An Experiment in Criticism

by C. S. Lewis

  Nevertheless, since silence might be given some sinister interpretation, I will lay on the table what few and plebeian cards I hold.

  If we take literature in the widest sense, so as to include the literature both of knowledge and of power, the question 'What is the good of reading what anyone writes?' is very like the question 'What is the good of listening to what anyone says?' Unless you contain in yourself sources that can supply all the information, entertainment, advice, rebuke and merriment you want, the answer is obvious. And if it is worth while listening or reading at all, it is often worth doing so attentively. Indeed we must attend even to discover that something is not worth attention.

  When we take literature in the narrower sense the question is more complicated.

  A work of literary art can be considered in two lights. It both means and is.

  It is both Logos (something said) and Poiema (something made). As Logos it tells a story, or expresses an emotion, or exhorts or pleads or describes or rebukes or excites laughter. As Poiema, by its aural beauties and also by the balance and contrast and the unified multiplicity of its successive parts, it is an objet (Part, a thing shaped so as to give great satisfaction. From this point of view, and perhaps from this only, the old parallel between painting and poetry is helpful.

  These two characters in the work of literary art are separated by an abstraction, and the better the work is the more violent the abstraction is felt to be. Unfortunately it is unavoidable.

  Our experience of the work as Poiema is unquestionably a keen pleasure. Those who have had it want to have it again. And they seek out new experiences of the same sort although they are not obliged to do so by their conscience, nor compelled by their necessities, nor allured by their interests. If anyone denies that an experience which fulfils these conditions is a pleasure, he may be asked to produce a definition of pleasure which would exclude it. The real objection to a merely hedonistic theory of literature, or of the arts in general, is that 'pleasure' is a very high, and therefore very empty, abstraction. It denotes too many things and connotes too little. If you tell me that something is a pleasure, I do not know whether it is more like revenge, or buttered toast, or success, or adoration, or relief from danger, or a good scratch. You will have to say that literature gives, not just pleasure, but the particular pleasure proper to it; and it is in defining this 'proper pleasure' that all your real work will have to be done. By the time you have finished, the fact that you used the word pleasure at the outset will not seem very important.

  It is, therefore, however true, unhelpful to say that the shape of the Poiema gives us pleasure. We must remember that 'shape', when applied to that whose parts succeed one another in time (as the parts of music and literature do), is a metaphor. To enjoy the shape of a Poiema is something very different from enjoying the (literal) shape of a house or a vase. The parts of the Poiema are things we ourselves do; we entertain various imaginations, imagined feelings, and thoughts in an order, and at a tempo, prescribed by the poet. (One of the reasons why a very 'exciting' story can hardly elicit the best reading is that greedy curiosity tempts us to take some passages more quickly than the author intends.) This is less like looking at a vase than like 'doing exercises' under an expert's direction or taking part in a choric dance invented by a good choreographer.

  There are many ingredients in our pleasure. The exercise of our faculties is in itself a pleasure. Successful obedience to what seems worth obeying and is not quite easily obeyed is a pleasure. And if the Poiema, or the exercises, or the dance is devised by a master, the rests and movements, the quickenings and slowings, the easier and the more arduous passages, will come exactly as we need them; we shall be deliciously surprised by the satisfaction of wants we were not aware of till they were satisfied. We shall end up just tired enough and not too tired, and 'on the right note'. It would have been unbearable if it had ended a moment sooner-or later-or in any different way. Looking back on the whole performance, we shall feel that we have been led through a pattern or arrangement of activities which our nature cried out for.

  The experience could not thus affect us-could not give this pleasure-unless it were good for us; not good as a means to some end beyond the Poiema, the dance, or the exercises, but good for us here and now. The relaxation, the slight (agreeable) weariness, the banishment of our fidgets, at the close of a great work all proclaim that it has done us good. That is the truth behind Aristotle's doctrine of Katharsis and Dr I. A. Richards's theory that the 'calm of mind'

