Episode 269: "An Experiment in Criticism" Revisited

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast: Episode 269 - "An Experiment in Criticism" Revisited

Release Date: March 25, 2025

Hosts: Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks
Sister Podcast: The Well Read Poem with poet Thomas Banks

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Introduction and Context

In Episode 269 of The Literary Life Podcast, hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks delve deep into C.S. Lewis's seminal work, Experiment in Criticism. This episode serves as a comprehensive revisitation and clarification of Lewis's ideas, addressing widespread listener confusion and expanding on the historical and theoretical context of Lewis's critique of contemporary literary criticism.

Changes in the Podcast

Angelina opens the episode by explaining recent changes to the podcast dynamics:

• Thomas Banks joins as a full-time co-host, a transition driven by Cindy Rollins's encouragement.
• Cindy Rollins is currently on sabbatical, managing significant life changes, including relocating to another state.

Angelina highlights upcoming events, including the 7th Annual Literary Life Online Conference titled "Living Language, Why Words Matter," scheduled for April 23-26. She also announces a free gift for listeners: last year's conference talk available exclusively on HouseOfHumaneLetters.com.

Revisiting C.S. Lewis's "Experiment in Criticism"

The core of the episode centers on C.S. Lewis's Experiment in Criticism, originally published in 1961 but written in the early 1930s. Lewis's work critiques the prevailing literary criticism of his time, particularly targeting the Cambridge School led by figures like I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis.

Historical Context: Oxford vs. Cambridge

Thomas Banks provides a historical backdrop:

• Oxford University, under the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien, emphasized studying "old books" in their original contexts, fostering a deep philological approach.
• Cambridge University, contrastingly, embraced modern literature and psychoanalytic readings, promoting literature as a tool for personal growth and moral improvement.

Angelina draws parallels between this historical divide and contemporary debates about the literary canon, emphasizing that Lewis opposed the elitist gatekeeping inherent in the Cambridge approach.

Key Concepts from Lewis

1. Literature as Experience, Not Utilitarian Use

   • Lewis argues that literature should be experienced akin to falling in love or undergoing a religious conversion, rather than used for self-help or moralizing purposes.
   • Notable Quote:
     "Lewis isn't saying literary experiences are like being saved. He's saying that it's like being someone and then this transformative experience happens, and now you're someone else."
     (Angelina Stanford, 22:51)

2. The Great Divide: Unlearning Modern Reading Habits

   • Lewis identifies a "Great Divide" between modern and pre-modern reading habits. Modern readers must unlearn contemporary ways of reading to fully engage with classic literature.
   • Notable Quote:
     "We have been shaped by invisible forces, assumptions, ideas about books and how to read them and how to think about them and their purpose."
     (Angelina Stanford, 30:02)

3. Horizontal vs. Vertical Plane (Inspired by Northrop Frye)

   • Horizontal Plane: Focus on personal and societal issues—self-help, psychological analysis, moral lessons.
   • Vertical Plane: Transcendent engagement with divine myths and greater truths beyond immediate human experiences.
   • Notable Quote:
     "Art is a window. You don't look at the window, you look through the window. And that's the divine light."
     (Angelina Stanford, 80:33)

Listener Feedback and Clarifications

Angelina addresses the overwhelming listener base that now numbers around 3 million unique downloads, far surpassing her original assumptions. She acknowledges misunderstandings where some listeners believed Lewis devalued literature, empathizing with their frustration while clarifying Lewis's true stance.

She explains that if listeners found Experiment in Criticism confusing, it might indicate they haven't yet experienced the type of literary engagement Lewis advocates. This realization opens the door for transformative literary experiences.

Critique of the Cambridge School

Thomas Banks elaborates on Lewis's criticisms of the Cambridge School:

• I.A. Richards: Promoted literature as a means for personal adjustment and self-improvement.
• F.R. Leavis: Advocated for a hierarchical assessment of literature, determining "what's in and what's out," fostering elitism and gatekeeping.

Angelina parallels this with modern debates on the literary canon, arguing against the notion of critics declaring certain works as superior or more valuable than others. She emphasizes that Lewis and Tolkien opposed this evaluative approach, advocating instead for reading literature to experience it.

Lewis's Literary Theory in Action

Angelina highlights how Lewis's literary theory permeates his other works:

• The Chronicles of Narnia: Represents Lewis's attempt to facilitate literary experiences that lead to transcendent insights, particularly the Christian narrative.
• Essays and Speeches: Such as "Preface to Paradise Lost" and "Myth Made Fact," where Lewis discusses reading literature beyond surface-level plots to uncover deeper, often divine, meanings.

She recommends various resources and podcast episodes for listeners to explore Lewis's ideas further, including:

• Allegory of Love
• Myth Made Fact
• Transposition
• Meditations in a Tool Shed

Encouragement for Deep Literary Engagement

Both hosts urge listeners to seek out the "vertical plane" of reading, transcending the mundane aspects of literary criticism to engage with the transformative power of stories. Angelina shares testimonials from listeners and members who have undergone paradigm shifts through their engagement with the podcast, underscoring the practical impact of Lewis's theories.

Notable Quote:
"When you have a literary experience, you're never going to want to go back to the crumbs under the table when you can have the whole feast."
(Angelina Stanford, 93:56)

Conclusion

Angelina concludes by reaffirming the podcast's mission to dismantle the "invisible walls" that hinder deep literary experiences. She encourages ongoing engagement with their content, emphasizing that true literary appreciation requires patience, openness, and a willingness to transcend modern reading conventions.

Notable Quote:
"Stories are a prism through which you can see the light of the world. And it is the light of the world that will save you."
(Angelina Stanford, 98:13)

Listeners are invited to participate in the upcoming conference, explore additional resources, and continue cultivating their literary lives through the podcast's extensive archive.

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Key Takeaways:

• C.S. Lewis's Experiment in Criticism advocates for reading literature as a transformative experience rather than a utilitarian tool.
• Oxford (with Lewis and Tolkien) and Cambridge (with Richards and Leavis) represent divergent approaches to literary criticism, with Oxford emphasizing philology and literary experience, and Cambridge focusing on modern, psychological, and evaluative readings.
• The Literary Life Podcast aims to guide listeners beyond superficial reading habits, fostering deeper engagement with classic literature to uncover transcendent truths.
• Listeners are encouraged to move from evaluating literature to experiencing it, aligning with Lewis's vision of literature as a conduit to greater understanding and the divine.

Recommended Resources:

• Myth Made Fact by C.S. Lewis
• Prelude to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis
• Arthurian Torso by Charles Williams (with Lewis’s commentary)
• Podcast series on Much Ado About Nothing, Why Read Fairy Tales?, and other thematic episodes

For more insights and to participate in the literary conversation, visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and here with me is the mysterious Mr. Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

I indeed. I indeed.

[Angelina Stanford]

If you have been listening to our best of series experiment and criticism by C.S. lewis, which I presume you are, if you're listening to this episode, which is devoted to revisiting that series, you may be curious why there's a man sitting across from me and not Cindy Rollins. Fear not, Mr. Banks is not Cindy Rollins, and Cindy Rollins is not Mr. Banks. We aired that series in 2019, and the podcast has certainly had some changes since then. One of those changes was that Cindy was quite insistent that my husband, Mr. Banks, joined the podcast. He, of course, is an experienced literature teacher and reader himself, which was very.

[Thomas Banks]

Tolerant of us, by the way, because, I mean, you know, at that time, like, we, Cindy and I didn't know each other terribly well. And for all she knew, I was just your idiot boyfriend or, oh, I mean, soon to be husband and all that kind of thing, so.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, well, exactly.

[Thomas Banks]

That's why I could have been completely illiterate.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you. Well, remains to be seen. We'll let the audience decide if that's the case or not, but yeah, yeah, for the record, I. I was. Cindy and I started this podcast before you and I got married. And I was not about to have nepotism, you know, hey, hey, can you. Can you put my husband on this?

[Thomas Banks]

You don't really go in for that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I do not. And it was. It was Cindy's idea. And I remember she kind of snuck you in that first summer. The occasional short story, the occasional essay. And then at some point she said, I really think he needs to be on the show full time. So just for the record, Cindy got you on this show. Not me.

[Thomas Banks]

This is true.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not me. Not me. And, you know, we'll see. We'll see if I let you stay Another change is that in this past year, Cindy has been on sabbatical. So she's not here for this essay today, this essay for this discussion today. She is taking a sabbatical. She talks about that on the podcast. I think it was our end of the year 2023 episode that she talked about that, and she's talked about it on our Patreon, very much here and very much in our lives. But she has got a ton going on in her life and just came to this place where sadly, she realized something had to give. And so we support her during this time. She's actually in the process moving to another state right now. So just when you thought she couldn't get more frazzled with more things, she is now moving to another state. You know how it is, buying one house, selling another. It's as about high stress as it can get. So that is what is going on. If you're, if you listen to those episodes and you're saying, wait, where is Cindy and who is this guy? Well, a lot has happened since these episodes first aired. All right, having said that, got our introduction out of the way, let's talk a little bit about what's been going on with us at the House of Humane Letters. If you listen to the best of episodes, you heard us talking about our conference that's coming up in just a few weeks here. So let me tell you some more about that because it is really shaping up nicely. This is our. I cannot believe this is our seventh annual Literary Life online conference. And boy, do we have a fantastic lineup for you this year. We've got. Well, here's our topic, Living Language, why Words Matter. And I will be speaking, Mr. Banks will be speaking, Dr. Ann Phillips, our classicist, will be speaking, and Jen Rogers, our Inklings expert, will be speaking. And our keynote speaker I'm super excited about is philologist Dr. Michael Drought, who I am a huge fan of and many of you have heard me in classes just rave about him. It is really, really. I'm so excited about how this is shaping up. And we're going to. You know, so many of the questions about how to read really boil down to how do you know what words mean, Right? Because stories are. Literature is made up of a bunch of sentences made up of words. Right? And, and so, so much of the reason why we're confused about what stories mean is because we're confused about how do you know what words mean? The implications to this are huge. Language is alive. And as Owen Barfil says, words have souls. And we'll figure we'll explore those things and more. So that's coming up April 23rd through 26th. And as with everything we do, it's live or later. So even if you can't make the live sessions, you will have the recordings to watch at your leisure. And you can find out about the conference and [e-mail] Now, I've got something fun for you, and it's going to be free, so get ready. This is my free gift here to celebrate the conference. I am actually going to have my last year's conference talk available for free for you guys, and you can share it and listen to it and all that good stuff. The inspiration for this was over on our Patreon. Some of the Patreon members were talking about what makes our conference distinct, distinct, what makes it special as opposed to other conferences. And one of the things that just kept getting said and really impressed me was how much they said that our talks are so much deeper than other conference talks that we cast this huge vision, and one person says it challenges you and raises the bar higher than you thought it could be raised at the same time that we lift you up to meet that level, which I thought was incredibly high praise. And we had people saying that, you know, after our conference, going to our conferences for, you know, seven years now, attending other conference talks just seems so shallow. And I thought, okay, how do. I can't make an ad that says, come to our conference, but we're not shallow. I thought, what can I do? What can I do to show people that this is a different conference? I mean, I know everybody out there is trying to get your money right and your time and your attention, all of which are limited resources. I get that. And I thought, how do I express to people that this is different? This is well worth your time and money, that there will be a huge payoff in return for the price of your ticket. And I thought, I think the easiest way is to just let people see for themselves. So with that in mind, so today is Tuesday. Yesterday was Monday. This entire week, Monday through Friday. If you go to our website, HouseOfHumaletters.com you can listen to my 2024 conference talk for free. You can stream it, you can listen to it over and over. You can share it with friends. Please do share it with friends. And if you like what you hear and you'd like to hear this year's conference talk, you can register then. It was a great talk. It was on the music of the spheres and Medieval harmony and all that good stuff. It's called Untune that String and Hark what Discord Follows, which is a line from Shakespeare, and it's about harmony in the medieval imagination. And it was one of those talks that people said was just completely paradigm shifting, just life altering.

