C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner
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wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which he that
loses his soul shall find it.3
At present we tend to think of the soul as somehow ‘inside’ the
body. But the glorified body of the resurrection as I conceive
it—the sensuous life raised from death—will be inside the soul.
As God is not in space but space is in God.4
3. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 90.
4. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 121.
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The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if
you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in
the house with many mansions.
Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you
alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch
as a glove is made for a hand.5
For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention
that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our atten-
tion; it is ourselves. For each of us the Baptist’s words are true:
“He must increase and I decrease.” He will be infinitely merciful
to our repeated failures; I know no promise that He will accept
a deliberate compromise. For He has, in the last resort, nothing
to give us but Himself; and He can give that only insofar as our
self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls.6
We notice here a strong iconoclastic tendency, at least with regard to conventional ideas about the soul. It is not inside our bodies; our bodies are inside it. We cannot call it our own; it belongs to God and only flourishes when this is freely acknowledged. Each human soul is unique, though none is more valuable than another.
Predictably there is much congruence between Lewis’s account and
the biblical account of the soul. What they share is a deep indifference to contemporary ideas of the self as somehow all-important. The soul, for Lewis and for the biblical writers I’ve quoted, is some deep organizing and animating principle in a human being, breathed into it (on a Christian understanding) by God. It gives life, not just in the sense of a mere capacity for experiencing the world, but in the sense of a capacity for experiencing it fruitfully or, as we might say, creatively.
Since the rise of Modernism, though, it might be said we’ve become intolerant of talk of the word “soul,” as indeed of the word “heart”: we are all supposed to prefer the Higgs boson. This is apparent from current interpretations of words that begin with the prefix psyche, like “psychology”
or “psychoanalysis.” When I ask students for a definition of either of these they commonly say that they are to do with the mind. The mind notice, not the soul. The mind unseats the soul in a despiritualizing age. And, it might 5. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 135.
6. Lewis, “A Slip of the Tongue,” 123–24.
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further be said, the ego, an individual’s sense of themselves, rather than the soul, is likely to become the chief object of our spiritual attentions.
Lewis was wary about psychoanalysis all his life, though less so later.
One reason for that was, no doubt, defensive, as we shall see. But another may have been that he feared the displacement of the soul—the means by which the individual is most intimately connected to God—by the narrowly self-interested ego.
However, what I want to talk about today is the presence in Lewis of something deeper than his conscious awareness of himself, deeper than his ego, which seems persistently to have frustrated his attempts to recognize the language of his soul. Since to have one’s soul occluded by one’s self or ego is a common predicament, the struggle in Lewis to listen to his soul is one of the characteristics of his work that modern readers are likely to find appealing. But what is this thing intermediate between the ego and the soul that I’m talking about? I will call it the grammar of emotion.
The Grammar of Emotion
Grammar is one of the most familiar examples of a process that operates unconsciously, but that manifests itself throughout our conscious lives. It organizes our entire experience of speaking, reading, and otherwise interpreting language. No fully adequate grammar has been produced for any living language, since grammar is constantly evolving and showing new ca-pabilities that elude attempts to formulate its “rules.” (It seems likely that the very concept of a rule stands to the living actuality of grammar as scientific enquiry stands to faith: there is a basic incompatibility between the thing investigated and the mode of investigation, which ensures that the investigation cannot find what it seeks.7 Such failures could be enlightening if they resulted in a new investigative procedure, instead merely of more rigorous applications of the old one.) This phenomenon of a process that is unconscious, all-subsuming within the sphere of its operation, definite enough to invite description, but so elusive that it defies full analysis obviously has 7. Bruce Hood, Professor of Developmental Psychology at Bristol University, has produced research to show that “superstition is hardwired into our brains” (“We Are Born to Believe in God,” Sunday Times, 6 September 2009, 9). The terms in which this claim is made reveal, I think, a radical misunderstanding of the grounds and motives of religious belief. It may be a form of superstition to find the metaphor of “hardwir-ing” here reassuring and to ignore the distinction between what is illogical and what is supra-logical. To the extent that the materialistic presuppositions of the article are accepted, the “discovery” serves (and perhaps aims) to exalt science at the expense of religion.
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resonances in other dimensions of our experience. Societies might be said to have grammars: they are organized; there are likely to be principles informing the organization; but formulating the principles might be tricky.
Even somewhat more restricted phenomena, like institutions (academic, governmental, or religious, say) exhibit certain consistencies in the way they work which implies the existence of some underlying system of organizing principles. Lacan famously said (or is said to have said) that the unconscious is structured like a language.8 And, if it is, then it too has a grammar, at once evident and latent, describable and eluding final description. In this essay I want to look at something neither as comprehensive as the unconscious, nor as restricted in the sphere of its operation as a language, but nonetheless very diffuse and wide-ranging, like the pull of moon on tide.
