I was reading C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, and something he wrote really connected for me with Williams' Descent into Hell. In The Great Divorce, a busload of people, including Lewis, ride from Hell to Heaven. They get out and look around, trying to decide if they want to stay there or return to Hell. They all meet someone from their lives on Earth who tries to persuade them to choose Heaven. Everything that is beautiful and good in Heaven, though, is painful to the people from Hell--the grass hurts their feet, the light is too bright, etc. Lewis meets George MacDonald in Heaven, and as they watch one man refuse his wife's pleas to choose love and Heaven, Lewis asks why the woman cannot go into Hell to save her husband. MacDonald explains that the tremendous good of Heaven, contained in the woman, could not fit into Hell, and neither could she ever make herself small enough to enter Hell. MacDonald says, "For a damned soul is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see."
Still, these people are not unreachable. "Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend...only One has descended into Hell." This passage really helped me to understand what was playing out in the Williams' novel. As the souls of the characters, especially Wentworth, turn in upon themselves, they are incapable of truly loving or connecting with other humans, just as the man in Heaven is incapable of accepting his wife's love and forgiveness. There is only one, the Greatest, who is able to descend low enough to reach this kind of person. In Williams, that person is Stanhope, and Williams goes one step further in that his "greatest" character is able to give that ability to others who are willing. Still, both for Williams and Lewis, the soul always chooses its damnation. The MacDonald in The Great Divorce says, "There is no spirit in prison to Whom He did not preach."