Volume 4 Number 1 Article 4

9-15-1976

A Briefing for Briefing: Charles Williams' Descent Into Hell and Doris Lessing's Briefing orF a Descent into Hell

Ellen Cronan Rose

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Recommended Citation Rose, Ellen Cronan (1976) "A Briefing for Briefing: Charles Williams' Descent Into Hell and Doris Lessing's Briefing orF a Descent into Hell," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 4 : No. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol4/iss1/4

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm

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Abstract Asserts that “Doris Lessing’s naming of her book and its protagonist was both intentional and ironic, and that it acknowledges her indebtedness to the form of Williams’ fiction and her [...] futile gesture toward the Romantic amalgam of appearance and reality.”

Additional Keywords Lessing, Doris. Briefing orF a Descent Into Hell; Williams, Charles. Descent Into Hell

This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol4/iss1/4 A Briefing for Briefing: Charles W illiams' Descent Into Hell a n d Doris Lessing's Briefing For a Descent into Hell by Ellen Cronan Rose

FOR YEARS I have thought it odd that no one has ever pub­ Y oga__ Zoroastrianism and esoteric Christianity; tracts on licly compared Doris Lessing's B riefing For a Descent the I Ching; Zen, w itchcraft, magic, astrology and vampir­ I n t o H e l l to Charles W illiams' Descent Into H ell. Who could ism; scholarly treatises on Sufism; the works of the Chris­ resist the tantalizing clues of the echoed title , the male tian m ystics."4 Following Lessing's advice, she "went protagonist (her first) whose first name is Charles and last through that process of ripping the heart, the pith, out of in itia l W, a Cambridge don whose personal magnetism, a subject, when she was ready for that subject" and attested to by Rosemary Baines, is as irresistible and inex­ "emerged" with the conclusion that "all these different plicable as was Charles W illiams' for his Oxford col­ faiths, or sets of ideas, were talking about the same pro­ le a g u e s ? 1 cesses, the same psychological truths. She was reading dif­ Determined to follow these clues where they might lead, ferent languages, or dialects, describing the same thing. I recently re-read both books and discovered why no one had This was true of all of them from the poems of St. John of thought to compare them. Superficially they are utterly the Cross to states of mind described in the Upanishads" dissim ilar. Williams' tale has to do with a doppelganger, a {The Four-Gated. C ity, p . 4 8 8 ) . succubus, and a revenant. Its hero is a Christian poet, I believe that the laundry basket which produced B r i e f ­ obviously modelled on T. S. E liot—or perhaps Williams him­ ing For a Descent Into H ell contained Charles Williams as self—who propounds a doctrine of "substituted love" which well as R. D. Laing, esoteric Christianity as well as science restates the orthodox Christian dogmas of incarnation and fiction. The question of literary indebtedness is compli­ atonement. Lessing's "inner space fiction" derives, it cated by Lessing's mode of acquiring facts. Compelled by would seem, from Kingsley Hall rather than Canterbury; her her own needs and vision, she must read as Martha does, dogmas are of the Philadelphia Association rather than of "taking a fragment here and a sentence there, and [building] the Holy Catholic Church. Lessing's B r i e f i n g n e i t h e r them into her mind." Like Martha, she has "in fact" not refashions W illiams' plot nor reincarnates his characters. read any author, "if reading means to take from an author The sim ilarities of title must be accidental. what he intends to convey."5 But in naming her book B r i e f ­ But no one who named the protagonist of a five-volume ing For a Descent Into H ell and its hero Charles Watkins, bildungsroman Martha Quest can be suspected of casual nam­ Lessing was, I believe, acknowledging a particular affinity ing. And Martha, who "read like a bird collecting twigs for between the interests that brought her to read Williams and a nest,"2 exemplifies Lessing's own scavenging relationship what she found in Descent Into H ell. to books. "There is only one way to