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Tuesday, February 03, 2009

George Orwell's Review of That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

I especially agree with Orwell about all the unfortunate supernatural silliness in the book, which render parts of the novel nearly unreadably bad (Orwell is too kind), and since it is clear from the last post where all this is heading, I do think it is important to point out that if Lewis had written the better book Orwell sensed in it, the book that would better skewer superlativity in its aborning organized expressions nowadays, not only would the magical crapola have been blue-penciled away but the plot would have inspired a review with the slightly different title, "The Pseudo-Scientist Takes Over." Be all that as it may, I give you, George Orwell --

The Scientist Takes Over

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

On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them. Still, it is possible to think of a fairly large number of worth-while books in which ghosts, magic, second-sight, angels, mermaids, and what-not play a part.

Mr. C. S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” can be included in their number – though, curiously enough, it would probably have been a better book if the magical element had been left out. For in essence it is a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.

In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”

Mr. Lewis probably owes something to Chesterton as a writer, and certainly shares his horror of modern machine civilisation (the title of the book, by the way, is taken from a poem about the Tower of Babel) and his reliance on the “eternal verities” of the Christian Church, as against scientific materialism or nihilism.

His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.

All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself.

There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand paople to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.

His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story.

It would be a very hardened reader who would not experience a thrill on learning that The Head is actually – however, that would be giving the game away.

One could recommend this book ureservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in, and it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways. The scientists are endeavouring, among other things, to get hold of the body of the ancient Celtic magician Merlin, who has been buried – not dead, but in a trance – for the last 1,500 years, in hopes of learning from him the secrets of pre-Christian magic.

They are frustrated by a character who is only doubtfully a human being, having spent part of his time on another planet where he has been gifted with eternal youth. Then there is a woman with second sight, one or two ghosts, and various superhuman visitors from outer space, some of them with rather tiresome names which derive from earlier books of Mr. Lewis’s. The book ends in a way that is so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed.

Much is made of the fact that the scientists are actually in touch with evil spirits, although this fact is known only to the inmost circle. Mr. Lewis appears to believe in the existence of such spirits, and of benevolent ones as well. He 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. However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading.

4 comments:

jimf said...

Oh, well, . . .

From: [JimF] on 19/04/2004 05:46 PM
To: dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Subject: Have you met the Fairy?

You may have gathered that C. S. Lewis was well
aware of the quasi-religious spin-offs of SF which
march these days under the banner of "transhumanism"
and which Lewis would have called the "cult of progress"
or "life-force worship" (he would have pointed to
H. G. Wells or G. B. Shaw as patron saints of that
religion). The third book in CSL's "Deep Heaven"
SF-toned fantasy trilogy, _That Hideous Strength_, can
be read as a parody of Extropian interests. At the time
I first read it, decades ago, I didn't like
it as much as the two earlier books, but these days
I find it hysterically over-the-top funny.

One of the most memorable characters is a cigar-smoking,
sadistic lesbian who is the chief of the security
police at the evil scientists' think-tank (the N.I.C.E. --
National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments),
whose name is -- hold onto your hat --
Fairy Hardcastle :-0 .

"'Listen, my friend,' interrrupted Filostrato, '... The first
thing to realise is that the N.I.C.E. is serious. It is nothing
less than the existence of the human race that depends
on our work, you comprehend? You will find frictions and
impertinences among this canaglia, this rabble... they
are of no consequence. As long as you have the good
will of the Deputy Director, you snap your fingers at
them... Ah -- and there is one other. Do not have the
Fairy for your enemy. For the rest -- you laugh at them.'

'The Fairy?'

'Yes. Her they call the Fairy. Oh my God, a terrible
Inglesaccia! She is the head of our police, the
Institutional Police. Ecco, she come. I will present
you. Miss Hardcastle, permit that I present to you
Mr. Studdock.'

Mark found himself writhing from the stoker's or
carter's hand-grip of a big woman in a black,
short-skirted uniform. Despite a bust that would
have done credit to a Victorian barmaid, she was
rather thickly built than fat and her iron-grey hair
was cropped short. Her face was square, stern,
and pale, and her voice deep. A smudge of
lipstick laid on with violent inattention to the real
shape of her mouth was her only concession to
fashion and she rolled or chewed a long black
cheroot, unlit, between her teeth. As she talked
she had a habit of removing this, staring intently
at the mixture of lipstick and saliva on its mangled
end, and then replacing it more firmly than
before. She sat down immediately in a chair
close to where Mark was standing, flung her
right leg over one of the arms, and fixed him with
a gaze of cold intimacy."

;-> ;-> ;->

Dale Carrico said...

{cringe} {shudder} Yeah, there's definitely that, too. {/shudder} {/cringe}

jimf said...

It's conceivable, BTW, that "Fairy Hardcastle" was based,
in part, on a real person.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.religion.christian/msg/4cf748e5ebf30657
-------------------
In 1941, a student at Somerville College [at Oxford University]
named Stella Aldwinkle started an undergraduate debating society named
the Socratic Club. It was "aggressively Christian in purpose." Since
each undergraduate club had to have a faculty member, she asked [C. S.] Lewis
to become President. He accepted and retained the post until he left
Oxford in 1954. Lewis was a natural for this post, as he was a very
good debater and really enjoyed stomping an opponent into the ground,
figuratively speaking. It should be remembered that many of the
debates in that period were quite vicious - they weren't so much to
settle a point as to destroy an opponent and Lewis did just that on
many occasions.

