Different Chiastic Readings of That Hideous Strength

Intro

The point of this post is to examine two (hopefully not, but unfortunately probably) competing chiastic structures that can be made of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and the different effects that they have on the meaning that can be drawn from the work. I will leave it up to the reader to familiarize themselves with what chiasm is either in my base post on chiasm or the Wikipedia page on it.

The two competing chiasms are my own seventeen-element Chiasm done based on Lewis’s original seventeen-chapter structure and a seven-element chiasm done by Sanford Schwartz in C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the Space Trilogy (p. 98 is the actual diagram of his chiasm). It is important to me to note that I do not see these as necessarily mutually exclusive. I think that they both are at work and that they compliment each other. The only reservation I have with somebody like Schwartz is if the chiasm he outlines is taken as the definitive chiasm of the work to the exclusion of the chiasm I make out of Lewis’s original chapter structuring. In reality, I would argue that the chiasm using the original chapter structure is the primary one, as the chapter structure is done by Lewis himself, and that Schwartz’s has to be added on top (although I think it is entirely legitimate to do so as exegeting the objective content of the work, especially given Lewis’s known erudition in classical literature and the undeniable place of the numerological value of the number 7, which, for the uninitiated to numerological thinking, is not a mathematical quality). But in the present climate, I will settle for at least seeing them as equal.

My Chiasm

This pretty much goes straight on the original chapters structure, “by the book” quite literally.

A = (ch. 1) Sale of College Property

    B = (ch. 2) Dinner with the Subwarden

        C = (ch. 3) Belbury and St Anne’s

           D = (ch. 4) Liquidation of Anachronisms

              E = (ch. 5) Elasticity

                 F = (ch. 6) Fog

                    G = (ch. 7) The Pendragon

                       H = (ch. 8) Moonligh at Belbury

                           I =  (ch. 9)The Saracen’s Head

                       H1 = (ch. 10) Conquered City

                    G1 = (ch. 11) Battle Begun

                 F1 = (ch. 12) Wet and Windy Night

              E1 = (ch. 13) Pulled Down Deep Heaven

           D1 = (ch. 14) Real Life is Meeting

        C1 = (ch. 15) Descent of the Gods

    B1 = (ch. 16) Banquet at Belbury

A1 =  (ch. 17)Venus at St. Anne’s

So, that is one big ole chiasm, yes? I’m going to rely on the reader having read (or going to read) the book, and I am going to go ahead and draw out chiastic elements in support of seeing these more numerous elements. A first really obvious one is that B (Dinner with the Subwarden) and B1 (Banquet at Belbury) are both what I call “ideology meals” at which the real workings of “inner circles” are going on, although in the first, it is Mark’s initiation to the progressive element and in the second it is the defeat of the bigger and more powerful “inner circle” within England, the NICE. But even on the outside of this, it cannot be missed that the that chapter 1opening with Jane’s contemplation of marriage is paired off against the real guide of marital love, Venus, doing her thing at St. Anne’s.

I’m keeping this list short just to give representative element-paring themes, but there are many more that could be done. But these last two that I will give here are also chosen very purposefully for what I will be arguing is the meaning to be drawn from this particular chiasm, which is the central theme of marriage and the married couple as facing the “hideous strenht.” The first is that in G (Pendragon) and G1 (Battle Begun) you have the two members of the couple, Jane and then Mark, each presented individually as having multiple versions of themselves interacting. In G, we have four Janes on the train coming back from St. Anne’s, the fourth of which is Jane herself as in control of the first three elements of herself, the first three “Janes,” and simply in a state of joy, while in G1, we have Mark discovering a fundamental version of himself that chooses “Jane’s side,” or the side of the “straight,” and contemplating that version of himself that was always trying to “get ahead” and be in the exclusive inner circle (I love the comments on how he and the tramp become an inner conspiratorial circle whose secrecy is so strong that it can never be broken).

 And the last I will give is maybe my favorite both for how well it is worked into the plot and for how well it embodies the theme I will propose: In D (Liquidation of Anachronisms), we have homes being broken up, particularly marital homes in the form of both Ivy Maggs and the Dimbles being turned out of their homes by the NICE by way of the university. Then in D1 (Real Life is Meeting), we have Jane with Mother Dimble preparing the marriage reunion chamber (the cottage at St. Anne’s) for Ivy Maggs and her “jailbird husband,” and there is this neat long exposition on Mother Dimble as representative of a tradition of mother types tucking young newlyweds into the marriage bed for generations. But we also have the flower-fire lady and her manic dwarves wrecking the place up, just as the NICE wrecked up the homes in the earlier chapter … as the director says, “what you will get if you will not have the other.”

