The wound of individuality

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

C.S. Lewis

Stories allow us to experience another person's pain, joy, love, struggles, passions, whatever. This is true of stories of all kinds, including those we find in movies, TV shows and even in conversations with friends or strangers. C.S. Lewis is speaking specifically of the stories found in great literature, offering us a clue as to why we study literature in high school and college classes. All stories work, but great stories work best.

What does Lewis mean when he says literature "heals the wound" of individuality? To be too self-absorbed really is something of a wound. Those who think only of themselves, their own wants and needs, do seem somehow unhealthy, somehow out of balance. Feeling compassion for fictional people isn't quite the same as feeling compassion for real people, but it is a start. However briefly, stories take us out of ourselves, while making ourselves better.

Lewis amplifies this idea in sentences that follow in the same paragraph.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.

I can be a boy wondering if he is bound for hell by taking a runaway slave downriver on a raft. Or a runaway slave wondering if he is making a terrible mistake by going downriver on a raft with an unreliable boy. I can be a girl wondering if the spooky, unseen man next door, whom she calls Boo, might cause her harm. Or the timid man next door wondering if that little girl might be worth venturing outside to save. And then I'm back appreciating what Lewis calls the privilege of being myself.

Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.

Literature allows us to eavesdrop on countless other lives, while viewing everything from our own unique perspective.

Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.