July 15, 2025

⁂ “It’s Got to Go On”: Colloquial Fatalism in Edgestow

One of the most psychologically chilling scenes in That Hideous Strength takes place not in Belbury, nor in a torture chamber, but in an ordinary pub.

“It says in this morning’s paper that things are pretty well settling down,” said the landlord.
“That’s right,” agreed the others.
“There’ll always be some who get awkward,” said the potato-faced man.
“What’s the good of getting awkward?” asked another, “it’s got to go on. You can’t stop it.”
“That’s what I say,” said the landlord.

This moment has no monsters, no sinister devices. But it may be the most quietly horrifying passage in the novel. Through colloquial dialogue, Lewis shows us how evil succeeds: not through grand ideology, but through small, neighborly shrugs.

The voices here are casual, ordinary, and fatally familiar. They don’t belong to villains. They belong to the weary, the mildly amused, the slightly inconvenienced—the resigned.

⁂ The Sound of Shrugged Conscience

What makes this scene effective is how unremarkable it feels. The words aren’t sinister. They’re comforting, even social:

• "That's right."
• "It’s got to go on."
• "You can’t stop it."

This is not propaganda. It’s not even denial. It’s accommodation—a gentle flattening of moral resistance. The pub-goers do not justify the evils of Edgestow. They simply refuse to be "awkward" about it. They believe the official story, not because it convinces them, but because it saves them the trouble of believing something else.

And this is Lewis’s point: evil doesn’t need fervent converts. It only needs casual agreement from people who want their tea and their normalcy. People who believe that the news must be right and the troublemakers must be wrong. People who think “awkwardness” is worse than injustice.

⁂ Dialogue as Psychological Realism

From a craft standpoint, this passage is remarkable. Lewis doesn’t editorialize. He doesn’t insert Ransom or the narrator to explain what’s wrong. Instead, he lets the dialogue do the moral work.

And because it’s written in flat, repetitive colloquialism—"That’s what I say"… "That’s right"—the reader feels the emotional tone: numbing sameness. No urgency. No dissent. Just a few phrases passed around like a pint of mild ale.

This is how cultural paralysis is revealed.

And Lewis knew it. He had lived through the rise of fascism. He had seen the cost of believing “it’s got to go on.”

⁂ The Banality Beneath

What Hannah Arendt would later call the banality of evil, Lewis renders here in beer-soaked terms. The men in the pub are not malicious. But their speech reveals a deeper rot: the abdication of personal judgment, the surrender of moral agency to convenience and social consensus.

And that’s why this scene is more terrifying than many of the book’s darker moments. Because we recognize it. It sounds like people we know. It may even sound like us, on a bad day—when we want things to settle down, when we avoid thinking too hard, when we agree just to keep from being awkward.

But the cost of that comfort is high. In Edgestow, it costs lives. In our world, it may cost the soul.

Lewis doesn’t tell us this outright. He just gives us the words.

And lets them settle in like smoke above a quiet pint.