Title: An Experiment in Criticism

By C.S. Lewis

Nature: Nonfiction

Genre: Essay

Sub genre: - Criticism

Nationality: - British

Time Period: - 20th Century (First Half)

First  read by Dr. Rearick:  Spring 1981 / Fall 2006

Rated: A+

Location: - Dr. Rearick's Office

Used for: Introduction to Literature

Scripture which Comes to Mind:

"Study to show thyself approved or stand ashamed before the Lord."

I am reminded of the line from Shadowlands in which his friend, Christopher, parodies Lewis at one point as saying "let me put it in the plain bluff language which has made me such a favorite among plain bluff men."  The line shows Lewis' gift for clarity and perhaps the slight condescension some of his colleagues may have had towards him.

After saying all of this, I must remind the undergraduate reader that Lewis does not write in their style.  He is coming at you as a classically educated Cambridge Professor, an Englishman, and someone of the first part of this century.

Chapter One: "The Few and the Many"
Chapter Two: "False Characterizations"

Chapter Three: "How the Few and the Many Use Music and Pictures"

Lewis' observations here may sound snobbish at times, but that is more because of the assumptions held by many (which he addresses in the second chapter) of the moral superiority of being literary and the inferiority of being what some might call the rabble.  Lewis divides not works of literature but readers of literature into two camps:  the literary an the unliterary:  What he says about the literary is certainly true of myself, but it strikes me that this division could be more generally viewed as the "deeply involved" and the "casual dabbler."    There are fans of sports and then there are those who occasionally view a game.  The fans match the Literary in their involvement of the event while the unliterary sound like myself at a soccer game.  After the game, the fans o somewhere to analyze the event while I go off and enjoy a cup of coffee and forget the whole thing as quickly as I can.

Another point comes to mind: If he is right about the numbers of literary compared to those who are not, then the minority who get so much out of reading are teaching the majority who don't see the point.  English teachers sometimes talk with condescension about the mindset of the common student. But the problem is not a moral one but one of temperament.   Furthermore, this is not limited to only English.  Instead it seems to me a basic problem in all areas of education.  Coaches were once players who loved a game.  They teach a group of individuals in general physical education classes who don't care at all and have a hard time not judging non players as somehow morally inferior slackers.  I suspect that this tendency is true for almost every discipline.
 

The Literary (The Few)

Read a work more than once.

Prefer the act to most other activities.

Occasionally have the emotional equivalent of love.

Always at the tip of the mind and tong

The Unliterary (The Many)
• Read a work no more than once (what's the sense?).
• Prefer other activities vastly over reading.
• Never have the emotional equivalent beyond diversion.
• Never occupy other moments.

As if in response to our concerns that he is being snobbish (or as he described himself at an earlier time during  his life as "being a prig"¹), Lewis goes to great lengths to assert that being a literary reader does NOT make one morally superior.  He knows of many fine people spiritually and emotionally healthy and insightful who are not literary readers.  He also knows quite of few who while literary are also among "the ignorant, the caddish, the stunted, the warped and the truculent" (6).  Thus, the student should not feel as if being nonliterary in anyway makes him less of a person in Lewis' (or my) eyes.

Lewis also notes that membership in these two groups are not cast in stone.  Those among the many do become members of the few (part of his reason for writing the book is on this hope).  He also notes that there are those who were once literary readers who for one reason or another abandon the joy of reading.  Among them he lists. . .

Those who by their profession are expected to be lovers of literature but who because of economic necessity and overwork have lost it.²  He writes "for those I have nothing but sympathy.  Unfortunately ambition and combativeness can also produce it. And however it is produced it destroys appreciation" (7).

Those who use literature as Status Seekers.  They read not for the work but so that they can mingle with the intellectual elite.  They have no firm sense of the value of the works themselves but instead follow whatever fad the reading culture happens to be following:   They are inclined to be snobbish, looking down on those who read popular fiction or despise films from Hollywood not so much for the specific shortfalls of a particular film but on the general principle that nothing good comes from the popular sector.³

Those who seek to be Devotees of Culture.  Lewis has real sympathy for such people in that he knows they mean well.  Furthermore they are less self centered than either of the two above.  Such a reader is NOT a follower of fashion but instead is the kind of person who asks me for a list of especially worthwhile books.  These are the same kinds of people who visit art galleries, not because they have any joy in the works themselves but because they know that to be a well rounded person one needs to be exposed to such things.  The problem here is again that for such a person the work has no reality in itself but is instead a means to an end.

It is interesting that Lewis laments the fact that Literature has become, thanks to these devotees of culture, a "subject" to be studied.  Students are deluded into thinking that they have somehow gained some sort of credit for having made their way through the works of the canon.

Lewis' main point which is developed in full in the next chapter is that for the literary reader works of literature are there to take them outside and beyond themselves while being amerced in the actual pleasure of reading, for many other literature is worthy because of the way it can be used not for itself.

Notes

1.Lewis, Clive Staples. Surprised by Joy. 

2.Lewis comments that this is especially true in foreign universities.  He is being polite.  The fact is that in America scholars have had to face the credo "publish or perish," meaning that if they do not write a certain amount of original criticism they will not be tenured and can never achieve any sense of security in their contracts.  This has not led to better scholarship but instead to a plethora of literary writings which of both shallow in content and exclusive in vocabulary. 
 
 3.  I can recall being especially susceptible to this appeal as a high school.  My teacher tried to shame some of us into reading literature and then exalted those of us who actually did as part of the upper crust.  It was intoxicating, especially for someone who was neither popular nor athletic. 

4. Being an English professor I am often approached by well meaning people (including a young lady who was an excellent student at ENC and is now a medical doctor) for lists of great works.  They are often nonplused when I tell them find works which you enjoy reading and then read for the pleasure of work.  Many walk away thinking that I am not a serious scholar--and yet anyone who knows me knows that the joy in literature is my deepest passion.  (That same young lady was offended to the hilt when someone suggested she might enjoy a harlequin romance, but I believe if read in a certain way there may be harlequin romances which are worthy works of art.

Chapter Three: "How the Few and the Many Use Music and Pictures"

Building on the theme of the use of art rather than the experience of art, Lewis begins this chapter describing his pleasure in the illustrations he found as a child within books.  His point here is that he recognizes now that what he did as a child was appreciate those pictures--some of which are beautiful while others are artistically awkward--not for their own sake but because they assisted him to reach what he was looking for: a vision of what was described in the book.  "I attended very inadequately to what was before me.  It mattered intensely what the picture was `;of' hardly at all was the picture was" (15). If given a choice between seeing real animals talking and walking about or a glimpse of Valhalla over the pictures illustrating these things, Lewis says he would have not hesitated for the first.  He enjoyed that art as a means and not as works themselves. He points out that "the many" rarely comment on the composition of a painting.  If they do it is in the terms of Trompe-l'œil (trick of the eye) achieved by the artist. This is the fallacy of many readers.  The value of a thing is for what it represents not for being the thing itself (17). He mentions several popular paintings which fill this needs of the many (for a larger view click the actual painting.  Click the title to go to a page discussing the nature of the painint.

[The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner by Sir Edwin Landseer] [Monarch of the Glen by Sir Edwin Landseer] [Bubbles or A Child's World, by Sir John Everett Millais]

Lewis compares the treatment of art this way as being similar to the treatment of toys or religious icons.    He writes that a toy's or an icon's "artistic merits will not make it a better or or a better icon, They may make it a worse one.  For its purpose is, not to fix attention upon itself, but to stimulate and liberate certain activities in the child or the worshipper" (17).  Lewis emphasizes that this activity is not a degraded one.  It may lead to silly (or even depraved thought processes but it can also lead to exalted ones.  He notes Keats whose poem "Ode to a Grecian Urn" may be an example of the later.  But if you read the poem you will notice that there is little in it that actually centers of the urn itself.  Keats is using art not experiencing it (18).  According to Lewis this is contrary to the purpose of art.

The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender.  Look, Listen, Receive.  Get yourself out of the way.  (There is no good asking yourself first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you can not possible bind out). . .The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it. (19)

One of the terrible qualities of being in an environment in which every course has to be justified to exist (and the arts are always on the defense i this areia, is that we must in fact submit to the demand to demonstrate how "useful" art, music and literature are. Lewis in fact laments the need to even create classes in the arts since they are often built on the assertion that they are useful.

Notes:

1.   Trompe-l'œil, which can also be spelled without the hyphen in English,[1] (French: "trick the eye", iis an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three-dimensions, instead of actually being a two-dimensional painting ("Trompe-l'œil," Wikipedia. 23 Jan 2009).