Why Literature Still Matters, and How to Teach It Like It Does

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” begins with this remarkable introduction of Eustace because he is C. S. Lewis’ protagonist in this particular story. And by the end, Eustace (his name means good harvest) will be converted by the story, the gospel story, which, in effect, makes this a story about the power of story; it is literature about why literature still matters.

Unfortunately, there are many ways in which literature has been attacked, misrepresented, misused, avoided, dismissed, cancelled, treated as an ornament in the store window, or just turned over to utility, and it is perilous not to confront these attitudes toward literature. If we fail to realize its real usefulness toward moral sensibilities and fostering human flourishing, literature will not just become irrelevant. It will become a dangerous tool in the hands of postmodernist theorists.

Literature still matters because it teaches us what the real world is like, it provides us with some perspective on the flow of history, and it has the potential to strengthen the moral life of the reader. There are other reasons why literature still matters, but here I will focus on these three, and then conclude with some tips for educators on how to teach literature like it does matter.

Literature and Reality

C. S. Lewis’ friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, who was a notable author in his own right, explains that imaginative literature like Lewis’ Narnia series of which fantasy is the core, works toward something he calls recovery, “the return and renewal of health, the regaining of a clear view” of our primary world.¹

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman lives his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.²

Because it is easy for us to get caught up in the monotony of daily life and miss those important signs and features of reality, Tolkien says, “We need… to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.”³

While there are other, albeit more inadequate, means of cleaning our windows and regaining a clear view of our world, imaginative literature like Lewis’s Narnia series accomplishes this thoroughly. This type of literature animates our imaginations to teach us what the real world is actually like.

The modern world that Eustace had come to know through his “books on information” and his life under the supervision of Harold and Alberta is an artificial, faddish world characterized by minimalism and socialized institutions; it is cold and sterile and all the people are vegetarians, non-smokers, and teetotalers; and, instead of dragons, there are only dead beetles pinned on a card.

In contrast, we learn in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” that the world is often unpretentious and routine, then suddenly dangerous and stormy. It is a world where real friends are virtuous, forgiveness is necessary, and redemption is possible. It is a world where nobility is something to be desired, where people can be very different from each other in many ways, but all share the same way of celebrating—feasting with food and drink. It’s a world filled with many delightful gifts, but a world that is also filled with hard work, perilous adventures, and real, live, fire-breathing dragons.

The Flow of History

In his 1976 classic, How Should We Then Live?, Francis Schaeffer famously asserted,

There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind—what they are in their thought world determines how they act. This is true of their value systems and it is true of their creativity. It is true of their corporate actions, such as political decisions, and it is true of their personal lives. The results of their thought world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo’s chisel and it is true of a dictator’s sword.⁴

In The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” Eustace is lost when confronted with the harsh realities of the real world because he had read all the wrong books. He had read plenty of books on exports and imports and governments and drains but all those books were weak on dragons. He loved picture books with grain elevators and fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools, but the wonder of ancient treasure possessed by most boys had never fired, let alone forged, his imagination; he had no idea what dragons were or what treasure was for.

To gain this kind of historical perspective, a person must read what C. S. Lewis called “the old books.” Lewis says,

If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said… sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books… Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period and that means the old books.⁵

Lewis goes on to explain that the unfortunate thing about reading only modern books is that they weaken our guard against and increase our blindness to error. He says, “Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”⁶

Lewis’ words remind us that there is a body of literature, sometimes called the Great Books, or “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” and “a collection of things remembered” from which to draw so that we might think through the big ideas that have shaped the various ages of western history.

The reason so many young people today are being hoodwinked by bad old philosophies dressed up in modern garb, why so many so-called conservatives, even Christians, are surprised with the emergence of some of the watershed political movements like Critical Theory, or with the rise of petty tyrants, or even with things like gender confusion, same-sex marriage, and the most recent twists on racism is because as a society, we have not been reading the right books, the old books.

If this generation had been reading the right books, we would have known something about dragons and we would be little surprised by their behavior.

Dr. Scott Postma

If this generation had been reading the right books, we would have known something about dragons and we would be little surprised by their behavior. Additionally, we would have recognized the valuable treasures that have been accumulated in western society, and why it is important to conserve these treasures.

