Undeceptions IV - The Ransom Trilogy and The Great Divorce

In the Ransom series, the number of self-deceived people in the first two books is small, because the number of characters is small. In Out of the Silent Planet, Devine has been deceived by Weston, but seems to have participated in this and embraced it. It is Weston who is entirely self-deceived, fixated on his own importance at first, but tinged with the idea that he is accomplishing some great work that will benefit all mankind. While this great cause seems a mere excuse at first for his personal ambitions, it is clear by the end that he does believe a great deal of it.  Lewis uses a clever device of having Ransom translate Weston's pompous speech to the Malacandrians into Old Solar, in order to lay bare the vacuity of the underlying ideas of colonising unfallen planets. It is a foreshadowing of Perelandra, in which Weston is now very much convinced of the idea of bringing the evil of earth to unfallen Venus.  We see rapidly that Weston is not entirely his own master by this point, infected or even inhabited by something darker. Yet we know that this conquest of his soul has been with his entire cooperation, and even near the end, after Ransom has suddenly turned in surprise and asked "Are you Weston?" he believes he could still come free by an act of will if he would only make some effort. "Pull yourself together. All that stuff you've been talking is lunacy. Say a child's prayer if you can't say a man's."

The third book of the series That Hideous Strength is awash with people deceiving themselves, most of them academics and fringe science-y people. Small wonder that Lewis, very used to watching academics deceive themselves could capture them so convincingly.  The main two stories (of seven, as I recently noted) revolve around Mark and Jane Studdock, nice enough young people who have been on the road to deceiving themselves these last few years but are not yet far gone. (I will have to write soon about how the intrusion of the Merlin/Logres plot, which Tolkien felt was due to the influence of Charles Williams and the destruction of an otherwise decent book, creates the most unfair criticism leveled against Jane. A topic for another day.) Jane brings some self-deception from her own beliefs of what a modern woman in general should be like, which prevent her from seeing some obvious things about herself individually.  Yet it is Mark who is deeper in, more vulnerable, and more in need of rescue.  The various players at the N.I.C.E. are attempting to deceive and manipulate him, yet they are playing off his ambition and need for flattery to achieve it. He gets warnings along the way, including from the only first-rank scientist in the bunch, Bill Hingest, who resigns and tells Studdock to get clear as soon as possible. Mark is being invited, not for his academic value as he supposes, but because of his own facility with words, to be used to manipulate local opinion. (Also, so that they may get at his wife's mystical abilities, part of another plot.) It is in this context that Mark has it explained to him by the head of the rapidly-growing secret police of the N.I.C.E. that the target of this is not the common people he believes so susceptible to manipulation in the press, but his own people, the educated.  It is likely the most often quoted section in the book. 

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

I was as surprised as Mark was when I first read that, but I have seen the truth of it repeatedly over the decades. 

 

 The Great Divorce is entirely about self-deception, beginning with the title which is a reply to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  Lewis's counter is that however things may appear confused and muddled in this fallen world where good and evil are often mixed, that is not their ultimate state, and the split between them is entire in the end. The structure is that Lewis has a dream about the edges of Hell and Heaven, where residents of the former are brought, if they allow it, to the latter to hear one final appeal to give up their illusion and enter in.  These include a bishop who believes his heretical opinions were all about free inquiry and intellectual courage, only to be reminded by a heavenly soul who was a colleague on earth that these in fact advanced his career and made him famous. The bishop wants to continue to teach heresies about what God is like to those who know know God firsthand. His colleague points out that this is not so much forbidden as just silly. It is a nice touch when the bishop goes back to the bus to return to hell, he is humming a hymn: City of God, How Broad and Far. There are women who want to set conditions of control over their son or husband before they will enter, and man who tries to emotionally blackmail his wife that if she truly loved him she would come share his misery in hell.

Yet you likely have already read this and know these characters, so I won't attempt anything complete. I will give you something of an assist, however.  There are (at least) three ways to read the book.  The most common is to accept the dream as some approximation of what heaven and hell are really like.  That Lewis specifically forbids this interpretation near the end has not prevented this. It is such an engaging idea that we want it to be symbolically true. We might fairly ask why, if Lewis does not want us to take this approach he does not stress that more at the beginning, instead saving it for the last pages. In the last section the narrator is watching all these invitations and debates of others in the company of George MacDonald, who answers his intellectual objections about them. We might reasonably think that the narrator is speaking for all of us, asking the questions anyone would. Only at the end are we reminded that the narrator is also one who has come to the edge, and this one's problem is that he has a host of theological objections why the place right in front of him shouldn't and couldn't really be this way.  Lewis is making fun of himself here, as one more character who has reasons that are mere excuses for not entering in. 

This leads us in to the second way of reading The Great Divorce.  All these debates are taking place within ourselves. Lewis uses the older form of dream-narrative, as in Dream of the Rood or Piers Ploughman but readers always knew those images were symbolic forms to teach a lesson. No one in the 10th C thought the cross of Christ was by then encrusted with gems. It pays then, to view each of these debates as something happening in ourselves.  This is unpleasant, as we prefer to think about how much that obnoxious boss who is demanding his rights is like a man we knew years ago, or the woman worried about her appearance is reminiscent of so many of the women we work with. If I were to write a group study guide for the book it would be simple.  After every encounter all the way back to the bus stop I would ask "Who does this remind you of?" and allow time for discussion.  I would then ask "How is this like yourself?" and when no one wanted to discuss that*, I would ask them to quietly write it down and keep it, deeply hidden somewhere. At the end of the study, I would tell the group that they should find some one person to share some of these with.

The third way is to regard the bus ride and encounters as what is happening on earth.  God delivers people with excuses to various Solid People, his children here, and we are to help them past their illusions.

*Well I might, but you're not in a group with me.