S8E13 – Perelandra – Chapter 10: “Always Very Nearly True”

With Matt away, it’s left to Andrew and David discuss the truth and lies of the Unman’s arguments.

The Unman continues to tempt the Green Lady, through vanity and stories of self-martyrdom. The walls appear to be slowly closing in, and Ransom perceives that the present state cannot continue forever.

S8E13: Chapter 10 – “Always Very Nearly True” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-Week

The image of her beautiful body had been offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy’s true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

Chit Chat

• With the Christmas season upon them, Matt couldn’t coordinate his schedule for this week’s recording. He will rejoin the crew for the next episode.
• Since this recording was on a Saturday, David spend much of the day sledding and making snowmen with his son Alexander.
• Its “very chilly” in Florida: Andrew actually had to put on a long-sleeved shirt! Listeners, please pray for his suffering to ease, the Midwest has nothing on him. He is also giving a talk at a church, and preparing his very first Christmas sermon. Following the Christmas services, he and his family are dashing away to their Tennessee cabin.

Toast

• Andrew had a dram of Lagavulin 16, a gift from his friends.
• Meanwhile, David had poured himself some Aberfeldy 12, a present from his brother in law.
• We have nobody in particular to toast tonight, but with Christmas upon us… to the Christ Child, and His mother!

Discussion

Chapter Summary

Ransom awakes to hear Un-man telling stories of rebellious women on earth who saved weak men. It becomes clear that he is having some success at poisoning her mind.

When Ransom next wakes, he finds them adorned in robes of feathers and leaves. The Lady asks about her beauty and the Un-Man gives her a small mirror, which terrifies her. The Un-man tells her she should embrace fear in order to save her race. She eventually throws off her robe, noble and triumphant. Ransom is relieved she has rejected the temptation of vanity, but starts to understand the Un-Man’s plan…

01. “The Storyteller”

The chapter begins at nighttime with Ransom trying to ignore the constant refrain of “Ransom, Ransom, Ransom”. This morning David was woken with “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy…” so he can relate! On the other hand, Ransom is woken by the sound of the Unman speaking to the Lady.

Q. What is the Unman saying to the Green Lady?

• He hears the Unman telling her a series of stories about women on earth.

It appeared to be telling, with extreme beauty and pathos, a number of stories, and at first Ransom could not perceive any connecting link between them. They were all about women, but women who had apparently lived at different periods of the world’s history and in quite different circumstances…
The heroines of the stories seemed all to have suffered a great deal–they had been oppressed by fathers, cast off by husbands, deserted by lovers. Their children had risen up against them and society had driven them out. But the stories all ended, in a sense, happily: sometimes with honours and praises to a heroine still living, more often with tardy acknowledgment and unavailing tears after her death.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• This reminded Andrew of Orual in “Till We Have Faces” wishing Psyche would come crawling back to her.
• Though the Unman makes them seem like noble martyrs in his tales, Ransom has a sneaking suspicion that these women were really of ill repute.

At last it dawned upon him what all these stories were about. Each one of these women had stood forth alone and braved a terrible risk for her child, her lover, or her people. Each had been misunderstood, reviled, and persecuted: but each also magnificently vindicated by the event.
Ransom had more than a suspicion that many of these noble pioneers had been what in ordinary terrestrial speech we call witches or perverts.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

Q. Why is the Un-man telling these stories?

• He is trying to put an image into the Lady’s head.

What emerged from the stories was rather an image than an idea–the picture of the tall, slender form, unbowed though the world’s weight rested upon its shoulders, stepping forth fearless and friendless into the dark to do for others what those others forbade it to do yet needed to have done.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• This is the most polyvalent of the chapters. It has elements of “The Screwtape Letters”, where we see the devil attempting to sway the Lady towards sin. It also has, as previously discussed, elements of “Till We Have Faces”, trying to use elements of their love in order to manipulate them. Finally, in a faint reflection of “The Great Divorce”, we see the consequences of evil on the human person; it makes them ghostlike.
• Andrew quotes an unpublished chapter of “The Great Divorce”, written by Lewis in Joy Davidman’s copy. In this chapter of “Perelandra”, we see the Unman attempting to give the Green Lady a false sense of self.

There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself

C. S. Lewis

• One interesting insight from this chapter is that, upon our realisation that we are experiencing temptation or a devilish attack, the enemy will often switch tactics.