[Thomas Banks]

No one has ever said that about anything I've ever written, said, or lectured on.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm sure that's not.

[Thomas Banks]

No, I lectured on Thomas Hobbes, and I have it on good authority that no paradigms were shifted. Not even one.

[Angelina Stanford]

I loved that.

[Thomas Banks]

No, actually, it did go fairly well. They were still awake at the end of it. And I take that as a good sign.

[Angelina Stanford]

Always my husband, the humble one. So, again, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to get that. To get access to that. Free talk for one week. And of course, you can register for other things as well. All right, well, we're ready to kick this off. Let's start by sharing our commonplace quotes. Mr. Banks, you got one for us?

[Thomas Banks]

Indeed I do. One of the best books I've read so far this year, and the year is still relatively young, is a biography by Gordon Daviot, which is actually a pen name of Josephine Te.

[Angelina Stanford]

Josephine Tay. Of Josephine Taylor novels.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. Of Daughter of Time and Franchise Affair. Franchise Affair, Yeah. One of the five or six, you know, sort of greats of that particular golden age generation of detectives.

[Angelina Stanford]

And guys, when he says he loves it, y'all don't. He has just been carrying this book around and raving about it.

[Thomas Banks]

I finished it a couple weeks ago. And it's a biography of the Royalist soldier James Graham, the Duke of Claverhouse. And if you like stories of war, intrigue, politics in 17th century Scotland, this is a book very much worth reading. Anyway, in this passage, he's describing a politician, this kind of careerist by the name of Lauderdale, and how he occupied himself. And she says, quote, his quiescent periods were mainly devoted to taking back what he had said. And that. Doesn't that describe so many politicians in so many ages?

[Angelina Stanford]

I would love that to actually be true. I wish more of them would take.

[Thomas Banks]

It's a. It's an observation which eludes its period.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, it's so interesting. In two weeks, we're going to air an episode that we actually recorded back in January. We're going to be doing. And I'm very excited about this, by the way. We'll be giving you guys the literary life of Peter Hitchens. And I was just so delighted he. He turned out to be so different than I expected, you know, he's got all this gravitas, and, you know, he's this British intellectual, and I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. And he was so playful and talked about children's literature and poetry. But one of the things he said that really surprised me was how much he loved Josephine Tey.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah. And he. He wrote an appreciative essay about her not too long ago in the Lamp, which is a Catholic literary magazine. And, yeah, some really good observations about just what a. Just what a fine mind she had. And she's also very, very historically literate, like I said. I mean, if you wrote this biography, she also wrote a number of historical plays, mainly on medieval subjects. Yeah. I mean, she was a formidably learned woman. Yeah. And also very fiercely independent minded and not afraid to defend unpopular causes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I like her already.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So that. That's. That interview is going to come up in two weeks, and we're actually going to release it early to the Patreon, and we're going to release the video of that conversation. And I really. I cannot wait for you guys to hear it. It was such a great conversation. Such a great conversation. All right, my commonplace quote. Well, since Cindy's not here, I'm going to provide a quote. And we can just imagine, as I read this, that Cindy's V would be saying, this is just like Charlotte Mason. This is a quote from Vanity Fair by William Thackeray. And this is fairly early in the book when we're still meeting the characters and their childhoods are being described, and we're meeting the character of Dobbin. And Dobbin doesn't really fit in. He's kind of awkward. He gets beat up at school. He's working class, I guess. Well, his dad, he's a scholarship boy. Scholarship boy. Yeah, exactly. And so he's getting. He's having a bit of a rough go. And so this is a description of him having found a quiet moment to escape all of this with a book. And I absolutely love what Thackeray says here about this reading experience. And again, just imagine Cindy exclaiming, this is just like Charlotte Mason. Sometime after this interview, it happened that Mr. Cuff, on a sunshiny afternoon, was in the neighborhood of poor William Dobbin, who was lying under a tree in the playground, spilling over a favorite copy of the Arabian Nights, which he had, apart from the rest of the school, who were pursuing their various sports, quite lonely and almost happy, if people would but leave children to themselves, if teachers would cease to bully them, if parents would not insist upon directing their thoughts and dominating their feelings, those feelings and thoughts which were a mystery to all. For how much do you and I know of each other, of our children, of our fathers, of our neighbor, and how far more beautiful and sacred are the thoughts of the poor lad or girl whom you govern likely to be than those of the dull and world corrupted person who rules him? If I say parents and masters would leave their children alone, a little more small harm would accrue, although a less quantity of asin presentae might be acquired.

[Thomas Banks]

It's a lovely passage.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's so good. It's so good. Right? And here's, here's Cindy jumping in, saying, yes, just leave children to their own thoughts and their own books. And they don't need to have their thoughts directed or their feelings managed for them, but they need to be left alone with their own mind and these stories. And actually, this quote really fits well with what we're going to talk about today because Lewis is very concerned that people want to use literature. One of the ways, of course, that we can use it is with moralizing and trying to direct our children's thoughts about what they should be thinking about as they're reading. So, anyway, loved that. Love that quote. All right, so this, this series on experiment and criticism was broadcast in 2019. So almost six years ago, about five and a half years ago. That means I have five and a half years of hearing people's responses to this, other questions, to see where they got confused, where they got off the track, what's troubling them. We're not going to sit around and talk about all the things people loved. I mean, that's, that's fine. This, this is an episode to try to deepen our understanding of what's going on in this book. And I've had a lot of time to think about what was in my head in 2019 that I think actually is contributing a little bit to the confusion in 2019. The podcast was brand new, and I had absolutely no idea that it was going to explode the way that it has in 2019. I imagined my audience, my podcast listeners, were the same people who were taking my classes. I imagined that whoever was listening to Experiment Criticism had listened to all of our episodes up to that point, which were not very many. And so I felt like I'm not going to have to explain what Lewis means by having, for example, a literary experience, because I've been showing you that on the podcast and I've been showing you that in my classes. And you guys are going to get that. Of course, what has happened is the podcast has completely exploded. The last time I checked the numbers, we were at something like, well, we had hit 3 million unique downloads. I don't have 3 million people in my classes. So clearly the podcast audience is much larger than I ever imagined. We are consistently the number one podcast in homeschooling. We are a top podcast in literature and arts. I mean, those are huge, huge categories. I honestly can't wrap my brain around that. I try not to. As far as I'm concerned, this podcast is just me and you talking, Mr. Banks, and no one's listening. Because if I think about how many people are listening, well, they certainly wasn't.

[Thomas Banks]

Listening to me by myself, you know, or if they did, that would be really sad.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I've had a chance to. To listen to the feedback and the questions, and I think, you know, my first thought was always like, well, how can you be confused about that? I've explained this over and over in the podcast, but again, now I understand that this series was, for some people, their very first exposure. And so I can see that if this is the first time you're thinking about this stuff, if you haven't been following me for years and kind of knowing what I believe about books, I can totally see how some of this stuff would be confusing. So what we're hoping to do today is to answer some of these questions to give more context to what's going on. I've got a lovely little reading list for you of other CS Lewis things that I think will help and. And just see if we can't help alleviate some of the confusion. And I'm seeing sort of two main areas of confusion that we're going to try to address today. The first big confusion, of course, is that in experiment, Lewis's basic argument here is we are supposed to receive literature, not use literature. That right there has caused a ton of confusion. I hear people over and over saying, well, what does he mean? If I'm not using it, what am I supposed to do with it? What is an experience? Does he mean do nothing? I've heard people say things like, I read this book, and it's like, CS Lewis doesn't think there's any value in literature at all. To which I clutch my imaginary pearls and say, grab the smelling salts. How could. How could someone possibly do it?

[Thomas Banks]

I think we have actual smelling salts around here somewhere.

[Angelina Stanford]

Get them immediately. Immediately.

[Thomas Banks]

Keep them on hand.

[Angelina Stanford]

The man devoted his life to literature. He wrote the Chronicles in Narnia for crying out loud, you're going to tell me that the author of the Chronicles of Narnia doesn't think there's a value in literature? Like, maybe before you jump in and start saying, as I. As I heard, I did read an actual comment like this on the Internet. Somebody said, I read Experiment and Criticism, and I've never been more disappointed in Lewis.

