Let’s try an experiment. Instead of evaluating the goodness of a piece of literature by its adherence to some sort of Good Literature Rubric that exists vaguely in our heads, we instead evaluate its goodness by the goodness of the people who read it.  What type of reader does this piece of literature attract? Are they careful readers who attend to the words on the page rather than to words they have heard other people say about the words on the page? Do they read because they value art for art’s sake, rather than for having something witty to say at their next social engagement? Do they listen to and discuss ideas with which they disagree because they want to be better citizens, community members, and Christians, rather than to stoke discord and debate? Do they seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful through virtue, wisdom, and joy?  In short: Are the readers of this text the type of people that we strive to be? If so, maybe it is indeed Good Literature.  

This is roughly what C.S. Lewis proposed some sixty-odd years ago in An Experiment in Criticism, when he challenged literary critics to define “good literature” by measuring whether it enables a reader to see something numinous or sublime, rather than by whether it aligns with current literary fashions or cultural critiques. Crucially, this type of criticism centers the reader, rather than the writer. According to Lewis, “the same book can be merely an exciting ‘yarn’ to one and convey a myth, or something like a myth, to another.” Referencing the adventure stories of Sir Henry Rider Haggard (author of King Solomon’s Mines), Lewis writes that two readers of the same novel may have fundamentally different experiences: “Where one finds only danger for the heroes, the other may feel the ‘aweful’. Where one races ahead in curiosity, the other may pause in wonder.” Even through a popular adventure novel, a literary reader “will still be aware of reaching through Haggard something which is quite incommensurable with mere excitement.”* 

I have just finished reading and discussing Lewis’s Experiment with a group of college upperclassmen taking literary theory. Literary theory is probably the most alienating class a literature student can take. It’s full of French theorists using phrases like the perception-consciousness system and untranslatable French words that the theorists just invented, so now we all must manage différance and concentrantionnaire whether we like it or not. We use words like post-structuralism and simulacra as we attempt to understand and evaluate the literature that has shaped us and that we shape in turn. We twist ourselves into knots trying to identify what counts as literature and why, and what should. 

But often, beneath the jargon and the theoretical arguments, we’re really just trying to answer the same basic question: what books are worth reading and why? It’s the same questions we’ve been asking since Socrates’ critique of poetry in Plato’s Republic. And I think that Lewis offers at least the beginning of an answer.  What if, instead of assigning value judgments on literature based solely on our opinions on it, we sit down and genuinely listen to the opinions of those who think that a given piece of literature is good. Why do they think that it is good? Does it help them be good? Does it guide them toward God and truth? If it does so for them—even if we can’t quite make it do so for ourselves—maybe we should resist the siren call to label the work “bad literature.” Maybe the problem isn’t that the work of literature is bad, but that we are doing a bad job of reading that work of literature. 

*All quotes are from C.S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge UP, 1992, pg. 48).