Month: October 2018

[This is the second part of an essay I published in the Inklings Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik, Band 18, in 2000. The first part can be found here. Both parts have been revised.]

At first glance, the Stingingman looks like a complex fusion of elements from Lewis’s favourite science fiction novels. The single horn on his head links him to Stapledon’s Last Men, who possess a retractable cranial telescope which permits them to get closer to the stars in both a visual and a metaphysical sense (284-6). Stapledon and Lewis were both familiar with the inhabitants of David Lindsay’s Arcturus, each of whom espouses a different philosophy, and whose point of view (so to speak) manifests itself in the form of an additional organ in the middle of his or her forehead – a kind of plum with a cavity in it, or an extra eye, or an arrangement of eyes, or the vestigial remains of these.[1] The Stingingman’s horn permits him to control the minds of his victims as some of Lindsay’s mutant philosophers control the weaker minds of their followers.[2] But A Voyage to Arcturus is not the only contemporary novel to adopt mind-control as a plot device. Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), which Lewis read when it first came out,[3] is an obvious allegory of the rise of Nazism, whose protagonist discovers a lost subterranean race of Romans living under Hadrian’s Wall. Like the people of Othertime, the Underworlders have ‘taken an entirely different road from our people on earth’ (O’Neill 93); where the Othertimers studied time to the exclusion of space, the Underworlders have studied the telepathic imposition of one individual’s will on another’s to the exclusion of technology. The citizens of Underworld are automata like the servants of the Stingingman, guided by the will of a Master of Knowledge as emotionless as Lewis’s horned dictator; and the automata in both worlds wear similar garments (O’Neill’s are ‘dressed merely in short kilts that fell from the waist to the knees’ (109), while the workers in the Tower are ‘dressed only in a sort of kilt’ (Tower 34)). The Underworlders, like the Othertimers, experiment on their children (O’Neill 160), and the bleak alternative worlds in both books testify to humanity’s ingenuity in constructing authentic replicas of hell. Lewis incorporated elements of Land Under England into both Perelandra and The Silver Chair;[4] he evidently found himself haunted by O’Neill’s nightmare of a totalitarian state embedded in the very soil of a professedly democratic nation.

The Stingingman, then, would seem (in part at least) to be an allegorical representation of military dictatorship – one of the symbols Lewis calls for in Spenser’s Images of Life as part of a twentieth-century iconography. This aspect of his figurative function is confirmed by the behaviour of the first young man he transfixes with his horn: the youth goes into convulsions, then begins ‘strutting with sharp, jerky movements, lifting his feet unnecessarily high and swinging his arms as if in time to the blaring swagger of some abominable march’ (Tower 35). His Cambridge observers would have recognized at once that he was mimicking the goose step from footage of Nazi military parades familiar to all watchers of newsreels in 1938. And the room where he performs these actions is crammed with other components of twentieth-century iconography. The walls, for instance, are covered with pictures of warring beetles – perverse travesties of the wall-decorations in Elizabethan public buildings; and it soon becomes clear that the whole Dark Tower is crawling with insects. The Stingingman pierces his victims ‘with a movement like the dart of a dragonfly’ (34) and acts ‘with the passionless precision of an insect or a machine’ (35); his assistants are bee-like ‘Drones’ (78) and his workers ‘rush at their tasks like ants’ (39). Scudamour even suspects that there are insects in the food (80). Again, we might guess that the entomological theme alludes to a work of contemporary science fiction: that it is a restatement of the version of alien life offered by Wells in The First Men in the Moon, which depicts the moon-dwellers or Selenites as a community of giant bugs governed by a vast disembodied brain. It was partly to combat this view of the alien as monstrous that Lewis wrote Out of the Silent Planet;[5] so there is a kind of witty inevitability about the Dark Tower’s transference of the insect theme from the lunar to the terrestrial sphere. It is men who aspire to make themselves monstrous through their elevation of the communal life above the rights of the individual; and if we did not recognize this as Lewis’s doctrine he helps us to do so by placing an idol in the Stingingman’s room, ‘an image in which a number of small human bodies culminate in a single large head’ (Tower 31). The statue parodically embodies Wells’s descriptions of the communal life in The Shape of Things to Come, where the human race has evolved into ‘one single organism of nearly two thousand five hundred million persons […] all members of one body’, and where ‘the history of life will pass into a new phase, a phase with a common consciousness and a common will’. The insect iconography of the Tower expresses, in fact, its rulers’ ambition to refashion the human race in the image of Wells’s future utopians, who for Lewis are no better than the Selenites. It is an ambition that links the scientific humanists with the Nazis in Lewis’s eyes, and he marks the uneasy synthesis of national and international socialism in the synthetic figure of the Stingingman, a peculiarly twentieth-century fusion of Victor Frankenstein and his tormented creature.

