Lost

Upon reading and attempting to grasp the waterfall that is Williams, I have discovered the key that holds the entire book together. From the very beginning there is a sense of lostness. Pauline is lost and does not know what to do. She is scared of becoming the person she is meant to be. It just so happens that Pauline had to lose herself more than she had ever been lost before she could truly come to terms with who she really is: Periel.

We first get the sense that Pauline is lost when Stanhope is talking about his play. As he and Myrtle Fox dialogue about play being terribly good, Pauline begins to feel uneasy. She begins to ponder the meaning of “a terrible good.” She is terrified that her own Magnus Zoroaster may be something wonderful and at the same time something terrible. As Lewis put it in Perelandra, “[Her] fear was now of another kind. [She] felt sure the creature was what we call “good,” but [she] wasn’t sure whether [she] liked “goodness” so much as [she] had supposed” (17). What if her double was something that was terribly good? What if she met her “better side” and didn’t like what she found? It would be as Lewis again says, “Suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful. . .then indeed, there is no rescue possible” (17). She has lost all hope and has become terribly afraid of the “good” that she is soon to become.

Seeing that Pauline is indeed lost and afraid, what is the resolution? How can one be found when one is utterly lost without knowing lostness? She must lose herself even more in order to find herself. As her grandmother dies, Pauline is catapulted into a frenzy of confusion. Time begins to mesh together with itself, and people intermingle and converse between conventional restraints. Williams grabs the reader and plunges him into the same confusion that Pauline is immersed in. On page 161 Williams’ incantation of time travel screams forth from the page: “Up and up, the wind was rising…nothing was there for her to find, but to find nothing now was to be saved from finding nothing…The edge of the other world was running up along the sky…Alice in Wonderland, sweet Alice, Alice sit by the fire…where things were given backward, and rules were against rights and rights against rules, and a ghost in the fire was a ghost in the street, and the thing that ha been was the thing that was to be and it was coming, was coming.” She was about to meet herself just as the martyr was about to meet himself. Times converged and connected in an instant, but before that instant could be approached, Pauline must lose herself in the cacophony of time. She is Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole, disoriented and confused. Upon the other side, she understands her task and walks boldly forward, gaining the right to be called Periel. As she speaks with the martyr, she hears herself taking his burden before she realizes what she is doing. She has become who she was always meant to be.

The journey that Williams takes us on is not a meaningless, emotionless journey. It is a terrible journey wrought with peril. Danger awaits us at every turn. Just as the chorus appears to embody the souls of the saints, so Periel is the incarnation of the Christian becoming a new creation.

So, if I have utterly confused you, I have proven true to the true heart of Charles Williams. If this dialogue has proven to be incomprehensible, it is only because the truth does not exist in words but in conversation between two people. Williams has truly captured the truth by avoiding clarity.