Living Dinosaurs, Literary Specimens, and Misplaced Spectacles: Reflections on C.S. Lewis' Autoethnographic Instinct

Living Dinosaurs, Literary Specimens, and Misplaced Spectacles: Reflections on C.S. Lewis' Autoethnographic Instinct

Abstract one hundred seventy-five words

C.S. Lewis makes numerous attempts across his diverse œuvre to tell his life story. He uses poetry to frame his philosophical beliefs and religious doubts, writes himself into his fiction, narrates his stories and lectures with personal intimacy, and uses his own experience as evidence for his literary and theological arguments. What, then, of Lewis' literary theoretical work in The Personal Heresy, nineteen thirty-nine, which seems to set aside the individual poet when looking at their poetry?

Lewis' parables and stories that illustrate 'Two Ways of Seeing' provide an epistemological structure that bridges the divide between Lewis' theory and praxis. This paper argues that Lewis displays not only a tendency to be autobiographical but an instinct for what later anthropologists, theologians, and critics will call 'autoethnography.' This paper sets the context for autoethnography as an emergent discipline using the critical approach to literature and theology by Heather Walton and others. Lewis consistently offers a critique of modern scholarship that presents itself as a critical, distant, external study and turns to autobiographically integrated explorations of literature, philosophy, and religion-without falling into solipsism or displacing the text and reader in meaning-making.

Living Dinosaurs, Literary Specimens, and Misplaced Spectacles: Reflections on C.S. Lewis' Autoethnographic Instinct

The Sense of a Season: Lewis the Athenian Dinosaur

A snapshot of one season in an author's life can show us how life and work, always in flux, are intricately and curiously bound together. Let's freeze the frame of C.S. Lewis' life in the Autumn of nineteen fifty-four: He is at the height of his literary and scholarly career and undergoing a fundamental personal and academic turning point. As Lewis reframes his academic identity for the public, he also provides a rationale for an approach to scholarship that will later be known as autoethnography.

After nearly two decades of research and writing, in September nineteen fifty-four, Lewis published his magnum opus, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. In October, Lewis officially took up a newly designed Cambridge Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature after thirty years as an Oxford don. Known outside academia as a Christian controversialist and popular author with bestselling books like The Screwtape Letters, nineteen forty-two, in nineteen fifty-two, Lewis released his twenty-fifth book, Mere Christianity, a compendium of his WWII BBC talks on faith and life. By the autumn of nineteen fifty-four, his Narnian chronicles were mostly written and the first five had been released in successive years. While not an immediate bestseller, infused the fairy-tale form with his love of literature and his intimacy with Christian faith as the mythic core of human existence. His memoir, Surprised by Joy, was complete and awaiting publication in nineteen fifty-five. Soon, Lewis would begin what is arguably his highest achievement in literary fiction, Till We Have Faces, nineteen fifty-six. All through this season, Lewis was beginning to fall in love-an entwined process of loss and discovery that historians are unable to record in detail. After all, life and literature are implicated in intriguing ways, as I hope to demonstrate here.

When Lewis gives his Cambridge inaugural address on November twenty-ninth, nineteen fifty-four, his fifty-sixth birthday, his entire public profile pivots. Titling the talk 'De Descriptione Temporum' -'a description of the times' or 'a sense of the season'-Lewis does not simply present himself as an expert in period literature and culture, as one might expect. He goes much further, inviting the audience to view him not merely as a guide to Medieval and Renaissance literature but as a specimen of that culture. While a cultural chasm exists between Cambridge in the nineteen fifties and the Medieval and Renaissance canon, Lewis proposes that 'those who are native to different sides of it can still meet; are meeting in this room.' Lewis then claims to be one of those natives to the lands of the old Western texts. Making himself an antiquity is a kind of disqualification, for in this sophisticated academic age, no one wants 'to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur.' Still, would not the fellowship of the curious-presumably those in the room with Lewis-yearn for something a little more?

If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk, then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modern anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling.

Lewis goes on to admit that he would give much to hear even an unlettered ancient Athenian talk about Greek tragedy because 'He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modern scholarship had been on the wrong track for years.'