There’s a large part of Out of the Silent Planet that is centered around the impossibility of translating human thought processes to other intelligent beings in the galaxy. Ransom, our hero, is modeled after a certain professor friend of Lewis’ who loved long walks and philology. This, of course, was J.R.R. Tolkien. You can tell that Lewis is working hard to make sure that particular friend is going to enjoy the book. Lewis works to give the impression of a fully functioning language (or set of languages) among the Malacandrans, and includes the more deeply spiritual themes that he and “Tollers” longed for in the speculative fiction of their day.
We’ll get to the climax of the novel soon, where Ransom does his best to translate the “bent” human worldview into something understandable to the Malacandrans, but first I thought we should explore a specific Malacandran word, which the hrossa would pronounce as “hnau.”
Anyone who speaks more than a single language will gladly tell you that there are certain words that are not quite translatable. There’s a loss of precision in the meaning, or a loss of expansiveness, or a slight depreciation in the connotation or the emotion of the word if nothing else. Hnau appears to be a word like that. Once Ransom learns it, he doesn’t use another word in its place.
We tried a few different words on for size in the last article (and check out the comments for some other suggestions, too). Words like: sentience, sapience, human, mortal, rational, people (etc.). None of them quite fit. So let’s learn the word as Ransom did, by hearing it in context and feeling for the edges of what is and what is not hnau.
The first time Ransom hears hnau, it’s in the negative sense. Maleldil is not hnau. “Maleldil the young,” Ransom is told, made the world and rules the world. He lives with the Old One, who doesn’t live in any place in particular. As Ransom pushes for more clarity on who exactly Maleldil is, the hrossa keep giving him more clues, and finally move into language that Ransom can’t quite follow. We’re given to understand that it’s religious and theological language. “It became plain that Maleldil was a spirit without body, parts or passions,” Ransom says. Maleldil is, of course, God without coming out and saying it.
But Maleldil is not hnau.
The hrossa start listing what is hnau: Ransom (and thus presumably humans). The hrossa. The séroni. The pfifltriggi. Now, Ransom has not really met all of these types of beings, but they are the different rational and aware people of Malacandra.
We learn there is a sort of hierarchy in the created order. There are animals at the bottom. Above them are the hnau: humans and the people of Malacandrana. There are the eldila who are a “kind of” hnau, though they have a different sort of body than other hnau (it’s suggested that there are probably animals with eldila type bodies as well). Above the hnau is the Oyarsa, a sort of planetary angel (though the text specifically says they are not angels). The Oyarsa is in charge of the hnau of their own planet and are meant to rule them. And then, above the Oyarsa is Maleldil/God.
Is the Oyarsa hnau? Maybe. There is some disagreement on whether it quite fits the definition because it has “no death and no young.” But we are clear on this: animals are not hnau. And Maleldil is not hnau.
The Malacandrans believe that a hnau comes with a clear and developed moral sense (what Lewis will come to call the Tao in “The Abolition of Man,” an essay which addresses many of the same points as the Space Trilogy and especially That Hideous Strength). In fact, Ransom’s hross friend, Hyoi, can’t even wrap his mind around the idea of a “bent” hnau. A hnau who is bent might work against the moral code of their people, or against the natural needs of their body, or against the needs of the community of other hnau.
Buy the Book
In the Watchful City
Hyoi struggles to think how a bent hnau could exist, and he can only come up with two examples. One is a legend about a hross who had a strange desire to eat dirt as he grew up. The other is about—and this story he shares with almost apologetic incredulity—a hross who desired two mates.
Ransom is astonished and troubled by this. He recognizes that the hnau of Malacandra appear to have instincts that lead them toward, as he says, “the unattained ideals of that far-divided species Man whose instincts were so deplorably different.” To which Hyoi can only say “Maleldil made us so.”
So human beings, Ransom learns, are “bent” hnau. They don’t work the way they are meant to. There are competing theories of why this could be, but the one given the most credence is that the Oyarsa of Earth is bent himself. And if the human’s Oyarsa is bent, then maybe that has caused them to become bent as well. We learn a bit later that the Malacandran Oyarsa sees protecting his people from becoming bent as part of his job. He would either fix them or unmake them if they became bent…but the Oyarsa of Earth appears to be encouraging and even manufacturing bentness in his hnau. It’s distressing for all the Malacandrans, the more humans they get to know.
