
It's Tuesday not Monday. Well, I took the day off. Lights are on the house, a door is painted, a new thermostat installed, a good days work, though it took a few hours to collect all the necessary materials. Step 10, to remind you, is to say - go see the movie, so I'm not behind.
Here are Lewis's last three observations of the unliterary reader. Lewis is trying here to give us an idea of how we can let a book simply be and not be used. It's interesting to note that Lewis doesn't equate literary with being "up" on the latest books, or literary in terms of academic degree. He does talk often about reading the right sorts of books as in this next observation.
3. Not only as regards the ear but also in every other way they are either quite unconscious of style or even prefer books which we should think badly written. Offer and unliterary twelve-year-old (not all twleve-year-olds are unliterary) Treasure Island instead of the Boys' Bloods about pirates which are his usual fare, or offer Wells's First Men in the Moon to a reader of the infimal sortsw of science fiction. You will often be disappointed. You give them, it would seem, just the sort of matter they want, but far better done: descriptions that really describe, dialogue that can produce some illusion, characters one can distinctly imagine. They peck about at it and presently lay the book aside. There is something in it that has put them off.
- My note. This was Lewis writing in the early 60's. How up to date these words are. My sense is that one of the challenges we have as adults, parents, and Christians, is to give children a love for words. But how can we if it is not in us? Well, we can expose children to good words. Many have tried to get me to read the Left Behind series. I have tried several times to see what it is about, but I get discouraged by the bad writing from the gitgo. (My other problem is the horrendous biblical interpretation in it.) The young people can't read Treasure Island, because they can't take the time with the words. How will they ever take time for the Word?
4. They enjoy narratives inwhich the verbal element is reduced to a minimum - 'strip' stories told in pictures, or films with the least possible dialogue.
- Two observations. First, maybe there is a renaissance in words with the popularity of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, and now Narnia. All these books are 'wordy'. Second, I hope for the film's sake that they narrate well. Lewis adds few visual connectors, mostly emotive ones.
5. They demand swift-moving narrative. Something must always be 'happening'. Their favourite terms of condemnation are 'slow', 'long-winded', and the like.
- Lewis's note: "It is not hard to see the common source of these characteristics. As the unmusical listener wants only the Tune, so the unliterary reader wants only the Event. The one ignores nearly all the sounds the orchestra is actually making; because he wants to hum the tune. The other ignores nearly all that the words before him are doing; he wants to know what happened next."
This is why, in reading Narnia, you pause at some of the descriptions Lewis makes about growing up, or feelings - they are part of the foundation that makes the text rich. There is something of a modern drivenness in his description. Always trying to find the Event. This is maybe why so many of our films today are so thin (maybe why George Lucas last three Star Wars were not as good as the first three) - they are merely props for the major Event - which is usually and technological pyrotechnics display in a battle. ( I hope the film doesn't make the battle scene in Narnia too big - Lewis didn't - but it would be so Hollywood.)
Enough for now.