Writers in The Habit of Being

There are lots of writers and books in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (The Noonday Press, 1979; 1988). Most are the usual subjects of American literature: Henry James, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Allen Tate, Eudora Welty. There are British, French, and other authors, too. One of the French authors is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who was an inspiration for the old priest in The Exorcist, written by William Peter Blatty. I won't cover very many authors here. Instead I'll just write about those who are of interest to readers and fans of weird fiction, science fiction, and fantasy--plus one more.

Hugh B. Cave (1910-2004) wrote for Weird Tales. In a letter to Robert Giroux (Sept. 29, 1960; p. 409), Flannery O'Connor mentioned that the Sister Superior of a Dominican congregation of nuns had written to "a man named Hugh Cave," asking him to write about the life a twelve-year-old girl who had died of cancer. He declined, saying that a Catholic author ought to do it, and so the Sister Superior approached Flannery to edit a manuscript that they had developed on their own. Where things went from there, I don't know. But it's interesting that a teller of weird tales is in her letters.

In a letter to Elizabeth McKee, dated July 16, 1952, Flannery O'Connor wrote: "A man named Martin Greenberg from the American Mercury wrote and asked me if I have any stories. I referred him to you." (p. 42) With Gunther Stuhlmann, Martin Greenberg worked as an associate editor at the American Mercury. The editor was William Bradford Huie. In the summer of 1952, the magazine changed hands, selling to a businessman named Russell Maguire. The editorial staff seems to have stayed on for a time. I have gone into this detail because there was a science fiction editor and publisher named Martin Greenberg (1918-2013). However, I haven't found anything to indicate that these two men were one and the same.

In her letters, Flannery O'Connor wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. She was especially influenced by her reading of The Humorous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. (pp. 98-99) The problem for me now is that there doesn't seem to have been a book by that title.

Her opinion of Ayn Rand is too good to pass up. On May 31, 1960, she wrote to Marryat Lee: "I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickie Spillane look like Dostoevsky." (p. 398)

Tennessee Williams is in The Habit of Being. He wrote one story for Weird Tales. So is Philip Wylie. He didn't, not even one. Wylie wrote science fiction, though, including an episode of The Name of the Game entitled "L.A. 2017," about a dystopian future. (The protagonist dreams rather than sleeps his way into the future.) I remember The Name of the Game and would like to see it again. I'm not sure that I ever will. Five hundred channels to look at and no Name of the Game.

The one more is Hollis Summers (1916-1987). As far as I know, he never wrote any works of fantasy, science fiction, or weird fiction. He did, however, write a crime novel called The Case of the Bludgeoned Teacher (originally Teach You a Lesson, 1956) under a pseudonym, Jim Hollis. Summers was a novelist, short story writer, poet, and teacher. He was one of a group of authors who taught at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in the 1960s and afterwards. In addition to Hollis Summers, they included Jack Matthews (1925-2013), Daniel Keyes (1927-2014), Walter Tevis (1928-1984), and Cecil Hemley (1914-1966). I have a friend who lives outside of Athens on the site of an old strip-mine operation. When she was young, her parents would have people over to the house. I asked her about some of the Ohio University authors. She remembers meeting Hollis Summers. "What kind of a person was he?" I asked. "Oh, he was a fantastic person," she said. By the way, Cecil Hemley was the director of the Noonday Press, which published The Habit of Being years after his premature death.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) knew Hollis Summers. In a letter to John Hawkes, dated September 10, 1963, she wrote: "I remember Hollis Summers and his wife very well and always liked them. They usually send me a poem at Christmastime with no return address on it but I think they are somewhere like Kentucky or Ohio." (pp. 537-538) At the time she wrote, Summers was not only "somewhere like . . . Ohio," he was actually in Ohio, teaching at Ohio University.

I received The Habit of Being as a Christmas gift. I backtracked from the index in search of the letter to Betty Hester. But I also looked for other authors, and I was pleased to find mention of Hollis Summers. I read his novel City Limit (1948) last year and enjoyed it. But I was even more pleased to read that he sent Christmas cards to Flannery O'Connor, for I have some of his Christmas cards, too, or at least the verse from his Christmas cards. I found them in copies of his books that I bought at a boutique in Athens. What a strange and wonderful thing it is to find these connections, especially when you can talk to a person who knew an author, or find something in your own life that was once in a book, or something in a book that is part of your own life. (My exact birthdate is in a book by Frederick Forsyth. I have never encountered such a thing before.) I suppose books and reading will one day go by the wayside as we rush into our illiterate and idiotic future. But at least we still have these things now. They of the future will have no idea what they missed.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Scraps of Research