[Thomas Banks]

Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Wow. I know. So, yeah. So maybe before we jump to conclusions that Lewis doesn't value literature, we might want stop and consider maybe we haven't understood what he said. And so that's what we're going to try to do today. So that's the first thing, right. He talks about you receive it. And when he says receive it, he says, what you're supposed to do is experience literature. So we're going to talk today about what is a literary experience. What is he talking about? What are we supposed to do if you're not supposed to use it? Okay, so that'll be one thing. The other giant area of confusion. And here's where Mr. Banks is going to really come in handy today. I think there's a lot of confusion because people don't understand what this book is. And the impression I'm getting from a lot of people is they think Experiment and criticism is C.S. lewis's how to Read Literature. His guide to how to read it is most definitely not that. And if you were expecting that, you're going to be very confused. Very confused, as so many. So many readers are.

[Thomas Banks]

It's more an examination of different types of reading.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. We'll talk about what it is. And we're going to. I'm going to actually put it in the larger context of Lewis's career because he actually wrote this book much earlier. It was published much later, but he wrote it just like with Personal Heresy. He wrote it much earlier.

[Thomas Banks]

It's published just about two years before he dies.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, he couldn't. He couldn't find a publisher for it, so he wrote it during the same time that he was writing essays on his Neo Aristotelian theory of literature, which he tried to get published, but TS Eliot shot it down. Thanks a lot. TS Eliot ruined it for all of us. And so Experiment and Criticism got put on the back burner. All of that stuff got put on the back burner. Personal Heresy got put on the back burner. And then. And then, you know, it got kind of got published later. But this is. He's writing this in the early 30s, which was the time of his most intense output. He And Tolkien were work in Barfield, Charles Williams, they were all working through this. Ideas of what is story? How does story work? How do you read? How do you write? How do you think about stories, how story is taught in the university? What are the wrong ways to approach it? Why is it wrong? It was a very, very intense period. And so experiment and criticism just represents one part of an overall picture. And I will again, I have lots of resources that I can recommend to help us get a fuller picture of what Lewis is talking about. But I want to start with what is a literary experience. Let's start there. In experiment and Criticism, Lewis says that a literary experience is like falling in love or a religious conversion. Let's think about that for a bit.

[Thomas Banks]

Trivial things like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Trivial things like that. Easy things to explain. Right. In both cases, those are experiences in which you were blind and then you could see. Right. That's what a religious conversion is.

[Thomas Banks]

Also potentially. At least. At least potentially transformative.

[Angelina Stanford]

Potentially transformative.

[Thomas Banks]

And not the same on the one side as you were.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. I was one person. Then this experience happened, and now I'm somebody else. Okay. Well, that is not only difficult to explain, in most cases, it's impossible to.

[Thomas Banks]

I should say. I think we should be careful because Lewis is not saying it's exactly like that. And if you have literary experiences, you're basically being saved. He's not.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, no, no. He's absolutely not saved. No, no, no. He's saying that it's like that in the sense of you were somebody and then this thing happened to you and now you're somebody else.

[Thomas Banks]

Agreed.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I'm trying to make the point that the difficulty in me trying to explain to you what a literary experience is is the same difficulty you have when you try to explain to somebody a religious conversion. It doesn't make sense to them. Right. If. If you are somebody who has gone through a religious conversion and you have found yourself in a situation where you're trying to explain it to somebody, a close friend, a family member, somebody who has not had an experience, you know what that's like? They're. They're blinking at you, you're speaking a foreign language. They don't know what you're talking about.

[Thomas Banks]

And there's always something that is. That eludes one's ability to reduce it. I mean, to pursue the thought of. The thought of conversion simply to a set of propositions that. I didn't accept that. Now I do. And here are exactly the arguments that caused me to.

[Angelina Stanford]

And that's sort of what People expect you'll hear things from like, well, tell me what it means that you're convert. What does that mean? I've had people ask me, what does it mean that you're converted and I'm. What doesn't it mean? You know, it means I was dead, now I'm alive. It means I was blind and now I see. Like, you can't explain that to somebody. It. You can only reduce it into a set of propositions. I mean, maybe they'll kind of say, oh, well, I'm, I'm really, I'm glad you've found something that's meaningful to you. Like, you know, but. And you think, and you have this frustration, right, of why can't I get them to understand? But. But you can't. You can't, right? There's something inherently impossible about trying to articulate an experience. All you can do is let someone else have the experience. And now they know what you're talking about, right? Okay, let's go back to his idea that it's like falling in love. Going to use myself as an example here. I fell in love with the man across the table here, Mr. Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

Wait, what?

[Angelina Stanford]

News flash. I'm in love with my husband. News flash. You know, we fell in love a little bit later in life than a lot of people. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, we could have fallen in love the day I was born and that would have not been too soon, but we fell in, in love a little bit later in life. So for a very long time, I literally would ask people, what, what is it like to fall in love? How will I know if I'm in love? What does it feel like? How do you know? Same sort of thing, right? I'm like asking people experience to me that they could not explain. And typically people would tell me something like, look, you'll know. You'll know when it happens. You'll know when you experience it. And I'll be honest, that was very frustrating to me. It was very frustrating. Sometimes I would be downright angry about it in the same way that I feel like people are downright angry with me and frustrated with me when I say things like, I can't really explain what a literary experience is, but when my friends would say to me, look, I can't explain it to you. You'll know when it happens. They weren't gatekeeping that they weren't acting like this was some secret knowledge that I couldn't have access to. They were telling me the truth. They were telling me that they couldn't explain it to me. But when I met Mr. Banks, no time at all before, it was just like, boom. I remember thinking, I remember having all these moments with you. I thought, oh, that's what everybody's talking about. That's what it is. Okay, now I get it, right? I had to experience it to know it. And after I experienced it, I was like, of course they couldn't explain it to me. Of course they couldn't explain it to me. Well, this is what Lewis says happens with a literary experience. When you have that experience, then it's, oh, that's what everybody's been trying to explain to me. And honestly, it's really interesting to hear on the Patreon people describe that has been their experience with this podcast. At first they're confused. They don't really know what I'm talking about. And then they finally have that experience with literature, and then they have, oh, oh, now I get it. That's what they've been trying to say. So this might be a little hard to hear. If you read Experiment and Criticism and thought, what is CS Lewis talking about when he says we have to experience literature? Then that is an indication that you have never had the kind of experience he is talking about. And that is not a criticism of you. It's just a fact. Just like it was a fact that I didn't know what love was. It's not a personal failing. It's just a fact.

[Thomas Banks]

Lewis here, at one point early in the book, he describes two guys who exercise, one of whom exercises in order to keep fit, another of whom plays games, plays amateur sports, whatever, because he delights in it. He's playing the game for the game's sake. And literary experience is something that's kind of equivalent to playing the game because you like to lose yourself in the game, not because you like to stay fit. But that's not because staying fit is a bad motive at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

And if you play because you love the game, you will be fit.

[Thomas Banks]

And Louis also this, at the very beginning, I think he makes an important qualification which is worth keeping in mind, that people who. The number of people who want literary experience and who want to lose themselves in whatever book they're reading, whether it's, you know, a popular bestseller or a agreed upon classic, that tends to be like a fairly small number of people, right? It's a minority, that he's not saying, he's not making some snobby case that, yes, these are the best people and you should want to belong to this very, very Exclusive club.

[Angelina Stanford]

Definitely not. And when we put this book in context, we're actually going to discover that he's fighting against that kind of snobbishness.

[Thomas Banks]

And we'll get to the figure, the he who will not be named, who in particular he has in mind, in a bit. But, yeah, he's not saying that if you don't have the particular type of literary epiphanies or whatever you want to call them that we have, then you're a lesser human being and scarcely worthy of life. That's not what he's doing at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely not. And if you just give me a second, we'll get there. We will get there. Okay, so the first. The first point I'm trying to make is if you read it and you thought, I don't know what he's talking about, what does it mean to experience literature? Take that as an indication that you haven't yet experienced it. But the good news is you can. You can. And by starting off saying, well, I haven't had this experience opens you up to now. You can have it. You can have it. Right. This is not a gatekeeping thing. Lewis says in the address he gave to Cambridge, Mr. Banks. It has that Latin name that I never get right.

[Thomas Banks]

D. Descript de descriptione temporum.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thank you. So he makes the point in that speech that for modern readers, we have a huge obstacle. He says when we read older books, we must first unlearn our modern habits of reading. We have to unlearn them. Okay, this is. I can't state this more strongly. Okay. Like, this is it. It's not your fault if you're not having the kind of literary experience Lewis is talking about. You have lived your whole life. You. Every breath you have taken, just like me, is the breath of modernity. We have been shaped by invisible forces, assumptions, ideas about books and how to read them and how to think about them and their purpose. We've been shaped by all of that. And so when we pick up a book, an older book, we read through all those modern assumptions, and they're invisible to us. We don't understand that they are getting in the way. Part of the purpose of this podcast is to help us remove this invisible wall, help us to understand what are the bad habits of reading we have picked up when we don't know. Lewis talks about the great divide, that Jane Austen's time period has more in common with Aristotle than we have in common with Jane Austen, that the real divide here is between modern and pre. Modern. We're carrying around all of these things that cut us off from the past. Okay? So it's not your fault. It's not your fault. And it's something that can be overcome, and it's something that's worthwhile to overcome, and I'm going to talk more about that, but that's. It's worth the effort. You shouldn't read this book and say, well, I don't know what he's talking about. So therefore, the door is closed to me. No, no, no, no, no. This is the starting point. This is the starting point, right? Like if. If I say to my. My child, you don't know your multiplication facts. That's not. We should just pull up, put all our hair, and drop out of school and say, well, math's not for me. No. Then you say, oh, no wonder you're struggling in algebra. You don't know your multiplication facts. Let's pause. Let's do these multiplication facts. And now you're gonna be able to rock algebra, right? It's. It's. It's just. It's information to help us. It shouldn't be discouraging. So, yeah, there's an invisible wall. There's the great divide. We are separated from these things, and we have to unlearn our modern habits. So what I try to do on the podcast is model exactly what CS Lewis is talking about. So I just said, it's impossible to describe it, but what I can do is model it. And so if you listen to the podcast and I'll have some specific episodes to point you to, but that's what I'm doing. I'm trying to guide you into a literary experience. I am pointing out and helping us to remove the invisible wall that stands between you and these older books. I'm trying to help provide you what Lewis calls an experiment, the right mental furniture. Right. We are trying to help you be able to have that experience. I mentioned earlier some of the Patreon comments we get over on our Patreon forum, and it's super interesting to me to listen to people describe their literary journeys and their journey with the podcast. And one of the things about putting my voice out there to 3 million listens is I have to be tough enough to handle criticism. And it's even on the Patreon, people will say, the first time I listened to you, Angelina, I got mad at you. I got mad on the podcast. I didn't understand what you were saying. I misunderstood what you were saying. I felt attacked because you were talking about wrong ways of reading, and I angrily Turned off the podcast. Now, that is really rough on my ego. Really rough, especially as a teacher, to feel like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You. You completely misunderstood me. I wasn't saying any of that. But then I. You know, I keep reading what they say and then they say, but something kept drawing me back. Even though I was angry, even though I was frustrated, something kept calling me back, calling me back. And the more they listened, the more that they began to cross that great divide in their own mind, Right? To have that paradigm shift. And then they talk about how all of a sudden it just clicked and they're like, wait, that's what she's talking about. I've misunderstood her this whole time. This is what she's talking about.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, they came back for you. Oh, I thought this was building up, too. And I crossed that great divide. And Mr. Banks, thank God. I was about to say, well, there's not many of us around, but it can be done.

