C. S. Lewis on How to Read a Book - Review of An Experiment in Criticism

C. S. Lewis’s experiment is to evaluate critics by how they read, not what they read. In an effort to cut down on the negative reviews by evaluative critics, Lewis questions their methods of reading, determining whether they are literary or unliterary. He writes of the potential hazard of adverse judgments (of books), which are common from the evaluative critics, and illustrates it by the change of fashionable authors over time. Lewis suggests how to read rather than who. So Lewis presents his plan on how to read a book.

Lewis categorizes literary readers apart from the majority. The majority never read anything twice. The majority never set much store by reading; “but literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention.” The majority do not see reading as eventful. The majority do not have what they’ve read “prominently present in their mind.”

If this categorizing of literary and unliterary sounds snobbish, reading more of Lewis, within this book and other writings of his, will show this is not the case. Two of the readers that Lewis criticizes are the one who reads only what is fashionable and the one who reads only those authors who are well-established. He states his attitude in reading any work: “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.” Lewis also proved he was not a snobbish reader by his other writings, with comments on little-known books, and his interest in science fiction, a genre not embraced by the intellectual elitists of the day. Lewis was not one to read only Great Books.

Lewis also categorizes users and recipients for those who read or take in art – the audience. The terms ‘user’ and ‘recipient’ describe what the audience does with the artwork (which is more than just books). The user is the person who uses art to gratify self; the experience of art is subjective. Lewis’s example is how we may use photos. I would take the example of popular loves songs, in which the listener does not learn of an experience portrayed in the song (such as Looking Glass’s “Brandy”), but applies the “Silly Love Song” to his or her own experience. Here Lewis goes into an aesthetic approach to art, surrendering oneself to the artist. “Real appreciation demands the opposite process. We must not let lose our own subjectivity…. We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our own preconceptions, interests, and associations.” The difference between the two positions determines whether we learn; “’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.”

Diversity in the Not So Wild West

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a story of Father Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, two French Catholic missionaries sent to America’s western frontier in 1851. Father Latour starts the story as a newly appointed Bishop to New Mexico. Father Joseph, a friend of Latour’s since college, serves with him.

The two travel their spacious diocese to establish Latour’s Vicarate and serve the people of this territory, a task that is complicated by different cultures and different religious practices, within and without the Catholic church. When Latour arrives in the area, Mexican priests do not recognize his authority. Others question his authority because of his youth. A corrupt priest ignores Bishop Latour until he and Father Vaillant must replace him.

In each chapter the two priests, together or on their own, have new encounters, quite different from what they remember of France. In one chapter they realize the danger of the frontier when they ask shelter for the night from a murderer, only to be warned by his frightened wife. In another chapter as Bishop Latour travels a distant town he sees that the residents practice a mix of religion and superstition, since they seldom see a priest. When Latour arrives he performs several marriages and baptisms before he must leave. In another chapter Bishop Latour is taken to an Indian sacred site by his reluctant guide, to protect them against threatening weather. The Bishop is told, “Their priests have their own kind of mysteries.”

If there is one central subject of the story it is the friendship between Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant. This relationship gradually develops until the last third of the book, when it becomes a subject in itself, when Bishop Latour becomes conscious of how meaningful the relationship is. “Since Father Vaillant went away the Bishop’s burdens had frown heavier and heavier. At a important point, when Father Vaillant must leave for another ministry, and after the Bishop realizes the importance of their friendship, the Bishop tells the father to take two mules that have long been in their service:

 
             "Oh, no. Not at all. But if you take Contento, I will ask
      you to take Angelica as well. They have a great affection
      for each other; why separate them indefinitely? One could
      not explain to them. They have worked long together."
     
Willa Cather’s book is remarkable for the diversity of cultures, each represented by singular characters, brought together in the wide expanse of America’s West. The priests meet Navajo, Mexican, Spanish, and American people. Since they are represented by characters, each has his or her own particulars. And yet Cather does not use this to build conflict, but rather to find some commonalities in religion, even different religions. Cather’s book is not completely devoid of conflict, but I do think the book challenges two maxims of fiction: that fiction must have conflict and that good people do not make good characters in fiction.

The expanse of the West is a culture in itself: “this settlement was his Bishopric in miniature; hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert, then a spring, a village, old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren.” Cather describes the unusual landscape well, by buildings, by plants, by rock-formations. An example:

Ever afterword the bishop remembered his first ride to Acoma as his introduction to the mesa county. One thing which struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it. These cloud formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky. Sometimes they were flat terraces, ledges of vapor; sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if an oriental city lay directly behind the rock. The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave.

The descriptions are exotic, as they would be for the French priest, and for the reader unfamiliar with this territory. That is one of the strengths of Cather’s book, her description of the frontier.

One quality I look for in any kind of writing of the spiritual, is the author’s ability to convey something of the spiritual, something of the Mystery. Perhaps the best passage is this:

Without comment or explanation he then proceeded to build a fire. The odor so disagreeable to the Bishop soon vanished before the fragrance of the burning logs. The heat seemed to purify the rank air at the same time that it took away the deathly chill, but the dizzy noise in Father Latour’s head persisted. At first he thought it was a vertigo, a roaring in his ears brought on by cold and changes in his circulation. But as he grew warm and relaxed, he perceived an extraordinary vibration in this cavern; it hummed like a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of distant drums. After a time he asked Jacinto whether he, too, noticed this. The slim Indian boy smiled for the first time since they had entered the cave. He took up a faggot for a torch, and beckoned the Padre to follow him along a tunnel which ran back into the mountain where the roof grew much lower, almost within reach of the hand. There Jacinto knelt down over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in china, which was plastered up with clay. Digging some of this out with his hunting knife, he put his ear on the opening, listened a few seconds, and motioned the Bishop to do likewise.

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.

                        “It is terrible,” he said at last, as he rose.