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.”