Schwartz’s Chiasm

Schwartz’s has to combine chapters to make elements work, but I will note that it’s interesting that he does have my multiple Janes and Marks chapters isolated (although his emphasis in the latter chapter, or at least his name for it in his actual chiasm descriptors, is not on Mark), which is some nice support for me.

A = Separation (chs. 1–3)

    B = NICE Offensive (chs. 4–6)

        C = Jane’s Transformation (ch. 7)

           D = Head vs. Merlin (chs. 8–10)

        C1 = Facing Death (ch. 11)

    B1 = Merlin to St. Anne’s (chs. 12–14)

A1 =  Reunion (chs. 15–17)

I’ll note one thing in defense of this chiasm off the bat. There is a reason that, say, Rowling’s Harry Potter series occurs in a seven-element chiasm. It’s among the most numerologically significant numbers, if not he most significant when we go all the way back in the Judeo-Christian tradition (to quote Tom Riddle, “Isn’t 7 the most magically powerful number?”). The world was made in seven days, and it is a number symbolizing completion or completeness. Add on top of this the fact that, even moreso than Rowling because he studied a lot more (as an Oxford don, versus simply completing an undergrad degree in classics), Lewis is steeped in medieval lit … and that means literary alchemy. The things all sort of travel together: literary alchemy and chiasm. Aside from all of the stuff provided by John Granger, who is the most knowledgeable person I personally know on this material, including on Lewis’s trilogy, just a small taste of Lewis’s use of alchemy will suffice to show that it is not at all stretching the imagination to suspect he uses it all over the place, including at the deepest levels of structure. Alchemy has a very standard description of it as a three-stage process: black (the negredo), white (the albedo), and red (the rubedo). For instance, Rowling demonstrably uses this structure in the last three of the Harry Potter books: Sirius Black dies in book 5, Albus Dumbledore dies in book 6, and Rubeus Hagrid is emphasized in book 7 as the one who bears Harry to the magical world of Hogwarts (he brought him across the lake in book 1 and carries his body to the castle from the forbidden forest in book 7 … Harry’s death, or undeniable and active willingness, to die). The small example from Lewis is in Perelandra when Ransom comes from the black darkness of the underground cave, up through the white crystal cave, and out into the red earth mountaintop.

The thing is that alchemy also has a seven-stage description. I’m not going to detail that here, partly because I am much less familiar with it than Granger, but Granger himself does a lot of exposition of the seven-stage process as the seven-book structure of the Harry Potter series. My main point here is, again, that these things all travel together: chiasm, literary alchemy, threes, sevens, and so on. And thus, it is not only all right, but even completely fitting and good practice, to look for a seven-element chiasm in a book by a medieval scholar like Lewis. My only problem would be if exposition limits itself to that here. Unfortunately I think that there is a tendency to do this at least on the popular level because of some of what I am going to say in the next section about in interest in “power players” eclipsing considerations of the hoi polloi, the common folk. I think its simply an unfortunate tendency we have to gravitate to the readings of the big power players to the exclusion of inclusion of the commoners.

The Real Difference

So, the real difference is one of emphasis at the center: power players or the “little people,” the hoi polloi. Which is the book really about? I would argue that it’s about both, and really about the connection between them, but also that there is a tendency often, when big power players can be seen, to bump the hoi polloi way down and almost ignore them.

