The Dystopia of CS Lewis; And Its Message For Us Today.
Are you aware that CS Lewis wrote a dystopian novel or that George Orwell reviewed it? This was news to me too not so long ago. It goes by the name of That Hideous Strength with the style typical Lewis.
Lewis takes us on a journey through the maze that is language deconstruction and it is I would say a wild ride.
What is fascinating is that Lewis saw things that were not on Orwell’s radar. While Orwell did say that the meaning of words would be reversed Lewis weighs in with much more detail.
After Orwell reviewed Lewis’s book in 1945 he warned; we are within sight of a time when such (monstrous) dreams will be realized.
A time such as this, when the rubber meets the road and when fantasies become reality in the realm of the Mad Hatters.
In one extract from Lewis’s book; the plans of the university elite go awry in a small college town when those who think they are the wisest become effectively dumb; both in a literal and in a figurative sense.
I paraphrase here.
At one point, Professor Frost, one of the “inner circle”, finds himself unable to speak: Nonsense syllables cross his mind and come out of his mouth. At the long-awaited “victory” banquet at Belbury Hall things start to fall apart at the seams. Never to be the same again.
Then the Director of the Institute gets up to speak but his speech turns gibberish. Unable to help themselves people in the audience begin to laugh. John Wither the Deputy Director thinks to himself that maybe it would be a good time for Jules (the aged Director) to make a fool of himself.
Jules was a nuisance in many respects and this might be a good a time as any to end his career.
The Deputy rises to his feet determined to show one and all that his clear speech will make him the new man for the job.
He takes to the podium.
Tidies and fugleman, I sheer foor that we all-er most steeply rebut the defensible though, I trust lavatory Aspasia which gleams to have selected our redeemed inspector this deceiving, it would- ah-be shark very shark from anyone’s debenture……
What? It sounds like a yarn straight out of the Twilight Zone series by Stephen King, am I right?
I wonder what will happen once language has been deconstructed to nadir to mean zilch or a big fat nothing.I say this in all seriousness as we barely understand each other now so how will we communicate then?
Will we be forced to grunt, squawk or bray like animals or will we use smoke signals? Or maybe come up with a code of sorts.
And now to continue with Lewis’s tale; pandemonium breaks out in the room. The sound of hysterical laughter, then a babble of voices, rage fills the air; the fistfights break out …….and a lot worse.
Before the night is over (the college elite) are either dead or scattered.
Lewis’s tale can be seen in a weird way in reverse to that of the ill-fated tale of the Tower of Babel. While both are all-time bad ideas the aim of Babel was to unify while in his tale it is to break up. As well as to break down.
It is all about going beyond the boundaries. The end result in both cases is confusion.
It is what happens when people are wont to create their own reality. It looks as if Lewis foresaw this current madness in his work That Hideous Strength.
Then as now the top people in the Institute are all rather strange to put it mildly. But these strange ones don’t think they are strange and for the most part the rest of society is afraid to say so.
They emulate them; they go along with the charade using a lot of words to say nothing at all. On the off chance that it is not, it is all contradictory.
Don’t you dare claim that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all, how very rude. …….high sounding words meant to baffle is the sum of it and boy do they lurve themselves a huge helping of that ‘ol confusion.
In much saner times they would have been called hucksters, con artists, deceivers and bull dusters. Now they are humored.
This is what mental fog does.