read," announces Les­ However slender my justification for reading Lessing's sing, "which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, pick­ B r i e f i n g in the light of Williams' D e s c e n t may be, I have ing up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping found his book invaluable in attempting to corral that them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag.... maverick of the Lessing canon. Descent Into H ell functions The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty w ill in a reading of B r i e f i n g much in the way that, according to open doors for you when you are forty or fifty ."3 * Fifty- Robert Scholes, the title s of certain contemporary novels year-old Martha filled laundry baskets with books from function. Writing of The Lime Twig and The Unicom, S c h o le s Jimmy Wood's "potted library" of "Rosicrucianism and the says, "Interestingly, both these works, in their titles alchemists; Buddhist books and the dozen or so varieties of encourage ideation by naming objects which do not appear in the narratives. There is no lime twig in Hawkes's story and no unicorn in Iris Murdoch's. Both images offer us concepts 1 He was a man, according to R. J. R eilly, who "seems to have impressed his friends in a way not really susceptible of analysis." Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, 2 Dorrs Lessing, Martha Quest (1952; rpt. London: Panther Lewisr Williams, and Tolkien (Athens: University of Georgia Books, 1966), 220. Press, 1971), 149. Similarly, for Rosemary Baines, Charles 3 Doris Lessing, "On the Golden Notebook," P a r tis a n Watkins' lecture "was a catalyst, touched a spring, some­ R e view 40:1 (Winter, 1973), 26. thing like that.... It is hard indeed to define it." Doris Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (New York: Alfred A. L e s s in g , Briefing For a Descent Into Hell (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969), 486. A. Knopf, 1971), 173. Martha Quest, 220. 10 that help to organize our perceptions into appropriate for her talents prevents her from perceiving its meaning; structures."6 Similarly, Lessing's title encourages idea­ she cannot move in the cadences of Stanhope's verse, but t i o n . Descent Into H ell organizes our perception of B r i e f ­ "arrange[s] whole groups of words in chunks, irrespective of i n g . It provides a referential context for defining the line and meaning, but according to her own views of the emo­ form or genre to which Lessing's strange book belongs. More tional quality to be stressed" (p. 92). Bound by self, she important, it anatomizes the thematic concerns which are is unpurged by the cathartic action of the romance. embedded in Lessing's narrative. And finally, it suggests a Even more removed from redemption is Lawrence Wentworth, way of defining Lessing's relation to the Romantic tradition whose fatal egoism corrupts his scholarly responsibility to to which Charles Williams belongs. truth. His descent into a hell of isolation from his fellow Most readers, coming to B r i e f i n g either from T h e G o ld e n men is accelerated when he allows the inaccurate costumes of n o te b o o k (the one Lessing novel everyone has read) or from the Grand Duke's guard to pass. Dismissing the production The Four-Gated C ity, its immediate chronological predeces­ of Stanhope's play as unimportant, he declares his hubris sor, find it bizarre, untypical. Not only is its protago­ and seals his doom. nist not the fam iliar Lessing woman, free or yearning to be Margaret Anstruther, who can distinguish poetry from free, he is hardly a "character" in the sense of being both mere elocution (p. 56), has been redeemed before the action fully dimensional and particular. He is anonymous and of Williams' romance begins. She advises her niece Pauline, homonymous, Sinbad the Sailor, Jason, Odysseus, Jonah, Nan­ "Ask Peter Stanhope to tell you how to read verse" (p. 57), cy's Charlie, and Benito Cereno. As several critics have and it is Pauline's openness to the mystery and beauty of noted, his adventures are psychic rather than social, fol­ Stanhope's play that mark her as the Questor. Her perfor­ lowing a paradigm described by R. D. Laing in The P olitics of mance in the play becomes a metaphor for her participation E x p e r ie n