew him. Sir Phillip Sydney was a great poet of the 16th century. Interestingly, Rhodes was an agnostic, a secular humanist, and a liberal (of a sort), and he read Wynwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man and said that it "made me who I am". It is most likely, however, that the primary reason Rhodes is chosen as a representative of the "bad" in English history is for his role as an amoral imperialist (cf. the implied anti-colonialism in Out of the Silent Planet). Lewis's conclusions conflicted with simple "conservatism": at the time of the writing, in the 1940s, most British still saw Rhodes as a hero. The villain Weston may be a caricature of Cecil Rhodes: Weston, like Rhodes, is racist, amoral, a secular humanist, and ruthless. Weston bears some likeness to Saruman in JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
[edit] Critique of global capitalism
Like the dialogue between the Oyarsa and Professor Weston in Out of the Silent Planet, the discussion between Ransom and Merlin dramatizes Lewis's opinions on modern Western materialistic culture:
- "The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and from their Father in Heaven".
This criticism is clearly based on religious and conservative premises. Merlin later expresses horror at finding a world in which there is no longer an Emperor "whose office it is to put down tyrants and give life to dying kingdoms". Much of this criticism also chimes with contemporary attacks on globalism and capitalism from the modern Left.
[edit] Egalitarianism at St Anne's
St Anne's own domestic politics are egalitarian. There are no servants. Jane is somewhat taken aback, despite her theoretical egalitarian beliefs, that Ivy treats the educated and middle-class residents as equals. Also, men and women share alternate shifts for the housework. The idea behind this is that men and women tend to work differently, or as one female character says, you may get a man to do something, but it only causes trouble to try to get him to help.
[edit] Nimrod and the Tower of Babel
The "Banquet at Belbury", where the N.I.C.E. leadership are made unable to comprehend each other's language and are thus undone, is clearly based on the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, to which the book's name also refers. (Specifically, it is taken from a quotation from the sixteenth-century Scottish poet Sir David Lindsay, which also serves as the book's motto: "The shadow of that hyddeous strength [the Tower of Babel] sax myle and more it is of length".)
When describing to the reawakened Merlin the conditions in the modern world, Ransom says "it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven". Though not specifically stated in the Bible, long-standing later tradition (attested in Jewish, Christian and Muslim sources alike) attributes to the hunter-king Nimrod the building of that tower, an ultimate act of rebellion against God's authority. The N.I.C.E. scientists do not build a physical tower, but they and their Satanic patrons, the "macrobes", are rebelling against God. This makes them Nimrod's successors, deserving of the same Divine retribution which fell upon Nimrod and his followers.
[edit] The Satanic "Ouroborindra"
Members of the N.I.C.E. "inmost circle" engage in a secret Satanic ritual of stripping naked and bowing down to the re-animated head of the criminal Alcasan, which actually houses one of the demonic macrobes. All the while they chant, "Ouroborindra! Ouroborindra! Ouroborindra ba-ba-hee!".
The name "Ouroborindra" is presumably composed of Ouroboros, the mythical worm or dragon swallowing its own tail, and the Hindu god Indra.
In the Christian interpretation Ouroboros is a symbol of the limited confines of the material world and the self-consuming transitory nature of a mere "worldly existence", and Chesterton, in The Everlasting Man, uses it as a symbol of the circular and self-defeating nature of pantheistic mysticism and of most modern philosophy. While Hindus in general reckon Indra as among the forces of Good, he is also considered the least perfect of their gods and the most inclined to sinful behavior, and on one occasion was punished for sexual misconduct by "a curse that one thousand phalluses would cover his body in a grotesque and vulgar display, and that his reign as king of the gods would meet with disaster and catastrophe".
[edit] Logres and Britain
At the end, the group at St Anne's reflect for a time on the meaning of their quest. Dimble suggests that there is something peculiarly English about the way their land is poised between Logres and Britain. McPhee protests that this is just a complex way of saying there are good and bad people. Ransom says that it means more than this, and it is wrong to think the position especially English. Every country and culture has its own form of good and its own ideal — it is evil that is standardized and monotonous.
Whereas the N.I.C.E. represents death and nihilism, St Anne's represents life. Not only human beings, but animals and angels as well join in cosmic harmony at the end. Mark and Jane Studdock are about to be reunited, and the Oyarsa of Perelandra is about to take Ransom back to Venus. Under her influence all the animals are going out in pairs - Mr Bultitude, the bear, has found his Mrs Bultitude.
[edit] Satire on academic politics
Some early chapters center on the small-minded affairs of academic politics, of which Lewis had much personal experience.
Early on, the University's so-called "Progressive Element" manipulates the rest of the Board into selling off the immemorial Bracton Wood, which had been in the school's proud possession since its founding and had stood untouched for countless centuries before that. After many hours of exhausting discussion on far more trivial issues, the tired and hungry board members consent in a single afternoon to let the pristine wood be bought and cut down by the remorseless real-estate developers of the N.I.C.E. (at this point the true nature of N.I.C.E is not yet clear). This depiction seems to anticipate the criticism of unbridled urban and industrial development made by environmentalists beginning in the 1960's, a feeling shared by Tolkien.
The University and its small-minded academics soon recede to the background as the true demonic character of N.I.C.E. is revealed.
