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NB: This post contains inevitable spoilers!
One of the most striking characteristics of the diabolical N.I.C.E. in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength is its noise.
The silence and solitude of Bragdon Wood are soon destroyed by “such noises as had never been heard in [the Common Room at Bracton] before – shouts and curses and the sound of lorries heavily drumming past or harshly changing gear, rattling of chains, drumming of mechanical drills, clanging of iron, whistles, thuddings, and an all pervasive vibration. Saeva sonare verbera, tum stridor ferri tractaeque catenae, as Glossop, sitting on the far side of the fire, had observed to Jewel.” As Glossop rightly observes, quoting Virgil’s description of the torments of the Underworld in Book VI of The Aeneid, what now emerges from Bragdon Wood is not mere noise but the sound of hellish torment.
It is a comparison we are likely to remember a few pages later when Mark disconsolately explores the grounds of Belbury and is “surprised by a stable-like smell and a medley of growls, grunts, and whimpers – all the signs, in fact, of a considerable zoo.” Any pleasant connotations of childhood are soon swept away as “a loud melancholy howl arose and then, as if it had set the key, all manner of trumpetings, bayings, screams, laughter even, which shuddered and protested for a moment and then died away into mutterings and whines.” Nor is this the last we hear of howling in the book. After the silent, timeless moment of Jane’s conversion, new noises break out as she is beset by temptation: “the voices of those who have not joy rose howling and chattering from every corner of her being.”
What we find at St Anne’s, by contrast, is silence and stillness. When Jane arrives at the Manor, “[s]he passed down one long passage, through that silence which is not quite like any other in the world – the silence upstairs, in a big house, on a winter afternoon.” Similarly, Merlin is struck by the silence of the house when he arrives: “In all the house there are warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial,” he says.
It is a silence we have been long prepared for. When the narrator visits Bragdon Wood at the beginning of the book, he tells us that the wood’s loneliness “felt more like the loneliness of a very large room in a deserted house than any ordinary solitude out of doors” and “[a]s I went forward over the quiet turf I had the sense of being received.” No wonder then, since the “air was so still and the billows of foliage so heavy about me, that I fell asleep,” just as Jane and the rest of the company at St Anne’s do after Merlin’s arrival. Silence and stillness are the marks of holiness and happiness in the book.
Not just silence but stillness too, as we see when Merlin arrives at the door of the Manor at St Anne’s: “The light fell full on his face, from which Ransom had the impression of an immense quietness. Every muscle of this man’s body seemed as relaxed as if he were asleep, and he stood absolutely still.”
Silence is quite a weak word in English. Or, at least, it’s a word that can be understood as either negative or positive. But there is a word which describes the silence and stillness we find in That Hideous Strength. It’s the Greek word, hesychia, which means “a state of inner tranquillity or mental quietude and concentration which arises in conjunction with, and is deepened by, the practice of pure prayer and the guarding of heart and intellect. Not simply silence, but an attitude of listening to God and of openness towards him.” (The Philokalia, Vol.1, p.365)
This is a very helpful word, I think, because it helps us to understand how the company at St Anne’s defeats the devilish conspirators at Belbury. They don’t fight fire with fire. They respond with silence and stillness, listening to God and being open to him.
We see this conflict between direct action and hesychastic openness to God in one of the great comic characters in the book, MacPhee, who is the voice of sceptical materialism at St Anne’s: “It may have occurred to you to wonder, Mrs Studdock,” he says, “how any man in his senses thinks we’re going to defeat a powerful conspiracy by sitting here growing winter vegetables and training performing bears. It is a question I have propounded on more than one occasion. The answer is always the same: we’re waiting for orders.” Ransom is able to wait on God: MacPhee is not. That is the essential difference between them. And, of course, Ransom is proved right in the end.
Part of the strength of this wonderful book is that Lewis manages to dramatise listening and waiting just as much as he dramatises speech and action. There may be more speech and action in the book as a whole, but it is listening and waiting which really matter and which ultimately drive the narrative. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way the book ends. In a sense, the whole narrative leads up to the “sacrificial ceremony” of the final paragraph, to a time of true at-one-ment. The book begins and ends in silence, but the silence on the first page is the silence of frustration. By the end of the book, Jane has found another way of silence and is transformed.
Thank you kindly for writing on that Latin quotation. My husband and I were reading that chapter recently and it took some time to find the source. Honestly, I didn't read your entire article because I want to avoid spoilers – many thanks for the warning!