The total subservience of the individual to the community can be achieved, Lewis implies, only by erasing all that is valuable in human history, both collective and individual. The Stingingman, on his first appearance, is siting so still that it is ‘as if something had come down like the blade of a guillotine and cut short the Man’s whole history at a moment’ (Tower 32). He has become a machine, with a machine’s indifference to anything in the past not directly connected with its present function. Insects, too, resemble machines, as Lewis reminds us in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955): ‘Their angular limbs,’ he writes, ‘their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism’ (13). The echo of the phrase ‘art jutting out into life, and life turning into art’ (Images 11) is unmistakable, and suggests that an entomological iconography of the sort we find in The Dark Tower would reverse the effects of the ‘healthy’ iconography of the Renaissance as Lewis saw it, dehumanizing and entrapping the minds of its observers instead of liberating them and giving them access to new forms of life. Insect iconography, then, is one of the perverse ‘doubles’ of things in this world with which Othertime is abundantly stocked. The Dark Tower itself is another such double, as is the double of Scudamour – with whom he accidentally swaps souls – and the double of his fiancée Camilla, whose appearance on screen provokes Scudamour’s attack on the chronoscope. These doubles, the Cambridge academics believe, not only resemble each other; they are made up of ‘the very same matter’ (Tower 59), and occupy the very same space in two different times. And it is the doubles that are drawing those times together, as one academic explains, through ‘a sort of gravitation. You see, if two times contained exactly the same distribution of matter, they would become simply the same time […] and if they contained some identical distributions they might approach’ (60). The rulers of the Dark Tower, as Scudamour learns from his Othertime history book, have formulated a similar theory of time attraction, and are working hard to get ‘within striking distance’ of twentieth-century England (90). They have built all sorts of replicas besides the Tower, and have already succeeded in swapping the souls of a little girl and her Othertime double, thus diabolically replicating the ancient folk motif of the changeling (90-1). Before long, no doubt, the Othertimers hope to have generated enough ‘time attraction’ or gravitational pull between the Dark Tower and its Cambridge equivalent to transport their society wholesale into Cambridgeshire. In this way they will escape the depredations of their enemies, the mysterious ‘White Riders’ who are closing in on the Tower. And once the chronic leap has been accomplished they will quickly find themselves to be as much at home with some aspects of modern terrestrial culture as Ransom found himself among the aliens of Mars and Venus.

But unknown to them, the Othertimers have already been colonized by things of this world more thoroughly, perhaps, than they could ever hope to colonize our own. Clues to this lie in their unwitting duplication of themes from ancient terrestrial literature and legend: the fairy tale of the changeling, for instance, or of Childe Roland, whose nineteenth-century adaptation – a famous poem by Browning – is in the Cambridge academics’ minds when they give the Dark Tower its name (27). I have already suggested, with reference to Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet, that the scientific humanists unconsciously find themselves, in Lewis’s fiction, involved in another story with which they are not familiar. Another way of putting it might be this: that they find their version of human history to occupy the same space and time as another, much older version, and that they themselves are simultaneously principal actors in both world dramas. Something similar might be said of the Stingingman and of the objects he has marshaled around him in his Tower. Without knowing it, he has duplicated matter from a field of literature very different from the future histories of scientific humanism; and one can only suspect that he is drawing towards himself a powerful iconography that will finally supplant his own. It is, of course, the Elizabethan iconography of Spenser’s Images of Life, and more specifically, it is the iconography of Spenser.

