Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis: Part I

[rushthatspeaks]

A while ago, truepenny made a series of fascinating posts on the Narnia books, and this sparked my annual rereading of Lewis's Space Trilogy, with a view towards closer analysis and discussion, because I haven't seen much on them in the way of literary criticism (though if you know of any, please point me towards it).

Now, when I say 'annual re-reading', I mean it: I have read the entire trilogy at least once every calendar year since I was twelve years old, when they were given to me as a Christmas present and I lost track of the world for a week. These were some of the first books I learned to argue with, the books that critically engaged me, the books that caused me to think about the philosophy in them and the effects it might have on my own life if various forms of philosophy were true or false. That's a precious thing, and the first two books, as well, are very beautiful, but it is for their flaws as well as their virtues that I love them, at this point, since it is the flaws as well as the virtues that provide the food for thought. I would like to discuss them with the understanding that I do love them deeply, but that I don't think it at all necessary that other people do also. I can see these being either extraordinarily boring or hatable to some people, and if that's how you happen to feel about them, cool. Tell me why. I'll find it interesting.

I would also like to note that, as the Narnia books are, the Space Trilogy is a work of Christian apologia. I am not a Christian. I was raised Baha'i, spent eight years in a Catholic school, and am presently a neo-pagan. I find some aspects of Christianity very interesting and some others totally inapplicable. The Christian philosophy and values expressed in these books has neither converted nor repelled me, and I expect it to stay that way.

Out of the Silent Planet is the first of the Space Trilogy, and the one in which the protagonist, Ransom, is kidnapped and taken to the planet its inhabitants call Malacandra. It's a short and light read, one hundred sixty pages in my fairly-large-print paperback edition (Macmillan, 1986, with a lovely Kinuko Y. Craft cover). It's the kind of book that gets labeled 'entertaining digression' or 'minor work' or 'prelude' in overviews of authorial careers, but I think it's worth discussing on its own in detail.


There are several things that generally come up in critical discussion of Lewis, and that I've heard specifically about the Space Trilogy in the passing mentions of it I've seen online: the occasional disjointure in Lewis's attempts to fuse classical mythology and Christianity, the Problem of Gender in Lewis (which by this time deserves the capitalization), the idea that Ransom is altogether too saintly and possibly in fact a Mary Sue. I'd like to talk about all three of these, but I'm going to take them out of order, despite the fact that the mythology/Christianity fusion comes up immediately in a discussion of the plot; I'm going to take gender first, because I suspect that it is the facet of this particular novel most easily overlooked.

Gender

Upon a first consideration of gender in Out of the Silent Planet, my first thought was that there aren't any women. At all. Anywhere.

Upon closer examination, this turned out to be incorrect: there is one, and only one, female character in the book, who is onstage and does have a speaking part.

She is the woman who in the first chapter asks Ransom to go and see if her son is all right, because he is late returning from his job, and he is simple, and she is worried. She is decidedly not a three-dimensional character; she is described as having a 'monotonous voice and limited vocabulary', she speaks in a caricature of a farming accent and calls Ransom 'sir' at least once a sentence, and he thinks of her as troublesome, as probably mistaken in her ideas that her son may be in trouble. He primarily agrees to look into the situation in the hopes of getting a room for the night from her son's employers, whom he perceives as being male, of his own class, and as therefore almost inevitably decent people. As it turns out, they are male, they are of his own class, and they are not decent people. They intended to kidnap the boy and take him on their spaceship, and they take Ransom in his place. The woman was right to be worried, in every particular, and would never have seen her son again if something had not been done, although Ransom never thinks about this. This is, although extremely minor, an indication that Ransom's values *do not hold* in this story and will not hold, that he is entering situations in which his expectations of class and civility and his ideas of who is in the right are irrelevant. Although she is gone by the end of the third full page of text, is presented downright insultingly, and is primarily a plot device (for I think it was important to Lewis that Ransom be impelled into the kidnapping by the performance of a (grudging) act of charity), the only female character in the book, and the only lower-class human character, is right where the protagonist is wrong.

I do not know how intentional this was, but I think it is important, because I suspect that a great deal of the reason that Ransom is perceived as being something of a Mary Sue is that he behaves much of the time after the manner of the default assumptions of an upper-class, scholarly gentleman of the time, only, you know, nicer, and able to deal with Powers and Principalities. But I do see a pattern, over and over again, in the instances when Ransom tries to fall back on these ingrained habits, of Lewis purposefully throwing him out of them, making them irrelevant, or having them simply not work. It's subtle, and in my opinion does not come across as clearly as it would need to to have a significant impact on most perceptions of Ransom-- and it may in fact not be intentional-- but it is repeated, later in this book and in Perelandra, and I'll point out further instances of it later. For now, I am getting ahead of myself.

