Bruce W. Young					11th International Conference on Persons
Brigham Young University				August 8-12, 2011

Beyond Personality: C. S. Lewis’s Semi-Postmodern View of the Human Person

	It’s admittedly a stretch to call C. S. Lewis a postmodernist or even a semi-postmodernist.  Though the words postmodern and postmodernism have been in use since the early twentieth century, they took on wider circulation in their currently predominant meanings beginning in the 1960s and especially the 1980s—in other words, after Lewis’s death.1  Yet Lewis had studied and taught philosophy at Oxford and was aware of some of the philosophical currents of mid-twentieth century, including personalism (though only vaguely).2  More importantly for my purposes, even if direct connections and influences are absent or minimal, his view of human personality repeatedly anticipates some of the doctrines of postmodernism.  In this paper I will consider three aspects of that anticipation: Lewis’s theological discussions of personality; his ethical view; and his view of authorship, which in some ways is the most presciently postmodern element in his writings.  I will use as sites of comparison and contrast certain writings by Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes.
	Some postmodern thinkers appear to dissolve coherent personhood completely and make the person an illusion or a function of social discourse or at most a site within which culture or discourse or being itself operates.  Others, like Levinas, see the separate person as an essential aspect of the structure of being while at the same time arguing that the self is primordially dependent on its relation to what is other than itself.  In Otherwise than Being, Levinas proposes that the human person is not a self-contained or static entity and that its most authentic activity is not the maintenance of its own being.  Here to be a self is to be exposed to the other, in a condition Levinas calls proximity, sensibility, even maternity.  Exposure to the other is not simply to be aware of the other person as a separate entity, but to be exposed to the very core, to be passive in this exposure with a passivity that is beyond passivity.  Levinas thus presents something of the same challenge other postmodern thinkers have made to the coherent self, except that here the self is a site, not of anonymous discourse or being, but of ethical responsibility.
	Lewis doesn’t go this far and doesn’t use quite the same vocabulary.  Yet he does see the human person, not as a finished entity, but as an activity, as in process of being created.  Lewis and Levinas both start from the idea of separation, a separation that makes each person other in relation to every other.  At the same time, both emphasize a relatedness that not only does not obliterate otherness but that sustains it.  According to Levinas, the relation with the personal other arouses consciousness and, if welcomed, invests existence with ethical meaning.  “[A] truly human life . . . is awakened by the other” (Ethics 122), and a human being—the “I”—“is confirmed in its singularity” to the degree that it becomes responsible to others (Totality 244-45).  Lewis, in more obviously theological language, likewise emphasizes relationship along with otherness.  “Christianity,” according to Lewis, “thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body—different from one another and each contributing what no other could.”  Indeed, “the whole human race is, in a sense, . . . one huge organism” in which each person plays a vital role (Mere Christianity 185-86).  The ideal condition God aims at—the condition that makes a fully significant life possible—is an even deeper unity, but a unity that will increase rather than diminish individual identity.  As they are “taken into the life of God,” Lewis argues, “human souls . . . [will] yet remains themselves—in fact, be very much more themselves than they were before” (161).  “The happiness which God designs for [humans] is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other” (48).  God, it appears, “wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct” (Screwtape Letters 39).
	This condition in which distinct beings enter freely into relationship is at the root of what Lewis describes as being “beyond personality.”  “Beyond” here has a double meaning: either of moving on to something else, or of transforming one condition into a more authentic, transcendently real version of itself.  If what we now have is “personality,” we must move on to something else; or perhaps we are now persons only in a most rudimentary sense and must move toward true personality.  Lewis plays with both readings of the phrase “beyond personality.”  “To become new men”—that is, to attain the transcendent condition for which we are designed—“means losing what we now call ‘ourselves.’”  Yet “[t]he more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way . . . , the more truly ourselves we become.”  Alluding to his earlier discussion of the Trinity (in which Lewis sees both distinction and unity), he argues not only that there are “Personalities in God,” but that “[t]here are no real personalities anywhere else.  Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self.”  The solution to this paradox is that our current personalities have little to do with authentic selfhood; our personalities certainly are not (as we sometimes pretend) our own creations, nor do they express what is most genuinely unique and valuable in our natures.  “I am not, in my natural state,” Lewis writes, “nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained”—for instance, as the result of “heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires,” even of advertising or propaganda (Mere Christianity 224-26).
	This view has affinities with the postmodern notion of a self that is nothing more than a site in which discourse or cultural or biological or psychic forces or the structures of power are at play.  Yet for Lewis, this condition is only the starting point.  The self can become truly itself—it can acquire genuine personality—through a complete and willing offering of itself.
	In this idea of self-offering we are at a transition point between theology and ethics.  For Lewis, the scriptural injunction to “lose ourselves” refers both to our relationship with God and to our ethical relation with others.  Levinas refers to the injunction as well, giving it an almost exclusively ethical reading.  According to Levinas, “I am defined as a subjectivity, as a singular person, as an ‘I,’ precisely because I am exposed to the other.  It is my inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the other that makes me an individual ‘I.’  So that I become a responsible or ethical ‘I’ to the extent that I agree to depose or dethrone myself—to abdicate my position of centrality—in favor of the vulnerable other.  As the Bible says: ‘He who loses his soul gains it’” (Face to Face 27).