[Angelina Stanford]

Us? Never mind us. Me. You and me.

[Thomas Banks]

I was starting to pull myself, be.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like, we and we. Like the royal we over here. I only speak for myself, but obviously you too, hon. And what they start talking about. And again, this is. This is where. This is where this whole episode is going. They start saying, now that I'm having a genuine literary experience, I get what this is all about, and it's so worth it. And they talk about their whole world has gotten bigger. This is one of the reasons why on the podcast we try to highlight different types of readers. You know, Joan Rose, Emily Rabel. We're bringing all these people out, and if you just listen to their story, that's their story. I wasn't a very. I did. I thought I knew how to read, and I didn't. And I have taken the time to work at this. Now I do. And, I mean, I love that line that Emily Rabel says in her episode where she said, my world got much bigger, but I could touch more of it.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, I'm gonna steal that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Isn't that great?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. I'm giving credit, of course.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. My world got bigger, but I could touch more of it. And that's it. That's really great. In just a few minutes, I'm going to explain how bad ways of reading reduce the impact of literature, that when you use it, you make it worth less. This isn't just about what's the right way to read. Angelina's being pedantic and insisting on an old no, this is about C. S. Lewis says, we've been given a feast, and we are so easily satisfied to have the crumbs under the table. That's what we're talking about. Modern ways of reading is crumbs under the table. I'm trying to show you the feast. This should excite you. This is me throwing open the doors. There's no need to get upset about any of this. I know it's hard, and I know it can be overwhelming. Don't think that I don't feel this all the time. The more that I learn, the more that I am aware of how much more I need to learn. It is going to be the. The project of my life to overcome as much of this great divide as I can. Because it's not just that I'm cut off from the past. I'm cut off from the source of life itself, living in this modern delusion. All right, let's go to the second thing. I. I said that part of the confusion that people are having with this book is that they come to it expecting the wrong thing. They come to it expecting, oh, experiment. Criticism is Lewis's how to Read literature guide. And then they read it, and they're like, rightly so. You're, like, upset that, hey, he doesn't ever say how to read Literature. He doesn't? Not really. Okay, so if it's not a How to Read literature book, what is it? What is it? So let's put it into its context. In the early 1930s, Lewis is part of the burgeoning English department at Oxford University. For English to be studied at all as a discipline is a brand new thing. You know, we had classics departments, and then the. There was the study of English language. But it was a whole new thing to start to consider that English literature was worthy of academic and scholarly work for a long time. The classics department, no offense, darling, was very snobbish about, you know, Homer and Virgil are worth studying. But reading English literature, that's something you do for fun at home. You don't study it at a university. Right. So they are part of the good old days. The good old days. There you go. So they are part of that whole movement, which, of course, then raises a ton of questions about, well, how do you study English literature? What does it mean to study English literature? So at this time in England, it's a little bit different in the United States. The United States, interestingly enough, was much quicker to introduce English literature as an academic discipline. Well, the first chair of the department of English at Harvard was Francis Child. And that's roughly like 1900, 1905, actually. It might have been 1895, now that I think about it, but it's right around the turn of the century. So was he. That was Kittredge's mentor.

[Thomas Banks]

A mentor.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. And so then Kittredge takes his place after Francis Child dies. Exactly. And he holds that for a long time. So, you know, they're teaching Shakespeare at Harvard and they're having English Literature classes, you know, almost a generation before you see that happening in England.

[Thomas Banks]

Is it something you can take a degree in?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yeah. Yes. And not just studying the. The history of the English language, but actually studying the literature as literature. So studying Chaucerta, studying Shakespeare. And there's a lot of reasons for that. One of one is the American Civil War was part of the reason for that, but which made Americans, I guess, a little suspicious about holding on to old traditions and made them open to. To newer things that can be good or bad. But in this case, it. It is what it is and it brought about English literature. Whereas you. So, so like. So, okay, so you get. Harvard has a chair of English Literature and Medieval English, you know, in the early 1900s. And Cambridge doesn't make its chair of Medieval Literature until what, like 1950. Something when Lewis starts. I should have looked up that date. But I mean, it's way way they.

[Thomas Banks]

Created the chair for you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. So it's, you can see it's just, you know, almost half a century goes by before England gets with the program. So. So in the 1930s in England, this is. This is brand new. Tolkien is the department head at the time. There's a whole interesting story behind how that happened. But he's got some strong ideas. And he and Lewis worked together to write the English syllabus, which is the British word for curriculum, what Americans would call curriculum. So they designed the whole English department, and they are very, very focused on old books. Old books read in the old way with an emphasis on that. You start off by learning the Anglo Saxon language. So it starts with Beowulf. And of course, Tolkien's famous essay and the Monster and the Critics is him arguing that Beowulf should be studied as a work of art, as a poem, as a story. Okay, so this is just like the hotbed time. This is the intense time when Lewis and Tolkien were hammering out all these ideas at Oxford. So Oxford's the old books in the old way. The cutoff date again was the great divide. So it was 1814. They did not study anything after 1814 in the Oxford English debarland.

[Thomas Banks]

Pause right there. And I think you May have answered this for me before. Why that particular year?

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, it's Jane Austen.

[Thomas Banks]

Jane Austen dies. No, no. She lived a little bit later than that, didn't she?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, okay, so in that Cambridge address, it's Jane Austen. And that, like, that's. That's where he. Okay, that's where he marks the great divide. Okay, so it's pre machine age. Pre machine. Okay, so he. Well, actually, I'm going to talk about that in just a minute about why he didn't want anything after newer than that. But let me first talk about Cambridge.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then we'll get to that. All right, so that's the Oxford again. All of this is the context for experiment and criticism. So you. You've got to understand this, because I think sometimes we forget that nonfiction books are not written in a vacuum. They're not written to an abstract, theoretical audience. They're written in a particular time to address a particular error.

[Thomas Banks]

This book is a work of literary controversy, which doesn't really seem like it on the surface, but it is nonetheless.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Because it's attacking the Cambridge School that I'm about to explain very specifically that. I mean, honestly, when I talk about literature, I'm doing the same thing. I am addressing very particular things that I see happening in my own time. And I have been teaching now for 32 years. And the stuff I'm addressing now is not what I was addressing 30 years ago. It's changed. The controversy surrounding literature have changed in my own lifetime. And so I focus on different things than I did 30 years ago. My message hasn't changed, but my focus has changed. What I'm addressing has changed. So, you know, Lewis is not writing a theoretical book about literature. He is addressing controversies and problems in the 1930s. Very specific bad ways of reading. Okay, so over at Cambridge, you have basically the opposite view. Cambridge has always seen itself. Still does. If you go on the Cambridge website right now, it's still on its homepage, talks about, you know, we're the school of innovation. Oxford is. The old Dark age is one. We're the one who does new stuff.

[Thomas Banks]

Someone once described Oxford University as that medieval bastion of culture where lost causes go to die. What I think was probably a Cambridge man of some kind.

[Angelina Stanford]

But, yeah, Tolkien felt that so, so hard. Okay, so I've actually heard the rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge described as the rivalry between Ole Miss and Mississippi State.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like, it's that.

[Thomas Banks]

I don't even understand the.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're not Southern, but it's like that intense rivalry, and we might Be in the same state. But there's a divide here and we hate each other.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Old Miss would be more like Oxford, you know, the old. The old way. And Mississippi State is more like the, you know, we're going to have an engineering department. Yeah, exactly. The upstart. So Cambridge is very like, we're new. So not surprisingly, when this whole thing starts, you know, we're going to have an English department. Cambridge takes the opposite view of Oxford. Right. So Oxford is old books read in the old way with an emphasis on language. Because Tolkien felt that if you separate language and literature, then literature can just mean anything you want. Hello. This is exactly what has happened. And that if you want to keep literature out of the realm of subjective and in the realm of objective, it needs to be rooted in language and words, you know, objective meaning. Cambridge takes the exact opposite position. Cambridge is like Beowulf, Anglo Saxon. Yawn. Who wants to read all of that nonsense? Who wants to read anything old? Oxford says nothing. After 1814, we're going to read all 20th century books. We are going to read contemporary fiction. So they start to build an English department. I mean, it's so insane to think about this, but they build an English department around D.H. lawrence, T.S. eliot.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, it definitely privileged contemporary or more close to contemporary figures. Yeah, that's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And they have no interest in old books and they have no interest in the old ways. So they want to read new books in the new ways. Specifically, what gets to be very popular at Cambridge is psychoanalytic readings. And of course, Lewis famously wrote an essay against psychoanalytic readings of literature, which I will talk about that when I give you my list of resources. So they're interested in psychological readings. They're interested in the idea of reading for personal growth. I. Richards, who's one of the Cambridge guys that Lewis is opposing, he. He says that you read to become properly adjusted, to get your neuroses in check. So it's. It's kind of like reading for virtue. It's like reading for self help. You know what you get, as you can tell which side won this debate?

