making it one of his earliest public presentations of critical judgment (only three years after his conversion and two years before the publication of The Allegory of Love).
The Content of Lewis’s Argument
Lewis challenges Tillyard’s claim that Milton’s Paradise Lost “is really about, the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it.”45 Lewis calls this approach The Personal Heresy, because, as has been mentioned, it takes the reader’s attention away from the text itself to focus on the author. That approach is a distraction. Lewis sets forth six reasons why he rejects Tillyard’s claim.
1. TO DESCRIBE EMOTION IS TO HAVE GOTTEN BEYOND THE EMOTION
Lewis begins to make his case, citing reasons why a text does not provide access to the state of the author’s mind when he wrote it. For instance, when an author describes a state of emotion, is the author in that state, or removed from such a state and now considering that state of mind by recollection? Lewis would later develop these ideas in his essay “Meditation in a Toolshed”46 and in Surprised by Joy where he comments about Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity.47 He makes the distinction between “enjoying” or experiencing and “contemplating” or thinking about. Here in The Personal Heresy we have perhaps the earliest expression of Lewis’s use of this distinction. “The character presented is that of a man in the grip of this emotion: the real poet is a man who has already escaped from that emotion sufficiently to see it objectively.”48 Therefore, the emotion does not express the state of the author’s mind as he writes.
2. THE LITERARY CRITIQUE NECESSARY FOR DRAMA
As an example, Lewis argues that any kind of sound, critical judgment about theatrical authorship would be threatened by Tillyard’s approach. Theater requires that several points of view be on display. Each character must have a point of view. “The Drama is, in fact, the strongest witness for my contention … for there the poet is manifestly out of sight, and we attend not to him but to his creation.”49 Lewis asserts:
Let it be granted that I do approach the poet; at least I do it by sharing his consciousness, not by studying it. I look with his eyes, not at him. He for the moment will be precisely what I do not see; for you can see any eyes rather than the pair you see with, and if you want to examine your own glasses you must take them off your own nose. The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him.50
Then, he adds: “To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles: in fine, as Professor Alexander would say, I must enjoy him and not contemplate him.”51
3. THE PROBLEM OF TEXTS WITH MULTIPLE AUTHORS, AND OF TRANSLATIONS
Lewis then asks about the “class of poetical experiences in which the consciousness that we share cannot possibly be attributed to any single individual.” Poems such as Beowulf come immediately to mind. The reader has no knowledge of who the author is, or if the text was redacted and several authors were involved in its production. Nevertheless, the story can still be enjoyed because the text is objective. As another case in point, Lewis suggests the biblical text of Isaiah where he claims we do not know the author. There could have been multiple authors and redactors.52 Lewis tips his hand, suggesting that as a young convert to Christianity he has been influenced by higher critical approaches to Scripture. This is a view he will later modify substantively, as evidenced by his late essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism.”53 Lewis uses this example to make his case that criticism must be about texts and not authors. Furthermore, this problem is exacerbated when it comes to translations of texts. Whose consciousness is manifest in the translation? Is it the author’s, or the translator’s, or both?54
4. THE PROBLEM OF THE “SHARED IMAGINATION”
Lewis presses his literary attack against Tillyard by means of what he calls the shared imagination. “It is his business, starting from his own consciousness; whatever that may happen to be, to find that arrangement of public experiences, embodied in words, which will admit him (and incidentally us) to a new mode of consciousness.”55 Sound rhetorical theory is audience-centered; it seeks to describe reality in a way that one’s audience comes to see and to be persuaded by the author’s argument. To do this well the author should know something of the hearer’s point of view. He or she appeals to experiences and values that are shared between them and draws on these to make a point. “The common world with its nights, its oaks, and its stars, which we have all seen, and which mean at least something the same to all of us, is the bank on which he [the author] draws his checks.”56 An appeal is made by means of these common experiences. Then the author, utilizing these shared experiences, seeks to go beyond what was previously known by author or reader. This could hardly be an expression solely of the state of the author’s own mind.
5. THE AUTHOR’S ROLE AS A WINDOW
Lewis suggests that the author’s role is a window through which the reader sees the world depicted in the story.57 “A poet does what no one else can do: what, perhaps, no other poet can do; but he does not express his personality. His own personality is his starting point, and his limitation: it is analogous to the position of a window” and, as Lewis reminds his readers, “windows are not put there that you may study windows; rather that you might forget windows. And if you find that you are forced to attend to the glass rather than the landscape, then either the window or your eye is faulty.”58 One looks through the window to see beyond it into the garden. Similarly, one looks through the author’s eyes to see the story depicted. It is the story to which the reader ought to attend, not to the author.
6. THE PROBLEM OF EMBELLISHMENTS
Here’s another objection Lewis has to Tillyard’s position. An author often “proceeds … partly by following the tradition of his predecessors, but very largely by the method of trial and error; and the result, when it comes, is for him, no less than for us, an acquisition, a voyage beyond the limits of his personal point of view, an annihilation of the brute fact of his own particular psychology rather than its assertion.”59
For Lewis, literary embellishments occur when an author builds his story on stories that came before. How should one distinguish between an author’s voice and the voices of those from which the author has drawn? For example, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, how would one distinguish between Shakespeare and Homer’s Odyssey from which Shakespeare borrowed? Or Virgil’s, when he wrote the Aeneid? Or Boccaccio’s when he wrote The Decameron? This point is made over and over in Lewis’s work on the nature of embellishments—see The Discarded Image,60 “The Genesis of a Medieval Book” and “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” both in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature;61 and in “What Chaucer Really did with Il Filostrato” from Selected Literary Essays.62
Conclusion of Lewis’s First Objection to Tillyard
Lewis