The Grand Inquisitor in Star Wars

The Grand Inquisitor is a character within a story or poem told in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1879-1880), but he is also in the animated TV show Star Wars Rebels, appearing first in 2014. I'll admit I have never seen him at work. I have seen images on the Internet, though. I'm struck by a similarity to the cover illustration of The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man that I showed the other day, namely, the nearly monochromatic scheme of each but with bright red highlights: the original Grand Inquisitor has a red serpent tongue, while the Star Wars character has red facial markings, a red light saber, and red background lighting. Like his namesake, he's bad but more obviously bad. He's also bald and has sunken, though shining, eyes. A great difference: the Star Wars saga takes place in a more or less amoral universe. The original parable of the Grand Inquisitor is of course one of good versus evil. I should add that the other red highlights in the cover illustration for The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man are the stigmata of Jesus Christ.

The Sith

Speaking of Star Wars, I was reading The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin by Brian Attebery (1980) when I ran across a word I had heard before but not in the same context. Mr. Attebery was referring to a folkloric creature in his writing. It's a new one for me. The creature is called a sith, and it's in Scottish folklore. There is the Cat Sith, the Dog Sith (or Cu Sith), and the Baobhan Sith, a female vampire. Darth Vader is of course the Dark Lord of the Sith. We didn't know what that meant in 1977 but it sounded cool. I'm not sure that George Lucas knew what it meant either. He is, after all, renowned for his retroactive changes to his original creation. I think Mr. Lucas drew concepts and inspiration from lots of different sources, but I have never read that his word sith comes from the Scottish original, even if Star Wars is something of a fairy tale. 

"I Am Not a Number, I Am a Free Man!" 

I have written a lot about We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924). To me it is an essential book. I would urge everyone to read it, especially because of what we're facing right now.

We is narrated by a character called D-503. Over the course of the book, he falls in crazy-love with a woman called I-330. I started thinking about those numbers, and so I said to the Internet, "Hey, Internet, is 503 a prime number?"

The Internet's answer?

"Yes, 503 is a prime number."

But, wait, there's more. According to the website Find the Factors, 503 is the sum of the cube of the first four prime numbers (2, 3, 5, and 7). And more still: "503 is the smallest prime number that is the sum of consecutive cubes of prime numbers. 503 is also the sum of three consecutive prime numbers: 163, 167, and 173."*

Is any of this significant? I don't know. As Doctor McCoy might say, I'm a writer, not a mathematician. But it seems to me that D-503, a mathematician driven by the need to bring about a mathematically perfect happiness among men, has an alphanumeric designation of some significance.

So, 503, a number, applies to a mathematician and an instrument of the United State. And what of I-330? Well, I is not significantly a letter but a word: I, signifying the individual in recognition of her identity and individuality.** Her number, 330, is composite--being a woman and a rebel against the State, she has manifold aspects and is made up of manifold things.

In traditional culture, numbers were made into words: deuce, trey, dozen, score, gross. You might say they migrated from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. In the nineteenth century--the first mass century--words, that is, people's names, made the return trip and were made into numbers, at least in literature. From The New Utopia by Jerome K. Jerome (1891):

"Oh! there was so much inequality in names. Some people were called Montmorency, and they looked down on the Smiths; and the Smythes did not like mixing with the Joneses: so, to save further bother, it was decided to abolish names altogether, and to give everybody a number."

I can't say for sure, but I imagine that was the first use of alphanumeric designations in the literature of Utopia/Dystopia. Here is a list of a few more instances, the first edition of the Internet Dystopian Fiction Alphanumeric Designation Database (IDFADDb):

• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (novel, 1924)
• Anthem by Ayn Rand (novel, 1938)
• The Prisoner, created by Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein (TV show, 1967)
• Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (novel, 1967; film, 1976)
• THX 1138, directed by George Lucas (film, 1971)

By the way, in Anthem, I is the word that the rebels discover once they have fled from the control of the State. Before that, each calls himself or herself we and the other they. The State prefers the plural to the singular, the collective to the individual, We to I, Unity to Individuality, Rebellion, and Dissent. Some things never change.

Of course we have numbers now, too, and are tracked and monitored by them. Numeric or alphanumeric designations might be a little old-fashioned, though. I don't know much about these things, but it seems to me that they are being or soon will be replaced by graphinumeric (my new word) designations: bar codes or UPC codes, matrix codes or 2D barcodes, Quick Response or QR codes, etc. And what is facial recognition software but the conversion and reduction of the face--the visage of the living, ensouled, sacred human being--into soulless binary code, all for the purposes of the State? There is something saving us right now: facial recognition technology is essentially racist. Once that problem is taken care of, though--and it will be--we will all be in greater peril.

