Show Notes
Introduction
Quote-of-the-Week
His arms seemed to move quicker than his thought. His hands taught him terrible things. He felt its ribs break, he heard its jaw-bone crack. The whole creature seemed to be crackling and splitting under his blows. His own pains, where it tore him, somehow failed to matter. He felt that he could so fight, so hate with a perfect hatred, for a whole year…the joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter 12
Chit-Chat
Toast
Discussion
Chapter Summary
Each participant receives ghastly wounds, but Ransom grows in confidence as he realizes the Un-man’s strength is limited to that of Weston’s body.
01. “Preparations”
Q. It’s a new dawn, a new day… It rather reminds me of exam days at school when it says Ransom passed with no intermediate stages from dreamless sleep to a full consciousness of his task. What does Ransom do when he awakes?
- Has a bath and drink
- Notices that he’s no longer a piebald!
- He thinks well of his body, particularly since he’s sure it’s about to get mangled!
- He felt pretty certain that he would never again wield an un-maimed body until a greater morning came for the whole universe, and he was glad that the instrument had been thus tuned up to concert pitch before he had to surrender it. “When I wake up after Thy image, I shall be satisfied,” [Psalm 17:15] he said to himself.
- He takes an accidental shower
- The pleasure was as sharp as when he had first experienced it, and his very stride was different as he emerged from them
- Has some of the gourd fruit
- Although this was to be his last meal, he did not even now feel it proper to look for any favourite fruit. But what met him was gourds. “A good breakfast on the morning you’re hanged,”
- Even if he’s about to die, Ransom is thankful he came
- “All said and done,” he thought, “it’s been worth it. I have had a time. I have lived in Paradise.”
Q. What happens when he stumbles upon the Green Lady?
- She’s sleeping – seemingly a supernatural sleep from Maleldil.
- Ransom reflects on how he’ll never look on the female form in the same way:
- “I shall never see her again,” he thought; and then, “I shall never again look on a female body in quite the same way as I look on this.”
- He thinks he would have loved to have seen Eve like this, but realizes that would be impossible and the reason for it seems to steel him to the task ahead…
- As he stood looking down on her, what was most with him was an intense and orphaned longing that he might, if only for once, have seen the great Mother of his own race thus, in her innocence and splendour. “Other things, other blessings, other glories,” he murmured. “But never that. Never in all worlds, that. God can make good use of all that happens. But the loss is real.” He looked at her once again and then walked abruptly past the place where she lay. “I was right,” he thought, “it couldn’t have gone on. It was time to stop it.”
Q. As he goes looking for the Un-man, what does Ransom notice about the world and how does he respond?
- It’s all quiet
- The dragon is also asleep
- The birds and seemingly the whole world.
- He’s initially desolated (why?), but then thankful
- For a moment this gave him a sense of desolation, but almost at once he rejoiced that no memory of blood and rage should be left imprinted in these happy minds.
02. “Ready…”
Q. About an hour later Ransom comes face-to-face with the Unman. What’s he doing and how does Ransom respond?
- He’s plucking and killing a bird
- A bird, already half plucked and with beak wide open in the soundless yell of strangulation, was feebly struggling in its long clever hands.
- Without much deliberation, Ransom punches him:
- Ransom found himself acting before he knew what he had done. Some memory of boxing at his preparatory school must have awaked, for he found he had delivered a straight left with all his might on the Un-man’s jaw. But he had forgotten that he was not fighting with gloves…it seemed almost to have broken his knuckles
- PSA – punching someone in the face will really hurt your hand!
- The Un-man still holds on to the bird
- Ransom found himself acting before he knew what he had done. Some memory of boxing at his preparatory school must have awaked, for he found he had delivered a straight left with all his might on the Un-man’s jaw. But he had forgotten that he was not fighting with gloves…it seemed almost to have broken his knuckles
Q. What happens when the Un-man gets up?
- Tries to intimidate Ransom
- “But this is very foolish,” said the Un-man. “Do you not know who I am?”
“I know what you are,” said Ransom. “Which of them doesn’t matter.”
- “But this is very foolish,” said the Un-man. “Do you not know who I am?”
- The Unman argues that God never helped the martyrs – He never helped His only-begotton Son:
“And you think, little one,… that you can fight with me? You think He will help you, perhaps? Many thought that. I’ve known Him longer than you, little one. They all think He’s going to help them–till they come to their senses screaming recantations too late in the middle of the fire, mouldering in concentration camps, writhing under saws, jibbering in mad-houses, or nailed on to crosses. Could He help Himself?”–and the creature suddenly threw back its head and cried in a voice so loud that it seemed the golden sky-roof must break, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.” [Matthew 27:46] And the moment it had done so, Ransom felt certain that the sounds it had made were perfect Aramaic of the First Century. The Un-man was not quoting; it was remembering. These were the very words spoken from the Cross, treasured through all those years in the burning memory of the outcast creature which had heard them, and now brought forward in hideous parody…
03. “Fight!”
Q. Talk us through the fight…
- The Unman attacks first…
- its arms about him, and its nails were ripping great strips off his back. His own arms were inside its embrace and, pummelling wildly, he could get no blow at it… It was not trying to box. It wanted to grapple.
- Ransom bites its arm and then chain punches it in the chest
- …he found himself raining punches about the region of its heart, faster and harder than he had supposed possible. He could hear through its open mouth the great gusts of breath that he was knocking out of it.
- He catches both of its arms and they struggle like that for some time (cf engraving print by Gustave Doré)
- They try to sweep each other’s legs. Ransom tries to twist the Un-man’s left arm, but that allows him to rake Ransom across the face with his right.