Lewis’s critical readings of The Faerie Queene are as instructive for readers of Lewis’s fiction as they are for readers of Spenser. This is nowhere more obvious than in The Dark Tower, whose male protagonist bears the name of a Spenserian hero, Scudamour, and whose female lead, Camilla, was originally named ‘Ammeret’ after Scudamour’s lover.[6] The story of Scudamour and Amoret, which spans Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene, tells how Amoret was raised by Venus in the Garden of Adonis, how she was educated in the Temple of Venus, and how Scudamour ‘rescued’ her from the Temple, only to have her snatched from his side by the sadistic enchanter Busirane, who imprisoned her in his house and forced her to take part in a kind of clockwork ritual of torture, the Masque of Cupid. Alastair Fowler long ago pointed out the resemblance between the Stingingman’s room and the House of Busirane (Fowler 795); it is particularly evident in the menacing decorations that cover the wall in both places, and in the stately procession of beautiful victims through each chamber. And a glance at how Lewis read Spenser’s epic as a whole, and this episode in particular, throws a blaze of light on his unfinished novel.

His first book of criticism, The Allegory of Love (1936), provides an especially detailed key to its iconographic methods. Here, for instance, Lewis describes Elizabethan allegory as the perfect literary form by which to represent the encounter between different worlds, whether physical or conceptual. It combines, he suggests, three apparently separate aspects of our mental lives in a single narrative: ‘the actual world’, the ‘world of religion’, and ‘a third world of myth and fancy’ (82). This is just what Lewis does in The Dark Tower, where the material world finds itself poised between two opposing grand narratives, that of scientific humanism and that of the Christian faith, together with their associated literary traditions. Gain, for Lewis Spenser’s world is more or less dualistic (Allegory 314-5). Good wars against evil in any given episode, and the eternal contest is encapsulated in a series of opposites which ranges itself around ‘such ultimate antitheses as Light and Darkness or Life and Death’ (313). The centrality of antitheses to Spenser’s text has been questioned by some of Lewis’s critics, but their centrality to The Dark Tower is unquestionable. The many ‘doubles’ in the novel echo the many pairs of antithetical characters Lewis identifies in The Faerie Queene: Una and Duessa, Venus and Acrasia, Britomart and Malecasta, the true and false Florimels. In the novel, too, night is pitched against day – the Dark Tower is seen mostly at night, while the Cambridge scholars discuss what they have observed in a usually sun-drenched garden – and this recalls Lewis’s statement in The Allegory of Love that ‘[n]ight is hardly ever mentioned by Spenser without aversion’, while ‘answering to this, in his descriptions of morning we have a never failing rapture’ (313). Finally, Lewis makes much of Spenser’s unequalled ability to portray good as attractively and cheerfully energetic, whereas ‘[h]is evils are all dead and dying things. Each of his deadly sins has a mortal disease’ (Allegory 315). The generalization describes Lewis’s portrayals of evil better than some of Spenser’s: his Stingingmen have a corpselike ‘yellowish pallor’ (Tower 50-1), the growth of a sting puts Scudamour’s double through the symptoms of a brain tumour, while one of the evils in That Hideous Strength, the severed head of Alcasan, is literally a dead thing.