*A note in revision, January 30, 2021: It occurs to me now that 330 is the sum of two of these three consecutive prime numbers: 163 + 167 = 330. It follows then that 330 is the difference between 503 and the third: 503 - 173 = 330. So is any of this significant? I still don't know.

**A second note in revision, February 10, 2021: In the English version of We, her designation is I-330. The I- prefix is no doubt significant. But what is the prefix in the original Russian? Is it я, the equivalent personal pronoun in Russian? Is it in fact І, a letter eliminated from Russian orthography in the first years of revolution, 1917-1918? Or is it something else? I think the answer is significant, but I think it would take the work of a Russian scholar to figure these things out.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A Return to Cozy Dystopia

I'm back again after a month, but this probably won't last very long. There's always so much to do until there isn't anymore. I last wrote about the concept of the cozy dystopia in art. This is in contrast to the more common dark dystopia, exemplified, I think, in Blade Runner (1982), Brazil (1985), and the less well known Batman: Digital Justice (1990). The cozy dystopia is one in which things are clean, bright, and shiny, yet society and people's lives within it, all creations and outward manifestations of the State, are perfectly awful. In Cozy Dystopia, everyone has what he needs except a chance at happiness.

In my conception of it, the cozy dystopia runs parallel to Brian Aldiss' cosy catastrophe. Examples of the cosy catastrophe are pretty easy to come by. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (1959) is one. In thinking about it over the past few weeks, I have come up with a possible cozy dystopia, too. It is described in Player Piano by a fellow Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Originally published in 1952, Player Piano has been reprinted many times, in English, Italian, German, French, and even Croatian. I had read a few years back about this book and eagerly sought it out. When I finally found a copy, I dove in and there began a long, long slog through one of the most boring and event-free books I have ever known. I suppose the eventlessness in Player Piano is in keeping with the idea of the dystopian society, which is, after all, one of complete stasis. Or, as D-503, the protagonist in We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, explains to the rebel and his soon-to-be lover, I-330:

"It is inconceivable! It is absurd! Is it not clear to you that what you are planning is a revolution? Absurd because a revolution is impossible! Because our--I speak for myself and for you--our revolution was the last one. No other revolutions may occur. Everybody knows that."

In other words, there can be no revolution after the one that introduces a completely stable and eventless dystopia into the world. 

* * *

By the way, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) and Logan's Run (1976) might also be called cozy dystopias. In Logan's Run, as in our world of today, there is even a Tinder-like machine called "the circuit" for choosing sexual partners: in the dystopian future as in the world of today, the individual human being is both objectified and commodified. Reduced in the mind of the user to mere material, the object of his desire is literally materialized within and by "the circuit."

* * *

I wrote before about the bread-and-circuses component of the cozy dystopia. In thinking about these things since then, I remember that the place of origin of the bread (i.e., food) and circuses (i.e., entertainment) that currently arrive in such vast supply on our doorsteps is called a "fulfillment center." Yes, you will be fulfilled by buying more stuff, so keep at it, America. Keep climbing that asymptotic slope towards the mountaintop of your happiness.

* * *

So, I wrote last about dystopia. In the interim we have had instead in the real world a taste of apocalypse. The mob has emerged from all of its dark, fetid places and has fallen upon us like a horde of zombies, bent on our destruction. Dystopia and apocalypse are interrelated--there can be no doubt of that. In much of our popular culture, the latter precedes the former. Anthem by Ayn Rand (1938) is a good example of this. Sometimes dystopia grows out of apocalyptic conditions: the aspiring dystopian ruler simply takes advantage of disaster and disorder to construct his perfectly awful society upon the ruins of the previous, far less awful one. Other times, the tyrant and his minions actually bring about the destruction of the preceding society so as to build their new, dystopian version in its place, complete with a calendar reset to Year Zero. That seems to be the aim of our current breed of aspiring tyrants. Apocalypse first, then Dystopia. We have seen people like them before. We will again. We can gain some comfort in knowing that they have always been and always will be defeated. Nevertheless, we should know this: although reality may be arrayed against them, we can't really count on it to defeat them by itself, not, that is, without the customary heaps of rotting bodies, deep, vast, mass graves, and chains of miserable gulags stretching from sea to shining sea. We have to take an active part in their defeat if we are to head these things off.

