The Dark Tower (1977 novel)
Encyclopedia
The Dark Tower is an incomplete manuscript allegedly written by C. S. Lewis
that appears to be an unfinished sequel to the science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet
. Perelandra
instead became the second book of Lewis' Space Trilogy
, concluded by That Hideous Strength
. Walter Hooper
, Lewis' literary executor, titled the fragment and published it in the 1977 collection The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog
challenged the authenticity of the work. For convenience the author of the text is referred to in this article as "Lewis" without qualification.
. A fictional Lewis himself narrates, as he does in Perelandra
, but Elwin Ransom
appears as a supporting character. The story begins with a discussion of time travel among several academics at a university (subsequently identified as Cambridge) during summer vacation. They conclude that it is impossible to violate the laws of space-time in such a way. However, after the discussion, one of the men (Orfieu) unveils an invention he believes allows people to see through time. The group uses this "chronoscope" to observe an alien world they call "Othertime" (he does not know if it is future or past), where a group of human automatons work to construct a tower at the bidding of the story's villain, the Unicorn, a devilish character with a single horn growing out of his forehead. The Unicorn stings people, apparently volunteers, causing them to become automatons (the "Jerkies").
After a while MacPhee, a character who appears in That Hideous Strength
(though here he is a Scot, not an Irishman), points out that the "Dark Tower" is in fact a replica of the new Cambridge University Library
. This suggests Othertime is the far future, with a replica of an ancient monument being constructed.
It is discovered that Orfieu's assistant, Scudamour, has a double in Othertime. Increasingly, the observers wonder if Othertime really is the past or future, or whether it is some other reality. Scudamour's double grows a sting and becomes the new Unicorn. During one viewing session, Scudamour sees the Unicorn about to sting the double of his fiancee, Camilla. In a blind fury, he rushes at the screen, and somehow switches bodies with the Unicorn. The remainder of the text deals with his experiences in Othertime, as well as his colleagues' attempt to hunt down the Unicorn in this world.
In Othertime, Scudamour survives by playing on his authority, his only card, while he tries to learn. He discovers to his amazement that there is a chronoscope in the Unicorn's room where he stung victims — but it is now broken. He refrains from stinging Camilla, and tries to plan their escape. It appears there is some sort of war (being waged by the "White Riders", who want to remove the stingers from the "unicorns") against the Othertime government. He reads in a library about the Othertimer's time-science. A theory is given of multiple timelines; these do not seem to split off from different outcomes, like quantum realities, but simply proceed separately. However, they can be controlled, and contact between them can be made. References are made to the changeling
myth. The law is stated that "Any two time-lines approximate to the exact degree to which their material contents are alike," and it is revealed that an experiment with a replica railway shed in the right place had already been successful in allowing a controlled transfer of minds. The text ends with Scudamour still reading.
, and there is no sign that Lewis intended to finish it.
Hooper surmises, based on its internal setting, that Lewis wrote it immediately after he finished Out of the Silent Planet, in about 1939. Hooper reports that the late Gervase Mathew told him that he heard Lewis read The Dark Tower to the Inklings
around that time. Anne Paxch posted in MERELEWIS that many who never attended any Inklings meetings heard CSL read his unpublished works elsewhere, and that she recalls Gervase Mathew and others discussing passages which later appeared in The Dark Tower. Inklings scholar John D. Rateliff
suggests that the story could have been written some years later, in about 1946, pointing to a reference in a letter by Lewis's friend J.R.R. Tolkien to a story by Lewis that could be The Dark Tower. Alistair Fowler had clear memories of the "Stinging Man" character in an unfinished manuscript which Lewis showed him in 1952.
However, Fowler's recollections, not shared until 2003, 51 years after the event, may be imperfect. He reported seeing a manuscript of the Lewis fragment "After Ten Years" on the same occasion, a text which Roger Lancelyn Green thought Lewis did not commence until 1959 (The Dark Tower and Other Stories, p. 155). Fowler also described Lewis as engrossed in an issue of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, which may be inaccurate given that Astounding featured what Lewis called "the fiction of Engineers," for which he "had not the slightest taste" ("On Science Fiction," 1955); in the 1950s, Lewis was both a reader of and contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
advanced the theory that The Dark Tower and other posthumously published works attributed to Lewis were forgeries
written by or at the behest of Walter Hooper, based upon her impressions of their style and questions she raised about their provenance
. Lindskoog claimed that The Dark Tower resembled stories by other writers, including A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L'Engle
(1962) and The Planet of the Dead by Clark Ashton Smith
(1932).
