Two books: "Till We Have Faces" by C.S. Lewis, and "Redshirts" by John Scalzi

by Doctor Science

What do they have in common? Nothing I can think of, except I've talked about both today and I'm copypasting my remarks here, for reference and so other people can chime in. Talk about books! It's one of my favorite things.

Redshirts by John Scalzi.

John Ringo decided to Explain It All To You: Understanding SJW logic and why it is destroying science fiction. He changed his mind and took down the post, but not quickly enough. Among his gems of wisdom:

To the Social Justice Warriors of Science Fiction publishing and fandom, the true and only purpose of science fiction is to promote increased equity in the arena of social justice.
...
One clear example that I know of: Redshirts.

Redshirts by John Scalzi was a fairly banal Star Trek fan-fic that featured a cast of Security that as I was told (never read it) was a fair SJW cross-section.

John Scalzi, although a cis-male, has relentlessly promoted social justice in various venues including purging the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America of persons who oppose the militant social justice approach or were otherwise in the way of promoting social justice.

-- by that last sentence, Ringo means "voted to kick out Vox Day for using organizational resources to make grossly racist and insulting statements about other writers." Militant stuff, you see.

Anyway, Scalzi thought this was absurd:

It is, in fact probably the least racially/sexually diverse book I've written BECAUSE the characters were supposed to reflect a BAD show.

Indeed, when the TV script for it was written, they CHANGED the sex of a couple of characters to make it more diverse! This is true.

So it really is a bad example of a Social Justice-y sort of book. Much worse, in fact, than my OMW series in general.

In the subsequent discussion of Redshirts and how social justice-y it isn't, I commented:

I spend a lot of time on tumblr, native habitat of SJWs — I'm told I'm really more of a Social Justice Druid, myself.

For me, Redshirts was a pitifully inadequate, even timorous take on an issue we spend a lot of time discussing on tumblr. The reality in the TV & movie industry is that characters who aren't SWMs are disproportionately redshirted, or fridged, or otherwise killed off for the sake of the SWM leads' manpain and "personal growth".

Most of the redshirts in Redshirts are SWMs, so the text completely avoids noticing how many classes of people, watching a show like this one, have to armor ourselves against identifying with the people who look like us — because the people who look like us are going to be killed, or raped, or otherwise end badly.

I'm really glad to hear that the TV series may be including more non-SWM redshirts, but I wonder if that means they're going to engage with issues of representation, with how it feels when having a certain identity means you're bound to die "for the sake of the story".

---

Meanwhile at Making Light, a discussion of the Hugo awards drifted into talk about C.S. Lewis. Kelly Jennings commented:

I recently taught Till We Have Faces in a class on Mythic Fiction, here in Northwest Arkansas. About a third of my students were Evangelical & Homeschooled Christians, and thus big fans of Lewis, since he was very nearly the only fantasy writer they had ever been allowed to read, growing up (or even yet, I suspect). The rest, though, were standard issue American young adults / returning students (Veterans and older women and laid-off workers).

All of which is to say -- nearly all of them, even many of the Evangelical students, disliked Till We Have Faces intensely.

I also didn't like it. While I can see what Lewis is after, it feels very much as though he is rigging the game in that novel, if you see what I mean -- manipulating the actions of the characters to achieve the outcome he desires.

I don't (that is) believe those characters would in fact act that way. I believe Lewis wants to say something about mortal love v. Holy Love*, and thus constructed a plot that would let him say that thing.

It feels like a dishonest book, is what I am saying, I guess.

I replied:

How odd. I LOVE Till We Have Faces, it's my favorite Lewis by far.

Why I love it (caveat: I haven't re-read it in 15-20 years): it's the *only* book I can think of which is really, truly about the "ugly princess", the one whom no-one *ever* thinks is beautiful, and who is never the object of anyone's desire.

Lewis really seems to understand, on a gut level, how defining beauty and its lack can be for women, how bitter and helpless it can make a woman feel.

Kelly replied:

See, that's one of the things I dislike most about the book.

For two reasons: (1) Yes, I know beauty is *supposed* to be the only thing that is important about a woman, but that is very much working from the Male Gaze, isn't it?

I mean, I know plenty of women who don't, in fact, have their lives ruined by their lack of beauty -- who have perfectly rich, valuable, and happy lives despite not being as lovely as the dawn.

And (2) I was also deeply annoyed that Lewis used the Queen's ugliness as both a symbol of her fallen soul *and* as the cause of her bitterness -- that is, it is her ugliness that makes her betray her sister: because she envies and hates her sister's beauty. So ugly women, you see, are wicked women. Only the beautiful woman is a good woman.