If the questions aroused by any one story proved at all difficult to answer, the speaker simply dropped that story and instantly began another.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• In addition to portraying the women of his stories as tragic heroes, the Unman also attempts to undermine men, subtly describing them as dimwitted and risk-averse.

And all the time, as a sort of background to these goddess shapes, the speaker was building up a picture of the other sex. No word was directly spoken on the subject: but one felt them there as a huge, dim multitude of creatures pitifully childish and complacently arrogant; timid, meticulous, unoriginating; sluggish and ox-like, rooted to the earth almost in their indolence, prepared to try nothing, to risk nothing, to make no exertion, and capable of being raised into full life only by the unthanked and rebellious virtue of their females. It was very well done. Ransom, who had little of the pride of sex, found himself for a few moments all but believing it.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• The last line is an echo of Screwtape’s origin. One can find himself nodding along and agreeing, transfixed by the speaker, until he snaps himself out of it.
• An example of this depiction being played out can be found in “The Great Divorce”, where one of the ghosts describes how she emasculated her husband constantly throughout his life in order to “better him”.

“I’m his wife, aren’t I? I was only beginning. There’s lots, lots, lots of things I still want to do with him. No, listen, Hilda. Please, please! I’m so miserable. I must have someone to – to do things to. It’s simply frightful down there. No one minds about me at all. I can’t alter them. It’s dreadful to see them all sitting about and not be able to do anything with them. Give him back to me. Why should he have everything his own way? It’s not good for him.“

C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter Ten

• David recalled the recent string of “girl boss” movies that have been released lately that he finds incredibly annoying, including Captain Marvel, where every man in the movie is terrible.

Q. There’s then thunder, rain, and a flash of lightning. Ransom sees the scene and the Lady’s face. What does he see that worries him?

• He sees the “tragedy queen” from a play.

…her expression was one he had not very often met on earth–except, as he realised with a shock, on the stage. “Like a tragedy queen” was the disgusting comparison that arose in his mind. Of course it was a gross exaggeration…. And yet . . . and yet . . . the tableau revealed by the lightning had photographed itself on his brain. Do what he would, he found it impossible not to think of that new look in her face… The fatal touch of invited grandeur, of enjoyed pathos–the assumption, however slight, of a rôle–seemed a hateful vulgarity…. for the first time the thought “This can’t go on” formulated itself in his mind.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• A “tableau” is a scene depicted on stage by silent and motionless participants.
• The “enjoyed pathos” is particularly poignant in this scene. It describes someone being happy in their misery, liking their self-pity. Andrew likened this again to “The Great Divorce”, where the ghost Pam drowns herself in her grief for her dead son, Michael. David compared it to Jadis and Uncle Andrew in “The Magician’s Nephew”.

“Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.“

C. S. Lewis, Uncle Andrew, The Magician’s Nephew

02. “Under Cover”

The lady goes to get some shelter from the rain, and everyone follows her. The Un-man immediately starts to tell a new story “there was a queen in our world who ruled over a little land—-“

Q. Whose story do you think that might be, Andrew?

• Was Lewis plotting “Till We Have Faces” this early? Because the story sounds much like Orual…

 “And another time,” began the Un-man at once, “there was a queen in our world who ruled over a little land—-“

Q. The lady interrupts the story and bids the Un-man to listen to the rain. Why?

• Part of it could be a funny gender thing, but more likely, it is that the Lady is remaining faithful to Maleldil’s instruction to live in the present moment and to listen to Him. Meanwhile, the Devil is filled with “what if’s”, and “what should be’s”. Rain is also a quiet witness to the provision of God.

Q. There’s then a low growl from some beast the lady doesn’t recognise. The Un-man says he doesn’t know it, but Ransom thinks he does. What do you make of that?

• David believes that it might be Perelandra itself growling. Previously, the planet seemed to rejoice at the victories of the Lady. Now that she is in danger, it is also expressing displeasure.

The Lady tells the Unman and Ransom to hush, and that’s the end of that night’s conversation.

03. “No Rest for the Wicked”

We then have a long section describing what happens over the coming days and nights. It’s rough for Ransom because the Lady needed less sleep than him, and the Un-man appeared to require none at all, so that whenever Ransom awoke, the Un-man would be speaking to her.

Q. Even when the Lady dismissed both of them, why doesn’t Ransom get much rest?

• First, he has to protect the animals and vegetation of Perelandra.