Thus, then, the only female character in the book with lines. What more remains to be said about gender here? Well, why aren't there more women?

It is, in fact, very odd that there aren't, because the book is set up in a way that draws attention to the omission.

Ransom, on Malacandra, stays for some while, in the book's central passage, with a tribe of hrossa, who are furry and seven feet tall and fond of poetry. His named associates, the ones with whom we see conversations, are male. The females, the hressni, are barely mentioned: in one instance it is stated that they are fond of Ransom, because he entertains their children (I don't see how this logically follows), and in another Ransom is discussing the mating habits of the hrossa with his friend Hyoi, who states that he once heard of a hross who had been taken ill, so that he saw everything double, and consequently and perversely loved two females. Ransom concludes that the species is naturally monogamous (which I find reasonable, as there are species which are), and thinks the following:

'At last it dawned upon him that it was not they, but his own species, who were the puzzle. That the hrossa should have such instincts was mildly surprising; but how came it that the instincts of the hrossa so closely resembled the unattained ideals of that far-divided species Man whose instincts were so deplorably different?' (p.74)

Sigh. I suppose that Ransom, being who he is, is bound to think this way, but this is a case in which Lewis does not jolt him out of his cultural assumptions, probably, I am afraid, because Lewis shares them. (Could he really not have encountered the concept of religiously ordained polygamy or promiscuity, or did he simply believe it to be an aberration that could not possibly affect the ideals of the whole human species? For that matter, are there ideals of the whole human species?)

I also suppose that the reason that Ransom's friends among the hrossa are male is that Ransom is more comfortable among males and Lewis is more comfortable writing about males.

However, there is a place where this tendency becomes a serious flaw, for it is not only the hressni who do not speak for themselves. There are two other intelligent species on Malacandra, the seroni and the pfifiltriggi, and it is stated outright that the culture of the pfifiltriggi is female-dominant. Ransom has a conversation with a pfifiltrigg artisan who is taking his portrait, and asks:

"Are your females of more account among you than those of the other hnau [sentient beings] among them?"

"Very greatly. The sorns [form of seroni] make least account of females and we make most." (p. 116)

In the postscript Ransom describes the pfifiltriggi as 'oviparous and matriarchal'.

Of the three sentient races on the planet, then, we have one theoretically male-dominated (sorns), one theoretically female-dominated, and one somewhere in the middle (hrossa): a good balance.

Or it would be if Ransom had any interaction with the hressni, and if the only species with whom he does not spend some time in their homes were not the pfifiltriggi. In addition, the only two members of this species who have speaking parts are both male, despite the fact that they are in attendance on the Oyarsa, the ruler of the planet, a position in which it seems reasonable there ought to be a female if the species is matriarchal. This is where the absence of females becomes painful to me, obvious, telling: a weakness in the book according to its own structure, a gap in the worldbuilding which can only be an unconscious turn towards the things which are more comfortable and familiar to write, a failure of imagination.

And yet the worldbuilding is there, so that the gap is noticeable, and the structure was in place to have a balanced view of gender in Malacandra.

The woman is right, but she is a caricature.

The woman is dominant, but she is not there.

This summarizes, in my opinion, the Problem with Gender in Lewis: all of the structure is there for him to do interesting things with gender, revolutionary things, even, and we modern feminist readers so dearly want him to do them, because it is unusual for us even to see the structure present in books of his time period, or even to some extent in fantasy, and in children's fantasy. And he doesn't. It does not seem to occur to him that emphasizing the woman's rightness and Ransom's wrongness would strengthen Ransom's character arc (and, especially in this book, it needs all the help it can get); it does not seem to him that it would add a touch of depth and wholeness to see the females of Malacandra. It does not seem to occur to him in the Narnia books that seeing Susan as an individual, with individual reasons for a fall from grace, without the blame being placed on adult female socialization and sexuality, would greatly humanize his argument and make the fall a real peril, a real thing to be avoided.

We, now, cannot help but see this continuous not-quite-reaching what we would have liked to happen as hurting his writing, as flawing what we see him come so close to, that now does not exist. And so we get angry with him about it, especially if we love him, and I for one am bloody furious, I want to grab him by the collar and shake him sometimes for not understanding, dammit.

But I think there are two things to remember: one, the structure is there. And two, we can see what he could have done, sometimes so closely we can taste it, by the light of what he did.

Tune in next time for: plot, myth, and worldbuilding dissection.