The Pen, the Chant, and the Text
Reader-Response Criticism in CS Lewis and Georges Poulet
For C. S. Lewis (and other Reader-response critics) reading a book is like entering a foreign country. It will change you. But first, you must strip off as much of your cultural baggage as possible and then travel with humility through a different world from your own. In An Experiment In Criticism, Lewis gives the following advice for getting the most out of a great book:
We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our own Preconceptions, interests, and associations…We sit down before [it] in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (Experiment 18).
It is hard for the postmodern reader to do this. We have been trained to read suspiciously; to read against the grain. I still remember how my graduate adviser raised her eyebrows in alarm when I told her that I seldom teach my students to “read against the grain.” I insist they read with the grain, I told her — with a humble and expectant hermeneutic (Not a method commonly espoused in graduate academia).
I’ve always found myself agreeing with Lewis that the aim of education is to “irrigate deserts” that stifle the imagination, not to “chop down jungles.” The deserts are our suspicious minds, guarding against being “taken in” by an author; the jungles are the highly impressionable minds we used to have as children but have long lost. “We must risk being taken in,” Lewis said if we are to get anything out of what we read (94). What is true for relationships is also true for reading. Without vulnerability, we protect ourselves but lose so much in return.
According to Reader-response theorists like Lewis, Georges Poulet, and Jean-Paul Sartre, reading is an act of co-creation. Without the Reader, a Text lies dormant. It “waits,” says Poulet, for a Reader to “suddenly transform” its existence —
like King Josiah’s sudden discovery of The Torah in the ruins of the temple; a discovery which transformed both King and Book: “When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his clothes” and ordered all of Israel to assemble for a public reading of the Book — triggering a spiritual transformation in ancient Israel (2 Kings 22).
This encounter between Reader and Text, says Poulet, is unlike any other artistic encounter (such as that between a human and a painting). In the textual encounter “you are inside it; it is inside you,” and something is created which was not there before; something which millions of readers have experienced and some have managed to describe: David in Psalm 119, Josiah in 2 Kings, St. Augustine in his Confessions, and C. S. Lewis in an An Experiment in Criticism (1961) — a work which pre-figured the Reader-response Criticism of the next decade:
One of the things we feel after after reading a great work is ‘I have got out.’ Or from another point of view, ‘I have got in’; pierced the shell of some other monad and discovered what it is like inside…In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis captures this Reader-Text encounter again — this time through the eyes of a little girl named Lucy:
She went up to the desk and laid her hand on the book; her fingers tingled when she touched it as if it were full of electricity. She tried to open it but couldn’t at first; this, however, was only because it was fastened by two leaden clasps, and when she had undone these it opened easily enough. And what a book it was!
But this time Lucy finds the encounter deeply disturbing, as the book reveals brief clips from her future which trigger sadness and anger. Books have the power to transform us, but not always in good ways. Some books were never meant for us to enter.
Sartre describes even the act of writing to be a Text that the author encounters — even while creating it. So the author encounters his own Text first as a writer-reader, then as a reader, and later as a re-reader. And each encounter can be quite different and quite revealing. We speak usually of the Author as the creator, not the Reader. But Reader-response critics, as mentioned, see the Reader very much as a co-creator with the Writer/Text.
In examining my father’s Bible, it is clear that he was not just reading the Text, but writing alongside it. The Indian-ink pen becomes his voice which engages the Text in an intense relationship. (And by Text, here, I mean “Logos” — the Word of God which became flesh and dwelt among us). And so for my father, this Text was the portal to a relationship, and his pen became a tangible means of response. And without response, the reader cannot enter a relationship with the Text.
But the pen is not the only means of responding to a Text. When visiting the Benedictine monks in Atchison, Kansas, I experienced the communal chant: an ancient means of responding to a Text as an entire community. The monks would arrange themselves into two responsive, or antiphonal choirs — facing each other. They would chant the Psalms back and forth to each other, following the parallel structure inherent in each Psalm. And in this, they did so much more than just read; they prayed the Text — fomenting relationship among themselves and the Text. This choral reading did something an individual reader would struggle to do: it got them out of themselves. It forced them to pray not for themselves — but for the choir “opposing” them. And this very act would transform a petitionary cry for help into an intercessory cry for help: the plaintive “me” of Psalm 69 would be transformed — when chanted over each other — into a “them”:
Choir A:
Save me [them]O God!
The water is up to [their]neck;
Choir B:
I [They are]am sinking in deep mud,
and there is no solid ground;
So reading Psalm 69 — as a two-way chant — transforms both psalm and chanter; David’s cry for help becomes my cry for your help. and my pain becomes our pain. “Literary experience,” says Lewis, “heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality”(140).
Texts with powerful reader-responses
David in Psalm 119
Moses’ Tablets
Jesus’ first reading in the Temple (“I am he…”)
Genesis 1 as “response” to Enuma Elish
CS Lewis and Longfellow’s poem
