A "modernist' C.S. Lewis?

Continuing vacation-week repostings of the nonpolitical...

(8/17/14) Lev Grossman, a fantasy writer whose works I have not yet been privileged to read, has a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful tribute to C. S. Lewis, who brought him into the worlds of reading and of fantasy. He focuses first on a passage that I used to xerox for students, also trying to capture its magic:

Even more than that, it’s the way he uses language—which is nothing like the way fantasists used language before him. There’s no sense of nostalgia. There’s no medieval floridness. There’s no fairy tale condescension to the child reader. It’s very straight, and very clean—there’s no Vaseline on the lens. You see everything clearly, not with sparkles or a flowery sense of wonderment, but with very specific physical details. Look at the attention to detail as you watch Lucy going through the wardrobe:

This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!" thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. "I wonder is that more mothballs?" she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. "This is very queer," she said, and went on a step or two further.

A stealth modernist's divine lamppost

Lev Grossman, a fantasy writer whose works I have not yet been privileged to read, has a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful tribute to C. S. Lewis, who brought him into the worlds of reading and of fantasy. He focuses first on a passage that I used to xerox for students, also trying to capture its magic:

Even more than that, it’s the way he uses language—which is nothing like the way fantasists used language before him. There’s no sense of nostalgia. There’s no medieval floridness. There’s no fairy tale condescension to the child reader. It’s very straight, and very clean—there’s no Vaseline on the lens. You see everything clearly, not with sparkles or a flowery sense of wonderment, but with very specific physical details. Look at the attention to detail as you watch Lucy going through the wardrobe:

This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!" thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. "I wonder is that more mothballs?" she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. "This is very queer," she said, and went on a step or two further.

"Those books are for kids"? C.S. Lewis says no

Over at the Dish they've been having some fun with a bit of snark by Joel Stein, who exhorts adults to act their age while reading:

The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.” Or a Twilight book. Or Harry Potter. The only time I’m O.K. with an adult holding a children’s book is if he’s moving his mouth as he reads.

Now, this strikes me as a cocktail party provocation -- who really gets indignant about other people's choice of reading matter? -- albeit with the germ of a point that could be worked out more seriously (e.g., by humorless me...read on!). A host of readers have been delighted to take the bait, defending adult reading of YA and children's books with reasons many and good.  The best, of course, is sharing an experience -- often quite deeply -- with one's children. Also, it never hurts to connect with our inner child.  Then, too, teenagers are a great audience -- in a sense, the ur-audience -- for the internal angst that the novel evolved to express, so novels dramatizing teen angst often connect with readers of all ages. One Dish reader, a much-traveled businessman, adds that mega-popular series like Harry Potter click with huge numbers of people around the world and provide a basis for relationship.  Finally the best children's literature is high art indeed, evoking the passions, dilemmas, and quiddity of human experience as intensely as good literature for adults.

One forceful spokesman for children's literature was C.S. Lewis, a man who spent his life reading adult literature from the Iliad to Eliot (whom he professed not to understand at all), and who is probably better known for the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia he dashed off for children than for all his scholarship, religious polemic, and adult fiction.  Lewis's argument for children's literature was partly historical: the kind of fantasy and romance he loved was out of fashion in his time. He was suspicious of fashion in all things --and children, he suggested, were immune to it.  In "On Juvenile Tastes," noting that "specifically childish taste has been generally held to be that for the adventurous and marvellous," he argued there is nothing inherently childish in it: