by Michael Ward
This is not to say that all critics who extract such a philosophy
from their favourite novelists or poets produce work without
value. Each attributes to his chosen author what he believes to
be wisdom; and the sort of thing that seems to him wise will of
course be determined by his own calibre. If he is a fool he will
find and admire foolishness, if he is a mediocrity, platitude, in
all his favourites.3
Even here, however, Lewis struggles to be fair to what in the end is not so much a response to the text as a response to a mirror.
But if he is a profound thinker himself, what he acclaims and
expounds as his author’s philosophy may be well worth reading,
even if it is in reality his own. We may compare him to the long
succession of divines who have based edifying and eloquent ser-
mons on some straining of their texts. The sermon, though bad
exegesis, was often good homiletics in its own right.4
But this is not a critical reading of literature. Lewis, we need to remember, was not a successful Oxford academic who turned to writing fiction in his middle age. The Pilgrim’s Regress was published in 1933, when he was still in his mid thirties, well before most of his better-known critical works.
He had published two volumes of poetry by the mid-1920s. Some biographers have argued that his views on poetry—including his dislike of T. S. Eliot—were at least partially coloured by his relative lack of success as a poet.
Maybe. I happen to like some of his poems—though not all. I also agree with those who say that much of his prose is more poetic than his verse.
But Lewis was always, I would argue, as much a creative writer as he was a critic, and there is no doubt that that was how he saw himself. Not merely was his considerable output consistently spread between criticism, theology, and fiction, but all these emerge from his pen not as distinct categories but as themselves mixed genres. Pilgrim’s Regress is at once fiction, allegory, satire, philosophy, and theology. It would be easy to think of The Screwtape 3. Ibid., 87.
4. Ibid.
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Letters as being primarily theology—but what theology! Looking back on what I thought of in my teens as “religion,” I now see it as primarily satire—
religious satire, to be sure, but satire none the less. Lewis was probably the last writer since Milton to give us a Devil’s eye view of the world (I discount Byron for obvious reasons) and a very subtle view of human failings it is too.
Nor should we ignore Lewis the philosopher. With a First in Greats, his first academic appointment in 1924 was as a philosophy tutor at University College. The English fellowship at Magdalen, which he held for most of his career, was to follow a year later. It is hardly surprising that Pilgrim’s Regress, the first major literary work after his conversion in 1931, is as much a philosophic as a religious satire. Even in the Narnia stories, you will remember that the old professor (owner of the Wardrobe) can be heard at intervals complaining of the children’s lack of a philosophical grounding in logic and Plato: “What do they teach them at these schools!”
I spoke earlier of the surprisingly theoretical bent to Lewis’s criticism, but, of course, it was not the so-called “theory” of the later twentieth-century French critics—which, in turn, of course, was derived largely from German Romanticism. It was, rather, the desire for a clear philosophical basis to his criticism—an attempt to put it beyond subjectivity, and to establish a common ground with other critics who did not share his premises. If philosophy could not prevent differences of opinion, the classical philosophy that Lewis had been grounded in could at least prevent people talking nonsense, and might even provide common premises from which to proceed. Yet even here, though you might expel it with a pitchfork, fiction had a strange way of stretching its tendrils under the fence and reaching into the debate. Who else would write a study in linguistics called “Bluspels and Flalansferes”?
Indeed, one could go further. Anyone who knows Owen Barfield’s send-up of the solemn speculative notions of early twentieth-century linguisticians, and who comes across phrases like “arboreal psychologists” to describe the ponderous theorizers of primitive man, can be forgiven for suspect-ing not merely the play of a riotous imagination, but even of straight-faced philological satire.
But my point should surely be clear by now. Lewis’s attack on those for whom the study of literature had become for them a surrogate religion, a philosophy, a school of ethics, a psychotherapy, etc., was not because he was not attracted by these things, but because they were in some sense all too attractive. He writes as an insider, and as an insider who knows his ground so well that in an essay like “Bluspels and Flalansferes” he is constantly turning his argument about the need for metaphor in thinking into something like a fictional narrative as he proceeds—and, once again, a fiction in places verging suspiciously on satire.
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Now, I’m well aware I’m on dangerous ground here. I recall another first-year lecture in which Lewis warned us seriously against the modern heresy of finding satire in mediaeval literature when none was intended.
And yet . . . it is as if he cannot help himself. One thinks of the man who said to Dr. Johnson that he had it in mind to be a philosopher, but “cheerfulness would keep breaking in.” Lewis’s reputation depends on his being many things, but satirist is not usually one of them—yet satire will keep breaking in. It is true that for anyone with a sense of humour, the idiocies of some critics are indeed an open invitation to satire, but Lewis’s criticism is constantly metamorphosing into fictional situations, imaginary conversations, and somewhere in all that there is nearly always a streak of satire. We recall his endorsement of J. W. Saunders’ proposal for a “Charientocracy,” or government by the refined, in his 1955 essay “Lilies that Fester,” where the problem that modern poets are only read by other modern poets is solved by the Swiftian suggestion that practical criticism—and especially listening to poetry readings by modern poets—be made the compulsory entry qualification for the Managerial Class.5 The only critic who I think was similar in this respect was the late, and much lamented, A. D. Nuttall—who, incidentally, though an atheist, was a great admirer of Lewis.
