C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner

by Michael Ward

  effect of violence in human action, the way in which violent conflict reduces human interaction to a “geometry” of forces seeking equilibrium so that there is never any significance for the participants in another point of view, another subject’s perspective that has to be weighed or felt.17

  In contrast, secondary epic does look to events that alter the course of things. Virgil is the paradigm for this kind of epic narrative, in which the temporal horizon of the story extends backwards and forwards in a way un-thinkable in Homer, framing the actions under immediate review against a background of foreshadowings and prefigurings. The hero’s action is called, mandated; it is the embodiment of a purpose not his own, apprehended both as duty and as desire.18 But as such it is also something with which the hero must struggle, precisely because it is not blind fate. As Lewis says, Aeneas is nothing if not an adult who has to negotiate competing goods and desires, who has to think about the cost of actions and learn to live in compromised and to some degree guilty self-awareness. Lewis’s analysis of Virgil, brief as it is, is one of the best things in the Preface, making one regret that he never devoted a whole book to the subject;19 and its heart is the contention that secondary epic is inevitably in some important sense tragic—involved with sacrifice and collision of values. But to understand the style of secondary epic—the need for the rhetoric we have already been thinking about—we have to grasp that this more reflective narration, lacking as it does the physically and publicly ritual trappings of primary epic (music and ceremony in the mead hall or whatever), has to work that much harder for its effects; and Lewis eloquently argues that Milton’s very syntax is an aspect of the rhetoric, carrying us along in its complex grammatical flow so that we internalise the long perspective and the connectedness of temporally remote things.

  There is, he says, a “facade of logical connexions” overlaying the emotional connections that are the main point;20 Milton both quarries the remotest areas of learning for similes pregnant with more than their surface shows, and, through the apparent indeterminacy that his Latinate style so often presents—highly complex constructions, grammatical patterns that do not immediately yield their sense—moves us along with what can seem like an 17. There is a translation (“The Iliad, Poem of Might”) in Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, ed. and trans. Geissbuhler. cf. Winch, Simone Weil:

  “The Just Balance,” 143–46, for a good discussion of the text.

  18. Lewis, Preface, 38.

  19. The fragments of his translation of the Aeneid along with some critical/expository material have been published, edited by Reyes as C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid.

  20. Lewis, Preface, 42.

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  almost dreamlike immediacy that is also rapidly shifting and slipping away; an “indivisible, flowing quality.”21

  All this is superbly presented and argued. But again it leaves a substantial question: does the subject matter of Paradise Lost actually lend itself to the techniques identified as those of secondary epic? On Lewis’s showing, epic of this kind focuses on an episode whose significance is prepared for long beforehand and felt long afterwards; and we can hardly deny that

  “Man’s first disobedience” is arguably such an episode. But part of the difficulty many readers have discovered in Milton’s epic is that the events surrounding this central drama (in which, as Lewis argues,22 it is possible to see elements of a will confronted with conflicting goods) are described as if the heavenly battle between the loyal angels and Satan were a series of contingent happenings whose outcome was uncertain—as if God could in principle be defeated. Lewis, in chapter 15 of the Preface, mounts a stout defence of the relative coherence of Milton’s view of angelic corporeality; but, even granting that Raphael, in narrating (in Book V) to Adam and Eve the war in heaven, excuses his use of routinely material language and categories to give an impression of “invisible exploits,” there is something bizarre about the entire enterprise of narrating the rebellion of Satan; and something worse than bizarre about depicting God’s involvement in it as a sort of clinching military intervention. And Lewis himself winces at the Homeric mockery of Satan’s defeat23 and the “Olympian” anthropomorphism of some of the depictions of heaven.24 Lewis rightly sees some of these passages as simply poetically tactless, not just theologically misplaced; but they reflect one of the underlying difficulties in Milton’s exercise as Lewis defines it. Secondary epic requires the delicate double vision of a contingent series of events unfolding and a fixed destiny and purpose shaping them, and this is none too easy to apply to the extra-historical setting of primordial spiritual conflict, let alone the interaction of the persons of the divine Trinity. It is as though the central action of Paradise Lost had proved inadequate in drama for its author and had to be supplemented with a drama imported from elsewhere, artificially sustained with the trappings of Renaissance militarism.