  we feel after a great tragedy really means 'All's well with the nervous system here and now'. I cannot accept either. I cannot accept Aristotle's because the world has not yet agreed what it means. I cannot accept Dr Richards's because it comes so perilously near to being a sanction for the lowest and most debilitating form of egoistic castle-building. Tragedy, for him, enables us to combine, at the incipient or imaginal level, impulses which would clash in explicit action-the impulse to approach, and the impulse to shun, the terrible. [Principles of Literary Criticism (1934), pp. no, HI, 245.] Quite. Just so when I read about the beneficence of Mr Pickwick I can combine (at the incipient level) my wish to give money and my wish to keep it; when I read Maldon I combine (at the same level) my wish to be very brave and my wish to be safe. The incipient level is thus a place where you can eat your cake and have it, where you can be heroic without danger and generous without expense. If I thought literature did this sort of thing to me I should never read again. But though I reject both Aristotle and Dr Richards, I think their theories are the right sort of theories, and stand together against all those who would find the value of literary works in 'views' or 'philosophies' of life, or even 'comments' on it. They place the goodness (where we actually feel it to be) in what has happened to us while we read; not in some remote and merely probable consequences.

  It is only by being also a Poiema that a Logos becomes a work of literary art at all. Conversely, the imaginations, emotions, and thoughts out of which the Poiema builds its harmony are aroused in us by, and directed towards, the Logos and would have no existence without it. We visualise Lear in the storm, we share his rage, we regard his whole story with pity and terror. What we thus react to is something, in itself, non-literary and non-verbal. The literature of the affair lies in the words that present the storm, the rage, the whole story, so as to arouse these reactions, and in ordering the reactions into the pattern of the 'dance' or 'exercise'. Donne's Apparition, as Poiema, has a very simple but effective design-a movement of direct insult leads, unexpectedly, not into a climax of insult but into a reticence which is far more sinister. The material of this pattern is the spite which, while we read, we share with Donne. The pattern gives it finality and a sort of grace. Similarly, .on a far larger scale, Dante orders and patterns our feelings about, and images of, the universe as he supposed, or partly feigned, it to be.

  The mark of strictly literary reading, as opposed to scientific or otherwise informative reading, is that we need not believe or approve the Logos. Most of us do not believe that Dante's universe is at all like the real one. Most of us, in real life, would judge the emotion expressed in Donne's Apparition to be silly and degraded; even, what is worse, uninteresting. None of us can accept simultaneously Housman's and Chesterton's views of life, or those of Fitzgerald's Omar and Kipling. What then is the good of-what is even the defence for-occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing our inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist-on Dante's earthly paradise, Thetis rising from the sea to comfort Achilles, Chaucer's or Spenser's Lady Nature, or the Mariner's skeleton ship?

  It is no use trying to evade the question by locating the whole goodness of a literary work in its character as Poiema, for it is out of our various interests in the Logos that the Poiema is made.

  The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be mo
re than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. And even when we build disinterested fantasies, they are saturated with, and limited by, our own psychology. To acquiesce in this particularity on the sensuous level-in other words, not to discount perspective-would be lunacy. We should then believe that the railway line really grew narrower as it receded into the distance. But we want to escape the illusions of perspective on higher levels too. We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. We are not content to be Leibnitzian monads. We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors. One of the things we feel after reading a great work is 'I have got out'. Or from another point of view, 'I have got in'; pierced the shell of some other monad and discovered what it is like inside.

  Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are. The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness.

  In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; 'he that loseth his life shall save it'.

  We therefore delight to enter into other men's beliefs (those, say, of Lucretius or Lawrence) even though we think them untrue. And into their passions, though we think them depraved, like those, sometimes, of Marlowe or Carlyle. And also into their imaginations, though they lack all realism of content.

  This must not be understood as if I were making the literature of power once more into a department within the literature of knowledge-a department which existed to gratify our rational curiosity about other people's psychology. It is not a question of knowing (in that sense) at all. It is connattre not savoir; it is erleben; we become these other selves. Not only nor chiefly in order to see what they are like but in order to see what they see, to occupy, for a while, their seat in the great theatre, to use their spectacles and be made free of whatever insights, joys, terrors, wonders or merriment those spectacles reveal.

  Hence it is irrelevant whether the mood expressed in a poem was truly and historically the poet's own or one that he also had imagined. What matters is his power to make us live it. I doubt whether Donne the man gave more than playful and dramatic harbourage to the mood expressed in The Apparition. I doubt still more whether the real Pope, save while he wrote it, or even then more than dramatically, felt what he expresses in the passage beginning 'Yes, I am proud'. [Epilogue to the Satires, dia. II, 1. 208.] What does it matter?