	“Losing one’s soul” or one’s “self” for Levinas means something like shifting one’s concern from one’s own being to the needs of others.  Thus, “The I, which we have seen arise . . . as a separated being having apart, in itself, the center around which its existence gravitates, is confirmed in its singularity by purging itself of this gravitation, purges itself interminably, and is confirmed precisely in this incessant effort to purge itself” (244–45).  This movement toward responsiveness to others (which also means accepting responsibility for others) brings the self to its significance as a singular being.
	Lewis too, sees human personality as coming into being in part through the ethical relationship with others.  Reflecting on the meaning of his marriage shortly after his wife’s death, Lewis wrote: “The most precious gift that marriage gave me was [the] constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant—in a word, real” (Grief Observed 18-19).  All reality, Lewis says, shatters the ideas to which we try to reduce it.  This need to be in relation with something other informs our relation both with God and with other humans: “I need Christ,” Lewis writes, “not something that resembles Him.  I want [my wife], not something that is like her. . . .  Not my idea of God, but God.  Not my idea of [my wife], but [my wife].  Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour” (65, 67).
	So far we have considered Lewis’s understanding of human personality from a theological and ethical point of view.  What it means to be a person, an individual self, is also an important issue in Lewis’s literary criticism and leads him to anticipate the later challenges posed by Foucault, Barthes, and others to traditional views of literature and authorship.
	In his essay “The Death of the Author” (1968), Roland Barthes asserts that the “author is a modern character” providing critics a means to block the endless interpretive possibilities of a text and imposing a kind of unity on a body of work.  According to Barthes, “the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; . . . explanation of the work is still sought in the person of its producer, as if . . . it was always, ultimately, the voice of one and the same person, the author, which was transmitting his ‘confidences’” (1131, 1132).  But this has never, Barthes says, been how “writing” actually works, for “writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin.  Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes” (1130-31).  Writing is essentially impersonal; language, not authors, produces texts.  Barthes proposes a shift from writer to reader, yet the reader too is a sort of empty space: “the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds collected into one and the same field all of the traces from which writing is constituted” (1133).  To read is therefore to provide a space in which writing can take place as an essentially impersonal activity.
	Michel Foucault, writing at about the same time as Barthes, agrees that “the author” is a problematic concept but, instead of exalting “writing” or “language” as Barthes does and granting them what Foucault calls “transcendental” privileges (“What Is an Author?” 141), he argues that discourse always happens within a concrete cultural context.  Among other things, cultural practices and understandings determine what it means to be an author.  Especially since the seventeenth century, he says, “the author” has been understood as the source of a work’s meaning, with the personality and biography of “the author” supposedly finding expression in the work and explaining its contents.  Yet this view is both historically situated (and therefore subject to change) and problematic.  According to Foucault, “We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author.  Discourses . . . would unfold in a pervasive anonymity” (“What Is an Author?” 148).
	Despite obvious differences, there are surprisingly significant connections between Lewis and these two French writers.  For one thing, Lewis agrees that the idea and function of the author have changed over time.  The author as the sole creator and owner of a text is a relatively modern invention, and to insist on viewing works of literature as the creations of this sort of author is a serious obstacle to understanding earlier literature.  Especially during the Middle Ages, Lewis says, texts were produced “by a process which is quite foreign to modern literature”:  “There is no question here of finding the single author, totally responsible for his work of art, and expressing his unique personality through it” (“Genesis” 36, 22).  Lacking the modern “ideal of originality,” writers of this period typically engaged in an activity of “‘touching up’ something that was already there” (36, 37).  Texts therefore are not so much self-sufficient units created by a single writer as they are the coming together of material from various sources.  At least when dealing with medieval literature, Lewis argues that we must set aside such notions as “the clear separation of one work from another and the clear unity of the individual author with the individual text” (22).  To a degree, Lewis favors taking this approach to all literature: “all criticism should be of books, not of authors,” he says (38).  He even questions the unity of individual books.  “Sometimes,” he argues, “we begin to doubt whether even the Book is a unit; when we are presented with something constantly retold, which never remains exactly the same in the retellings yet never becomes wholly new, it is hard to say where one Book ends and another begins” (38).  The “real literary units” of the Middle Ages “were ‘matters,’ ‘stories,’ and the like”—in other words, rather amorphous bodies of cultural discourse—“rather than individual authors” or even individual books (“What Chaucer Really Did” 30).
	Like Lewis, Barthes and Foucault locate the idea of “the Author-Book unit” (Lewis, “Genesis” 38) in the modern period, following the Middle Ages.  According to Barthes, the modern idea of the author was “produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages, influenced by English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, thereby discovering the prestige of the individual, or, as we say more nobly, of the ‘human person.’” In addition, “positivism” and “capitalist ideology” contributed to elevating the importance of “the author’s ‘person’”—the personality that originated, owns, explains, and expresses itself in a given work (1131).  Foucault notes that “there was a time when those texts which we now call ‘literary’ . . . were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author” (“What Is an Author?” 143).  He locates the change in the seventeenth century, when “‘literary’ discourse [came to be] acceptable only if it carried an author’s name. . . . [I]n our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author,” so that if a work is anonymous we insist on trying to discover an author and recreate his personality (“What Is an Author?” 153).  Now, Foucault says, “We ask authors to answer for the unity of the works published in their names; we ask that they reveal, or at least display the hidden sense pervading their work; we ask them to reveal their personal lives, to account for their experiences and the real story that gave birth to their writings” (“Discourse on Language” 153).  