Others accept that the story is by Lewis, as the author's estate and the publishers assert by publishing it under his name. The oppressive atmosphere of the book is reminiscent of Lewis's own That Hideous Strength
(1945) and David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus
(1920), which Lewis acknowledged as an influence.
The Dark Tower does differ to a degree from the published novels of Lewis' Space Trilogy
in setting and subject matter. For example, Ransom becomes a marginal character, and the action takes place partly in an alternate universe. However, if, as Hooper supposes, the text was written prior to Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, it would have had no need to maintain consistency with an as yet unwritten series, especially considering that the tone and subject-matter of the published series changes markedly between its first and last books.
Alastair Fowler, Regius Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, to whom Lewis served as a doctoral supervisor, wrote in 2003 that he saw portions of The Dark Tower including the Stinging Man and discussed them with Lewis in 1952. Harry Lee Poe, "Shedding Light on the Dark Tower," Christianity Today, February 2, 2007.
Two quantitative stylometric
analyses have compared The Dark Tower to other books in the Lewis space trilogy. Both analyses have supported the perception that, for whatever reason, the style of The Dark Tower is atypical of that employed by Lewis in the trilogy. The first, by Carla Faust Jones (Mythlore 57: Spring 1989, 11-15), concluded from examination of a portion of The Dark Towers text that "with respect to the frequency of single letters and particularly letter pairs, 'The Dark Tower' fragment represents a different style than the books comprising Lewis's deep space trilogy." The second, by J. R. Thompson and J. Rasp (Austrian Journal of Statistics, 38(2):2009 71-82), concluded that "vocabulary usage in The Dark Tower differs from that predicted by [Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra]."
, a medieval narrative poem merging the Orpheus myth with the trip to fairyland.
The construction of the tower is clearly important. Lewis's time-lines are quite coherent in terms of the science fiction of his generation; it is often forgotten by readers that he was seriously interested in science fiction long before it was fashionable. In terms of the law that "Any two time-lines approximate to the exact degree to which their material contents are alike" the tower is obviously a repeat, on a grand scale, of the Othertimers' successful but small experiment with a railway shed constructed in the same space as ours. However, although Lewis was a reader of all sorts of science fiction, he himself was not interested in writing the technical side: he wrote in 1955 that "The most superficial appearance of plausibility--the merest sop to our critical intellect--will do.... I took a hero to Mars once in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus" ("On Science Fiction," in Of This and Other Worlds).
How Lewis would have explored the threat from the Othertime world remains unknown. The text mentions an "idol" whose face is, in some way, recognizable to the Cambridge observers, and which is, the narrator says, "still there" at the end of the events to be narrated. How Lewis intended to follow up this foreshadowing is unclear; he may have intended to suggest links to contemporary world events, or may have had no precise idea in mind. The story could be interpreted as the germ of a dystopia
n novel like That Hideous Strength
: the Stingingmen and Jerkies could parallel the Conditioners and the Conditioned as described in The Abolition of Man
. The idol with many bodies and one head may express Lewis' horror, expressed in many of his works, at the absorption and suppression of the individual into a collective controlled by a single will: in Perelandra
, referring to a similar loss of individuality, he speculates that "what the Pantheists falsely hoped for in Heaven, the wicked really receive in Hell".
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
that appears to be an unfinished sequel to the science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet
Out of the Silent Planet
Out of the Silent Planet is the first novel of a science fiction trilogy written by C. S. Lewis, sometimes referred to as the Space Trilogy, Ransom Trilogy or Cosmic Trilogy. The other volumes are Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, and a fragment of a sequel was published posthumously as The...
. Perelandra
Perelandra
Perelandra is the second book in the Space Trilogy of C. S. Lewis, set in the Field of Arbol...
instead became the second book of Lewis' Space Trilogy
Space Trilogy
The Space Trilogy, Cosmic Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy is a trilogy of science fiction novels by C. S. Lewis, famous for his later series The Chronicles of Narnia. A philologist named Elwin Ransom is the hero of the first two novels and an important character in the third.The books in the trilogy...
, concluded by That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength is a 1945 novel by C. S. Lewis, the final book in Lewis's theological science fiction Space Trilogy. The events of this novel follow those of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and once again feature the philologist Elwin Ransom...
