Descent into Hell

Rating:
Summary: Ye shall bear one another's burdens
Review: Ere it shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust, the Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image Walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw. -Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

Charles Williams is less well known than his fellow Inklings, like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, but like them he wrote a series of novels which combine elements of fantasy and Christian symbolism. The action of Descent into Hell takes place in Battle Hill, outside London, amidst the townspeople's staging of a new play by Peter Stanhope. The hill seems to reside at the crux of time, as characters from the past appear, and perhaps at a doorway to the beyond, as characters are alternately summoned heavenwards or descend into hell.

Pauline Anstruther, the heroine of the novel, lives in fear of meeting her own doppelganger, which has appeared to her throughout her life. But Stanhope, in an action central to the author's own theology, takes the burden of her fears upon himself--Williams called this The Doctrine of Substituted Love--and enables Pauline, at long last, to face her true self. Williams drew this idea from the biblical verse, "Ye shall bear one another's burdens :"

She said, still perplexed at a strange language : 'But how can I cease to be troubled ? will it leave off coming because I pretend it wants you ? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street ?'

'It is not,' he said, 'and you shall not pretend at all. The thing itself you may one day meet--never mind that now, but you'll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven't you heard it said that we ought to bear one another's burdens ?'

'But that means---' she began, and stopped.

'I know,' Stanhope said. 'It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don't say a against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of. If you're still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for you--however sympathetic I may be. And anyhow there's no need to introduce Christ, unless you wish. It's a fact of experience. If you give a weight to me, you can't be carrying it yourself; all I'm asking you to do is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn't sound very difficult.'

And so Stanhope does take the weight, with no surreptitious motive, in the most affecting scene in the novel. And Pauline, liberated, is able to accept truth.

On the other hand, Lawrence Wentworth, a local historian, finding his desire for Adela Hunt to be unrequited, falls in love instead with a spirit form of Adela, which seems to represent a kind of extreme self love on his part.

The shape of Lawrence Wentworth's desire had emerged from the power of his body. He had assented to that making, and again, outside the garden of satisfied dreams, he had assented to the company of the shape which could not be except by his will and was imperceptibly to possess his will. Image without incarnation, it was the delight of his incarnation for it was without any of the things that troubled him in the incarnation of the beloved. He could exercise upon it all arts but one; he could not ever discover by it or practise towards it freedom of love. A man cannot love himself; he can only idolize it, and over the idol delightfully tyrannize--without purpose. The great gift which the simple idolatry os self gives is lack of further purpose; it is, the saints tell us, a somewhat similar thing that exists in those wholly possessed by their End; it is, human experience shows, the most exquisite delight in the interchanges of romantic love. But in all loves but one there are counterpointing times of purpose; in this only there are none.

As he isolates himself more and more with this insubstantial figure, and dreams of descending a silver rope into a dark pit, Wentworth begins the descent into Hell.

Because of the way that time and space and the supernatural all converge upon Battle Hill, the book can be somewhat confusing. But it is rich in atmosphere and unusual ideas and it is unlike any other book I've ever read. It is challenging, but ultimately rewarding if you stick with it.

GRADE : B

Rating:
Summary: new Light on Isaiah 53.
Review: In a housing development called Battle Hill just north of London, a local drama group is staging a play written by the distinguished playwright/poet Peter Stanhope. There is a brutal history of ancient bloodshed that seems to hover over this geographical spot, presenting itself as a sort of pressure canopy over the participants in the play. Of these, Pauline Anstruther is particularly bedevilled (literally obsessed with personal fear), and becomes, in many ways, the central focus of the book. She is the only character who seems to understand what Stanhope has set out to accomplish through his play. On the site of Battle Hill, an ancestor of Pauline's was burnt at the stake as a heretic under the persecutions of Mary Tudor. Whether real or imagined (does it matter?) Pauline is pursued by a "doppelganger", a type of ghost which seems to be yourself dogging your own footsteps. It always appears when she is alone and it stays at a considerable distance. Her fear centers around the question of what will happen to her when it finally catches up to her, and perhaps even touches her. She is relentlessly pursued.

Stanhope, seeing and understanding her struggle, begins to instruct her in the ways of "substitution". By this he means that one can, by mutual consent, take on the fears, pains or BURDENS of another. Honestly, when I read of this in Chapter 6, I was overwhelmed by the revelation of it all... what to me has become a very profound, albeit difficult truth. The concept of the deliberate agreement and intention for one person to carry the other's burden, just as one might a parcel. Stanhope takes our feeble understanding of "bearing one another's burdens" up a notch or two... or three. He literally offers to take Pauline's burden of fear upon himself, by suggesting to her "...what can be easier than for me to carry a little while a burden that isn't mine?" She, as can be expected, is completely confused, so he continues to explain: "To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of. If you're still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for you - however sympathetic I may be. It's a fact of experience. If you give a weight to me, you can't be carrying it yourself; all I'm asking you to do is to notice that blazing truth."

He instructs her that the next time she is alone and afraid, she is to put HIM in her place and let HIM be afraid FOR her. He, in turn, takes it upon himself to BE afraid in her stead. He does this by visualizing the situation that she is frightened of and opening himself fully to the negative emotions she might feel as a consequence, but because he is not embroiled within the situation by weight of past emotional connotations, it is an altogether lighter burden for him to bear. It works. She receives a powerful deliverance as a result of his sacrifice, and further finds that the doppelganger that she has run from for all those years, turned out to be no great horror, but her ideal spiritual self. After reading chapter 6, I immediately re-read Isaiah chapter 53 in the Bible and realized that Williams' ideas were not entirely original, but were definitely communicated in a new and beautiful way that emphasizes the responsibility we have one to another.

There are so many other characters and situations about this book that one could discuss, but for brevity I wanted to focus on that which meant the most to me personally. It does become arcane at times... no, it is ALWAYS arcane, but that is the nature of all of Williams' work. I've heard commentary that suggested this is Williams' most complex novel but I disagree. I feel it is conversely the least strange of all of his stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Simply made no sense
Review: This is, unfortunately, one of the worst books I've ever read. I got surprisingly little out of a book that makes the reader work so hard to extract any kind of meaning from the author's words. Williams does an excellent job of giving the reader a sense of a very dark and morbid setting, and yet it is hard to explain what makes it so. Unless you are a literary scholar, I would advise staying away from this rather dreary and torturous book.