[Thomas Banks]

A proper equilibrium of feelings.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, exactly.

[Thomas Banks]

So Richards. That's a phrase of his, right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly, exactly. So you're going to read these books and you're going to look at the characters, you look at their psychology, and it's going to be like reading for self help. Okay, in a, In a nutshell, Richards was very adamant that literature should never be studied on its own for its own purpose, but for its own sake. But rather should always be read for something else like psychology or philosophy, self help help, et cetera, et cetera. And you can see if you've read experiment criticism that Lewis is saying, no, no, no, you read it for its own sake. Right. You play the game because you love the game, not because you're trying to work out. You can see that that's an exact reference to what's going on at Cambridge. Right. Because they want to read the books to get something out, they're going to use it for self help guides. Now I understand this way of reading has won the day and it so dominates what we think about literature that when Lewis says you're not supposed to do that, that many of us are left scratching our heads saying, but what else is there? I'm going to talk about what else there is. But, but that's what's going on. He's. He's against using it. So the, that was one big name, IA Richards. And the two names I'm about to give you are, are Lewis's two greatest professional enemies. He spills a ton of ink against IA Richards, Abolition of Man. Dislike on a personal level, dislike him. That's right. As opposed to the guy I'm about to talk about who he very much everyone personally dislikes him. So Lewis was not unique here, but he wrote Abolition of Man against the ways of reading that IA Richards talks about, which I'm going to be talking about in my conference talk at this upcoming conference. Okay, so that's I Richards. That was one school that dominated Cambridge. The other school that dominated Cambridge. Again, these are both new ways of reading new books that's opposed to what Lewis and Tolkien are saying at Oxford. So one is I.A. richards and the, the other is Fr. Levis, who I affectionately called Father Levis because he thinks he is the high priest of literature. So Abolition of Man is written against the views of IA Richards. Experiment and Criticism is written against the views of FR Leavis.

[Thomas Banks]

So he even had a school. Frankly, I mean, the Levis sites were a recognized cabal or cadre cult. I'm looking for C words here.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I mean Lewis calls him a bunch of puritanical readers.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, when he talks about puritanical reading in this book, he doesn't name Levis. Precisely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Precisely. He would have known that's what he was talking about.

[Thomas Banks]

The funny thing is, I've been reading about, I've read more about Levis than I have of Levis himself, though I have dipped into the great tradition, which is his sort of magnum opus. And even a very sympathetic essay written by the literary critic Frank Kermode in Commentary magazine 40 odd years ago. And Kermode is writing more positively than not about Levis. But he singles these out as marks of the Levisite school of criticism. Quote, scrupulosity of conscience, mistrust of outsiders, severity of doctrine, acrimony in polemic, dependence on a leader's charisma. These are marks of a religious sect. And then he says, it's almost kind of like he catches himself and he says that's not to say that Levis was consciously trying to lead a cult, but it did have kind of, there was something of the Hotel California, but I think you can check out anytime you want in anytime you want, but you can never, well, leave us, I guess, but.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, boom, boom. Nice.

[Thomas Banks]

Sorry. Yeah, that wasn't a very good pun.

[Angelina Stanford]

Call him Father Levis. He was, it was very cultish. So let's talk a bit about, see if we can understand.

[Thomas Banks]

And he demanded like this kind of rigid, unthinking, almost kind of robot like devotion from his pupils, his prodigies. You had to feel about every book the way that he.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. He's basically, he would be a modern day literary influencer where he tells you what's hot and what's not. Like that's Levis. And you're just supposed to say, oh yeah, oh, oh, that guy's out. Okay, I don't like him anymore. Oh, this guy's in. Okay, I like him.

[Thomas Banks]

He treated the purpose of a literary education sort of like this. You have, imagine a bookshelf. On the top shelf are the greats, and below them the somewhat less greats. Below them, you know, the middling talents and below them the trash. And knowing exactly where on which shelf every author who has ever put pen to paper goes, that is the duty of the teacher to guide his students to this knowledge and exactly this knowledge. So it's, it's, it's not so much a way of being, it's not so much a. I mean, he would probably say it is a transformative experience, perhaps even more adamantly than Lewis would, but it's, it's, it's a body of received opinion that you do not deviate from.

[Angelina Stanford]

Correct.

[Thomas Banks]

It's, it's a body of dogma. That's exactly what it is, an apostolic deposit of faith.

[Angelina Stanford]

That. Well said. And that's why I call him Father Levis.

[Thomas Banks]

Father Levis.

[Angelina Stanford]

So whereas IA Richards sees literature in terms of like self help, Levis sees, he's a common coming out of the Matthew Arnold school. And he sees literature as a good replacement for religion.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. This Frank Hermode essay says he tended to. I don't remember the phrase exactly, but he tended to see literature and ethics is very closely bound up literature, almost as kind of a branch of the discipline of philosophical ethics.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. And. And for him, good taste and good morality is the same thing.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I think that's a fair judgment as well.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's part of what Lewis is pushing against in experiment criticism. So. So it's Levis who has the very snobby, oh, you don't read the right books, therefore you're not a good person. Lewis is not like that. Lewis is taking the opposite position. So, yeah, so Levis is. He's very focused on reading new books and very focused on thinking that the job of the reader is to pass an evaluative judgment on the work. Because, again, you want to cultivate good taste because that is what makes you a good person. And having bad taste means you're a bad person. So you need to read a book and decide, is this good art or is this not good art? And like you said, it created this. This cultish devotion to him because everybody wanted to make sure they were on the right side of what's hot and what's not. So he takes the approach that the job of the literature department at Cambridge is to teach students how to judge literature. That's why Lewis is very adamant in experiment, that it is our job to receive it, not to evaluate it, not to pass judgment on it. Now Levis passes some insane judgments on it.

[Thomas Banks]

He thought that D.H. lawrence was pretty much a direct literary descendant of Jane Austen and George Eliot.

[Angelina Stanford]

They're also enamored with D.H. lawrence. It's just crazy.

[Thomas Banks]

I think you would have to have been alive at that time or something. I mean, I've read some D.H. lawrence, and I think he has some good books, but I don't understand someone losing their head over.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that's the thing. Right. That's why you ultimately have to have time, judge what is a great work of art, because you can be very enamored of not great stuff in the moment, as all these guys were all enamored with D.H. lawrence. I mean, no one even reads D.H. lawrence anymore. You know, like. Anyway, I digress.

[Thomas Banks]

We.

[Angelina Stanford]

I also like D.H. lawrence, and we did a fantastic D.H. lawrence short story, the Rocky. And I'm a fan of him, but no, he's not Jane Austen. So a little more about Levis. So Levis Writes books and writes articles where he. What he does is pass judgment. So he's not writing articles saying this is what the book means. Okay. He's writing articles saying, this is in, this is out. And it was very arbitrary and he switched it sometimes. So sometimes this guy would be in and the next month he'd be out. Now, let me finish that thought and you can talk. But Lewis talks about. In Experiment and Criticism, he actually makes references to that like, oh, well, everybody knows Milton's out now, but I actually still think Milton is good. Or everybody knows Dunn is out, but Dunn was out and Dunn's back in. That's all Levis. Who's in and who's out.

[Thomas Banks]

Somewhere in the great tradition, Levis compares Milton to a bricklayer. And his lines of iambic pentameter is just so much bricklaying.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, right. Is Milton really a first rate talent for the second shelf at best?

[Angelina Stanford]

That's part of why Lewis wrote Preface to Paradise Lost was to defend Milton against the attacks by Levis. So Levis has a very, very narrow understanding of what makes great art. And one of his criteria was that it had to be serious. It had to be serious. So, you know, Charles Dickens is out, D.H. lawrence is in. Cause he's serious. Right. Shakespeare. Well, we kind of have to put him in. But honestly, some of his stuff is so embarrassing.

[Thomas Banks]

Poetry in general, actually. Really? Yeah. FR Leavis did not make much room in the great tradition for poetry at all. I mean, I think he really believed that the novel was the central expression of literary possibilities in not just the modern world, but any world. I mean, I mean, the novel's a modern form basically. But yeah, I think he believed that every literary genre that had existed prior to the novel was kind of a. At best, a prototypical step towards it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

And that our great writers really are the novelists. And you know, not even all of them, but kind of these five or six greats and everything, everything prior to this has been sort of a forerunner, a John the Baptist, if you will.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. And so when Lewis in Experiment and Criticism has that section where he says, you know, if you listen to some of these guys, they tried convince you that Chaucer didn't write this to make you laugh. And that's that. He's talking about Levis and Levi's disciples, Levocites, who. Who were called Levites because they. They thought they had to be, oh, so serious about art. And Lewis makes the point in Experiment that the way to read Chaucer seriously is to read it as he intended it. And it's funny, and you should laugh. So to laugh at Chaucer is to take Chaucer seriously.

[Thomas Banks]

It's not taking a dose of castor oil.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, Right. So it might seem kind of silly to us, but Levis was extremely influential and still wills a lot of influence, even to people who don't know his name. I mean, there are literature podcasts right now where if you put them on, they're not going to do what we do. They're not going to try to tell you this is what the art means. They're going to sit around and say, it's good art or it's not good art, or I don't like, this is not good writing. And this is what they're doing. They're doing the Levis thing where they think their job is pass judgment on the literature, where for somebody like Lewis and Tolkien and, and for me and for you, that is like the most. This is the least interesting thing to think about art. Like, I, I don't. I don't. I don't think of it like, I'm not. I don't rank Shakespeare's plays. You know, I'm. I read it and I just think, oh, gosh, look, that was amazing what Shakespeare showed me. And I'm not the whole time going, well, this isn't his best verse, and this isn't a very good play, and I'm so hoity toity and snobbish. So it all goes to very snobbishness. And I would say, too, that. That Lewis, talking about having a literary experience, I made the point earlier. This is not gatekeeping. The Leva sites are gatekeepers, because ultimately they are the ones who get to decide what's hot and what's not. And you need to align yourself to that.

