Wohlwender

One of the simplest ways to corrupt a person is to subvert his perception of beauty. C.S. Lewis demonstrates this in That Hideous Strength, the final book of his Space Trilogy. Protagonist Mark Studdock is subjected to "training" by the sinister institute "N.I.C.E." to remove his emotional responses and his ability to recognize right from wrong. Mark is made to get used to a windowless room filled with nonsensical architecture and ugly art designed to disorient him. It is lit strangely and has unsettling proportions: too tall and narrow, a subtly wonky arched door, and dots on the ceiling positioned with such irregularity that it would be impossible to count them. On the walls are grotesque and creepy pictures, but just verging on normal. There is a hyper-real portrait of a young woman, but her mouth is filled with hair. One is a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis. Some are distortions of Bible scenes, like a painting of the Last Supper with hundreds of beetles under the table. This is Mark's first step toward "objectivity": "the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the fastidious society of the Macrobes." Later, Mark is forced to do simple, deliberately pointless or mildly offensive acts repeatedly. The kinds of things most people would find stupid or rude. For Mark, they are meant to gradually erode his sense of anything being important. Our ability to recognize good from bad, virtue from vice, or beautiful from ugly is precisely what makes us human — our ability to make value judgments. When we spend too much time surrounded by ugliness, it has a dulling effect on this especially human part of us. Even worse is when we are forced to call these ugly things beautiful, or bad things good. If we are not careful, it will ruin our ability to properly recognize anything of value in our lives. Interestingly, Mark is ultimately won over against N.I.C.E. when he refuses to trample on a crucifix — not because he is a Christian (he isn't yet), but because it is inherently ugly and evil nonetheless. When someone intentionally creates ugly art, Lewis calls on us to call it out as such. The beauty we include in our lives is not neutral, nor is it trivial.