Joseph Weigel from Men with Chests Returns to talk about That Hideous Strength (part 1)

Hello listeners! Thanks for tuning in to the THCSL podcast. It is my pleasure to welcome back Joseph Weigel from the Men with Chests podcast. We covered a lot of ground in this discussion so I am releasing it as a 2-part episode.

In part 1, we continue our discussion about the N.I.C.E.’s quest for immortality through the conversation between Mark Studdock and Filostrato from the “Moonlight at Belbury” chapter. The N.I.C.E. has plans to control man as we know. But here we learn more about how they plan to do that. In the words of Filostrato, man becomes more governable when you remove sex from the equation. But these guys don’t just want to take away the pleasure aspect of sex - they want to control procreation and ultimately get rid of all organic life! Joseph draws on his deep insights about this book and shares a thought-provoking comparison between That Hideous Strength and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Part 2 will include our deep-dive on Merlin. Stay tuned and I will get that out in a week or so.

***apologies for some of the background noise. My kids were enjoying Christmas break just outside the home podcast studio :) ***

Episode Roadmap

Intro & Chit Chat

• What to do with Merlin

• Different versions of the King Arthur stories

• Quick recap of previous conversation

THS Genre & Criticisms

• THS as both a fairy tale (for grown-ups) and dystopian fiction

• Comparisons with 1984 and Brave New World

• Orwell’s criticism of THS

• Reading THS as a stand-alone vs in context with OSP and Perelandra

• Joseph’s take on the proper reading order of Narnia

N.I.C.E., Alchemy, and Bluebeard

• References to Bluebeard (French fairy tale) in chapter 1 concerning Alcasan

• Man with multiple wives who murders them and stores the bodies in a locked room; current wife discovers his gruesome secrets

• He turns to alchemy to reverse his fortune and eventually Satanism

Lewisian Pejoratives

• Experts, technical experts

• Planners

• Conditioners

• Leaders vs rulers

Filostrato and the Quest for Immortality

• Replacing God with man

• Pursuing false purity

• Removing all organic life from the earth

• Controlling the population by getting rid of sex (Filostrato was a eunuch!)

Aldous Huxley and Brave New World

• Comparisons between Lewis’ sexless non-procreative dystopia vs Huxley’s no-holds-barred hyper-sexual non-procreative dystopia

• Rise of sex robots and other aberrations