The Moral Life of the Reader

Finally, literature still matters because it has the potential to shape the moral life of the reader for the better. Though it is much debated—yay, even ridiculed—by modern literary critics, this belief has long been held by the classical tradition from Aristotle, who held that the mark of good literature was its ability to satisfy the moral sense, to Sir Philip Sidney who asserted that the poet “comes unto you, with a tale which holds children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue.” (Poetics, Book XIII)

Commenting on Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, Lewis explains in what way literature satisfies and shapes the moral sense (hint: it’s not in the way so many suppose). Lewis writes,

The respectable theory that poetry is ‘delightful teaching’ is here ready to slip into the manifestly absurd theory that the scenes and the persons of the poem are mere examples, in themselves as arbitrary and sapless as the symbols of algebra. But any such development is precluded by the whole nature of Sidney’s thought. If poetry does not ravish, it is for him nothing. The ‘Golden world’ which it presents must be set forth ‘in so rich Tapestry’ as Nature never knew, must lure us into itself. The images of virtue are no mere moralitas, no powder hidden under jam. They are the final sweetness of that sweet world, ‘the form of goodness, which seen we cannot but love’. The assumption that the ethical is the aesthetic par excellence is so basic to Sidney that he never argues it. He thought we would know.⁷

Literature still matters because it allows us to recognize forms of goodness that serve to order our loves. Even stories that we would argue are not “good stories” in their own right must interact with the grand story of God and the cosmos as it has been set forth by Him.

Dr. Scott Postma

In other words, literature still matters because it allows us to recognize forms of goodness that serve to order our loves. Even stories that we would argue are not “good stories” in their own right, stories that perpetuate a less than desirable worldview, are stories that must interact with the grand story of God and the cosmos as it has been set forth by Him.

Terry Eagleton, who wrote one of the most standard works on literary theory, asserts that “If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it seems to many conventional critics one of the few remaining places where, in a divided, fragmented world, a sense of universal value may still be incarnate; and where, in a sordidly material world, a rare glimpse of transcendence can still be attained.”⁸

Teaching Literature Like It Matters

In order to teach literature like it matters, educators must separate learning from grade achievement and instead focus on cultivating literary people. This is better accomplished—or at least there is more hope of accomplishing it—by removing the various contenders with and obstacles to the pedagogical authority of the text. This means that the teacher must also recognize and submit to the pedagogical authority of the text to the classroom. In Humane Education, Donald Verene wisely observes,

The dull teacher may have knowledge but not true language for it. Such a teacher can instruct but has not ability to delight or move, and thus is boring. The comedic teacher is shallow and a menace to the subject matter, because such a performer is a sham. The comedic teacher is a sophist and enjoys the success that the sophist often enjoys. The comedic teacher’s aim is audience satisfaction and often such teachers are the recipients of rewards. Neither boredom or comedy is sustaining for the student. The truth of the subject matter is what makes possible both the teacher and the student.⁹

The teacher must also approach the Western Canon by engaging it Socratically, as a body of things remembered, by asking good questions. To cite Verene further:

This Dialectic between the theoretical and practical is what motivates the discussion of the truth of the text or subject matter in humane thought. Socrates is the inventor of the question. The question opens up the subject. The starting points of thought are always metaphors. Thus in studying the text, the student should first be directed to locate the metaphors, the “root metaphors,” so to speak. The meaning of these metaphors becomes the subject of the question. What is held in the metaphor begins to be cognizable. One question leads to another because we are always ignorant of the shape of the whole.¹⁰

In a world of would-be literary assassins, literature still matters because it teaches what the real world is like, provides perspective on the flow of history, and it has the potential to strengthen the moral life of the reader. But for it to be effective, educators must believe literature matters in these particular ways and teach it like it does.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” in Tree and Leaf: Including Mythopoeia and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001), 57. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 59. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 58. ↩︎
4. Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 19. ↩︎
5. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014), 218–219. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 220. ↩︎
7. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century Excluding Drama, ed. Frank Percy Wilson and Dobrée Bonamy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 346. ↩︎
8. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 208. ↩︎
9. Donald Phillip Verene, The Art of Humane Education (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 23. ↩︎
10. Ibid., 27–28. ↩︎