Straw Dolls, Satire and Cruelty
Andrew Rilstone
I've just read "Pilgrims Regress" for the first time. Despite a few
jolly moments, I wouldn't actually recommend it very strongly. Lewis
makes the same points much more clearly in "Surprised by Joy", and a lot
of the good allegory re-surfaces elsewhere. (Mr Broard is quite clearly
the liberal Bishop who we meet in hell in "The Great Divorce".) It was
his first attempt at religious writing, after all.
We've heard a lot recently about Lewis's tendency to set up straw dolls
with the intention of knocking them down. The "Regress" is practically
one long attack on a series of grotesque straw dolls. No puritan was
ever stupid enough to say that God "was quite extraordinarily kind and
good to his tenants and would certainly torture most of them to death
the moment he had the slightest pretext"; no rationalist has ever
asserted in consecutive sentences that priests are both shrewd, clever
decievers and simple old souls, just like children. I doubt if anyone
has ever had a conversation quite like the one that John has with Mr
Englightenment, either:
"But how do you know that there is no landlord?"
"Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of
printing, gundpowder!!" replied Mr Enlightenment...
I assume that we would all agree that to say that real puritans,
Freudians and rationalists are not really as stupid as the characters in
the allegory would be to miss the point. It is obvious what Lewis is
doing: creating exaggerated, "types" in order to illustrate stages in
his spiritual developments and the philsophies he flirted with along the
way.
This techniqiue makes for good, funny, vivid writing. It has something
in common with a modern political satirist, and something in common with
the Medieval morality tradition, personifying the Seven Deadly Sins as
characters who are at once funny and shocking. Lewis does it in almost
all his writing.
"The Great Divorce" is full of such characters -- the bitter young man
who blames everything on his up-bringing, his parents, his education;
the woman who made her husbands life a misery by trying to make
something of him; the mother who has based her whole life around her
dead son and may actually end up demanding that he be allowed to come
down to hell with her. Of course these are satires -- people much
worse than any we have met in real life. They are supposed to be damned
souls, after all.
This seems to me to be a very good technique of writing. Rather than
warn us in the abstract about the tyranny of well-meaning love, he
creates the wonderful portrait of Mrs Busy -- one of the women who lives
for others ('you can tell the others by their hunted expressions'). When
he wants to talk about the tabloid press, he invents a dishonest
journalist called "Creon" and chats about why it is that a respectable
friend went out to dinner with him, rather than shunning him like
prostitute or a hangman. This makes the piece much more vivid (and
funnier) than if he had started to talk about news reporting in the
abstract. Creon is no writer in particular, and probably no one writer
embodies all the faults of tabloid writing to that extent. (Richard
Littlejohn had not been born at the time Lewis was writing.) That, quite
obviously, is the point.
Then again, there's a wonderful essay called "The Sermon on the Lunch"
in which Lewis describes how a parson of his acquiantance treats his
wife and grown up children absolutely appallingly over Sunday Lunch,
having just been preaching about "family values". There's a brief,
bitter description in "Delinquents in the Snow" of The Elderly Lady, a
magistrate, who lets off some boys who had vandalised Lewis's orchard
with a fine and a warning about "silly pranks". He presents these events
as real; but I suspect that neither portrait is quite fair. But they
serve to make his points vividly, and I see no harm in it.
This tendency to caricature seems to have been something that Lewis had
in ordinary life. George Sayer reports that Lewis referred to Mrs C
Rakestraw, the American who commissioned the "Four Loves" boardcasts as
"Mrs Cartwheel", ("The woman she was with has a name like Clara
Bootlace"). It sounds to me that the exchange that Sayer describe Lewis
recounting ("The trouble, Professor Lewis, is that you have several
times brought sex into your talk on Eros.") is slightly exaggerated as
well. If so, this simply shows us that Lewis was a witty
conversationalist. Sayer also quotes a school friend of Lewis's saying
that he used to mimick teachers and school fellows.
Could it be that this tendency to caricature and exaggerate and create
grotesques was a major part of Lewis's personality, and perhaps, a key
factor in his talent?
But there are obviously problems inherrent in this tendency. For one
thing, it might make us doubt the veracity of some of the people he
purports to give us actual portraits of. Think of the very funny
descriptions of his Father and the Great Knock in 'Surprised by Joy': is
there any element of caricature, inthe scene where Knock wanders into
his wife's bridge party, and, three hours later is still asking the
elderly ladies to "clarify their terms"? Were his father's conversations
really as confused as Lewis makes out?
Worse, it can easily turn into a sort of low-level misanthropy, worlds
populated by grotesques. (It must also be tempting to use it to get your
own back on people who irritate you -- Lewis's worlds seem to be rather
fuller of silly middle-class women and domestic tyrants than with, say
vulgar and abusive men.) I think this is what Ursual Le Guin had in mind
in the essay quote elsewhere, in which she accused Lewis having a good
deal of hatred in him; and what A.N Wilson meant when he said that
Screwtape was a cruel book. For my part, I have always been uneasy with
the character of Eustace in "Dawn Treader". There seems almost to be a
glee in creating a character who it is OK to dislike. Granted, Eustace
is a genuinely irritating and spoiled kid, but the book comes close to
blaming him for "going to a mixed school", "calling his parents by their
first names", "preferring factual books to imaginative ones" and "having
a silly name" ("he was called Eustace Scrubb and he almost deserved
it"). This comes perilously close to the bully who picks on anyone who
is a bit different.
Finally, I wonder whethher this caricaturing tendency is the the root of
the "straw dolls" in Lewis's more philosophical writings. Are his
"conditioners", "straighteners" and "naturalists" to be thought of as
"ideal types"--personifications or caricatures of real tendencies,
created in order to make arguments more vivid and easy to hold in our
minds? Are they supposed to represent "real people" any more than Creon
or Mrs Busy? There is no doubt that this sort of device can make very
powerful articles. Quite often, he seems to be clear what he is doing:
the "conditioners" in "Abolition of Man" are quite clearly hypothetical
beings who may one day come into being: the middle section of the book
seems to consciously drift into satire, extrapolation, even science
fiction. The problem seems to occur more forcibly, as we've seen, in
something like "Miracles" where it is far from being clear whether the
"naturalists" are a rhetorical personifcation of an extreme position, or
whether it is a viewpoint that he things that real scientists really
hold.
--
Andrew Rilstone and...@aslan.demon.co.uk http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/
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"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity"
Yeats
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