An Experiment in Criticism (1961) (edit title/settings)

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• “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poems, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowledge, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

• “I think the two kinds of readers are already foreshadowed in the nursery. Before they can read at all, while literature comes before them as stories not read but listened to, do not children react to it differently? Certainly, as soon as they can read for themselves, the two groups are already divided. There are those who read only when there is nothing better to do, gobble up each story to ‘find out what happened’, and seldom go back to it; others who reread and are profoundly moved.”

• “A crucifix exists in order to direct the worshiper’s thought and affections to the Passion. It had better not have any excellencies, subtleties, or originalities which will fix attention upon itself. Hence devout people may, for this purpose, prefer the crudest and emptiest ikon. The emptier, the more permeable; and they want, as it were, to pass through the material image and go beyond. For the same reason it is often not the costliest and most lifelike toy that wins the child’s love.”

• “We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen exactly what is there. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (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 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.”

• “It is, therefore, an absolute rule: 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. Disinterested castle-building may dream of nectar and ambrosia, of fairy bread and honey dew; the egoistic sort dreams rather of bacon and eggs or steak.”

• “The effort to force such stories into a radically realistic theory of literature seems to me perverse. They are not, in any sense that matters, representations of life as we know it, and they were never valued for being so. The strange events are not clothed with hypothetical probability in order to increase our knowledge of real life by showing how it would react to this improbable test. It is the other way around. The hypothetical probability is brought in to make the strange events more fully imaginable. Hamlet is not faced with a ghost in order that his reactions may tell us more about his nature and therefore about human nature in general; he is shown reacting naturally in order that we may accept the ghost. The demand that all literature should have realism of content cannot be maintained. Most of the great literature so far produced in the world has not.”

• “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 but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious ‘comment on life’. For some at least of such comments must be false.”

• “To imagine any special affinity between childhood and stories of the marvelous is like imagining a special affinity between childhood and Victorian sofas. 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. What we see in them is not a specifically childish taste, temporarily atrophied in their elders by a fashion. It is we, not they, whose taste needs explanation. And even to say this is to say too much. We ought in, strict truth, to say that some children, as well as some adults, like this genre, and that many children, like many adults, do not. For we must not be deceived by the contemporary practice of sorting books out according to the ‘age-groups’ for which they are supposed to be appropriate. That work is done by people who are not very curious about the real nature of literature nor very well acquainted with its history.”

• “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 that 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?”

• “On a higher level <a fault> appears as the belief that 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 a designs are neglected. They are reverenced as teachers and insufficiently appreciated as artists.”

• “The excessively ‘knowing’ rustic who comes to town too well primed with warnings against coney-catchers does not always get on very well; indeed, after rejecting much genuine friendliness, missing many real opportunities and making several enemies, he is quite likely to fall a victim to some trickster who flatters his ‘shrewdness’. So here. No poem will give up its secret to a reader who enters it regarding the poet as a potential deceiver, and determined not to be taken in. We must risk being taken in, if we are to get anything. The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good; just as a real and affectionate acquaintance with honest people gives a better protection against rogues than a habitual distrust of everyone.”

• “Admittedly, we can never quite get out of our own skins. Whatever we do, something of our own and of our age’s making will remain n our experience of all literature. Equally, I can never see anything exactly fro the point of view even of those whom I know and love best. But I can make at least some progress toward it. I can eliminate at least the grosser illusions of perspective. Literature helps me to do it with live people, and live people help me to do it with literature. If I can’t get out of the dungeon I shall at least look out through the bars. It is better than sinking back on the straw in the darkest corner.”

• “For there are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.”

• “Books on a shelf are only potential literature.”