A great deal of his time was spent in protecting the animals from it. Whenever it got out of sight, or even a few yards ahead, it would make a grab at any beast or bird within its reach and pull out some fur or feathers…
When the Un-man could not get animals it was content with plants. It was fond of cutting their outer rinds through with its nails, or grubbing up roots, or pulling off leaves, or even tearing up handfuls of turf. 

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• Secondly, the Unman was unrelenting in his cruelty and petty, taunting nature.

Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even a sombre tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not like dealing with a wicked politician at all: it was much more like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child…
With Ransom himself it had innumerable games to play. It had a whole repertory of obscenities to perform with its own–or rather with Weston’s–body: and the mere silliness of them was almost worse than the dirtiness.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• Around this time, Lewis was also writing “A Preface to Paradise Lost”, which responded to a depiction of Satan as a tragic figure in Milton’s version. In “Perelandra”, Lewis makes a sharp distinction from the interesting and dynamic character. He instead makes sin appear incredibly unappealing.
• The grimaces depicted in this scene are reminiscent of the depictions of the possessed child in the movie The Exorcist.

It would sit making grimaces at him for hours together; and then, for hours more, it would go back to its old repetition of “Ransom . . . Ransom.” Often its grimaces achieved a horrible resemblance to people whom Ransom had known and loved in our own world. 

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

Q. Sometimes it would seem that Weston would be allowed to regain some control of his body. What does he say and how to Ransom respond?

• Weston appears to be confused, but comes across as pitiful, resolutely selfish, and complaining, continually nursing old grievances.

[He]… would begin a pitiful, hesitant mumbling, “You be very careful, Ransom. I’m down in the bottom of a big black hole. No I’m not, though. I’m on Perelandra. I can’t think very well now, but that doesn’t matter, he does all my thinking for me. It’ll get quite easy presently. That boy keeps on shutting the windows. That’s all right, they’ve taken off my head and put someone else’s on me. I’ll soon be all right now. They won’t let me see my press cuttings. So then I went and told him that if they didn’t want me in the first Fifteen they could jolly well do without me, see. We’ll tell that young whelp it’s an insult to the examiners to show up this kind of work. What I want to know is why I should pay for a first-class ticket and then be crowded out like this. It’s not fair. Not fair. I never meant any harm. . Could you take some of this weight off my chest, I don’t want all those clothes. Let me alone. Let me alone. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. What enormous bluebottles. They say you get used to them”–and then it would end in the canine howl.

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• Beelzebub is known as the lord of the flies (bluebottles).
• Ransom feels some pity for Weston, and begins to pray for him. Once again, we see echos of “The Great Divorce” in the shadow that Weston has made of himself through inviting in the Devil.

He discovered that any hatred he had once felt for the Professor was dead. He found it natural to pray fervently for his soul. Yet what he felt for Weston was not exactly pity. Up till that moment, whenever he had thought of Hell, he had pictured the lost souls as being still human; now, as the frightful abyss which parts ghosthood from manhood yawned before him, pity was almost swallowed up in horror–in the unconquerable revulsion of the life within him from positive and self-consuming Death. If the remains of Weston were, at such moments, speaking through the lips of the Un-man, then Weston was not now a man at all. The forces which had begun, perhaps years ago, to eat away his humanity had now completed their work. The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affections had now at last poisoned itself and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces. Only a ghost was left–an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odour of decay. 

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

04. “Who’s Winning?”

We’re then told about the conversations between Ransom, the Temptor, and the Green Lady. Although sometimes successful, Ransom realises that the Un-man is gaining ground. When he bids the Lady to send them away, she rebukes him, saying “Shall I go and rest and play… while all this lies on our hands? Not till I am certain that there is no great deed to be done by me for the King and for the children of our children.”

Q. How does the Un-man press this idea?

• He continues to pepper her with stories of “the great deed”.

The ideas of the Great Deed, of the Great Risk, of a kind of martyrdom, were presented to her every day, varied in a thousand forms.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

Q. How does the Un-man deal with the question of the King?

• Any notion of reliance on him is described as cowardice.

The whole point of her action–the whole grandeur–would lie in taking it without the King’s knowledge, in leaving him utterly free to repudiate it, so that all the benefits should be his, and all the risks hers; and with the risk, of course, all the magnanimity, the pathos, the tragedy, and the originality.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• The whole point is to do it without the king, as opposed to with him…

And also, the Tempter hinted, it would be no use asking the King, for he would certainly not approve the action: men were like that. The King must be forced to be free. Now, while she was on her own–now or never–the noble thing must be achieved.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• This is an echo of “The Four Loves”, where Lewis discusses the coercion of love. Love has to be free, not forced.
• Additionally, the Unman is keeping the pressure on by saying that the moment is slipping away from her.
• The Unman asserts that women are often victims of subjugation on earth, and that the Queen must stop that from happening on Perelandra.