[Thomas Banks]

And thinking of themselves not so much as guides, but as. As mandarins, sort of in the. In the negative sense of that word.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, exactly, exactly. They don't see themselves as guides at all. And so Lewis makes the case in experiment and criticism that that kind of writing, and that is what he means by criticism, by the way, Levis is calling this literary criticism. So it puts Cambridge different than Oxford. So Oxford is trying to teach you English literature. These are these books, and these. This is what it means. This is how to read them, and this is what it means. Levis thinks the English department should be dominated by classes that teach you how to criticize literature, to critique it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. With him, you think that criticism was almost a more central literary Activity than creation itself.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, it's snobbish.

[Thomas Banks]

Even the name of his magazine is Scrutiny. Who subscribes to Scrutiny?

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, because we're going to put everything under scrutiny and we're gonna. We're gonna just judge and judge and judge. And Lewis's point throughout Experiment and Criticism is if you're reading it to judge it, you will never know what the book actually said. You're cutting whatever value the book has. You're not going to get it because you went in there to tear it apart. And it's not going to lay itself open to you if you're going in there to fight it. And so Experiment and Criticism is his way of saying, just reject all this Cambridge nonsense and just experience literature. This is not the place, however, where he tells you how to experience literature. So if you're having a. Like. Well, what is he talking about? He didn't. He didn't. He just assumes it. In this book. He's. He's defending the old way of reading and he assumes it. And primarily what he's doing is picking apart Fr. Levis's claims because Levis is dominating the discussion at that time.

[Thomas Banks]

And you talk about the old ways, etc, versus new. And another thing about Levis, Levis was not sensitive to language at all. And he did not really think of literature as. He did not think of. He did not think it really important when evaluating a great work of literature to consider it as a particular expression of a language that has roots in historical experience and, you know, the past generally going back so and so many generations. He. He tended to kind of divorce literary works from that. And he even gave it as his opinion, I believe, that literary critics and scholars should restrict their inquiries to works, novels, poems, plays in their own language. Because, you know, why would you. Why would you go investigating into foreign languages? That's for, you know, foreign literary experts to do. So he didn't think of, like, a family of European language languages with all these interconnecting, you know, vines and philological roots that, you know, overlap with each other, that he tended to be kind of contemptuous of such scholarship. So Tolkien's deep interest in philology would have seemed to him a waste of time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely.

[Thomas Banks]

Mere scholarship. He. That was a term of dismissal.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, no, he would have been very against that. So for him, what serious art is, is books that talk about subjects that he thinks are serious.

[Thomas Banks]

Serious, yeah. Books that bring into view books that have their center, very earnest discussions and inquiries into matters of human conduct, duty the possibilities of being right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And if you give me just a few minutes, audience, I will explain what the problem is with that focusing on topics and human experience. Again, this is the popular way to read. Now, this is your book club.

[Thomas Banks]

And it sounds kind of reasonable on the face.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, right.

[Thomas Banks]

Like there are some books like that Middle March.

[Angelina Stanford]

If I read this, obviously I'm going to sit around, talk about marriage, Right. And what does Jane Austen tell us about marriage? And is she telling us, you know, how to pick a spouse? And it sounds so reasonable, but you're going to see in just a few minutes, I hope that that is a. That is a reducing of it that's making Jane Austen smaller. Of course, a man like Levis would have such a small, small lens, but Levis. Levis had his detractors. He had his haters, Lewis and Tolkien, but others. Do you remember the George Orwell essay on Levis that you found?

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

It was such a great.

[Thomas Banks]

Shall I? Through the George Orwell show. Okay, yeah. So. So this is a review, actually, one of the last things that Orwell wrote.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, actually, Levis wrote a book called the Great Tradition, in which he basically redefined the word tradition. To me. This is a list of books that I think fit my view of literature, and I'm calling them the Tradition. So the Tradition of Leviticus.

[Thomas Banks]

So this is Orwell here in the last year of his life, writing in The observer issue, February 1949, a review of the Great Tradition. He says just where the tradition comes in, it is not easy to say. Clearly, the four writers whom Dr. Liebes has picked out as great do not exhibit any sort of continuity. And he's referring here to Austin, Henry James, George Eliot, D.H. lawrence. I think, actually, I think he included Joseph Conrad as well as a fifth. But anyhow, so the writers whom Levis has picked out do not exhibit any sort of continuity. Two of these English novelists are not English. So Henry James and Joseph Conrad are not English. And one of them, Conrad, derives entirely from French and Russian sources. One has the impression that what Dr. Levis most wants to do is to induce in the reader a feeling of due reverence towards the quote, unquote great and of due irreverence towards everybody else. One should read. He seems to imply with one eye, always on the scale of values, like a wine drinker reminding himself of the price per bottle at every sip.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love that. That's so good.

[Thomas Banks]

Orwell is looking at this from the point of view of a, you know, a journalist and, you know, a novelist. As opposed to that of a scholar. But he still senses that there's this kind of. Of like a kind of unhealthy elitism at the bottom of Levis's project here. There's something, yeah, maybe a much abused word, but I think there's something anti democratic about it. This, this idea that there's like this kind of hieratic type of approach to literature which only the. The best minds, only the few, the elect, the chosen can properly perform.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I want to say two things and I'm gonna so help me remember them, because you know how my. My mind goes down these rabbit trails. Leave it. Lewis is going to attack this idea that it's the job of the reader to evaluate and that we should be thinking primarily in terms of what's a good book. Therefore, what's in and what's a bad book means meaning what's out. And that's why Lewis tries to turn it on its head and says it's really about how to read that instead of reading a book the whole time thinking, is this in, is this out, is this good, this is this bad, that you should read it and focus on being a good reader instead of a bad reader. That's his case. His case is it's not about obsessing with what are the right books, it's about becoming the right reader, because the right reader can find something good even in a bad book. Book. That is the essence of what he's saying. And he's pushing against Levis. He's saying, focus on being a good reader instead of focus on deciding what's in and what's out.

[Thomas Banks]

Trying to seek out and sort of sniff out the hidden faults of the book. Like a bloodhound.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly, exactly. And he's saying that's going to cut you off from having a genuine literary experience. The other thing I want to say is to pick up on your idea of elitism. This what's in and what's out. We are still dealing with the fallout from that. So. So before Levis, people were not declaring this is in and this is out. Shakespeare comes into fashion, he goes out of fashion because people aren't reading him, but people aren't writing all the time about what's in, what's out. Like the Instagram, I think that there.

[Thomas Banks]

Were moments like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, here's what I'm trying to make the point of. When Levis writes a book where he puts in writing what's in and what's out, this is the birth of the literary canon.

[Thomas Banks]

He provided Them with a justification for their snobbery, with where before snobbery might have just been snobbery, but now it has theoretically underpinnings that give it a sort of. A sort of respectability it might not otherwise have had.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Harold Bloom later on is going to write a book called the Canon of Western Civilization, right, where he is going to give his list. So he agrees with Levis. We can objectively decide what's in and what's out, what's hot and what's not. I'm going to put it in writing. I don't think Levis got it right. I think my list is right. And he gives his list. Most of the debate we're having right now about what is considered an author worthy of his study and what is not right, is it just white men? Should women have a place? Should minority writers have a place, et cetera, et cetera. That whole debate comes from Levis and Harold Bloom because they decided it was the job of the critic, the job of the teacher, to be declaring about every book what's hot and what's not. And so of course, we have people saying, well, this is. Their list is not good. I have a list. Why can't my list be it? Right? And Lewis and Tolkien are over here going there. There is no list. There is no declaration of what's hot and what's not. You know, one of the.

[Thomas Banks]

The canon is something that is revealed by time rather than by any particular.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. It's not a gatekeeping thing of people saying.

[Thomas Banks]

I mean, yes, some things will last and some things will have only, you know, kind of parochial, limited interest in their generation.

[Angelina Stanford]

But we can't. No, just like every now and then somebody will ask me, like, what authors that are popular right now do you think will be a popular 100 years from now? My answer is always, I have absolutely no way of knowing that. And nor does anyone. Nor is it a question we should even be bothering to ask. Only time is going to tell us what authors, if any, are going to still be read. I mean, look, Levi was convinced D.H. lawrence was going to be the greatest author of the 20th century, and he's not. The 20th century is over. Time has ruled. He is not. So Lewis had some great snark in a couple of his essays about. About why he doesn't think the literature major, okay, not these books are unworthy to read. He's not saying that. He's talking about what do you study in an academic setting. And he says it's old books. Because he says what is the point of going to college to take these classes? It is for a professor who understands these old books to help you understand these old books. And he said, no modern student needs help reading a modern book. He goes on to say, say the modern student should understand the modern books better than us old fogey professors do. So why would you have a class about that? And then he says this, and it's just beautiful. Lewis snark. And he says, going to college to take classes on contemporary fiction is like hiring a nurse to teach you how to blow your nose.

[Thomas Banks]

Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, great. That's wow. Snark right there. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so again, so much of the debate that we have right now about, you know, are minority authors being gatekept out of the canon? I reject the whole idea of making a list of who's in and who's out. Right. Read what you want, but if you're going to have something in a class, it needs to be something old, because that's what you need help reading. We don't read all the contemporary fiction you want by whoever you want. Read as diversely as you want. That's all good. And. Well.

[Thomas Banks]

I go back and forth about that. I mean, I myself have. I don't think I've ever taught a book by a living author, actually. I mean, we've done a couple on the podcast here and there. But I mean, in my classes, I wouldn't go probably quite as far as Lewis and say that, like, if there's a contemporary literature class in a university, then it's by definition kind of a waste of time. I agree with you. Yeah. So I teach Jay Bergman at the same time. I mean, it is. I mean, he does have a very, very strong point that really, it's the older books that you need a Virgil with. You need a guide.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. Because we need help.

[Thomas Banks]

We don't live in their context.

[Angelina Stanford]

I agree with you. And so I teach. I teach a living author. I teach Jay BER Crow in my how to read lit class, and he's still currently alive, but I teach it as an example of how you can find the tradition of the old books in a modern book. Sure. I'm not teaching it from, you know, this is a contemporary comment on life or any of the kind of Levis or Richard views, but as a way to help people find that thread of the old book and the way that it comes through in the new books. So I agree with you. There is. There can be value, depending how it is. But of course, I mean, English departments have become insane, and they don't teach old books at all. They teach literary theory and they teach, you know, contemporary things. But because that's what people want to read now. So that is the context, then. I think we've thoroughly covered it. So it is wrong to think, experiment and criticism is Lewis's how to read guide. It is not. It is a very specific attack on the idea that the reader is supposed to read to decide what's hot and what's not. That instead, he says, just focus on being a good read reader. Which leads us to the question, then, what does it mean to be a good reader? How does one have this literary experience? And if he doesn't talk about it here, where does he talk about it?