To talk of the grammar of emotion is to imply that beneath emotions themselves (whatever they might be understood to be) is something organizing them, something that is not itself an emotion quite, but that determines the character of what we apprehend as our emotions. Freud’s cumbrous but heavily suggestive phrase (as translated by Strachey) is “quotas of energy in some unimaginable substratum.”9 Understood this way, emotions are the form in which our psychic energies make themselves manifest to us.
Religious belief, or metaphysical outlook, is prominent among the
things that make each person both like and unlike any other. Many Buddhists cultivate a habit of expecting to encounter the adversities that in our society we may feel ourselves encouraged to treat as surprising accidents.
Christianity has its different way of trying to reconcile us to the experience of pain. Both acknowledge that, when it comes, even if we have done everything possible to eliminate the more obviously neurotic elements in our responses, we may still experience anguish. Christ wept for Lazarus and for Jerusalem and in the Garden of Gethsemane sweated blood.10 But whether anguish is anticipated or arrives unexpectedly, accepting it remains hard. The gloss I am prompted to put on this i
s a further revelation of my own ideological perspective: I feel we are creatures who carry into a post-8. What Lacan actually said was in French; but in English the nearest we get in the Écrits to this familiar catchphrase is, “This is precisely why the unconscious, which tells the truth about truth, is structured like a language” ( Écrits, 737). Lacan was fond of the trope of structuring, probably borrowed in the first place from linguistics. He writes that a “symptom is structured like a language” (ibid., 223) and that a “personality is structured like a symptom.” That the phrase, in English, has acquired a life of its own is owing to the suggestiveness of the notion that the unconscious may have within it something analogous to the thing that structures a language. And that something is a grammar.
9. Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life.”
10. John 11:35; Luke 19:41; Luke 22:44.
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lapsarian world expectations and desires that are immutably pre-lapsarian.
This is not to say (as Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett might construe me as saying) that I believe in the historicity of the Fall. Rather, I agree with Coleridge that:
A fall of some sort or other . . . is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery
itself is too profound for human insight. . . .11
I affirm this belief in order to expose candidly how emotions are
conditioned by metaphysical beliefs that we hold more or less consciously.
What I am more interested in here, however, operates at a lower and less easily accessible level in the infrastructure of our emotions. I have indicated how an emotion might be affected by a belief; but how might a belief be affected by a still deeper emotion?
William Empson once remarked, with a flourish of his coat, but truly nonetheless, that he thought “a profound enough criticism could extract an entire cultural history from a simple lyric”;12 similarly, a good enough psychotherapist might discern within the expression of an unemphatic, ostensibly trivial emotion, the lineaments of a person’s sensibility: the outline of their whole manner of experiencing the world.
Unappeasably, in an early poem, Philip Larkin intones:
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.13
Beneath the characteristically sombre intonation, I would like to suggest, is an undertone of expectation. Larkin expects defeat, disappointment and terminal death (unlike Blake, for whom death was a terminus, but not terminal). It is this expectation that organizes the style of his experience and gives to his poetic style its distinctive dour plangency and pathos. More generally, it might be said that such broad metaphysical expectations (“age, and then the only end of age”14) determine the key into which more conscious emotions are unknowingly transposed.
At the very start of his posthumous fiction, The Double Tongue, William Golding tries bearing witness to the possibility of experience before 11. Coleridge, Table Talk of 1 May 1830 ( Major Works, 592–93). Fifteen years earlier, when he was forty-two, Coleridge had insisted on his belief in “a Fall in some sense, as a fact . . . the reality of which is attested by experience and conscience” (letter to Wordsworth, 30 May 1815).
12. Empson, “The Verbal Analysis,” in Argufying, ed. Haffenden, 107.
13. Larkin, “Wants,” in Philip Larkin, ed. Thwaite, 42.
14. Larkin, “Dockery and Son,” 152–53.
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the consciousness (or even formation) of self. He knows he is flouting the assumption that selves are innate—that simply because we cannot quite express memories before we had them, we must have always had them:
Blazing light and warmth, undifferentiated and experiencing
themselves. There! I’ve done it! The best I can, that is. Memory.
A memory before memory? But there was no time, not even
implied. So how could it be before or after, seeing that it was
unlike anything else, separate, distinct, a one-off. No words, no
time, not even I, ego, since as I tried to say, the warmth and the blazing light was experiencing itself, if you see what I mean. Of
course you do!15
The tone of that “Of course you do!” is hard to catch. Mocking? Because he knows that of course we don’t see. Or companionable? Because he knows that we all have such experience, however much the conditions of evolving a distinct and self-conscious self—which include the use of language—make such experience hard to communicate, even to contemplate.