But the Un-man asked whether this elaborate division of the human race into two sexes could possibly be meant for no other purpose than offspring?..  A moment later it was explaining that men like Ransom in his own world–men of that intensely male and backward-looking type who always shrank away from the new good–had continuously laboured to keep woman down to mere child-bearing and to ignore the high destiny for which Maleldil had actually created her. It told her that such men had already done incalculable harm. Let her look to it that nothing of the sort happened on Perelandra.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• However, this seems to fall apart as she grapples with the new words that the Unman is teaching her.

It was at this stage that it began to teach her many new words: words like Creative and Intuition and Spiritual. But that was one of its false steps. When she had at last been made to understand what “creative” meant she forgot all about the Great Risk and the tragic loneliness and laughed for a whole minute on end. Finally she told the Un-man that it was younger even than Piebald, and sent them both away.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• In George MacDonald’s “Unspoken Sermons”, there is a line that states that when creation is applied to great human genius, it becomes a mockery of humanity. After all, what is humanity itself, but a creation? What we do is actually sub-creation.

Q. One day Ransom loses his temper. Why?

• He fights back against the Temptor’s twisted notion of sacrifice:

He tried to tell her that he’d seen this kind of “unselfishness” in action: to tell her of women making themselves sick with hunger rather than begin the meal before the man of the house returned, though they knew perfectly well that there was nothing he disliked more; of mothers wearing themselves to a ravelling to marry some daughter to a man whom she detested; of Agrippina and of Lady Macbeth. “Can you not see,” he shouted, “that he is making you say words that mean nothing? What is the good of saying you would do this for the King’s sake when you know it is what the King would hate most? Are you Maleldil that you should determine what is good for the King?“

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• Lady Macbeth pushed her husband to murder for the sake of ambition. Agrippina is much the same.
• The Queen should be one with the King, but the Unman is trying to make her independent and significantly different.

Q. Where is there truth and falsehood in what the Un-man is saying?

• The Lady is meant to grow in knowledge. However, she is not meant to grow like this.

The matter was, of course, cruelly complicated. What the Un-man said was always very nearly true. Certainly it must be part of the Divine plan that this happy creature should mature, should become more and more a creature of free choice, should become, in a sense, more distinct from God and from her husband in order thereby to be at one with them in a richer fashion. In fact, he had seen this very process going on from the moment at which he met her, and had, unconsciously, assisted it. This present temptation, if conquered, would itself be the next, and greatest, step in the same direction: an obedience freer, more reasoned, more conscious than any she had known before, was being put in her power. But for that very reason the fatal false step which, once taken, would thrust her down into the terrible slavery of appetite and hate and economics and government which our race knows so well, could be made to sound so like the true one.

…But if her will was uncorrupted, half her imagination was already filled with bright, poisonous shapes. “This can’t go on,” thought Ransom for the second time.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

05. “Where is Everyone?”

Q. One night Ransom falls asleep and awakes to find himself alone. He hunts for them and finds them. What does he see?

• The Unman and the Lady have dressed themselves in feathers and leaves. The Lady says that the Unman “found the feathers somewhere”. Here we see a parody of Adam and Eve, and the blood sacrifices it took to cover over the results of sin.

Two human figures, robed to their feet, stood before him, silent under the yellow sky. Their clothes were of purple and blue, their heads wore chaplets of silver leaves, and their feet were bare. They seemed to him to be, the one the ugliest, and the other the most beautiful, of the children of men. Then one of them spoke and he realised that they were none other than the Green Lady herself and the haunted body of Weston. The robes were of feathers, and he knew well the Perelandrian birds from which they had been derived; the art of the weaving, if weaving it could be called, was beyond his comprehension.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• She asks Ransom why he never told her about clothes.

“This one showed me that the trees have leaves and the beasts have fur, and said that in your world the men and women also hung beautiful things about them. Why do you not tell us how we look? Oh, Piebald, Piebald, I hope this is not going to be another of the new goods from which you draw back your hand. It cannot be new to you if they all do it in your world.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

Q. Ransom asks what she’s been told as to why people on earth wear clothes, even when it’s warm:

• The Unman says that it is to appear more beautiful, which Ransom is almost grateful for: he thought that the Unman was teaching her a much graver, harder to combat sin than mere vanity.

