Literary Study

The Discarded Image

The-Discarded-Image-Lewis-C-S-9780521477352Have you ever wanted to escape your time? Most of us read at least partly to do just that. But our efforts are limited by something we can’t easily escape: our own minds, so steeped in the spirit of the age, so conditioned by present day knowledge and perspective. We may venture into works from the distant past, but we bring our modern perspective with us. It shapes our understanding of what we read.

But suppose we encounter a true expert — someone deeply and broadly knowledgeable about the period out of which the work we’re reading comes? And suppose this true scholar takes the time to sit down with us and explain the ways the perspective of readers and writers of the past differs from our own?

That’s what C.S. Lewis does in The Discarded Image, his last book, and probably the most scholarly in his canon. I’ve read his fiction for children and adults, and I’ve read the majority of his writings in popular theology. But Lewis was a classicist, and I’ve always wondered: if he speaks so compellingly in these areas outside his field of expertise, how does he sound when he’s in his sweet spot?

The Discarded Image provides the answer. Not being a medievalist myself, I found this “introduction to medieval and Renaissance literature” quite challenging because of the dense thicket of literary allusions. I’m more familiar with the literature of the Renaissance than of the medieval period, and Lewis ranges widely and deeply among the writers of both eras. But I found that I gathered momentum as I went along, getting better at harvesting the insights without having read all the works.

Lewis speaks with the easy confidence of someone who has studied long and pondered much. He identifies the major writers, examines their qualities of mind and writing, and traces out their influence among various literary descendents. He navigates the intricate map of inter-textual dialogue and allusion with steadiness and patience. Above all, he resurrects for us a faithful model of the medieval mind in all its uniqueness. It was a mind that conceived of science, history, theology and the cosmos in a tightly organized, connected, coherent way. Everything had a place within the overall unity. It gave rise to totally different attitudes and feelings about human life.

In the literature of the age (which is the book’s main concern), Lewis contends that both dullness and humility grow from this same root. Because medieval authors loved this model of the universe, they frequently retraced familiar ground by taking it as their subject. But because they located the world’s meaning and significance outside of themselves in the great structure of which they were a part, they weren’t self-focused in the way later works become through what Lewis calls the “great process of Internalisation which has turnedĀ geniusĀ from an attendantĀ daemon into a quality of the mind. Always, century by century, item after item is transferred from the object’s side of the account to the subject’s.”

The one problem with this model is that it was not true, Lewis concedes. But he goes on to point out that all of our successive models are constructs that provide only an incomplete account of total reality. Nevertheless the medieval model is fascinating to study, ordered and aesthetically beautiful. “I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors,” Lewis writes. “Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree.”

These pages offer a small but truthful glimpse, and it made me wistful for a mind furnished in such a way as to make every one of Lewis’s allusions familiar and meaningful. I doubt that I have the time and mental space at this stage of my life to dig deeply into Dante and Chaucer, but this book made me want to. There must be something stabilizing about letting the imagination graze in literature that holds so firmly to an ordered, richly populated universe.

In any case, this is an excellent book if you are interested in the subject and willing to work. As I read it, characteristics of Lewis’s fictional universes came to mind (especially those of the space trilogy). I could see that his imagination had seized at times upon medieval materials in his own craft. The opportunity to supplement my perspective on Lewis through The Discarded Image is sure to enrich further reading of his books.

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