The Literary Experience

Orpheus and Eurydice in Hades
by Heinrich Friedrich Fuger

On the long drive north to visit family and share a pot of after-Thanksgiving soup, I decided it was time to begin my annual sort through the many (many) open chrome tabs on my phone and close the ones that I just wasn't going to get to. When I scrolled up to the very first tab left open, I rediscovered an anthology I found last year when I was teaching The Wind in the Willows. I had been looking up any and all things related to Kenneth Grahame and found a collection called Winged Words which was part of a larger series called The Kings Treasuries of Literature, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch.  

I am notorious in my family for being easily distracted from an original purpose by little things along the way, and so of course I forgot about closing tabs (especially this one) and began to read through the collection. It was absolutely delightful. (Here is the link if you want to check it out for yourself.) I flipped around at random and came upon a wonderful description by Alexander Kinglake about his boyhood love for Homer. I stopped flipping around and just read and re-read that entry several times:

    A Child's Reading of Homer by Alexander W. Kinglake

from The Kings Treasuries of Literature, edited by Arthur Quiller Couch

I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar's love. The most humble and pious amongst women was yet so proud a mother that she could teach her first-born son, no Watts's hymns--no collects for the day; she could teach him in earliest childhood, no less than this--to find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that old Homer sung. True it is, that the Greek was ingeniously rendered into English-the English of Pope---but not even a mesh like that can screen an earnest child from the fire of Homer's battles.

I pored over the Odyssey as over a story-book hoping and fearing for the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the Iliad-line by line, I clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as with love. As an old woman deeply trustful sits reading her Bible because of the world to come, so as though it would fit me for the coming strife of this temporal world I read, and read the Iliad. Even outwardly it was not like other books; it was throned in towering folios. There was a preface or dissertation printed in type still more majestic than the rest of the book: this I read, but not till my enthusiasm for the Iliad had already run high. The writer compiling the opinions of many men, and chiefly of the ancients, set forth, I know not how quaintly, that the Iliad was all in all to the human race--that it was history, poetry, revelation-that the works of men's hands were folly and vanity, and would pass away like the dreams of a child, but that the kingdom of Homer would endure for ever and ever.

I assented with all my soul. I read, and still read; I came to know Homer. A learned commentator knows something of the Greeks, in the same sense as an oil and colour man may be said to know something of painting; but take an untamed child, and leave him alone for twelve months with any translation of Homer, and he will be nearer by twenty centuries to the Spirit of old Greece: he does not stop in the ninth year of the siege to admire this or that group of words-he has no books in his tent, but he shares in vital counsels with the 'King of men', and knows the inmost souls of the impending gods; how profanely he exults over the powers divine when they are taught to dread the prowess of mortals! and most of all, how he rejoices when the God of War flies howling from the spear of Diomed and mounts into heaven for safety! Then the beautiful episode of the sixth book: the way to feel this is not to go casting about, and learning from pastors and masters how best to admire it; the impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays and their talking--the mention of the nurse is personal, and little sympathy has he for the child that is young enough to be frightened at the nodding plume of a helmet; but all the while that he thus chafes at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of Homer's poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the Iliad, that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his mother's shawl yet of this great gain he is unconscious, and on he goes, vengefully thirsting for the best blood of Troy and never remitting his fierceness, till almost suddenly it is changed for sorrow--the new and generous sorrow that he learns to feel, when the noblest of all his foes lies sadly dying at the Scaean gate.

What Kinglake described was a bona fide literary experience, exactly like what Lewis writes about in his Experiment in Criticism:

    

    As there are, or were, families and circles in which it was almost a social necessity to display an interest in hunting, or county cricket, or the Army List, so there are others where it requires great independence not to talk about, and therefore occasionally to read, the approved literature, especially the new and astonishing works, and those which have been banned or have become in some other way subjects of controversy. Readers of this sort … are entirely dominated by fashion…. Yet, while this goes on downstairs, the only real literary experience in such a family may be occurring in a back bedroom where a small boy is reading Treasure Island under the bed-clothes by the light of an electric torch.

What is a Literary Experience?