So I suppose what I mean is not that I dislike Lewis making an ugly woman his main character; I dislike what he then does with that main character.

I replied:

I read it almost the opposite to you. Lewis didn't *make* the character "wicked", he started with a character who was supposed to be wicked and showed how she was human.

Lewis was writing fanfic, based on Cupid/Psyche (and any number of other myths & fairy tales). He asks the question, "why is the ugly sister always the bad one, and the beautiful sister the good one? How is that fair and right?"

Growing up (I was born in the mid-50s, so I'm probably a generation older than you) I felt this question *very* strongly and personally. It was a revelation to me to see a man who felt it, too.

What Till We Have Faces shows, for me, is Lewis saying that where men have the power and the Male Gaze is in fact a determining factor in women's lives -- a situation that seemed to me, as a child in the 60s, an accurate description of reality, not to mention accurate for historical reality -- ugly women become non-persons, and being a non-person is *bad* for people.

He's saying, suffering doesn't "ennoble" people, it doesn't make people better -- it *hurts*, and it keeps hurting, and the scars it leaves are actual impairments.

Orual isn't "wicked" (as the ugly sister is in a fairy tale or the original story), she's *hurt* and does the wrong thing in her pain. But she's also strong -- and her experience with suffering, her ability to keep going even though she's hurting, actually helps Psyche. Orual bears Psyche's pain and lightens her burden -- but Lewis doesn't show that making Orual's life all good and sweet.

Leo and Diane Dillon's covers for Till We Have Faces. I have this edition, and I've spent a good deal of time staring at these pictures.

Coincidentally, the only non-Puppy nominated for Best Pro Artist this year is last year's winner, Julie Dillon. I was surprised to learn that she's no relation to Leo & Diane, because the ethnic diversity of her models reminded me of theirs -- a rarity in SF/F, then and now.

Comments

[wj]

It seems like Mr Ringo needs to go read some James Schmitz. Stories written well before Social Justice Warriors came on the scene. Female protagonists. Non-human (essentially non-white) protagonists.

Maybe start with Agent of Vega. Might be a revelation for him.

[Kelly Jennings]

I do like your reading. It's just not at all how I remember reading the book.

Wasn't Lewis saying (among the many things he was saying!) that Queen Orual's love for her sister was destructive?

It's been a few years since I read it, but I recall his point being that her bitterness about being ugly warped her ability to love her sister.

This was part of his banging on about all mortal love being corrupt and selfish, how only God's love was real love, that whole bit.

As I recall, Lewis suggests that Orual's love is actually envy -- envy spiteful enough that it causes her to destroy her sister.

And this is what he suggests *all* mortal love really is, as I recall: just envy sublimated. Only God's love is really love. (I might be misremembering, I'll admit.)

I really should read the book again.

[Kelly Jennings]

Oh! I meant to say: Love the covers.

[Donald johnson]

I also loved "Till We Have Faces"--it was the first Lewis book I ever stumbled across and is still my favorite. I'm really surprised that almost everyone in that class hated it and find Kelly James's reaction to it perverse. To me she is projecting the worst possible interpretation on the book--I for one sympathized with Orual all through the novel. It's true that Lewis exposes her flaws at the end, but the point there is not that Orual is some terrible person--she is in fact a remarkable woman and her realization of her sins didn't make me admire her any less. Lewis is just making the traditional Christian point that all of us are sinners, even the best. Is he manipulating the characters? I didn' think so. He is showing how different people who mean well can hurt each other without realizing it. Orual, her Greek tutor, and Bardia all wound each other without realizing that they are doing it. The same is true of Orual and Psyche.j

And gosh, who would ever imagine an ugly princess with a beautiful sister in an Iron Age barbarian kingdom might find her life somewhat difficult.

I've always loved reading, but always hated reading books for a literature class. This reminds me of why-- the pleasure is spoiled if you have to listen to someone teach a book that they seem to be willfully misreading. In my experience, literature classes seem designed to make reading a painful chore.

[Donald johnson]

I also have no idea what James means when saying that no one would act the way the characters acted. I thought Orual's fears for her sister were logical-- if I were going to criticize any character or characters in the book it would be the gods. But Lewis seems to be saying that religions are often a mixture of darkness and light--the priests who try to rationalize their faith are leaving something out. I'm not sure what Lewis means, but whatever theological point he is trying to make he makes by having his gods behave inscrutably.

