Talk:That Hideous Strength
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Pastiche seems strong to me. Is Perelandra a pastiche of Milton? I wouldn't say that Lewis has imitated Williams style so much (at least not successfully, if he was trying to do so). It's more a question of theme...Michael Larsen 12:07, 8 Oct 2003 (UTC)
The quotation marks around "evil science" and "objectivists" suggest to me that they're quotations from the book. I'm sure the former isn't; is the latter? If not, I think they need to be rewritten. --JerryFriedman 01:01, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I don't think the former is, but I know the latter is. Snowboardpunk
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[edit] Please avoid critical essays
Anonymous editor 192.115.19.52: I'm sorry to have taken out a considerable amount of text that you added today, but I don't think it belongs in a Wikipedia article. It's one thing to point out the book's themes and influences, but quite another to speculate about what Lewis would have thought about this or that, or state that Ransom "speaks for Lewis", or make judgements about Lewis's charity or skill. That's the domain of a critic or essayist, but here it violates our rules on neutral point of view and no original research. I'm afraid that your recent edits on other Lewis books have the same problem. ←Hob 04:07, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
- (The removed text follows:)
Like the dialogue between the Martian Oyarsa and Prof. Weston in Out of the Silent Planet, the discussion between Ransom and the reawekened Merlin in this book serves to show Lewis' deep criticism of the modern Western materialistic culture. (Also as it was in the 1940's, before the advent of, for example, commercial TV - one can imagine how he would have detested all the more this culture's present manifestation.)
To be sure, Lewis' criticism is deeply conservative in nature, rooted in a deep nostalgia for a perceived glorious and pure past. Still, in many ways it intersects and overlaps with some strands of the left-wing criticism of global Capitalism, as most recently manifested in the last decade's anti-Globalisation movement.
For much the same reason, The Lord of the Rings by Lewis' friend Tolkien, also imbued with the same anti-modern conservative philosophy (especially explicit in the character of Saruman, who clearly represents the destructiveness of modern industrialisation) was enthusiastically taken up by proponents of the 1960's Counter-culture.
In the following quotation, Ransom clearly speaks for Lewis.
[Merlin]: "We must go to him whose office is to put down tyrants and restore life to dying kingdoms. We must call on the Emperor." [Ransom]: "There is no Emperor". "No Emperor..." Began Merlin, and then his voice died away. He sat still for some minutes, wrestling with a world which he had never envisaged". (...)
Ransom shook his head. "You do not understand" he said."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 the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus".
At least in the frame of this book, all human effort is completely futile against this overwhelming oppressive force, the only solution available is - quite literally - deus ex machina: the angels/Greek gods descending to Earth/Tellus and making short work of the evil "Hideous Strength".
To do that they need to work through, effectively to posses, a human being - since their naked strength would completely destroy Earth; and Merlin is chosen for the task, which he would not survive. Ransom pushes the highly reluctant Merlin to take up this duty and give up the life he had started re-living after more than a millennium of sleep - as remorselessly as in Perelandra God in person has persuaded Ransom himself to take up an unpleasant and self-sacrificing duty.
The descending angels/gods re-enact, first the visitation of the Tower of Babylon and then the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lewis is very skilful in realistically depicting how such miraculous supernatural interventions could plausibly impact the prosaic mid-Twentieth Cenury England.
The realism is completed by the immediate aftermath, where the arch-opportunist Curry figures out at record speed how to make use of the cataclism in order to further his own academic career. The character of Curry is probably meant to satyrise some colleague of Lewis' at Oxford.
Actually, Lewis exhibits some Chrisitian charity in letting Curry survive, since he was a minor accomplice in the diabolic take-over by N.I.C.E. - the sin for which the town and university of Edgestow were doomed to total destruction.
One may wonder if, while writing the above-quoted lament at the absence of an Empror and the emptiness of thrones, Lewis reflected on his own having volunteered to fight in WWI and thus taken a minor share in the responsibility for emptying the throne of the German Kaiser and quite a few other thrones as well. (Possibly he did, indeed quite possibly his firstahnd winessing of the horrors of mechanised war might have contributed to his disgust of the modern Western culture).
Here's another one. Please see above for my reason for removing it.
I think there might be a good deal of interest in a C. S. Lewis or Space Trilogy wiki. The one at http://www.malacandra.co.uk/site1/index.php/Main_Page is empty, but maybe some of the deleted text should go there. —JerryFriedman 21:54, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Removed text follows:
[edit] A world where genocide is legitimate
In the beginning of the book Mark, the young professor, is being successfully tempted to join N.I.C.E. by the arch-schemer Lord Feverstone. Before the reader ever has a glimpse of the N.I.C.E.'s monstrous headquarters, Feverstone gives quite a frank description of what the N.I.C.E.'s aims are:
"Quite simple and obvious things, at first - sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don't want any dead weights), selective breeding." To which Mark replies "But this is stupendous, Feverstone" and becomes all the more eager to join an institute of which these are some of the proclaimed aims.
This is all the more significant as Mark's most obvious characteristic, as portrayed by Lewis, is an extreme conformism and a strong desire to fit himself to the prevalent ideas and fashions in his social environment. Moreover, he prides himself on being part of "The Progressive Element" in his university (the term "politically correct" did not yet exist).
This clearly implies Lewis' dark 1944 vision of the post-war world: a world where, though Nazi Germany was militarily crushed (that was already a foregone conclusion when the book was written), racism, eugenics, and genocide have become respectable ideas, completely acceptable to "progressive" academics. Lewis also presents vivisection, forced human experimentation, and scientific immortality as atrocities committed by N.I.C.E. Another issue Lewis deals with is the subversion of Christianity by secular humanists.
Later on, one of the N.I.C.E. directors asserts that the two World Wars were "merely the first of sixteen wars scheduled to take place until the end of the Twentieth Century", whose hidden real purpose is to exterminate the bulk of humanity and leave only "a small nucleus" desirable to the Satanic "macrobes". No wonder that Ransom talks of "The shadow of one dark wing" covering the whole of Tellus [Earth].
[edit] Dispute: Connections to Tolkien Works
The section in question seems like OR and should modified or edited to be more accurate. --Eldarone 18:13, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] OR
It seems to me that much of the "Major themes" section of this article constitutes original research. If references cannot be supplied for the speculation on "Ouroborindra," etc., it might be a good idea to excise a good deal of this material. As it stands, the article reads, in places, more like a school essay than an encyclopedia article. Deor 16:24, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
- I have to agree. Verifable references should remain, but speculated material should be removed. At the very least, a rewrite so it's encyclopedic.--Eldarone 17:44, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Misquote of Orwell
"or, to quote the actual, startlingly similar words of Orwell's arch-villain O'Bbrien[sic] (who bears some resemblance to Lewis' Professor Frost): "The Party's rule is like a boot on a face, forever"."
Please, if we're going to tenuously cite "the actual" words of Orwell, let's try and get the actual words. The real quote is, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever." Note, he is talking about the future, not the party, and there is some stamping going on. I don't even see the relevance of O'Brien's ( not O'Bbrien ) quote - was this lifted from somebodies high school essay? I apologise for the tone, but this simply shouldn't be here. -- 219.194.176.19 06:40, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