Definition by example is often more helpful for me than a strict "this is that" type of defining. What is happening in this example? Downstairs, we have the family discussing the latest controversial work, which has been read, not first because the book or story itself was enjoyable; rather, the book was read because being in the small but elite crowd of people who can say they have read it and can pontificate on it is enjoyable. The Literary Critic Experience as opposed to an Actual Experience of Literature. The story itself is secondary, if matters at all. It may not even come into consideration for what it is in itself. But meanwhile, upstairs, we have a boy immersed in a story, experiencing the story itself and enjoying the experience. From this I gather that enjoyment is not only first in a true literary experience, but foundational. There is a desire to *know* this work, not just intellectually, but intimately, on its own terms. We come to a story ready to meet the story itself, to get to know it as it is and let it become part of us however it can, treating it like an open door or a garden gate inviting us in. If we come to the story with the attitude of use, of pragmatism and utilitarianism, then the story becomes only a stepping stool to our favorite soap boxes. We only experience what we have already brought to it. Yesterday, I came across an excellent piece on Substack by Clifford Stume (on The Magician's Nephew and Susanna Clark's Piranesi), the first paragraph of which had me cheering:

The greatest threat to literature in 2024 is the pragmatist—the person who reads a book and asks, “But what use is it?” Pragmatists rarely read fiction (and definitely not fantasy). If they do read fiction, they scour the book for a moral or a lesson—anything to make the reading experience “worthwhile.” They use books as pawns in censorship-themed culture wars...

The one thing pragmatists never seem to do is enjoy a story. And this can have a devastating effect on the pragmatist, their children or students, and on the culture at large.

Yes and Amen. Standing ovation. Encore. All the accolades. Reminds me of this Bradbury-ism:

Enjoyment and the Moral Imagination

Enjoyment is a necessary, key, atomical, molecular, elemental piece to a Real, Actual, True Literary Experience. And - hear me now - this Real, Actual, True Literary Experience is how our moral imaginations are shaped. It is NOT by pulling morals or lessons out of the stories, but letting the story do its work in us in its own time and in its own way. 

As an example I submit the final lines of the Kinglake passage above:

Then the beautiful episode of the sixth book: the way to feel this is not to go casting about, and learning from pastors and masters how best to admire it;

Oh boy! Take that, pragmatic teachers and utilitarian worksheet makers! You cannot teach them how to feel or even "how best to admire it" - they must experience it for themselves.  Kinglake goes on:

the impatient child is not grubbing for beauties,

I love this phrase! 

but pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays and their talking--the mention of the nurse is personal, and little sympathy has he for the child that is young enough to be frightened at the nodding plume of a helmet; but all the while that he thus chafes at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of Homer's poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the Iliad,

The story is working on him, and not just the story as a record of action and plot, but the beautiful language, and in this case the beautiful translation, is working on his imagination and finding inroads to his heart and soul: 

that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his mother's shawl yet of this great gain he is unconscious,

He doesn't know that he is being affected and changed and moved! And nor should he. Seeing and understanding how this worked on him came later, long after the Actual Change had taken place. To paraphrase Lewis, the child wasn't admiring the sunbeam, but looking along to beam to Things Beyond. It's the seeing of the things beyond that works on the moral imagination, and Kinglake recognized that as a grown man. 

and on he goes, vengefully thirsting for the best blood of Troy and never remitting his fierceness, till almost suddenly it is changed for sorrow--the new and generous sorrow that he learns to feel, when the noblest of all his foes lies sadly dying at the Scaean gate.

Kinglake puts it so well. The entire experience is one we should all keep in mind, especially those of us who homeschool or teach the humanities in some capacity, whether as professionals or amateurs. We cannot make a child receive benefit from stories. We can only put him in the way of good stories and trust that they will do their work in him.

Enjoyment Makes the Serious Student

Lewis says that this enjoyment is also what makes "the serious student" of literature:

...applying the word serious to the right sort of readers and reading...suggests itself at first as just the word we want. But it is fatally equivocal. It may mean, on the one hand, something like 'grave' or 'solemn'; on the other, something more like 'thoroughgoing, whole-hearted, energetic.' Thus we say that Smith is 'a serious man', meanign that he is the reverse of gay, and that Wilson is 'a serious student', meaning that he studies hard. The serious man, far from being a serious student, may be a dabbler and a dilettante. The serious student may be as playful as Mercutio. ... This is where the literary Puritans may fail most lamentably. They are too serious as men to be seriously receptive as readers. [emphasis mine]

Several times in the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis talks about seriousness and solemnity. In the Last Battle, at the end, a joke is made that sets everyone laughing (interesting to note that in The Magician's Nephew, in the very serious and solemn record of the founding of Narnia, there is a chapter called The First Joke and Other Matters - joy and solemnity are not mutually exclusive) after which Lewis makes this distinction:

But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

“Deep seriousness is not at all an enemy to joy, only to folly.” This quote from Douglas Taylor in another article worth reading, tangentially related.