c e .7 The reader expecting a novel comes away from in life: "She acted, and her acting was reality" (p. 181). B r i e f i n g as baffled as the members of Williams' Battle Hill Like Shakespeare's romances, Williams' fiction re-enacts dramatic society, who cannot comprehend Peter Stanhope's the myth of Eden and man's fall. There are two endings, latest play: Pauline's redemption through love and Wentworth's damnation through self-love. Frye characterizes the romantic plot as To begin with, it had no title beyond A P a s to ­ dialectical (Anatomy o f C riticism , p. 187), determined by a r a l . That was unsatisfactory. Then the plot conflict between the hero and his antagonist. Moreover, the was incredibly loose. It was of no particular terms of the conflict are simplified. Fundamentally, it is time and no particular place, and to any cul­ between good and evil. Thus characterization in romance is tured listener it seemed to have little bits of everything and everybody put in at odd moments. thin, unsubtle. Characters in a romance are, says Frye, "like black and white pieces in a chess game" (A n a to m y o f The verse was undoubtedly Stanhope's own, of his C r i t i c i s m , p. 195). The lines of battle are clearly drawn latest, most heightened, and most epigrammatic style, but now and then all kinds of reminiscen­ in Williams' fiction. The "good" characters all have "their ces moved in it. Once...the word p a s tic h e moral opposites confronting" them (Anatomy o f C riticism , p . floated through Mrs. Parry's mind.8 195): Stanhope wrestles with Lily Sammile (who becomes gen­ eralized into L ilith midway through the book) for Pauline's Peter Stanhope, however, is well aware of the genre to which allegiance; Wentworth the bad historian is contrasted to his play belongs. It is a romance, in the style of Shake­ Aston Moffat the good. Pauline's doppelganger is good, speare's last plays, as his title, cast of characters, and Adela Hunt's—the succubus who comes at Wentworth's whistle numerous references to C y m b e lin e and The Tempest make —is clearly evil. Even visions have their opposites: Mar­ c l e a r . 9 garet Anstruther's dream mountain (p. 72) is a true image of In f a c t , Descent Into H ell is a romance within a Eden; Lawrence Wentworth's imagined wood a false one, as romance, Stanhope's play being an emblem of W illiams' fic­ Williams' use of the conditional makes clear: "He might be tion. If Pauline Anstruther's name evokes St. Paul, it does back again in Eden, and she [the succubus] be Eve" (p. 85). so by way of Paulina in A W inter's Tale. Descent Into Hell If Frye is correct in locating the "essential difference is compounded of those element Northrop Frye finds charac­ between novel and romance...in the concept of characteriza­ teristic of romance. The "green world"10 of the pastoral is tion" whereby the romancer "does not attempt to create 'real the setting both of Stanhope's play and Williams' fiction, people' so much as stylized figures which expand into psych­ whose plot—directed by Pauline's flight from her doppel- ological archetypes" (Anatomy o f C riticism , p. 304), then by ganger, Wentworth's descent into solipsism, Mrs. Anstru­ that criterion alone, Briefing for a Descent Into H ell — li k e ther's journey toward death and eternity—is a variation of W illia m s ' Descent Into H ell and Peter Stanhope's P a s t o r a l — the romantic quest. Like Shakespeare's romances, its theme is a romance. But it shares with them other appurtenances is redemption. As Pauline vaguely senses, Stanhope's play of the romance. Charles Watkins' adventures are a psychic is only a "dress rehearsal" (D e s c e n t , p. 151) for the play quest, what Douglass Bolling has called "the archetypal o f l i f e , h e r life which is Williams' fiction. voyage into the core of his being."11 This quest takes place The readiness of the various characters to participate at the hallucinatory level as an actual voyage, at the in Williams' romance of redemption is indicated by their psychological as a return to primal images and myths, among response to Stanhope's P a s t o r a l . Mrs. Parry who "hesitates" them the myth of Eden.12 over what to call it, finally settles for "idyllic" (p. 13). Surrounding and competing over Charles Watkins are pairs Naming its