In 1947, Lewis published a book called, "Miracles", "his most
carefully thought and judiciously written theological work," according
to [biographer A. N.] Wilson. . . [A]s I've said
several times, Lewis's theological works that I have read have holes
in their logic big enough to drive a truck through. He is, after all,
the originator of the notorious, "Lord, Liar or Lunatic" 'argument'
[Lewis's "Trilemma" -- an example of the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle,
False Dichotomy, or False Dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma ].

"Miracles" is. . . strongly philosophical. Wilson says, "In the
simplest possible terms, the question for Lewis was whether this
universe, discernible by sense perceptions, is all that there is, or
whether there is another world, another universe, a supernatural order
into which our universe fits or is concealed; another universe which,
if we could but tune into it, would make sense of our own. Lewis felt
it was essential to choose between whether you believed that there was
a Total System - that everything we do, think or experience must be
explicable in terms of the physical universe we inhabit - or that
there was an argument, as philosophers from Plato to Hegel had been
interested to explore, which suggested that in many of our judgements
we step outside this closed system of thought and value and bring to
bear upon it values which actually come from Somewhere Else." . . .

Wilson states, (And remember, he's _sympathetic_ to Lewis)
"Any dispassionate reader can at once see many flaws in Lewis's arguments..."

One person who apparently spotted many of those flaws was a woman
named Elizabeth Anscombe. She was invited to read a paper at the
Socratic Club in 1948 and she chose to reply to Chapter Three.
["A Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis’s Argument that 'Naturalism is Self-Refuting'"
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/cslphilos/CSLnat.htm ]
Wilson writes, "The resulting debate instantaneously became legend.
Anscombe was a match for Lewis not only in mind but also in personality.
She shared his taste for fisticuffs, for brutality as well as finesse
in argument. She is, as countless stories about her attest, deeply
exhibitionistic. Like Lewis, she is a massive physical type. She was
quite equal to the bullying and the exploitation of the audience to
which Lewis resorted when he was boxed into a corner. She could
employ analogous techniques herself. That evening at the Socratic
Club was the first in the Society's history that Lewis was thoroughly
trounced in argument. Because Anscombe was herself a Christian (a
Catholic convert), the pious audience could not have the satisfaction
of feeling that Lewis was a defender of the faith against the infidel.
He was merely shown up as a man who had not come to terms with the way
that philosophers since Wittgenstein thought."

Being trounced in a debate is never pleasant, but it was worse for
Lewis. He lost badly defending the heart of his religious beliefs -
and he lost to a woman and a Catholic woman at that! In the
misogynic atmosphere of Oxford, losing to a woman was a double
calamity. For an Irish Protestant, losing to a woman who was also a
Roman Catholic was humiliation squared.

Afterwards, Lewis actually rewrote chapter three of "Miracles",
dropping many of his arguments and changing the title from, "The
Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist" to "The Cardinal Difficulty of
Naturalism". (Wilson points out that this willingness to recast
thinking and even change writings is a virtue rare among academics.)

It also changed Lewis forever. I think it is _very_ significant that
he _never wrote another theological work_. In fact, this is the
beginning of his children's and science fiction books. He worked
himself out of a deep depression partially by beginning the Narnia
series of books. Rather than tangling with the real philosophers,
scientists and theologians, he took to putting forth his point of view
in fiction, through allegory.


http://www.perichoresis.org/The%20Inconsolable%20Secret%20Part%202.html
-------------------
"Completely Demolished"

On February 2, 1948 (just eight months after the release of
Miracles), Lewis found himself engaged in a debate at the
Oxford University Socratic Club. His opponent was a tough-minded,
cigar-smoking Roman Catholic tutor in philosophy at Somerville
College, Miss Elizabeth Anscombe. Though she was herself a
Christian, Professor Anscombe took strong issue with Lewis
over his arguments in Miracles, in particular chapter three,
"The Self-contradiction of the Naturalist." It is interesting
to note that Professor Anscombe actually agreed with Lewis
in principle, but disagreed that his arguments in Miracles
proved his point. Her whole challenge was over his methodology
and his rationale. "All that I was doing," she said later,
"was to argue as a modern philosopher, academically. I was
not expressing my deepest beliefs." The debate was vigorous,
and at its conclusion there was considerable disagreement over
who won, the audience being evenly divided over who had carried
the day. Both Anscombe and Lewis, still in defensive posture,
claimed victory.

Two days later, however, Lewis was very disturbed over
the debate, which he felt that in truth he had lost badly.
A pupil, Derek Brewer, was among a group of students eating
dinner with him. Brewer recalls,

He was obviously deeply disturbed by his encounter
last Monday with Miss Anscombe...Lewis described the
[Socratic] club meeting...such an onslaught against his
views, with real horror. His imagery was all of the
fog of war, the retreat of infantry thrown back under
heavy attack...Lewis was really still miserable and
went [away] early."

Lewis told another student, Bede Griffiths, that Professor
Anscombe had "completely demolished" his argument. Friend
and fellow Inkling George Sayer remembers that Lewis "thought
he had been defeated...and he was still unhappy about the
evening...He told me he had been proved wrong, that his argument
for the existence of God had been demolished."

Walter Hooper, while disagreeing that Lewis lost the debate,
acknowledges that he met Professor Anscombe years later
and asked her how she remembered it. "She removed a cigar
from her mouth only long enough to say, 'I won.' "
-------------------

jimf said...

An obit for Liz Anscombe:

Professor G. E. M. Anscombe was a student of Ludwig
Wittgenstein. She died in 2001, at the age of 81.
"Her quirks made Elizabeth Anscombe a memorable tutor.
Clad in leopardskin trousers and a leather jacket, she
might sit in silence for minutes on end, puffing on a
cigar, after one of her students had finished reading
out an essay."

http://www.lyddonhall.co.uk/obits/obit4.html