[Thomas Banks]

Okay, I'm halfway through clocking in at one hour. Now.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know I'm halfway through my notes. I can do it. So the answer is, where does Lewis talk about it? Everywhere. Everywhere. But not in a systematic, ordered way. Not. He doesn't ever sit down and say, this is my how to read. He was trying to write a systematic theory of literature, but T.S. eliot shot that down. So he never writes that. Instead, you find it in bits and pieces all over the place.

[Thomas Banks]

It's a good way. I mean, a good place to begin. Do you think might be some of his book reviews?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, actually, I have a stack of things I'm going to recommend right here. I would also say, too, the Chronicles are Narnia. I'm absolutely convinced that at some point, Lewis just was like, I can't explain anymore to people how to read. I'm just going to have to show them. And I am convinced that the Chronicles of Narnia is his attempt to help you have a literary experience. And that what you see in that literary experience is Christ that you. You go. Just like at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where he says to the kids, you came into Narnia to meet me here so that when you went back to your world, you could meet me there. That's Lewis's literary theory in a nutshell. That's it. You have a literary experience and you meet Christ there so that you have new eyes to see when you come back out of the book. And now you can find Christ everywhere. I'll give you an example of what I mean, though, when I say it's everywhere. So Jen Rogers, our CS Lewis X expert, she said this to me just the other day. She said, you know, so she just taught a class for us on the Inklings Literary Theory, which I Highly recommend. It was just absolutely fantastic. And she was rereading all this Lewis essays and books and letters and things, and she said, you know, I felt like I knew this stuff, but she said, after years of being under your tutelage, after years of, you know, reading Northrop Fry and the podcast and all of that, she said, now that I'm revisiting all this Lewis stuff, she's like, he totally is saying the exact same thing you're saying with slightly different language. But she's like, it's just so obvious. It's in everything he wrote. And let me see if I can explain why it is that you might read these Lewis essays and not see it there. Okay, so one of our graduates of our fellowship program, K. Pellum. So shout out to K. She, she has talked to me about her experience of going through the podcast, and when she first started taking classes from me and was first in the fellowship, I remember her saying to me, like, she was so pumped up, you know, she's so excited we're recovering this old way of reading. She's having these life changing, you know, world altering literary experiences. Her eyes are being open. She's so excited. And she would say to me, why isn't anybody else talking about this? She's like, I read all these old books. Why aren't they saying this? And I remember I said to her, they are. You're just not understanding that that's what they're saying. I was like, you're reading these essays through your modern lens and so you're misunderstanding what they said. And she took it it, even though I knew that was kind of a rough thing to hear. And then like about a year later, she came to me and she said, oh my gosh, you're right. It's everywhere. It's in all of these old authors. It's in Lewis, it's in Tolkien, it's in chesterton, it's in MacDonald, it's in Charlotte Mason. They're all saying what you're saying. And it was because she had finally had that paradigm shift and she now she could hear what they were saying. And I really genuinely think that is part of a big obstacle to people misunderstanding experiment and criticism. You know, I, I saw some things online of people attacking the book, and essentially what they were saying was, I picked up this book expecting to hear Lewis reflect my literary theory, and when he didn't say what I thought he was going to say, I rejected it. But I think you're misreading it, first of all. And I also Think you might want to consider that your literary theory is wrong. Okay, so where can we find this stuff? Well, I've got a stack of books here and you're going to see it in bits and pieces. As I said, T.S. eliot shot down Lewis's idea to write out. I think it was a six part literary theory and he shot it down. So Lewis never wrote it. Instead he just wrote specific things here and there. So I'm going to point you to some books, some essays. It's all over his letters and we'll see if we can't get to understanding what he means. Because one of the things that really concerned me about people's responses to this book was people saying it sounds like CS Lewis doesn't see any value in literature at all. Which is just like unfathomable to me that someone could conclude that he sees a value in just a different value than self help. It's a different value than trying to get a virtue out of a story. It's a much bigger, bigger value than that. So anyway, here's a few titles of places you can see parts of Lewis's literary theory. So Preface to Paradise Lost. He talks about reading there. Allegory of Love. One of my fellows is going through Allegory of Love and I read it a long time ago, but. But she's reading it, Wendy, shout out to Wendy. And she's sending me all these quotes and I'm just like, holy cow, I got to revisit Allegory of Love. So he, he's definitely talking about how to read there in the old way. You see that in essays like Myth Made Fact, where you start to see that what Lewis means when he talks about Myth, you see it in essays like Transposition. The Silver Chair is a wonderful sort of literary experience version of his essay Transposition. So Transposition is where he says that what art does is take the orchestra of the unit, the symphony that God is playing in the universe, and transpose it into a simpler version. Right, so this will fit in with some things you're going to hear me say in a few minutes. But he sees the value of art in the way it reflects the larger divine art that God is making on, on the cosmic level. Which again, so you see, this wouldn't be self help. This is more like Music of the Spheres kind of stuff. We find it in places like Meditations in a Tool Shed where he talks about. You look along the beam, not at the beam.

[Thomas Banks]

Sorry, Meditations in a Tool Shed. Where is that?

[Angelina Stanford]

Believe it's in Weight of Glory. Okay, that's the thing where he says.

[Thomas Banks]

I've just forgotten the title, I guess. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that's where he says, you don't look at the beam, you look along the beam. So there are several podcast episodes, which I will reference in just a minute, where I made the point that that's how you read, that bad ways of reading are having you look at the beam. But what we're supposed to do is look along the beam to the other thing. Again, I'll explain that in just a minute. He talks about this in an essay he wrote as a speech, actually, he gave on Hamlet, where he argues that we shouldn't. He says, like, everybody tells me I've read Shakespeare wrong when I was a kid, that I should be focused on the characters and their psychology and their motivations. And he said, but really, it's a fairy tale. It's witches, it's ogres, it's, you know, lightning and thunder. It's a fairy tale. Now, that's a perfect example of how you can read something Lewis says and just not get it. You'll hear him saying, it's a fairy tale, but you have to know what he thinks fairy tales do. So there's a whole, whole bigger thing. So to. To even take the sentence Lewis says we should read Shakespeare as a fairy tale, that's going to be confusing. You could go listen to our episode, why Read Fairy Tales? And then I will show you what a fairy tale is and what it does and what it means. And then you'll be like, oh, that's what he's talking about. You can look at our Shakespeare series that we did, Much Ado About Nothing that We Just did, or Winter's Tale that we Just did, and you'll see what it means. What does it mean to read Shakespeare as a fairy tale? Well, it means something much, much bigger than talking about the psychology of the characters or the choices they're making or something, you know, inane like that. You find it in his essay on Jane Austen, where, again, instead of talking about, like, Levis, like, this is Jane Austen books are about, you know, should you get married, what should you look for in a spouse that he sees all of the Jane Austen stories as the journey, journey of the soul, the journey from blindness to sight and how we go. Go to that, through that experience. You see it in essays like Christianity and Literature, Christianity and Culture. You see it in books like Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, where he's got a lot of different essays. Again, you're never going to find it systematically given to you. It's going to be in bits and pieces. Because T.S. eliot shot him down when he wanted to write a systematic.

[Thomas Banks]

Was this before or after T.S. eliot shot down the ability to publish Animal Farm? Because you're talking about his days of Faber and Faber. Yeah. He also received the manuscript from George Orwell in 1943. He was on fire. And he got rid of it. I mean, he sent it back with a friendly letter to George Orwell saying, you know, we received your book and I don't get it. The Animal Farm, I mean, the pigs on. In charge of the farm. That's how it should be, because the pigs are the most intelligent animals. I'm not exaggerating. He did.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it's true, he did.

[Thomas Banks]