type, she dismisses its possible relevance to of characters, good and bad, white and black: Dr. Y and Dr. life. Becoming its impresario, she assigns herself to the X, Felicity and Violet. Sometimes the pairing of opposites wings of the romance of life. Adela Hunt, who plays the cuts through a different dimension, as when the real and Princess in Stanhope's play, cannot learn her lines, is living Miles Bovey contradicts the dead hero of Watkins' "continually trying, and continually failing to learn, the fantasy, or the devoted wife and mother who is the real Fel­ part that repeated to her a muddle of words about perception icity is mocked by the maenad of Watkins' dreams. and love" (p. 202). Her interest in the play as a vehicle W illiams' romance is concerned with the redemptive power of fact and the conflict between fact and illusion. The 5 Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford U ni­ facts are One and they are many; the central Fact in this versity Press, 1967), 111. Christian tale is the mutual interdependence of all men, 7See Paul Schlueter, The Novels of Doris Lessing (Car- what Williams calls "co-inherence."13 We are our brother's bondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), k e e p e r b e c a u s e we a r e our brother, through our participation 123, who credits Lois Marchino x .h first noting the paral­ in the life of Christ, across time and space. Thus "the lels between B r ie f in g and The Purities of Experience. See past is in the web of life" (D e s c e n t, p. 77) equally with also Douglass Bolling, "Structure and Theme in Briefing For the present and Battle Hill is a palimpsest of all the lives a Descent Into Hell," Contemporary Literature 14:4 (Autumn, that have ever been lived there, from prehistory through the 1973), 556. Wars of the Roses, to the near past when the workman whose 8 Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell (1937; rpt. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970), 151. 11 Bolling, op. cit., 553. 9 Stanhope renames Pauline Anstruther, who is to play the 12 As Bolling notes, op. cit., 559. Chorus, "Periel," a portmanteau of Ariel and Perdita. 13 See Charles A. Huttar, "Charles Williams, Novelist and 10 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957; rpt. Prince­ P rop h et," The Gordon Review .10:2 (Winter, 1967), 51-75 for a ton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 182. concise introduction to Williams' theology. 11 ghost haunts the pages of Descent Into H ell committed sui­ tant of B attle H ill, poor Charles Watkins is locked up in cide in the house where Lawrence Wentworth now liv es. the loony bin. In W illiam s' romance, all facts corroborate Wentworth refuses to acknowledge th is Fact: he "had the central Fact of co-inherence. In Lessing's, W atkins' never acknowledged the unity" (p. 76). A historian, he has vision of the Unity is diagnosed as psychotic. The world of no sense of the living past, because he w ill not participate facts does not relate to the central Fact of the Unity; it in the communal web of the present. His blindness to Fact opposes it. Things are seen, not as part of a whole, but as is announced by his carelessness about facts. He distorts "fragments" (p. 128) or "facets and one at a time" (p. 142). and m anipulates facts in order to justify his own conclu­ Society, represented by Doctors X and Y, insistes on "divid­ sions, thus damning him self as a scholar and paradigming his ing off, compartmenting, pigeon-holing" (p. 142). damnation as a human soul. For Peter Stanhope, words are m eaningful, ju st as facts As Wentworth is w illing to adjust historical facts to are unavoidable and inextricably bound to the central Fact. justify his own theses, so he turns away from the facts Responding to a debutante's gushing announcement that about his relationship to Adela Hunt—that she is young, "N ature's so terribly good. Don't you think so, Mr. Stan­ shallow , vain, and increasingly attracted to young Hugh hope?" Peter replies, Prescott—and invents a phantasm. Preferring the false Adela, his succubus, to the real, he retreats even further "Yes, Miss Fox. You do mean 'terribly'?" from facts and his neighbors. In the system of mythic cor­ "Why, certainly," Miss Fox said. "Terribly respondences which underlies W