  This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. They are not, any more than our personal experiences, all equally worth having. Some, as we say, 'interest' us more than others. The causes of this interest are naturally extremely various and differ from one man to another; it may be the typical (and we say 'How true!') or the abnormal (and we say' How strange!'); it may be the beautiful, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, the exhilarating, the pathetic, the comic, or the merely piquant. Literature gives the entree to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books.

  Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

  Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the-privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But 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.

  Next Chapter...

  APPENDIX:

  A NOTE ON OEDIPUS

  (See Chapter VII ON REALISMS - Paragraph 9)

  It is just possible that some will deny the story of Oedipus to be atypical

  on the ground that there have been societies in which marriages between parent and child were lawful. [See Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, ed. J. G. Frazer (Loeb, 1922), vol. II, pp. 373 sq.]

  The theory may find some support in those not uncommon myths which give the

  earth-goddess a young consort who is also her son. But all this is quite irrelevant to the story of Oedipus as we have it. For it is not a story simply about a

  man who married his mother, but about a man cruelly destined to marry his mother, unknowingly and unwillingly, in a society where such marriages were regarded

  as abominable. Societies, if there were any, which approved such marriages would be precisely the societies in which a story like that of Oedipus could never

  be told, because it would have no point. If marrying your mother is as normal as marrying the girl next door, it is no more sensational than marrying the

  girl next door and no more worth making into a story. We might perhaps say that the story is 'derived' from dim memories of an earlier age, or dim rumours of an alien culture, where there was no objection to marriage of parent and child.

  But the memory must have become so 'dim'-let us frankly say, so erroneous-that the old custom is not recognised as a custom at all and any remembered instance of it is mistaken for a monstrous accident. And the alien culture must be so

  alien that what is reported of it must be similarly misunderstood by the story-tellers.

  Otherwise the story, as we have it, is ruined-just as the story of Thyestes

  would be ruined if it were told about a society in which feeding a guest with the flesh of his own children were a recognised form of hospitality. The absence, even the inconceivability, of the custom is the conditio sine qua non of the

  story.

  THE END

  ON REALISMS

  The word realism has one meaning in logic, where its opposite is nominalism, and another in metaphysics, where its opposite is idealism. In political language it has a third and somewhat debased meaning; the attitudes we should call 'cynical'

  in our opponents are called 'realistic' when our own side adopts them. At present we are concerned with none of these, but only with realism and realistic as terms of literary criticism. And even within this restricted area a distinction must immediately be drawn.

  We should all describe as realistic the exact specifications of size which are given by direct measurements in Gulliver or by comparison with well-known objects in the Divine Comedy. And when Chaucer's friar drives the cat off the bench where he wants to sit down himself, we should describe this as a realistic touch.[Canterbury Tales, D. 1775.]

  This is what I call Realism of Presentation-the art of bringing something close to us, making it palpable and vivid, by sharply observed or sharply imagined detail. We may cite as examples the dragon 'sniffing along the
stone' in Beowulf; Layamon's Arthur, who, on hearing that he was king, sat very quiet and' one time he was red and one time he was pale'; the pinnacles in Gawain that looked as if they were 'pared out of paper'; Jonah going into the whale's mouth ' like a mote at a minster door'; the fairy bakers in Huon rubbing the paste off their fingers; Falstaff on his death-bed plucking at the sheet; Wordsworth's little streams heard at evening but 'inaudible by daylight'. [Beowulf, 2288; Brut, 1987 sq.; Gawain and the Green Knight, 802; Patience, 268; Duke Huon ofBurdeux,il, cxvi, p. 409, ed. S. Lee, E.E.T.S.; Henry V, II, iii, 14; Excursion, IV, 1174.]

  For Macaulay such realism of presentation was what chiefly distinguished Dante from Milton. And Macaulay was right so far as he went, but never realised that what he had stumbled on was not a difference between two particular poets but a general difference between medieval and classical work. The Middle Ages favoured a brilliant and exuberant development of presentational realism, because men were at that time inhibited neither by a sense of period-they dressed every story in the manners of their own day-nor by a sense of decorum. The medieval tradition gives us 'Fire and fleet and candle-light'; the classical, C^etait pendant Vhorreur d'une profonde nuit.