	Yet as the status of the self has come into question, so has the status of the author.  Foucault anticipates that we will move past seeing texts as the creations and self-expression of authors and will see them as locations where the cultural activity of discourse takes place.  We will ask, in effect, “What matter who’s speaking?” (“What Is an Author?” 148).
	Through most of Lewis’s lifetime literary culture was dominated by the idea of the author as a creative being expressing himself in works that somehow belong to him.  Anticipating some of what Barthes, Foucault, and others would say, Lewis was consistent—from the 1930s to the 1960s—in critiquing this idea.  As early as 1932, he argued that literary texts and their authors must be viewed as historically situated and that we must avoid the “preposterous picture of the author as that abstraction, a pure individual, bound to no time nor place” (“What Chaucer Really Did” 27).  While modern criticism “loves to treat a work of art as the expression of an artist’s personality and perhaps values that personality chiefly for its difference from others,” Lewis recommends (in a lecture written in 1952) reading books “in the spirit of children” who “would not care whether two or twenty-two had written it” (“Hero and Leander” 58, 73)—an attitude that should remind us of Foucault’s question “What matter who’s speaking?”  In fact, in 1939, Lewis asked a similar question: “[A]lways, of every idea and of every method [the writer] will ask not ‘Is it mine?,’ but ‘Is it good?’ (“Christianity and Literature” 9).
	Especially during the 1930s, Lewis reacted against the idea that we read in order to come into contact with a writer’s personality.  In the book The Personal Heresy, Lewis proposed an “objective or impersonal theory of poetry” incorporating his conviction that imaginative literature does not “[consist] in self-expression” and that what literature presents to us “is not and never can be the personality of the [writer]” but rather a vivid sense of external realities (8, 98, 11).  The consciousness we participate in as we read does not even necessarily belong to a single writer, especially in works drawing on traditional language and poetic devices.  In reading such works, the consciousness we share is “not the consciousness of any single individual,” but a mode of consciousness made possible by various elements of culture and language (15).  Hence, the details of poet’s biography or temperament are not relevant to literature as literature.  What is important in literary experience is what happens to readers, not what it reveals about the author’s attitudes or state of mind (see 120).
	In “Christianity and Literature,” Lewis challenges the contemporary dominance of ideas of creativity, spontaneity, and freedom.  As the title of his essay makes clear, Lewis critiques these notions from a specifically religious viewpoint.  The New Testament as he reads it endorses imitation; “‘Originality’ in the New Testament is quite plainly the prerogative of God alone” (6).  Therefore, a literary artist should not aim at being creative but instead should try “to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.”  Literary criticism should not exalt spontaneity and originality; “and above all it would be opposed to the idea that literature is self-expression” (7).  Why?  Because one’s self—one’s “own temperament and experience”—“are of no value or importance whatsoever” except as a medium through which something of greater value may be conveyed.  The writer’s temperament and experience are not valuable simply because they exist and least of all because they “belong” to the writer as a kind of personal possession (8).
	Given the imperfect state of personhood, both writer and reader must be willing to surrender themselves as they are.  Though Lewis does not, like Barthes, view the reader merely as an empty space, he does assert that the reader must divest himself of—or at least suspend his attachment to—his individual history, biography, and psychology in order to experience a book as other: “We must,” Lewis writes, “empty our minds and lay ourselves open” (116).  But we do so precisely to become more than we are now.  Literature “admits us to experiences other than our own” (139); and it does so by allowing us to “become these other selves” whose voices and imaginations we experience as we read (139).
	Literary experience is thus closely tied for Lewis to what it means to be a self.  To be a self in the fullest sense is to be in relation to something genuinely other and to be willing to give up what one is now in order to be transformed into something richer and larger.  Literary experience at its best involves a similar openness to relationship and transformation.  “Obviously,” Lewis says in An Experiment in Criticism, “this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self.  But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it’” (138).  Literary experience certainly does not, for Lewis, involve a total or permanent annihilation of the self, for that would make the notion of experience itself nonsensical.  Instead, Lewis (like Levinas) uses the notion of transcendence: in literary experience, “as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do” (141).  Levinas, though with an ethical emphasis, views transcendence in much the same way: “Transcendence is the transcendence of an I.  Only an I can respond to the injunction of a face” (Totality 305).  In being for the other, the “I” can be beyond itself and yet remain itself, in a sense become more fully, uniquely, and significantly itself than it would be in isolation or in self-centeredness.  Lewis would agree that transcendence, in literary experience as well as elsewhere, occurs only when we come into relationship with something genuinely other than ourselves.
	As we compare Lewis’s views with those of postmodern thinkers, important distinctions must be made, especially ones having to do with the presence or absence of God and the ultimate origin and possible destiny of the human person.  Yet there are important connections, especially in their rejection of the self as the master and owner of discourse.  For none of those I’ve discussed are human beings simply individuals; in fact, for some postmodernists, there is no such thing as individual selves.  There is only “a series of subjective positions” or of spaces opened up by language or culture (“What Is an Author?” 145).  Lewis, by contrast, asserts the reality of individual selves, joining with Levinas in arguing not only that the self arises in response to others but that the self thereby becomes most truly itself.  That is part of what Lewis would mean by acknowledging that we are members of one another, or as he put it early on, “if we mean something, we do not mean alone.”  We have meaning as part of “the whole process of things,” a process that includes our relationship with others (Personal Heresy 30, 29).