illiam s' narrative, "he had —dreadfully—very." got right away from the road which was the shape of t h e Adam "Yes," Stanhope said again. "Very. Only— outstretched in the sleep precedent to the creation of fact, you must forgive me; it comes from doing so much the separation of Eden, the making of things other than the writing, but when I say 'terribly' I think I self" (p. 89). Wentworth chooses L ilith in preference to mean 'full of terror'. A dreadful goodness." (p. 16) Eve and leaves Eden for Gomorrah This phrase, "a terrib le good," runs through Descent Into As W entworth's cavalier attitude toward facts defines H e l l , the words fu ll of meaning, yet meaning precisely con­ his attitude toward the central Fact, so does Pauline's trolled by their identity as words. Thus Stanhope reminds literal-m indedness predict her salvation. She recognizes P a u l i n e , Lily Sammile for L ilith and her hut for Gomorrah, "the oppo­ site of holy fact, and the contradiction of sacred love" "The substantive, of course, governs the (p. 203), and refutes her tem ptress with a simple question, adjective; not the other way round." "How could I want anything but what is?" (p. 208). "The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly. In Chapter VI, Peter Stanhope expounds to Pauline the "Good. It contains terror, not terror doctrine of substituted love, another statem ent of the cen­ good." (p. 65) tral Fact of co-inherence. If we are all one in C hrist, Just as there are the equivalent facts of the doppelganger then we can litera lly and in fact bear each others' burdens. and Pauline's fear, so there are equivalently real meanings Stanhope can assume Pauline's burden of fear, thus freeing for "terrible" and "good." But the fragments are related by her not, as she naively supposes, from the possibility of the grammar of the central Fact. meeting her doppelganger, but of the dread of meeting it: I n B r i e f i n g , there is the Logos and there are words, and "And if I see it after all?" she asked. they are not related. For if the world was created "with a "But not 'after all'," he said. "The fact word" (p. 130), it was threatened by the "M aster of Words" remains—but see how different a fact, if it (p. 134), who is also the "God of Thieves" (p. 133) in Less­ can't be dreaded! " (p. 100) ing's panmythos, Mercury and Satan. The Eliotan refrain, "I gotta use words when I talk to you" (p. 123), jangles All facts are im portant because of the central Fact, which through W atkins' consciousness, as a summary expression of modifies all facts. The fact of dread can be separated from his inability to communicate the reality of his perceptions the fact of the doppelganger's appearance because of the to hearers who w ill their own deafness. The world of Fact of substitution. B r i e f i n g is anticipated by Martha in The Four-Gated C ity. Charles Watkins has a vision, in the center of his psy­ chic quest, of the nature of reality , a vision whose images [Society] is an organism which above a ll is uncannily echo W illiam s'. Attempting to articulate his own unable to th in k .... Anything new, whether hos­ idea of co-inherence, Watkins first thinks of him self and tile or helpful, must be stunned into immobil­ his comrades as "faceted" together in the "inner structure" ity or at least wrapped around with poison or a of the C rystal, the m ysterious UFO which sweeps in and out cloud of distorting colour.... The process is of his dream adventure (p. 106). They are then "fishes in a accomplished, in this society, through words. school, cells in honeycomb, flames in fire" as he continues (p. 430) to grope for the appropriate metaphor. Finally he finds it By a perverse process, words come to define reality . in W illiam s' web, "this spin of fusion like a web whose How is the patient Charles Watkins to know which is real every strand is linked and vibrates with every other" (p. life, which his fantasy? "Y ou'll have to take my word tor 107). W atkins' vision is of "motes or m ites of humanity" it, I'm afraid," the doctor tells him: (p. 109) enclosed in a shimmering web of ecological rela­ "If I did have to, I'd be afraid," Watkins tionship, a vision no less m ystical than any C hristian's. answers. "I can't take words for anything. The wholeness and interdependence