Perelandra Ch 1-8 Revisited
A re-enchantment fell upon him...it was sharp, sweet, wild, and holy, all in one
“But how can one wish any of those waves not to reach us which Maleldil is rolling towards us?” (58)
And just like that, our journey has again left earth, and returned to another world in the heavens. Welcome to Eden Perelandra.
I hope you enjoyed this first half of the novel—a thought experiment into pre-fallen beauty, a “what if?” pleasure was good to the last bite, and no more.
First Things First - Chapters 1-2:
Before we arrive on pre-Fall Perelandra, we are forced to begin on post-Fall Earth. I was particularly interested to see if the themes we were tracking in Out of the Silent Planet would be present. Themes of:
“No Word For…”/ Gap
Anti-Man (i.e. Science & Business vs. Man)
Light/the heavens
Perspective Shifts (both physical and spiritual)
I found them all. This Read Along Guide, therefore, will work off the assumption that Lewis laid the groundwork carefully, and that these stories are building upon each other. Let’s get to work.
Narrative Voice
This novel begins where Ransom left us: confirming that what is at stake is of cosmic (or at least solar) and eternal (not temporal) consequence.
The narrator, who only showed himself at the very end of Out of The Silent Planet, is foremost at the outset of Perelandra.
This choice causes me to ask: What does it do to the story to have the narrator more present?
For me, inserting a stronger narrative voice causes me to feel more removed from Ransom, creating a “gap,” where the reader and the narrator are on one side, and Ransom and “the other” (those eldils and otherworldly beings) are on the other side. Thus, Ransom’s growth and perspective shifts in the first novel, have removed him from our every day, terrestrial, fear-bound perspective in this novel, perhaps making him a man set apart.
A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can’t put the difference into words (10).
Gaps in language imitate gaps in understanding, as well as perhaps point towards a reality which is literally more distant.
A way to rearrange who is on what side of the gap, is to keep the reader and the narrator on this terrestrial side, and keep “the other” on the other side, but then place between the two sides: Ransom, as the bridge.
The distinction between the natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, one realised how great a comfort it had been—how it had eased the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in the same context (11).
This, then, leads us into the territory of seeing Ransom as a mediator, or a Christ-like figure.
Any way you draw the line, by including a more developed narrative voice, Lewis has provided himself the means of allowing Ransom to grow apart from us, placing distance between Ransom and ourselves.
“What, you too!?”
In these two chapters, Lewis does one of the things he does best: namely, understand and describe the insides of the human mind. Right after coming close to acknowledging the reality of immaterial beings, the narrator falls into a distracting, almost de-railing negative spiral. Coincidence? Ransom tells us it is not:
“I never intended to leave you to make that journey alone.”
…
“You mean it wasn’t just my nerves? There really was something in the way?”
“Yes. They didn’t want you to get here” (19).
Thus, not only is Lewis able to describe my own psychological spirals of self-doubt, but he also points us out of ourselves and suggests an external cause for these logic traps.
If you were reading along with us last month, you remember that Iago used words, logic, overly-critial-self-assessing doubt, and one’s own virtue, to twist the person into wrong action. The same battle is being waged here.
By putting reality on a page, Lewis creates a gap large enough for me to recognize myself.
[Mimetic Art] can often afford us a better insight into the formal quality of something than does the direct experience of the thing.
(Daniel McInerny, Beauty and Imitation, 24)
In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom was the one in need of perspective shifts. In Perelandra, beginning with this first person narrator, it seems that Lewis is challenging me (the reader) to shift and grow and view old things in new ways.
Perspective Shift
Remember, friends, what it felt like to be outside the door of faith? Any believer who has been believing for any space of time, has gone through those moments in which additional conversion was necessary. Remember, friends, what faith can look and feel like from the outside?
After going through a miserable, terrifying battle of seemingly stupid effort in the dark to arrive at the house and knock…
There was no reply—not a sound except the echo of sounds I had been making myself (15).
And, after mustering courage to enter the house, and frantically lighting a candle…
I had seen nothing by it except the palm of my own hand hollowed in an attempt to guard the flame (15).
