The Dark Tower and Other Stories

*The most important events in every age never reach the history books.* - *The Dark Tower*

***The Dark Tower*** is an unfinished science fiction novel, allegedly by Irish author Clive Staples Lewis, published after his death in 1977 in the collection *The Dark Tower and Other Stories*.

*The Dark Tower* appears to be an unfinished sequel of under a hundred pages to the science fiction novel *Out of the Silent Planet*. In the official canonical Cosmic Trilogy, the novel *Perelandra* instead became the second book of Lewis' Space Trilogy, and the series was concluded by *That Hideous Strength*. The work features the return of Elwin Ransom who appears in the canonical trilogy as well as Andrew MacPhee, who also appears in *That Hideous Strength* in a different guise. Like *That Hideous Strength*, the setting is Earth-bound rather than interplanetary, although it does feature interdimensional travel like the later and more famous *Chronicles of Narnia*. The remaining works in the collection *The Dark Tower and Other Stories* are not related to the Space Trilogy at all, so are not discussed here. Much of the contents of this collection also appear in *C. S. Lewis:  Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces* (edited by Lesley Walmsley, HarperCollins, 2000)

Walter McGehee Hooper, Lewis' literary executor, gave a title to the fragment and included it in the 1977 collection *The Dark Tower and Other Stories*. Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog has challenged the authenticity of the work, but her views are not universal. If it is the work of C.S. Lewis, then it is also unclear whether Lewis ever intended to publish it, or had rejected it for whatever reason. The MS is incomplete, not only lacking an ending, but some sections within the remaining text, so it is not a completely flowing narrative. Because of its unclear origins, literary quality, incompleteness and the question of whether Lewis wished it published or not, it cannot be claimed to be fully canon, and instead remains at best a deuterocanonical addition to the series. It is left out of single volume editions of the Space Trilogy.

*For convenience, the author of the text is mostly referred to in this article as "Lewis" without qualification.*

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## Title

The story takes its name from Robert Browning poem, "*Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came*":

> *If at his counsel I should turn aside/ Into that ominous tract which, all agree,/ Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly/ I did turn as he pointed: neither pride/ Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,/ So much as gladness that some end might be.*
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The title of this poem, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", in turn forms the last words of the poem, is a line from William Shakespeare's play *King Lear* (*ca.* 1607). In the play, Gloucester's son, Edgar, lends credence to his disguise as Tom o' Bedlam by talking nonsense, of which this is a part:

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> Child Rowland to the dark tower came.
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> His word was still "Fie, foh, and fum,
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> I smell the blood of a British man."
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> *King Lear*, Act 3, scene 4, lines 195-197

The Dark Tower is also likely a visual reference to the Tower of Babel which gives its name to *That Hideous Strength*.

J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series features Barad-dûr as the home of the Dark Lord Sauron. Barad-dûr means "Dark Tower" in one of Tolkien's languages. Given *The Dark Tower* provenance, it is not clear which came first, but it is well known Lewis and Tolkien had a mutual influence on each other as did the other Inklings.

Stephen King has used the same title for a series of his own books - it is not known if King has read this work or how much he is influenced by it.

## Plot

The story deals with an early rendition of interdimensional travel. 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 the University of Cambridge) during the summer holidays. 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 Unicorn, a devilish but human (or possibly semi-human) character with a single horn growing out of his forehead. The Unicorn stings people, apparently volunteers, causing them to become automatons ("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 British Library at Cambridge. This suggests Othertime is the far future, with a replica of an ancient monument being constructed.

It is discovered that Orfieu's assistant, Michael 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 fiancée, Camilla Bembridge. 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 his 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 social system. He reads in the library in the Dark Tower about the time-science of the Othertimers. 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.

## Characters

* **Big Brain**
* **Camilla Bembridge**
* **Doubles**
* **Drones**
* **Jerkies**
* **Cyril Knellie**
* **Clive Staples Lewis**, as narrator
* **Andrew MacPhee** - Scottish in this book, not Irish. A recurring character.
* **Orfieu**
* **Elwin Ransom**, a recurring character throughout the Space Trilogy.
* **Michael Scudamour**
* **Stingingmen** or **Unicorn-men**
* **White Riders**
* **Othertime social system**

## Suggested development

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 Queene* 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 Orfeo*, 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".

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 dystopian novel like *That Hideous Strength*: 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"

## Authenticity, relation to the previously published novels and literary criticism

The existence of *The Dark Tower* was announced in 1966, three years after Lewis' death, by Walter McGehee Hooper in the preface of *Of Other Worlds*. He claimed that Warren Lewis, Jack's brother, and their gardener were burning Lewis' papers and that he had saved them. There was a further mention of its existence in Roger Gilbert Lancelyn Green's biography of C.S. Lewis published in 1974, along with a synopsis, and three years later Hooper published the work along with other pieces he had found.

The Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog 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. Lindskoog notes that in Lindsay's *A Voyage to Arcturus*:

> The most striking resemblance of all, of course, is the presence in both novels of new organs on the foreheads of the protagonists. Upon reaching Tormance, Maskull immediately finds a strange new organ upon his forehead. (Voyage, p. 44). When Scudamour enters Othertime, he likewise immediately finds a new organ on his forehead. (Dark Tower, pp. 62-63)
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*The Dark Tower* does differ to a degree from the published novels of Lewis's *The 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.

