What is Literary Criticism For? (Part 1)

A Defense of Postcritique and Wonder

The Woods

When I was growing up, the woods behind my house seemed to me a place of peril and adventure. Raised as I had been on classic fantasy tales such as C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Lloyd Alexander’s The Prydain Chronicles, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it took very little of my childhood imagination to transform the woods into a magical land. Reading these tales of danger, courage, mythical beasts, and terrible and beautiful wildernesses developed in me a yearning for high adventure. I wanted to embark on a dangerous quest with nothing but my sword and my cloak and my inner determination, setting out into a world full of wonders. For me, the woods and ravines behind my house were the closest I could get to Middle-Earth or Narnia, and so they became emblematic of that nameless yearning to step outside the everyday and into the unknown, into the mysterious, into the dangerous, into the beautiful. They became almost mystical.

I remember countless journeys into that other world, the woods, when I was growing up. There was the discovery of a set of old ruins (probably at one time a farm house) that only added to the sense that it was, indeed, some ancient and magical kingdom. In the spring, the ravine next to it would rush foaming and sparkling and spitting with the spring thaw, and it would tumble over a little cliff into a pool. Indeed, the whole ravine was a moss-embalmed, rocky, stratified series of little waterfalls, almost a staircase, fringed by slender, gray-barked trees rising sunward above, filtering the sunlight that came down to warm the stones that were always wet to the touch, as the topography slowly descended toward the valley far away, all of it strangely hushed and expectant. One year, my sister and I and our friends designated a specific portion of the woods as Narnia. This must have been at the height of our imaginative powers, because we fantasized so intensely that we almost believed it was true, as though we had had a vision of the real thing. In a sense, we did have a vision of something real, though I was not to understand it until years later.

This image of the wood, as a mythic place, a place between worlds, and a place of perspective on daily life, serves to illustrate the place of literature and my relationship to it. I view the process of reading, writing, or teaching as a journey into that unknown realm, a quest to gain a glimpse of another world, and through it to see our own, and, if we are especially fortunate, bring back something precious when we return.

There came a time for my sister and me, as there does for every child, when it became harder and harder to pretend. The magic faded. The golden bridge we had built into another world turned out to be only a little wooden board set on some logs, and the spring rains came and washed it into the drainage ditch, and it rotted. As time passed, I came to realize with an unspoken disappointment, though never fully consciously, that none of it was real. There was no Narnia or Middle-Earth. I would never step through a wardrobe or cross a bridge and find myself in a world surrounded by fantastic creatures and desperate missions, however much I might long to (and the longing, in spite of everything, remained). Although I had probably never believed in a literal Narnia or Middle-Earth (except maybe when I was very small), I had still known or felt that something was out there. Somewhere, in some form, those worlds existed. But now, it seemed, I had been wrong. Life went on in its mundane way, and I did not trip and find myself slipping through the seams of our world into some other.

In his dedication of the first Narnia book he ever wrote, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis penned these lines:

My Dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say but I shall still be

Your affectionate Godfather,

C.S. Lewis

I know now, better, what Lewis meant when he said that someday his Goddaughter would be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. A child has to pass out of the fairy tale stage for a time so that the child can come to see, one day, when no longer a child, what the fairy tales were really about.

And it has been my joy to discover that the stories were real after all. Because they were about this life, not some other. The language was that of our world, though written in a strange alphabet so that we would pay more attention. By changing up the lighting, costumes, and backdrops, so to speak, fantasy allows us to see the world fresh—and this, I came to see, is the accomplishment not of fantasy only but of all good literature. Life does possess adventure—monsters and spells, quests and true love. Each of us fights monsters: depression, poverty, illness, our own wrongdoings, injustice, loss, the daily grind, whatever it may be. Each of us encounters spells, some good, some bad: the pull of a drug, the enchantment of music, the stillness of a softly settling evening, the mysterious processes and powers of nature. Each of us faces desperate quests: the career we are chasing, the people we are trying to save, the person we are trying to become, and there are countless dangers that could draw us away from our quests, that could literally destroy our lives. And there is love. We may not be able to bring a princess back to life through a kiss, but we can raise someone up from despair by showing them our love and kindness. Heroes are no fantasy. And so the importance of literature, which comments on the presence of these wonders in our world is very real and very personal.