- A second later–he did not know quite how it happened–they were standing apart, their chests heaving in great gasps, each staring at the other.
Q. What does Random learn from this initial exchange of combat?
- Ransom realizes that the Un-man doesn’t have superhuman strength and that he could actually win this!
- …had all along, despite what reason told him, expected that the strength of its body would be superhuman, diabolical. He had reckoned on arms that could no more be caught and stopped than the blades of an aeroplane’s propeller. But now he knew, by actual experience, that its bodily strength was merely that of Weston. On the physical plane it was one middle-aged scholar against another. Weston had been the more powerfully built of the two men, but he was fat; his body would not take punishment well. Ransom was nimbler and better breathed. His former certainty of death now seemed to him ridiculous. It was a very fair match. There was no reason why he should not win–and live.
Q. What happens as the fight continues?
- It effectively falls into rounds as they exhaust each other:
- All that rich world was asleep about them. There were no rules, no umpire, no spectators; but mere exhaustion, constantly compelling them to fall apart, divided the grotesque duel into rounds as accurately as could be wished. Ransom could never remember how many of these rounds were fought. The thing became like the frantic repetitions of delirium, and thirst a greater pain than any the adversary could inflict.
- Ransom shouts poetry at the Unman!?
- Once [Ransom] was actually astride the enemy’s chest, squeezing its throat with both hands and–he found to his surprise–shouting a line out of The Battle of Maldon [Old English poem ~ 10th Century]
Q. Ransom then feels hatred like he never has before… but has a very strange reaction to it…
- It’s a righteous anger!
- Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him–a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood. What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person: but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation. It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object.
04. “Get over here!”
Q. At one point in the fight, Ransom finds himself punching nothing! What happened?!
- The Un-man is flees!
- Ransom pursues
- As they pass the Green Lady, the Unman would have attacked her if he could, but he didn’t want to risk Ransom catching up
- They passed the Lady, sleeping with a smile on her face, The Un-man stooped low as it passed her with the fingers of its left hand crooked for scratching. It would have torn her if it dared, but Ransom was close behind and it could not risk the delay.
- Ransom can’t gain on the Un-man, and he has a horrible thought:
- It was a wonder that any creature so maimed as its uneven strides showed it to be, could maintain that pace. If the ankle were really sprained, as he suspected, it must suffer indescribably at every step. Then the horrible thought came into his mind that perhaps it could somehow hand over the pain to be borne by whatever remnants of Weston’s consciousness yet survived in its body. The idea that something which had once been of his own kind and fed at a human breast might even now be imprisoned in the thing he was pursuing redoubled his hatred [cf. George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons], which was unlike nearly all other hatreds he had ever known, for it increased his strength.
- It is the very presence of this fading humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal only, and not a man or a woman that did us hurt, we should not hate: we should only kill. We hate the man just because we are prevented from loving him. We push over the verge of the creation – we damn – just because we cannot embrace.
– MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons
- It is the very presence of this fading humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal only, and not a man or a woman that did us hurt, we should not hate: we should only kill. We hate the man just because we are prevented from loving him. We push over the verge of the creation – we damn – just because we cannot embrace.
- It was a wonder that any creature so maimed as its uneven strides showed it to be, could maintain that pace. If the ankle were really sprained, as he suspected, it must suffer indescribably at every step. Then the horrible thought came into his mind that perhaps it could somehow hand over the pain to be borne by whatever remnants of Weston’s consciousness yet survived in its body. The idea that something which had once been of his own kind and fed at a human breast might even now be imprisoned in the thing he was pursuing redoubled his hatred [cf. George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons], which was unlike nearly all other hatreds he had ever known, for it increased his strength.
05. “Flock of seagulls”
The Un-man then flees the land, jumping into the water. Ransom is pleased because he’s a strong swimmer. However, soon the Un-man is riding a fish. Apparently the fish aren’t asleep and are still cooperative with the Un-man. Even then it appears to be “urging” its fish onward with its nails.
Ransom finds himself in a shoal of the fishes and, after some difficulty, manages to get himself astride one of them. Ransom can’t see the Un-man any more, but as we’ve seen, these fish move as a unit, so Ransom doesn’t lose him. Once again Ransom shouts out poetry, this time from A Midsummernight’s Dream.
Ransom inspects himself and finds that his body is not in good condition:
He foolishly put back his hand to explore his shoulders, and almost screamed at the pain of his own touch. His back seemed to be in shreds and the shreds seemed to be all stuck together. At the same time he noticed that he had lost a tooth and that nearly all the skin was gone from his knuckles; and underneath the smarting surface pains, deeper and more ominous aches racked him from head to foot.
He realizes how thirsty he is and it turns out drinking while riding a fish is rather difficult. He risks passing out, but keeps it together.
They ride for quite some time. More fish join them, as well as a flock of birds.
Q. Thoughts on the final section of this chapter about Ransom’s discovery of Nature as a thing in her own right?
It came into his head that he knew nothing at all about this world. Some day, no doubt, it would be peopled by the descendants of the King and Queen. But all its millions of years in the unpeopled past, all its uncounted miles of laughing water in the lonely present . . . did they exist solely for that? It was strange that he to whom a wood or a morning sky on earth had sometimes been a kind of meal, should have had to come to another planet in order to realise Nature as a thing in her own right. The diffused meaning, the inscrutable character, which had been both in Tellus and Perelandra since they split off from the Sun, and which would be, in one sense, displaced by the advent of imperial man, yet, in some other sense, not displaced at all, enfolded him on every side and caught him into itself.
Wrap Up
Concluding Thoughts
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