• “And it ought to be obvious why adverse judgments are so hazardous. A negative proposition is harder to establish than a positive. One glance may enable us to say there is a spider in the room; we should need a spring-cleaning (at least) before we could say with certainty that there wasn’t. When we pronounce a book good we have a positive experience of our own to go upon. We have found ourselves enabled, and invited, and perhaps compelled to what we think thoroughly good reading; at any rate, to the best reading we are capable of. Though a modest doubt as to the quality even of our best may, and should, remain we can hardly be mistaken as to which of our readings are better and which worse. But in order to pronounce a book bad we are claiming not that it can elicit bad reading, but that it can’t elicit good. This negative proposition can never be certain.”

• “The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors to enjoy the critics.”

• “Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are. The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it.”

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Alexandrine: A line of poetic meter having twelve syllables, usually divided into two or three equal parts.
• Eumenides: A name, meaning "The Kindly Ones", for the Greek Furies, three supernatural women who viciously and ruthlessly pursued justice, usually in the form of revenge.
• Faibliaux: A comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France in the 13th and 14th centuries.
• Trompe-l'œil: A painting rendered in such great detail as to deceive the viewer concerning its reality.
• Ikon: A conventional religious painting in oil on a small wooden panel, used for devotional purposes.
• Prurient: Having a morbid or unhealthy sexual desire; lustful.
• Stile: A structure which provides a passage through or over a fence or boundary via steps, ladders, or narrow gaps.
• Chokepear: Any variety of pear that has an astringent taste and that is difficult to swallow.
• Calumny: A false accusation of an offense or a malicious misrepresentation of someone's words or actions.
• Lugubrious: Gloomy, mournful or dismal, especially to an exaggerated degree.
• Bercense: Describe this term.
• Impi: In English, used to mean a Zulu regiment.
• Précis: A sketchy summary of the main points of a theory or story.
• Bathetic: An effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous; effusively or insincerely emotional.
• Weltanschauung: A comprehensive view of the world and human life.
• Cheverel: A kid (a juvenile goat) or leather made from a kid, especially gloves.
• Exegesis: Explanation or critical interpretation of passages from a document (especially the Bible) to reveal what it meant to its author and others in the author's culture.
• Homiletics: The branch of rhetoric that treats of the composition and delivery of sermons.
• Gnomic: Mysterious and often incomprehensible, yet seemingly wise.
• Dromenon: A labyrinth that leads inward toward the center.
• Moyen de parvenir: French for "Means of achieving".
• Exiguous: Extremely scanty or meager.
• Simpliciter: Latin for "simply" or "naturally"; without any qualification or condition.
• Vers libre: Free verse: unrhymed verse without a consistent metrical pattern.
• Ancillary: Serving as an accessory, or furnishing added support.
• Tu quoque: Latin for "You, too." An argument whereby an accusation or insult is turned back on the accuser.
• Floruit: The time period during which a person, group, culture, etc. is at its peak.
• Prima facie: Apparently correct; not needing proof unless evidence to the contrary is shown. A Latin expression, meaning on first appearance, or at first sight.
• Acrimony: Bitterness; strong resentment or cynicism.
• Faute de mieux: For want of something better; for lack of an alternative. A loose, practical or formal method of proof.
• Thomist: A follower or advocate of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
• Corage: Courage, bravery.
• Mutatis mutandis: Having changed what needed to be changed. A Latin phrase used to draw attention to the differences between a statement and a similar but different earlier statement.
• En regle: French for "as a rule".
• Biolatry: The worship of life.
• Surfeit: An excessive amount of something; overindulgence in either food or drink.
• Incipient: Only partly in existence; imperfectly formed. Beginning to exist or be apparent.
• Connaître: A French word meaning to know a fact, or to know how to do something.
• Savoir: A French word meaning to know a person, a thing, or a place.
• Erleben: German for "experience".

Series & Lists edit see section history

List the series to which this book belongs.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. C. S. Lewis (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 801.95

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › United States › History & Criticism › Literary Theory
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( L ) › Lewis, C.S.
• Books › Literature & Fiction › History & Criticism › Criticism & Theory › Semiotics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › British
• Books › Reference › Writing