I would bet that this is what some of the evangelical students disliked.

[JakeB]

It's 'Jennings', not 'James', Donald.

[Donald johnson]

Sorry, Kelly--I should have realized you might show up in this thread. If I had thought about it, I would have written that a little differently. Take it as the irritated reaction of someone who loved a book and finds someone else saying it was terrible.

[Doctor Science]

Kelly:

Thank you for stopping by.

I think he was suggesting that all human love is *imperfect*, yes, but not that it's all envy, specifically.

One of the most Christian parts of the book, IMHO, is the title, which I think is supposed to make us think of I Corinthians 13:12. So Orual's love is imperfect, mortal, and human -- which means it's sometimes destructive, too, because human love can be like that.

I think Orual's experiences are also supposed to remind us of Job -- not the Job of the beginning and end of the book, but the one who argues with G-d and who comes to acceptance not through logic, but through face to face experience.

As I said, I came to the book as someone who'd always been deeply unhappy with the "ugly is wicked" trope, and I found TWHF a satisfying exploration of it. Do you think that your students (and you) didn't start from that point -- that the meta-premise wasn't resonating with you? Or what?

[Donald johnson]

Thanks for the correction, Jake. I'm feeling more guilty about my bad tempered reaction than about getting her name wrong, so I will take the opportunity to apologize again for my sarcasm and go to bed.

[Hartmut]

To be nasty, I thought 'plot-rigging' is what Lewis is about in general.
I have not read that particular text but half a shelf of others by C.S.Lewis and this always seemed (to me) to be his greatest flaw, characters acting not the way that I'd consider natural (for them) but according to the message they are supposed to send. He CAN create characters that feel real and that makes it even more annoying when they suddenly start to behave and talk out of it with the obvious intent to push 'the message'. I dislike that even more than some authors' habit to dispose of characters that have outlived their usefulness to them (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness with the author as the one doing the disposing).

"Man merkt die Absicht, und man ist verstimmt" (The intent shines through, so one is displeased)[Goethe*].

*in the most popular form of the quote, slightly deviating form the original. Cf. 'Beam me up Scotty' and 'Luke, I am your father'.

[Lexin (@mpmrommel)]

"He CAN create characters that feel real and that makes it even more annoying when they suddenly start to behave and talk out of it with the obvious intent to push 'the message'."

Yes, indeed. That's one of things which make Lewis essentially unreadable for me, because even when I'm jogging along nicely with the story and enjoying what I'm reading, I've read enough Lewis to be waiting for him to start preaching at me.

I can't stand that; it's like having Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons coming to the door and asking me if I'm saved.

I suppose my atheism makes this kind of thing grate on me more than it would someone else, but I don't think I'm alone.

[Hartmut]

I can put up with preaching when it's openly declared and fits the characters (and is well-written). Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days is the prime example*. His successors and imitators (there were lots of those) did for the most part not manage that. Kipling, no friend of 'Muscular Christianity' he, wrote very scornfully of those, their hypocrisy and their awful writing' but I cannot remember him attacking Hughes. Just take his frequent barbs against Farrar's Eric in Stalky&Co (and Farrar was still open about his preaching, just godawful as a writer).
Lewis' 'Screwtape Letters' sheds the pretense and is imo quite readable as a result.

*I would not call it a literay masterpiece but solid enough. The movies often fall short (nothing new there. I have yet to see a film version of Hugo's Hunchback that does not reduce it to a cliche-ridden 'cloak and dagger' dime novel level; it's likely impossible).

[Kelly Jennings]

"..deeply unhappy with the "ugly is wicked" trope."

That may well be it. I read the book well after my feminist awakenings (imagine me saying this with a slight ironic smirk). But I never really attached much credit to the notion that a woman's value lay in her looks.

I mean, I knew that was supposed to true, but it seems such an obvious scam -- so many women around me who weren't beautiful were so obviously happy and worthwhile and living good lives, that I knew it couldn't be true. (I remember rolling my eyes in exasperation at the bits in L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time and other books where she keeps insisting that Meg's mother is not JUST a brilliant scientist BUT ALSO beautiful. Oh, come on. WHO CARES.)

ANYWAY. Yes: my reading of it probably did focus more on what Lewis was doing with the mortal-love-is-corrupt-love bit, which, as I've said, I found disturbing.

If he'd just been saying, look here, *this* person's love is flawed; look here, *some* people have problems loving well -- that would have been one thing. But Lewis was saying all human love is corrupted by our fallen human nature; all human love is self-love, and sinful, at its root.