Apply this to reading - who is the one who is going to "get the most" out of a book? Not the person with the checklist of morals to find or social issues a book must address, not even the person with an overly large sense of the Importance of Literature (and usually an accompanying sense of their own importance - and ability - as a Literary Person). It is the person who loves the story as a story. Honestly, I think about it as if we were talking about friends and friendship. If I become friends with someone to promote myself in some way or make myself look better, am I going to get anything of actual value out of that relationship? That is a pragmatic and utilitarian approach to something I think we can all agree ought to be above that kind of thinking. 

Two Kinds of Readers, or How the Moral Imagination is Formed

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. [emphasis mine]

Again, Lewis describes something I think we have all seen. The person who says, "I've read _____" in the tone of one checking off an item on a to-do list, and another who talks about the first read as almost a handshake and an introduction, and who would like to know the story better. Lewis spends a lot of time discussing this in Experiment in Criticism. 

I believe there is a distinction between the Literary Person and the Educated Reader. In my experience, the Literary Person is not the same as an Educated Reader. The Literary Person can be a scholar or an amateur but they will feel themselves to be Literary and they usually make sure you know it. There isn’t a willingness to learn alongside the less-educated amateur reader. An Educated Reader can also be a scholar or an amateur, but they will feel the need to practice their craft, to learn how to become better at reading in the way that will allow for real literary experiences. They will be the medievalist who loves talking to the new reader of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. They will enjoy sharing their experience.

For those of us firmly in the amateur camp, let me say there is no shame in being an amateur. 

 "I think that what is true of scholarship is also true of the creative arts: those who paint and write and compose are, again, producers. The process of liberal education seems to me to be concerned more with understanding and responding to the arts than with producing them, though, of course, this is a matter of emphasis, not of definition. As Castiglione showed for the Renaissance courtier, the artist needs to be complemented by the cultivated amateur, who represents the social vision of an educated public that has some idea what to do with the artist's work. Hence education in the arts is primarily critical: it struggles to attain a conscious knowledge and understanding of a kind that is normally detached from the creative process itself, though it should be as useful to the creative artist as to anyone else. The chief deficiency in today's literature, for example, is not the lack of good writers, but the lack of a reading public sufficiently large, informed, and articulate to establish the real social importance of the good writer." [emphasis mine]

 The Educated Reader's work is never finished. In A Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis writes about the way we ought to approach old works of literature:

Instead of stripping the knight of armour you can try to put his armour on yourself; instead of seeing how the courtier would look without his lace, you can try to see how you would feel with his lace; that is, with his honour, his wit, his royalism, and his gallantries out of the Grand Cyrus. I had much rather know what I should feel like if I adopted the beliefs of Lucretius than how Lucretius would have felt if he had never entertained them. The possible Lucretius in myself interests me more than the possible C.S. Lewis in Lucretius. There is in G. K. Chesterton's Avowals and Denials a wholly admirable essay called On Man: Heir of All the Ages. An heir is one who inherits and 'any man who is cut off from the past...is a man most unjustly disinherited'. To enjoy our full humanity we ought, so far as possible, to contain within us potentially at all times, and on occasion to actualize, all the modes of feeling and thinking through which man has passed. You must, so far as in you lies, become an Achaean chief while reading Homer, a medieval knight while reading Malory, and an eighteenth century Londoner while reading Johnson. Only thus will you be able to judge the work 'in the same spirit that its author writ' and to avoid chimerical criticism. It is better to study the changes in which the being the of Human Heart largely consists than to amuse ourselves with fictions about its immutability. For the truth is that when you have stripped off what the human heart actually was in this or that culture, you are left with a miserable abstraction totally unlike the life really lived by any human being.