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland.  “The Death of the Author.”  1968.  Trans. Stephen Heath.  Critical Theory Since Plato.  Rev. ed.  Ed. Hazard Adams.  Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.  1130-33.

Foucault, Michel.  “The Discourse on Language.”  1971.  Trans. Rupert Swyer.  Critical Theory Since 1965.  Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle.  Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986.  148-62.

— — —.   “What Is an Author?”  1969.  Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and sherry Simon.  Critical Theory Since 1965.  Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle.  Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986.  138-48.

Levinas, Emmanuel.  Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo.  1982.  Trans. Richard A. Cohen.  Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985.

— — —.  Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence.  1974.  Trans. Alphonso Lingis.  The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.

— — —.  Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.  1961.  Trans. Alphonso Lingis.  Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. 

Levinas, Emmanuel, and Richard Kearney.  “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas.”  Face to Face with Levinas.  Ed. Richard A. Cohen.  Albany: SUNY Press, 1986.  13-33.

Lewis, C. S.  “Christianity and Literature.”  1939.  Christian Reflections.  Ed. Walter Hooper.  Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967.  1-11.

— — —.  The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis.  Ed. Walter Hooper.  Vols. 1-3.  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004-2007.

— — —.  An Experiment in Criticism.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961.

— — —.  “The Genesis of a Medieval Book.”  Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.  Ed. Walter Hooper.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966.

— — —.  A Grief Observed.  1961.  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001

— — —.  “Hero and Leander.”  1952.  Selected Literary Essays.  Ed. Walter Hooper.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969.  58-73.

— — —.  Mere Christianity.  1952.  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

— — —.  The Screwtape Letters.  1942.  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

— — —.  Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.  New York: Harcourt, 1955.

— — —.  “What Chaucer Really Did to ‘Il Filostrato.’” 1932.  Selected Literary Essays.  Ed. Walter Hooper.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969.  27-44.

The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., Dec. 2006; online version June 2011.

Tillyard, E. M. W., and C. S. Lewis.  The Personal Heresy: A Controversy.  1939.  London: Oxford UP, 1965.