An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. LewisMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
"In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself," C.S. Lewis offers after 140 pages of the most wonderfully vexing postulations regarding that which is "literary" and "unliterary." This is definitely a "MBF" -- a "must-be-finished" book. I've read too many reviews that seem to have bristled at the beginning and either stopped reading closely or just stopped reading altogether. To be sure, Lewis's tone befits his Oxford professorship, but there are so many moments when his tongue is planted firmly (but elegantly) in his cheek, and his provocations are intended to prove perhaps his largest point: literature is to be received, not used.
"Using", he says, is "inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brights, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it." (88). Lewis advocates deep reading, a "resting" in the literature, rather than using it as an opportunity for "castle-building" as he calls it. A good book coexists in a rather symbiotic relationship with good reading. The work should work on us, rather than the other way around. He writes, "In good reading there ought to be 'no problem of belief' meaning we should be able to receive that with which we do not agree, thereby possibly entertaining a time and space otherwise when we might agree.
I think he loses people with his attempts to parse "literary" from "unliterary" in the first few chapters. But he offers nuance: "Let us be quite clear that the unliterary are unliterary not because they enjoy stories in these ways, but because they enjoy them in no other." (38) Here he refers to a desire for excitement and an arousal of certain emotions, which he is not condemning, as I understand it, but offering that it is only part of literary engagement.
Lewis has one moment that I felt was truly classist: he decides that grocers and gardeners will have read few books, but perhaps have seen more films (76). It is an unfortunate moment in a book that otherwise seems to have a fair amount of equanimity, versus a critique (in the negative sense). "The literary," he notes, "sometimes 'use' poetry instead of receiving it. They differ from the unliterary because they know very well what they are doing and are prepared to defend it." (100). But he also, supporting his "good reader" theory, offers that there are really, at the end of the day, no so-called "guilty pleasures": "If ... we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale." (108)
If you are a reader (whatever that means to you), it is worth spending some time with what Lewis had to say. It has made me re-evaluate why I have a numeric reading goal every year. I know part of that is there is SO MUCH I wish to read and I am extrinsically motivated when my time is not always my own. But Lewis has given me a lot to think about in terms of the reading experience. If he irks you at the beginning, read more slowly. Underline. Receive what he is actually saying. You may come away from it still irritated and thinking he's a pretentious prig, but you might find some value there too.
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2026 Reading Goals 30/60
#192030 Challenge: 1961
TYPTBR 15/18
