2025 #7: The Discarded Image (Lewis)

 

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The subtitle of this book is misleading in some respects. If you are not already well-versed in literature (not just medieval and Renaissance lit, but Hellenic antiquity as well), you might find yourself frustrated by Lewis's consistent references to items he believes should make up a core knowledge. That said, there is so much to be gained here and one should avoid distraction by getting too bogged down in the individual references. To do so is to miss the proverbial forest for the trees. Ultimately Lewis is building a case for a medieval model, and his epilogue addresses the complex and layered meaning behind that word. Ultimately he proposes more of a model-process: "The new Model will not be set up without evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great." (222-23).

Somehow, Lewis manages to bring us from talk of angels and daemons (not always demons), to an investment in the exercises of the human soul, such as Intellectus and Ratio:

"We are enjoying intellectus when we 'just see' a self-evident truth. We are exercising ratio when we proceed step-by-step to prove a truth which is not self-evident. A cognitive life in which all truth can be simply 'seen' would be the life of an intelligentia, an angel." (157).

It cannot be forgotten that Lewis was a literary scholar, a theologian, a poet, and himself a writer of science-fiction and fantasy. One gets the sense when reading Lewis, particularly in this book, that none of these are actually distinctively parsed for him. His acknowledgement and study of tropes seems to play out in real time, with statements that could be one or more layers of his intellectual onion. He critiques how we consider the past--as a 'costume play.' "This superficial (and often inaccurate) characterisation of different ages," he writes, " helps far more than we suspect towards ur later and subtler discriminations between them." (183). Indeed, I often remind my students (and myself) that history is more about patterns and tropes than pigeonholing figures, events, and art into narratively defined styles and genres.

The sum of the micro-literature reviews, the subtle 'digression' about digressions, and the encyclopaedic tone (something Lewis manages as an art), is an over-arching treatise on our human condition as it relates to literature (and art as a whole):

"Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud..." (214)

This book could be read in multiple ways. Perhaps when I have more time for curiosity, unhampered by the obligations of a career, I will sit again with this book and look up every treasure that Lewis cites. I will see the details of the collective contributions toward the medieval Model, and I suspect I will be richer for it. Lewis is not without his detractors, notably Philip Pullman (an author whose books I love), and others who have critiqued some of his works as sexist, and depictions in Narnia, in particular, as racist. Not having read any of those books since I was a child, I'm not equipped to comment on that at present, but I keep it in mind as I read Lewis's non-fiction works.

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