This is not to say that Lewis’s own judgement was always sound. The modern reader notices at once the way in which a writer he approves of is always masculine, whereas someone lightweight or trivial is female. One of his less attractive short stories, “The Shoddy Lands,” first published in 1956, is about seeing the world through the eyes of a woman who is only interested in clothing and jewellery shops; everything else—trees, flowers, even sunlight—is vague and undefined. Nor is this the only example of women being the natural location of all that is trivial and worthless—recall the unexpected fate of Susan in the Narnia stories.
Though “The Shoddy Lands” is presented as a satire on consumerism, what is actually described is an aesthetic failure; a failure of observation.
Thus the trees in this dream are “the crudest, shabbiest apology for trees you could imagine.” Lacking any real anatomy, “they were more like lamp-posts with great shapeless blobs of green stuck on top of them.” Similarly, the grass under his feet, though soft and springy to the feet
. . . when you looked down it was horribly disappointing to the
eye. It was, in a very rough way, the colour of grass; the colour
grass has on a very dull day when you look at it while thinking
pretty hard about something else. But there were no separate
blades in it. I stooped down and tried to find them; the closer
5. Lewis, “Lilies that Fester,” 116–17.
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one looked, the vaguer it seemed to become. It had in fact just
the same smudged, unfinished quality as the trees: shoddy.6
We shall return to those shoddy blades of grass in a moment. What I want to call attention to here is yet another example of what one might call Lewis’s narrative synaesthesia. What is being criticised is a consumerism that is only interested in useless artefacts for sale—the fact that it is being presented as through the eyes of a woman, though perhaps illustrative of misogyny, is technically irrelevant here. A moral failing is presented as an inability to focus on things that have no monetary value; moral blindness becomes physical myopia, a limitation of consciousness. In a reversal of the processes we have seen earlier, where criticism turns into fiction, here fictional narrative has become critical philosophy. More significantly, the whole process is presented in terms of an aesthetic failure. She is shut off from the sheer beauty of the natural world—and, in particular, from that longing which for Lewis is the driving force behind all spiritual growth.
I am not arguing that this kind of movement between genres is unique to Lewis—far from it, I think we all do it to some extent, if only in our imaginations rather than on paper. What I do believe is that this is much more common in Lewis than in most critics. Indeed, I think it is one of his defining characteristics—and one that makes him, for all his faults, a great critic and a great writer. Here I would draw a parallel with an even greater writer, Dickens. There are so many faults in Dickens’s writing that it is hard to know where to start—and critics have recognised them and deplored them from his own day onwards. And yet, when all is said and done, he remains one of the very best.
So, for very different reasons, is it with Lewis. He is a writer whose perceptions just jostle against each other, and are so interconnected that it is almost impossible to separate one strand from the next. These are characteristics more common in the poet than the critic, and not for nothing did Lewis see himself as primarily a poet. But let us come back to that passage in An Experiment in Criticism with which we began, published in 1961, only two years before his death. Here Lewis attempts to separate the response of the reader to a great work from any number of ancillaries that might clut-ter it up—religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. Nor is the answer simply that of cultural acquisition. In that paper I just mentioned, “Lilies that Fester,” he had attacked the idea of “culture” in the abstract as distinct from the value of a particular cultural artefact. “Those who read poetry to improve their minds,” he warns, “will never improve their minds by reading poetry.”7
6. Lewis, “The Shoddy Lands,” 105.
7. Lewis, “Lilies that Fester,” 108.
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To distinguish what he really values from these peripheral distractions, he tries to define what it is that is valuable about encountering great art. It is all too easy to read Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton, as part of a cultural programme, without surrendering ourselves before them; allowing them to dictate the terms under which we encounter them. “The many use art and the few receive it.”8 When, finally, Lewis tries to describe what lies at the heart of that response his answer almost leaps off the page with pleasure and excitement:
In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet
remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with
a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am
never more myself than when I do.9
At first glance that looks again like an aesthetic response—but, of course it is not. As with Thomas Traherne, whom I suspect Lewis may be echoing here, aesthetics is a surrogate; a metonymy. Even in seeking to frame it in terms of an aesthetic description, he is already moving beyond them. Indeed, he is clearly—and quite consciously—using aesthetics to describe something that is not really aesthetic at all. When, again, he writes of that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like
a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying
overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Kahn, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves . . . .10
he is using aesthetic experiences quite explicitly to point elsewhere. But what is noticeable here is how much better he is at describing the qualities to be gained by reading than he is about how one should learn to read. How, then, should we read literature? And—even more important—if we should not read to improve our minds, or gain culture, what can or should we gain from it? Can you train people to be responsive, to be so possessed? Lewis certainly believed one could—but, clearly, only some people.
