Out of the Silent Planet Ch 12-22 (& Postscript) Revisited

I am homesick

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered…When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But we still know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting.

-Hyoi, pg 74

And just like that, our journey through the heavens returns to earth.

Let us begin with a space-eye’s view of the entire structure:

Structure

Ch 1 - on earth
Ch 2 - on earth
Ch 3 - in space
Ch 4 - in space
Ch 5 - in space
Ch 6 - in space
Ch 7 - on Malacandra w/ Weston & Devine
Ch 8 - on Malacandra alone & wandering
Ch 9 - on Malacandra alone then with a Hross (but unable to communicate)
Ch 10 - on Malacandra w/ a Hross (learning to communicate)
Ch 11 - on Malacandra w/ Hyoi (knows names, can communicate better)
Ch 12 - on Malacandra w/ Hyoi (communicating well)
Ch 13 - on Malacandra w/ Hyoi (Hyoi killed)
Ch 14 - on Malacandra alone & traveling
Ch 15 - on Malacandra w/ Augray the sorn
Ch 16 - on Malacandra w/ Augray & other sorns
Ch 17 - on Malacandra w/ Augray, then alone in Meldilorn, then with pfifltrigg
Ch 18 - on Malacandra in Meldilorn w/ Oyarsa
Ch 19 - on Malacandra in Meldilorn w/Oyarsa, Weston, & Devine
Ch 20 - on Malacandra in Meldilorn w/Oyarsa, Weston, & Devine
Ch 21 - in space
Ch 22 - on earth
Postscript - on earth

Seeing it laid before me, I will now contend that Out of the Silent Planet has a chiastic structure, if we accept two conditions:

1. the postscript counts; and

2. we consider that Oyarsa is in heaven (i.e. “space”) more than he is on Malacandra, and therefore chapters 18-20 could be counted as “in space” since Ransom is in his presence.

And it is here that I will officially choose to change our terminology from “space” to “the heavens” since this word is now definitively more accurate.

Thuswise and therefore…chapter 12 is the central chapter of the novel.

Enabling me to look at the 5 Malacandrian chapters leading up to this central chapter as “collecting data.” (Implying a detached, impersonal collection of facts and details, in which the picture cannot yet be seen, because one does not yet know what one is looking at.)

And, I will call the 5 Malacandrian chapters following this central chapter: “deepening understanding.” (Because it is in these chapters that Ransom begins to see, and therefore love, Malacandra.)

Rewritten structure:

Ch 1 - on earth
Ch 2 - on earth
Ch 3 - in the heavens
Ch 4 - in the heavens
Ch 5 - in the heavens
Ch 6 - in the heavens
Ch 7 - on Malacandra collecting data
Ch 8 - on Malacandra collecting data
Ch 9 - on Malacandra collecting data
Ch 10 - on Malacandra collecting data
Ch 11 - on Malacandra collecting data
Ch 12 - on Malacandra w/ Hyoi (communicating well)
Ch 13 - on Malacandra deepening understanding
Ch 14 - on Malacandra deepening understanding
Ch 15 - on Malacandra deepening understanding
Ch 16 - on Malacandra deepening understanding
Ch 17 - on Malacandra deepening understanding
Ch 18 - in the heavens
Ch 19 - in the heavens
Ch 20 - in the heavens
Ch 21 - in the heavens
Ch 22 - on earth
Postscript - on earth

Additionally, the themes we were tracking last time were:

• Anti-Man (i.e. Science & Business vs. Man)

• Light/the heavens

• Perspective Shifts (these were our two themes of: Thinking Upside Down, which focused on physical perspective, and Too Much Baggage to See Clearly, which focused on spiritual perspective. I am reuniting this theme in true Theology of the Body style.)

These themes reappear in chapters 12-22, but in reverse (and thus chiastic) order.

Quotes & Themes

Chapter 12—the central chapter— Major Theme: “No Word For…”

“He says, he says —I cannot say what he says” (135).

