Selected Literary Essays, part II

I introduced this topic last time. So I’ll just jump in to the review this time, starting with some scattered notes on various essays, moving into a topic that ties together three essays and leads to a point personally very satisfying, and ending with a point quite unsatisfactory.

In “Variation in Shakespeare,” Lewis points to passages in the Bard’s work in which one metaphor tumbles forth after another, all basically saying the same thing. Cleopatra says of Antony, “His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear’d arm / Crested the world; his voice was propertied / As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends.” Each of the three sentences essentially says, “He was more a Titan than a human.” For me, the most interesting point Lewis makes out of this observation is that the variation technique allows Shakespeare to write beautiful poetry and yet create realistic, deep characters. Speaking one great poetic line sounds forced, but speaking several poetic lines saying the same thing sounds like an imaginative mind trying to find the right metaphor off the cuff.

Speaking of Shakespeare’s characters, in “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” Lewis complains that critics told his college-age self that true enjoyment of the play required appreciation of the characters, while he wanted to continue to enjoy the ghost and the poison that he enjoyed when he was a child. In “The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version,” a topic he was asked to speak on, Lewis disappointed his orginal audience by saying that there is none: the Bible has influened literature to be sure, but any element of a particular translation, even the AV (i.e. King James), that finds its way into non-Biblical literature is a knowing reference, not an indication that the translation’s vocabulary or grammar has worked its way into the English language. In “Sir Walter Scott,” he says that the novels shine because they created, for the first time in literature, the feeling for period, even with all their anachronistic mistakes. 

In two essays near the end, “Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism” and “The Anthropological Approach” Lewis makes essentially the same point. Scholars from nonliterary fields had started explaining  literature (explaining it away, really), claiming that they had discovered what hadn’t been understood before. Freud said all literature is “just” competition with the father and sexual desires too shocking to be admitted; anthropologists said it’s all “just” a reworking of primitive myths. To Freud Lewis argues (1) that people aren’t really all that shocked at sexual desires anymore and (2) that sexual desire is one of the most boring topics in literature. To the anthropologists he says that the stories of the Holy Grail are exciting and mysterious and have captured imaginations for centuries, while the Celtic cauldron myth they trace it to is simplistic and has fallen out of all interest for anyone but anthropologists. To both he says that literature is so much more interesting and so much more varied than any of their supposedly exciting sources. Maybe those things are truly in or behind or under literature, he argues, but literature can’t be “just” that, or we wouldn’t be so devoted to it. I wrestled with some people who tried to take away the legitimacy of my field of scholarship, as well, so I sympathized with Lewis as he battled bravely against the barbarian invaders!

In some post from the last year or two, I said that I enjoyed poetry partly by listening (even when I read it to myself) to the conflict of the underlying meter and the actual rhythm of a line. I may even have admitted that I sometimes read a line with the meter clearly accented – to BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUES-tion – and try to follow with an inner ear the way the line would be read if it were just a bit of prose. Sometimes I go the other way: I read the line naturally while attempting to keep some internal click marking off the longs in the feet. I know I said that I was unsure that my way of understanding the issue had any true validity, that perhaps I was just trying to impose an idea of musical meter and syncopated rhythm into a place it doesn’t belong. Well, in three essays on meter in poetry, Lewis affirmed my view. In “The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line,” he says that, while all meter allows for play between the paradigm (i.e. the pattern of metrical feet) and the natural pronunciation, "the decasyllabic" (i.e. iambic pentameter) allows the most. "Hence all poetry in this metre has to be read with what we may call ‘double audition'." Wait! Did he just say what I think he said? I had to wait a few essays to find out!

In “Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century” (I really should read some of Donne’s love poetry!), Lewis says that most modern readers, including every last one of his students, do not know how to scan. I first thought he meant scan with sophistication. But, no: he meant that they didn’t understand meter at all. All their teachers had decided that meter was a pointless distraction, so they didn’t teach it. Then, in the simply titled “Metre,” he picks up that point again and furthers it. Students are missing out on so much by not knowing how to scan the meter in a line! Meter, he says, is only interesting if the actual line goes against the paradigm (five iambic feet, for instance) with some frequency. There are two main schools of performing poetry with these contradictions (what I think of as syncopations): Minstrels sing the paradigm and leave the listener to imagine the rhythms of ordinary speech, while Actors offer the rhythm and tempo of ordinary speech and leave the listener to imagine the meter. "Scansion is the conformity, made audible by Minstrels and concealed by Actors, of the individual line to this paradigm." Amazing! Not only did he say that I was right to hear two different levels of rhythm in a line of poetry, but he even gave names to my two ways of reading: sometimes I’m a Minstrel and sometimes I’m an Actor!

Well, I’ve covered the scattered notes and the satisfying point. Now it’s time for the disappointment. In “High and Low Brows,” Lewis spends some time on what he calls “style,” which, he says, is the ability to use exactly the right word or turn of phrase to make a mountain in the description seem unlike any other mountain, to make a sunset look to the reader like a particular sunset on a particular evening, and so on. Then – brace yourselves – he throws in the gratuitous remark that Dickens has “detestable” problems with style. *uggh* I can hardly type the words. But Lewis can’t have meant it! I don’t believe that he praises G. K. Chesterton’s wisdom in any other book as much as he does in Selected Literary Essays, and Chesterton called Dickens “the last of the Great Men.” Surely Lewis agrees!

Surely!