Margaret Wheatfield noted that

> "*In* The Dark Tower *we see an alternate reality with a dark analogue of Cambridge University, where evil magic is manifest and rampant, and people are made into automatons by the sting of a magical horn. In* That Hideous Strength *evil magic is at work behind the scenes at an ancient English university in our familiar reality, subtly corrupting the faculty by mundane means - manipulation of academic politics, offers of tempting career advances and of lucrative real estate deals. The terrifying deviltry behind it becomes only gradually visible to the reader. At least to this reviewer, it seems entirely plausible to consider the one as an early draft of the other*".
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Blogger Adrian McCauley says

> *There are a few twists and a few genuinely unsettling moments. Stylistically, this story is unlike anything of Lewis’s that I have read, and this is also the basis as to why the authenticity is still debated by academics. The story is dark and uncomfortable to read – the setting is unidentifiable (possibly set in post-war time) but feels like it could be a Victorian gothic story, with the sense of growing dread and nihilism common in H. P. Lovecraft’s works. The characters, though underdeveloped due to the unfinished nature of the story, are suitably sympathetic with clear motivations.*
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One notable omission is the Eldila, who appear in every part of the Space Trilogy in some form, but not in *the Dark Tower*.

Alastair David Shaw 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.

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 concluded from examination of a portion of the text of *The Dark Tower* 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 concluded that "vocabulary usage in The Dark Tower differs from that predicted by *Out of the Silent Planet* and *Perelandra*."

Don King, author of *C. S. Lewis, Poet* has said,"If Lindskoog is wrong, [then] Lewis wrote some pieces that were stillborn at best or just plain bad at worst. If she is right, then someone is a forger."  Chris S. Friel in his paper, *It All Began in The Dark Tower* suggests that Michael Scudamour in ***The Dark Tower***was an early model for Mark Gainsby Studdock, although the authorship of that work remains controversial.

However, some 1970s reviews of *the Dark Tower* have been more positive. *The Illustrated London News* wrote:

> *Admirers of the late C.S. Lewis' interplanetary trilogy will welcome the six previously unpublished and collected pieces now brought together.*
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A review in the *Church of England Newspaper* wrote "The Dark Tower, *I believe, is as good as anything he [ C.S. Lewis ] wrote...*"

The idea of parallel universes was already around when Lewis was writing the Space Trilogy. Murray Leinster's *Sidewise in Time* had already popularises the idea. It also relates back to C.S. Lewis' Irish background, in which some people still thought there was an Otherworld nearby, and that some people could see it through so called "Thin" Places.

Despite Phillip Pullman's open hatred of Lewis, this book seems to have been a direct influence on *His Dark Materials*, particularly the second volume, *The Subtle Knife* which has the characters journeying between alternate realities. A similarity has also been noted with the *Mirror Mirror* episode of Star Trek.

