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

The Center and the Rim: Inversions of the System of the Heavens in Perelandra and The Discarded Image

The Center and the Rim Inversions of the System of the Heavens in Perelandra and The Discarded Image Nikolay Epplée The writings of C. S. Lewis are deeply interrelated. Of special interest for the cultural historian are the relations between his scholarly and fictional works. They closely comment on one another: The Allegory of Love (written in parallel with the allegory Pilgrim’s Regress) is, in a way, a collection of images later expressed in the symbolism of Narnia. A Preface to Paradise Lost is likewise closely interconnected with the complex of moral problems treated in Mere Christianity (then being delivered as a series of radio talks), and provides an important parallel to the theme of Adam and Eve in Perelandra. The Discarded Image is a late Lewisian manifesto on the advantage of the medieval model over modernity, and in a way a historical subtext to his antimodernism.1 But the parallels between Lewis’s Cosmic or Space Trilogy and his “philological trilogy” constitute an especially fructuous and beautiful theme. Here is just one example (though a very important one) of interrelations between Perelandra and The Discarded Image. In the final chapter of Perelandra, the hero, a modest philologist who has become a ransomer of the Venusian version of sacred history, contemplates and joins the Great Dance, a visionary résumé of the novel. One of its leitmotifs is the theme of center and periphery, the center and the rim. Ransom first introduces this motif when he confesses that the recent events on Perelandra confound his cherished belief in the centrality of the human race, and thus bring uncomfortably close – 83 – 84 c. s. lewis’s perelandra the enemy’s talk which thrusts my world and my race into a remote corner and gives me a universe with no center at all, but millions of worlds that lead nowhere or (what is worse) to more and more worlds for ever, and comes over me with numbers and empty spaces and repetitions and asks me to bow down before bigness. . . . Is the enemy easily answered when He says that all is without plan or meaning? As soon as we think we see one it melts away into nothing, or into some other plan that we never dreamed of, and what was the center becomes the rim, till we doubt if any shape or plan or pattern was ever more than a trick of our own eyes, cheated with hope, or tired with too much looking.2 But peering into the Dance, Ransom perceives that Each grain is at the center. The Dust is at the center. The Worlds are at the center. The beasts are at the center. The ancient peoples are there. The race that sinned is there. . . . Where Maleldil is, there is the center. He is in every place. Not some of Him in one place and some in another, but in each place the whole Maleldil, even in the smallness beyond thought. There is no way out of the center save into the Bent Will which casts itself into the Nowhere. . . . Each thing was made for Him. He is the center. Because we are with Him, each of us is at the center. . . . There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no center because it is all center. (P, 216–18) Earlier in the novel, in the fascinating scene of Ransom’s visible battle with the Un-Man, Lewis introduces a seductive, “bent” image of the universe . Another earthman, seduced and turned into Satan’s emissary and embodiment, introduces Ransom to his master’s worldview: “All the good things are now—a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then—the real universe for ever and ever. . . . all the dead have sunk down into the inner darkness: under the rind. . . . Picture the universe as an infinite globe with this very thin crust on the outside” (P, 167–68). And God is outside this Globe, “like a Moon.” He is transcendent in the sense that He does not care for and never follows his creatures sinking into nonentity. This model of the universe is not merely the Un-Man’s drivel. It is a medieval universe from the corrupt creature’s point of view. Comparing inversions of the system in perelandra and the discarded image 85 the quoted description of the Great Dance with the Un-Man...