. Walter Hooper
Walter Hooper
Walter McGehee Hooper is a trustee and literary advisor of the estate of C.S. Lewis. Born in Reidsville, North Carolina, U.S., he earned an M.A. in education and was an instructor in English at the University of Kentucky in the early 1960s. As a visitor to England, he served briefly as Lewis's...
, Lewis' literary executor, titled the fragment and published it in the 1977 collection The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog
Kathryn Lindskoog
Kathryn Lindskoog was a C. S. Lewis scholar known largely for her theory that some works attributed to Lewis are forgeries, including The Dark Tower....
challenged the authenticity of the work. For convenience the author of the text is referred to in this article as "Lewis" without qualification.
Plot summaries
The story deals with an early rendition of interdimensional travelParallel universe (fiction)
A parallel universe or alternative reality is a hypothetical self-contained separate reality coexisting with one's own. A specific group of parallel universes is called a "multiverse", although this term can also be used to describe the possible parallel universes that constitute reality...
. A fictional Lewis himself narrates, as he does in Perelandra
Perelandra
Perelandra is the second book in the Space Trilogy of C. S. Lewis, set in the Field of Arbol...
, but Elwin Ransom
Elwin Ransom
Elwin Ransom is the prominent character from C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy series. He is the main character in the books Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, which are told almost entirely from his point of view...
appears as a supporting character. The story begins with a discussion of time travel among several academics at a university (subsequently identified as Cambridge) during summer vacation. They conclude that it is impossible to violate the laws of space-time in such a way. However, after the discussion, one of the men (Orfieu) unveils an invention he believes allows people to see through time. The group uses this "chronoscope" to observe an alien world they call "Othertime" (he does not know if it is future or past), where a group of human automatons work to construct a tower at the bidding of the story's villain, the Unicorn, a devilish character with a single horn growing out of his forehead. The Unicorn stings people, apparently volunteers, causing them to become automatons (the "Jerkies").
After a while MacPhee, a character who appears in That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength is a 1945 novel by C. S. Lewis, the final book in Lewis's theological science fiction Space Trilogy. The events of this novel follow those of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and once again feature the philologist Elwin Ransom...
(though here he is a Scot, not an Irishman), points out that the "Dark Tower" is in fact a replica of the new Cambridge University Library
Cambridge University Library
The Cambridge University Library is the centrally-administered library of Cambridge University in England. It comprises five separate libraries:* the University Library main building * the Medical Library...
. This suggests Othertime is the far future, with a replica of an ancient monument being constructed.
It is discovered that Orfieu's assistant, Scudamour, has a double in Othertime. Increasingly, the observers wonder if Othertime really is the past or future, or whether it is some other reality. Scudamour's double grows a sting and becomes the new Unicorn. During one viewing session, Scudamour sees the Unicorn about to sting the double of his fiancee, Camilla. In a blind fury, he rushes at the screen, and somehow switches bodies with the Unicorn. The remainder of the text deals with his experiences in Othertime, as well as his colleagues' attempt to hunt down the Unicorn in this world.
In Othertime, Scudamour survives by playing on his authority, his only card, while he tries to learn. He discovers to his amazement that there is a chronoscope in the Unicorn's room where he stung victims — but it is now broken. He refrains from stinging Camilla, and tries to plan their escape. It appears there is some sort of war (being waged by the "White Riders", who want to remove the stingers from the "unicorns") against the Othertime government. He reads in a library about the Othertimer's time-science. A theory is given of multiple timelines; these do not seem to split off from different outcomes, like quantum realities, but simply proceed separately. However, they can be controlled, and contact between them can be made. References are made to the changeling
Changeling
A changeling is a creature found in Western European folklore and folk religion. It is typically described as being the offspring of a fairy, troll, elf or other legendary creature that has been secretly left in the place of a human child. Sometimes the term is also used to refer to the child who...
myth. The law is stated that "Any two time-lines approximate to the exact degree to which their material contents are alike," and it is revealed that an experiment with a replica railway shed in the right place had already been successful in allowing a controlled transfer of minds. The text ends with Scudamour still reading.
Origin
In his introduction to The Dark Tower and Other Stories, Hooper states that he rescued an untitled manuscript in Lewis' handwriting of the story from a bonfire of the author's writings early in 1964, several months after Lewis' death. The 64-page manuscript appears to have originally had at least 66 pages, two of which are now missing. If the text did at one time continue past the 66th page, these additional pages are also lost. As it stands, the narrative contains two gaps and comes to an abrupt end. The Dark Tower is an unfinished workUnfinished work
An unfinished work is creative work that has not been finished. Its creator may have chosen never to finish it or may have been prevented from doing so by circumstances outside of their control such as death. Such pieces are often the subject of speculation as to what the finished piece would have...