For Lewis, the chief antithesis in Spenser’s text is the struggle it enacts throughout its length between what he calls ‘Nature’ and ‘Artifice’ (Allegory 326ff.). The Bower of Bliss is a carefully fabricated trap, its delights wreathed in metallic ivy, while the untainted Garden of Adonis in the next book of the poem is the product of natural forces, is flowers and trees arranging themselves in patterns with ebullient spontaneity, its floral babies springing from the earth without horticultural assistance. The same antithesis, with similar exceptions, can be found in Lewis’s science fiction. Here, too, ‘the opposition of natural and artificial, naïve and sophisticated, genuine and spurious, meets us at every turn’ (Allegory 328). The island of the angelic Oyarsa in Out of the Silent Planet is a grove whose natural beauty is enhanced by the controlled artifice of a race of Martian craftspeople, the Pfifltriggi; in this it resembles Spenser’s Temple of Venus where art ‘is allowed only to supplement Nature, not to deceive or sophisticate as it does in the Bower of Bliss’ (Allegory 327). The Christian sanctuary St Anne’s in That Hideous Strength is surrounded by profusely fertile gardens, while its evil counterpart, Belbury, has grounds that resemble a ‘municipal cemetery’ (101). So too in The Dark Tower the forces of good have a ‘natural’ base, the Fellows’ garden where the academics recuperate after each hard stint of studying the horrors of Othertime: ‘always, as a background, that garden which, whether by starlight or sunlight, so often seemed our only link with sanity’ (37). The Tower itself, by contrast, is grotesquely described as a ‘work of art’ by the post-decadent aesthete Knellie (51), while the Stingingman is thought by his assistants and would-be successors to have achieved his sting by artificial means – they ‘spend nearly all their spare time in the laboratory, concocting every kind of nostrum which they think may produce the coveted deformity’ (78).

Of course, even in Lewis’s novels the natural and the artificial are not so easily distinguished as he might have wished. The difference between the gardens at St Anne’s and at Belbury, for instance, would seem to many readers to be no more than a matter of degree and of aesthetic judgement. But the relevance of the nature/artifice antithesis to Lewis’s contest with the scientific humanists I clear enough. The socialist visionaries of the 1930s made no secret of their willingness to deploy all the artificial techniques available to them, from aerospatial engineering to the radical modification of entire planetary ecosystems, in the struggle to achieve a harmonious and just community. Lewis’s ‘natural’ order defines itself by its opposition to their ambitiously unnatural programme, and above all to their blithely interventionist attitude to the human body. For Wells and Stapledon, physiological change marks the social and cultural progress of humanity. By the end of The Shape of Things to Come the citizen of the World State has transformed herself, as a by-product of the revolutions of intervening decades, into a ‘different animal’ from nineteenth-century man, ‘bigger and stronger, more clear-headed, with more self-control and more definitely related to his fellow creatures’ (Wells 411). Stapledon’s Neptunian humans, the titular Last Men, have evolved far more drastically over a longer period by means of strenuous genetic sculpture. A twentieth-century visitor would consider them bestial giants, some covered with fur or ‘mole-velvet’, others with skin of diverse hues ranging from bronze to ‘a translucent ashgreen’; their heads bristle with unfamiliar ‘excrescences’ including the telescopic stargazing horn (Stapledon 284). The sexual behaviour of these new human animals has changed as radically as their bodies. Wells’s twentieth-first-century utopians have abolished the institution of marriage as an unnecessary impediment to responsible intercourse, and have transferred the puritan impulse to a deep-rooted disapproval of capitalist enterprise (Wells 399); while Stapledon’s Neptunians gain their greatest philosophical insights through group sex, involving complicated couplings between representatives of the ‘many sub-sexes’ into which the ‘two ancient sexes’ have inexplicably proliferated (287). Many of these physiological and sexual changes, says Stapledon’s Neptunian narrator, ‘would doubtless revolt our [twentieth-century] visitor’ (284). They certainly revolted Lewis. For him they seem logical extensions of the forms of sexual ‘deviance’ that disgusted him in his own era – represented in The Dark Tower by the homosexual Knellie (who is also, for good measure, a voyeuristic sadist delighted by the Stingingman’s torture chamber), and by Scudamour’s emancipated fiancée Camilla, who was ‘so free to talk about the things her grandmother could not mention that Ransom once said he wondered if she were free to talk about anything else’ (Tower 76). Such figures violate what Lewis took to be the essential, timeless characteristics of human nature, and in particular of sex and gender; and it is against a specifically gendered version of the ‘unnatural’ that the full weight of the book’s Spenserian allegory is unleashed.