In this sense Lewis was an unashamed elitist. University studies are not for the masses11—and, as he says, many of those who do study English at university shouldn’t be doing so. But he is, we note, careful never to suggest that the academic study of literature is a necessary training for reading.
8. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 19.
9. Ibid., 141.
10. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, 15.
11. Cf., e.g., Lewis, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.”
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There are many people who with no academic background at all who can receive and be possessed by great works of art and literature. This is not an elite of privilege or entitlement, but one that has to be . . . I was going to say
“earned,” but perhaps that’s not the right word. Possibly “acknowledged,” or even “discovered” in the sense that Lewis speaks of finding oneself a Christian rather than choosing to be one.
So what then are the grounds for admission, the price of entry? Here, I think, Lewis is faced with a real paradox. Because of his insistence that good readers may be drawn from any walk of life, and that many of those who specialize in the study of literature are doing so for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way, he finds himself forced towards finding his true readers, the true lovers of literature, almost in terms of a mysterious “elect”—chosen as it were by some Calvinist Demi-God of literature, not on their own merits, but by arbitrary selection. The language of that last quotation from An Experiment in Criticism is surely significant. Such people transcend themselves,
“as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing,” and are never more themselves than when they do. The studied neutrality, in which atheist and Christian can alike be great teachers, has, if not disappeared, been transmuted into something very different. Though Lewis would not, I think, deny that atheists could indeed be great critics, sensitive readers, vision-ary teachers, it is clear that in doing so—in what he calls “transcending”
themselves—they have consciously or unconsciously moved onto religious ground, achieved self-realization, or even perhaps “un-self-realization”
through transcendence. Whatever he might claim, this is not the language of secularity—and, more important, not an experience easily described in secular terms.
Though this was furiously resented by some, I do not accept that this is necessarily a criticism of Lewis. He was, by this stage of his life, a deeply religious man, and it was natural enough to him to describe the kind of experience he is trying to portray in religious terms. Nor, I think, would he have wanted to claim that such experiences were the exclusive preserve of religious people. There are enough such experiences in real life, not to mention literature, for him not to be unaware of their existence—one thinks, for instance, of passages in Carlyle, Dickens, even, perhaps, George Eliot.
Nevertheless, what this tells us unmistakably is that for Lewis the experience of great art or great literature is, if not a religious experience (and he makes it very clear that to identify the two was a fundamental category mis-take12), an experience that ultimately takes its meaning from the religious 12. This is the subject of perhaps his worst critical essay, “Christianity and Literature” (1939), but it is a point he repeatedly touched on in his writing
s elsewhere.
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experience of “longing” that it is emphatically not—in exactly the way that moonlight, while not being sunlight, is impossible without the existence of the sun. Virgil, the good pagan, though he cannot come into the presence of Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, is, nevertheless Dante’s guide to reach that point—or, to put this more precisely in Lewis’s own terms, it is an ineffable pull of something just outside the range of his own experience that draws the pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Regress forward on his journey. There may be other ways to that experience, but this was the nearest for him.
And this brings me back to that grass. Exactly ten years before “The Shoddy Lands,” in 1946, Lewis had published The Great Divorce, a Dantean vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven. It is true that the characterisation is perfunctory and even stereotyped, but, then, what would you expect of those in hell? The wages of selfishness are a diminished self. But his vision of the place—the city of dreadful night where the only punishment is other people—is extraordinarily powerful and haunting. Heaven—reached by a daily bus, free for any to go, and even stay, if they wish—is much more so.
The only qualification for heaven is the desire to be there—and, of course, the majority of the day-trippers hate the place even more than they hated hell. It’s that grass again. Though not true heaven, which would be unimaginable, this is more Dante’s Earthly Paradise—with a beauty both strange and yet still recognizable as earthly beauty. But there is a shock in store for any visitor from hell. So far from being soft and indistinct, this grass is so real that, for the denizens of hell, who have become thin and wraith-like in the searing light of paradise, it is hard and unyielding as diamond. It hurts them to walk on it. If they can only forget themselves they will, in time grow stronger and more solid and real—and one tripper, one of the least likely, does indeed accept that challenge and stay—but for the rest the only thing they cannot give up is themselves, and they choose freely to return, making their own hell from what would otherwise be purgatory. Indeed, as with Dante, choice is the key to this whole system. God allows freewill—complete and utter unfettered freedom. But since we are outside time, as we know it, choice acts retrospectively, backwards as well as forwards, so that events in the past become good or bad, pleasurable or painful, according to the choices they lead to.