As Ransom comes to understand hnau better, he begins to wonder if humans are hnau at all. When his human pursuers catch up and kill Hyoi, Ransom tells him that the entire human race is bent, that we are, at best, “only half hnau.”
Hnau do not kill hnau. Or such is the case in Malacandra. But, as Ransom tries to explain to his new friends, the other humans won’t recognize the hrossa as hnau, and even if they did they would gladly kill the hrossa or even Ransom who is both hnau and human if it meant they would get their way. This is completely alien in every sense to the hrossa. “One does not kill hnau.” Only Oyarsa holds the power to do such a thing without it being evil, because Oyarsa is in charge of the hnau of his planet…just as a hnau could kill a beast with cause.
Ransom begins to understand that there is a piece of hnau that has to do with moral action. When he is taken to the séroni, he decides to be completely honest with them because “it would not be hnau” to do otherwise. There’s an expectation that hnau are honest. So he tells them about the bentness of the human race, and specifically about “war, slavery, and prostitution.” The séroni are astonished.
The séroni are philosophers and, as Ransom calls them, “the intelligentsia” and their argument about why the humans are bent is interesting to note as we’re thinking about who or what is hnau:
‘It is because they have no Oyarsa,’ said one of the pupils.
‘It is because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,’ said Augray.
‘They cannot help it,’ said the old sorn. ‘There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maleldil. These creatures have no eldila. They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair—or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it—like a female trying to beget young on herself.’
They feel compassion for humanity, and see the main culprit in our bent nature to be a breakdown in the natural hierarchy of the world (a common—and Medieval—thought of Lewis’).
Indeed, Oyarsa thinks similarly. When Ransom floats the idea that Malacandra might be safest if Oyarsa killed all the humans (including himself), Oyarsa says it’s outside his clear authority and that it would be a terrible thing to kill “someone else’s hnau.”
A murdered hnau is not a thing to take lightly. Oyarsa demands answers from Weston and Devine…he asks them three times why they killed one of the hrossa. As they try to evade the question or give incomplete or bent answers, Oyarsa begins to wonder if they are ill or mentally incapacitated. He sends Weston off to get dunked in cold water, hoping it will bring him to his senses.
Meanwhile, there is an unmaking ceremony, where they honor the dead hnau, and Oyarsa causes the body to disappear. The body, he explains, is not what is hnau, but something within it…perhaps what we might call a soul (though neither Lewis nor Ransom use this word). The body is done, because it is temporal, but the hnau continues, because it is eternal. A dead hnau is worthy of honor regardless.
After Weston’s big speech, Oyarsa gives his pronouncement. Weston is hnau, but bent…purposely bent by the Oyarsa of Earth. A true hnau knows moral law naturally. Things like “pity and straight dealing and shame” and “the love of kindred.” Weston is missing some of these, and has been taught to value certain lesser laws as if they are the most important, and thus he does horrific things in service of what could be a virtue if put in the proper context. He’s bent, not broken, and if he belonged on Malacandra, Oyarsa would try to cure him.
Devine, on the other hand, is not hnau at all according to Oyarsa. Maybe he was once. But he is broken, not bent, because all that’s left in him is greed. None of the virtues, none of the natural law of the hnau remains. He’s a “talking animal” and if he belonged to Oyarsa he would unmake him. Oyarsa doesn’t believe Devine can be repaired.
This is, of course, a theme that Lewis will return to often in the Narnia books. He believes that the spiritual life is never static, that we have the capability to move toward greater things—to move toward divinity—or to devolve into animals.
So what is it to be hnau?
There’s not a single word for it other than hnau.
It’s to be something more than an animal but less than an Oyarsa in the hierarchy of the universe. It’s to be mortal for a time, but immortal later. It’s to have an innate moral world that has love at its core, and an unshakeable commitment to never spill the blood of another hnau. It’s connected to rationality, but there are rational and sentient and sapient beings who are not hnau.
And what of us humans?
