A Review Essay of C. S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism

 

Angela Parchen

Project of Theology

Professor McGrath

July 12, 2003

 

There is an art to every science, and a science to every art.  Although deeper understanding of the ‘rules’ of an art leads to greater appreciation for it, an overemphasis on the rules may have adverse effects and give way to hyper-criticism and rash condemnation.  In nearly every subject, criticism based on rules has become increasingly pedantic, and pedantic criticism the rule.  However, as one of the rules for the art of photography is ‘to break the rules,’ perhaps a need for a similar balance should be taken into account for literature.  This appears to be C. S. Lewis’ concern in An Experiment in Criticism, primarily because criticism is often so extreme on one side or the other, and these judgments tend to reverse from one generation to the next.  Lewis is of the opinion that “such a surfeit of [evaluative] criticism is so dangerous that it demands immediate treatment.”[1]

            For the majority of his book, Lewis discusses a theory of literary criticism that he hopes will remedy the shifting condemnations of present judgments.  He recommends that rather than judging a literary work itself, a critic should analyze both the reader and how the piece is read.  Instead of judging a work as first, ‘beyond the pale’ or not, and second, ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ he proposes first judging the reader as ‘literary’ or ‘unliterary,’ and then judging the reading as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’  As a result, a particular piece of literature can be judged with a broader scope of genre and time.

            Lewis differentiates between literary and unliterary people with four standards.  First, unliterary people do not re-read literature; once read, “it [is] for them dead, like a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, or yesterday’s paper.”[2]  Furthermore, reading is not generally an activity they choose to do, but a last resort or a sleep-inducement.  Third, while a great work may change literary people to be what they were not, unliterary people will remain unchanged.  And finally, because literary people put so much stock in reading, it is likely to

be at the forefront of their minds and, consequently, their conversations.  The unliterary, on the other hand, are less likely to accuse the literary “of liking the wrong books, but of making such a fuss about any books at all.”[3] 

            After determining a reader as literary or unliterary, in Lewis’ experiment the critic must make the more difficult judgment of the type of reading that has taken place.  “The necessary condition of all good reading is ‘to get ourselves out of the way.’”[4]  Literature must be received rather than used, and this can happen only with an open mind.  As a result, the literary person will read it as the author wrote it, and not only that, the recipient will hear it as such.  The aural qualities of literature make themselves known in the act of reading.  All these are the criteria of Lewis’ literary criticism, with the exception of myths and poetry, for which he makes reservations we will not be exploring in this paper. 

            As a result, the process of criticism would be much longer, and much more difficult.  One benefit of his theory is the stress of the concrete—that is, the act of reading.  Conversely, focusing on this takes the critics out of the realm of the known, namely the words on the page, and places them in the ‘unknowable’ territory of reading styles.  Another positive aspect is the stability gained from the analysis of many readers over any length of time.  While this prevents good literature from becoming “a chronological phenomenon,”[5] the objection that people may read the same book in many different ways shows the arduous task before a critic who adheres to this theory. 

            Perhaps the greatest advantage to Lewis’ theory is also its greatest difficulty: critical condemnation.  Because Lewis’ approach needs only some literary person to achieve a good reading of a book in order for it to be classified amongst good literature, it is far less likely to denounce rashly.  By comparison, modern criticism shows “the use of the guillotine becomes an addiction.”[6]  Hyper-selectivity seems a better quality for the elite critic than approval.  “A negative proposition is harder to establish than a positive.  One glance may enable us to say there is a spider in the room; we should need a spring-cleaning (at least) before we could say with certainty that there wasn’t.”[7]

            In order to see how Lewis’ method of criticism might be played out from a theological standpoint, we must first understand why literary criticism is used in theology and how it is then used.  In the Patristic Period, the early church fathers used literary criticism to interpret and understand Scriptures, but not as we do now.  Instead of critiquing biblical literature by the standards at the time of its inscription, they would compare it to works of their own day.  However, “the positive aspect of the Fathers’ approach is that they recognized the literary qualities of the biblical stories, an awareness that gradually diminished as the content of the Scriptures was abstracted into various theological systems.”[8]  It was not until the eighteenth century that Robert Lowth, an English professor at Oxford, was the catalyst of a re-adoption of literary criticism as a part of biblical studies, particularly that of Hebrew poetry.[9]  Although there has been a variety of forms of biblical literary criticism, there are three primary focal points that scholars have used since its reappearance in theology nearly two centuries ago: the author, the text, or the reader.  These are often entwined, but because Lewis’ theory relies heavily on the reader, we will take a closer look at that method. 

Before doing this, however, Lewis’ views on the Bible as literature should be clarified.  He concedes that on one hand, “those who talk of reading the Bible ‘as literature’ sometimes mean, I think, reading it without attending to the main thing it is about...That seems to me to be nonsense.”[10]  In this, and in his critical theory, we see the importance he places on content.  In An Experiment in Criticism, he compares a book to a lens.  You cannot judge a lens by simply looking at it; “unless you are really trying to look through the lens you cannot discover whether it is good or bad.”[11]  On the same token, critics can do no more than analyze literary style in the Bible until they take the time to understand also what it has to say.