## Quotations

* > *Where you are is always your world.*
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* > *The most important events in every age never reach the history books.*
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* > *"Excuse me," said Ransom. "But it is funny, you know. The idea of a man thinking he could become a saint as a minor detail in his scientific training. You might as well imagine you could use the stairs of heaven as a short cut to the nearest tobacconist’s. Don’t you see that long before you had reached the level of timeless experience you would have had to become so interested in something else—or, frankly, Someone Else—that you wouldn’t be bothering about time-travel?"*
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* > *No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden*
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* > *‘Oh, Michael,’ said Camilla with a gesture of despair, ‘have you forgotten even that? They are the savages, the man-eaters, who have destroyed nearly all the world.’*
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* > *He - or it - [ Unicorn ] began to perform a series of acts and gestures so obscene that, even after the experiences we had already had, I could hardly believe my eyes. If you had seen a mentally deficient street-urchin doing the same things at the back of a warehouse in Liverpool docks, with a grin on his face, you would have shuddered. But the peculiar horror of the Stingingman was that he did them with perfect gravity and ritual solemnity and all the time he looked, or seemed to look, unblinkingly at us.*
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* > *Scudamour could only describe him as a stingless Stingingman. He had all the appearances of the stinging caste except the sting—black robes, black hair, and pallid face.*
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* > '‘In other words, sir,’ said Scudamour to me, ‘there are no spare particles to be had in the universe at any given moment. It’s like trying to get back into college after you’ve gone down: all the rooms are occupied as they were in your time, but by different people.’'
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* > *But what startled him far more was that in the very act of setting the girl down he found his whole mind reeling under the effort of resisting a desire which horrified him both by its content and by its almost maniacal strength. He wanted to sting. There was a cloud of pain in his head so that he felt his head would burst if he did not sting. And for one horrible moment it seemed to him that to sting Camilla would be the most natural thing in the world. For what other purpose was she there? Of course Scudamour has read his psychoanalysis. He is perfectly well aware that under abnormal conditions a much more natural desire might disguise itself in this grotesque form. But he is pretty sure that this was not what was hap­pening. The pain and pressure in his forehead, as he still remembers them, leave no room for doubt. This was a desire with a real physiological basis. He was full of poison and ached to discharge it. As soon as he realized what his body was urging him to do he fell back several paces from the chair. He dared not look at the girl for a few minutes, whatever assistance she might need: certainly he must not go near her.*
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* > "*‘I’d sooner go to a heaven of harps and angels like what they used to tell me about when I was a boy. […] I’d sooner have anything than go round and round that way like a rat in a bucket of water"(p.88)*\*
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* > *During the whole of our stay in College with Orfieu, his aged colleague Knellie (Cyril Knellie, the now almost forgotten author of* Erotici Graeci Minimi, Table-Talk of a Famous Florentine Courtesan*, and* Lesbos: A Masque*) was a great trial to us. It would not be fair to mention him in a story about Cambridge without adding that Oxford had produced Knellie and indeed nurtured him till his fortieth year. He was now a shrunk, pale man with a white moustache and a skin like satin that had been badly creased; very carefully dressed; nice in his eating; a little exotic in gesture; and very anxious to be regarded as a man of the world. He was the affectionate type of bore, and I was his selected victim. On the strength of having been at my old college—some time in the nineties—he addressed me as Lu-Lu, a sobriquet I particularly dislike. When dinner was over and Orfieu was just beginning to make his apologies to the old man for withdrawing us on the ground of urgent work, he held up his forefinger as prettily as if he had newly learned the trick.*
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* > *The truth is that the stingless relatives of the Stingingmen—the Drones, as we may call them—have only one interest in life. They are all hoping to grow stings. They spend nearly all their spare time in the laboratory, concocting every kind of nostrum which they think may produce the coveted deformity. Sometimes it is drugs to drink, sometimes powders and plasters for the forehead, sometimes incisions and cauterisations. One depends on diet, another on some kind of exercises. Scudamour says they reminded him of nothing so much as of the inveterate gamblers whom one finds living in the neighbourhood of any big continental casino—every one with an infallible private recipe for making his fortune. And like the gamblers they seemed to have a hope which no experience could overthrow. Very few of them, perhaps none, as far as he could learn, had ever succeeded. Year after year they watched young men on whom the caprice of nature had lavished the sting succeeding to the seats of power while they themselves grew old amid their experiments. Often if Scudamour came suddenly into the anteroom he heard fragments of their whispered conversation—‘When my sting has grown,’ ‘Now that I have found the real treatment,’ ‘Of course it is almost certain that I shall not be with you next year.’*
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* *Ransom had actually experienced … how thin is the crust which protects ‘real life’ from the fantastic.*
*" “…Who is it by?”*

“It’s by the Devil, if you want to know,” shouted Scudamour.
“Ah–,” said Knellie very slowly, “I see what you mean. Perhaps in a certain sense that is true of all art at its supreme moments. Didn’t poor Oscar say something like that–?” (p52)
## References

Source: partly Wikipedia

1. ↑ https://www.bartleby.com/246/654.html
2. ↑ Folger Digital Texts (en).
3. ↑ https://www.discovery.org/a/856/
4. ↑ Lindskoog, Kathryn. *Light in the Shadowlands: Protecting the Real C. S. Lewis*. Multnomah Publishers, 1994. ISBN|0-88070-695-3
5. ↑ Lindskoog, Kathryn. *The C. S. Lewis Hoax*. Multnomah Publishers, 1988. ISBN 0-88070-258-3
6. ↑ https://www.discovery.org/a/882/
7. ↑ Wheatfield, Margaret "Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Revisited" in Evangelia Kaplanova (ed.), "A Retrospective View of Twentieth Century Science Fiction and Fantasy Writings" (Essay collection published in Russian, Moscow 2002, Wheatfield article appearing in both English and Russian)
8. ↑ https://adrianmccauley.com/2017/08/27/the-dark-tower-by-c-s-lewis/
9. ↑ Poe, Harry Lee, "Shedding Light on the Dark Tower" *Christianity Today*, 2 February 2007
10. ↑ http://www.lewisiana.nl/fowler/index.htm
11. ↑ https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/33/3/637/4652887
12. ↑ https://www.academia.edu/52985294/Computer\_stylometry\_of\_C\_S\_Lewis\_s\_The\_Dark\_Tower\_and\_related\_texts
13. ↑ Carla Faust Jones. *Mythlore* 57: Spring 1989, 11-15
14. ↑ Thompson, J. R. and Rasp, J. (*Austrian Journal of Statistics*, 38(2):2009 71-82
15. ↑ https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/february/28.44.html
16. ↑ https://www.academia.edu/32764528/It\_All\_Began\_in\_The\_Dark\_Tower\_An\_Episode\_from\_Edmund\_Spenser\_in\_the\_Life\_of\_C\_S\_Lewis
17. ↑  https://stromata.tripod.com/id76.htm
18. ↑ https://www.discovery.org/a/882/

## 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.
* *The Dark Tower* review, available here, originally published in *How Thin is the Crust” in Mythlore 6.1 (#19) (1979): 32-33*