And then he manipulated his characters and his plot to "prove" that.

(Or I so I recall. Again, I haven't read this book in a couple of years. I might be remembering it entirely wrong!)

[Kelly Jennings]

Oh -- Donald: thanks for the apology. It's fine. Different people like different books!

As I said over on Making Light, I really had expected to like Till We Have Faces. I wouldn't have chosen it for the class otherwise. I had read several of C.S. Lewis's non-fiction books, including Screwtape Letters, and liked them a great deal. And I generally do like books that have a mythic background. (It was a class on mythic fiction.)

[Yarrow]

I think that Lewis intended us to take at face value Arnom's judgment of Orual as "the most wise, just, valiant, fortunate and merciful of all the princes known in our parts of the world", and to see her self-blame as the torment that a great heart must inflict on itself to be worthy. (Worthy of God, I suppose Lewis would say.)

That's not my kink; but I believe that to Lewis, all the litany of Orual's failings she records in Part II are supposed to make us admire her more.

[Donald johnson]

Thanks Kelly. My bad tempered reaction to one side, it startled me to read that about "Faces". He is of course preaching, but I thought the characters all acted the way one would expect them to under the circumstances. I was a fourteen year old when I read the book and identified completely with Orual and her actions seemed logical to me. I read it again now and then and for me it still holds up. Orual and the people she loved all seemed to keep hurting each other unintentionally and that seemed, well, realistic. I thought Lewis even did a good job portraying Orual's father--you see his warts and his bullying and cowardice from the viewpoint of Orual and the Greek tutor, but Bardia says he does better with soldiers and hunters and is frightened by women and intellectuals (people he doesn't understand). It humanized him without excusing his actions. For me the whole book was like that. The most intriguing part which I couldn't figure out is what exactly was going on with the gods and priests. It sort of reminded me of Flannery O'Connor, who seemed to be saying that sometimes those crude weird fundamentalists understand something that rationalists don't, but getting back to "Faces"' I wasn't sure how Ungit and the Priest fit in with Psyche's husband. Lewis thinks Orual had enough clues to see the beautiful reality underneath all the ugliness of the religion she was raised with, but I think he was honest enough to write the story so that the reader will side with Orual.

[wj]

I think a lot of what we consider "reasonable" choices by characters is governed by those around us. If you can say "I can see people I know who would act like that" (even if you wouldn't do it yourself), then the characters are behaving realistically.

But if nobody you know would make those kinds of choices, then they are not. Not matter how many other people in the world would do the same thing.

To take a personal example, when I was growing up and reading SF and fantasy, I would have considered it amazingly weird if a story had some people choosing to join a group marriage (or even a homosexual one) -- simply because I had never encountered, or even heard of, such a thing.

Now, having see it happen multiple times with people I know, I can find it realistic and reasonable it when I see it in a story. I may still think it is a bad idea, but it isn't unrealistic.

[Nombrilisme Vide]

Oh, John Ringo, no...

[Morat20]

Rather randomly, did anyone else read "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe?" I'm trying to decide if I should recommend it to an English teacher of my acquaintance. (And in a thread about Redshirts and CS Lewis, I figure I have a good chance...)

[Brett Bellmore]

Is it anything like the Evil Overlord checklist?

No, apparently not, checking the wikipedia article on it. Too bad. I feel roughly the same disappointment as when I found out "The Life of Pi" wasn't a documentary about trigonometry.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

when I found out "The Life of Pi" wasn't a documentary about trigonometry.

Movie critic 1: "It just goes on FOREVER!"
Movie critic 2: "But at least it never gets repetitive"
Movie critic 3: "The book was better, but I never finished it.."

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Movie critic 3.1: "reminds me of the life of Fibonacci, parts 1, 1, 2 and 3."
Movie critic 3.14: "The cinematography was great, but the plot was irrational"
Movie critic 3.141: "I liked the XKCD version better"

I could go on and on...

[JakeB]

Hm, I'm pleased to see there's also a movie or two called E.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

"I'm pleased to see there's also a movie or two called E"

Yes, but the second one was derived from the first, and exactly identical.

[wj]

Obviously Movie Critic 3.141 is the only one worth paying any attention to.

The others are just so derivitive....

[Porlock Junior]

E is rumored to be appearing on a double bill with M, in hopes of raising money for filming Sea Squared.

[Doctor Science]

Damn, I'm disappointed too, Brett. I was hoping for the SF version of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

[Brett Bellmore]

That does sound like fun.

