House of the Octopus

The House of the Octopus is a verse drama by Charles Williams, published in 1945, the year he died. It was written for performance by a church group, in the tradition of the religious plays Williams had been composing since the 1930s, notably Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury and Seed of Adam. Its setting is an imagined pagan island whose people worship a monstrous Octopus, and a Christian missionary arrives to preach a different God. The play came out of the war years, when Williams, an editor at Oxford University Press and a member of the Inklings, was thinking hard about how totalizing powers capture and consume the people who serve them.

The drama stages a collision between two ways of being human. The Octopus is a god of absorption: it takes in, it devours, it makes its worshippers extensions of itself, and its priests speak in the language of unity and belonging. Against this the missionary offers a faith whose center is a crucified God, one who gives himself away rather than swallowing others. Williams is working here with ideas that run through all his thought, especially the idea of substituted love and the way of exchange, in which burdens are borne for one another, and he sets this against a counterfeit of communion in which identity is dissolved into the will of the whole. The play does not argue the point by abstract exposition. It lets the false god sound attractive, even comforting, so that the reader feels how real the temptation of absorption is, and then lets the cost of that comfort become visible in what happens to the islanders. The missionary's own faithfulness is tested, and the play does not treat him as a simple hero.

The work has remained a minor but telling piece in Williams's output. It shows his habit of using theater as a vehicle for theology and reads naturally alongside his novels, where similar contrasts between self-giving and self-enclosure are worked out at greater length. In an age of ideologies that promise belonging at the price of the self, its picture of a devouring unity dressed as love has not lost its edge.

Who should read this: readers of Williams, the Inklings, and twentieth-century religious drama will find it rewarding, as will anyone interested in how Christian thought can critique totalitarian and collectivist impulses through imaginative form. It is not an introduction to Williams, and those who want a plain devotional or a straightforward argument will find its symbolic method demanding. It is best approached after some acquaintance with his wider writing.