Imagination: Healing the Wound of Individuality
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Jack Lewis tells of the discovery of joy through the reading of Norse mythology. These stories had a power that his religion seemed not to contain. In time, he developed a concept of myth and fantasy which provided a corrective to carefully reasoned doctrine. Throughout his life he recognized the tension between imagination and reason. As a theologian he is often regarded as a careful and clever technician in the exposition of Christian belief. He himself called this mere Christianity. By his own admission and design this was a bare-bones, rational approach to belief. His purpose was to create space for imagination. By this, I mean, that he presented a defense for Christianity to demonstrate that belief is not an unreasonable position. Having done so, he says this is mere as in elemental or basic. The content of belief (doctrine) is left out. In typical Lewis' fashion, he describes this by resorting to an image:
| It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in... not a place to live in. (Mere Christianity) |
Imagination is the key to the inner rooms, and for Lewis, literature embodies imagination.
| Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more than when I do. (An Experiment in Criticism) |