An Experiment in Criticism

by C.S. Lewis

define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another.

The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work.

Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.

literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.

the first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison.

what they have read is constantly and prominently present to the mind

Now the true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can.

Solemn men, but not serious readers; they have not fairly and squarely laid their minds open, without preconception, to the works they read.

The emphasis is on what may be called the narrative qualities of the picture.

you ‘do things with it’. You don’t lay yourself open to what it, by being in its totality precisely the thing it is, can do to you.

We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our own preconceptions, interests, and associations.

(There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

We shall thus receive only those elements in his invention which he shares with the poet.

his specifically pictorial invention:

The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it.

it is inaccurate to say that the majority ‘enjoy bad pictures’. They enjoy the ideas suggested to them by bad pictures. They do not really see the pictures as they are. If they did, they could not live with them. There is a sense in which bad work never is nor can be enjoyed by anyone. The people do not like the bad picture because the faces in them are like those of puppets and there is no real mobility in the lines that are meant to be moving and no energy or grace in the whole design. These faults are simply invisible to them; as the actual face of the Teddy-bear is invisible to an imaginative and warm-hearted child when it is absorbed in its play. It no longer notices that the eyes are only beads.

The real objection to that way of enjoying pictures is that you never get beyond yourself.

Both rush hastily forward to do things with the work of art instead of waiting for it to do something to them.

discover the appropriate mode in which our distinction between using and receiving applies to reading.

The most unliterary reader of all sticks to ‘the news’.

The most horrible cacophonies and the most perfect specimens of rhythm and vocalic melody are to them exactly equal.

prefer books which we should think badly written.

As the unmusical listener wants only the Tune, so the unliterary reader wants only the Event.

We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.

the unliterary reader never intends to give the words more than the bare minimum of attention necessary for extracting the Event. Most of the things which good writing gives or bad writing fails to give are things he does not want and has no use for.

really good drawing is not only not demanded but would be an impediment.

every person or object must be instantly and effortlessly recognisable.

is nothing to them that the best English speakers and writers have been ending sentences with prepositions for over a thousand years.

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. Not what they have but what they lack cuts them off from the fulness of literary experience.

am concerned with the effect of myths as they act on the conscious imagination of minds more or less like our own, not with their hypothetical effect on pre-logical minds or their pre-history in the unconscious.

They may feign a whole world and people it and remain outside it. But when that stage is reached, something more than mere reverie has come into action: construction, invention, in a word fiction, is proceeding.

the more completely a man’s reading is a form of egoistic castle-building, the more he will demand a certain superficial realism, and the less he will like the fantastic. He wishes to be deceived, at least momentarily, and nothing can deceive unless it bears a plausible resemblance to reality.

Realism of Presentation—the art of bringing something close to us, making it palpable and vivid, by sharply observed or sharply imagined detail.

The Middle Ages favoured a brilliant and exuberant development of presentational realism, because men were at that time inhibited neither by a sense of period—they dressed every story in the manners of their own day—nor by a sense of decorum.

fiction is realistic in content when it is probable or ‘true to life’.

There is no disbelief to be suspended. We never doubt that this is just what might happen.

I know very well what it would be like to be Oreste (or Adolphe); but I should not know either if I met him,

all four ways of writing are good and masterpieces can be produced in any of them.

The dominant taste at present demands realism of content.

on’,

are overwhelming. The bad luck of Oedipus calls for as much suspension of disbelief as the good luck of Monte Cristo.4 In George

until quite modern times nearly all stories were of the first type—belonged to the family of the Oedipus, not to that of Middlemarch.

Men begin ‘The strangest sight I ever saw was—’, or ‘I’ll tell you something queerer even than that’, or ‘Here’s something you’ll hardly believe’. Such was the spirit of nearly all stories before the nineteenth century.

such stories are implicitly saying ‘Life is such

conceivably be as unlucky as Balin. A man might conceivably get burned with a hot iron and cry out “Water” just in time to induce a silly old landlord to cut a rope because he had been previously persuaded that “Noe’s flood” was coming again. A city might conceivably be taken by a wooden horse.’ And we should have to maintain

were granted—and the last item takes a good deal of swallowing—the position would

not thinking about any such generality as human

These,

are well done we usually get what may be called hypothetical probability—what would be probable if the initial situation occurred. But the situation itself is usually

To question the postulate itself would show a misunderstanding; like asking why trumps should be trumps.