Words create. Without the word for an idea, you can’t have that idea. This is why it is a perspective-altering gem to discover and master an untranslatable word in a secondary language. New words create a space in your mind that did not exist before.

It is also world-shaping to discovery the absence of a word.

“He knew no word for war” (73).

The closest word to “bad” in hrossa is “bent.”

Later, in chapter 13, when Ransom is trying to explain guns and bullets and cowardly violence and sin, he is forced to use many words, because of the many gaps in the Malacandrian language for all of these wrongs:

“Hyoi, it is through me that this has happened. It is the other hmana who have hit you, the bent two that brought me to Malacandra. They can throw death at a distance with a thing they have made. I should have told you. We are all a bent race. We have come here to bring evil to Malacandra. We are only half hnau—Hyoi…” His speech died away into the inarticulate. He did not know the words for “forgive” or “shame” or “fault,” hardly the word for “sorry” (82).

All of chapter 12 is worth quoting, as there’s an entire way of living here, that is almost untranslatable into any language from Earth.

At a recent planetarium visit, the astrophysicist giving the presentation said that it is very, very likely that there is intelligent life in other solar systems.

Lewis’ conception of other worlds causes me to be excited for those other places, places that also have been made by God, places that perhaps have life-giving and life-honoring gaps in their language as well.

The word for “gap” or “an unfilled space or interval” in Latin is: lacuna.

Scott Cairns

recently released a book of poetry called Lacunae: New Poems, in which the first poem is called: “Recuperating Lacunae,” and which has literal gaps between words.

(In order to reproduce this effect on Substack, I had to use incredibly clunky looking dashes. Forgive the insulting appearance, it was the only way I was able to get Substack to post this excerpt with the gaps. Cairns’ poem when presented correctly has no dashes, just beautiful empty space: Lacunae: New Poems.)

I include this excerpt because I believe his poem is a parallel expression to C.S. Lewis’ “No word for…” theme, which expresses the presence in the gaps:

No, not so much ________ an emptiness, never yet
an emptiness. __________Think, rather, a discrete

cove proving still________to offer—and ever
to offer—what one _______cannot, can never,

comprehend…

(excerpt from “Recuperating Lacunae,” Scott Cairns)

The discussion of poetry, of language’s strengths and limitations, of the beauty of gaps appears in a conversation in chapter 17:

“The best poetry, then, comes in the roughest speech?”

“Perhaps,” said the pfifltrigg (114).

Within these four short pages of chapter 12, Hyoi introduces us to a way of enjoying pleasures without greed; a way of remembering without pointless longing for the past; a way of loving without possessiveness; a way of fighting a foe without fear or hatred and with a virtuous pride; and a way of living in the material world with eyes that see and ears that hear the immaterial world.

These are all gaps within our own Earthly way of living. Mind the gap.

And then examine how, in the epilogue, when we get the unfiltered voice of Tolkien, I mean, Ransom, he speaks as one who must now live in the gap:

I am homesick for my old Malacandrian valley when I think of it; yet God knows when I heard it there I was homesick enough for the Earth (154).

This journey has changed Ransom. He’s been made a permanent sojourner, a person who loves the world while longing for another, a man exiled to live in the gap, a mediator between places, in short, a Christian.

But all is well, for Maleldil has taught his servants how to act “over a gap of time, or a gap of place” (140).

Chapters 13-Epilogue

In this final half of the book, the themes tumble and topple and merge into each other. Forgive me for my somewhat arbitrary placement of passages within themes.

Major Theme: Perspective Shifts

The fissures and moulding of distant slopes were clear as the background of a primitive picture made before man learned perspective (99).

In the five chapters following the central gap, Ransom undergoes a profound and rapid alteration in which his understanding is exponentially deepened. (This mirrors the experience of learning a new language.)

