by Stanley Anderson » July 29th, 2004, 3:23 pm
[from K]:
>Finaly there is the conclusion that Weston has been cut off from
>any more inter-planetary flights - Now that 'Weston' has shut
>the door, the way to the planets lies through the past; if there is
>to be any more space-travelling, it will have to be time-travelling
>as well ...!
>To me this sounds as if "The Dark Tower" was meant to be the
>sequel to "Out of the Silent Planet". Could Lewis have been
>thinking about redoing H.G. Wells' Time Machine novel? But since
>TDT did not work out, it seems that Lewis found an excuse for
>Weston to make it to Venus, aka Perelandra.
Yes. I think the obvious meaning of the time-travelling comment is as a sort of pun on the earlier sentence in the paragraph about reading every old book -- ie, one must now be content to merely read about earlier times in Earth's own history when ideas from "the Heavens" seeped into Man's knowledge. But it is like Lewis to take such a line and try to do something different with it. And I think The Dark Tower is just such an attempt (for I am of the contingent -- small, it seems from the loud proclamations of 'forgery' on the other side -- that think Lewis did write the book). I lament the fragmentary nature of it and would love to see what he might have done.
But it is curious that he changed his mind about the book and also about his statement at the end of OSP. For though he says that Weston shut the door on more space travelling, he has Weston, willy-nilly, travel through the Heavens one more time in a ship apparently very similar to the one that they took to Mars.
Just a few concluding remarks from me:
It is interesting to see that Ransom has nearly the same reservations about translating an experience to book form that many people feel about translating a book into a movie. He says, "I won't deny that I am disappointed, but then any attempt to tell such a story is bound to disappoint the man who has really been there."
The descriptive nature of the postscript to the book very much fits in with the medieval sensibility. In chapter VIII "The Influence of the Model" of The Discarded Image, Lewis writes about the digressive nature of medieval works and says, "The simplest form in which this tendency expresses itself is mere catalogue. We have in Bernardus...[and here Lewis -- you can almost see him smiling at his imitation of the very subject he is writing about -- launches into a paragraph -- a veritable list -- of examples of lists in medieval works]" Lewis continues with "At first one suspects pedantry, but that can hardly be the true explanation. Much, though not all, of the knowledge was too common to reflect on any particular distinction on an author...One gets the impression that medieval people, like Professor Tolkein's Hobbits, enjoyed books which told them what they already knew". And this: "...In the same way, if all the catalogues and digressions are filled with a certain sort of matter, this must be because writers and their audiences liked it. Digression need not deal with the large, permanent features of the universe unless you want. The long-tailed similes in Homer or the 'episodes' in Thomson usually do not. The are more often 'vignettes'."
I think much of the postscript fits in pretty well with these sorts of digressions that Lewis writes about of Medieval books.
Again, one could go paragraph-by-paragraph or even sentence-by-sentence to find medieval ideas and influences in this section, but that probably gets a bit too pedantic even for me:-) But I can't resist pointing out a couple instances. In the very last paragraph of the book he writes "I am trying to read every old book on the subject that I can hear of". From other examples earlier, it is clear he is talking about looking for medieval texts to support this medieval cosmological view.
In the glorious previous paragraph, he says "But the Malacandrians would say, 'within the Asteroids', for they have an odd habit, sometimes, of turning the solar system inside out." Again, this is straight out of TDI. In the chapter "The Heavens", Lewis writes, "...I have already hinted that the intelligible universe reverses it all; there the Earth is the rim, the outside edge where being fades away on the border of nonentity...The universe is thus, when our minds are sufficiently freed from the senses, turned inside out. Dante...locates us and our Earth 'outside the city wall'." Again, I can't emphasize enough how illuminating a thorough reading of The Discarded Image can have on all three of the Space Trilogy books as well as much of Lewis' other works.
I'll just conclude with the observation that the penultimate paragraph that I already described as glorious is a simply wonderful tribute and summoning to the pleasures and fascination with the Medieval cosmological model and its effect on the mind that is open enough to receive it as such. Lewis had a great love for this worldview and it shines through in sparkling wonder here. The evocation of the "nature" of the king of the planets, Jupiter, is a mere hint of that glory.
--Stanley