Book Review - C.S. Lewis's "On Stories"

Quarantine Reading Book 1: C.S. Lewis's On Stories. I picked up this book of essays about seven or eight months ago, started reading it around my birthday, and just now finished it up with all the craziness going on. This is a collection of 20 of Lewis's essays--none of which I had read before--and there were a few things that were impressed upon me.I'm not going to dive into what he thought was good or bad, but share some common thoughts and conclusions that Lewis seemed to arrive at concerning his own tastes, preferences, and larger trends in literature in general.

1. Concerning science fiction writing in particular and fiction writing in general: A theme that kept popping up is his distaste for the idea that a story is better if the premise is the same, but it's just more interesting if you set the story in another world or another planet. He says (and I largely agree with him) that this idea is garbage. If your story is set in another world, but it could take place here on earth, what, then, was the point of setting it elsewhere? He uses a relevant example from his day of setting a story on the moon. He contends that if the story happens on the moon, and is about a poor boy who wants to be a space station commander who is in love with the commander's daughter, you have largely told a story that could happen on earth, so why set it elsewhere? At first I disagreed with him, because I definitely focus on setting and place in my stories, so I felt the aesthetic enjoyment of the landscape is what the science fiction writer who writes these kinds of stories is hoping will make up for it, and that is entirely his point, the "story" must be original and enthralling to stand on its own and work, it does not matter if it's on Mars or Missouri. Although I never really write sci-fi (I've written 2 sci-fi little vignettes of sorts), I would have to agree with him on this point. (If you want to read one of my sci-fi stories, read on, I'll show you where you can find one.)

2. His preference for the "fairy-tale" story. Lewis really enjoyed the idea of suspended belief in fairy-tale and the "what-if" of the tale. To be more specific, Lewis says to make a good story worth telling-reading-writing, it must "be a series of events, but it must be understood that this series--the plot as we call it--is really only a net thereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something that is something other than a process and much more like a state or quality. (Lewis 25). I liked this analysis a lot, and felt that it was trying to make this abstract feel of a story that works into a concrete guide to at least consider as you write any type of fiction, but most importantly, fairy-tale and sci-fi.

3. He also spends time talking about the point of critiquing good literature in schools. His argument is that it might be dangerous to teach a classic piece of literature in a way that requires obsessive scholarship because it may thwart any appreciation or enjoyment a reluctant or less-critical reader might have of ever really enjoying it and wanting to read again. So he warns teachers to resist making students do too much critical analysis of good literature at least at the younger ages when you're trying to develop your students' tastes and appreciation for the literature. I agree with Lewis here a lot, and it agitates me to no end that in our school system we shy away from reading quality literature of age and lexile -ready stories and place validity on and incorporate crap texts that push a socio-political agenda, and to this point, the public system ought to be ashamed of itself--at least on its way of teaching literature. I'm glad Lewis more or less agrees with me in that with his argument here.

4. The last point he makes is specifically on academic writing on literature, i.e. - literary criticism. Lewis points out that more modern criticism seems to have the propensity to find things that the author of the review/criticism doesn't like, thinks was poorly done, etc. and focus on explaining why they didn't like it. He--and I do as well--contends this is stupid and lazy on the author's part because it's not looking at the literary function of the text and judging it from literary merit, but judging it on our preference or deference for/to it. This is pretty astute of him because we have always done this in the media and we attack things based on our like or dislike of it and not on intellectual merit. Our news and social media sites are wizards at this and it absolutely disgusts me. (And yet, here I am using facebook to tell you this.) Nevertheless, I wanted to have a bit of humility and a sense of humor to this and realize that we all could be more thoughtful, reflective, and circumspect of ourselves, and I'm absolutely horrid at this myself. So, it was a nice reminder for me to do better.