by Stanley Anderson » October 25th, 2004, 4:36 pm
[from a hnau]:
>Lewis deliberately says the beds were made. I think this is very subtle
>on his part; I'm assuming that at this early stage in their marriage (six
>months), Mark and Jane still sleep in the same bed - so there would only
>be one bed to make - but I think Lewis deliberately uses the plural to
>avoid bringing into the mind of the reader any thought of the intimacy
>(or lack of it) between Jane and Mark, which he wants to introduce in his
>own specific terms a couple of paragraphs later. Am I reading too much
>into this?
Interesting to think about, but ultimately, I suspect it may be reading too much into it. I wonder if "the beds were made" is more of simply a conventional way of talking about cleaning up. After all, Lewis certainly doesn't "avoid bringing into the mind of the reader any thought of the intimacy" between Jane and Mark. The line, "Only one thing ever seemed able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long", is pretty clear what it is talking about I think. And Jane worries about waking him up after her dream, so she "crept out of bed and sat waiting for the first hint of morning." Wouldn't such an indication as "crept out of bed" suggest that she was not in a separate bed, otherwise, why creep? And I think one of the purposes of the whole scene is to establish their lack of emotional intimacy despite any physical intimacy they have.
By the way, even though chapter two has already started, I'll make a couple comments here about chapter one that I had made notes about but forgot to mention while replying to others' comments about it. The first rather minor observation is to note how similar both OSP and Perelandra start out -- a man walking through the countryside in somewhat disagreeable circumstances, thinking about his duty to another person.
I also "recognized" Lewis the walker's discomfort at Ransom's "change" upon returning from Malacandra. His comment is very much like one a non-Christian might think about a recently converted friend. Here it is:
"One can't put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover. But much worse my growing conviction that , since his return, the eldila were not leaving him alone. Little things in his conversation, little mannerisms, accidental allusions which he made and then drew back with an awkward apology, all suggested that he was keeping strange company"
And of course he mentions the example of Christianity directly in the next paragraph, although in this case in reference to his own fear of being "drawn in" rather than about Ransom's changes. I guess I think of it here since Jo has often posted questions about how conversion changes a person inwardly or outwardly. The quote above, metaphorically of course, is perhaps a very good answer to that sort of question.
Here is another minor observation, but I like the way Lewis conveys physical actions so clearly. After he has tripped on the coffin-like thing (which the reader has no idea of what it is or is like yet), he writes, "One's hand groped alnog the rim of a kind of low wall -- the thumb on the outside and the fingers down inside the enclosed space". This almost sensual description really gets across the action that Lewis the walker is experiencing. Rather than simply describe what the thing was, we follow the character's exploration of it. Has anyone read that line (if they read carefully and not simply skimmed) and not actually put their hand into the air in that position while imagining moving it along the edge of the thing? It is also another example of a quality that Lewis uses extensively (which I mentioned quite a bit in the OSP study too) of having the reader experience things without knowing what they are and only afterwards being told what it is, part of the "seeing it from another point of view" method that Lewis is fond of doing (and which I've mentioned the theological reasons for doing so elsewhere).
Well, lots of other things one could go into great detail about this chapter, but chapter two calls!:-)
--Stanley