by Stanley Anderson » November 3rd, 2004, 6:23 pm
The first thing I wanted to say about this chapter is something I’m not yet sure of. Ransom’s arrival on Perelandra is for him a riot of colours and overwhelming senses and confused thoughts and intense emotions. It almost reminds me of a sort of “boot camp” initialization where the will of the initiates needs to be broken down in a way that they may be built back up to have the kind of strength needed for future tasks. Ransom can’t be sure of anything he sees and it is all so overwhelming that he can only sort of receive it in without being able to react intellectually (although there is plenty here about his thoughts during the process). It sort of wears him down mentally so that he effectively is simply ready to "give in" to the role he will be playing in the book as advocate for Maleldil. In a corrupt, dark, worldly way, this is the sort of thing that various cults can often engage in in order to "brainwash" their inductees. But of course that "dark side" is not Lewis' intent here.
It is also, I think a sort of rapid “bringing up to speed” of the very Perelandrian nature that he is going to be encountering where the unfallen creature must simply submit to the will of Maleldil – embrace the wave that comes, as it will be described later in the book, without longing or trying to preserve what has passed. There is too much to take in ahead to take time to look behind. And the continual change in point-of-view helps effect this – something that is brought out continually in a physical way as the very landscape of the islands changes moment to moment from hillsides to valleys to flat lands.
On this last point I am reminded (again!:-) very much of The Discarded Image where Lewis talks much about models as ways of seeing reality. In Perelandra, he writes, “[the floating islands] are dry and fruitful like land but their only shape is the inconstant shape of the water beneath them. Yet the land-like appearance proved hard to resist.”
In any case, I feel like the intense displacement and disorientation for Ransom is meant to serve some kind of literary or theological purpose besides simple pure excitement and fascination for the reader. I touch on the possible theological purposes above (although I also feel like there is something more that I can’t put my finger on yet), but the literary purposes may also to help put the reader into similar state of pure wonderment like Ransom, so that they will be ready to absorb the rather intellectual discourse to come later in the book.
In any case, the evidence that this overwhelming of Ransom’s senses is taking effect is shown by that beautiful last lines of the chapter (that I quoted some time ago on these forums) – “Night covered him like a blanket and kept all loneliness from him. The blackness might have been his own room. Sleep came like a fruit which falls into the hand almost before you have touched the stem.” In advance of the next chapter’s comments, I’ll just say how magically this leads into the opening sentence of chapter 4 – “At Ransom’s waking something happened to him which perhaps never happens to a man until he is out of his own world: he saw reality, and thought it was a dream.” (and of course the wonderful images that follow).
Other notes on the chapter -- The encore prohibition that Ransom feels is a sort of prefiguring of the prohibition of staying on the fixed land (a point that is made explicitly near the end of the book by the Green Lady herself after Ransom’s “resurrection”)
I notice that Lewis’ characters often seem very concerned about losing their sanity. Lewis the walker wonders several times whether or not he is on the verge of madness, and here in this chapter we read, “If he [Ransom] had any fear now, it was a faint apprehension that his reason might be in danger. There was something on Perelandra that might overload a human brain.” With the intensity of the images and descriptions I also wonder if the reader isn’t in danger of overload too:-)
But the mention of Ransom’s “reason” brings me to another TDI connection. In the description of Ransom’s reluctance to repeat the pleasure of eating from the gourd, Lewis writes, “His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world…”. This is probably too in depth to get into here, but this is almost a direct reference to the change in the meaning of “reason” from the medieval mindset to later meanings. He writes in some detail about this idea in pages 158-162 in my edition of TDI. He writes later in the Perelandra paragraph ‘Yet something seemed opposed to this “reason” ‘. Lewis puts quotes around “reason” here because the modern meaning of reason has been narrowed down from the medieval sense to include only a sort of logical deduction. But as he explains in TDI, it’s medieval sense was that reason was the “organ or morality”. In this section of Perelandra Lewis is pointing out that Ransom’s more encompassing “medieval reason” was acting in opposition to his merely modern narrow sense of reason as a simple “I like it – I want more of it – therefore I should simply take more” sort of logical deduction.
I’ll mention as a personal note that re-reading his description of tasting the gourd always reminds me of my experience of tasting a wonderful passion-fruit drink for the first time on our honeymoon in Hawaii (I’ve searched for and tried numerous passion fruit juices and drinks in the years since here in California, and though I like them, nothing matches the heavenly taste of that fresh island drink I had for the first time – not sure if it was a real difference in flavour or the elevated feeling being on a honeymoon, or simply my memory building it up more than it actually was. I do know that the fresh pineapple was definitely better there than those we get here.)
Another perhaps rather obscure connection in my mind is the rapid descent of night on Perelandra into absolute blackness with no real twilight, and the sudden change between night and day in Samuel Beckett’s very bleak (and yet one of my favourites by any writer) play “Happy Days” (not connected in any way with the TV series about Richie and ‘The Fonz’). And just bringing that play to mind makes me think of interesting contrasts between Perelandra and Happy Days. They both have similar “turning on and off” of day and night, but in one the world everything is barren and bleak (a woman is buried up to her waist in the ground and ponders very bleak surrounding with exclamations of “Oh what a happy day this is!” when she is able to squeeze the tiniest bit of toothpaste out of a tube, for example), while in the other a woman (the Green Lady) exists in a world of overwhelming beauty and plenty. (I’m suddenly remembering a scene in the play too where a passer-by wonders whether the woman is wearing anything underneath the dirt she is buried in – an odd connection to the Green Lady’s state perhaps? The play might make for an interesting paper in comparing it to Perelandra)
Oh, and I meant to mention at some point about Lewis’ extensive use of “water and water surface” images. Of course the whole planet is covered in water and his first experience there is to be immersed in it, but in several places (not just in Perelandra) he uses these sorts of images as primarily images of joy and beauty. In this chapter mentions some bushes coloured like sea anemones and efforts at walking like “walking on water”. Not much support in those isolated images, but later on in the book we will see “forests” with ocean-like leaves blowing in the wind and such. And there is much in OSP of these sorts of images as well as in Narnia. I get the impression that Lewis was very fond of this sort of “floating in water” or the surface of water dividing two worlds above and beneath as inspiring feelings of Joy.
One little side note: in my paperback on page 41 four lines down is this sentence – “It took him several hours to get a hundred years away from the edge, or coast, of the floating island”. I think the word “years” must surly have been meant to be “yards”. Does anyone else’s copy have this typo? Perhaps mine is just an old copy:-)
Well, enough for now.
--Stanley