This semester I’m teaching a course that I’ve called “Philosophy Seminar — Beyond Narnia: the Varieties of C.S. Lewis.” We’re reading Lewis’s less-known works, with an eye to their philosophical ideas. We have read parts of Allegory of Love, Experiment in Criticism, The Discarded Image, and all of Miracles. Later we’ll read Abolition of Man, some of the ethics essays (e.g., “The Inner Ring”; “Learning in Wartime”), and whatever else we have time for. The middle section is Lewis’s adult fiction: the Ransom trilogy and Till We Have Faces. (We will skip Narnia, Mere Christianity, and Screwtape Letters, since these are all much more widely known.)
These are some various thoughts on the first of the Ransom Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet.
OSP is the simplest of the Ransom books by far. The narrative is straightforward. There are few attempts to explain things, to engage in philosophical theology, etc. Perelandra, in contrast, is far more complex (more on that in a future post), and That Hideous Strength is vastly more complex, with far more characters and many more ideas floating around — and also longer than the other two books combined. Many people have noted that the three books are the Male book, the Female book, and the Marriage book. Perhaps it is appropriate that the male book is the least complicated.
One of the questions I posed to my students is to define Lewis/Ransom’s word hnau. This is clearly an important word in the book; indeed, I suspect that the entire book is really about what this word means.
A few scholars, including several of the writers in the impressive volume Life on the Silent Planet, suggest that hnau means something like “rational creature”. But this won’t work, because Oyarsa, the angelic ruler of the planet is agreed to not be hnau. The reason is that he does not die and he does not have children. There is some dispute among the hrossa whether the eldila are hnau, and Oyarsa is thought to be some kind of eldil. (“Eldila” are clearly something like “angels”, and Oyarsa is apparently some higher order of being, or at least a more important kind of angel.)
Regardless, hnau has to be more than “rational creature”. We might further refine the definition to be “rational mortal creature”. This is, of course, is a philosophically important definition, for it is the one that Boethius gives in response to Lady Philosophy, expressing the standard classical definition of “human being”. Adding mortality (i.e., having a type of existence that naturally includes death) distinguishes hnau from eldila, for the latter do not die.
Yet even this revision doesn’t quite capture what Ransom seems to come to understand about hnau. The key passage occurs just at the end of the hnakra hunt, when Ransom and his fellows have killed the dragon. They are standing side-by-side in triumph, and “they were all hnau…[Ransom] had grown up.” Here we have a further clue about what the word means.
I suggest that Lewis is trying to explore the meaning of a different word, one formerly in use here on Thulcandra. That word is vir, the Latin word for “human”, but distinctively for man. Vir distinguishes not only between male and female, but also between boy and adult. A boy is not vir on account of his youth. Women are not vir on account of their sex. And some adult males are not vir on account of their vices, or at least their incontinence. A weak and fearful man is not virtuous — he is not “manly”. The term is the root of our word “virtue” — having qualities appropriate to adult masculinity in particular.
Thus, it is entirely correct that OSP is the “male” book, and not merely because there are basically no significant female characters. The action is all about the males, but more to the point, the central narrative question is about the nature of masculinity, here condensed to a quasi-generic, masculine term for human being.
Throughout the book Lewis describes an extensive catalog of different kinds of fears. The story is told from Ransom’s point of view, and we find that he has many ways to be afraid, ranging from such heighted experiences that he can’t distinguish fear from general excitement, to gothic creature horror, to the much more basic nervousness of sitting for an exam in school. When Ransom meets Oyarsa, the first line from the latter is “What are you so afraid of, Ransom of Thulcandra?” And this is the appropriate question, for until very recently fear has been the dominant feature of Ransom’s experiences.
Yet by this point Ransom has grown up. Though he is still afraid in a way, he is not afraid in the same way that he had been. An interesting feature of Lewis’s narrative is that after the hnakra hunt, Ransom’s fears are given little to no phenomenological description, whereas virtually every fear before this point has at least sentences, if not entire paragraphs describing how the fear feels. Even when Ransom first meets a sorn, he does not fear it, albeit perhaps because he is too tired to care. Nevertheless, after Ransom “grows up” his fears no longer control him. He is, in his words, like the man on a horse, rather than the man on a sailing ship. He is along for the ride with his emotions, but he is also an agent toward them, rather than merely a patient.
Next: Perelandra
