Imagination

            The rehabilitation of the imagination is a matter of showing the reader what is and is not genuinely attractive.  Early on in the novel, we learn that the City of Man is not concerned with beauty but with practical application.  One member of the N.I.C.E. notes with delight that the nation will eventually be run by a “Pragmatometer” (38), a prioritizing machine.  Note the contrast to Ransom’s charming use of mice to pick up crumbs off the floor (149).  Jane’s choosing to return to Ransom’s people at St. Anne’s is not at all a moral choice but is inspired by Ransom’s very appearance, the beauty of a man who has been to pure worlds, which in turn inspires the recollection of aesthetic pleasures: chorales by Bach, Shakespearean sonnets, the simple joy of buttered toast and tea (152).  Beauty in the imagination draws her to the truth.  For the fallen city, however, the grotesque becomes a philosophical position as we see in Frost’s ugliness room (297-9).  Mark is placed in this room where all symmetries, all patterns are askew.  After some time, he realizes the room’s purpose and Frost’s intentions:

He turned his back on the pictures and sat down.  He understood the whole business now.  Frost was not trying to make him insane; at least not in the sense Mark had hitherto given to the word “insanity.”  Frost had meant what he said.  To sit in the room was the first step towards what Frost called objectivity--the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the fastidious society of the Macrobes. Higher degrees in the asceticism of anti-Nature would doubtless follow: the eating of abominable food, the dabbling in dirt and blood, the ritual performances of calculated obscenities.  They were . . . offering him the very same initiation through which they themselves had passed and which had divided them from humanity. (299)

Order

            Each city has its own vision for the ordering of the cosmos.  The vision of the City of Man is revealed in a conversation between mark and Filostrato who defines a “civilized tree” as one made of metal (172).  His ultimate goal is to do away with all vegetation, once humanity finds a substitute for oxygen, in order to “clean the planet.”  He also wants to do away with birds.  Mechanical ones will only sing when you want them to (173).  Eventually, all organic life, including the human body, will be done away with.  Filostrato’s idea of perfection is the dead moon: “There is cleanness, purity.  Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fibre of lichen, not one grain of dust” (175).  It is, for him, perfection.

            In the City of God, the Medieval idea of hierarchy, of order through diversity not sterility, reigns.  We saw this order in OSP in the order of created beings: Oyarsas, eldila, hnau, non-sentient creatures.  And we can return, again, to the scene with Ransom, Jane and the mice.  After the little creatures leave, Jane thinks, “How huge we must seem to them” (150) and then is herself overwhelmed with a sense of some huge presence upon her.  An Oyarsa has descended.  Ransom tells her to leave, saying, “This is no place for us small ones . . . .”  Later, in thinking of heaven, Jane realizes that she had been conceiving it as a “neutral, or democratic, vacuum where differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended but simply taken away.  Now the suspicion dawned upon her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of ascent” (315).

Life

            We saw, in the last section, the vision of a world barren of life that represents the fallen city and of how the City of God celebrates all life (even mice).  As another example of this contrast between the two cities, consider the two leaders of the novel (chapters seven and nine).  The “Saracen’s Head” is bodiless, dead and ugly (Filostrato’s dream).  His skull is missing, his brain oversized, and artificial saliva drips from his mouth.  Ransom is full of life; his body, though wounded, has seemed to age backwards.  He is beautiful, godlike.  Consider also the attitude toward animals.  At St. Anne’s, animals are pets; at the N.I.C.E. they are fodder for experiments.

Truth

            In the opening of the novel, Jane recalls a dream of the Saracen’s Head and notes the beheading of Alcasan in the next day’s newspaper (14-16).  We learn, as the novel progresses, that Jane has a gift for seeing actual events in her dreams.  The good people of Logres are able to utilize her talent to achieve victory.  The other primary example of “visions of truth,” as I termed it in the chart, is that which we saw under the section on imagination.  The beauty of the City of God is an imaginative vision which speaks truth.

            In opposition to this approach to truth is the purposeful manipulation of language among the N.I.C.E. in order to control people.  Wither uses double speak in order to keep every employee of N.I.C.E. in doubt as to his/her place in the organization.  He is deliberately vague and so instills the fear of insecurity (95-97).  Says Fairy Hardcastle, “Making things clear is the one thing . . . [Wither] . . . can’t stand . . . . That’s how he runs the place.  And mind you, he knows what he’s about.  It works, Sonny” (97).  Mark, also, is drawn into an exercise in propaganda, writing two articles about the riots at Edgestow, each one intended to manipulate a different audience toward a desired response (130-135).

            Language is, of course, a key symbol for the novel, from the Babel reference on the title page to the confusion of language that Merlin imposes on the N.I.C.E. at the novel’s end.  We see what language ought to be in a conversation between Ransom and his colleague Dimble where Ransom asks him to speak in the old Solar language:

. . . this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little water drop.  This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth . . . . (229)

            Contrast Wither’s speech at the confusion of Merlin:

Tidies and fugleman--I sheel foor that we all--er--most steeply rebut the defensible, though, I trust, lavatory, Aspasia which gleams to have selected our redeemed inspector this deceiving.  It would--ah--be shark, very shark, from anyone’s debenture . . . . (346)

            It is the natural progression that God’s singular gift to man should be removed when man rejects Him.  As Merlin shouts above the confusion of his magical curse, “They that have despised the word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away” (351).

