S8E17 – Perelandra – Chapter 14: “The Cave”

Ransom’s battle with the Un-man draws to an end, and our hero finds himself in disorienting darkness…

S8E17: Chapter 14 – “The Cave” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-Week

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, here goes – I mean, amen.”

C. S. Lewis, Ransom, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

Chit-Chat

• Oh, how the tables have turned, as Andrew got stuck in transit and is late to the meeting! Matt feels especially vindicated. Andrew is returning from a talkback for a stage performance of “The Screwtape Letters”.
• Matt has a long and relaxing stretch of time ahead with little to no travel.
• David’s wife’s brother has officially moved to La Crosse, WI.
• A listener followed our advice to visit the Wade Center while visiting Chicago, and left a wonderful review!

Greetings. I happened to be visiting family & friends in the Chicago land area a week or two ago. I knew I was close to the Wade Center, so, I took your advice to drop in. The staff were most friendly, spoke highly of the Pints with Jack podcast, and, provided insights into the Wade Center history. If the U. S. were offering posthumous honorary citizenship, all should be considered.

Listener Kay Mihelich

• Speaking of citizenship, David will hopefully be a U. S. citizen within the month! He will celebrate with cheap American beer.

Toast

• Matt came in 5 minutes late, so he was unprepared for the toast.
• David drank Athletic Brewing’s “All Out”, Extra Dark.

• Today we are toasting Dan Norlin!

Discussion

Chapter Summary

Ransom and the Un-man emerge from the water on a beach, where Ransom chokes him to death.

After waiting for daybreak, he realizes he’s in a cavern. He begins climbing, following the sound of water until he sees a red light coming from a ceiling aperture. 

Ransom climbs up into a large chamber, but somehow the Un-man and a ghastly insect-like creature climb through also. 

After invoking the Trinity, Ransom smashes the Un-man’s face with a rock, throwing him into an abyss of fire. The insect crawls back into the hole after which Ransom glorifies God and goes to sleep.

Reflection

• Matt suggests that the chapter relates to Plato’s Cave allegory, and the difference between abstraction and reality. He discussed this in an episode last season with Dr. Louis Markos.
• Andrew joined the gang, wearing Screwtape inspired swag from the show, and carrying a “The Great Divorce” bag.

01. “The End”

Last chapter, we left with the Un-man attempting to drag Ransom beneath the waters to his death. Chapter fourteen begins with Ransom running out of breath.

• Deciding he is going to die, Ransom tries to open his mouth to let himself drown, but his body refuses.

 In the immediate presence of death all ideas of the after life were withdrawn from his mind. The mere abstract proposition, “This is a man dying” floated before him in an unemotional way.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• This scene is a reflection of Lewis’ own near death experience in WWI, found in “Surprised by Joy”. There is also a reference to “The Screwtape Letters”, with the wil; at the center.

He decided to stop holding his breath, to open his mouth and die, but his will did not obey this decision.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy.

C. S. Lewis, Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters, Chapter Six

• Both characters make it to the surface, but it’s unclear what happened.

It was idle to struggle. His arms met no adversary and his legs were pinioned. He became aware that they were moving upwards.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• The two wash up on a rocky beach. The fight comes to an end, as Ransom strangles the Un-man.

The blackness was filled with gasping curses, now in his own voice, now in Weston’s, with yelps of pain, thudding concussions, and the noise of laboured breath. In the end he was astride of the enemy. He pressed its sides between his knees till its ribs cracked and clasped his hands round its throat.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Ransom continues to strangle the body, long after it ceased to breathe. He wonders whether it was Weston speaking to him before being dragged under, or if it was teh Un-man. Ultimately, he decides, it does not matter.

