“The leering grin behind the mask of the alluring smile is the enemy and to open the door to the imagination is to invite death in.”
IN A LETTER CONCERNING C.S. LEWIS'S WORKS, his dear friend J.R.R. Tolkien makes an observation about the prevalence of dualism in Lewis's fiction: "I noticed, for the first time consciously, how dualistic Lewis' mind and imagination [were], though as a philosopher his reason entirely rejected this. So the pun Hierarchy/Lowerarchy. And of course the 'Miserific Vision' is rationally nonsense, not to say theologically blasphemous" (371). In this letter, however, Tolkien blurs the distinction between two different types of dualism: a philosophical dualism, the dualism that Tolkien says Lewis's reason rejects, and narrative dualism (a term of my own coinage and defined in the following paragraphs), which serves as a literary device. Although Lewis rejects philosophical dualism, he employs narrative dualism in his fiction, namely in That Hideous Strength; there Lewis uses the device paradoxically to lead Mark and Jane, the novel's two protagonists, to a unity of purpose and marital harmony by means of their separate experiences in the camps of Logres and the N.I.C.E.
In Mere Christianity, Lewis defines philosophical dualism as "the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back if everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war" (42). He goes on to say that "[t]he two powers, or spirits, or gods--the good one and the bad one--are supposed to be quite independent. [...] Neither of them made the other, neither of them has the right to call itself God" (42). With this philosophical dualism, as Tolkien states, Lewis did not agree; he believed that the opposing forces, good and evil, right and wrong, were neither matching in power nor did they equally deserve to exist. He believed, as he says in Mere Christianity, that "one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right," and "what we mean by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the real ultimate God and the other is a wrong relation to Him" (43). One should note, however, that although Lewis did not believe in dualism as a religion in itself or as part of his own Christianity, he maintains that dualism is almost a part of Christianity:
One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe--a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in part of the universe occupied by the rebel. (45)
This rebellion to which Lewis refers is one of the main themes in That Hideous Strength. According to Charles Moorman, "in order to provide a suitable literary vehicle for orthodox ideas, Lewis creates his own cosmic myth. Science fiction provides him with a method and a plot" (401).
Although Tolkien neglects to distinguish between philosophical dualism and narrative dualism in his letter about Lewis's imagination, Lewis himself employs purely narrative dualism as an element of storytelling. I have come to define narrative dualism as the existence of two opposing forces that define each other in their contrasting roles and, in so doing, further the plot and character development of a story. In That Hideous Strength [HS], the last installment of Lewis's space trilogy, almost every aspect of the story is dualistic in nature, emphasizing the many themes discussed later in this essay. Most clearly, the Pendragon of Logres and the Head of the N.I.C.E. have different methods of maintaining order: free will versus compulsion, clarity versus confusion, true news versus false news, the spirit of life versus the sterility of life. …