Blithely, we can forget the dark and quiet and thorny road of faith.
Then, once inside the house, our narrator comes face to face with “the other,” and we get more gap and perspective shift themes:
Since I saw the thing I must obviously have seen it either white or coloured; but no efforts of my memory can conjure up the faintest image of what that colour was…How it is possible to have a visual experience which immediately and ever after becomes impossible to remember, I do not attempt to explain (16).
The other is other. This same gap is identified by Dante when attempting to say things that cannot be said:
I have been in that heaven He makes most bright,
and seen things neither mind can hold nor tongue
utter, when one descends from such great height,
For as we near the One for whom we long,
our intellects so plunge into the deep,
memory cannot follow where we go.(Dante, Paradiso I.4-9,
translation)
Words, Time, Memory, Space, all of these things we have given distinct and separate names to. But Dante and Lewis both recognize that these distinctions are terrestrial, land-locked. When Man encounters “the other,” the numinous, his words break, and the very horizon shifts.
What one actually felt at the moment was that the column of light was vertical but the floor was not horizontal1—the whole room seemed to have heeled over as if it were on board ship. The impression, however produced, was that this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside of the Earth, and that its mere presence imposed that alien system on me and abolished the terrestrial horizontal (17).
See how we were right in the last Read Along Guide to consider Ransom’s time in the presence of Oyarsa, as time spent in the heavens? In the presence of a being that exists constantly in reference to God, all else must alter.
I felt sure that the creature was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played (17).
Blithely we talk about encountering God. Blithely we acknowledge Christ as our mediator, our bridge between Man and God. Jarringly Lewis reminds us that we desperately need that mediator.
Lewis takes theological truths, enfleshes them in a story, and makes me feel them. I know that “fear of the Lord” is something proper to Man. In this scene I understand it.
Also, remember how we learned from Othello that men are not often able to distinguish an honest man from a devil? Remember St. Paul saying that if an angel preach another Gospel, do not believe it? Remember that Weston engages with “Spirit,” without the assistance of Church or doctrine?
These passages warn us that, alone, we are not capable of successfully discerning spirits. Thus Ransom gives the sage advice:
Don’t try to answer them. They like drawing you into an interminable argument (20).
Easier said than done.
Resurrection
Lastly on these first two chapters, I’ll acknowledge that we should all be tracking the death, resurrection, baptism, and garden imagery.
Additionally, it’s interesting that here, at the beginning, we are given the ending. In chapter two Ransom leaves, and in chapter two Ransom returns, more alive than before his coffin-journey, though permanently marked with a wound. The Christ-imagery is strong in Ransom, and we haven’t even discussed his name.
What does it do to the story to know the end while still at the beginning? Well, it should have the same affect on this story that it should have on ours: freedom. The good guys win. The battle is already fought and won. This is a Comedy, not a Tragedy. Death has no sting. But, this may take all our strength to remember.
Chapters 3-4
Thank you for your earthly patience, and now welcome to Perelandra! Revel in un-fallen beauty.
Themes of being alone, return but in an original way:
The sense of solitude became intense without becoming at all painful (37).
And…
It was strange that the utter loneliness through all these hours had not troubled him so much as one night of it on Malacandra. He thought the difference lay in this, that mere chance, or what he took for chance, had turned him adrift in Mars, but here he knew that he was a part of a plan (44).
Know the end, and you know there’s a plan.
Then…it is not good for Man to be alone. Ransom sees the human form, separated from him, gapped from him, on another island. And Lewis causes me to begin to understand what Adam must have felt.
The solitude, which up till now had been scarcely painful, had become a horror. Any return to it was a possibility he dared not face (46).
Additionally, Lewis gives me a new desire for temperance:
But for whatever the cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day (38).
We have a word for temperance, but it doesn’t mean much to me. We have a word, but it is “gapped” for me, lacking definition, too far removed. Lewis gives body to this word.
But he was restrained by the same sort of feeling which had restrained him over-night from tasting a second gourd…This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards…was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film (43).