We are hnau, most of us. Bent but not yet broken. Something more than animals. Ransom comes home from Malacandra with a deep desire to be cured, to be on the side of the unbent hnau in the galaxy. During his time with the hrossa he learned not just who he was, but who he was meant to be, and he is working to try to grow into that.
We may be bent, but we don’t have to remain that way.
So long as we are hnau, there is hope.
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
Amazing article! I never noticed the linguistic throughline in the book, but it’s so startlingly clear once you pointed it out. Also, I’m really looking forward to that article on Weston’s speech; it’s like watching a dog whistling politician and his translator.
This is really interesting! To me, as I read (and reread) this book, it was clear that the single word, “hnau” indicated the phrase “rational creatures with souls”. It’s a very succinct way of saying all the things that phrase implies, and that you’ve expanded on above. At first, I was inclined to think “hnau” meant merely “creatures with souls”, but I’m not sure of this any more. Animals may or may not have souls; they have individuality and intelligence, but they are not rational. Devine is rational, as is Weston. Devine, in particular, is a complete materialist. Is he no longer hnau because he has killed his own soul? Is that even possible?
As to what Oyarsa is, if Lucifer is the Oyarsa of earth, surely Oyarsa is an angel? At least in a general sense. Something higher than an angel like Michael or Gabriel: a Seraph or Throne or Dominion?
But what is puzzling and frightening to me is the concept that a rational materialist is capable of killing his own soul. Or do you think I’m really off-track here? Another thing: the young disabled boy at the beginning of the book. Surely he is hnau, as is his mother, because they are human and have souls, even though they aren’t particularly rational. I think it is significant that men who deny the soul should start their quest with the planned kidnapping and murder of a mentally handicapped child (the boy was probably in his teens, as written?).
I love all of your insights into Lewis’ writings. There are several things in this one that distracted me, however.
Maleldil is frequently miss-typed as Maledil. In my head, the missing “l” emphasizes “Male” meaning “bad” or “sick” in Latin which is going in the opposite direction from Maleldil.
“He sends them off to get dunked…” Only Weston is sent off to get dunked. Devine stays and sees the unbodying. He later tells Weston to be careful because “These devils can split the atom or something pretty like it.”
I’m reading the Nature of Middle Earth right now and somebody smarter than me should do some type of analysis of how this concept compares and contrasts with Tolkien’s hroa/fea concept as it relates to what makes up a human/Elvish (and Dwarvish?) person, especially as (for Elves at least) one eventually diminishes as they grow older and the other remains with the earth.
From my own context, it seems to somewhat align with ideas in writings like theology of the body in which the body/soul are joined for a reason and both matter and we will ultimately get new/perfected bodies. And also ideas like concupiscence (I’m not sure if that’s a uniquely Catholic term) which is basiclally the fancy theological word for describing our ‘bentness’.
“the main culprit in our bent nature to be a breakdown in the natural hierarchy of the world” is quite a common view among those who find themselves at the top of the hierarchy and want to stay there.
Calling Devine an animal is insulting to animals.
“Anyone who speaks more than a single language will gladly tell you that there are certain words that are not quite translatable. There’s a loss of precision in the meaning, or a loss of expansiveness, or a slight depreciation in the connotation or the emotion of the word if nothing else.”
This is spot-on, and in fact doesn’t go quite far enough. As a retired classics professor who taught Greek and Latin for over 30 years and who also speaks or reads six modern languages, I’d say that it isn’t just “certain words” that are, fundamentally, untranslatable but in fact MOST words. Once you get beyond the very simplest declarative statement such as “The grass is green,” you are faced with the different resonances of words in the source language and the target language. By “resonances” I mean what is often called “semantic field” — all the implications, connections, associations, sub-meanings, and so on that are present in any word we use, and that make up a not inconsiderable part of the “meaning” of any statement.