* * *

You're not supposed to give advice to your enemies, but the zombie hordes running through our streets, universities, and television studios should know two things. One is a lesson from history, and it is this: although you as a revolutionary may be the one pulling the trigger today, tomorrow you will be the one facing the firing squad. That's not just a figure of speech: it will really happen, as it has happened before. (Why do progressives always think they're doing something new?) Just ask the ghosts of Trotsky and Robespierre. In the worlds of art and entertainment, Jimmy Kimmel and J.K Rowling have had the mob turn upon them. Margaret Atwood, too, I think. Yesterday these people were progressives. Today they are dangerous reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries. The mob is unlikely to rest until they are destroyed, or at least rendered non-persons, or persons of little or no consequence. Just past his allotted threescore-and-ten, Stephen King has been cowed and now speaks nonsense so as to conform to the mob's orthodoxy. In the process he has made himself inconsequential as an artist and thinker. He probably imagines that he has saved himself. He should know, though, that his time before the firing squad will come, too. It's just that instead of tomorrow, it will happen the day after tomorrow. In any event, we might feel sorry for Mr. Kimmel, Ms. Rowling, and others like them who have been hoisted with their own petards. Then again, we might not.

The other thing that the zombie hordes and their tyrant-leaders might want to know is that there is a poison pill in each of us, poison, that is, to those who aspire to control us. However hard they might try to impose dystopia upon us, they must always fail because we each have within us the means of their destruction: each one of us alone has greater power than the entire State. Imagine that. Here is the explanation: because the State is made by man, it is trapped within time and cannot endure. The spirit and nature of the individual, on the other hand, made as they are by something greater than man, exist outside of time and are thus eternal and imperishable. The Progressive believes otherwise of course, that the Perfect State is the end point of History and will thus last forever in its unchanging condition, also that the individual human being is negligible and eradicable, his spirit extinguishable.* The poison pill is of course our freedom, that unalienable, inseparable, and irrepressible condition of our very existence. The tyrant may have his run and murder millions, but in the end human freedom always wins and he is undone.

* * *

Sex, too, is a poison pill, a passion so great that it always undermines the efforts of the State. That's why the State always seeks to control it. See Orwell's 1984 or Anthony Burgess' 1985 for explications of the State's antipathy to sex. One of the problems with sex--from the point of view of the State, I mean--is that it is so completely powerful. It is meant to be that way, I would wager, by the One who planted the seed of sex within us. Another is that sex is inextricably bound to love, marriage, and the formation of families. The State cannot tolerate any of these institutions because they necessarily stand between it and the individual. In other words, if the individual loves and is devoted to another person or persons, then he cannot fully love or devote himself to the State--and he must so love and devote himself. He must prostrate himself before the State. Nothing must intervene between it and him, and there can be no other object for him. That explains the statist/socialist/progressive desire to undermine and ultimately destroy marriage and family. We have had that in rounds of recent supreme court decisions, deposited upon us and our Constitution like stinking piles of manure. Look elsewhere on the Internet for this quote: "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement . . . ." From there it drones on and on as boring and tiresome socialists inevitably do. As Jahn in the Star Trek episode "Miri" might say, Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, too bad for all of them. The poison pill has been expertly placed and cannot be removed. You, the statist/socialist/progressive, can only choke on it. Excuse me if I don't offer you a glass of water or a pump for your stomach.

* * *

*A pertinent quote from George Orwell's 1984, pertinent not just here but to our current situation:

He [the protagonist Winston Smith] tried to make her [his lover Julia] understand. "This was an exceptional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. [Emphasis added.]

Update (June 30, 2020): Here is another quote, from a digital flyer announcing a protest at the home of the multi-bezillionaire who sends us all the stuff we so crave: "Abolish the present. Reconstruct our future." Emphasis added again. Note the recurring use of the word abolish. At the protest itself, modern-day Jacobins set up a guillotine as a not-very veiled threat against him. My comment is this: You can't make this stuff up. My thought: I wonder if the protesters ordered their sign-making materials from the multi-bezillionaire himself and had it delivered to their doorsteps. My disclaimer: I did not pay anyone to do these things just so I might look oh-so-smart and my essay oh-so-prescient. Actually, you don't have to be very smart to see through these people and to understand that when it comes to humanity and its endeavors, there is nothing new under the sun.

Utopia 14 (1954), the Bantam Books edition of Player Piano (1952) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The cover art is by Charles Binger (1907-1974), who also, as it turns out, did the cover art for the Bantam edition of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1953).

Revised during the day and into the evening, June 30, 2020.
Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

From Things To Come into The Space Trilogy-Part Five

There are now more parts to this series than there are to The Space Trilogy. It's been this way for several days now. This is the end of it, though, and it comes on a momentous day in English history mostly by serendipity. I should point out that this entry also makes 1,001 posts in the history of my blog--one thousand and one Tellers of Weird Tales.

