Perelandra: Ch.4

Ransom lands and begins to experience the wonders of Perelandra. As alien and strange in its own way as the ancient planet of Malacandra had been, Ransom felt no fear or discomfort, though, as he had there. In part it was that very experience that helped him deal with his encounter with Perelandra. On Malacandra he had had an adventure. But because of that, on Perelandra he “had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth”(3270). Perhaps even more important, that earlier experience had made him realize “that he was part of a plan. He was no longer unattached, no longer on the outside” (3318).

And that’s a good thing he had this sense of enacting a myth too. Because when he meets the Green Lady near the end of the chapter he comes face-to-face with a smorgasbord of mythologies.

“Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images. One way of putting it would be to say that neither our sacred nor our profane art could make her portrait. Beautiful, naked, shameless, young—she was obviously a goddess: but then the face, the face so calm that it escaped insipidity by the very concentration of its mildness, the face that was like the sudden coldness and stillness of a church when we enter it from a hot street—that made her a Madonna. The alert, inner silence which looked out from those eyes overawed him; yet at any moment she might laugh like a child, or run like Artemis or dance like a Maenad” (3541).

Earlier he had thought about her that he

“. . . had . . . (never) seen a face so calm, and so unearthly, despite the full humanity of every feature. He decided afterwards that the unearthly quality was due to the complete absence of that element of resignation which mixes, in however slight a degree, with all profound stillness in terrestrial faces. This was a calm which no storm had ever preceded. It might be idiocy, it might be immortality” (3410).

Later on Ransom realizes that the Green Lady is Eve in Perelandra and what mission is to prevent her from falling into sin as the Eve in our world had done with disastrous and deadly consequences. Talk about enacting a myth!

The abundance of different and magnificent pleasures on Perelandra, beyond anything he’d ever experienced or known on earth, tempted Ransom to wants to experience them again and again. Something within him, though, warned him against that. As he reflected on this “temptation” he wondered

\

“This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backward . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film” (3286).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in an outline for a book about the post-war church in Europe which he did not live to write, made notes for a section on our fallen human tendency to want to “insure” ourselves against everything we could imagine might go wrong in life. This strikes me as cognate to what Lewis says through Ransom here. And of course, money is at the heart of both. It takes a good bit of money to insure ourselves “adequately” against all contingencies. Of course, Bonhoeffer wryly observed that the one thing humans could not insure themselves against was humanity itself! A sentiment with which Lewis would heartily concur.

A particular delicacy Ransom ran across, “redhearts,” were so delicious and the desire to taste them again so strong that Ransom quickly became aware that on earth “they’d soon discover how to breed these redhearts, and they’d cost a great deal more than the others.” And money would provide the means of saying encore, of repeating pleasures, in a voice that could not be disobeyed (3310).