My favorite example of this for Latin is the noun pietas and the associated adjective pius, which are absolutely crucial for Virgil’s delineation of Aeneas’ character and our understanding of it. But we have no English word that means what pietas means. It’s obviously the etymological source of “piety”, but pietas means so much more than piety — it refers to the specific duties and responsibilities one owes to, well, everyone to whom one owes a duty or a responsibility. So when Aeneas is described as “pius”, it means that he acts with the appropriate attention to his responsibilities, duties, obligations, and even emotions towards: the gods; his father; his wife; his son; his country; his fellow citizens; the soldiers under his command; his allies; his enemies; and so on. (And sometimes, of course, he fails.) How do you say that in English? Well, alas, you don’t; we don’t have a word that means all that AND carries a tone of the highest approval, and that indicates a concept of central cultural importance. “Dutiful Aeneas” might have worked once upon a time, but not any longer; to my (American) ear, at least, “dutiful” now carries a sense of grudging half-heartedness (except, perhaps, in a military context) which is entirely wrong for “pius”.
Lewis knew all this very well indeed, of course. His marvelous book “Studies in Words” is a treasure-trove of investigations into how words change their meanings and how rich the semantic field of a word like “Nature” really is. I have no doubt that he carefully constructed his treatment of “hnau” in OTSP precisely to make us realize that in fact we do NOT have a word that adequately translates “hnau”.
Just a note on “like a female trying to beget young on herself” – parthenogenesis and self-fertilization are reasonably common in the natural world.
@3: “Maleldil” spelling corrected, and I’ve updated the sentence about Weston/dunking–thanks!
I suspect that “bent” as a way of talking about evil is Lewis riffing on the Augustinian line about the sinner who is incurvatus in se (turned in on himself), an idea which Luther was to take up in his Lectures on Romans.
@@.-@
Concupiscence is not uniquely Catholic term, and indeed features in the Thirty Nine Articles. But Lewis would definitely have been familiar with the concept.
@7 I just went down a really interesting rabbit hole on wikipedia. Although probably Lewis is mostly referring here to a species in which dimorphism is more or less a given. Although somewhere in there is a clever joke that the microbiologist in me wants to make about the Virgin Mary/Incarnation which my Catholic sensibilities also make me feel a twinge guilty about making ;)
@5 very true (similar to the whole ‘why can’t we just be peaceful/stop being so divisive’ argument). Although at least in this case the people Lewis is painting as the villains are the ones on top of the hierarchy (white men) so he’s at least not really punching down here. But it is easier to have more faith in/goodwill towards a hierarchy when you’re not the one on the bottom, at any rate.
@6 – thank you for that interesting discussion of pietas and associated concepts.
@11– You’re very welcome!
@2, I may be mistaken, but I don’t think Lewis is talking about the destruction of the soul but the loss of capability for morality. Or for moral morality? Devine (is his name a pun on divine or devil? or both?) has lost the ability to put anything ahead of personal desires. Weston has to rationalize that handing over Ransom to (as they thought) be sacrificed was justified because of the benefit to humanity en masse. Devine figures killing Ransom is OK if that’s what he needs to get gold.
@10 Lewis is trying to show a world without our world’s flaws. In our world, power gets abused. This includes social power. On Malacandra, you have a world where it doesn’t work that way. It’s a defense of hierarchy only in the sense that showing a world where people didn’t ever get robbed or cheated would be a defense of blind trust. Sure, if that’s the way the world works, go for it. But, Lewis’ point is that it doesn’t work that way.
Ellyne, thanks for your response! I do see what you mean about Devine’s loss of the capacity for morality (and I love what you say about his name. I noticed that , too). But it still leaves me with some questions.
What Devine is, IMHO, is a very well-drawn high-functioning psychopath. Other people simply don’t matter to him unless he can use them. Such people exist, and they are a great mystery. Many of them end up in positions of power–bosses, heads of organizations, even heads of state. In such positions, they can do great harm. But here’s the question:
Do such human beings, apparently born without the capacity for empathy, actually lack free will? Do they therefore lack the capacity for moral choice? And finally, can any judge, even an Oyarsa, make that determination? I would argue that the answer to all these questions is no. It’s troubling that there are human beings like Devine who are sadistic and completely self-absorbed. But surely all human beings are, and must be, capable of choice. Surely all humans are free to choose ethical behavior?
If Lewis is arguing the opposite–that humans who become materialists and operate only out of selfish motives therefore destroy their own free will–well, I don’t think I can agree. And I don’t think that argument is in accord with what Lewis himself said elsewhere.