You can fairly say that the villains in The Space Trilogy are not three-dimensional characters at all but strawmen. Maybe the whole thing is an allegory (or a melodrama) and so characterization takes a back seat to the author's main purpose. In any case, C.S. Lewis sets up his villains and then easily mows them down again, not so much with the events of his plot as with the weakness of their own words and beliefs: he leads us to see them as they truly are, as dangerous fools, liars, and charlatans. His villains don't stand a chance against his fully operational faith in greater things. People in the real world would seem fuller and a little more complicated than this comic book- or science fiction-type villain, but then Crazy Bernie or one of his acolytes spouts some bit of nonsense and you begin to see that there really are strawmen in the world. Stupid, ignorant, and dangerous in the extreme, they are in dire need of being mowed down.

I have been writing about gnosticism, which has reared its head again and again throughout history and since the nineteenth century in the form of Marxism and socialism. It's in science fiction and fantasy, too. In The Space Trilogy, it drives first Weston, then the people of N.I.C.E., towards an ultimate goal of pure-spirit. Here is one of them, Gould, in That Hideous Strength:

"In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould--all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must be rid of. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."

He concludes:

"There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become governable." [Emphasis added; from Chapter 8.]

That is the goal and thus, I think, the anti-sex, anti-body (or mind-over-body or mind-more-important-than-body) attitude of progressivism and leftism, of socialism and statism, exhibited in 1984 for example but also explained in Anthony Burgess' 1985:

Fornication is forbidden by the State, since it offers a pleasure the State cannot control. To make love physically is an act of rebellion. (p. 101)

Remember, too, the story of Whittaker Chambers' conversion, recounted by Jonathan Leaf (from the website Stream, here):

     Suffering from melancholy and loneliness, Whittaker desperately wanted to believe in a cause that would offer him hope. And, for a time, the Communist movement offered him this. But there were costs involved in being part of it. One was that the Communists did not believe that their cadres should have children, as the party wanted their total devotion. Thus, when his wife became pregnant, the couple was told that she should have an abortion.
     This was a turning point for Chambers.
     He and his wife wanted a family, and they came to realize that the Communist Party’s ideas were in the most literal sense anti-life. [Emphasis added.]

The progressive/leftist/socialist/statist cause is of course notorious for its anti-life and by extension anti-body and anti-sex attitude. Or maybe it's the other way around: a person becomes anti-life, anti-body, and anti-sex before he goes looking for a creed that might affirm him in his convictions. I guess the reason is that true believers of this kind strive to be as gods or angels, just as in That Hideous Strength the members of N.I.C.E. attempt to become sexless, bodiless, and deathless, like the angelic eldila:

 "He says they don't breathe. He said also that they don't reproduce their species and don't die." (Chapter 9)

We should remember that Marx saw himself as being above ordinary people. There are people today--they will always be with us--corrupted to their souls with the same kind of arrogance and contempt for their fellow human beings. Is it bad of me if I say it will come as a kind of satisfaction to watch them become old, frail, and sickly--to see them finally on their deathbeds? Will they finally realize, in the confrontation, their own bodily-ness? Their own mortality? Where will all of their aspirations to godhood be then?

* * *

At the end of Chapter 9 of That Hideous Strength, there is a long statement as to the nature of the crisis at hand:

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom's own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manœuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. [. . .] Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.

Here, then, is the program:

1. "Despair of objective truth" to be insinuated not just in scientists but in everyone. (Paul Johnson diagnosed more or less the same problem--that there is nothing fixed and all is relative--in his history Modern Times.)

2. "A concentration upon mere power": here is O'Brien in 1984:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. [. . .] The object of power is power." (From Part 3, Chapter 3)

Here is that dingbat congresswoman from New York recently, letting the mask slip before hiding herself again:

"So I don't want your money as much as we want your power. The people, not me."

It's always in the name of the people.

3. "[T]he old dream of Man as God", the gnostic dream, I guess, of escape from the body and the confines of Earth, into bodiless-ness, into pure-spirit, free to remake the Creation and to wander unbound over its vastnesses.

4. "[A] conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress."

Then, a related question:

What should they [the people of N.I.C.E.] regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?

The French philosopher Paul Virilio (1932-2018) asked questions like it in his book Art and Fear (2003). You can read some of his words and what I wrote about him and his book by clicking here. (I should point out that this point--and Virilio's point--is just one more bit of evidence in support of Brian Aldiss' statement that all science fiction is gothic and descends from Frankenstein.)