  Lewis has characterized Virgilian tragedy wonderfully well earlier in the book when he writes of Aeneas having to seek “something more important than happiness” and of the inescapable unhappiness of those who are 21. Ibid., 48.

  22. Ibid., chapter 18.

  23. Ibid., 95.

  24. Ibid., 131.

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  left damaged in the wake of this vocationally directed quest.25 But if secondary epic is about a destiny intermittently seen and pursued at tragic cost, what exactly is there about the narrative of the Fall that is Virgilian? The vocation of Adam and Eve is crystal clear; the following of it is not intrinsically shadowed with unavoidable loss. I suspect that Lewis’s admirable clarity in expounding and defending what we might call the post-Virgilian aspects of Milton’s rhetoric and idiom somewhat diverts our eyes at first from the extreme difficulty of representing Milton’s subject matter in Virgilian terms.

  This is related to but not quite identical with the question of whether a genuinely tragic perspective is possible for a Christian artist—a larger issue than I can hope to tackle here. But if we read the war in heaven as an essential part of the poetic labour of “justifying” God’s ways, the critical and theological embarrassments will not go away in a hurry. What Milton is saying is, in effect, that the apparently causeless act of disobedience by Adam and Eve in Eden is in fact the effect of Satan’s rebellion; the narrative of a will struggling with unsought choices is projected from Eden to heaven. But the two great imaginative difficulties this faces are, first, that it is, by definition, impossible for us to imagine the interiority—and so the narrative trajec-tory—of the unfallen mind (more on this a little later); and second, that the war in heaven simply shifts the problem of causeless disobedience to another level. The minds of both angels and unfallen human agents are not narratable in the way in which we habitually narrate growing and deciding; they cannot be dealt with as if they were like Aeneas. Lewis’s insightful and lucid anatomy of epic and its language turns out not quite to fit the Miltonic case; and, rather ironically, the lack of fit appears most clearly in Lewis’s analysis of the post-Fall psychology of Milton’s figures.

  Moral Analysis

  The chapters in which Lewis analyses the moral discourse of Satan and the fallen angels—and indeed of the fallen Adam and Eve (13, 14, 18)—are among the most lively and entertaining in the Preface. In many ways, they mirror the exactly contemporary enterprise that Lewis was involved in, the composition of The Screwtape Letters. The analysis of the “diabolical” mind requires us to try to see virtue itself through the lens of falsehood, holiness through the lens of unqualified self-absorption; and Lewis clearly believed that such an analysis could be an important stimulus to proper moral self-awareness. Follow through the implications of routine selfishness and idle-ness and this is where you end, in the ingenious but wholly sterile perspective 25. Ibid., 38–39.

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  enjoyed (not the right word, o
f course) by the devil and his angels—and also in the vulgarity of emotion and utterance displayed by the fallen Adam and Eve (“The father of all the bright epigrammatic wasters and the mother of all the corrupting female novelists are now both before us”26). These chapters, like Screwtape, remain a useful exercise for anyone looking to identify more clearly their own habits of moral evasion and self-deception; but their place in the Preface is, as Lewis explains,27 nonetheless a matter of critical understanding. He is not, he says, “merely moralizing”; the aesthetics of Satan’s language and that of the other fallen angels is bound up with their moral tenor and function. If we are concerned with issues of rhetoric, we need to learn how to read these utterances. They are illustrations of what language can do faced with intractable reality, examples of how we may be persuaded not to see what is in front of our eyes. For dramatic purposes, the devils are locked into a frame of self-reference that cannot be changed (because only they can change it and they choose not to): how do you speak, how do you configure the world and persuade others, when you are irreparably out of touch with reality? That is the question Milton addresses, according to Lewis, in the demonic speeches of Book II of Paradise Lost.