As I grew up, I discovered that I had crossed a bridge and found myself in a world where I was surrounded by fantastic creatures and desperate missions, and, most shocking of all, it was this world and the bridge had been my birth. Each one of us enters the world by some impossible chance, finding ourselves thrust in a land most terrible and most beautiful, with our own unique quest that no one else can complete. With this new perspective, the splendor of being came into focus. I have become convinced of this: we live in an adventure, grander and more exciting than can be found in any novel, though novels can work as a mirror to show us this more clearly.

Some will consider me a hopeless romantic for saying this. But I think that is only because they haven’t thought it through. Imagine, for a moment, the possibility of non-existence. And then realize the magnificent surprise of living, and living in such a world as this, and compare the two. There could be no greater adventure than what we have received. (To the ultimate pessimists out there who would truly rather not exist than exist, I’m afraid this article is not for you, nor is my quarrel with you. My only advice: read a great novel to gain some inspiration for living.)

Fantasy was thus my gateway to literature and literature’s connection to life, but I came to believe that many kinds of books can function in the same way, commenting on the world around us, reminding us of the peril and beauty of our existence. Literature works like the woods behind my house growing up: a place of the unknown, the terrible and wonderful, a place of imagination, but more than that, a bridge between our world and other worlds through the power of imagination. Great art communicates to the observer the beauty of creation and the grandeur and tragedy of the human condition. By presenting the familiar in a new or unfamiliar way, the artist, with his or her keen vision, is able to show the observer something the observer would not notice otherwise, or that they had forgotten. Philosopher Josef Pieper describes it this way in his book, Only the Lover Sings:

Anybody can ponder human deeds and happenings and thus gaze into the unfathomable depths of destiny and history; anybody can get absorbed in the contemplation of a rose or human face and thus touch the mystery of creation; everybody, therefore, participates in the quest that has stirred the minds of the great philosophers since the beginning. We see still another form of such activity in the creation of the artist, who does not so much aim at presenting copies of reality as rather making visible and tangible in speech, sound, color, and stone the archetypical essences of all things as he was privileged to perceive them…all forms of “liberal” activities, above all in the area of the arts, are essentially of a festive nature as long as they contain at least some remote echo of that fundamental attitude of acceptance [of the universe]. (24, 26)

Great books do not invent a mere dream, or subvert reality. They pull away the veil, so to speak, to reveal something true about reality. In “Another Message in the Bottle,” Walker Percy observes the following about literature. “But what is a good writer up to when he’s writing a book that will give the reader pleasure? First of all, he's telling the truth. Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition” (364) or again as Flannery O’Connor puts it in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”: “The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have…is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or situation” (72). I would add that great works of literature do not just state truth and describe reality, they revisit it, investigate it, celebrate it. In this attempt, of course, the writer runs a risk of creating dull platitudes, banal, familiar, or predictable fiction. As Charles Baxter writes, “It is not always enough simply to tell a truth in art, especially if the truth has no dramatic tension or has lost its emotional force. The truth can get dull (37).”

However, the solution is not to abandon the truth in favor of lies or “originality,” or shock value, which is the path of the avant-garde, a movement Baxter rightly criticizes. As he puts it, “The tradition of novelty, of ongoing necessary novelty has created permanent confusion in this century” (40). No, rather, the truth must be sought out, hunted, trailed, like a wild—but very real—animal. Great books cast it in mystery, rediscover its excitement, always remembering that the presence of a mystery is not a denial of truth, it is not a fantasy. Concealment doesn’t mean non-existence. In order to avoid over-familiarity, the truth must be presented in a new way. The writer must open up old and misplaced truths. As Baxter has it, “The truth that writers are after may be dramatic only if it has been forgotten first” (38). The element of the forgotten is key here. Reading should be a process of discovery. In sketching out and rediscovering such truths, great art can help society. According to John Gardner in On Moral Fiction, “[A]rt is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us” (5). We have come full circle; not only does literature remind us of the fantasy-like monsters that exist in life, it can be a weapon in our hands to beat them back, even defeat them.

PART 2