Seeking an Enlargement of Our Being

A good friend of mine doesn't read fiction. Why, he asks, would I spend precious time reading about things that aren't true? Why would I get tangled up in a story that never happened? Why, he insists on knowing, should I get emotionally involved in some fictional set of circumstances when my own family's every bit as dysfunctional as Pat Conroy's?

C.S. Lewis, I suspect, answered the question best. We read literature, he said, because, "We seek an enlargement of our being."

If there's one thing I could change about myself, it's this: I want to be smarter. I want a better intellect. I want to know more, and I want to understand everything more deeply. All of us, I suspect, long at times to see from a different perspective. We want to reason with another's brain. We want to dream through some other imagination; we yearn to feel through a loved one's emotional grid. We want to get outside ourselves, to perceive the world through a framework other than the single, narrow one we've been given. As Lewis said, "We demand windows."

In his essay, An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis said that, "...this, so far as I can see, is the specific value of literature considered as Logos [the rational principle that governs the universe]; it admits us to experiences other than our own.... My own eyes are not enough for me," he continued, "I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough, I will see what others have invented."

Think about the best books you've read. Consider the experiences you had within their pages. Think about the characters you've loved and hated-from Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, to Ishmael and Ahab, to Holden Caulfield and Jane Gallagher, to Atticus Finch and Boo Radley.... What's the debt we owe to Mark Twain and Herman Melville and J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee? What have they added to our lives? Our thoughts? Our conception of what the world ought to be?

"Literary experience," Lewis said, "heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality...In reading literature," he said, "I become a thousand men and yet remain myself ... Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."

Richard Doster is the editor of byFaith, the magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America. He is also the author of two novels, Safe at Home (March 2008) and Crossing the Lines (June 2009), both published by David C. Cook Publishers. 

Sources:
An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1961.