He was one with them. That difficulty which they, accustomed to more than one rational species, had perhaps never felt, was now over come. They were all hnau. They had stood shoulder to shoulder in the face of an enemy, and the shapes of their heads no longer mattered. And he, even Ransom, had come through it and not been disgraced. He had grown up (81-81).

And in his time with the philosopher sorns he learns:

“There are a great many bodies you cannot see. Every animal’s eyes see some things but not others” (94).

And then this ironic passage, when Ransom is on Mars, but does not know it because of the untranslatable nature of language to define where one is in the universe without the assistance of the “bigger picture,” he sees:

He wondered for a moment if it was Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized what they were—Northern Europe and a piece of North America. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him (96).

And this most lovely of passages, in which his new familiarity with the internal identity of sorns informs and alters his view of their external reality; a moment in which spiritual understanding influences physical sight (I hope you’re bringing with you some Othello thoughts from last month!):

Only towards afternoon, as they were about to descend into a dip of the road, they met three sorns together coming towards them down the opposite slope…Their grace of movement, their lofty stature, and the softened glancing of the sunlight on their feathery sides, effected a final transformation in Ransom’s feeling towards their race. “Ogres” he had called them when they first met his eyes as he struggled in the grip of Weston and Devine; “Titans” or “Angels” he now thought would have been a better word (101).

Released from the twin-towered grip of Science and Business, Ransom can see the sorns for who they are.

And then a final passage for this section on perspective shifts, a true gem:

After these came a number of others armed with harpoons and apparently guarding two creatures which he did not recognize. The light was behind them as they entered between the two farthest monoliths. They were much shorter than any animal he had yet seen on Malacandra…Suddenly, with an indescribable change of feeling, he realized that he was looking at man…he, for one privileged moment, had seen the human form with almost Malacandrian eyes (124).

What a gift (bitter-sweet but a gift none-the-less) to be able, for a moment, to see oneself. Ransom has new eyes. (Later, when listening to the Hross funeral, we discover he has new ears as well. But we must press on.)

Theme: Light/the Heavens

“But the body of an eldil is a movement swift as light; you may say its body is made of light, but not of that which is light for the eldil. His “light” is a swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and bathe in…For him Malacandra is only a place in the heavens; it is in the heavens that he and the others live” (95).

Dog-ear that last line. We’ll return to the idea of a spirit being in the heavens, and not contained by our concept of material space, in Perelandra.

There are so many beautiful passages on light, I wish I could quote them all, but for the sake of time, we will press on.

Theme: Anti-Man

“Strange!” said Oyarsa. “You do not love any one of your race—you would have let me kill Ransom. You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are” (137).

These passages in Chapter 20 are some of my favorite. The gaps in language strip Weston’s grand, drippingly-modern speeches of not only their grandeur, but also their sense.

“To you I may seem a vulgar robber, but I bear on my shoulders the destiny of the human race” (134).

A normal enough phrase to our intelligentsia-instructed selves.

But then, see it in translation, and it becomes not only absurd, but its “no word for that” nature exposes the faults in our society and the strength in theirs.

“Among us, Oyarsa, there is a kind of hnau who will take other hnau’s food and—and things, when they are not looking. He says he is not an ordinary one of that kind. He says what he does now will make very different things happen to those of our people who are not yet born” (134).

Not exactly the speech to rally the people.

The best comes when Ransom must translate “civilized man” to:

The best animal now is the kind of man who makes the big huts and carries the heavy weights and does all the other things I told you about (135).

All that we have accomplished, all that we, as modern humans are so proud of, when summarized in simple terms, becomes quite humbling.

Big ideas about the success of humanity, translate into disregard for the soul of a man.

Theme: Love of Fellow Man

“Love of our own kind,” he said, “is not the greatest of laws, but you, Oyarsa, have said it is a law. If I cannot live in Thulcandra, it is better for me not to live at all” (141).

It is not good for man to be alone. Ransom learns this on Malacadria.

But it was Earth he was seeing—even, perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it. It was all there in that little disk—London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

“Yes,” he said dully to the sorn. “That is my world.” It was the bleakest moment of all his travels (96).