It is clear, however, that Lewis does not view the Bible as above or beyond the scope of literary criticism.  His first quote from Reflections on the Psalms is a preamble to his understanding that “there is a saner sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.”[12]  At this point the door is opened for us to apply his theory of criticism to the Bible and compare it with the reader-focused technique of literary criticism sometimes practiced today.

When the reader is the focal point of literary criticism of the Bible, a problem arises that does not arise in other books.  Because the Bible is also the primary literary source of answers to moral and religious questions for Christians, the different ways of reading experienced by individual readers and the resulting interpretations lead to moral and religious controversy—not simply literary disagreement.  The distinction between literary criticism of the Bible and another piece of literature is that the line between deeper literary understanding and theological interpretations can be a difficult one to draw.  Nevertheless, when kept within a reasonable perspective it can be balanced.  E. V. McKnight explains this:

The relationship between reader and subject (acting upon the text) and the reader as object (being acted upon by the text), however, is not seen as an opposition but as two sides of the same coin.  It is only as the reader is subject of text and language that the reader becomes object.  It is as the reader becomes object that the fullness of the reader’s needs and desires as subject are met.[13]

Therefore, keeping in mind the reality that the act of reading consists of the meaning of the book acting on the reader and the reader’s perception acting on the book, the reader-centered theory leads us to insights other theories cannot offer.

            Using Lewis’ theory, the first step in biblical literary criticism is to find literary people who are reading the Bible.  Unlike some theorists who limit the reader to the “superreader,” “informed reader,” or “ideal reader” (meaning the completely competent reader),[14] Lewis’ theory requires the reader to truly appreciate literature.  On one side, this brings in a group who may not be among the Christian faithful, which could contradict the importance of “looking through the lens.”  And yet Lewis asserts that

in good reading there ought to be no ‘problem of belief’…A true lover of literature should be in one way like an honest examiner, who is prepared to give the highest marks to the telling, felicitous and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates.[15]

            So, upon finding a group of literary people who have read the Bible, the critic’s next step is to judge their reading of it.  Have they received it, or have they used it?  In theological terms we might ask if their reading was exegetical or eisegetical.  Such a question would certainly be useful in the practiced method of reader-centered criticism because the most frequent employers of this style of criticism are ‘ideological readers,’ namely liberation and feminist theologians.  When reading with a discriminating eye in search of insights about liberating the oppressed or empowering women, there is the concern that “many utilize reader-response theory for their theoretical justification.”[16]  A critic using Lewis’ theory, however, could see that any narrow reading of that description would not make the cut.

            Some of Lewis’ other criteria can be grouped together as the way the reader ‘uses’ the words.  Although a reader should not use the literature itself, she cannot help using the words.  “Every piece of literature is a sequence of words; and sounds (or their graphic equivalent) are words precisely because they carry the mind beyond themselves.”[17]  As stated, the reader must make full use of the words and appreciate their aural quality.  Yet in reading the Bible, the fact that very few of even the literary readers are reading it in its original languages causes unanticipated complications.  Certainly not all is lost in translation, but much of the aural quality is, and even in the same language no two words are exact equivalents.  While this is possibly a weakness of both Lewis’ theory and the reader-focused theory in practice, it is also a strength.  The critique is now focused on the translation rather than the original text, but because that is precisely the work that is being read by the majority of modern Bible readers, it needs the attention of criticism as well.  In addition, Lewis points out that one of the primary literary devices in the Bible, parallelism, crosses language barriers: “It is…either a wonderful piece of luck or a wise provision of God’s, that poetry which was to be turned into all languages should have as its chief formal characteristic one that does not disappear (as mere metre does) in translation.”[18]

            Finally, the ultimate critique of a reading is to determine if the reader was taken beyond him or herself.  Clearly, a variety of literary and unliterary readers of the Bible would vouch for the truth of this criterion.  The objection may be raised, however, that many of these readers are seeking personal guidance or other self-focused ends.  Lewis makes the exception that one seeking “to improve himself, to develop his potentialities, to become a more complete man”[19] may indeed be a literary person.  Furthermore, the act of looking through the eyes of someone else, in fact the eyes of many different authors and characters, to gain greater understanding could not better fit Lewis’ experience: “in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”[20]

            And lastly, we look at the critic himself.  Obviously in Lewis’ theory the critic loses much of the power he once had, but for good reason.  As no critic is perfect, the open-mindedness Lewis advises prevents the ease of sliding from constructive criticism to nitpicking and hairsplitting.  From a theological perspective, considering Lewis’ caution would do us an immense favor.  When we as ‘critics’ rashly judge and dismantle other theological views, we are often left with consequences similar to hasty, narrow-minded literary criticisms.  Ideas become fashionable then obsolete, orthodox then unspiritual.  Increased openness to a variety of thoughts and decreased assurance of our own accuracy could aid our search for Truth and minimize our fluctuation along the way.  A critic “is, in a word, to have the character which MacDonald attributed to God, and Chesterton, following him, to the critic; that of being ‘easy to please, but hard to satisfy.’”[21]

 

Sources

Lewis, C. S.  An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

Lewis, C. S.  Reflections on the Psalms.  London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1958.

Longman, Tremper III.  Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation.  Grand Rapids:

 

Zondervan Publishing House, 1987.