Narnia And Beyond by Thomas Howard

Author:Thomas Howard [Howard, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586171483
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2010-01-15T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

That Hideous Strength:

The Miserific Vision

A close commentary on That Hideous Strength could easily run to thousands of pages, since we have here a kind of narrative analogous to the visionary novels of George MacDonald and Charles Williams. The most obvious effect of this sort of narrative on the prose itself is that it is possible to “unpack” every phrase and to discover therein themes and images that all open out onto the gigantic vista lying around the borders of the small part of the tale that forms the immediate drama in the book itself. Put another way, the narrative is closer in its texture to poetry or to pageant than it is to the prose that we are accustomed to meet in novels. You can creep line by line through a poem—say The Faerie Queene or Paradise Lost or Four Quartets—and the work will sustain and reward this line-by-line scrutiny, even if the reader of your commentary cannot sustain it. The point here is that we expect extreme economy, even density, in poetry; we know that the language, image by image, sound by sound, word by word, represents the purest possible product of the fiercest refining heat that the poet’s imagination can bring to bear on his materials. To try to say exactly what Spenser or Milton or Eliot have said in their poems, the critic must run to thousands of words, and when he has finished he must send the reader back to the poem itself with the confession that his commentary is about as close to the poet’s achievement as is a contour map to the Alps.

This is true of all good prose narrative as well. It is not as though we may say that Spenser has to refine his materials while Tolstoy or James may load theirs up with alloy and dross. There is, presumably, no epaulette in Tolstoy and no tassel in James that is there at a mere hap. It is extremely difficult to chase down just what the final difference is between poetry and prose: but we may say lamely that in the common run of things any given page of James will not invite as many lines of explication as will a page of Eliot. That is perhaps a misleading way of putting it, since you can write as fat a book about Isabel Archer as you can about Prufrock—but remember that Isabel Archer has three hundred pages to herself and Prufrock has only five.

Lewis’ narratives, especially when we come to That Hideous Strength and Till We Have Faces, seem to wrench the category “prose” about. If you are the sort who annotates what you read, you will find that a page of this prose requires more underlinings and more “Aha’s” in the margin and more asterisks leading to excited footnotes and more crossreferences, than does the average page of James or Tolstoy. (Once more I adduce these two novelists, not because I wish to set Lewis in their company as novelists,

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