Eros

            Says Filostrato, “There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex.  When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable” (178).  Contemporary Americans would hardly think to associate such a negative view of sex with the corrupt City of Man over the “puritanical” City of God.  A more typically recognized argument between the good and corrupt visions is the take on the relationship between sex and progeny.  Early in the novel we learn that Mark and Jane are practicing birth control (14), a choice which Merlin strongly condemns, calling Jane “the falsest lady of any at this time alive” because “it was the purpose of God that she and her lord should between them have begotten a child by whom the enemies should have been put out of Logres for a thousand years” (278).

            Equally contested today is the question of gender--whether there is a gender based hierarchy in which the man is head of the woman and whether there is any such thing as gender at all.  In the City of Man, the relationship between masculine and feminine is corrupted or neutered (that is, denied).  Jane questions her marriage to Mark in the opening chapter; she wonders where the romance has gone to.  We have already seen Filostrato’s vision of removing the human body, thus gender.  Fairy Hardcastle is the living symbol of this very neutering: a woman who acts and dresses like a man except that she wears a short skirt in order to be intimidating both asexually and sexually.  Her very name stands in marked contrast to that of Grace Ironwood of St. Anne’s, the former representing the false strength of human artifice, the latter the unbelievable (grace is always so) power of the natural order.

            The right order of the masculine and the feminine returns us to the section on order where hierarchy is acknowledged over equality.  Jane’s problem, according to Ransom, is pride.  He says,

You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud irruptive, possessive thing-- the gold lion, the bearded bull--which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level.  But the masculine none of us can escape.  What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.  You had better agree with your adversary quickly. (316)

            We learn later that the cosmic hierarchy does, in fact, consist of seven genders (325).  Even the Oyarsas have gender; this is revealed in Perelandra: Venus is feminine (not only the angel but the very planet) and Mars is masculine.  Part of the action of redemption for Mark and Jane is the recognition by each of their place in the hierarchy.  The positive result is a moment of intense consummation where Mark and Jane are restored to each other, to romance, to sexuality and to fertility (376-79).

Praxis

            What characterizes the N.I.C.E. is its use of brutal power, hideous strength.  Their plans are active, the tactics strong armed.  In contrast, the people of Logres rely on quiet power.  Their work is most characterized by their willingness to wait for orders (192).  The power on which they rely comes from no actions of their own but from above, from the Oyarsas who descend to pour their power into Merlin (322-27), which they do because even their good power would be enough to unmake the world were it to be poured out in full force:

“Sir,” said Merlin, “what will come of this?  If they put forth their power,   they will unmake all Middle Earth.” “Their naked power, yes,” said Ransom.  “That is why they will work only through a man.” (291)

Sovereignty

            The central issue in the battle between the City of Man and the City of God is the question, who will be in charge?  It was the issue at Babel and is the issue behind the warring cities, Babylon and New Jerusalem, in the Apocalypse of St. John.  Lewis says in The Great Divorce that the difference between those in heaven and hell is that the heaven bound have learned to say to God, “Thy will be done,” while to those in hell God says, “Thy will be done” (72).  In THS, submission to higher authority (as we have seen in Jane’s development) is set off against the desire by men to control humanity, to throw off the fetters of the human body, to be godlike (we saw this in just about every previous thematic section).  But, of course, the elevation of man to the place of godhood is a lie.  The leaders of N.I.C.E. are not in control.  This is never more clear than at the novel’s end when the Head, knowing that all is lost, works as much evil as possible in the last moments:

In the end, the three men stood naked before the Head--gaunt, big-boned Straik; Filostrato, a wobbling mountain of fat; Wither, an obscene senility.  Then the high ridge of terror from which Filostrato was never again to descend, was reached; for what he thought impossible began to happen.  No one had read the dials, adjusted the pressures, or turned on the air and the artificial saliva.  Yet words came out of the dry gaping mouth of the dead man’s head.  “Adore!” it said. (354)

            Wither and Straik offer Filostrato as a human sacrifice to the head and then turn on each other at the head’s behest until their own destruction.  Equality in the City of Man is a lie, godhood an enticement to become fodder for the gods.

Identity

            The issue of identity has been delineated throughout this exploration.  In the City of Man, human beings are used while they clamor for the illusion of equality.  In the City of God, humanity humbly submits to its place in the cosmic hierarchy, thus realizing the fulness of human glory.  Ransom, the wounded yet angelic Pendragon of Logres who confronts the power of Merlin on crutches and who receives the blessing of returning to Perelandra at the novel’s end, is the perfect example of this humble glory.

            Lewis has attempted to present the reader a hideous vision in the hope that we will reject it for a truer more beautiful one.  Duriez summarizes well when he, summarizing the Abolition of Man, notes “that a world which rejects objective principles of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, also rejects what constitutes mankind’s very nature, and creates an unhumanity” (200).  What remains is for us to choose.

Works Cited

Duriez, Colin. The C.S. Lewis Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to his Life, Thought and Writings.
          Eastbourne, U.K.: Monarch, 1990.

Guroian, Vigen. Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination.
          New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Holy Bible. King James Version.

Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. New York: Macmillan, 1946.

---. Letters of C.S. Lewis: Revised and Enlarged Edition. Ed. W.H. Lewis. Revised Edition Ed. Walter
          Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988.

---. That Hideous Strength. New York: Macmillan, 1946.