Introduction: A Confession
I have to begin with a confession. For years now, I’ve been living with That Hideous Strength[^1]—not just reading it, but living with it. I return to it over and over, sometimes because I want to, and sometimes because I need to. It's become one of those rare books that keeps working on me long after I put it down, a companion that does not let go.
In spite of all this familiarity, I continue to find something different. What seemed minor before suddenly stands out in clear view. What I once skimmed past now stays in my imagination. And more than once, I’ve been surprised by how much this book written by someone born in the late 1800s seems to know about us, our evasions, our habits of thought, our ways of avoiding what is too real or too close for comfort. Not just us, me.
The passage I want to reflect on here is only one example. It's pressed on me in recent days. It speaks about Mark, but in its strange way it's been speaking about me too. And so, instead of a detached analysis, I want to share what I am learning through it—because this is one of those valuable places where Lewis, through Mark, keeps drawing me back, asking me to see myself.
“They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy.
They saw the recalcitrant and backward laborer and heard his views on the weather.
They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman.
It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it.
It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward laborer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear.
The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly (When had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back.) did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person.
All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw.
Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, plowman or farmer’s boy, was the shadow.
Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations:” for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.”
1. The Education of Abstraction
Lewis shows us Mark as a man hollowed out by his education. He is not cruel, not even particularly hardened; he is simply shaped by a system that has taught him to prefer the statistic over the person. “Things that he read and wrote were more real to him than things he saw.”
[^1]: That Hideous Strength (1945) is the third novel in C. S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy.” Unlike the earlier books, which take place partly on other planets, this one unfolds entirely in England. It blends modern satire with Arthurian myth, showing how an ordinary university town becomes the stage for a cosmic struggle between forces of corruption and the remnants of an older, more faithful order.