Most people who discuss art try to define a universal concept of good that’s present in some works of art and absent in others. People who like art that’s good have good taste. People who like art that’s ‘bad’ have bad taste.
In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis flips the paradigm: what if, he asks, instead of trying to gauge taste by starting with a concept of goodness in art, we begin by identifying people who are good consumers of art, and define good art based on what they like?
What are the characteristics of good consumers of art? Fundamentally, good consumers are those who engage with a work of art deeply and wholeheartedly, and who are open to ‘receiving’ whatever art has to communicate, as opposing to ‘using’ art for some pre-defined purpose of their own (including self-improvement, status, entertainment, or vicarious sentiment). In contrast, but consumers exhibit these behaviours (Lewis focuses mainly on reading):
They almost never read anything that’s not narrative.
They don’t pay any attention to rhythm and melody: as Lewis puts it, they read exclusively by eye.
More generally, they are unconscious of style. They don’t pay attention to the richness of description, or the realism of dialogue, or the depth of the characters.
They dislike the verbal element — for example, they prefer films with as little dialogue as possible. (I am not sure I agree with this. Lewis suggests bad readers prefer ‘strip’ stories told in pictures, but in fact, comic books are heavy on dialogue. Some excellent comic books that feature no dialogue at all are, in fact, less attractive to casual readers, because they require much more attention to understand what is happening. (More generally, though Lewis is very much anti-snob through the book, he condemns comic books. To be fair, I suppose the comic strips of his time were dire.))
They want fast-moving narratives, and dismiss anything that does not provide that as slow and long-winded.
According to Lewis, all these stem from an impulse to ignore what the words on the page are doing: the reader just wants to find out what happens next. This is where we start being able to determine what’s good art based on the behaviour of the consumer: art that is made better upon inspection is good. Art where closer inspection has nothing to offer, and in fact, starts detracting, is bad: bad art does not lend itself to deep engagement. A poorly-painted seascape might appeal to a bad consumer, because they will not pay close attention to the technique: they will use it as a springboard to imagine themselves at the seaside, or to dream of adventures at sea, and that will be sufficient for them. But a good consumer of art will pay attention and will notice imperfections and that will prevent them from enjoying the work.
(There is a tendency in our days to conflate all senses of the word ‘good’: we like to praise or condemn unequivocally. Lewis makes it clear that ‘bad’ ways of consuming art are not morally inferior. There is nothing wrong with being moved by a book that reminds us our childhood; but it is unliterary, because if we only enjoy art because of how it connects with us, we are using it instead of receiving it: we are not open to transcendent experiences.
In fact, Lewis also makes an argument against a tendency to conflate different concepts of good in a different context: he criticises those who
admit no such realm of experience as the aesthetic. There is for them no specifically literary good. A work, or a single passage, cannot for them be good in any sense unless it is good simply, unless it reveals attitudes which are essential elements in the good life.
This is spot on, and something we should heed more. In today’s world, we have an impulse to censor anything with which we disagree, regardless of how well it’s made. In fact, the concept of ‘canceling’ means we censor work even if it in itself is inoffensive: if its creator is bad, then it must be bad too.)
To be clear, good consumers of art can share some characteristics with bad consumers. They too can consume art with excitement and curiosity, and feeling — in fact, it is essential that they do. The difference is that they receive what art has to offer them, instead of choosing art that meets a specific pre-defined purpose. This is why, for instance, good readers do not demand a happy ending to a story (unless the story requires it (Lewis here makes the astute point that unhappy endings can jar a good reader if they are contrived. This is a common pitfall of much prestige TV.) A bad reader will be disappointed by anything other than a happy ending, because they are looking for it: they are not open to the story unfolding in its own way.)
All this makes sense. In many ways, Lewis’s argument is similar to the one I’ve been grasping at, only more fleshed-out and well-articulated: there is no such thing as good and bad taste — there’s taste (‘discernment’ might be a better word for it), and absence of it, in the same way that ‘darkness’ is absence of light, instead of an independent entity. But there are two issues with his thesis: the first is that he never quite succeeds in defining the purpose of ‘good reading’; and the second is that his view makes it almost impossible to say that any particular work of art is objectively good or bad.
