The Mystical Body of Antichrist
The somewhat alarming title of this posting is of ancient provenance, but in the 20th century no less a person than Marshall McLuhan revived it to refer to electronic environments. Perhaps because it's getting on to Halloween, the formula occurred to me on reading Jessica E. Vascellaro's article, Why Email No Longer Rules, in the Wall Street Journal of October 12. The piece is a sober summary of the business and personal applications of new information services, the gist of which is that the information has become continuous stream rather than a granular transfer, like email. We read this:
Many of the companies pitching the services insist they will free up people.
Jeff Teper, vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint division, which makes software that businesses use to collaborate, says in the past, employees received an email every time the status changed on a project they were working on, which led to hundreds of unnecessary emails a day. Now, thanks to SharePoint and other software that allows companies to direct those updates to flow through centralized sites that employees can check when they need to, those unnecessary emails are out of users' in-boxes.
"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says. "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."
Annoying, you say, but not self-evidently diabolical? Then consider this excerpt from my favorite Halloween-season book, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. We hear one of the dupes of a dark conspiracy explaining what he imagines will be the amenities of its proposed headquarters:
"I agree with James," said Curry, who had been waiting somewhat impatiently to speak. "The N.I.C.E. marks the beginning of a new ear -- the really scientific era. Up to now, everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science itself on a scientific basis. There are to be forty interlocking committees sitting every day and they've got a wonderful gadget -- I was shown the model last time I was in town -- by which the findings of each committee print themselves off in their own little compartment on the Analytical Notice-Board every half hour. Then, that report slides itself into the right position where it's connected up by little arrows with all the relevant parts of the other reports. A glance at the Board shows you the policy of the whole Institute actually taking shape under your own eyes. There'll be a staff of at least twenty experts at the top of the building working this Notice-Board in a room rather like the Tube control rooms. It's a marvellous gadget. The different kinds of business all come out in the Board in different coloured lights. It must have cost half a million. They call it a Pragmatometer."
Lewis's book was written during the Second World War. I suspect the Pragmatometer was a parody of H.G. Wells's proposal for a "World Brain" of interconnected libraries (the nominal head of the N.I.C.E. is a foolish fellow clearly based on Wells). The idea of hypertext has been around longer than the hardware that eventually made it useful; the notion seems to have influenced Lewis here.
But Lewis meant all this as a joke. Now it's your life.
* * *
Speaking of Lewis, I just read a book that has no business being out of print. It's an anthology, published by William B. Eerdmans in 1974 with an Introduction by Mary McDermott Shideler, entitled Taliessin Through Logres. That is the title of one of the two Arthurian poem cycles by Lewis's friend, Charles Williams, that the book contains. The other is "The Region of the Summer Stars." The book also includes The Arthurian Torso, which combines "The Figure of Arthur," a long fragment by Williams about the literary history of Arthur and the Holy Grail, and C.S. Lewis's critical essay, "Williams and the Arthuriad." The Lewis essay arranges the poems in the two cycles into a single chronological sequence, thereby turning Williams's impressionistic rendering of the rise and fall of Camelot as seen by King Arthur's poet, Taliessin, into a connected narrative. The result is not quite the Arthurian backstory of That Hideous Strength, but it is very close.
Richard Barber has credited Williams with being the only major writer in the Arthurian tradition to devise a purpose for Arthur and the Grail that was really worthy of their rumor. If I understand correctly, Camelot was providentially intended to effect a union of the transcendent (represented by the Empire) with the collective unconscious (represented by the Forest of Borceliande). Camelot fails, however, because of Arthur's merely esthetic chivalry and the unfaithfulness of Lancelot and Guinevere. The Grail Quest to restore the Wasteland is an unanticipated result, an example of surprising good from what otherwise would have been complete catastrophe.
Just a few points particularly struck me:
There was Arthurian literature before there was any mention of the Grail. Arthur's court was originally a narrative device, the place from which heros could set out for adventures. The effect of the Grail on the literature, Williams notes, was very much like the effect of the Grail on Arthur's court; both were disrupted and fragmented by the new factor.
Parzival and the German tradition are absent from this study.
Lewis makes clear several obscure recurring motifs of Williams's thought, one of them the "Breatrician Vision." This is the proposition that the state of being in love (particularly romantic love, but the vision can also apply to esthetic and intellectual fascination) is not simply a delusion, but a brief window through which we can see the beloved as she really is. Williams says that is how we would see everyone and everything, but for the Fall.
Someone considering a further reprint of this material might consider using "The Figure of Arthur" as an Introduction and then print the poems in Lewis's sequence in the left column with Lewis's commentary on the right. Illustrations for such a volume would be easy to find in the public domain if you used a pragmatometer.
