Abolishing Man is Harder Than It Sounds

CS Lewis vs George Orwell and the power of fiction

It’s rather thrilling watching two great heroes slug it out. A while back, I quoted Orwell on CS Lewis’s novel, That Hideous Strength. But recently, I came across CS Lewis’s comments on Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Originally written for Time & Tide and republished in Of This and Other Worlds, Lewis writes:

Here we have two books by the same author which deal, at bottom, with the same subject… What puzzles me is the marked preference of the public for 1984. For it seems to me (apart from its magnificent, and fortunately detachable, Appendix on ‘Newspeak’) to be merely a flawed, interesting book; but the Farm is a work of genius which may well outlive the particular and (let us hope) temporary conditions that provoked it.

To begin with, it is very much the shorter of the two. This in itself would not, of course, show it to be the better. I am the last person to think so… But in this instance the shorter book seems to do all that the longer one does; and more. The longer book does not justify its greater length. There is dead wood in it. And I think we can all see where the dead wood comes.

Dead wood. Ouch. Take that, George.

Why is Lewis writing this? Is he getting back at Orwell for not liking That Hideous Strength? Lewis is writing this because it seems to be true. Animal Farm is much more elegant, saying:

…the shorter book does all that the longer does. But it also does more. Paradoxically, when Orwell turns all his characters into animals he makes them more fully human. In 1984 the cruelty of the tyrants is odious, but it is not tragic; odious like a man skinning a cat alive, not tragic like the cruelty of Regan and Goneril to Lear.

A little later, Lewis concludes:

Finally, Animal Farm is formally almost perfect; light, strong, balanced. There is not a sentence that does not contribute to the whole. The myth says all the author wants it to say and (equally important) it doesn’t say anything else. Here is an objet d’art as durably satisfying as a Horatian ode or a Chippendale chair.

We get the idea. Lewis did not care for the overwritten, unambigious 1984, complete with boot-stamping exposition and an expendable appendix. But so what?

Abolishing Man

I mention it because I’ve been trying to read The Abolition of Man. This a book based on series of lectures given by CS Lewis at King's College, Newcastle, then part of the University of Durham, on 24–26 February 1943. (This was the time that the Allies started relentlessly bombing Germany, and the Wehrmacht launched Operation Ox Head in Tunisia, just to give it some context.)

There are some entertaining moments in The Abolition of Man, especially when Lewis takes on those who teach students that texts only tell us about our own feelings. The book also includes a memorable section on ‘men without chests’, that I’ve mentioned here before.

But I have to be honest. The Abolition of Man is rather hard work. It’s not full of dead wood. Quite the reverse. There’s plenty of living wood. It’s just very dense. One expects this when reading other authors, but Lewis’s prose is normally so plain and simple that the meaning is obvious, and none the worse for that.

It was interesting to read the mixed reactions to the book in the first few pages of Michael Ward’s After Humanity: A Guide to CS Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Ward then goes on to tease out Lewis’s meaning, and explain some of the references that might not be obvious to us in the 21st century.

A Better Way Plus A Bear

There is, however, another way of getting Lewis’s meaning in glorious technicolor and surround sound without studying the text like scripture. Read a different book that intentionally embodies the same ideas: That Hideous Strength. This is the third book in his Cosmic Trilogy which does everything the The Abolition of Man does, but with a great story and a bear called Mr Bultitude. What’s not to like?

It’s tempting to conclude that stories are a handy way of explaining propositional truth, to illustrate eternal realities and help us understand whatever message has been fictionalised. But I really don’t think this is so. Novels, plays and movies say things that statements cannot, or at least they do if they’re any good.

Lightyear failed on that score, since it hammered one lesson repeatedly throughout the movie. It was less than the sum total of the parts. A movie or novel that stands the test of time is one that cannot be reduced to propositional statements, even if the marketing department demand a strapline for the poster.

So, just as George Orwell wrote two books on one subject, so did Lewis. And one of them is superior to the other, although it’s likely Orwell preferred the wrong one.

However, I wonder if Lewis saw in Animal Farm such a potent embodiment of ideas that he was inspired to condense theology and medieval cosmology into The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe five years later. The effects of that book alone, let alone the ones that followed in that series, are incalculable.

If you’re enjoying this weekly article, you might find it easier to read on the Substack App, which is rather good and distraction-free. I use it quite a lot, and with the other people I follow, it’s turned it into some kind of magazine full of my favourite columnists. Some incorporate audio - which is something I might do in the future. But why not give the app a try?