C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages by Robert Boenig

Author:Robert Boenig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages
ISBN: 9781606351147
Publisher: The Kent State University Press
Published: 2013-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

4

A Moustache and a Fishhook

The last chapter addressed what Lewis really did to a variety of prior texts. Out of the Silent Planet and Prince Caspian are both reworkings of specific books—one a riposte to H. G. Wells and the other a redirection of William Morris. The Great Divorce, however, was Lewis’s response to a whole genre, though Dante’s Divine Comedy has pride of place in that genre as the first among equals. Each of Lewis’s books here is dominated by his debate or engagement with the prior text or texts. But he was also capable of fashioning a riposte to a prior text as a supporting point in a book whose main engagement is with other texts and issues. Sometimes he wrote books in reaction not to a single prior text but to a prior idea that he wished to clarify. This chapter develops two examples—his liberation of the medieval figure of Merlin in That Hideous Strength not simply from a centuries-long hibernation but also from what Lewis thought was a vandalistic treatment at the hands of T. H. White and also Lewis’s profound synthesis of the three competing models of Christ’s Atonement when crafting Aslan’s salvific work in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

As mentioned, That Hideous Strength can profitably be studied as “What Lewis really did to Charles Williams’s supernatural thrillers.” Lewis’s Ransom may have begun his career as a tribute to Tolkien—a philologist on a walking tour—but he ends up as a portrait of Charles Williams—a charismatic proponent of Williams’s doctrine of co-inherence who attracts a company of followers much as Williams in real life seemed to do.1 The novel reads very much like one of Williams’s, with supernatural events and magic gradually entering and then dominating everyday life—all with souls, even worlds hanging in the balance. What Lewis really does to Williams’s books, like Many Dimensions and War in Heaven, is celebrate them, incorporating them into the model of the cosmos that he expounded in The Discarded Image and employed in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. This, I think, is quite clearly his main purpose, and a number of fine critics have discussed That Hideous Strength in terms of its relationship to Williams’s books.2 But I suggest that there is a secondary motive behind Lewis’s novel involving not just a celebration of prior texts but also an argument with one. In a way, it is similar to what Lewis really does to Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, but the difference is that Lewis does not choose to refashion someone else’s plot. Instead, he refashions someone else’s character.

As he made clear in his letters, he did not like the famous book by his contemporary T. H. White, The Once and Future King, in which Merlin (whose name White, following the spelling of William Caxton’s edition of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, renders “Merlyn”). Lewis responded to White’s book by fashioning the character Merlin in That Hideous Strength in ways he thought more

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