of all living things—this Words come out of your mouth and fa ll on the is W atkins' vision of reality. Man's tragedy lies in his floor. Words in exchange for? Is that it? inability to perceive this central Fact that "I...am not I, Your dreams or your life. But it is not or, but part of a whole composed of other human beings as they that is the point. It is an a n d . Everything are of me" (p. 120). is. Your dreams and your life." (pp. 167-68) In the briefing, which is the central episode in Less­ ing's inner space fiction, Merck Ury confidently predicts Because words distinguish between either and or, they are that "an ability to see things as they are, in their m ulti­ lies. So in her own voice, Lessing has doubted the veracity farious relations—in other words, Truth—w ill be part of hum anity's new, soon-to-be-developed equipment" (p. 143). 14So Martha, in The Four-Gated C ity, 33, reflects that Charles W atkins, who identifies him self with all sea voy­ "one's daytime brain was slotted, compartmented, pigeon­ agers, historic and mythic, sees things as they are. Har­ h o le d ." assed by the doctors who want him to make distinctions 15The quotation in context reiterates the conflict between fact and fantasy, biography and romance, memory and between "either/or" and "and" which characterizes Watkins' im agination, W atkins wonders, "Why do you say Or? A n d i s relation to the sane society: more like it __ _ It isn 't either or at all, it's and, and, When y o u 'r e a lo n e l i k e h e was a lo n e and, and, and, and" (p. 165). You're either or neither Peter Stanhope in sists that he and Pauline are one "in I tell you again it don't apply the place of the Omnipotence" (D e s c e n t , p. 102). Charles Death or life or life or death Watkins says, "I think I am my friends. And they are—in Death is life and life is death the name of the Crystal. Yes. A unit. Unity." (B r i e f ­ I gotta use words when I talk to you. i n g ,, p . 1 7 1 ) . T. S. E liot, "Fragment of an But while Peter Stanhope is the most respected inhabi­ Agon," from Sweeney Agonistes. 1 2 of words. Looking at a completed fiction, she says, the parting was a fact; all facts are joyous; therefore parting writer must be dissatisfied: was joyous" (D e s c e n t , p. 205). Truly and essentially, what­ ever is is right. What Stanhope calls "holy imagination" How little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity; (p. 101) is simply seeing things as they are; and although how can this small neat thing be true when what poets may be superfluous in Salem, the City of Fact and of I experienced was so rough and apparently form­ our God, they may fitly w rite songs for the redeemed to less and unshaped. ("On the Golden Notebook," p. 21) sing (p. 212). Charles Watkins' vision of the Unity, the shimmering I have said that the form of Descent Into H ell i s a web, is an equally Romantic statement of the nature of real­ romance within a romance. In those terms, Briefing for a ity. But not only in Briefing For a Descent Into H ell i s Descent Into H ell can be said to be a romance within an this vision a dream vision, in the dual sense of fantasy and anti-romance. The elements of romance enumerated by Frye wish. Anna Wulf dreams of "an enormous web of beautifual and exemplified in both Stanhope's play and W illiams' fic­ f a b r i c " (The Golden Notebook, p. 256), which is the tion are all present in Charles Watkins' fantasy. But while globe on which we live. "The colours are melting and flow­ the romantic elements of Stanhope's play are echoed and mag­ ing into each other, indescribably beautiful so that the nified in W illiams' fiction, which places and judges its world becomes whole, all one beautiful glittering colour." characters at least in part according to their response to Martha Quest continually returns, through her five-volume Stanhope's play, Watkins' romance is denied admission to the life, to the knowledge that "people in any sort of commun­ surrounding world of the frame fiction. Announcing that he ion, link, connection, make up a whole" {The Four-Gated is Sinbad, Jason, Jonah, Odysseus, he is informed that he is C i t y , p. 211). But Martha's vision is contradicted by "the deluded, that he is "Professor Charles Watkins, 15 Acacia real truth" that "everything declined