Blog #8 - Out of the Silent Planet (and a little bit of Perelandra)- Vickie GG

First, even though I don't fully understand a lot of this text, I really love this book, as well as what I've read so far of Perelandra! Some varied thoughts and connections: 

• The Problem of Evil...Again
  I know I may be beating a dead demon here, but do we have the same potential Problem of Evil situation that I complained about in The Magician's Nephew, when Aslan created Narnia, knowing the White Witch was already in the not-yet-made world space? On pgs. 119-120, it says that Thulcandra's (Earth's) Oyarsa "became bent" (120), and that the other Oyarsas and eldila "drove him back out of hte heavens and bound him in the air of his own world," "before any life came on your world [of Thulcandra]" (120). So, there seems to be a theme here of some angel / celestial / supernatural being becoming evil, and then some deity or superior being locking that evil being up and subsequently creating humans in that same "locked" space. This is still very problematic to me, but I'm also feel a little burnt out of thinking about it...
  
  Updates: I went to the Philosophy poster session on Friday and learned some more info relevant to The Problem of Evil. 
  
  1) "Evil is a byproduct of humans' free will" (Triana Forad) 
  This is sort of a compelling argument. And yet, I'm one (of probably a small number of people) who think it would be better to not have free will but have peace / no evil vs. having free will and having evil. Probably an unpopular opinion, I know! But Triana also noted on her poster that "if we don't have free will, we can't think or grow." Not sure I 100% agree that we can't think, but this statement still gives me pause about endorsing a non-free-will perspective. 
  
  2) "Suffering...to serve a higher purpose" (Julanney Herrera) 
  Likewise, the idea of "suffering as He suffered" (Christ), similar to the St. Julian stuff. 
  Also, "do the thing you can do; let go of the thing you can't, and don't desire it" 
  This seems similar to Ransom's and The Lady's conversations about the good God gives you vs. the good you expected / wanted him to give you. 
  
  
• "The Real Meeting" - Reading vs. Remembering Myth 
  This is the main topic I'm considering for my final research paper. In the Narnia books and in Out of the Silent Planet, we see myths conveyed through many methods - written stories, oral tales, songs, and event pictorial myths. In Out of the Silent Planet (and what little I've read so far of Perelandra), Lewis seems to suggest the supremacy of the more immediate and unrepeatable modes of myth conveyance - song and spoken stories - over any written (and thus able to be reviewed or experienced over and again) form of mythmaking (which is ironic, considering we are reading his written myths). He talks about this directly (about storytelling / myth) and more indirectly in relation to "pleasure" (among which we could count the experience of "meeting" a myth). For my research, I'd be interested - using the goals of myth we've learned about from our class readings - to explore if Lewis's suspicion is "right," what the effects and value of each myth conveyance method are, etc. One thing from my own experience that makes me think Lewis might be right (or at least that I agree with him on this point): the book says that Ransom "saw now that it [Space / Heaven] was "the womb of worlds" (OotSP 34). I heard Dr. Redick speak almost the same phrase once when telling a story during a Tuesday Tea, about a time he and a friend hiked into a remote canyon somewhere, and Dr. Redick cried out that the pool they were in within the canyon was the "womb of the world" or something similar. What is interesting is that Dr. Redick's location (on Earth) is much more mundane or relatable and thus I would think would have less of a spiritual affect on me than Ransom's description of the Heavens. But since Dr. Redick's story was spoken (and by the person who lived it), and Ransom's story is written (and relayed second-hand by the narrator / Lewis), there is less of a true "meeting" in the latter, and thus it definitely affected me less. 
  
  Below are some textual examples of Lewis's argument. 
  
  
• OotSP: "But even in a poem does a hross never long to hear one splendid line over again?" (74)
  "The most splendid line becomes fully splendid only be means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. you would kill it" (75) AND "a pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered"..."what it will be when I rememebr it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting" (75)
• OotSP: "He [Ransom] was specially interested in a collection of rolls, seemingly skin, covered with characters, which were clearly books; but he gathered that books were few in Malacandra." "'It is better to remember,' said the sorns... 'the hrossa used to have many books of poetry...but now they have fewer. They say that the writing of books destroys poetry'" (101). 
• OotSP: Pg. 130 - description of when Ransom "awoke" due to Malacandrian song, at the hrossa funeral. While Ransom gains knowledge when looking at the written, pictorial myths in Meldilorn (pgs. 110-113), he does not gain the kind of "participation" and spiritual awakening described on pg. 130 - understanding "mystery," "through knowledge of the creatures and his love for them he began, ever so little, to hear it with their ears," "of he knew not what and yet what he had always known, awoke in him...and bowed down his spirit as if the gate of heaven had opened before him" (130)
• Perelandra: "to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. ...But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day," "how often in his life on earth he had reiterated pleasures not through desire, but in the teeth of desire and in obedience to a spurious rationalism" (38). 
• Perelandra: the bubble-trees - "how easy it would be to get up and plunge oneself through the whole lot of them and to feel, all at once, that magical refreshment multiplied ten-fold. But he was restrained by the same sort of feeling which had restrained him over-night from tasting a second gourd...but this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards...was it possibly the root of all evil?...but money itself - perhaps one valued it chiefly as...a security for being able to have things over again" (43). 
  
  
• Myths (and History) Across Worlds / Cultures 
  I'm interested in the idea of commonalities within myths across worlds (in these books) and cultures (in "real life"), so this could be another topic for the research paper (though I suspect this topic is a little more well-worn). I would probably particularly be interested in religious mythology across religions, but again, I think that's been done, and that's not really what Lewis focuses on here (though I think something I saw on the internet suggests our final book by Lewis might address those ideas...) Comments in the books that made me interested in this: 
• "Their mythology, like ours, associates some idea of the female with Venus" (OotSP 111). 
• "In the very different world called Malacandra...he had met the original of the Cyclops...were all the things which appeared as mythology on earth scattered through other worlds as realities" (Perelandra 40) 
• "Was this the beginning of the hallucinations he had feared? Or another myth coming out into the world of fact..." (Perelandra 48)? 
  
  
• "Ransom" 
  Not a very well-thought out idea or question, but I'm very interested in Lewis's choice of the name "Ransom" for the main character. The obvious meaning is that Weston and Devine initially intend Ransom to function as a, well, sacrifice or "ransom" to get something they want - sun's blood (i.e. gold) in the case of Devine, and continued access to the planet so they can take it over in the case of Weston. But I feel like - even with my limited memory of my Catholic / Protestant Christian upbringing - I remembered this same word being used somewhere in the Bible, in relation to Jesus. So, I looked it up - 1 Peter 1:18-19, "God paid a ransome to save you from the impossible road to heaven which your fathers tried to take, and the ransom he paid was not mere gold or silver, as you very well know. But he paid for you with the precious lifeblood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God." So...does this mean that - even though he didn't end up being a sacrifice to the Malacandrian Oyarsa and/or Maleldil in Out of the Silent Planet, does Lewis's choice of name for his main character portend that he must eventually die in order to win the celestial war on Thulcandra and finally free all of humanity from the clutches of their planet's / our planet's bend Oyarsa (who I'm assuming is supposed to be Satan or something like him)? Or will Ransom have to make some other sacrifice besides death (since Out of the Silent planet suggests in multiple places - from Ransom's own musings eventually - that death is not bad)? If any of this, I wonder why Lewis would put such a potential spoiler up front. Then again, we're dealing with God-related allegory, so maybe it is like the Titanic - it's not *really* a spoiler that the ship is eventually gonna go down...
  UPDATE: pgs. 125 - 127 of Perelandra - "it is not for nothing that you are named Ransom" 
  "My name is also Ransom, said the voice." So...YUP! :) 
  
  
• Fact or Fiction? Both? Neither? Does It Matter? 
  Up front in OotSP, Lewis calls this a "space-and-time story" (dedication), and says that he acknowledges his debt to "Mr. H.G. Wells's fantasies" (suggesting that his story, too, is not "literally" true but is a "fictional" work. But even early on, the narrator says "the events recorded in this book" (my emphasis) (20), with recorded suggesting history or things that "actually" happened, rather than a "made-up" tale. Then, in Chapter 20 and the postscript, this idea that what we as readers take to be a work of pure "fiction" is actually a true story that happened to whoever Ransom is and that Lewis (noted by name as the narrator) simply pretends the story is fiction because what happened "would certainly not be listened to as fact" and that writing this story as "fiction" would also "reach a great many people sooner than 'Weston'" (152). The Postscript - a supposed letter from "Ransom" to Lewis, is so realistic from one who experienced these things rather than a character that it kind of (almost) makes you believe this stuff really DID happen and that it is the "fiction" that is, in fact, a fiction. But then, at the start of Perelandra, it says on the title page that this is "A Novel," which it didn't say under OotSP, suggesting fiction (a "fictitious prose narrative"), and the Preface notes that "all the human characters in this book are purely fictitious," which suggests "Ransom" is not actually a real person but a made-up character, and thus the things that happened to "Ransom" surely happened to him in the Secondary World(s) of Lewis's Space Trilogy but NOT in our Primary World, on our Earth, Mars, and Venus. So, questions arise: does Lewis want us to think these stories are fact or fiction, both or neither? Whichever we believe, does that change the truths we can learn from these myths / stories? Does it even matter whether or not these stories actually happened or are "fiction"? (I would think yes, but I dunno?)  
  
  
• The Pfifltriggi!
  I am "anxious to know more of the pfifltriggi" (though I would of course also love to know more about the language too (155). First, I wonder why Lewis chose to spend so much time on the hross and sorns but almost no time with the pfifltriggi? It doesn't escape my notice that the one group of hnau Lewis chooses to gloss over is the one group that is matriarchal... But, my feminist objections aside, I would also be interested to learn more about these beings so I can better understand and empathize with my father-in-law. When Augray noted that the pfifltriggi "will make things for us...provided they are difficult enough. They have not the patience to make easy things however useful they would be" (98), that reminded me so much of my FIL, Roland! This guy LOVES making things and doing hands-on projects, but only if they are challenging. That always sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. So, if I could learn more about the pfifltriggi, it might help me be even closer with my FIL (who I already am tight with, but I just can't relate to why he wants to do all these difficult handy projects - yuck!)  
  
  
• Philosophies of Death 
  I'd be interested to research philosophers and religious scholars who discuss death and/or the role that myth plays in helping humans grapple with death. I was very interested in the musings about death and the death scenes ("unbodyings") shown in Out of the Silent Planet.