Talk:That Hideous Strength

[edit] Major themes

[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" MacPhee 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 Merlin criticizes Mark and Jane for their use of contraceptives (it is not made clear whether Ransom, or Lewis, agrees). It defends the family and traditional marriage. Lewis 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 one character's voice to observe that while "experimenting" 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. Monarchism is refelcted in the above reference to "the empty thrones" as one of the evils of the modern world, as in Merlin's 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". Neverhtless, much of this criticism also chimes with contemporary attacks on globalism and capitalism from the modern Left.

[edit] Total War, Racism and Genocide

In the beginning of the book, even before the reader had a glimpse of the N.I.C.E. monstrous headquarters, the arch-schemer Lord Feverstone tells the young professor Mark about N.I.C.E.'s aims: "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 has no reservations about joining 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. The book was written in 1944, when WWII was still going on but Nazi Germany's defeat was already a foregone conclusion. Still, Lewis foresaw a post-war world where Nazism's worst heritage of racism and genocide would live on among the victors and be current in "respectable" British academic circles.

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".

[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. Though the community as such is not Christian, given that the "resident sceptic" MacPhee is a member in good standing, nevertheless this egalitarianism recalls that of the early Christian communities, in the time of Jesus Christ himself and his disciples and in the early Roman-persecuted communities, an egalitarianism recalled by Christian reformers at various times and places.

[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. Another possibility is that it refers to the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo, whose ideas would have been distasteful to Lewis.

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 vulvas 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] Surrealist painting

The so-called "Objective Room" at Belbury, training place of candidates for the "inner circle" of servants and worshippers of the Satanic Macrobes, includes - among the decorations intended to induce in such trainees the necessary state of mind - paintings with such themes as "A young woman who held her mouth wide open, to reveal the fact that the inside of it was overgrown with hair(...) a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis, and a man with corkscrews instead of arms bathing in a flat, sadly coloured sea beneath a summer sunset."

Though the name is not explicitly mentioned, and though no actual paintings with the specific themes enumerated are known, the Surrealist school of painting is plainly meant. Salvador Dalí was already at the peak of his career at the time of writing.

[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 Bragdon 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 1960s, 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 the fall 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. The spirits seem to be angelic entities, similar to the Ainur in Tolkien's work.

This novel, unlike the previous two books, shows the influence of Charles Williams. Similarities to Williams' 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 University.

[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.

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 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 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 stamping on a human 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.