and frayed and came to Road, Brink, Near Cambridge" (p. 165). Remembering his pieces in one's hands...a mass of fragments" {The Four-Gated Edenic interlude in Yugoslavia, he is assured that he has C i t y , p. 337). And Anna's vision "was slowly dissolving, never been in Yugoslavia. disintegrating and flying off into fragments, all through Williams' vision of the web of life in Descent Into H ell space, so that all around me were weightless fragments is realized and activated by Peter Stanhope's practice of drifting about, bouncing into each other and drifting away. the doctrine of substituted love. There is a correspon­ The world had gone, and there was chaos" {The Golden Note­ dence, as R. J. Reilly has remarked, between the nature of b o o k , p . 2 5 6 ). reality and its manifestation in nature (Romantic R eligion, Lessing's novels make the Romantic gesture unsupported p. 154). Co-inherence is asserted by Charles Watkins no by the Romantic faith in correspondences. Like the V ictori­ less vehemently than by Charles Williams, but it is not a n s o f whom J . H i l l i s M i l l e r h a s w r i t t e n i n The Disappear­ verified in his experience. Words express meaning for Wil­ ance o f God, Lessing perceives a world in which "what once liams, diffuse and fragment it for Watkins. As Charles Hut- was a unity, gathering all together, has exploded into frag­ tar reminds us in his essay on Williams, the opposite of co­ ments. The isolated ego faces the other dimensions of exis­ inherence is incoherence.16 Watkins' Unity is a mass of tence across an empty space. Subject, objects, words, other "fragments" in the world outside his fantasy (p. 128). His minds, the supernatural—each of these realms is divorced words are interpreted by that world as incoherent gibberish. from the others, and man finds himself one of the 'poor Descent Into H ell is centrally located in the Romantic fragments of a broken w orld."'20 epistemology. In a recent revaluation of Romanticism,17 all I believe Doris Lessing's naming of her book and its contributors to the symposium agreed that "the reconciling, protagonist was both intentional and ironic, that it acknow­ synthetic imagination [is] the common denominator of Roman­ ledges her direct indebtedness to the form of W illiams' fic­ ticism ."18 For a Romantic, the exterior world is an "objec­ tion and her uncontrollable but futile gesture toward the tive structure"19 of reality, and the aesthetic act is an Romantic amalgam of appearance and reality. For Northrop imaginative perception of correspondences between things and Frye, the romance is "naturally a more revolutionary form their ideas. Williams' theology is romantic, as his critics than the novel" which depends on "the framework of a stable point out, precisely because "the image was central for him s o c i e t y " (Anatomy o f C riticism , p. 305). Rejecting its .... The connection between image and what is imaged is no apparent stability, Williams proposes in his romance to arbitrary relationship but a necessary one based on the revolutionize secular society with the certainties of Chris­ underlying principle of the created universe" (Huttar, p. tian dogma; deprived both of those certainties and of even 55). Pauline's quest ends "with that unnecessary syllogism the apparent, if specious, stability of society, Lessing delicately exhibiting itself as a knowledge of truth...that pushes her romance beyond revolution to anarchy. She is Frye's ultim ate romancer, who "deals with individuality, 16 Huttar, op. c lt., 55. with characters i n v a c u o ____Something n ih ilistic and 17 Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the Eng­ untameable is likely to keep breaking out of [her] pages" lish Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia Uni­ (Anatomy o f C riticism , p. 305). For nihilism, as H illis versity Press, 1963) . M iller trenchantly observes, "is one of the possible conse­ 18 Rene W ellek, "Romanticism Re-examined," in Romanticism quences of romanticism" (Poets of R eality , p . 1 ) . Reconsidered, 113. 19 Northrop Frye, "The Dunken Boat: The Revolutionary Ele­ 20 J. H illis M iller, Poets of Reality (New York: Atheneum, ment in Romanticism," Romanticism Reconsidered, 1 0. 1969) , p. 2

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