G.K. Chesterton says…that love is not blind. That this is the last thing love is. Anyone who says that love is blind has never met a woman. A woman knows (to the smallest detail) all the faults of her husband and children, and passionately tries to change them even as she passionately loves them. Chesterton says that it is this love that is required to better the soul of a man, and thus the nation, society, and the world.

This is the love Ransom has learned to hold. This is the love that is necessary to accomplish great things. This is the love that can defeat the false grandeur of Modern Man’s proclaimed love for the human race.

Carry these thoughts with you further into the Trilogy.

Comparing Lewis to Lewis

Lewis kept reminding me of his other works!

• When Weston was talking to the old, sleeping, supposedly ventriloquist Hross instead of Oyarsa, I was thinking about the moment in The Great Divorce when the heavenly wife refuses to talk to her husband’s ventriloquized projection of himself.

• When Weston is determined to “utter the thing—almost the only thing outside his own science—which he had to say” (134), it reminded me of Orual in Til We Have Faces when she is made to utter the thing that has lain at the center of herself, and which she has been repeating, idiot-like, to herself her whole life.

• When Oyarsa says that Weston has wisdom concerning bodies, but in all other things he has the “mind of an animal” (133), I think of the moment in Prince Caspian when Lucy has just been attacked by a bear that may have once been a Talking Bear, and she expresses her horror that men could externally appear the same, while inside they have reverted back to bestiality. This thought is compounded by Weston’s use of the phrase “gone native.” (Also, this idea surely came to Lewis through George MacDonald’s character Curdie, who is able to shake the hand of a man, and know what animal that man is turning into.)

Thoughts to Carry Forward into the Trilogy:

Remember whose side Weston says he’s on when we get to Perelandra:

“Me no care Maleldil. Like Bent One better: me on his side” (139).

Remember these lines when we get to That Hideous Strength:

It would be a strange but not inconceivable world; heroism and poetry at the bottom, cold scientific intellect above it, and overtopping all some dark superstition which scientific intellect, helpless against the revenge of the emotional depths it had ignored, had neither will nor power to remove (86).

And don’t forget Ransom’s parting words in chapter 22, as they are a guide to the reality of the struggle in That Hideous Strength:

The dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic, or at least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal (152).

All the things we didn’t get to talk about and questions…

• How do spiritual beings make sound when they have no throats?! Fascinating query.

• The fact that Lewis modeled Ransom after his philologist friend Tolkien… and how the Epilogue must have been so amusing for Lewis to write in Tolkien’s voice with his petulance for details.

• The idea that death in Malacandra is as predictable as birth, and everyone goes out with his “year group.”

• In Chapter 21, the narrator first raises his head and makes himself known with the use of the pronoun “I.” Will Lewis as a narrator, continue to make himself a presence in the next novels? Will he make for himself a fully fleshed out character?

• Will language, and the “gaps” inherent between words and worlds, continue to play a role in this Trilogy?

That’s it for Out of the Silent Planet, y’all! Post thoughts and comments below so as not to lose them, because it’s time to travel to another planet!

Parting thought experiment for those of you who haven’t read this Trilogy before: with the spaceship destroyed, how do you think Ransom will get to Perelandra?!

Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.

In Case You Missed It:

On the Podcast:

• ep. 36: Introducing The Space Trilogy w/ David Bates

• ep. 37: Our Favorite Winter Reads

• ep. 38: My Cousin Rachel (Book Swap #2)

• ep. 39: The Bookish Bio of Mary Tappe

Read Along Guides for the (last month’s book) Othello:

• Othello Introduction & Reading Schedule

Read Along Guides for the the Space Trilogy:

• Out of the Silent Planet Ch 1-11 Revisited

• Space Trilogy Introduction & Reading Schedule

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What We’re Reading Now/Next:

February

Out of the Silent Planet AND Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

March

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

April

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

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