As mentioned earlier, the fundamental difference between a good and bad consumer of art is that the former receives art whereas the latter uses it. A bad consumer can only find in art what’s already in them, and can therefore never exceed their own limits. But it’s hard to make sense of this in practice: beyond the obvious deconstructivist argument (everything is parsed through our own subjective experience; there is nothing without), the question that arises is, receiving art to what end? And besides, so much art is explicitly moralistic or emotional: the intent of the artist is to instruct, to make political arguments, to soothe or to disturb. Lewis writes
[novels or poems] are complex and carefully made objects. Attention to the very objects they are is our first step. To value them chiefly for reflections which they may suggest to us or morals we may draw from them, is a flagrant instance of ‘using’ instead of ‘receiving’.
But if you don’t read Vanity Fair, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, or War & Peace as (at least among other things) social, political, and historical critiques, then you’re not reading them as they’re meant to be read. While I get Lewis’s point that these works should be appreciated aesthetically as well, and while one shouldn’t read these books because they expect to agree with their theses, I think it’s wrong to suggest that to read books in search of moral instruction is unliterary. More generally, Lewis spends more time on bad reasons for reading than good reasons. The closest he comes to that are the following passages:
I have rejected the views that literature is to be valued (a) for telling us truths about life, (b) as an aid to culture. I have also said that, while we read, we must treat the reception of the work we are reading as an end in itself.
[…]
The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. […] We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.
[…]
Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three.
[…]
This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own.
But to me, this also sounds as using literature: perhaps not in a shallow way of reading to confirm existing thoughts, or to bring to the surface feelings associated by our own memories (and triggered by what we’re reading), but using nevertheless. And it feels to me that the sort of reading suggested by Lewis is done by people whose own experience of the world is never sufficient:
[The unliterary reader] inhabits a tiny world. It it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison.
I counter that the man who is content to be himself is happy; more, the man who is content to be himself is wise. Lewis himself rejects reading as escapism as unliterary, when escapism is defined as casting one’s self as the hero in an imaginary world. But reading so as to experience a different self is also escapism, and it feels strange to consider self-sufficient readers as unliterary.
My second objection is that Lewis is equivocal on what (if anything) can be called bad art. Throughout the book, he offers several examples of badness: for example, metaphors that confusing instead of evocative are bad (‘the planets were rolling in their liquid orbit of light’); prose that is jarring when read out loud is bad (‘the relation between mechanisation and nationalisation’); cliches are bad; writing that is neither too sparse nor too detailed, but straddles a dull middle, just enough to excite the imagination, but not sufficient to limn an accurate image for the reader, is bad; and so on. But then, towards the end of the book, he says
We must, therefore, say that what damns a book is not the existence of bad readings, but the absence of good ones. […] The ideally bad book is the one of which a good reading is impossible. […] In calling the book bad we are claiming not that it can elicit bad reading, but that it can’t elicit good. This negative proposition can never be certain.
This strikes me as overly generous. I get the point he is making: yes, an attentive reader might find a nugget of beauty or wisdom in even a terrible book or film; is that enough to redeem it? I think it’s fair to ask that we give every work of art we consume a fair chance, and that we don’t dismiss anything out of hand, but I think we can take goodwill too far.
This is why my own view is that while we should avoid claiming a work of art is absolutely good or bad, we should evaluate it in specific ways. One such way I proposed in my previous post is whether the work of art succeeds in the artist’s intention. Wooden dialogue is not necessarily bad acting, if the director’s and actors’ intention is to jar or to alienate (see Lanthimos’s films (though one can question whether the intention itself is sensible)); but if the intention is verisimilitude, and passion, then flat dialogue is clearly bad, and the fact that a viewer may still find something worthwhile in it doesn’t absolve it.
Where does all this leave us? I don’t think Lewis’s experiment gets us to a definitive answer to what makes for good or bad art, but it does get us a little closer: it does suggest that things that benefit from more contemplation are better. And it does serve as a reminder to pay keener attention to the art we consume.