c.s. lewis' ethic of reading

In Experiment in Criticism, Lewis sets out a system for judging and interpreting literature based upon how real-world readers “use” or “receive” it. Books that compel readers to “conceive, imagine, and feel as the words invite” are true works of art; they “guide [readers] into every cranny of a character’s mind or make palpable and individual” the worlds that they inhabit. Books that encourage readers to “use” the works for “castle building” and “assistance to [their] own activities” belong to “the many” and are not art (88). Rather, they form a spectrum of common diversions ranging from the harmless to the less-than-innocent. These kinds of works encourage readers to indulge in fantasies of various types, the most damnable of which Lewis calls “egoistic castle-building,” in which “the day-dreamer himself is always the hero. . . . It is he who makes the witty retorts, captivates the beautiful women, owns the ocean-going yacht, or is acclaimed as the greatest living poet” (52).

Lewis’ readers may notice that the system he sets out is in many ways a moral one. The very word “egoistic,” by which he describes the worst kind of reading, is a powerful moral judgment, especially from a Christian like Lewis, whose vision of hell in The Screwtape Letters is one in which the soul is so consumed with itself that the self becomes utterly lost forever. Indeed, the readers who merit Lewis’ most damning verdict are those who read stories about “the high life” for the vicarious pleasure they receive from them. The books they consume and dispose of depend entirely on “egoistic castle-building,” and Lewis’ description of these consumers on the lowest stratum of readers is charged with moral language:

"These are the favourite reading of readers in the lowest class; lowest, because reading takes them least out of themselves, confirms in them an indulgence which they already use too much, and turns them away from most of what is most worth having both in books and in life. . . . The woman reader does not believe that all eyes follow her, as they follow the heroine of the book; but she wants to feel that . . . they might." (55)

“Lowest,” “indulgence,” “too much,” “worth having”—this language charges Lewis’ system with a moral value in reading nearly unheard of in contemporary critical theory and practice. The egoistic castle-builder is lowest because his reading turns entirely on his self, his reading indulgent because it consists entirely in the vices of self concern and pride. It deprives him of the most important benefits of both reading and interaction with other people: the chance to experience the lives, feelings, thoughts, and perspectives of persons other than ourselves. In our best selves, we “seek an enlargement of our being. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts” (137). Reading only in order to seek oneself is a kind of self-love, then—the spiritual equivalent of masturbation.

Lewis’ thoroughly Christian ethic of reading could perhaps provide the perfect antidote to the often desolate and uninspired field of critical studies today. In abandoning the pursuit of authorial intent, modern criticism has made the conversation entirely one-sided and turned what should be a window into a mirror. By the standards of many modern critic, then, The Odyssey, Hamlet, and Anna Karenina can only tell us of ourselves—they are mirrors, not windows. Lewis, who condemns reading to see only oneself, acknowledges that modern works of literature—especially poetry—often encourage readers to treat them as “raw material for whatever each reader’s sensibility make of them, and there [is] no intention that one reader’s experience should have anything in common with another’s or with the [writer’s]” (102). Such a reading, Lewis grudgingly admits, is entirely “proper” for those works, then. But the admission itself contains a note of condemnation. Reading a work that is so vague and superficially spiritual that any reader can see himself in it does not satisfy the desire in our nature which draws our eyes from mirrors to pictures and stories: the desire “to be more than ourselves.” Without poiema each of us “sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself” (137). Good literature succeeds where egoistic castle-building fails: it gives us the opportunity to see through a glass—not darkly, but clearly—and to know as we as we are known and know ourselves.