, and there is no sign that Lewis intended to finish it.
Hooper surmises, based on its internal setting, that Lewis wrote it immediately after he finished Out of the Silent Planet, in about 1939. Hooper reports that the late Gervase Mathew told him that he heard Lewis read The Dark Tower to the Inklings
Inklings
The Inklings was an informal literary discussion group associated with the University of Oxford, England, for nearly two decades between the early 1930s and late 1949. The Inklings were literary enthusiasts who praised the value of narrative in fiction, and encouraged the writing of fantasy...
around that time. Anne Paxch posted in MERELEWIS that many who never attended any Inklings meetings heard CSL read his unpublished works elsewhere, and that she recalls Gervase Mathew and others discussing passages which later appeared in The Dark Tower. Inklings scholar John D. Rateliff
John D. Rateliff
John D. Rateliff is a published scholar of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. He acquired his Ph.D. at Marquette University, where he researched Tolkien's works. His most recent publication is The History of The Hobbit.-Career:...
suggests that the story could have been written some years later, in about 1946, pointing to a reference in a letter by Lewis's friend J.R.R. Tolkien to a story by Lewis that could be The Dark Tower. Alistair Fowler had clear memories of the "Stinging Man" character in an unfinished manuscript which Lewis showed him in 1952.
However, Fowler's recollections, not shared until 2003, 51 years after the event, may be imperfect. He reported seeing a manuscript of the Lewis fragment "After Ten Years" on the same occasion, a text which Roger Lancelyn Green thought Lewis did not commence until 1959 (The Dark Tower and Other Stories, p. 155). Fowler also described Lewis as engrossed in an issue of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, which may be inaccurate given that Astounding featured what Lewis called "the fiction of Engineers," for which he "had not the slightest taste" ("On Science Fiction," 1955); in the 1950s, Lewis was both a reader of and contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Authenticity and relation to the published novels
Lewis scholar Kathryn LindskoogKathryn Lindskoog
Kathryn Lindskoog was a C. S. Lewis scholar known largely for her theory that some works attributed to Lewis are forgeries, including The Dark Tower....
advanced the theory that The Dark Tower and other posthumously published works attributed to Lewis were forgeries
Forgery
Forgery is the process of making, adapting, or imitating objects, statistics, or documents with the intent to deceive. Copies, studio replicas, and reproductions are not considered forgeries, though they may later become forgeries through knowing and willful misrepresentations. Forging money or...
written by or at the behest of Walter Hooper, based upon her impressions of their style and questions she raised about their provenance
Provenance
Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of an historical object. The term was originally mostly used for works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including science and computing...
. Lindskoog claimed that The Dark Tower resembled stories by other writers, including A Wrinkle in Time
A Wrinkle in Time
A Wrinkle in Time is a science fantasy novel by Madeleine L'Engle, first published in 1962. The story revolves around a young girl whose father, a government scientist, has gone missing after working on a mysterious project called a tesseract. The book won a Newbery Medal, Sequoyah Book Award, and...
by Madeleine L'Engle
Madeleine L'Engle
Madeleine L'Engle was an American writer best known for her young-adult fiction, particularly the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time...
(1962) and The Planet of the Dead by Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne...
(1932).
Others accept that the story is by Lewis, as the author's estate and the publishers assert by publishing it under his name. The oppressive atmosphere of the book is reminiscent of Lewis's own That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength is a 1945 novel by C. S. Lewis, the final book in Lewis's theological science fiction Space Trilogy. The events of this novel follow those of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and once again feature the philologist Elwin Ransom...
(1945) and David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus
A Voyage to Arcturus
A Voyage to Arcturus is a novel by Scottish writer David Lindsay, first published in 1920. It combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. It has been described by critic and philosopher Colin Wilson as the...
(1920), which Lewis acknowledged as an influence.
The Dark Tower does differ to a degree from the published novels of Lewis' Space Trilogy
Space Trilogy
The Space Trilogy, Cosmic Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy is a trilogy of science fiction novels by C. S. Lewis, famous for his later series The Chronicles of Narnia. A philologist named Elwin Ransom is the hero of the first two novels and an important character in the third.The books in the trilogy...
in setting and subject matter. For example, Ransom becomes a marginal character, and the action takes place partly in an alternate universe. However, if, as Hooper supposes, the text was written prior to Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, it would have had no need to maintain consistency with an as yet unwritten series, especially considering that the tone and subject-matter of the published series changes markedly between its first and last books.
