C. S. Lewis's Perelandra

Reshaping the Image of the Cosmos

Brendan Wolfe, Judith Wolfe

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612777184
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik in Science-Fiction

The first single-volume study of an important Lewis novel

C. S. Lewis considered his novel Perelandra (1943) among his best works. A triumph of imaginative science fiction, Perelandra —the second volume of Lewis's "Space Trilogy"—is also theologically ambitious. C. S. Lewis's Perelandra: Reshaping the Image of the Cosmos explores how the novel synthesizes the three traditions of cosmology, mythology, and Christianity. The first group of essays considers the cosmological implications of the world Lewis depicts in Perelandra while the second group examines the relationship between morality and meaning in Lewis's created cosmology of the planet Perelandra.

This work brings together a world-class group of literary and theological scholars and Lewis specialists that includes Paul S. Fiddes, Monika B. Hilder, Sanford Schwartz, Michael Travers, and Michael Ward. The collection is enhanced by Walter Hooper's reminiscences of his conversations with Lewis about Perelandra and the possible provenance of the stories in Lewis's imagination.

C. S. Lewis scholars and devoted readers alike will find this volume indispensible to the understanding of this canonical work of speculative fiction.

The Perelandran Cosmos

Voyage to Venus

Lewis’s Imaginative Path to Perelandra

MICHAEL WARD

When I think of Perelandra, the word that comes immediately to mind is plenitude. Plenitude . . . abundance . . . bounty: these are the qualities that linger upon the imaginative palate. In this second volume of his Cosmic Trilogy,¹ Lewis has created a veritable cornucopia, almost overwhelming in the intensity and vitality of the sensory pleasures that it describes, heaping them lavishly, like the Danaëan shower of gold,² upon its fortunate hero, Ransom, and through him upon us readers also.

And if plenitude aptly describes Ransom’s experience on Perelandra, and our experience in reading Perelandra, it is no less apt a term when it comes to surveying the novel from a critical and analytical standpoint, as this present volume does. What I mean by plenitude is perhaps usefully expressed by drawing a parallel with the twelve great feasts of the liturgical calendar of the Eastern Orthodox Church. These twelve great feasts, surprisingly, do not include the Feast of the Resurrection. That is because the Resurrection is a feast unto itself, the Feast of Feasts, in its own separate class, the completion and consummation of the other twelve. Plenitude, I suggest, should be regarded in a similar fashion vis-à-vis Perelandra: it should be seen as the quality that informs, envelops, and fulfils all the other literary, philosophical, and theological elements in the novel, not merely making of them a series of discrete banquets, pleasing to the intellect and the imagination in recognizable ways, but elevating them into a banquet of another order, a higher, epiphenomenal order, a whole new genus of literary pleasure.

Plenitude, plenty, plenteousness: the Perelandran Feast of Feasts. To other readers who may disagree that this is the essential flavor of the book, and who may wish to argue that their own favored aspect is the real center, I would reply, “Each is equally at the center and none are there by being equals, but some by giving place and some by receiving it, the small things by their smallness and the great by their greatness, and all the patterns linked and looped together by the unions of a kneeling with a sceptered love. Blessed be He!”³ In other words, whichever feature of the pattern one’s eye fixes upon becomes the center of the Great Dance and, also, the center of the book, and this is what I mean by plenitude: not just one particular aspect of the dance, but that very characteristic of the dance itself, its capacity to be more than the sum of its parts. All is central because all is loved. Perelandra is Venus, the planet of love, and love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. All things come equally within the loving embrace of Venus; she will have no favorites among her children. She will not prefer the wave that has just gone to the wave that is about to come. She will not choose one fish to ride on more often than another. Every single thing in her domain will be enjoyed freely and with a perfect equilibrium of attention, both to its peculiar qualities and to its universal qualities. She will have no favorites because all are favorites.

When one’s subject is plenitude, it is easy to lapse into thinking that plenitude is a “come-one-come-all” kind of multifariousness, an undiscriminating, bran-tub mentality. In fact, plenitude as Lewis presents it for our enjoyment in Perelandra is much more than just a bland “everything-ism.” There is a peculiar identity to plenitude that distinguishes it from other things, and that quality comes, I would suggest, from Lewis’s enduring, imaginative, and scholarly meditations upon the imagery associated with Venus.

In the rest of this essay, therefore, I wish to survey how Lewis gradually became more enamored of, and learned in, the personality of Venus during the years prior to his writing of Perelandra. Occasionally, where examples are particularly striking, I will glance forward to his continuing interest in Venus even after the writing of Perelandra, in order to emphasize just how long-lived and deep was his involvement with Venereal imagery. In so doing, I hope to provide a secure sense of Lewis’s imaginative voyage to Venus and show how he arrived at the presentation of plenitude that is the center of the trilogy’s central story.

IMAGINATIVE PREPARATION FOR PERELANDRA

“‘Sweeter than all it is when one bed holds twain that love, and the queen of Cypris is praised of both.’ Queen of Cypris, you know, is Aphrodite.” Thus Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, in 1917, quoting Asclepiades;⁴ it is the first manifestation of his literary interest in the goddess of the third heaven. A year later, he recalls to Greeves’s mind “the night when we first broached the ‘nameless secrets of Aphrodite.’”⁵ These nameless secrets, otherwise embarrassing or shameful to the young Lewis, became thinkable and discussible under the rubric of Aphrodite/Venus and the imagery associated with her, and it was around this time that he began to develop his abiding absorption in her qualities.