I’ll describe in a moment how I think my chiasm maintains a focus on the hoi polloi and why I think it is significant, but first I want to put in a note of fairness to Schwartz’s reading (and again, I can’t emphasize enough, especially because Schwartz has a LOT more erudition in this field than do I [he got this book published on it by Oxford University Press … that’s a lot bigger achievement than my little blog here], that I think his chiasm is absolutely legitimate, just that it should not be taken in isolation, as I fear many would). Lewis does, in fact, at least at one particular point, employ a heirachical structure between power players and hoi polloi. And it is all the more emphasized by the fact that, at least I think, he uses an actual medieval stage-play structure for it. I am not sure whether “everyman plays” were an official subset of morality plays or that it is simply the fact that the most representative of these morality plays was called “Everyman.” I just know that this is an element we discussed in a class in undergrad when we discussed the play “The Just Vengeance” by Lewis’s friend, famous translator of Dante, one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford, and immensely popular author of the Lord Peter Wimsey series of short stories and novels … Dorothy L. Sayers. The structure in these particular medieval plays (her play was modeled on this and written for performance in the Lichfield cathedral) was that there was the broader lower stage on which went the hoi polloi, the main “everyman” character and a few other principals and the chorus with its representatives of various classes or elements in society, and then there was a smaller upper stage on which God / the Trinity, the angels, and biblical characters acted, sometimes in big-player discussions and sometimes in reenactments of biblical stories, and there was a correspondence between the upper and lower stages … as above, so below (check out my review of the horror film by that name here, btw) … “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Lewis uses this exact setup when the edilla descend on Ransom and Merlin and instill their powers in Merlin to do what he needs to do. With each “god” that comes into the blue room on the upper floor, there is an appropriate effect on the hoi polloi down in the kitchen on the ground floor. I quite simply love this sequence … so much rich texture in the depiction of the hoi polloi. When Mercury, the messenger, the god of language, descends, they have these conversations that they can never remember the content of afterwards, simply that they had amazing wordplays and double entendres, and triple entendres, wit upon wit. When Venus descends, while the bachelor and bachelorette (MacPhee and Ironwood) kind of doze off, the two married couples are leaning close together in intimate conversations with many blushing smiles, and Jane, since she is in neither class (she is married, but not a Christian marriage, on Lewis’s terms, and her husband is not there), simply observes. My favorite is when Jove (Jupiter), the festive king of the gods, descends. They clear the floor and Arthur Denniston brings out a fiddle and they dance, and I love the way Lewis works in the “can’t remember clearly but can remember broad tones” thing, and while I don’t usually quote at this length because of the bother of reading and typing, it is worth doing here (and it reminds me a bit of the dark Morris dance in Pratchett’s Wintersmith):

What they danced no one could remember. It was some round dance, no modern shuffling: it involved beating the floor, clapping of hands, leaping high. And no one while it lasted thought himself or his fellows ridiculous. It may in fact have been some village measure, not ill-suited to the tiled kitchen: the spirit in which they danced it was not so. It seemed to each that the room was filled with kings and queens, that the wildness of their dance expressed heroic energy and its quieter movements had seized the very spirit behind all noble ceremonies.

[SIDE NOTE: I apologize to Schwartz or anybody else who has written on the use of the stage-play structure in this scene that I am not mentioning. My observation of it is my own work, but I know that I am not a particularly original thinker in this area and that, if I can see it, I’m sure I’m not the first. I simply haven’t read it anywhere else. I have Schwartz’s book, but I have not been through it thoroughly at all to know … I simply picked out the chiasm originally to bring in something interesting for the book club discussion for which I reread Hideous Strength in October 2017, so he may even cover it … I should read it thoroughly to know, but time sometimes does not allow, and I am not always the most organized with time and studies either, so apologies to him or any others I should be crediting on the medieval theater structure relation to the descent of the gods scene, but it is also true that I did put it together myself from memory of studying the structure for the undergrad class … but, in a completely esoteric and nerdy aside, this post is also a bit nostalgic for me because my own notes from which I am working for my chiasm were drawn up while finishing reading the book sitting in Bryant Park behind the NYPL on my last biking trip to NYC, just as I saved rereading part of the Silmarillion for another bookclub meeting for sitting on my reading rock in Central Park on another biking trip END SIDE NOTE].

All of that digression is simply to say that the hierarchy of power players over hoi polloi is not at all out of place in the book. It’s just that I think that Lewis’s main point dwells on the hoi polloi, and particularly the married couple Mark and Jane Studdock. It’s not that it does it to the exclusion of the power players, for the couple could not do what they need to do without the power players (the eldilla, Ransom, and Merlin) doing what they do, they need them. But the emphasis is, I think, still on the couple confronting the head (symbolic of confronting evil in all of their married life together) and needing to have some agency themselves in the doing of it. I don’t think that it is wise to miss the significance of the fact that the book opens with one of the two in that hoi polloi married couple contemplating the meaning of marriage. I don’t think that that is just a mundane detail introduction as you quite often have to make the central elements grab the reader when introduced. I think it’s centrality is evidenced by the fact that it is paired with the very last scene of the book, in which we find that Jane has really prepared her own marriage chamber (and that in it she had to confront the fire lady, again, as Rasnoms tells her, “what you will get if you will not have the other”) and is going in to be with Mark.

The Crux

So, since this is a chiastic argument, the central element must be examined for core meaning. In Schwartz’s chiasm, it is Merlin versus the head, and this is the only place I would offer any direct criticism, but again, it may be that this applies only if his chiasm is taken in isolation of my own (I have posts elsewhere on layered chiasm, particularly in Harry Potter and the first Fantastic Beasts movie). The thing is, we never see Merlin square off against the head or the macrobe that animates it. When he is in the vicinity of the head, meaning at Belbury, he only confuses the language and sets the animals in frenzy on the humans. And then Merlin is out the door and driving Devine to drive at break-neck speed down a cart trail for the fireworks finale at Edgestow. We don’t even see the demise of the actual head in the jaws of Mr Bultitude the bear after he gets all riled up and expectant by Merlin.

But it’s not that we don’t see any central action with the head. We do see it operated by the macrobe right at the crux of the novel as defined by Lewis’s own original chapter structuring … and the title of chapter 9, the dead center of the novel, even focuses on the head, “The Saracen’s Head.” [Weird thing: There’s actually a tavern called this exact name, dating back possibly even to the fifteenth century, but I have never looked into whether it has any connection here for Lewis, which would seem odd, but … how do you account for such exact coincidence?] But only two of our cast of good-guy characters (which group Mark joins in the end) ever directly encounter the head and macrobe … and they are Mark and Jane. Of all the St. Anne’s crowd, Jane is the only one to have actually seen the head or, more centrally as power-player emphasis, to have seen the macrobe in action. Again, the couple cannot hope to face the head, to face the “hideous strength” that moves it, on their own. The power of the good eldilla is necessary for there to be any hope. But at the same time, the central action is the couple facing the head.

There is a wonderful dynamic going on here. They face the head together … but not. Jane is there sort of participating with Mark through her vision and her feelings of sympathy and maybe even empathy for him, but he does not know this, and so he is also really facing it alone. It’s a good symbol of their alienation but also desire for and possibility of unity.

One further aspect I will note is one that I have noted in other contexts in other works, which is a well-done use of classical staging (particularly Greek tragedies) in having particularly traumatic (but central) action take place “off stage” (e.g., in Harry Potter book 4, the dementor’s kiss takes place offstage, and in book 5 the narrative follows Harry and Cho right up to the point of kissing but then all of a sudden Harry is simply retelling it to Ron and Hermione in the common room). The narrative follows Mark right up to the point where he meets the head, but the actual encounter is only retold the next day in Jane telling her dream to Ransom.

And there is one element in that retelling that I really love. Mark’s face is covered, but Jane identifies him by other means: The director asks, “you are uncertain?” and she replies, “No … it was Mark … I knew his walk.” She knew the motions of his body … that’s the intimacy of marriage. (I can’t resist putting in here a mention of my own post on reading a layered-chiastic story as like watching the chiastic bodywalk down the street, just because I think that the fact that it can be used for something so central here supports it strong resonance for humanity, and therefore its aptness as an image for talking about the functioning of literature.)

Conclusion

I’ve pretty much tried to mention my main point over and over again, which is that I think these two chiasms should be taken together, rather than choosing mine over Schwartz’s, but also that I think the chiasm based on the original chapter structure and focused on the couple is essential. To this I will add only a further consideration or argument from my perspective. The more you can tie out smaller units, the more you should go with that chiasm. “Smaller” here includes fineness of material detail, because the more you have to go with bigger “thematics,” the more risk you are running of eisogeting. If I can tie out housebreaking up in the early chapter (Ivy Maggs and the Dimbles turned out of their houses) with housebuilding (Mother Dimble) and housewrecking (the flower-fire woman and her dwarves) in the later chapter and the two chapters are directly opposite in the chapter numbering, which is more units than the Schwarz chiasm, this not only lends support to my reading, but also gives a more complete reading of the work because it accounts for more details. This should be done with caution, though, because complexity (more elements) should not be done simply for its own sake. And I think doing so sometimes distinctly errs in the reading of a work. For instance, I think the four monarchs in Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe is intentional for the four elements as a whole thing or in general, but I think tying it out any more tightly than that (each individual as one of the elements) probably gets unstable (who knows, maybe not, maybe somebody has done it really well, in which case, I would love to read the exposition). Or I think Logan has a center but that it’s notchiastic because I haven’t seen matching elements, and I think that trying totie it out as a chiasm tortures the work. Whereas I think it fits so well with Wonderwoman without having to torture it. And with That Hideous Strength, especially given that seventeen-chapter structure is Lewis’s own original structure, the couple’s encounter with the head almost jumps off the page as the crux when examining the book through a chiastic lens and the many chiastic pairings of specific details are so natural that they also jump off the page.

Postscript

For a little more from me on meaning in That Hideous Strength, check out my use of Mark Studdock’s conversion to Jane as an analog in my post on my final reading of Person of Interest.