Alastair Fowler, Regius Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, to whom Lewis served as a doctoral supervisor, wrote in 2003 that he saw portions of The Dark Tower including the Stinging Man and discussed them with Lewis in 1952. Harry Lee Poe, "Shedding Light on the Dark Tower," Christianity Today, February 2, 2007.
Two quantitative stylometric
Stylometry
Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language, but it has successfully been applied to music and to fine-art paintings as well.Stylometry is often used to attribute authorship to anonymous or disputed documents...
analyses have compared The Dark Tower to other books in the Lewis space trilogy. Both analyses have supported the perception that, for whatever reason, the style of The Dark Tower is atypical of that employed by Lewis in the trilogy. The first, by Carla Faust Jones (Mythlore 57: Spring 1989, 11-15), concluded from examination of a portion of The Dark Towers text that "with respect to the frequency of single letters and particularly letter pairs, 'The Dark Tower' fragment represents a different style than the books comprising Lewis's deep space trilogy." The second, by J. R. Thompson and J. Rasp (Austrian Journal of Statistics, 38(2):2009 71-82), concluded that "vocabulary usage in The Dark Tower differs from that predicted by [Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra]."
Suggested developments
Walter Hooper noted, in his afterword, that Scudamour's fiancee is once given the surname Ammeret, and suggests a basis in the characters Sir Scudamour and Amoret in The Faerie Queen Book III. Amoret was carried off by an enchanter and had to be rescued. Another allusion to note is the probable reference of Orfieu to Sir OrfeoSir Orfeo
Sir Orfeo is an anonymous Middle English narrative poem, retelling the story of Orpheus as a king rescuing his wife from the fairy king.-History and Manuscripts:...
, a medieval narrative poem merging the Orpheus myth with the trip to fairyland.
The construction of the tower is clearly important. Lewis's time-lines are quite coherent in terms of the science fiction of his generation; it is often forgotten by readers that he was seriously interested in science fiction long before it was fashionable. In terms of the law that "Any two time-lines approximate to the exact degree to which their material contents are alike" the tower is obviously a repeat, on a grand scale, of the Othertimers' successful but small experiment with a railway shed constructed in the same space as ours. However, although Lewis was a reader of all sorts of science fiction, he himself was not interested in writing the technical side: he wrote in 1955 that "The most superficial appearance of plausibility--the merest sop to our critical intellect--will do.... I took a hero to Mars once in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus" ("On Science Fiction," in Of This and Other Worlds).
How Lewis would have explored the threat from the Othertime world remains unknown. The text mentions an "idol" whose face is, in some way, recognizable to the Cambridge observers, and which is, the narrator says, "still there" at the end of the events to be narrated. How Lewis intended to follow up this foreshadowing is unclear; he may have intended to suggest links to contemporary world events, or may have had no precise idea in mind. The story could be interpreted as the germ of a dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
n novel like That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength is a 1945 novel by C. S. Lewis, the final book in Lewis's theological science fiction Space Trilogy. The events of this novel follow those of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and once again feature the philologist Elwin Ransom...
: the Stingingmen and Jerkies could parallel the Conditioners and the Conditioned as described in The Abolition of Man
The Abolition of Man
The Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," and uses that as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law, and a warning of the consequences of...
. The idol with many bodies and one head may express Lewis' horror, expressed in many of his works, at the absorption and suppression of the individual into a collective controlled by a single will: in Perelandra
Perelandra
Perelandra is the second book in the Space Trilogy of C. S. Lewis, set in the Field of Arbol...
, referring to a similar loss of individuality, he speculates that "what the Pantheists falsely hoped for in Heaven, the wicked really receive in Hell".
Further reading
- Downing, David C., Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy. University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. ISBN 0-87023-997-X
- Himes, Jonathan B. "The Allegory of Lust: Textual and Sexual Deviance in The Dark Tower." Truths Breathed Through Silver: The Inklings' Moral and Mythopoeic Legacy. Ed. Jonathan B. Himes, with Joe R. Christopher and Salwa Khoddam. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 51-80.
- Schwartz, Sanford. Appendix A: "The Dark Tower." C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the Space Trilogy. Oxford UP, 2009. 151-56.