“Thank Heaven,” thought Ransom, “he is only teaching her vanity”; for he had feared something worse. Yet could it be possible, in the long run, to wear clothes without learning modesty, and through modesty lasciviousness?

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

Q. The Lady asks Ransom if she looks more beautiful. What does he say?

• At first “no”, but he then changes his answer to “I don’t know”.

The Un-man, now that Weston’s prosaic shirt and shorts were concealed, looked a more exotic and therefore a more imaginatively, less squalidly, hideous figure.
As for the Lady–that she looked in some way worse was not doubtful. Yet there is a plainness in nudity–as we speak of “plain” bread. A sort of richness, a flamboyancy, a concession, as it were, to lower conceptions of the beautiful, had come with the purple robe. For the first (and last) time she appeared to him at that moment as a woman whom an earth-born man might conceivably love. And this was intolerable. The ghastly inappropriateness of the idea had, all in one moment, stolen something from the colours of the landscape and the scent of the flowers.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

06. “Mirror, Mirror…”

The Lady says that everyone should wish to be as beautiful as they can, even though they can’t see themselves. It’s then that the Un-man introduces a shaving mirror.

Q. How does she respond?

• She is afraid.

“Look!” he said. Then taking it from her he held it up to her face. She stared for quite an appreciable time without apparently making anything of it. Then she started back with a cry and covered her face. Ransom started too. It was the first time he had seen her the mere passive recipient of any emotion. The world about him was big with change.
“My face–out there–looking at me. Am I growing older or is it something else? I feel . . . I feel . . . my heart is beating too hard. I am not warm. What is it?” She glanced from one of them to the other. The mysteries had all vanished from her face. It was as easy to read as that of a man in a shelter when a bomb is coming.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• Mirrors are significant in Lewis’ work. They appear in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” with Eustace and Lucy, and “Till We Have Faces”. It is a Narcissan tool of vanity, of someone obsessed with their own beauty.

Q. What does the Un-man want her to do?

• He tells her to embrace the fear, leaning once again into self-martyrdom.

“It will never go away if you do what he wishes. It is into more and more fear that he is leading you.”
“It is,” said the Un-man, “into the great waves and through them and beyond. Now that you know Fear, you see that it must be you who shall taste it on behalf of your race. You know the King will not. You do not wish him to. But there is no cause for fear in this little thing: rather for joy. What is fearful in it?”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• They have a discussion about how to determine if something is right or wrong, and if one can intrinsically know or not.

“It comes into my mind, Stranger,” she answered, “that a fruit does not eat itself, and a man cannot be together with himself.”
“A fruit cannot do that because it is only a fruit,” said the Un-man. “But we can do it. We call this thing a mirror. A man can love himself, and be together with himself. That is what it means to be a man or a woman–to walk alongside oneself as if one were a second person and to delight in one’s own beauty. Mirrors were made to teach this art.”
“Is it a good?” said the Lady.
“No,” said Ransom.
“How can you find out without trying?” said the Un-man.
“If you try it and it is not good,” said Ransom, “how do you know whether you will be able to stop doing it?”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

• She sees herself in her clothes and chooses to discard them. The Un-man tries to convince her to keep them. He appeals to her vanity, but also insults her as having a low nature.

“I had forgotten,” said the Un-man. “I had forgotten that you would not live on the Fixed Land nor build a house nor in any way become mistress of your own days. Keeping means putting a thing where you know you can always find it again, and where rain, and beasts, and other people cannot reach it. I would give you this mirror to keep. It would be the Queen’s mirror, a gift brought into the world from Deep Heaven: the other women would not have it. But you have reminded me. There can be no gifts, no keeping, no foresight while you live as you do–from day to day, like the beasts.“

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

Q. What seems to have been awakened?

• He was offering her her soul, a spot as a main character in a play, as it seemed. The thing is though, her soul already belonged to her as a gift from Maleldil.

But the Lady did not appear to be listening to him. She stood like one almost dazed with the richness of a day-dream. She did not look in the least like a woman who is thinking about a new dress. The expression of her face was noble. It was a great deal too noble. Greatness, tragedy, high sentiment–these were obviously what occupied her thoughts. Ransom perceived that the affair of the robes and the mirror had been only superficially concerned with what is commonly called female vanity. The image of her beautiful body had been offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy’s true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Ten

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

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