[dr ngo]

"Exactly identical" strikes me as redundantly repetitive.

"Exactly identical" strikes me as redundantly repetitive.

[Nous]

I might like Till We Have Faces if it were a stand-alone narrative and not a retelling of Eros and Psyche. Lewis' biggest failure, for me, is not his allegorical urges, but rather his complete inability to understand and connect with the pagan material that he borrows and adapts. He does not seek to understand it, only to co-opt it. It makes his writing feel procrustean in a way that his more purely Christian allegories do not.

[Hartmut]

Identical twins are not fully identical, so 'exactly identical' is not necessarily redundant.

[Slartibartfast]

That makes "identical twins" oxymoronic at some level of detail, no?

[Hartmut]

Identical twins pose a lot of other problems too. If the soul enters at conception, i.e. the single cell stage, are there up to the split two souls in one body or does the soul split too. What if the split is artifically prevented in the former case or how does a split soul differ from a normal one in the latter? How can it be an individual (lit. a non-split-able) from the start when it splits up shortly after. A question for Catholic theologians and GOP lawmakers to answer without the usual cop-out of 'the L#rds's ways are...'.
The old solution of some tribes to kill identical twins as a matter of principle is unlikely to catch on again.

[thompson]

the single cell stage, are there up to the split two souls in one body or does the soul split too.

That's why there's *always* an evil twin...

[Doctor Science]

Nous:

I don't think Lewis had a failure to connect with the pagan material, I think maybe he connected too much.

In some ways I, like Lewis, received a "classical education". When we were growing up, my father read my brother & me the stories of the Greek myths the way other kids get fairy tales.

And whaddaya know, we especially got re-tellings by Roger Lancelyn Green, who was a student of C.S. Lewis'.

Anyway, when Greek & Roman myths are familiar to you from youth, you don't think of them as coming from a different mind-set to your own. They become part of your mental furniture, and you blend them in with the rest.

Which is my way of saying that yes, Lewis didn't really understand the original myth. But he didn't really co-opt it, the story was familiar to him long before he did anything as conscious as co-opting to it.

[jeff]

I read Assop fabels to my boy and then advanced to Calvin & Hobbs. He turned out to be a smart lad with a good sense of humor.

[Nigel]

Loved 'Tales of the Greek Heroes' as a kid.

[jeff]

Aesop
I have big thunbs and a small smart phone

[Donald johnson]

I suspect Lewis understood how pagans understood the Cupid and Psyche story as well as any modern could. He was a classics scholar in part. But he is writing his re-interpretation of the story based on his pet theory that God smuggled in some divine revelation about Himself into pagan mythology. Of course if he is wrong about what God was doing than he misunderstood. I think the story works fine both in The Golden Ass ( which I read long ago) and in Lewis's version. People are always reworking old stories.

[Nous]

Lewis connected with pagan myth in an Edith Hamilton sort of way, not in a Jane Ellen Harrison sort of way, or even a Sophoclean sort of way. He didn't so much absorb the stories as he colonized them.

[Nous]

(In much the same way that Alan Watts Beyond Theology is an interesting meditation on Christianity from a Buddhist perspective, but is not a book about Christianity.)

[Snarki, child of Loki]

My feeling is that it's rather difficult for 'moderns' to get inside the head of ancient peoples; to understand their view of their world and its relationship to their beliefs.

It's not just reading mythology, even in the original language, but more an exercise in anthropology.

This comment applies both to 'classical' mythology and early christian/jewish practices.

[wj]

It's hardly surprising. It appears to be almost impossible for "moderns" in developed countries to comprehend what things are really like in undeveloped countries.

Try to tell them that someone would work in a sweatshop because it was better than staying home doing subsistance agriculture, and they look at you in blank incomprehension. It's not so much a problem of isolation in time as one of serious cultural isolation.

[Nous]

It is difficult to bridge that gap, but for many academics working in the humanities today, historicism and the "anthropological turn" are second nature, and a first step towards understanding older material.

Lewis read as a classicist but found his chair in English Lit as a Medievalist. Today, with the same type of scholarship, he'd likely find a home in a department of Comparative Religion as a specialist in Christianity with occasional teaching in medievalism and chivalric romance. His readings of classical material are all shaded by medieval retellings and allegory anyway.

I'll freely admit that I have a bias towards a more modern approach to pre-Christian material and that Lewis' work is quite accomplished. I just don't think that when he was reading older versions of Eros and Psyche that he ever really grokked the original.