Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Quest for Joy (or the Dialectic of Desire)
- 2 Intertextual Healing
- 3 Telling it Slant: The Allegorical Imperative
- 4 Telling it (Almost) Straight: Apologies
- 5 The Christian Imaginary: Narnia
- 6 Consummatum Est: Tales of Love and Death
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
2 - Intertextual Healing
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Quest for Joy (or the Dialectic of Desire)
- 2 Intertextual Healing
- 3 Telling it Slant: The Allegorical Imperative
- 4 Telling it (Almost) Straight: Apologies
- 5 The Christian Imaginary: Narnia
- 6 Consummatum Est: Tales of Love and Death
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Even as a teenager Jack Lewis was conscious of his tendency to let his reading shape, if not actually replace, his experience of ‘real life’. In an early letter to his friend Arthur Greeves he wrote:
You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first hand experience on any subject, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better – the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catullus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Brontë, of, of, – anyone else I have read. (TST 85)
Later in The Personal Heresy he described literature as ‘a voyage beyond the limits of [the reader's as well as the writer ‘s] personal point of view, an annihilation of the brute fact of his own particular psychology rather than its assertion’ (PH 26–7). And in one of his last books, An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis spoke eloquently of:
the impulse … 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…. [t]his 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 ’…. Literary experience heals the wound without undermining the privilege of individuality … I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. (EIC 138 ff., emphasis added)
While remaining wary of the tendency to make a kind of religion out of aesthetic experience (cf. ‘Christianity and Literature’ in Christian Reflections), Lewis nevertheless clearly does see the act of reading as at least analogous to certain kinds of religious experience. Literary experience and Joy have a similar relation to Christian faith; as long as neither of them is made into an idolatrous substitute for Christian faith, for Lewis they may provide invaluable experiences which can point towards, and even participate in, the truth of Christianity.
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- C.S. Lewis , pp. 17 - 26Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1998