And again, a great man of letters, a great, you know, in his line, a great poet. But yeah, some of his editorial. Editorial decisions, kind of wide of the mark.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. No, so this was before that. This was in the 30s.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. You find it in essays like Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism, which. So that's a very interesting one because he is attacking Freudian ways of reading and explaining, again, not systematically, but he talks about how symbols work. So, like a garden is not how to not read a garden as a Freudian symbol, but how to read a garden more as a medieval symbol. You find it in essays like the Anthropological Approach, where he attacks. That was also another popular early 20th century way to read. And so he attacks that. It's very similar to Tolkien's argument in the Monster and the Critics. But one of the best places that you can find how Lewis reads in action is actually not in a Lewis book, it's in a Charles Williams book. So when Charles Williams wrote his king Arthur cycle, C.S. lewis wrote a commentary on Charles Williams. So you actually can see in real time Lewis reading this and making comments about symbolically what's going on, allegorically what's going on. And you can see, okay, this is what he's talking. Talking about. This is how you read. So I would recommend the book Arthurian Torso by Charles Williams because that is Lewis's commentary. Okay, so one last thing for me to try to explain what he's talking about here. What are all these little nods here and there from Lewis actually getting at? And. And how is this approach different from Levis and other bad ways of reading? One of C.S. lewis's students was Northrop Fry, who you hear us quote all the time on the podcast. And Fry actually was at Oxford in the 1930s when Lewis and Tolkien were going through all of this. Fry was in the audience when Tolkien gave his speech on fairy stories, which was hugely influential on his later work. He was in the audience when C.S. lewis gave the series of lectures that became the book the discarded image. C.S. lewis was on Northrop Frye's master's committee, and he actually graded Northrop Frye's oral exams. And Northrop Frye was one of only two people who got a first that year. So that means that Lewis was very impressed by him. And we have really tried to find a letter anywhere that he mentions Frye, but. But we can't before I talks about Lewis and Tolkien in his notebooks. So Fry explains it like this. You've got two planes going on when you read a book. You have a horizontal plane and you have a vertical plane. The horizontal. Well, this is Richardson Levis, right? This is like the human action. This is like, I'm going to read a story and I'm going to look for the human experience on the horizontal plane. Things like, like, you know, what does it mean to be well adjusted? Or, you know, how can I grow as a human being? How do I pick a spouse? How do I handle grief, how do I handle trauma? Okay, all of that's on the horizontal level. Not saying that's bad. It's just on the horizontal plane. So it's flattened. This is where I see just about all discussions of literature. It's stuck in that horizontal plane. I mean, honestly, it's the framework that we even look at our, our lives. Everything's just stuck on the horizontal plane. What is, what is happening? How did I get here? How do I handle what's being thrown my way? One way to understand what I mean when I say the horizontal is flattening things is the medievals, their understanding of reality and the universe was a three dimensional model. And a lot of what they did in medieval education was play with that model, turn it over mentally in their mind. They enjoyed those kinds of intellectual exercises of turning it in their minds and looking at this 3D model. What happens in modernity is we don't accept that there is a 3D model of reality and we flatten it down to two dimensions. That's what these kinds of ways of reading do. We like, it's a three dimensional model and we smushed it down into a two dimensional horizontal plane. And so we think, think. Well, all that is important about our lives is our life here, our human actions, our human lives, our up and downs. So obviously that must be what art is about. Well, Lewis would say. No, Lewis would say art is trying to help us transcend our horizontal lies and to show us that the things that happen to us on the horizontal plane only can be understood in a larger divine context. And that's where the vertical comes in. So the horizontal is that flat human experience kind of thing. And the vertical is that which lifts us up. Out of that, we transcend the horizontal. We go up, we get connected to the divine. Again, I'm trying to explain something that is almost unexplainable that you have to experience. And I'm going to give some podcast episodes as examples of ways you can experience that vertical. But what I see, you know, even in, like, Christian education, and obviously Christians believe that there is a transcendent realm. When I see them saying something like, well, of course literature is transcendent, and they try to connect it to something transcendent, I still see them flattening it. I still see them stuck in the horizontal. And I always think to myself, you don't know what transcendent is. That's not transcendent. Like, for example, I'll hear people in Christian education saying things like, oh, we read old books because they help us transcend. And so they'll talk about transcendent virtues, whole lot of emphasis on we read for virtues. And so they'll talk about, you know, courage or honesty. That's not transcendent. Courage and honesty, those are not transcendent things. Those are Kantian imperatives. That's all part of the horizontal plane. You have not escaped the horizontal plane. If you're talking about virtual, you. Transcendence is when you get pulled out of the horizontal and up into the vertical. So, for example, and we've talked about this before on the podcast, Tolkien saw art as a prism. And so what is coming through the prison is prism is the light, capital L. And art is refracted light. That's transcendent. That's when you see the light refracted through the prism, and you know there's a greater light behind it. So the transcendent is when you have a literary experience and you can see the light behind it, you're not looking at the literature, you're looking through the literature. You're looking through the prism and you see the light. It's the divine light. That is the point. So Lewis. Lewis has a great quote. This is from a letter. I'm going to give credit to Jen Rogers because she dug this letter up, up. And this is a great, great quote. This is a letter he wrote to his best friend, Arthur Greaves, in September of 1931. So this is right at the same time, actually right at the beginning of when he's starting to put his literary theory together. And here's what he says. I've also been studying the Winter's Tale. You remember that last scene where Hermione is introduced as a statue and then comes to life? Hitherto, I had thought it rather silly this time, seeing that the absurdity of the plot doesn't matter and is merely the scaffolding whereby Shakespeare, probably unconscious, is able to give us an image of the whole idea of resurrection. I was simply overwhelmed. You'll say that I'm here doing to Shakespeare just what I did to MacDonald over Wilfred Cumbermead. Perhaps I am. I must confess that more and more, the value of plays and novels becomes, for me, me dependent on the moments when, by whatever artifice, they succeed in expressing the great myths. That's it. That is everything this podcast stands for in a nutshell. And again, you'd have to ask yourself, what does he mean by great myths? Well, go read Myth Became Fact. What he's saying is all this horizontal surface stuff. When you read something like the Winter's Tale, things like, why is Hermione's husband doing this to her? Is he mentally ill? Is he a narcissist? Right. Are people at the end of the Winter's Tale, when her mind and her husband are reunited saying things like, well, this is going to be a terribly abusive marriage. He's very unstable. Okay? Lewis comes to realize none of that's the point. That's all looking at the surface. That's all stuck in the horizontal. The real value of this play and all plays and all novels is when the great myth that is the great story of the Resurrection, when it breaks through the art. So we're right back to this prism idea, right? What the winner's tale shows us is the Resurrection. It's an encounter with the resurrection that is transformative. That is what is at the heart of literary expanse. That's the real value. This is how we are transformed by art. Not through self help, not through good taste, not through focus on virtue, about how to live better, but about an actual encounter with Christ. Art is a window. It's an icon. You don't look at the window, you look through the window. And I would highly recommend our series on Much Ado About Nothing. We just did that one. And that was a series where I tried to be much more explicit in explaining what was happening. But we saw the Same thing there, right? Um, Harrow is resurrected. She comes alive again. That's what we're seeing there. That's what you see in the Chronicles of Narnia. That's when you see in the Hobbit, right? That is how you escape the horizontal and get up to the vertical. And so when Lewis attacks bad ways of reading, when we on the podcast attack bad ways of reading, what we're trying to do is help us all to undo the modern ways of reading that stand between us and the light, the light that's shining through the prism. If art is a window, all these bad ways of reading, all these invisible assumptions we have, they're just smudges on the window and they have to be cleaned off. And that's what we're trying to do, right? Stop hyper focusing on the latch on the window, the curtains hanging on the window. How old is this? How was it made? Was it ethically sourced? Were women involved in the making of this? What virtue must have hard work of the virtue of hard work in making this window? Look, I'm not saying there might not be a time and a place to talk about that, but that is never going to be as important as what is on the other side of the window. It's the light, it's Christ, it's the resurrection, to use Lewis's words. It's the great myths shining through all of those horizontal surfaces. Issues ultimately pale in the light of the reality of the Resurrection. And again, if you're unsure what we're talking about, the Much Ado About Nothing series, start there. The why Read Fairy Tales? Go to that one. Why read Pagan myths? Go to that one. I explicitly spell these things out. The how to Read Fairy Tales class. Jason Baxter's book, why Literature Still Matters. All of these things are going to help you to understand. And again, at the end of the day, I can't really explain it to you any more than I can explain what it's like to be converted religiously, what it's like to fall in love. You have to experience it. And so be patient with yourself, be open to it, keep listening to the podcast, keep taking classes, and you will start to see. And when the veil is pulled back and you see what really is standing on the other side of that story, you are never, ever going to want to go back to the crumbs under the table when you can have the whole feast. Northrop Fry in his notebooks, says at one point he's like asking this question to himself, why do people resist this way of reading and he says, because ultimately it leads you to what is essentially a religious experience, an encounter with the word capital W. I hope that this has been a help to understand what Lewis is and isn't saying in that book. And I hope it's a help to encourage you to keep reading and keep being open to seeing beyond what's on the surface, to see the larger patterns, to see the great myths shining through. Mr. Banks, any final words?

[Thomas Banks]

Not really. After that, I have little to say. I suppose it's one of those things. I guess I would say it's frustrating, perhaps, because having a literary life can be very much a lifetime investment. It doesn't have to be an expensive one, though, fortunately it is. Again, to go back to the idea, this is not a. A elite sort of vocation. It's not one that you need to spend a lot of money on. It could be as simple as getting a library card and, you know, reading very patiently. But, yeah, it's not the kind of thing that one should frantically try to buy oneself into.

[Angelina Stanford]

Correct.

[Thomas Banks]

I suppose I would say that as a counsel or a warning.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the podcast is free?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, the podcast is free.

[Angelina Stanford]

If you're somebody who's like, well, I can't afford your classes, this. Everything you need is right here. Many people have said to me everything they need to understand stories in the podcast. But you have to be patient. You have to be patient because we're always making comments in the. In the various. That's why the opening says it's not a book chat show. It's an ongoing conversation about literature. Anytime I'm talking about a book, I'm talking about the world of books. Because each book is a gateway into all the books, right? Because they're prisms. They're not closed unions, units about human experience. They're. They're about the divine and the universal. And so that would be my encouragement. If you want to fast track it, I would recommend starting with the how to Read Fairy Tales mini class, because it is absolutely a boot camp in this way of reading. And a lot of people say it completely changed their lives and, and opened their eyes. It was one of those I was blind and now I see kind of moments. But, you know, if that's out of your reach for budget, it's all right here in the podcast. We've got six years worth of podcasts. Now. Start with the why Read Fairy Tales and the why Read Myths. Start there. Go into the Much Ado About Nothing series if you want to see what it means, then to apply those mythic and fairy tale principles to reading Shakespeare. Just start there, start there and I hope you feel encouraged. I know some people read this book and felt discouraged and felt like, oh, he's pointing the finger at me. I'm illiterate. Just, you know, let that be. Let that be the start of a shaking off the blinders of modernity and, and seeing the light. All right, again, my conference talk is available for free this week. Go to our website and take a listen. Share it with people. If you like what you hear, sign up for our conference because it is really going to be fantastic. I just couldn't be more excited about talking about how we know what things mean. Next week we'll have a repeat of a best of episode. This was a great one. This is a short story by Leo Tolstoy. It's a great episode. How Much Land Does a Man Need? And in two weeks we'll give you the Literary Life of Peter Hitchens. As I said on the Patreon, we're going to release that early and we're going to release it with the video, the unedited video. And I think you're going to enjoy that a lot. So until next time, keep crafting your literary life. Because stories will save the world. And the reason that they will save the world is not because of this horizontal stuff, but because stories are a prism through which you can see the light of the world. And it is the light of the world that will save you. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

Notes on the Art of Poetry by Dylan Thomas. I could never have dreamt that there were such goings on in the world between the covers of books. Such sandstorms and ice blasts of words, such staggering peace, such enormous laughter, such and so many blinding bright lights splashing all over the pages in a million bits and pieces, all of which were words, words, words, and each of which were alive forever in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.