  We noted earlier that a refusal to take rhetoric seriously in its metaphysical and moral context left us with a picture of human affairs as no more than a contest about power, detached from any idea of a substantive and common moral good. The chapters on the rhetoric of the devils can be read as a spelling-out of the same point: imagine a situation in which there is no sense of a set of moral goals independent of the will, and then imagine what could be said in such a situation. As in many other contexts,28 Lewis’s underlying concern is to show that the very idea of reasoned discourse takes for granted a “something” that is being talked about, and that without this there is only the clash of wills. For him, an inextricable aspect of the critical task itself is to expose what is going on when language becomes no more than such a contest of power. And to understand the general importance of knowing how rhetoric works—which is, as we have seen, a major motive in the Preface—is essential in conserving any notion of what linguistic integrity means; without a grasp of what it is for language to embody its purpose 26. Ibid., 128.

  27. Ibid., 104.

  28. Notably the unforgettable passage in Out of the Silent Planet where Ransom attempts to translate into the language of the planet Malacandra the aspirations of the Faustian scientist Weston, cast as they are in what turns out to be untranslatable cliché; and in the bloody and grotesque climax to That Hideous Strength, in which the power of coherent speech is taken away from the villains who have consistently abused and distorted language itself.

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  in its form, the form of any utterance becomes exactly what some kinds of postmodern theory insist it must be, a coding for power. And, lest we should be under any illusion about what this means, Lewis very characteristically insists that it means an infinity of boredom. In chapter 13 he notes how Satan is depicted as repeatedly “stating his own position”:29 any and every aspect of his environment has to become grist for the mill of his self-defence and self-reference, and, says Lewis, this monomania “is a necessity of the Satanic predicament,”30 the fundamental refusal of a reality not at the mercy of the will.

  Lewis admits the risk of “trespass[ing] beyond the bounds of purely literary criticism” in what he has to say about Satan;31 and most readers will probably feel that these chapters, though superbly engaging, are really a coda to the properly literary discussion of earlier pages. It is certainly true that Lewis is letting his hair down somewhat; but it is a mistake to think that he is stepping away from the main themes of the Preface. What this analysis has sought to draw out is the way in which a set of arguments about genre and style are, for Lewis, inseparably connected with a robustly moral view of what criticism itself is for. This needs to be stated carefully: as his own later Experiment in Criticism 32 was to argue at greater length, the point is not that criticism as such enables moral and aesthetic judgements to be made more decisively and authoritatively than “ordinary” reading but that the good critic will help you see more clearly what a writer is saying and intending—what the writer values, despises, wants to persuade you about.

  Criticism is thus always a moral science to the degree that writing, like other forms of human speech, is out to make a difference—to make the reader want something other than he or she might have wanted left to themselves.

  The critic shows you with greater clarity what is to be judged rather than prescribing the judgement to be made. Thus Lewis can, in effect, say in the Preface that he is not insisting on a moral condemnation of the language of the fallen angels on critical grounds; he is simply spelling out what the fallen angels are in fact saying. That he himself manifestly, eloquently, and entertainingly regards this as poisonous nonsense he does not attempt to conceal; but he does try to distinguish between the critical task of explaining what it is that Milton’s epic as a whole, and the dramatic speeches of the devils in particular, are as a matter of fact saying, and what a sensible person ought to think about what they are saying. The somewhat porous boundary between 29. Lewis, Preface, 102.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Ibid., 94.

  32. Cambridge University Press, 1961.

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  these two exercises is of course part of the appeal of the book, even for those who do not agree with Lewis about either question.