If The Faerie Queene organizes itself, for Lewis, around the nature/artifice antithesis, its central episode – the one he returned to most often in his criticism – concerns the contrast between natural and unnatural sexuality. For him the tale of Scudamour and Amoret exemplifies the sexual antithesis in Spenser’s epic: it is an allegory of healthy and diseased sexuality, in which marriage is the only context for healthy physical union. As such it makes a neat conclusion for Lewis’s study of what he sees as the predominantly adulterous ‘courtly love’ tradition in The Allegory of Love, since he can present it as the moment when courtly love is finally superseded by a new sense of literary responsibility. Lewis’s view of medieval courtly love as a celebration of adultery has been challenged, like his views on Spenser’s antitheses, as a gross oversimplification of a complex cultural phenomenon. It certainly leads him to oversimplify what many critics regard as the most complex and ambivalent of Spenser’s meditations on sexuality, the Bower of Bliss episode in Book II of The Faerie Queene. Lewis reads this episode as Spenser’s hostile response to courtly adultery, ‘a picture, the most powerful ever painted, of the whole sexual nature in disease’ (Allegory 332); against it, he says, ‘we should set not only the Garden of Adonis, but the rapturous reunion of Scudamour and Amoret’ (Allegory 341). To put it simply, Spenser sees sex outside marriage as evil, and marital sex as the basis both for a stable patriarchal state and for a stable universe. Or so Lewis, rightly or wrongly, would have us believe.

Lewis’s own Busirane, the Stingingman, is his effort to transplant the notion of ‘the whole sexual nature in disease’ into the twentieth century. The phallic appearance of the Stingingman’s horn is unmistakable: ‘It was hard and horny, but not like bone. It was red, like most of the things in a man, and apparently lubricated by some kind of saliva’ (Tower 33). This mocks the exalted metaphysical state of Stapledon’s Last Men, whose cranial horn and orgiastic grapplings help them to achieve harmony with the cosmos and with each other. In contrast to the blissfully communistic Last Men, however, the Stingingman derives a purely one-sided pleasure from his extra organ: when Scudamour takes over his body he finds himself ‘burdened with a horrible physical deformity from which horrible and, perhaps in the long run, irresistible desires would pour into his consciousness at every moment’ (64). Scudamour’s earthly fiancée Camilla suffers from a less physiological form of sexual self-centredness: ‘There would have been no difficulty,’ Lewis tells us, ‘about suggesting to her that she might become your mistress’, but ‘I do not think you would have succeeded unless you had offered very good security’ (76). Camilla’s penchant for infidelity makes her (along with Knellie) the terrestrial focus in the book of the diseased sexuality represented by the Stingingman; a sexuality which is also an abuse of the healthy, ‘natural’ power relations between men, or between men and women. A glance at That Hideous Strength helps to clarify the situation. In it the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments at Belbury, which hopes to remake the world in its own image, is a perverse scientific humanist ‘family’ (as its Deputy Director explains), whose members are an Italian ‘eunuch’, an asexual scientist, an impotent old man, and a sadistic lesbian who is also the Institute’s chief of police. The lesbian’s name – Fairy Hardcastle – associates her with another of the allegories of corrupt sexuality in The Faerie Queene, Malecasta, who tries to seduce the heroic warrior woman Britomart at the beginning of Book III (Allegory 340). Hardcastle’s virtuous opposite number, Jane Studdock, gives up her academic ambitions to be reunited with her husband at the end of the novel, in a scene that mimics the reunion of Amoret and Scudamour in the 1590 version of Spenser’s epic.[7] For much of the novel’s length Jane is in serious danger (from Lewis’s point of view) of becoming another Camilla: she yearns for independence and academic recognition, and has to be gently persuaded by the Forces of Good into the ‘natural’ wifely role, which is to be obedient and have babies. As a result of her eventual restoration to this ‘natural’ state, the twentieth-century equivalent of the marriage of Scudamour and Amoret – which had been deferred since Lewis left The Dark Tower unfinished – finally achieves what he would no doubt have considered a happy consummation.

