by Nerd42 » March 23rd, 2010, 5:55 pm
The thing I'm really interested in talking about from That Hideous Strength is the Objective Room from chapter 14. Before even the blasphemy that Studdock is expected to engage in there, I think the whole room is the most truly horrible thing in the entire book, more horrible than meeting the Head and everything else. Because there's nothing physically attacking or threatening you in the Objective Room, but the whole place is deliberately and calculatingly designed as a seemingly innocuous attack directly on the soul, to kill the spirit and leave the body (and even to some degree, the mind) intact. I very much fear that something very like this may someday be made real, for the inclinations of the Powers That Be who run our world certainly haven't abandoned the philosophy that Lewis predicted will lead to it. The scene, of course, directly connects to the central thesis of The Abolition of Man.
Of particular interest is the passage about the dots on the ceiling. The point of that passage is, I think, that the designers and builders of the room want the subject to be divested of any aversion to doing wrong and so try to get the subject to overcome a related (according to classical philosophers at least) aversion to ugliness. I'm sure the arrangement of the dots Lewis is referring to must have been calculated to leave absolutely no possibility for the average person to find any pattern in them, yet put there in a way that looks deliberate. Getting the subject used to overcoming other aversions is, I think, meant to get them to overcome aversions to or inhibitions against doing wrong.
I wish Lewis had taken the Objective Room scenes and put them into their own short story, because that would make it easier to talk about. :)
Last edited by
Nerd42 on May 14th, 2010, 3:36 am, edited 1 time in total.