But towards the end, after the Institute is consumed, the supremely opportunistic leader of "The Progressive Element" reappears. Having been on a train bound for the school when the town and university alike were destroyed in a cataclysmic re-enactment of Sodom and Gomorrah, Dr Curry, the surviving sub-warden of Bracton College, realizes at once that the destruction of the University and the death of all his fellow lecturers offers him a unique chance for personal glory, and an eventual statue of himself in Bracton Hall. He resolves to immediately take charge of the University's reconstruction, and is last seen dreaming of going down in the University's history as "The Second Founder", and having his statue erected "in the rebuilt quadrangle"...
[edit] Allusions/references to other works
Parts of That Hideous Strength are a homage to Lewis's close friend and colleague, J.R.R. Tolkien. A major theme of the novel is that as time goes on, the universe keeps coming to sharper and sharper points, and that while magical communion with nature may have been lawful in ancient times (in the time of Merlin and King Arthur]], now such activities are unlawful and almost impossible. There are references to "Numinor" (an unintentional misspelling of Númenor, a word Lewis had heard while listening to Tolkien reading his stories aloud, but had never seen written down), which is the last land in Tolkien's mythology before the Undying Lands. Magic was apparently lawful and accessible in Númenor, to some extent, and there were non-human intelligences accessible to human beings. This sounds very much like the description of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and twice in the chapter "They Have Pulled Down Deep Heavens on Their Heads" Lewis specifically references the Earth as "Middle-Earth": once in Dr. Dimble's discussion with his wife, and once when Merlin states that if the gods come down it will unmake all of Middle-Earth. However, here, the non-human intelligences are not elves or immortals such as Gandalf; they appear to be spirits.
This novel, unlike the previous two books, shows the influence of Charles Williams. Similarities to William's supernatural thrillers include the non-exotic setting, the gathering of an informal team of heroes rather than a single protagonist, the focus on a temporarily estranged married couple, and the use of Arthurian legend. Olaf Stapledon was an indirect influence. The description of the "Head" is similar to that of the Fourth Men in Last and First Men. In the book's preface, Lewis said of Stapledon: "…Mr Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow".
The character of Jules is believed to be a caricature of H. G. Wells, whose ideas conflicted sharply with Lewis's. The popularity of Wells, whose views Lewis and his friends disagreed with, had been one of the negative influences inspiring the Space Trilogy, although it should be noted that in Out of the Silent Planet and elsewhere Lewis stated his debt to Wells in imaginative terms. (Lewis was throughout his life able to admire a very wide range of literature, even if he disagreed with it.) The historian A.J.P.Taylor, a fellow at the same Oxford college as Lewis, speculates in his memoirs about several other characters in the book being based on certain people at the school.
[edit] Connections with Orwell
There are interesting parallels between Lewis's vision and that of George Orwell, despite the fact that Orwell had disliked Lewis's wartime religious broadcasts. From their divergent viewpoints — Christian in the one case, Democratic Socialist in the other — Lewis and Orwell were both deeply concerned with the same phenomena which they discerned in the post-war world.
Some two years before writing his own Nineteen Eighty-four , Orwell reviewed That Hideous Strength for the Manchester Evening News [1] commenting: "Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters [i.e. the N.I.C.E. scientists], and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realizable." (It is noteworthy that the review was written in the direct aftermath of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are referred to in the text.)
However, the atheist Orwell argued that Lewis's book "would have been a stronger without the supernatural elements". Particularly, Orwell objected to the ending in which N.I.C.E. is overthrown by Divine intervention: "[Lewis] is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict, one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid."
In the Lewis book, Ransom tells Merlin that "No power that is merely earthly will serve (...) The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist, to squeeze it as it wills" — but hope is not lost, since the "gods" (actually, the angels of the true God) are about to come down and overthrow N.I.C.E.
For Orwell, however, there did not exist any power but the "merely earthly", and in his 1984, "Big Brother" does "squeeze the Earth in his fist", with no one to effectively oppose him — or, to quote the actual, startlingly similar words of Orwell's arch-villain O'Brien (who bears some resemblance to Lewis' Professor Frost): "The Party's rule is like a boot on a face, forever".
For his part, Lewis does at one point mention Nineteen Eighty-four, though dismissing it as a work morally and aesthetically far inferior to Orwell's other novel, Animal Farm.
[edit] References
- ^ "The Scientist Takes Over", review of C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945) by George Orwell, Manchester Evening News, 16 August 1945, reprinted as No. 2720 (first half) in The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, Vol. XVII (1998), pp. 250–251, [1],
[edit] External links
- Notes on Quotations & Allusions in That Hideous Strength
- Malacandra.co.uk - A Wiki especially for C.S. Lewis fans.
- That Hideous Strength publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- George Orwell's 1945 review
| Space Trilogy | Out of the Silent Planet | Perelandra | That Hideous Strength |
| The Chronicles of Narnia | The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | Prince Caspian | The Voyage of the Dawn Treader | The Silver Chair | The Horse and His Boy | The Magician's Nephew | The Last Battle |
| Individual Novels | The Pilgrim's Regress | The Screwtape Letters | The Great Divorce | Till We Have Faces |
| Miscellaneous Titles | Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer | The Dark Tower | Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis |
