C.S. Lewis vs. Roy Lichtenstein: On why the great books bore us

Strange as it may sound, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) hated cars. And newspapers. And zippers. Really.

What are for most of us the banal and indispensable necessities of daily life, were, for Lewis, icons of modernity. In a remarkable passage in Surprised by Joy, Lewis described the blessing of not growing up in the world of automobiles:

The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed ‘infinite riches’ in what would have been to motorists ‘a little room.’ The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space.’ It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten.

This was a big deal for Lewis, because it was this sense of “slow time” that touched on the very heart of his sense of vocation. He loved the metaphor of “atmosphere” to describe both what he was after as a reader, as well as what he wanted to create as a writer. He sometimes called it “climate” or “weather” or “landscape,” but it was the single most important thing that literature could do, and that which set it apart from every other form of serious human inquiry. We find him confessing in a March 1951 letter that he did not read novels “for the characters. It’s more that for me a novel, or any work of art, is primarily a Thing, an Object, enjoyed for its color, proportions, atmosphere, its flavor—the Odyssey-ishness of the Odyssey or the Learishness of K[ing] Lear” (Letters 3, 102).

Similarly, if a boy reads Fenimore Cooper, he speculated in his essay “On Stories”, he was not necessarily after danger and excitement, but rather elementally pure “story,” which he considered the most elusive and underappreciated aspect of literature: “take away the feathers, the high cheek-bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk, and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense, but that whole world to which it belonged… The one lay a hushing spell on the imagination; the other excites a rapid flutter of the nerves.” In contrast, The Three Musketeers, he loathed, because it was nothing but a string of action moments: “[it] makes no appeal to me at all. The total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book—save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather.”

When I think about Lewis’s desire to create such literary worlds, I cannot help but think, by contrast, of the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97). Although classically trained, Lichtenstein rejected traditional painterly conventions that he thought had become stale. Why pretend? And instead of the slow, world-building, multi-layered, atmosphere-rendering art described by Lewis, Lichtenstein gives us something we’re more comfortable with: those very automobiles, ripping through landscapes, obliterating space, and outrunning meaning. Like an old master, Lichtenstein painted monumentally on large canvases, but, unlike traditional painters, he intentionally adopted a popular style of representation, used for tabloids, advertisements, and comic books: the so-called dot-matrix system.

And armed with this popularizing technique, he set about to reform every major genre of painting: a weighty still life of a basket of fruit by Cezanne becomes, for Lichtenstein, a glass of water with lemon; Van Eyck’s warm interiors (like that in the Arnolfini Wedding), in which author proudly paints himself in a convex mirror, become vacant, clean Manhattan apartments, with mirrors, reflecting nothing; the traditional portrait becomes an image of some young woman receiving devastating news, while projecting a calm exterior; he also vernacularized Picasso and Jackson Pollock, who don’t look nearly so angsty when executed in the dot-matrix style.

But more to my purpose, look at his Whaam! Lichtenstein knew that old, slow paintings don’t move us: but amped up action exploding under the ironic gaze a detached observer, do. Lichtenstein frequently portrays macho men, expressing their primal masculinity by operating heavy machinery. His wilting females—frail, passive, emotional–also fit into the stereotypes of modernity.

Lichtenstein is often called a painter of “amplification,” but his persuasiveness comes from the fact that these displays of amped-up speed and force are consonant with the “metaphysics” of his backgrounds: this is, he gives a “cosmic imaginary” made up of empty space, in which bits of passive matter are moved by external energy into collisions in which objects breaks down and recombine. On the other hand, we have invulnerable, emotionally distant violent men, who speed through life and their melodramatic relationships with irony. If I’m right, Lichtenstein is the apotheosis of Cartesian dualistic modernity. His Whaam! is Charles Taylor’s seven hundred-page A Secular Age, reduced to an image.

And so, it’s of all the more interesting that we like him so much (I have an indelible memory of watching a single young woman walking out of an art exhibit with a print of an interior of an apartment to go hang on the wall of her minimalist Chicago apartment). By reducing the number of colors and the delicacy of balance, Lichtenstein gives us a landscape that reflects back to us only what our emotions bring (look at his Sunset). But, at the same time, his paintings feel so comfortable. They are so much more familiar than Rubens. In fact, when I show these paintings to my students, side by side—even my students!—they all admit that, although the Rubens possesses a noticeable complexity of figure and color and layers of background, it feels strangely “flat” and “dull” next to Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein’s paintings are plugged into an electrical outlet. And next to the glowing screen, Rubens seems dull. Like Mendelsohn next to Calvin Harris.

But back to Lewis.

What’s extraordinary is that every critic’s favorite word for describing this modern aesthetic—“amplification”—was used long before modernity, and, in facet, was considered the finest quality a poem or painting could possess in antiquity or the Middle ages. But for our pre-modern ancestors, “amplification” was different: it unfolded within space as opposed to within time. Amplification was not the increase of frequency in time—a hyping up, an acceleration of mass, a force, an increase of momentum—but rather the attempt to render a vision “full” or “ample,” generous, abundant, charged with a density, alive beyond any expectation.

And it is that aesthetic experience that Lewis was after in his reading. Indeed, in Surprised by Joy, Lewis continually uses landscapes to describe reading experiences, or reading experiences to get at landscapes. For instance, when living in Surrey, he learned not to compare landscapes but to love each in its particularity:

What delighted me in Surrey was its intricacy. My Irish walks commanded large horizons and the general lie of land and sea could be taken in at a glance… But in Surrey the contours were so tortuous, the little valleys so narrow, there was so much timber, so many villages concealed in woods or hollows, so many field paths, sunk lanes, dingles, copses… [To] walk in it daily gave one the same sort of pleasure that there is in the labyrinthine complexity of Malory or the Faerie Queene” (SBJ, 72).

And it is also why Lewis thought there was an “invisible wall” between us and our non-mechanized ancestors:

We must picture them growing up from boyhood in a world of ‘prettie epanorthosis,’ paranomasia, isocolon, and similiter cadentia. Nor were these, like many subjects in a modern school, things dear to the masters but mocked or languidly regarded by the parents. Your father, your grown-up brother, your admired elder schoolfellow, all loved rhetoric. Therefore, you loved it, too. You adored sweet Tully and were as concerned about asyndeton and chiasmus as a modern schoolboy is about country cricketers, or types of aeroplane (English Lit., 61).

We can see Lewis’s command of the tradition, the ease with which he half-heartedly tosses off a half dozen technical terms from the rhetorical tradition! But Lewis’s intuition is as keen as his ability to conduct technical reasoning: he feels that, for our ancestors, beauty was “slow” and “spacious.” They tried to arrest the incessant flight of time, to open hearts out into eternity. But we? We prefer Hemingway to Milton: speed, power, force, physics. And cars. And, definitely, zippers.