Ah, here is the theme of money, I’ve been looking for it. Look how Lewis tucks it in as an anti-definition. This theme will build into a central temptation to possess.
Chapters 5-6
She looked up and said, “You make me grow older more quickly than I can bear,” and walked a little farther off. Ransom wondered what he had done. It was suddenly borne in upon him that her purity and peace were not, as they had seemed, things settled and inevitable like the purity and peace of an animal—that they were alive and therefore breakable, a balance maintained by a mind and therefore, at least in theory, able to be lost (59).
In these chapters, Lewis continues giving me new eyes to see. Here I see pre-Fall Reason, beautiful and noble and like glass.
For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat…Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years…Happiness depended on not doing something.
(G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
We know the end, we know that it is good, but we do not know how we will get there, and we worry. We hope the stone is not thrown.
And then I began to worry that Ransom might be becoming the snake in the Garden, when he proposes to the Lady:
You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other (59).
It is with some relief, therefore, that Weston arrives, and Ransom is made to be the defense attorney, rather than the prosecuting educator.
Although, perhaps, just perhaps, Ransom could have shown to the Lady the beauty of glass without breaking it.
In Bridging the Great Divide, Bishop Robert Barron writes this perspective challenging passage:
Again, it is crucial to approach this story [the story of Genesis] as if for the first time, and without the overlay of theological interpretive tradition, according to which the serpent is automatically associated with the devil. What Genesis itself has told us is that all of God’s creatures are good and that the serpent is the “cleverest” or “shrewdest” of them all. Does this shrewdness necessarily have a nefarious overtone or is it perhaps indicative of special insight? And is the serpent, in its own way, acting as an agent of divine purposes, drawing the childish souls of Adam and Eve into maturity and freedom? Could it be that the Creator placed the snake in the garden, not as an arbitrary tempter or tester, but rather as a catalyst toward maturity, just as he places within all of our psyches the restless quest to transcend the limitation of dreaming innocence? Now this is not to suggest that the snake is an unambiguously positive character or that his successful temptation redounds only to the good. As is so often the case in this story, we are on shifting ground.
(Bridging the Great Divide, Bishop Robert Barron, 142)
Now, that above passage can be jarring. Please trust me when I say, Bishop Barron is a fully orthodox Christian, who certainly believes in the reality of evil. That remains true. What he has written, however, deeply informs my reading of this Perelandrian Genesis account. There is an aspect of Ransom causing the Green Lady to “grow older” that feels necessary for her to be able to stand before God at her fully realized, mature stature.
Yet, this growth feels like it’s balancing on the knife’s edge, with falls on either hand. Ransom makes me nervous in these chapters. But perhaps its because I require more faith? Perhaps seeking knowledge doesn’t lead to the Fall, as much as disobedience. Perhaps, I need a theologian to help me through these passages.
And to close our thoughts on these chapters, what a moving way to describe Free Will. Lewis continues to take theological truths and enflesh them in story.
“I thought,” she said, “that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. I feel as if I were living in that roofless world of yours where men walk undefended beneath naked heaven. It is a delight with terror in it! One’s own self to be walking from one good to another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even holding hands. How has He made me so separate from Himself? How did it enter His mind to conceive such a thing? The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths—but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path” (60).
With the new eyes he gives me, I can see old truths.
The fruit we are eating is always the best fruit of all (71).
Chapters 7-8
In coming! What a juxtaposition.
After relaxing within unflawed thought through the Green Lady, we are thrown into the mire of twisted language by the arrival of Weston.
It’s diabolically nonsensical. But also, I think it may have given Lewis a chuckle to spew forth this ridiculous, false-premised logic that must have been all too prevalent in his intelligentsia circles.
But let’s talk about the devil.
He’s here. His inexplicable arrival on Perelandra, his epileptic fit, his biting and breaking of the glass, his “all Spirit is good” & anti-Man diatribe, and his impossible journey to the Lady’s island over the dark ocean…all point to diabolical influence. And yet…there’s still enough Weston in him to cause Ransom to doubt to what extent a demonish possession has possessed this former scientist.
