An Experiment in Criticism

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

An Experiment in Criticism proposes a fundamental inversion of the usual critical procedure. Rather than judging readers by the books they favour, Lewis suggests that books ought to be judged by the quality of reading they permit. A 'good book' is thus defined as one that can only be engaged with in a literary mode, whilst a 'bad book' is one that can be adequately consumed in an unliterary mode. Literature, in this view, exists solely in the transient experience of reading, with critical work serving to multiply, prolong, and safeguard experiences of good reading.

Lewis distinguishes between 'The Few' and 'The Many', not by education, cultural ambition, or moral superiority, but by observable behaviours. The Few are characterised by their habit of rereading works multiple times over a lifetime, their hunger for leisure and silence to read, the transformative impact a great first read has upon them, and the permanent presence of literary scenes and characters in their consciousness. Lewis also clarifies that The Few are not simply the opposite of the rabble, nor are they a fixed category, literary professionals, status-seekers, devotees of culture, or 'Literary Puritans'.

The foundational distinction in Lewis's argument lies between 'using' and 'receiving' a work of art. To use a work is to treat it as a vehicle for one's own pre-existing subjectivity, projecting oneself onto it. To receive it, conversely, is to lay aside one's subjectivity, attend carefully to what is actually present, and allow the work to act upon the reader. This act of surrender is the primary demand any work of art makes. The 'bad-art test' illustrates this: a bad picture, when studied intently, reveals its poverty, as its enjoyment stems from ideas suggested by the art, not the art itself. The Goethe epigram, "Zum Eckel find' ich immer nur mich" ('I always find only myself, to my disgust'), encapsulates the limitation of using, which keeps one confined within oneself, unlike receiving, which allows an encounter with what the art has added to the world. A fuller treatment of this distinction may be found at Using and Receiving.

Lewis identifies five behavioural markers of the unliterary reader: they read only narrative, exclusively by eye without an ear for rhythm, are unconscious of style or prefer bad writing, enjoy strip stories and near-wordless films, and demand swift-moving narrative. Their common focus is the 'Event' – what happened – often preferring cliché as a hieroglyph for feeling, requiring minimal Attention. Lewis concedes that the three types of Event (exciting, mystery, vicarious participation) are not inherently wrong, but the unliterary reader's attention to them is shallow. In contrast, Lewis's restricted sense of 'myth' describes an extra-literary category with characteristics such as value independent of any particular telling, inevitability rather than suspense, minimal human sympathy, the fantastic, gravity, and a numinous quality. The myth-lover is considered 'extra-literary' rather than unliterary, as whilst both attend minimally to words and concentrate on Event, the myth-lover engages with something genuinely valuable.

Lewis examines three psychological senses of 'fantasy': morbid castle-building (life-impairing waking dream), normal egoistic castle-building (self as hero, vicarious triumphs), and normal disinterested castle-building (attention outward to an imagined world). A key insight is that egoistic castle-builders often detest literary fantasy because the fantastic signals that the story cannot happen to them in the real world, thus frustrating their purpose of egoistic projection. The more a man's reading is a form of egoistic castle-building, the more he will demand superficial realism and dislike the fantastic. Lewis also distinguishes two forms of 'realism' in literary criticism: 'realism of presentation', which is the art of making something palpable through sharply observed detail, independent of overall probability; and 'realism of content', concerning whether the situation depicted is probable or 'true to life'. The modern mistake, Lewis argues, is to demand realism of content from all fiction, a habit that condemns much great pre-novelistic literature. The proper demand is that a book should have as much realism as it pretends to have. In stories of the exceptional, 'hypothetical probability' means the situation is the postulate, and the realistic element is the natural behaviour within it. All reading is, in a sense, an escape from immediate actuality; the question is what one escapes to. The pejorative 'escapism' refers to chronic escape into wrong things, or as a substitute for appropriate action.

Even literary readers can confuse art with life. Lewis identifies a particularly insidious form of this in extracting a 'philosophy of life' from tragedy, arguing that real sorrow follows no aesthetic pattern. Such an approach is a flagrant instance of 'using' instead of 'receiving'. A great literary work both means (Logos – something said) and is (Poiema – something made). Treating it chiefly as a vehicle for a 'philosophy of life' neglects its quality as a made object. A chief achievement of good fiction is the 'triumphant adjustment of two different kinds of order': the chronological order of events and the design-order in which scenes relate to each other like masses in a picture. This concept is further detailed at Logos and Poiema.

Lewis concludes by outlining the advantages of judging books by how they are read, primarily that this approach fixes critical attention on the act of reading itself, thereby safeguarding the experience of literature.