Silence in Narnia and That Hideous Strength

I hope some time to be able to write about the work I have done for my PhD in Theology and Literature (‘Seven Types of Silence: Literature and Liturgy in a Secular Age’), but I probably ought to finish the PhD first or my supervisor will start asking hard questions. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a few brief reflections on silence in Narnia and in my favourite Lewis novel (or romance, to be precise): That Hideous Strength.

But let’s start with Lewis’s poetry. In The Pilgrim’s Regress, John sings:

Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense, but in thy great

Unbroken speech our halting metaphor translate.

In one of my favourite Lewisian poems, ‘The Apologist’s Evening Prayer,’ Lewis goes a step further, praying:

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead

Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.

From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee

O thou fair silence, fall, and set me free.

Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,

Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

I would like to argue that this “fair silence” is a quiet presence in both That Hideous Strength and the Chronicles of Narnia.

One way of understanding this silence is by getting to grips with the Greek term, hesychia, a word that is not entirely straightforward to translate. For the writers of the Philokalia, hesychia is: “a state of inner tranquillity or mental quietude and concentration which arises in conjunction with, and is deepened by, the practice of pure prayer and the guarding of heart and intellect. Not simply silence, but an attitude of listening to God and of openness towards him.” (Vol.1, p.365)

So where do we see (or hear or experience) that hesychia in That Hideous Strength?

Certainly not at the start of the book where Jane finds the silence of her flat stultifying because her life has become unbearably silent and empty. However, later in the book when she reaches St Anne’s she is confronted by a very different kind of silence: we are told that “[s]he passed down one long passage, through that silence which is not quite like any other in the world – the silence upstairs, in a big house, on a winter afternoon.” It is silence too that strikes Merlin on his arrival: “In all the house there are warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial.” The silence Jane and Merlin experience is clearly not merely absence of noise but the sign of the “inner tranquillity” and “mental quietude” of which the Philokalia speaks.

Long before the arrival of Jane and Merlin at St Anne’s, we have been prepared for this silence. When the narrator visited Bragdon Wood, he told us that the wood’s loneliness “felt more like the loneliness of a very large room in a deserted house than any ordinary solitude out of doors” and “[a]s I went forward over the quiet turf I had the sense of being received.”

By contrast, Belbury and its workers are often stridently noisy. The silence and solitude of Bragdon Wood is soon destroyed by “such noises as had never been heard in [the Common Room at Bracton] before – shouts and curses and the sound of lorries heavily drumming past or harshly changing gear, rattling of chains, drumming of mechanical drills, clanging of iron, whistles, thuddings, and an all pervasive vibration. Saeva sonare verbera, tum stridor ferri tractaeque catenae, as Glossop, sitting on the far side of the fire, had observed to Jewel.” The quotation is from Virgil’s description of the torments of the Underworld in Book VI of The Aeneid; what now emerges from Bragdon Wood is not mere noise but the sound of hell.

There is a great deal more to be said about silence in that Hideous Strength but let’s look briefly at Narnia. In Planet Narnia, Michael Ward argues that in The Horse and His Boy Lewis depicts a “hesychastic experience” in “the transformation of Shasta and Aravis, Bree and Hwin.” He also points out that, when Aravis and the horses meet Aslan:

they are moved to silence. This silence is not, however, simply an absence of words; it is an eloquent silence, an articulacy of a spiritual kind. It is like what happens to Ransom and Merlin who find themselves sitting without saying anything in ‘the white-hot furnace of essential speech’; the ‘shining whiteness’ by which Shasta finds himself enveloped in the mountain-pass may be a reworking of that image.

This is an intriguing suggestion, which again I haven’t got space to explore any further here - I’ll save it for a later post - but I think we can say that a great way to explore the hidden depths of the Chronicles of Narnia is to read That Hideous Strength, and vice versa. But do so silently.