  But, to return for a moment to the issue touched on at the end of the previous section, the manner in which the fallen angels are depicted in Paradise Lost and the characterization of the post-Fall Adam and Eve highlight the central difficulty in Lewis’s attempt to persuade us to read Milton in a Virgilian way. The speeches of the fallen angels and humans represent exactly what Lewis’s Virgil opens up for us: they are about choice and loss, all the more poignantly, of course, because the speakers do not recognize the choices they are making or the losses they are incurring. As we have just seen, one of the functions of criticism is to clarify, at least for the reader, what those choices and losses amount to. But in the context of Paradise Lost, these are matters that arise in the wake of the Fall itself: the devils and Adam and Eve now have psyches like ours, we might say, inner lives about which we can tell a story. The fallen psyche is able to represent to itself its own position, its history, its location in regard to other egos; that is why it is able at worst comprehensively to ignore the pressure of reality and to create its own world. This is the nature of its inalienable freedom; or rather, this is what becomes of created freedom once it has discovered its capacity to talk about itself. (It is no accident that in Perelandra the equivalent to the biblical temptation of Eve involves the agent of evil presenting the Eve figure with a mirror.) That capacity is the source both of destructive falsehood and of healing repentance (and sanity-inducing irony); it is what makes both tragedy and comedy possible. The complete erosion of this would be just that reduction of language to contests of power that Lewis helps us identify—a purely diabolical language. The problem of Satan’s followers in chapter 14 of the Preface is, you might say, that they haven’t yet become diabolical enough for their own stability; they still resent and suffer because of the truth. It is a question Lewis leaves open whether there could be absolute and final deadness to truth, with not even a vestige of the pain that is both recognized and denied in the speeches of the fallen angels. But at the other end of the spectrum, something similar holds. We cannot imagine tragedy or comedy in the lives of unfallen angels or humans; and this is not so much a theological point as a “grammatical” one. The very idea of unfallen consciousness in this imaginative world is of an awareness so transparent to reality that it is not capable of being interested in itself. Remember that, as we saw in the first section of this essay, Lewis sees all forms of such interest—the whole business of being a self-aware “personality”—as ambig
uous at best. And the unavoidable conclusion of all this is that the most an epic about the Fall could do would be to dramatise its effects; it could not take the Fall itself as a narrative or dramatic subject without subverting the central moral

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  and spiritual point, that a particular sort of consciousness, bound up with language as we know it, is unimaginable in an unfallen state. The transition from one state to another cannot therefore be shown as a dramatic episode, a struggle involving what we now know as choices. The creation of what we now know as the choosing consciousness cannot be represented as an episode in the history of choosing consciousnesses.

  This is not a nit-picking point. It means that, whatever might be said in general about Christianity and tragedy, about truly indeterminate choice and the unavoidable loss of some goods in consequence, the story of the beginning of such drama cannot itself be a case of the drama. And this means in turn that any Virgilian elements in Milton’s epic must be at best decorative if they are located in a pre-Fall situation. The narrative of war in heaven, however it may be defended (as it is by the Archangel) as a translation into human terms of events otherwise beyond direct description, cannot work as Milton seems to want it to, and as Lewis wishes us to read it. If a great part of the force and intellectual energy of the Preface is bound up with its powerful and coherent mapping of the ethics of speech and the place of rhetoric, it becomes all the clearer that there is something eccentric about the Miltonic enterprise insofar as it seeks to present a narrative of the origins of evil.

  Conclusion

  But this is really to go beyond the scope of comment on what Lewis is directly doing as a critic. What this essay has attempted to suggest is that the central critical goal in the Preface is to defend and expound the significance of rhetoric; we need to know, if we are to read any text intelligently, what a writer’s purpose is, so that we can grasp why the writer makes this or that choice in register, image, rhythm, and so on, and this is already to bring us into the territory of rhetoric. The writer wants to make a difference; the choices he or she makes are shaped by what kind of difference they have in mind. And the clarification of the range of available options—the typology of epic narrative, for example—is closely connected with this central aim of explaining what rhetoric is and how it works. All this accounts for a great deal of Lewis’s argument. But the case of Paradise Lost proves more complex than at first appeared: it fits badly into the Virgilian and post-Virgilian world in which Lewis understandably wants to place it, because its subject matter is the process by which the “Virgilian” consciousness (of choice, loss, the cost of destiny in the actual fabric of particular human lives) comes into being. Lewis’s own fascination with the moral twists and turns of looking at one’s own psychology, a subject that he handles with consistent and