This is exactly the exercise our Imagination provides that our Reason cannot. Imagination was given to us, I believe and as I've told my children in various parental lectures through the years, to first help us toward compassion and fulfilling the second great commandment. We "do unto others" by first asking, "what would I want if I were in that situation?" This is an imaginative exercise. In Lewis's example, it is still me that is trying to put on knightly armour or the lace of the courtier, but Lewis points out that with the lace comes all the difference of thought and experience of reality that I must try to understand if I am to read the work as the courtier would have read it. Modern man does not think like the ancients or the medievals, and since they cannot reach through time to try to understand us, we must reach toward them to understand how they felt and saw the world. The moral imagination is formed through feeling for the characters we meet in stories as though we were of their world and their time and their culture. It is the same exercise Christians are called to when we are told to love our neighbors as ourselves, but it is a more playful form. When I cried my way through Anne of Green Gables or Silence, it was because I was feeling with the characters. There is no judgement. There is no, "Should the priest in Silence have done this or that?" That is the wrong question, and not only the wrong question but the wrong language. It is like asking a cake to tell you what it thinks about Marie Antoinette. Ridiculous. 

Who is Your Virgil?

  In the reader's odyssey to become more like Kinglake and Lewis, to become the "cultivated amateur" as Northrop Frye calls him, it is necessary to have guides, teachers who can help you know exactly how the courtier thought and felt. The sensitive reader can often get pretty far on his own, but eventually, and especially if he is drawn to works of literature from the long ago times, he will come up against things in a work that he doesn't understand because he doesn't know the imaginative context the author was working in. The imaginative context, a term coined by Angelina Stanford of the House of Humane Letters and the Literary Life podcast (my main Virgil, so to speak), includes historical and maybe biographical information, but it is primarily the context of stories that the author is drawing from and working out of. Tolkien talks about "the cauldron of story" into which is dropped all kinds of tidbits drawn from history and myth and folklore and who knows where else. To really understand Shakespeare, for example, we don't need to know who is ruling England as much as what stories filled the English imagination because that is going to help us understand his stories. 

This is where finding trusted scholars is so important, scholars who love their subject and want to help others love it, too. Obviously C.S. Lewis is one for me. And Tolkien. And Northrop Frye. I mentioned Angelina Stanford as a kind of Virgil. Actually, Kelly Cumbee was my Virgil who led me to the Beatrice that is Miss Stanford who leads her student to look beyond her to the beauty within the story. Highly recommend her classes if you can take them, but she gives so much for free on the podcast linked above that if you only listened to the podcast, you would still grow as a reader. Jason Baxter is another one for me (he recently launched a substack called "Beauty Matters" - yes, it does). Find your guides and follow them. You may not always agree with them, but they can help you enter a story and not only enter it but speak its native language and eat its native food and not just be a tourist:

 There are two ways of enjoying the past, as there are two ways of enjoying a foreign country. One man carries his Englishry abroad with him and brings it home unchanged. Wherever he goes he consorts with the other English tourists. By a good hotel he means one that is like an English hotel. He complains of the bad tea where he might have had excellent coffee. [. . .]
But there is another sort of travelling and another sort of reading. You can eat the local food and drink the local wines, you can share the foreign life, you can begin to see the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants. You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature. You can go beyond the first impression that a poem makes on your modern sensibility. By study of things outside the poem, by comparing it with other poems, by steeping yourself in the vanished period, you can then re-enter the poem with eyes more like those of the natives; now perhaps seeing that the associations you gave to the old words were false, that the real implications were different than you supposed.
[. . .] I am writing to help the second sort of reading. Partly, of course, because I have a historical motive. I am a man as well as a lover of poetry: being human, I am inquisitive, I want to know as well as to enjoy. But even if enjoyment alone were my aim I should still choose this way, for I should hope to be led by it to newer and fresher enjoyments, things I could never have met in my own period, modes of feeling, flavours, atmospheres, nowhere accessible but by a mental journey into the real past. I have lived nearly sixty years with myself and my own century and am not so enamoured of either as to desire no glimpse of a world beyond them.

- Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

A Poem a Day

In honor of today's post, I give you Keats and his beautiful expression of a literary experience:

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
by John Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.