by Stanley Anderson » September 17th, 2008, 3:44 pm
Old-timer’s here will likely be familiar with the “chessboard” view of THS that I’ve proposed, but I should probably describe it a bit for any who may be unfamiliar with it. It is the idea that many of the characters, places, things, events, settings, and themes in THS seem to occur in parallel or contrasting pairs, much like the black and white pieces on a chessboard. They are generally (but not exclusively) aligned as part of the “opposing” sides of the NICE (or Belbury) and St Annes-on-the-Hill. To me this aspect so permeates the book that it seems like a key aspect (but not the only one of course) of what Lewis was trying to accomplish with the book. Something like this “parallel and contrasting” aspect also occurs strongly in many of his other books (in somewhat different ways), so that I think it is a general “Lewisian” trait that is also fascinating to explore apart from THS, but I won’t go much into that more general idea at the moment.
I’m going to digress here for a bit but it will relate to the chessboard view as you will see. Years ago I read about a poem that had an odd quality. For the life of me I can’t find that poem now, the poem’s author, or the person that wrote about the poem, but I think the poem was by TS Elliot, and the person writing about this aspect of the poem was Douglas Hofstadter, the author of the wonderful book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I’ve searched and searched for the reference, but can’t find it anywhere, so I may have the names wrong (and if anyone can tell me where it is or the real names, I’ll be eternally grateful – or well, for a long time anyway).
But here is the idea: The poem in question is a long-ish apparently unrhymed poem that as one reads, one is suddenly struck by an isolated rhyming couplet around the middle of the poem. Since none of the other lines rhyme, it seems odd and “sticks out like a sore thumb”. But then one may happen to notice that the line just before that couplet rhymes with the line just after the couplet. And, oddly enough, the line just before that first “enveloping” line rhymes with the line just after the ending enveloping line. It seems a pattern is developing. Sure enough, the lines before and after that group also rhyme (forming a rhyme scheme of “…d-c-b-a-a-b-c-d…”, not unlike a sort of poetic set of Russian dolls where each larger one encloses the smaller ones inside), and in fact, one can follow the pattern all the way back to the beginning and ending of the poem to find that the first line of the poem rhymes with the last line of the poem.
This odd rhyme structure is curious in that one would not notice it until one got to the middle of the poem and each “surrounding” couplet is harder and harder to “hear”, but if one knows what to look for, it is easy to see that it runs throughout the entire poem. Well, I go into this digression because that is sort of how I “found” the chessboard view of THS. One doesn’t really notice it at the beginning of the book (even though Mark and Jane are primary parallel “pieces” in the set), but there in the middle of the book are the curious characters of (the real) Merlin, along with the odd tramp that the NICE thinks is Merlin. They are both such odd characters that they seem to go together somehow. But then I began to notice other seeming parallel characters, like the strange parallel sound in the names of Grace Ironwood and Fairy Hardcastle, and the king-piece-like aspect of the “heads” of the NICE and St. Annes, Alcasan’s head and Ransom, both “leaders” of their respective camp but both very limited in their movement (Ransom with his bad foot, and Alcasan with his bad -- well, you see what I mean:-), just like opposing king pieces on a chessboard.
From there it expanded to other characters, but interestingly, even into many other aspects of the book – events, places, things, etc, as mentioned above. And by the way, the parallels and contrasts are quite varying and don’t necessarily “line up” with each other in the sense that say, "Since Grace goes with the Fairy, then obviously so-and-so must go with that-guy-over-there". No. It's not that "logical". The same thing might parallel two or more other different areas in different ways, or something one person does may not correspond with what that person's parallel character does, but rather with a different character's actions altogether. The “rhyming couplets” are all over the map, so to speak, sometimes occurring right next to each other in the text, and other times at opposite end of the book. The only consistency is that, to me, they permeate nearly every aspect of the book in some way, and new examples occur to me on each reading. The variety and density of examples is truly amazing to me.
With this comment one might say, "well, it does seem that you can find whatever you like, Stanley -- they do the same thing with numerical "discoveries" in the text of Shakespeare and the Bible and even the phone book, but that doesn't prove anything". And that is true. I can only say that if seeing how the examples develop as we go through the book doesn't convince one about the idea, I can only shrug my shoulders. It is something that seems clear to me, but I can understand potential doubt in someone else's view.
Well, anyway, I’ll get to all that detail as we go further into the book, but I mention the origin of my noticing the chessboard view because in talking about the part of the chessboard view that I see in these first two sections of Chapter 1, you might think “That’s it??? Boy, that sure seems like a stretch, Stanley”. And you would be right – if that were the only or most illuminating example of the chessboard view. But just as it is in noticing the rhymes in that poem described above, it is at this point only one of the lesser examples and the general chessboard view will develop much more as we go along. So with that long introduction, I’ll dive into my thoughts on this section in connection with the first section as related to the chessboard view.
Mark and Jane, to me, are clearly parallel characters in this view – there are many, many parallels between them that I’ll mention later, but for now, we see both of them realizing that they are not really in the situation they might have thought they are in. Jane does not see the wonderful aspects of relationship that she had seemed to experience before marriage just as Mark walks by the beautiful settings of the landscape around him without noticing them. Was her “charm” for Mark just imaginary and not “really” the reason he married her – or indeed, the author suggests that Jane is not really the insightful scholar she would like to think of herself as when she talks about working on her Donne project?
We see something of the same feeling in Mark when he realizes that his election as a fellow was not because of his “papers” as he might have thought, but because of Feverstone’s influence – a rather disconcerting feeling for both Mark and Jane to find themselves in. And they both have the disorienting experience of trying to “fit” the people they are seeing (Jane in her dream of Alcasan and Merlin, and Mark with his views of Curry, Feverstone, and the others) into what they thought they knew about them previously.
And it is too much for both of them to sort out. Jane, in trying to block it all out, decides to get away from the flat to go “anywhere, to be out of that room, that flat, that whole house”, and Mark, as he and Curry arrive at their destination and Mark feeling uncomfortable with the turn the conversation has taken says, in an effort to change the subject, “It’s not yet twelve – what about popping into the Bristol for a drink?” Even though that is difficult for him in terms of expenses, “the Bristol was a very pleasant place”. And getting a bit tipsy with alcohol (as we shall see that this plays an apparently important “smoothing” effect for the “NICE” relations in general) helps him to “get away” from that difficult thought process, just as Jane in her way does the same thing physically by getting out of the house.
(whew! sorry for the long digression there, but I had to get it out of the way at the beginning. Hopefully later posts won't be as involved -- but no guarantees:-),
--Stanley
…on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.