There are of course people still at work trying to implement that program. Lewis recognized them in his day and predicted them in our own. In That Hideous Strength, they are defeated, at least for a while. Like the plague in Camus' novel, though, their ideas are certain to go simply back into a trunk, only to flare up again on another day. In any case, they're back, and they'll keep coming back, in one form or another, for as long as there are people, and wherever we happen to live in this universe. As Lewis wrote in the first book of his trilogy, we are bent and because of that we are to be quarantined on this silent planet.

* * *

George Orwell objected to the supernatural elements in That Hideous Strength. (You can read his review here.) He objected specifically to the resurrection of the old Arthurian wizard Merlin. I'm not sure that Lewis handled this part of his story very well. I admit to being confused by it, the way Orwell seems to have been confused. There is an idea that struck me in the Merlin plot, though, especially considering current events. After the crisis is resolved, Dimble, one of the good guys, observes:

". . . gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting."

     "What haunting?" asked Camilla.

    "How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? [. . . ] There has been a secret Logres [i.e., the original Arthurian realm] in the very heart of Britain all these years; an unbroken succession of Pendragons. [. . .] [I]n every age they and the little Logres which gathered round them have been the fingers which gave the tiny shove or the almost imperceptible pull to prod England out of the drunken sleep or to draw her back from the final outrage into which Britain tempted her." (Chapter 17)

This might be a strange thing for an Irishman like Lewis to write. Nonetheless, it resonates on this day--finally, finally--of Brexit, a day upon which England (Wales, too, Lewis' original home country) backs away from the elitism, internationalism, and so on of what is called "Europe" and into its own sovereignty and independence again. I wish I could say that Brexit also means a backing away from tyranny, but maybe we can't have everything all at once. If we could, where would the excitement be or the struggle originate? Anyway, I would like to congratulate the people of England and Wales--and anybody in Scotland and Northern Ireland who wants it--on their freeing themselves from an unwanted association with the Continent. The legend is that King Arthur would return one day to save his country. Who would have thought that he would become embodied in an American-born, upper-crust, tousle-haired Etonian? Then again, maybe England isn't saved just yet. In this week also of impeachment (I write on January 25), when the leaders of one American party, with their overweening pride in themselves and the perceived fineness of their own minds and ideas--contemporary gnostics, I suppose--are busy trying to undo the results of the last election and prevent the results of the next, and when the man they're trying to impeach eloquently speaks at a Pro-Life march in Washington, D.C., we might have reason to believe that God does indeed work in mysterious ways.

* * *

At last, towards the very end of That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis has the merest mention of a book, Trahison des clercs, and no mention at all of its author, Julien Benda (1867-1956), or any of his ideas. I haven't read this book and can't really speak to it. I guess Lewis threw it like the kitchen sink into That Hideous Strength and there it lies for us to consider.

And so ends this series.

That Hideous Strength, a paperback edition issued in 1955-1956 by Pan Books with cover art by "Sax," Rudolph Michael Sachs (1897-1969). The horse and rider at the bottom remind me of the painting "The Race Track" or "Death on a Pale Horse" by the American artist Albert Pinkham Ryder.

The book was called The Tortured Planet in an American edition from Avon, 1958. The cover art was by another horse--a workhorse named Richard M. Powers (1921-1996). The surname and Powers' Roman Catholic faith make me think that he was of Irish descent.

Finally, another British edition, from 1960, again with art by Sax. Note the gothic imagery of decay and apocalyptic destruction in both of his covers.

By the way, in my posting the other day on Anthem by Ayn Rand, I closed with a pulp-magazine cover showing her hero, who has renamed himself Prometheus, grasping a lightning bolt, representing his rediscovery of electrical power. Well, in That Hideous Strength the symbol of N.I.C.E. is described as "a muscular male nude grasping a thunderbolt." (Chapter 10) Remember that Frankenstein is subtitled "A Modern Prometheus." I guess if we are to displace God at the head of the universe and become godlike in our power and wisdom, we must literally steal his thunder.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

One More Thing . . .

So, what we have so far:

In working on this series, I have quoted from a website, which shall remain nameless:

A member of the Pulitzer Prize jury, the late Frank McConnell helped science fiction gain standing as serious literature. [. . .] Initially believing that science fiction is primarily one of many forms of storytelling, McConnell gradually recognized science fiction as a modern expression of Gnosticism, rejecting bodily concerns for an emphasis on spirituality. [Emphasis added.]

In one of my replies to a comment from a reader, Randy Stafford, I wrote:

Harold Bloom [. . . .] wrote on Gnosticism, too, including in a book called The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992, 2006). In that book (I haven't read it), he evidently proposed a unified-field theory of his subject, saying that American religion is essentially Gnostic.

In various political movements, science and religion have become wed: any science fiction that is progressive, leftist, socialist, or Marxist in nature would seem to have been born from that union. Science fiction certainly has its gnostic progenitors and practitioners, including Joseph Smith, Madame Blavatsky, Richard S. Shaver, L. Ron Hubbard, and even Charles Fort. In one of his comments, Mr. Stafford pointed out that Philip K. Dick "is frequently cited as gnostic, especially [in] The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." I'm sure there are other gnostic authors, novels, and characters, including Weston, the villain in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy.

Randy Stafford also wrote: "I think Brian Aldiss had the notion that [science fiction] was essentially gothic." Mr. Aldiss put forth that idea, I think, in his book The Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (1973). (Unfortunately I don't have a copy of this book.) Here is a quote from that fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, from Mr. Aldiss' book:

Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science) and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode.

There is plenty of gothic science fiction to be sure, from Frankenstein (1) to Neuromancer to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which might be the most gothic of all of the Star Wars movies so far. (This is assuming that Star Wars is science fiction and not something else.) (2) Now I have this, from a book I picked up over Christmastime:

Science fiction does not tend to support a given political establishment, but on a deeper level it almost invariably backs the basic tenet of Western civilization: that is, the concept that the individual man is worth more than the organization--whatever it may be--and that nothing is more important than human freedom. (3)

So according to whom you believe, science fiction is essentially gnostic, or gothic, or classically liberal. I'm not sure that any two of these things are easily reconcilable. I'm more inclined to think that some science fiction is gnostic, some gothic, some classically liberal, and some other things altogether. It's probably too simplistic to say that science fiction is all basically one thing--not that anyone is saying that, I guess.

And here's a thought: why do we not have theorizing like this about weird fiction? Could it be that weird fiction comes from a pre-intellectual or pre-academic culture? Is weird fiction, being an essentially conservative genre, necessarily anti-intellectual and so defies this kind of theorizing?

Notes
(1) Frankenstein is subtitled The Modern Prometheus. I think that like Frankenstein's monster, Mary Shelley's book is a hybrid: a proto-science fiction novel and a gothic romance. Well, as it turns out Ayn Rand's protagonist in Anthem, Equality 7-2521, takes the name Prometheus once he has gained--or made--his freedom. The theme, I think, is much the same in both books as in so much of our popular literature: a man reaching for godlike power. In Frankenstein, written perhaps by a closeted conservative, he falls short, but in Anthem, a book by an atheist and innovator, he may yet succeed. In any case, Anthem is a dystopian/post-apocalyptic novel, a genre that is very often gothic in its mood and imagery. Even 1984 has its gothic elements.
(2) The scenes in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker that take place on the planet of the Sith are obviously infused with gothicism. They remind me of the drawings of Piranesi, more yet like images from Barlowe's Inferno by Wayne Douglas Barlowe. As for the Sith themselves, well, they are ghost-like or wraith-like figures in black robes and hoods (hoodies like the guy pirating the movie in the public service announcements before it begins) and chant like they're in Carmina Burana. Their world waits in darkness and drips with decay. William Basinski could easily have composed the score for their part of the movie.
(3) From "The Role of Science Fiction" by Ben Bova in Science Fiction: Today and Tomorrow, A Discursive Symposium, edited by Reginald Bretnor (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 11.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

From Things To Come into The Space Trilogy-A Final Aside

I'm still catching up on last year, on my reading and writing. After reading 1985 by Anthony Burgess late in the year, I read another dystopian novel, Anthem by Ayn Rand. This was the first time I had read either of these authors. As it turns out, my reading of Anthem was timely in two ways. More on that in a while.

First published in Great Britain in 1938, Anthem was Ayn Rand's second novel. It is not only dystopian but also post-apocalyptic: in its pages, a new dark age has descended upon the world after disaster has also descended. The book is brief. I have the Signet edition of 1961 in which the text of the story is only 112 pages long. It starts off well. In fact, it's fascinating. Like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, from 1924 (in the English-language edition), Anthem takes the form of a diary of a young man caught in an oppressive, totalitarian, and thoroughly collectivized society. Also as in We, the characters lack names. Ayn Rand cleverly gives them codewords associated in her time and ours with the progressive/leftist/socialist/statist cause, followed by a numerical designation. The narrator then, is Equality 7-2521, but there also these alphanumerics: Union 5-3992, International 4-8818, Liberty 5-3000, Fraternity 2-5503, Solidarity 9-6347, Collective 0-0009, Democracy 4-6998, Unanimity 7-3304, Harmony 9-2642--you get the picture. It's kind of like a commie phonebook from the 1950s ("Beechwood 4-5789 . . ."). Significantly, Liberty--the only word among these untainted by the real-world collectivism of the twentieth century--is the name of Equality 7-2521's girlfriend, the woman who will inspire him to rebel against his condition.