He did not know whether in the last few hours the spirit which had spoken to him was really Weston’s or whether he had been the victim of a ruse. Indeed, it made little difference. There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle held over the gas ring. The question whether Satan, or one whom Satan has digested, is acting on any given occasion, has in the long run no clear significance.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• The statement about soldiers is an inversion of the toy soldiers in Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”. And the reference to Satan having “digested” someone is another Screwtapian reference, seeing people as food, or cattle.
• Matt compared pawns of Satan to the Orcs in the Lord of the Rings movies, who all appear the same; just ugly slaves to be used. Meanwhile, the good characters are unique and distinct from one another, like Legolas and Aragorn.
• Andrew brought up a quote from “The Four Loves”:

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [Tolkien’s] reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves.

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

• Andrew points out that the confusion of Ransom’s senses mirrors the beginning of “Out of the Silent Planet”.

02. “Waiting”

Ransom assumes he’s in a narrow bay between cliffs.  With the Un-man dead, he decides to wait for morning to examine the body and possibly take further steps to make sure the Un-man can’t come back.

Q: What does he do to kill time?

• He retells the story of his quest, thinks about classic literature, and plays mental games.

He beguiled himself by recapitulating the whole story of his adventure in Perelandra. He recited all that he could remember of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Æneid, the Chanson de Roland, Paradise Lost, the Kalevala, the Hunting of the Snark, and a rhyme about Germanic sound-laws which he had composed as a freshman. He tried to spend as long as he could hunting for the lines he could not remember. He set himself a chess problem. He tried to rough out a chapter for a book he was writing. But it was all rather a failure.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Ransom finds that he is in a cavern. He starts to notice the absence of “those sweet night breezes which he had met everywhere else in Perelandra and phosphorescent wave-crests.”
• He realises that they have been sucked up through a hole.

He and his enemy when they sank had clearly, by some hundredth chance, been carried through a hole in the cliffs well below water-level and come up on the beach of a cavern.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• The trouble is, because of the pure darkness, he can’t return the way he came…
• Andrew notices the echos of “Beowulf”, who faces three monsters, and in order to face the primary one, he must dive into a hole and emerge in her cavern. David tied in the end of “The Silver Chair”.

03. “Climbing in the Darkness”

Q: Ransom can breathe in the cavern, so air must be coming from somewhere, so he tries to find it, slowly and painfully climbing in darkness. How does the darkness actually help him here?

• Loosing his sight means losing his fear of heights, giving him the resolve he might not have had if he had seen the summit he was to climb.

For some minutes he did things which he had never done on Earth. Doubtless he was in one way helped by the darkness: he had no real sensation of height and no giddiness.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Ransom stumbles upon a pool of water fed by a waterfall and drinks. He then follows the waterfall to a larger expanse in the cave.

04. “Blinded by the Light”

Q: The tension starts to build as Ransom begins to hear noises in the dark. What is he hearing, and what does he begin to fear?

• He wonders if the Un-man is stalking him in the dark, or if he’s being followed by some other unholy creature.

It was shortly after this that he began to be worried by the noises…. Sometimes it would be a dull plump as if something had slipped into one of the pools behind him: sometimes, more mysteriously, a dry rattling sound as if metal were being dragged over the stones…
Could it be that the Un-man had after all come to life and was still following him? But that seemed improbable, for its whole plan had been to escape. It was not so easy to dispose of the other possibility–that these caverns might have inhabitants. All his experience, indeed, assured him that if there were such inhabitants they would probably be harmless, but somehow he could not quite believe that anything which lived in such a place would be agreeable, and a little echo of the Un-man’s–or was it Weston’s–talk came back to him.  “All beautiful on the surface, but down inside–darkness, heat, horror, and stink.” 

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Lots of references to other classic literature; Andrew connected the undercover pursuit to Lewis Caroll’s poem, “The Hunting of the Snark”. Could it also be Lewis grabbing inspiration from his friend Tolkien, with the footpad Gollum? “The Hobbit” was being written around this time, after all.
• David wondered if Ransom was experiencing a manifestation of what Weston/the Un-man was describing at the end of the previous chapter. It’s almost as if Ransom has been dragged down into hell.
• Matt considered the possibility that this was like “The Great Divorce”, where the ghosts come up out of a crack smaller than a blade of grass.
• Ransom sees something new: a red light.

A very dim, tiny, quivering luminosity, slightly red in colour, was before him. It was too weak to illuminate anything else and in that world of blackness he could not tell whether it was five feet or five miles away…
While he thought it was still a long way off he found himself almost stepping into it. It was a circle of light lying on the surface of the water, which thereabouts formed a deepish trembling pool….
The very first glance at the funnel restored dimensions and perspective to his world, and this in itself was like delivery from prison. It seemed to tell him far more than it actually did of his surroundings: it gave him back that whole frame of spatial directions without which a man seems hardly able to call his body his own.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Ransom struggles to reach the light above him, and finds himself in a blindingly bright hall filled with “firelight”.

The heat increased rapidly. “I’m a fool to have come up here,” said Ransom: but even as he said so, he was at the top.
At first he was blinded by the light. …he found himself in a vast hall so filled with firelight… The floor sloped down to the left side. On his right it sloped upward to what appeared a cliff edge, beyond which was an abyss of blinding brightness.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

05. “The Un-man Rises”

• Ransom walks to the edge of the cliff, and sees a fire thousands of feet below. It’s a lake of fire! Ransom, like Dante, is passing through an Infernal experience.
• Sitting down to collect himself, Ransom experiences some very intrusive thoughts. Here we are most drawn to the narrative of Plato’s cave, because it is here that doubts about reality are sown.

Suddenly and irresistibly, like an attack by tanks, that whole view of the universe which Weston (if it were Weston) had so lately preached to him, took all but complete possession of his mind. He seemed to see that he had been living all his life in a world of illusion. The ghosts, the damned ghosts, were right. The beauty of Perelandra, the innocence of the Lady, the sufferings of saints, and the kindly affections of men, were all only an appearance and outward show. What he had called the worlds were but the skins of the worlds: a quarter of a mile beneath the surface, and from thence through thousands of miles of dark and silence and infernal fire, to the very heart of each, Reality lived–the meaningless, the un-made, the omnipotent idiocy to which all spirits were irrelevant and before which all efforts were vain. Whatever was following him would come up that wet, dark hole, would presently be excreted by that hideous duct, and then he would die. And then–“I thought as much,” said Ransom.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Andrew and David discuss the militaristic, warlike terms that Lewis uses to portray conflict, particularly in the spiritual realm. World War One clearly left a deep mark on him, and on other authors of his time, like Virginia Woolf.
• As Ransom predicted, the Un-man crawls out of the hole, followed by a large insect-like creature.

Slowly, shakily, with unnatural and inhuman movements a human form, scarlet in the firelight, crawled out on to the floor of the cave. It was the Un-man, of course: dragging its broken leg and with its lower jaw sagging open like that of a corpse, it raised itself to a standing position.
And then, close behind it, something else came up out of the hole. First came what looked like branches of trees, and then seven or eight spots of light, irregularly grouped like a constellation. Then a tubular mass which reflected the red glow as if it were polished. His heart gave a great leap as the branches suddenly resolved themselves into long wiry feelers and the dotted lights became the many eyes of a shell-helmeted head and the mass that followed it was revealed as a large roughly cylindrical body. Horrible things followed–angular, many jointed legs, and presently, when he thought the whole body was in sight, a second body came following it and after that a third. The thing was in three parts, united only by a kind of wasp’s waist structure–three parts that did not seem to be truly aligned and made it look as if it had been trodden on–a huge, many legged, quivering deformity, standing just behind the Un-man so that the horrible shadows of both danced in enormous and united menace on the wall of rock behind them.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Next season, we will explore “Surprised by Joy”, and Lewis’ fear of insects.

My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about spectres and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse; to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula … As Owen Barfield once said to me, ‘The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives – they have all the works on the outside.’ The works – that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism. You may add that in the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two things that some of us most dread for our own species – the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective.

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

06. “Doxological Drubbing”

Q: How does Ransom respond to this new horror?

• With anger!

