GK Chesterton and Alan Jacobs discuss fiction and literature

I am reading Alan Jacobs' The Narnian: the life and imagination of CS Lewis. On page 123 Jacobs has a very interesting comment on GK Chesterton.

One of Chesterton's most famous essays is an early one (1901) called "in defence of penny dreadfuls" – "penny dreadfuls" being what we might call "pulp fiction," but for adolescents. Apparently many cultural pedagogues of the time were exercised by the popularity of such "vulgar" stories and wished them to be replaced by genuine literature. GKC is half – puzzled and half – offended by this alarm. He has no wish to defend the dreadfuls as literature but he does want to defend them as "the actual centre of 1 million flaming imaginations." To Chesterton, "the simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personae, but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by careful comparison with Balzac." In fact, he continues, "literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." That is while we can live without Balzac, brilliant though he may be, the penny dreadfuls are actually vital to human well-being.

A mere ripple

C.S. Lewis, from his classic essay, "Courtly Love:"

Compared to this revolution [the invention of the "romantic species of passion" by medieval poets] the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.

Now that was a real, take-no-prisoners medievalist!

Bizarre news from the modern religion front

From the New York Times, news of an edition of the Bible annotated solely with C.S. Lewis quotations:

The Lewis Bible, available in cloth (18,000 copies sold since its November debut) or leather (6,000), shares a recycling genre with “A Year with C. S. Lewis,” a collection of 365 Lewis readings, which since 2003 has sold 200,000 copies.

The new Bible splices in quotations from Lewis’s books and unpublished papers. For example, in Genesis, next to the story of Noah’s drunkenness, appears an excerpt from a 1955 letter to one Mrs. Johnson. “One can understand,” it reads in part, “the bitterness of some ‘temperance’ fanatics if one has ever lived with a drunkard.” But, Lewis suggests, teetotalers are wrong if they write alcohol out of the Bible.

To the Book of Matthew, where Jesus denounces the outwardly but not truly religious, there is added a quotation from “Mere Christianity”: “How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious?” They are “worshiping an imaginary God.”

Mr. Maudlin became an evangelical Protestant after reading Lewis in college. “But you meet Mormons or Catholics, and their favorite author might be C. S. Lewis,” he said.

One can understand Mr. Maudlin’s worries about marketing Lewis, who habitually overshadows books he loved, like the Bible. The problem will only grow in May, when Lewis’s unfinished translation of the “Aeneid” appears, or in 2012, when C.S. Lewis College opens in Northfield, Mass.
“He would be uncomfortable if it were sold as a personality cult, or him as mentor or guru,” Mr. Maudlin said of Lewis, whose name looms larger than the word “Bible” on the book’s cover. “So we had to make it dignified.”