One area of interest encompassed musical expressions of her nature. Lewis listened to Wagner’s Tannhauser, or as he called it, Wagner’s “Venusburg music”; he listened to the “Bright Star of Eve” by Charles Gounod; he enjoyed Holst’s “Planets Suite,” with its interpretation of Venus as the bringer of peace.⁶ Music, as we will see below, became an important component of his eventual Perelandran sub-creation.

In the visual arts, too, Lewis found valuable expressions of Venus’s personality. While an undergraduate at Oxford, he hung a picture of Venus in his college rooms at University College, the picture in question probably being “The Mirror of Venus,” though whether it was the painting of that name by Velasquez or Titian or Burne-Jones or some other artist is unclear.⁷ Derek Brewer recalls that Bronzino’s “Allegory of Venus and Cupid” used to hang in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen.⁸ Alastair Fowler remembers also seeing there a “large, dim reproduction of Botticelli’s ‘Mars and Venus,’”⁹ a painting that Lewis particularly valued. George Watson recalls how Lewis said that he liked to peruse it when he was in a “Warburgian state of mind.”¹⁰ It is a painting to which we will have cause to return at the end of this essay.

In addition to finding Venus a useful symbolic way of talking about love and sex, and in addition to learning how Venus had been treated over the centuries by composers and painters, Lewis began to write his own poems about her. “I have nearly finished the Venus poem and am full of ideas for another,” he wrote to Greeves in 1919, and he mentioned further work on Venus-focused poetry in a letter to Leo Baker in 1921.¹¹ He also looked at Venus in the night sky, repeatedly mentioning his observations to his correspondents. To his brother in 1940, for instance, he wrote, “Every night Venus grows more spectacular. It is true Chaucerian weather!”¹² This mention of Geoffrey Chaucer takes us to an additional and even more extensive outlet for Lewis’s developing interest in Venus: namely, his scholarship.

As a medieval scholar, Lewis was of course intimately acquainted with the works of Chaucer, and his seven-volume edition of Chaucer’s complete works contains numerous marginal comments, underlinings, markings, and other annotations in his own hand that make for fascinating reading.¹³ In the endleaves of volume 5, for instance, Lewis made an index of eight items that especially interested him: three of these eight are connected with Venus. In one, he notes Chaucer’s description of Venus in “The Knight’s Tale,” which runs as follows:

The statue of Venus, glorious for to se,

Was naked, fletynge in the large see,

And fro the navele doun al covered was

With wawes grene, and brighte as any glas.

A citole in hir right hand hadde she,

And on hir heed, ful semely for to se,

A rose garland, fressh and wel smellynge;

Above hir heed hir dowves flikerynge. (lines 1955ff)

Lewis glosses citole as “a stringed instrument,” and although, when he came to create his own Green Lady on Perelandra, he does not have her playing an instrument, there are recurrent musical references throughout the story; these include a mention of Covent Garden in chapter 4, one of choral music in chapter 5, a suggestion of music that comes from inside Ransom’s own body in chapter 8, and a description of a beautiful song that he hears in chapter 15: “Now high in air above him, now welling up as if from glens and valleys far below, it floated through his sleep and was the first sound at every waking. It was formless as the song of a bird, yet it was not a bird’s voice. As a bird’s voice is to a flute, so this was to a cello: low and ripe and tender, full­-bellied, rich and golden-brown: passionate too; but not with the passions of men.” The final climactic scene of Perelandra was, Lewis said, deliberately “operatic” in its manner of presentation, and so it is highly appropriate that he should have welcomed Donald Swann’s idea to compose an opera based on the novel.

The other two references connected with Venus in Lewis’s index to volume 5 of his copy of The Canterbury Tales are to “Friday,” Venus’s day (which prompts Lewis to note “From Paxford, a Cotswold man, I have heard ‘Friday has a trick above all days’”),¹⁴ and to Venus as ranked among the seven planets of medieval cosmology. I say “medieval cosmology,” but, of course, the seven heavens of pre-Copernican astronomy were not a medieval invention; they go back to time immemorial, and Lewis’s scholarly interest in Venus finds play in the deepest roots of European mythology as well as in Middle English poetry. However, we cannot here examine his knowledge of Venus’s and Aphrodite’s many appearances in Roman and Greek mythology, let alone those of Freya or Frigg in Norse mythology. His knowledge of the subject was so extensive and detailed¹⁵ that we must confine our examination to medieval and Renaissance times only.

Venus was prominent in the planetary pantheon partly because she was so bright and beautiful and partly because she could be seen at both dawn and dusk: she was the Morning Star and the Evening Star, both Lucifer and Hesperus. Lewis gives the following brief summary of her qualities in his chapter on the heavens in The Discarded Image, his introduction to medieval and Renaissance literature:

In beneficence Venus stands second only to Jupiter; she is Fortuna Minor. Her metal is copper. The connection is not clear till we observe that Cyprus was once famed for its copper mines; that copper is cyprium, the Cyprian metal; and that Venus, or Aphrodite, especially worshipped in that island, was κúπρις, the Lady of Cyprus. In mortals she produces beauty and amorousness; in history, fortunate events. Dante makes her sphere the He...