“They want to frighten me,” said something in Ransom’s brain, and at the same moment he became convinced both that the Un-man had summoned this great earth crawler and also that the evil thoughts which had preceded the appearance of the enemy had been poured into his own mind by the enemy’s will. The knowledge that his thoughts could be thus managed from without did not awake terror but rage.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Lewis believes that most alien creatures are either service or monstrous. He tries to change this perspective in these science fiction books.
• Ransom engages the diabolical duo with violence!

“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes–I mean Amen,” said Ransom, and hurled the stone as hard as he could into the Un-man’s face. The Un-man fell as a pencil falls, the face smashed out of all recognition.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Ransom does something important by invoking the Lord’s name, because, as Scripture states, the Lord’s name is a strong tower. He looks not to his own ability but God’s, and acts as his agent.

The name of the Lord is a strong tower;
    the righteous man runs into it and is safe.

Proverbs 18:10

Q: What happens to the other creature?

• He almost forgets about it, even though it’s right in front of him.

…where had the horror gone? The creature was there, a curiously shaped creature no doubt, but all the loathing had vanished clean out of his mind, so that neither then nor at any other time could he remember it, nor ever understand again why one should quarrel with an animal for having more legs or eyes than oneself. All that he had felt from childhood about insects and reptiles died that moment: died utterly, as hideous music dies when you switch off the wireless.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Ransom attributes his initial fear to an enchantment of the Un-man.

Apparently it had all, even from the beginning, been a dark enchantment of the enemy’s…. He saw at once that the creature intended him no harm–had indeed no intentions at all. It had been drawn thither by the Un-man, and now stood still, tentatively moving its antennæ.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• The fear is so far from his mind that the animal begins to seem funny to him.

Then, apparently not liking its surroundings, it turned laboriously round and began descending into the hole by which it had come. As he saw the last section of its tripartite body wobble on the edge of the aperture, and then finally tip upward with its torpedo-shaped tail in the air, Ransom almost laughed. “Like an animated corridor train” was his comment.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• After the creature descends back into the cave, Ransom takes the body of the Un-man and throws it over the cliff’s edge.

He turned to the Un-man. It had hardly anything left that you could call a head, but he thought it better to take no risks. He took it by its ankles and lugged it up to the edge of the cliff: then, after resting a few seconds, he shoved it over. He saw its shape black, for a second, against the sea of fire: and then that was the end of it.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Exhausted from his tribulation, he takes a drink and promptly falls asleep.

He rolled rather than crawled back to the stream and drank deeply. “This may be the end of me or it may not,” thought Ransom. “There may be a way out of these caves or there may not. But I won’t go another step further to-day. Not if it was to save my life–not to save my life. That’s flat. Glory be to God, I’m tired.” A second later he was asleep.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Fourteen

• Andrew discusses the spiritual implications of thirst in Lewis’ other books, with characters like Orual, Jill, and Rillian. The physical needs and sensations can point us to God, and our dependence on him.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”

Matthew 5:6

What is Lewis Doing?

• The chapter doesn’t seem especially necessary to the story. Lewis could have had Ransom kill the Un-man and been done with it. Why the journey through the underworld, and the insect creature, the lake of burning fire, and the doubting of reality?
• As he read this chapter, Matt asked himself, “who is the Un-man to me? What illusions am I believing?” He felt that Ransom modeled calling on the name of God and tackling evil head on.
• Going through this trial will set the trajectory of the rest of Ransom’s life, as Andrew explains. Because of this quest, he can embrace future roles back on earth, and in “That Hideous Strength”. Andrew reiterated that the story is a true romance, like the classic Arthurian tales (ex: “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”) ; a knightly quest, with the hero standing up for righteousness and the honour of a woman.
• David describes the chapter as “very Danteian”, referring to Dante’s “Inferno”. He has been dragged into hell, flipped his perspective and orientation, risen up from Sheol, and is now ascending into the heavens.
• Another profound lesson to be learned from this chapter is that the Un-man returns, even when you think you’ve killed him, just like sin. You will likely have to fight the battle more than once.

That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

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