I first came to Lewis through reading his Narnia novels, not in my childhood but in my twenties. While I enjoyed these books I wasn't that excited by them. I was very aware that he was a Christian apologist which at that time I did not regard as a point in his favour. But I have slowly come to see that Lewis has a sensibility well worth exploring and I have also come to appreciate the Christian cultural/spiritual tradition.
Lewis has a number of different facets to his work. The Mythic/Fantasy Imaginative works, Christian Apoligetics, Philosophy/Theology, Social Commentator and Literary Criticism and analysis. This last category of his writing I think is often overlooked now, partly because of the fame of his Narnia books and the rise in appreciation in the US particularly of his overtly Christian writing.
In recent times I have read two works of his literary analysis by CS Lewis "The Discarded Image" which explores the cosmological conception of the Middle Ages and how it appears in literature. And Now the "Allegory of Love" which is an exploration of Allegorical tradition of Courtly Love. Both books are impressive works of scholarship but also very engaging reads.
Lewis has said that when reading every second book should be an old one and one of the reasons for that is that by reading old books we discover a sensibility different from our own. If we could read books from the future they would serve the same purpose, unfortunately we haven't figured out how to do so. Sci Fi is possibly an imaginative attempt to satisfy that desire. Old books can let us see our own time with other eyes.
Lewis dedicated this book to fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield and a central strand of thought that he may have picked up from Barfield is that through literature we can explore the way consciousness develops. "Allegory of Love" explores literature from the Middle Ages and some things that we may regard as fundamental had not emerged, for instance the romantic love story that leads to marriage which now seems such a cliche. In Courtly love adultery was the norm and it is interesting to see the way a new mode of love hammers itself out in the imaginations of the poets. Whether they were leading or following the social trend I don't know, but in those works we can see the transformation.
Another interesting development that Lewis seems to be tracing is that of the expression of the inner life through literature, which first found expression in Allegory and Lewis focus primarily on the Romance of the Rose for this, where the different parts of the personality are depicted as separate personifications. Later he claims that it was possible to do the same thing more realistically. The Romance of the Rose Lewis claims is the most consistent and structural Allegory, the later works he explores use Allegory only in part, mixed with other modes of expression.
I'm not going to give a survey of the whole book which is rich in ideas, and I admit I was not able to digest it all, partly because I didn't have sufficient familiarity of the texts he discusses. But even so I was captivated by Lewis easy engagement with these works from the Middle Ages leading up to Spenser's Fairy Queen. That engagement drew me with him through all 450 pages. This book could well serve to generate enthusiasm to read these early texts.
It was also interesting how Lewis' familiarity with the Middle Ages is reflected in his Narnia books. The odd mix of mythologies, images, ideas lumped together that makes the Narnia books is stylistically typical of works from the Middle Ages.
Hopefully this will spur me to read Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida and the entire Fairy Queen other books discussed. It would be great to return to this book again when I am more familiar with the imaginative country it explores.