Interesting that the core of this possessed man’s temptation will be to take possession. But I’ll leave these thoughts, for later.
At the end of chapter 8, we get an incredible imitation of the original Eve temptation. Once again Lewis, you are giving me new eyes. When the whole world sang for the Lady’s triumphant demise of Weston’s attack, I fist pumped.
The whole darkness about him rang with victory…Festal revelry and dance and splendour poured into him—no sound, yet in a fashion that it could not be remembered or thought of except as music. It was like having a new sense. It was like being present when the morning stars sang together. It was as if Perelandra had at that moment been created—and perhaps in some sense it had. The feeling of a great disaster averted was forced upon his mind, and with it came the hope that there would be no second attempt; and then, sweeter than all, the suggestion that he had been brought here not to do anything but only as a spectator or a witness (92).
Miscellany:
The Theme of Myth
“He had met the original of the Cyclops, a giant in a cave and a shepherd. Were all the things which appeared as mythology on earth scattered through other worlds as realities?” (40)
What’s with the dragon?
I think Lewis is picking up details from previous myths, considering them, showing them to the reader, and then setting them down, or altering them slightly, saying, “not that way this time.”
Why the “Piebald Man?”
Names are important, why is Ransom called “Piebald” by the Lady? Why is he two-colored? My first thought was that he hasn’t completely changed, and there’s still growth (or more tanning) left to be done. Another thought is that if he is a Christ-figure, than his two-toned appearance could represent Christ’s dual nature.
Lewis’ Explanation of the Human Form on Perelandra:
“Oh, my Lady,” he said, “why do you say that such creatures linger only in ancient worlds?”
“Are you so young?” she answered. “How could they come again? Since our Beloved became a man, how should Reason in any world take on another form? Do you not understand? That is all over. Among times there is a time that turns a corner and everything this side of it is new. Times do not go backward” (54).
Memory & Time:
Remember Hyoi saying, “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered” (74). The Lady builds on these thoughts:
“I was young yesterday,” she said…
“You say you were young?”
“Yes.”
“Are you not young to-day?”
She appeared to be thinking for a few moments, so intently that the flowers dropped, unregarded, from her hand.
“I see now,” she said presently. “It is very strange to say one is young at the moment one is speaking. But to-morrow I shall be older. And then I shall say I was young to-day. You are quite right. This is great wisdom you are bringing, O Piebald Man.”
“What do you mean?”
“This looking backward and forward along the line and seeing how a day has one appearance as it comes to you, and another when you are in it, and a third when it has gone past. Like the waves.”
(52)
Comparing Lewis to Lewis
The descriptions of pleasure completely reference Lewis’ The Four Loves discussion of Need-pleasure and Pleasure of Appreciation
Structure
Finally, here is the structure as it currently stands:
Ch 1 - on earth
Ch 2 - on earth
Ch 3 - on Perelandra, alone in ocean then floating island
Ch 4 - on Perelandra, alone, sees Green Lady on other island
Ch 5 - on Perelandra, w/Green Lady on island
Ch 6 - on Perelandra, w/Green Lady on island & Fixed Land, Weston arrives
Ch 7 - on Perelandra, w/Weston on Fixed Land
Ch 8 - on Perelandra, on Fixed Land alone, on island overhearing Temptation
We’ve ended this week’s reading just before the central chapter (chapter 9). I’m interested to see if/how Lewis uses a chiastic structure in this novel.
Now, on to the end of this second book of the Space Trilogy!
Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.
In Case You Missed It:
On the Podcast:
Read Along Guides for the the Space Trilogy:
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
A Few Reminders:
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Sidenote: doesn’t this sound similar to Ransom’s experience in the spaceship on the journey to Malacandra, when the horizon and what was “down” kept altering?
Thank you for the guides. I have to share that I am struggling to continue through the series, but I am holding onto what Jess shared at the end of the Othello podcast where she encouraged everyone to keep pushing through if it is a struggle. I also created some accountability and have a few friends reading through with me so hopefully that helps. Thank you ladies for all you do.