Anthem goes downhill pretty quickly about midway through when the reader starts to realize that this is not so much a work of fiction as a vehicle for its author's wacky ideas. (There's even a postcard in my paperback edition that you can use to send away for more Objectivist wackiness. The whole business reminds me of Scientology.) Before you reach that point, though, you encounter some genuine power in the plight of the protagonist, in his struggles to assert his individuality, and in his yearning to love the young woman named Liberty . . . who kind of fades away once they have gained their freedom. Maybe it wasn't love after all that he wanted.

Before that, the collectivism in Anthem has reached a point where there aren't any singular personal pronouns. A person calls himself "We" (shades of Zamyatin's earlier novel) and the other person "They":

"Speak these words again," they whispered.

"Which words?" we asked. But they did not answer, and we knew it.

"Our dearest one," we whispered. (p. 60)

Only when they are free and living in a house from olden times do they encounter for the first time the word "I." But then it becomes "I", "I", "I," never "you," or better yet, "Thou." Like I said, the girlfriend fades away.

I found out not long after reading Anthem that Merriam Webster dictionary decided that "they" would be their word of the year for 2019. The context and meaning are different, but the purpose, it seems to me, is more or less the same: as in 1984, it is to change the meaning of words and language so that our perceptions of reality might be altered and so that we might be deprived of our ability to think independently and to dissent from prevailing thought: to call a man "he" and a woman "she" will soon be a thoughtcrime, if it isn't already.

That's the first timely thing about my reading of Anthem. The other is that Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for the rock group Rush, died on January 7, 2020, at age sixty-seven.  (He was born on the day the Flatwoods Monster came to earth, September 12, 1952.) As it turns out, the late Mr. Peart was influenced by Ayn Rand, specifically by Anthem. Strange world.

* * *

Ayn Rand may or may not have read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, but George Orwell read it. We know that because he wrote a review of it published seventy-four years ago this month, in January 1946. (It seems pretty likely to me that she read it, too, inasmuch as her own Dystopia resembles Zamyatin's, plus he was her countryman: she would surely have heard of him and his book. She would also have had the advantage of reading it in the language in which it was written, for whatever that's worth.) Orwell read C.S. Lewis, too. You can read his review of That Hideous Strength ("The Scientists Take Over") by clicking here. The British scientist J.B.S. Haldane also read and at least twice criticized Lewis' Space Trilogy. You can read his articles ("Auld Hornie, F.R.S." and "More Anti-Lewisite") by clicking here.

In case you're keeping score at home, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a former atheist who became a devout believer and a Christian apologist; George Orwell (1903-1950) was a socialist, thus presumably also an atheist but also strangely enough a kind of conservative; J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) was an atheist and thoroughgoing Marxist (I guess he and Orwell would have been on opposite sides of the same side during the Spanish Civil War); Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was an atheist, a rabid individualist, an advocate of capitalism, and a kooky cultist; and Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was an Old Bolshevik but also the first writer to have his work censored once the new Bolsheviks--you know, the killing kind--came into power in Russia in the early 1920s.

One more thing. (There's always one more thing in this Columbo universe.) George Orwell encountered We for the first time because of the poet and literary historian Gleb Struve (1898-1985) of the original Magdeburg Struves. (Gleb's father was Peter Struve, first a Marxist, then an anti-Marxist.) Well, Gleb's second cousin (I think, if I have my Struves lined up right) was Otto Struve (1897-1963), an astronomer who initiated Project Ozma, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence carried out at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia (the same state in which the Flatwoods Monster came to Earth, this on a the same day, as you will remember from earlier in this article, that Neil Peart was born), in 1960. That led to many things, directly or roundabout-ly, including a good deal of science fiction such as "The Listeners" by James Gunn (1968), the movie The Day of the Dolphin (1973), and Contact by Carl Sagan (1985).

There are not only six degrees of Kevin Bacon, there are six degrees of everything.

One more thing: These asides are getting to be longer than the original series.

One more thing and then I promise you I will go: Today, January 20, 2020, is the 136th anniversary of Yevgeny Zamyatin's birth under the old calendar, so Happy Birthday to Him!

Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1953. Cover story: "Anthem" by Ayn Rand. Cover art by Lawrence showing a hunky 1950s guy with a death grip on Reddy Kilowatt, and his hot girlfriend, whom he unfairly ignores here and in the conclusion of the novel, relegated to the background.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley