C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra: Reshaping the Image of the Cosmos

Perelandra in Its Own Time: A Modern View of the Space Trilogy

50 c. s. lewis’s perelandra Perelandra in Its Own Time A Modern View of the Space Trilogy Sanford Schwartz In the first two volumes of the Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943), C. S. Lewis presents his readers with a clear line of continuity and development as they proceed from one novel to the next. The continuity rests primarily on the conflict between the Christian protagonist , Elwin Ransom, and his two ruthless foes—the physicist Weston and the venture capitalist Devine—who are introduced in Out of the Silent Planet and who resurface in the two sequels—Weston in Perelandra and Devine (as Lord Feverstone) in That Hideous Strength (1945). The sense of development is most apparent in the gradual transformation of the hero, who progresses from a confused captive to an anointed agent of divine redemption as he confronts the demonic powers that threaten the beneficent order of the created universe. Equally important, however, are the largely neglected changes that occur in Ransom’s enemies and in the modern“evolutionary”or“developmental”modeltheyexplicitlyrepresent. In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom’s antagonists are associated with the popular “materialist” view of the evolutionary process—the infamous “struggle for existence”1—especially as it appears in H. G. Wells’s portrayal of interplanetary invasion in The War of the Worlds and elsewhere. The two villains use the presumption of their own evolutionary superiority to justify the conquest, displacement, or outright extermination of other rational beings, whether they are members of other species, as they are on Malacandra (Mars), or “inferior” members of our own species here on Earth.2 In Perelandra, Ransom once again encounters Weston, who has – 50 – a modern view of the space trilogy 51 been converted to “biological philosophy” and now espouses the vision of perpetual cosmic progress as it appears in Henri Bergson’s “creative evolution” and the British “emergent evolution” that followed in its wake. At first glance, the physicist’s conversion may seem a distinction without a difference, since the encounter between Ransom and Weston (or rather, the Satanic Un-man who gradually takes possession of Weston’s mind) rapidly descends, as it does in the first book, into a mortal conflict between Christian tradition and modern apostasy. Nevertheless, as readers of Lewis’s “interstellar romances,” we should not be too quick to shrug off the evil professor’s newfound faith. In many of his other writings, Lewis discriminates carefully between the “materialist” (or “mechanistic”) view of “orthodox Darwinism”3 and the “organic” (or “vitalist”) view of creative/ emergent evolution, and though he is critical of each of these stances, he refuses to equate the one with the other. Moreover, the distinction between Wellsianity (his term) and Bergsianity (my term) plays a constitutive role in the Space Trilogy. As we shall see, certain features of Lewis’s Malacandra suggest that this spiritually uncorrupted planet should be regarded as the “sublimation” or “taking up” of the Wellsian war between the species,4 while the distinctive temporal dynamism of Perelandra may be considered a sanctified version of “creative evolution” itself. In line with his Augustinian view that “bad things are good things perverted,”5 Lewis transforms first the mechanistic and then the vitalist views of evolution into pristine worlds that make their terrestrial counterparts appear as parodic distortions of unspoiled and divinely created originals. In this respect, the distinction between Wellsianity and Bergsianity illuminates not only the changing character of the evil powers in the two interstellar romances but also some of the most salient differences between the unfallen worlds that Lewis envisions on Mars and Venus before returning to Earth in the final volume of the series. Bergson and Lewis To appreciate the difference between mechanistic and vitalist views of the evolutionary process, we must take a closer look at creative evolution and the function it served in early-twentieth-century culture. The term itself is associated specifically with the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose 52 c. s. lewis’s perelandra Creative Evolution (1907) became one of the most influential books of the period.6 Bergson’s theory of evolution developed out of his pioneering reformulation of the concept of time, which upset the traditional priority of Being over Becoming and paved the way for the British movement of emergent evolution—expressed most notably in Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity (1920) and C. Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent...