Book Club: Perelandra
Plot summary:
Elwin Ransom, the main character of Out of the Silent Planet, is sent to the planet Perelandra—what we call Venus. Sent by whom? By Maleldil (that is, God). The actual trip is arranged and engineered by some eldila (angels). Apparently, the ancient Enemy, the “bent” angel of Earth (that is, Satan) intends some mischief there and Ransom is sent in response, but he doesn’t know exactly what he’s supposed to do once he gets there. He meets a Perelandran woman, who turns out to be THE Perelandran woman, the Venutian equivalent of Eve, who, along with a Perelandran man, has just “awakened” into sentience and rationality.
After a while Ransom discovers that his old nemesis from Out of the Silent Planet, Weston, has also made his way to Perelandra via his spaceship. But Weston has deliberately opened himself up to the influence of evil spirits and becomes legit possessed by Satan. In the physical form of Weston, Satan then begins a moral and verbal assault on the Woman, with the purpose of thoroughly corrupting her the way he did Eve, in the earthly garden of Eden.
It becomes clear to Ransom that he has been sent to Perelandra to intervene and prevent the “Fall” of this fledgling race. Will he succeed? Not even Ransom knows for sure…
C. S. Lewis: master of “supposal”
John Milton published his magnum opus — Paradise Lost — in 1667. It’s an epic retelling, in verse, of the story recounted briefly in the book of Genesis, chapter 3. Many of you are no doubt familiar with this passage:
Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, “Yea, hath God said, ‘Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’ ”
And the woman said unto the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ‘Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.’ ”
And the serpent said unto the woman, “Ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
Upon this choice hinged the entire future history of the world and the destiny of Mankind, the choice to obey God or to succumb to the temptation to “be as gods…”
Most of us know the rest of the story:
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
Milton’s masterpiece takes us from the garden of Eden, to the halls of Heaven, to the depths of Hell, in an imaginative tour de force that explains how such a catastrophe could possibly have happened, and thereby “justify the ways of God to men.”
Lewis was a university scholar and instructor well-versed in Milton. His book Preface to Paradise Lost should be required reading for anyone embarking on a journey through Milton’s incredible poem. But Lewis was also an author with a fertile imagination of his own, and he used the concept of “supposal” in his fiction.
Examples of C. S. Lewis’s most well-known supposals include:
Suppose there were a world populated by human beings, talking animals, and mythological creatures such as fauns and dryads. What might such a world be like? What if such a world needed saving in the same way the real world did? How might the Son of God appear in such a world? What Incarnate form would he take? (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)
Suppose the planet Mars were inhabited by various intelligent species? (Out of the Silent Planet)
Suppose that, in the myth of Psyche and Cupid, Psyche’s sisters really could not see her celestial palace and therefore rightly thought she had gone mad? (Till We Have Faces)
The supposal of Perelandra is this:
Suppose that, in the middle of the 20th century, God breathed rational souls into previously “brute” creatures on the planet Venus. Suppose also that Satan, the ancient enemy, got wind of this and traveled to the planet Venus in order to tempt and corrupt them, the way he corrupted Adam and Eve on planet Earth eons ago? Suppose further that God sent a human being from the planet Earth to intervene and prevent this from happening?
Where Paradise Lost is a retelling of Genesis chapter 3, Perelandra is a reimagining of it.
Lewisian themes in Perelandra and elsewhere
A reader of C. S. Lewis will notice several recurring themes, things that crop up again and again, expressed one way in his fiction, another way in his non-fiction, and yet another way in his poetry. Notable among these are:
First, our incomplete conception of “The Good.” We mistakenly think that Good is the same as “harmless,” “mild,” “non-threatening,” “safe.” But Lewis knew well that Goodness need be none of these things. Two passages come to mind. The first, in Perelandra, in which the Narrator encounters an eldil (angel):
I felt sure that the creature was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful?..Here at last was a bit of that world from beyond the world , which I had always supposed that I loved and desired, breaking through and appearing to my senses: and I didn’t like it. I wanted it to go away. (Perelandra)
The second passage is a scene from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which two of the Pevensy children express some reservations about meeting Aslan:
“Is he—quite safe? [said Susan] I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
The second recurring theme in the works of C. S. Lewis is Holy Desire. The German word sehnsucht describes this feeling as “inconsolable longing.” It’s the sense of intensely missing something that we’ve never actually experienced. It’s the ineffable, almost excruciating sweetness of the Divine breaking through. Lewis called it Stabs of Joy. It is a reminder that our primordial longing for is Heaven.
This passage is from Perelandra:
The cord of longing which drew him to the invisible isle seemed to him at that moment to have been fastened long, long before his coming to Perelandra, long before the earliest times that memory could recover in his childhood, before birth, before the birth of man himself, before the origins of time. It was sharp, sweet, wild, and holy, all in one, and in any world where men’s nerves have ceased to obey their central desires would doubtless have been aphrodisiac too, but not in Perelandra.
From childhood, Lewis was captivated by this elusive feeling. Like happiness, it is not something sought for its own sake; it is a side-effect of living well and an unexpected gift to received with gratitude.
A third concept that appears again and again in Lewis is the redemption and restoration of our human appetites. Because of the Fall, our appetites are distorted and perverted. The appetite for food and drink morphs into Gluttony. The desire for companionship and communion becomes Lust. The need for rest descends into Sloth. If our legitimate desires and appetites are thwarted and unfulfilled, we risk succumbing to Wrath or Dejection. Or if we perceive that others seem to possess what we desire, we may become full of Envy, Bitterness, and Resentment.
But on both Malacandra and Perelandra, Ransom experienced purification of his senses, desires, and appetites. For example, in Chapters 3 and 4, Ransom encountered the various fruit of Perelandra. After his first taste of the delicious fruit, he reaches for another one. But…
…it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favour of tasting this miracle again; the childlike innocence of fruit, the labours he had undergone, the uncertainty of the future, all seemed to commend the action. Yet something seemed opposed to this “reason.” It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again.
Other works in which Lewis explores the proper subjugation and utilization of our human faculties include The Great Divorce and The Abolition of Man.
C. S. Lewis subverts more Science Fiction tropes
In Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis cast as villains the earthmen whose goal was to travel throughout the galaxy, laying waste to every civilization they discovered, in order to repopulate every planet with human beings. This was a direct rebuke of the common science fiction trope of his day, namely the glorious expansion of humanity into every corner of the galaxy, for profit and for the propagation of our own species, in the process shouldering aside every sentient race with which we came into contact.
Perelandra also contains some trope subversion, such as:
Extra-terrestrial planets are all exotic, dangerous, and inhospitable, and, by extension, all the beings encountered on other planets are dangerous and inhospitable. Lewis’s vision of the planet Venus is more akin to a Pacific island paradise, one that any reasonable or sensible person would very much want to live in.
Temptation comes in the form of appealing to our physical senses or to our materialistic desires. By contrast, both in the biblical account and in Perelandra, the Tempter targets the Woman’s mind by subtle intellectual twisting and bending of the truth, and by appealing to her pride.
The subtlety and cleverness of evil. The tempter on Perelandra, the Unman, definitely deploys deception and clever wordplay, but Ransom eventually realizes that the Unman is waging a war of attrition—by sheer volume of words and brute persistence, the woman will become exhausted and her defenses will crumble. Ransom realizes that it’s no use trying to reason with un-reason. His solution? Drastic measures. Mayhem ensues.
Resources for further reading
If you’d like to pick up your own copies of Perelandra and the other books we mentioned, do check out Clare’s Bookshop.org page. Scroll down to the Splanchnics Book Club section, the C. S. Lewis section, or the Science Fiction & Fantasy section.
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Credits
Cover illustration for Perelandra by Kinuko Y. Craft for the 1986 paperback edition, Macmillan Publishing Company.
Theme Music: “Splanchnics Riff” composed and performed by Clare T. Walker