All this is profoundly distasteful to most twenty-first century readers, and it’s impossible to read That Hideous Strength today (or its precursor, The Dark Tower) without feeling that Lewis himself had serious psychological issues when it came to both sexuality and gender. But it’s worth, I think, pausing to consider the philosophical basis of these issues. Lewis seems to have considered sex, like reading, as a kind of meeting-point between worlds, a hugely – indeed at times oppressively – significant iconographic process which draws together the spiritual and material aspects of our beings, so that this life and what he calls the ‘eternal’ interpenetrate and act on one another in every sexual encounter. This, at least, is what he suggests in a letter to a woman – an ex-student – written in 1940 soon after his abandonment of The Dark Tower:

Apparently, if Christianity is true, the mere fact of sexual intercourse sets up between human beings a relation wh. has, so to speak, transcendental repercussions – some eternal relation is established whether they like it or not. This sounds very odd. But is it? After all, if there is an eternal world and if our world is its manifestation, then you would expect bits of it to ‘stick through’ into ours. We are like children pulling the levers of a vast machine of which most is concealed. We see a few little wheels that buzz round on this side when we start it up – but what glorious or frightful processes we are initiating in there, we don’t know. That’s why it is so important to do what we’re told. (Letters 349)

The levers pulled by the sexually promiscuous Camilla in The Dark Tower have truly frightful repercussions. Her self-interest is one of the ‘little wheels’ that sets a ‘vast machine’ in motion. It draws towards our world, from the beyond, a world where the proper ‘Head’ of the human family – God – has been replaced by a monstrous mock-human Brain, whose aim is to develop itself and spread its influence at the expense of the wretched bodies and minds that serve it. As Lewis went on to explain in his letter, ‘if marriage is a permanent relation, intended to produce a kind of new organism (“the one flesh”) there must be a Head’ (Letters 349): he means, of course, that St Paul is right when he tells us that the husband is the ‘head’ of the household (1 Corinthians 11.3). The head of the Stingingman with its phallic outgrowth, the Big Brain lodged in its phallic tower, the Head of Alcasan in That Hideous Strength, all long for grotesque physical and mental unions which will produce tormented travesties of ‘the one flesh’, and they will disseminate themselves promiscuously from world to world like a virus in their efforts to achieve such unions. By imitating their quest for ‘unnatural’ authority, by rejecting the ‘Headship of Man’ and seeking a different sort of ‘good security’ in her sexual relations, Camilla opens a conduit for that virus, a kind of interface between Othertime and the 1930s by means of which the Othertime virus can swarm into our historical strand and make it one with the strand that contains the Stingingmen. Her behaviour, in fact, brings with it the threat of a global catastrophe as devastating as anything imagined by Haldane or Stapledon. As Lewis put it in his letter, ‘this sounds very odd’, and the analogy between sex and the instrument panel of a giant machine makes it sound odder still. If one took the analogy seriously one might well prefer homosexual relationships between men or women to the unfathomable terrors of the marriage bed; except that Lewis’s Christianity forbids these too. Sex begins to look like a minefield better skirted around than indulged in.

It’s hard to imagine that such an attitude to sexual activity could have anything but a deleterious impact on its possessor’s mental wellbeing. At the same time, distasteful as it is, the attitude can help to explain the extraordinary energy of Lewis’s imaginative writing. Actions in our world set off processes in the other world – the one where God is encountered face to face, as opposed to this one, where God is merely made manifest through analogies and metaphors. There are lots of other worlds analogous to our world, and these are the worlds of imaginative fiction – fictions like The Dark Tower and That Hideous Strength. Each fiction stands in more or less the same relation to God’s world as does our world – the world of the reader. This makes fiction as important as fact, because neither of them is the ‘real thing’; they are all shadows of a platonic ideal. At the same time, all these worlds – our own world and the various imaginative worlds we conjure up – have ‘levers’ sticking into them from God’s world, so that they actively participate in it. This is as true for the fictional worlds of science fiction and fantasy as it is for the world we live in, and Lewis’s own fiction reverberates with the conviction that this is true, based on his faith that the unseen world of God is what matters most of all, and that the human imagination is the best way of apprehending it. Writing fiction, then, is a hugely important activity for Lewis, and one that must be engaged in with an acute awareness of your responsibility to get it right. Luckily, there’s a guidebook for this activity: the Christian story as told in the Bible – which means that writing is for him by no means as scary as having sex, which doesn’t get detailed treatment in the Scriptures.

