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Book Review: An Experiment in Criticism
Feb. 18th, 2019 07:15 amSome critics write of those who constitute the literary ‘many’ as if they belonged to the many in every respect, and indeed to the rabble. They accuse them of illiteracy, barbarism, ‘crass’, ‘crude’ and ‘stock’ responses which (it is suggested) must make them clumsy and insensitive in all the relations of life and render them a permanent danger to civilization. It sometimes sounds as if the reading of ‘popular’ fiction involved moral turpitude.
The problem with writing about a C. S. Lewis book is that inevitably, and often sooner rather than later, I always feel like crying, “Oh, just read the book! He says it better than I could!”
In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis is writing in particular about literary criticism (although he notes that similar criteria might be useful in criticism for the other arts - music or painting). He argues that:
1. Lack of literary (musical, artistic, cinematic, etc) taste does not make someone a bad person and critics should stop acting as if it signifies a moral lack.
2. Books should be judged based on the kind of reading that they invite. Does a book reward close attention or repeated rereads? Or is it the sort of book that you read once, maybe to pass the time on a long train ride, and never revisit it thereafter because one reading has drained it to the dregs?
3. Trying to declare a book officially Bad, particularly if it’s a book that has been read and loved for centuries, is generally a losing proposition. In fact, he argues, “the very fact that people, or even any one person, can well and truly read, and love for a lifetime, a book we had thought bad, will raise a suspicion that it cannot really be as bad as we thought… The prima facie probability that anything which has ever been truly read and obstinately loved by any reader has some virtue in it is overwhelming.”
(Lewis wrote An Experiment in Criticism near the end of his life, after watching repeated waves of literary criticism declare certain authors Bad, only for the next wave to declare them Good again, or vice versa, and you can tell he’s gotten impatient with the whole thing.)
4. Realism, in particular, is often a poor criterion by which to judge literary works, but critics (at the time of Lewis’s writing; and I think to some extent today) love to use it as a yardstick.
No one I know of has indeed laid down in so many words that a fiction cannot be fit for adult and civilized reading unless it represents life as we have all found it to be, or probably shall find it to be, in experience. But some such assumption seems to lurk tacitly in the background of much criticism or literary discussion… We notice also that ‘truth to life’ is held to have a claim on literature that overrides all other considerations.
But in fact large swathes of world literature aren’t even trying to be realistic; you’re not going to get very far trying to criticize The Tempest (or P.G. Wodehouse, for that matter) by the standards of strict realism. What we should ask, Lewis argues, is “not that all books should be realistic in content, but that every book should have as much of this realism as it pretends to have.”
He’s taking aim here not particularly at wish-fulfillment fluff (which most people know on some level is wish-fulfillment) but at The Tragic Point of View: “It seems to me undeniable, that tragedy, taken as a philosophy of life, is the most obstinate and best camouflaged of all wish-fulfillments, just because its pretensions are so apparently realistic,” he comments. “Next to a world in which there are no sorrows we should like one where sorrows were always significant and sublime.”
It should be noted that he’s not criticizing literary works of tragedy for existing, but the point of view that some readers and critics - and grimdark fantasy authors (for isn’t grimdark a variety of tragedy, in the Titus Andronicus tradition) extrapolate from tragedy when they argue that tragedy is inherently realistic, or at least more realistic than comedy, when really both are stylized responses to the world.
5. Why do we read? Or rather, why do the literary few read different than the literary “many” - who don’t read at all, or read a book once and then toss it aside? “The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being,” Lewis writes. “...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.”
The problem with writing about a C. S. Lewis book is that inevitably, and often sooner rather than later, I always feel like crying, “Oh, just read the book! He says it better than I could!”
In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis is writing in particular about literary criticism (although he notes that similar criteria might be useful in criticism for the other arts - music or painting). He argues that:
1. Lack of literary (musical, artistic, cinematic, etc) taste does not make someone a bad person and critics should stop acting as if it signifies a moral lack.
2. Books should be judged based on the kind of reading that they invite. Does a book reward close attention or repeated rereads? Or is it the sort of book that you read once, maybe to pass the time on a long train ride, and never revisit it thereafter because one reading has drained it to the dregs?
3. Trying to declare a book officially Bad, particularly if it’s a book that has been read and loved for centuries, is generally a losing proposition. In fact, he argues, “the very fact that people, or even any one person, can well and truly read, and love for a lifetime, a book we had thought bad, will raise a suspicion that it cannot really be as bad as we thought… The prima facie probability that anything which has ever been truly read and obstinately loved by any reader has some virtue in it is overwhelming.”
(Lewis wrote An Experiment in Criticism near the end of his life, after watching repeated waves of literary criticism declare certain authors Bad, only for the next wave to declare them Good again, or vice versa, and you can tell he’s gotten impatient with the whole thing.)
4. Realism, in particular, is often a poor criterion by which to judge literary works, but critics (at the time of Lewis’s writing; and I think to some extent today) love to use it as a yardstick.
No one I know of has indeed laid down in so many words that a fiction cannot be fit for adult and civilized reading unless it represents life as we have all found it to be, or probably shall find it to be, in experience. But some such assumption seems to lurk tacitly in the background of much criticism or literary discussion… We notice also that ‘truth to life’ is held to have a claim on literature that overrides all other considerations.
But in fact large swathes of world literature aren’t even trying to be realistic; you’re not going to get very far trying to criticize The Tempest (or P.G. Wodehouse, for that matter) by the standards of strict realism. What we should ask, Lewis argues, is “not that all books should be realistic in content, but that every book should have as much of this realism as it pretends to have.”
He’s taking aim here not particularly at wish-fulfillment fluff (which most people know on some level is wish-fulfillment) but at The Tragic Point of View: “It seems to me undeniable, that tragedy, taken as a philosophy of life, is the most obstinate and best camouflaged of all wish-fulfillments, just because its pretensions are so apparently realistic,” he comments. “Next to a world in which there are no sorrows we should like one where sorrows were always significant and sublime.”
It should be noted that he’s not criticizing literary works of tragedy for existing, but the point of view that some readers and critics - and grimdark fantasy authors (for isn’t grimdark a variety of tragedy, in the Titus Andronicus tradition) extrapolate from tragedy when they argue that tragedy is inherently realistic, or at least more realistic than comedy, when really both are stylized responses to the world.
5. Why do we read? Or rather, why do the literary few read different than the literary “many” - who don’t read at all, or read a book once and then toss it aside? “The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being,” Lewis writes. “...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.”