The interesting thing is this: when I first read this book as a late adolescent, I wasn’t at all bothered by what Oyarsa said about Devine. Now, I am. And it’s not that Devine isn’t perfectly horrible. He is, and very realistically so. But isn’t he still human, after all? (echoing what Weston says about Ranson at the beginning of the book.)
I admit, I’m not sure what Lewis is saying about Devine and I’m not sure if I would agree or disagree with him.
Broadly speaking, there are a lot of people who aren’t morally capable. Children and people with mental limitations may not understand right and wrong or may understand it only in terms of what’s allowed and what isn’t. Children, given time, generally learn. But, that lack of ability doesn’t mean they aren’t people or that they lack what I would call a soul.
My own religious belief is that people who lack that or never learn that still have lives with a purpose and that there are still things they are meant to experience in this life.
I think Lewis would agree that the disabled boy at the beginning of the story is like this. I think, if he saw Devine differently, it would be because he saw Devine as a person who had had that ability and lost it, like a guy who doesn’t have a dog anymore because he starved it to death. I know there’s some debate about psychopaths but that they’re generally seen as lacking the ability rather than having killed it off. In Devine’s case, Lewis presents it as something Devine has done to himself (albeit with help from outside forces).
This gets more tangled up because Weston and Devine aren’t just individuals. They represent philosophies that were prevalent back in Lewis’ day. So, condemning Devine is also about condemning the philosophy he represents.
Also, Oyarsa reminds me a bit of Frodo at the end of The Lord of the Rings when he is willing to let Saruman go (whether that’s a wise choice or not). Saruman belongs to a very different order of beings who are separate from Hobbits and the other peoples of Middle Earth. Frodo also hopes that, though it’s beyond his ability, he may yet find healing.
I feel like, while Oyarsa recognizes that, if Devine were one of the people he is responsible for, he would be beyond Oyarsa’s ability to heal and that the right thing would be to execute him for his crimes. But–and this may be something I’ve read into the story that Lewis didn’t intend–I think that Oyarsa also recognizes that his judgement of anyone from our world must be flawed and imperfect. Devine may yet have meaning and purpose he can’t see.
There’s also the question of what Devine deserves as a murderer. The book was published in 1938, when the death penalty was still common in the UK, so I could be looking too deeply at what would have been Devine’s penalty in his own world if he’d done this to a human being in his own country.
I agree with the condemnation of Devine’s philosophy. I can accept that he’s committed first degree murder and deserves legal punishment (ignoring issues about the death penalty). I think Lewis saw Devine’s condition as more of a learned trait than I do and that he condemns him for it. But, I think he also has some sympathy for a person from a damaged world and that’s part of the reasoning behind Oyarsa not enacting his sentence.
@6 – Well put! I feel obliged to point out that even color perception has changed in language over time, so Homer’s contemporaries, for example, might even describe grass, wine, and the evening sky by the same color word!
@Matt – Are the Oyarses not angels? Ransom says that they might be a more specific form of angel (or that ours might be a more specific form of eldil) but the forms they take on at the end of Perelandra are explicitly the same as the angels seen by Ezekiel, and I can’t imagine breaking the identification of the bent Oyarsa of Thulcandra with Lucifer.
There are some very interesting thoughts here about the capacity for moral choice and what that means for us as hnau….
My first thought on reading that sentence was: Then how can Maleldil rule himself?
And if he does not, who does it for him?
@17 — That’s very much the lifelong question I’ve always had; I asked my mother when I was 4 years old “if God made the world, then who made God?” The answer, of course, is supposedly that God/Maleldil is not a “creature” (that is, a created being) but instead is the CreatOR, and therefore is at the top of the hierarchy, or outside the hierarchy, or however one wants to put it. That explanation has never really worked for me, and so after many years of attending church and reading theology I came eventually to atheism. Still, I think it’s what Lewis would say in answer to your question; Maleldil made the creatures, and therefore he is outside the system of rule under which all the created beings (beasts, hnau, and eldils alike) live. He is the source of Rule, not one of the ruled.
Another point that might be relevant:
In the aftermath of Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis talks about how Malacandrians don’t keep pets and generally don’t relate to their “lower animals” in quite the same way we do to ours, because what we get by interacting with pets and treating animals as almost hnau, they can get much better by interacting with other hnau of different races.