An Experiment in Criticism

by C.S. Lewis

The raison d’être of the story is that we shall weep, or shudder, or wonder, or laugh as we follow it.

The hypothetical probability is brought in to make the strange events more fully imaginable.

No one can deceive you unless he makes you think he is telling the truth.

The unblushingly romantic has far less power to deceive than the apparently realistic.

Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines. None of us are deceived by the Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. The real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable ...

the association between fantasy (including Märchen) and childhood, the belief that children are the proper readers for this sort of work or that it is the proper reading for children, is modern and local.

If few but children now read such stories, that is not because children, as such, have a special predilection for them, but because children are indifferent to literary fashions.

if we are to use the words childish or infantile as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing; not to those which every sane man would keep if he could and which some are fortunate for keeping.

who in his senses would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire? The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose. Not to acquire a taste for the realistic is childish in the bad sense; to have lost the taste for marvels and adventures is no more a matter for congratulation than losing our teeth, our hair, our palate, and finally, our hopes. Why do we hear so much about the defects of immaturity and so little about those of senility?

youth’s characteristic chronological snobbery. And what then would become of the criticism which attaches so much importance to being adult and instils a fear and shame of any enjoyment we can share with the very young?

fault in reading

a confusion between life and art, even a failure to allow for the existence of art at all.

type of reader who wants sensational narrative but will not accept it unless it is offered him as ‘news’.

all good books are good primarily because they give us knowledge, teach us ‘truths’ about ‘life’.

Dramatists and novelists are praised as if they were doing, essentially, what used to be expected of theologians and philosophers, and the qualities which belong to their works as inventions and as designs are neglected. They are rev...

It seems to me undeniable, that tragedy, taken as a philosophy of life, is the most obstinate and best camouflaged of all wish-fulfilments, just because its pretensions are so apparently realistic.

realism of presentation and realism of content.

None of the three kinds is making a statement about life in general. They are all constructions: things made out of the stuff of real life; additions to life rather than comments on it.

However improbable and abnormal a story he has chosen, it will, as we say, ‘come to life’ in his hands. The life to which it comes will be impregnated with all the wisdom, knowledge and experience the author has;

all this comes to us, and was very possibly called out of the poet, as the ‘spirit’ (using that word in a quasi-chemical sense) of a work of art, a play. To formulate it as a philosophy, even if it were a rational philosophy, and regard the actual play as primarily a vehicle for that philosophy, is an outrage to the thing the poet has made for us.

guards the good reader from treating a tragedy—he will not talk much about an abstraction like ‘Tragedy’—as a mere vehicle for truth is his continual awareness that it not only means, but is. It is not merely logos (something said) but poiema (something made).

To value them chiefly for reflections which they may suggest to us or morals we may draw from them, is a flagrant instance of ‘using’ instead of ‘receiving’.

As little as possible must exist solely for the sake of other things.

Every episode, explanation, description, dialogue—ideally every sentence—must be pleasureable and interesting for its own sake.

We have ‘put on mental muscle’ as a result of this activity. We may thank Shakespeare or Dante for that muscle, but we had better not father on them the philosophical or ethical use we make of it.

Many of the comments on life which people get out of Shakespeare could have been reached by very moderate talents without his assistance.

We may go back to it chiefly to find further confirmation for our belief that it teaches this or that, rather than for a fresh immersion in what it is.

We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves.

In reading imaginative work, I suggest, we should be much less concerned with altering our own opinions—though this of course is sometimes their effect—than with entering fully into the opinions, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings and total experience, of other men.

A true lover of literature should be in one way like an honest examiner, who is prepared to give the highest marks to the telling, felicitous and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates.

The sort of misreading I here protest against is unfortunately encouraged by the increasing importance of ‘English Literature’ as an academic discipline.

Forced to talk incessantly about books, what can they do but try to make books into the sort of things they can talk about?

Hence literature becomes for them a religion, a philosophy, a school of ethics, a psychotherapy, a sociology—anything rather than a collection of works of art.

A work of (whatever) art can be either ‘received’ or ‘used’. When we ‘receive’ it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities.

The ‘uses’ which the many make of the arts may or may not be intrinsically vulgar, depraved, or morbid.

‘Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.

When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to ‘receive’ significant words is alway...

The ‘user’ wants to use this content—as pastime for a dull or torturing hour, as a puzzle, as a help to castle-building, or perhaps as a source for ‘philosophies of life’.

The ‘recipient’ wants to rest in it. It is for him, at least temporarily, an end. That way, it may be compared (upward) with religious contemplation or (downward) with a game.

the ‘user’ never makes a full use of the words and indeed prefers words of which no really full use could be made. A very rough and ready apprehension of the content is enough for his purpose because he wants only to use it for his present need. Whatever in the words invites a more p...

W...

They are exquisitely detailed compulsions on a mind willing and able to be so compelled.

What bad reading wholly consists in may enter as an ingredient into good reading. Excitement and curiosity obviously do. So does vicarious happiness; not that good readers ever read for the sake of it, but that when happiness legitimately occurs in a fiction they enter into it. But when they demand a happy ending it will not be for this reason but because it seems to them in various ways demanded by the work itself. (Deaths and disasters can be as patently ‘contrived’ and inharmonious as wedding bells.)

Entertainment, in this sense, is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities.

Where the intelligent reader holds his breath, the duller one may complain that nothing is happening.

we can judge any sentence or even word only by the work it does or fails to do.

The effect must precede the judgement on the effect.

we must receive it first and then evaluate it. Otherwise, we have...

young readers. At a first reading of some great work, they are ‘knocked flat’. Criticise it? No, by God, but read it again.

I am very doubtful whether criticism is a proper exercise for boys and girls. A clever schoolboy’s reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.