At its best – by which I mean in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra – Lewis’s science fiction leaves us with a sense of reading as an encounter between worlds, both dangerous and exhilarating, and of living as an extension of our reading. Sometimes, as in his characterizations of Camilla and Knellie, the interpenetration between books and life becomes unwieldy, even grotesque – especially if one reads Spenser, the Bible or the future histories of the 1930s as complex texts rather than simple ones. From time to time, however, Lewis brings books alive, in his fiction as in his criticism, and hurls his readers bodily into battles between the animated volumes with which he stocks his pages, enlisting us as subsidiary characters in his cosmic narrative – although we will not always be inclined to fight on the side he favours.

 

Bibliography

Crossley, Robert. ‘Olaf Stapledon and the Idea of Science Fiction.’ Modern Fiction Studies 32 (1986): 21-42.

Dunne, J. W. An Experiment with Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1958.

Fiedler, Lesley A. Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Fowler, Alistair. ‘The Aliens of Othertime.’ Times Literary Supplement, July 1, 1977: 795.

Haldane, J. B. S. Possible Worlds and Other Essays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927.

Kegler, Karl. ‘Travels, Towers, Space and Time: Lewis’s The Dark Tower and its Correspondences.’ Inklings-Jahnrbuch 16 (1998): 119-137.

Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.

Lewis, C. S. The Dark Tower (manuscript). MS. Eng. misc. c. 1109, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Lewis, C. S. The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Ed. Walter Hooper. Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1983.

Lewis, C. S. Letters. Ed. W. H. Lewis, rev. Walter Hooper. Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1988.

Lewis, C. S., The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves. Ed. Walter Hooper. New York: Macmillan, 1986.

Lewis, C. S. Miracles. Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1988.

Lewis, C. S. Of This and Other Worlds. Ed. Walter Hooper. Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1984.

Lewis, C. S. Out of the Silent Planet. London: Pan Books, 1952.

Lewis, C. S. Perelandra [Voyage to Venus]. London: Pan Books, 1983.

Lewis, C. S. Spenser’s Images of Life. Ed. Alistair Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life. Glasgow: Fontana, 1959.

Lewis, C. S. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. London: Pan Books, 1983.

Lewis, C. S. They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962.

Lindsay, David. A Voyage to Arcturus. London: Sphere Books, 1980.

O’Neill, Joseph. Land Under England. Harmondswoth: Penguin Books, 1987.

Stapledon, Olaf. Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963.

Wells, H. G. The Shape of Things to Come. London: Corgi Books, 1967.

 

Notes

[1] For Stapledon’s knowledge of Lindsay see Crossley, 33.

[2] See Lindsay, 101ff. See Kegler for a fuller discussion of Lewis’s debt to Lindsay in The Dark Tower.

[3] See Lewis, Letters to Arthur Greeves, 472 (letter dated 23 April 1935).

[4] In Perelandra Ransom’s subterranean duel with Weston resembles the son’s subterranean duel with his father at the end of O’Neill’s narrative, while the underground country entered by Eustace and Jill in The Silver Chair has clear affinities with O’Neill’s Underworld.

[5] See, for instance, his remark in a conversation of 1962 with Brian Aldiss: ‘most of the earlier [science fiction] stories start from the […] assumption that we, the human race, are in the right, and everything else is ogres’ (Of This and Other Worlds 185). It’s worth pointing out that this is by no means the case in The First Men in the Moon, where the men of the title are at least as monstrous in their morals as the bugs. All the same, Ransom’s fear of the Martians as he travels to Mars is based on his reading of The First Men in the Moon, though it proves groundless when he meets them.

[6] See the Bodleian manuscript of The Dark Tower, fol. 24r: ‘Miss Ammeret was expected in a very few days’. Ammeret is a deliberate misspelling of Spenser’s Amoret, and I’m guessing that the replacement of the Latin for love, ‘amor’, with an echo of the French ‘amer’ or ‘bitter’ was Lewis’s comment on Camilla’s character.

[7] There are too many links to be mentioned here, but a close reading of the final chapters of That Hideous Strength alongside The Allegory of Love should make them clear enough.