For language, like consciousness, imposes categories of perception, such as time: “A memory before memory? But there was no time, not even implied.
So how could it be before or after.” The attempt to express one’s own experience implies a consciousness of the distinction between perceiver and perceived. Hence Golding’s attempt to avoid saying, “I remember blazing light and warmth.” Such statements imply the imposition of a grammar: a system of organizing assumptions which possibly do not exert their full organizing force in the very earliest stages of life—or indeed in some of the states we experience at later stages: sleep, daydreaming, sexual transport, drunkenness, loving absorption in another’s joy, or religious contemplation. Many poets are profoundly interested in the imaginative recovery of this state—I am thinking of Keats writing about minnows as if he were one, or Pound evok-ing the aftermath of the Trojan War in the mind of a waking fallen soldier.
Buddhist contemplation, or Christian prayer, constantly aspire to a state in which consciousness is retained, but self-consciousness escaped, as if it were the chrysalis of being, not the final form of it. To me, the Buddhist notion as well as (obviously) the Christian one is fully congruent with the belief that the conditions under which we normally live our lives are post-lapsarian.
We treat as normal modes of being that preclude normality. We take our fill of the food that sustains us only enough to dream of health.
Among psychoanalysts, D. W. Winnicott is perhaps especially notable for his attempts to imagine experience before selfhood:
15. Golding, The Double Tongue, 3.
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For the baby there comes first a unity that includes the mother.
If all goes well, the baby comes to perceive the mother and all
other objects and to see these as not-me. [The mother] is first
a delusion which the baby has to be able to disallow, and there
needs to be substituted the uncomfortable I AM unit which in-
volves the loss of the merged-in original unit, which is safe. The baby’s ego [its developing sense of itself as a being distinct from the maternal care it depends on] is strong if there is the mother’s ego support to make it strong; else it is feeble.16
It is perhaps customary now to enter objections to Winnicott’s claims as unsubstantiated: entrancing fictions about a fantasy.17 Well . . . a psychoanalytic writer capable of entrancing is perhaps not to be sniffed at; and attempts to practise entrancement do at least show a capacity for recognizing the importance in human experience of being entranced. While scientists pine for forms of proof that babies can’t supply, poets (and those, like Winnicott, who value poets) will stand by forms of intuition that they can’t ignore.
Winnicott here provides a gloss on the experience of observing babies that stimulates what he takes to be the memory of being one. And in this he is at one with a poetic forerunner of all psychoanalysis. In 1798 Wordsworth wrote:
Blest the infant babe—
For with my best conjectures I would trace
The progress of our being—blest the babe
Nursed in his mother’s arms, the babe who sleeps
Upon his mother’s breast, who, when his soul
Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul
Doth gather passion from his mother’s eye.
&nbs
p; Such feelings pass into his torpid life
Like an awakening breeze, and hence his mind,
Even in the first trial of its powers,
Is prompt and watchful, eager to combine
In one appearance all the elements
And parts of the same object, else detached
And loth to coalesce.18
Perception, as adults understand it, is learned. The aptitude for learning it may be innate, but the capacity for engaging in it is not. According 16. Winnicott, “Sum, I Am” in Home is Where We Start From, 62–63.
17. See, e.g., Leopoldo Fulgencio, “Winnicott’s Rejection of the Basic Concepts of Freud’s Metapsychology,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Volume 88 (2007), 443–61.
18. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 267–94.
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to Wordsworth, the (in this example, male) baby’s intuitive recognition of
“manifest kindred” with his mother is what stimulates the attempt to learn perception. He is “eager to combine / In one appearance all the elements /
And parts of the same object, else detached / And loth to coalesce.” Before this voluntary effort is made, the Mother does not exist, but, rather a loose congeries of sensory data, which only after it “combine / In one appearance.”
By imagining the child in this state of incipient perceptiveness, Wordsworth and Winnicott coax us back into the quiddities of experience prior to the development of the categories that supply its adult grammar. By imagining the formation of a sense of self in this way, they enable us to apprehend more vividly the ease with which the process might be disrupted and the sense of self damaged, or damagingly inflected. Selfhood might be imagined as the bedrock of a person’s grammatical organization. The character of the self determines, or powerfully conditions, the character of anything else that is organized on the basis of it.
Lewis and Grief
Lewis thought he could write better than he could speak. For some it is writing that offers the best hope of assuaging the sense—familiar to us all, presumably—of not having adequately expressed ourselves. For some such people, writing becomes, if not a fetish exactly, then an activity that comes to be relied upon for the relief it is expected to afford: “ink is the great cure for all human ills.”19 Andrew Cuneo, formerly a literary critic and now a priest, observes: “How often Lewis notes in his letters that writing is the cure for all ills.”20 One such ill, however, is that of compulsive introspection.