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In general, readers of C. S. Lewis have not shown much interest in critical theory, and readers of critical theory have not shown much interest in Lewis. Yet as Terry Eagleton has observed, those who dismiss literary theory—or who claim they can get along without it—are usually in the grip of one theory or another without knowing it. And Lewis understood as well that we cannot grapple with the meaning of a particular text until we know what we mean by meaning.
Those who popularized the word deconstruction in the United States have not overlooked Lewis. In a famous review, J. Hillis Miller suggested that M. H. Abrams's landmark study Natural Supernaturalism was obsolescent upon publication, because it critiqued Romanticism using assumptions inherited from the Romantics themselves. Miller patronizingly linked Abrams to the "grand tradition of modern humanistic scholarship, the tradition of Curtius, Auerbach, Lovejoy, C. S. Lewis." The compliment was lost on Abrams, who responded with his essay "The Deconstructive Angel" (1977), one of the earliest and still one of the most incisive critiques of poststructuralist interpretive strategies.
C. S. Lewis would not have enjoyed the compliment either. Throughout a lifetime of writing, two words that nearly always connote something wrong-headed or distasteful in his books are "modern" and "humanistic." Yet Lewis's critical essays invite rereading according to another famous remark by Miller—that "all good readers are and always have been deconstructionists." The results of such a project might well surprise both Lewis's admirers and his detractors.
In exploring the current critical landscape, students of Lewis may wonder where he might fit in. The simple answer is that he is off the map. Lewis was a theist, a traditionalist, one who assumed that a text had meaning, and who even insisted upon universal ethical values. Yet Lewis said that the educated person "is almost compelled to be aware that reality is very odd and that the ultimate truth, whatever it may be, must have the characteristics of strangeness."1
Strange indeed is the experience I have had reading critical theorists of the past few decades. In the midst of grappling with Jacques Derrida on the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, one of the doyens of structuralism; Michel Foucault on social mores; or Roland Barthes on the novelist Honore de Balzac, I have had moments of thinking I've read this sort of critique before. And, strange to say, the echoes I was hearing came not from Friedrich Nietzsche or Ludwig Wittgenstein, but from the pages of C. S. Lewis.
My first example of dejavu comes from Derrida's critique of Levi-Strauss. Influenced by the theories of the great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Levi-Strauss inventoried 800 myths as sign systems on the analogy of languages, where meaning emerges from binary oppositions among signifiers. In the "Overture" to his four-volume Mythologiques (1964-71), Levi-Strauss announced: "I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of it."
Derrida seriously undermined Levi-Strauss's structuralist project in a presentation published as "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Derrida pointed out that the attempt to interpret the underlying structure of myths assumed an ability to stand outside interpretive structures, to free oneself from one's own cultural understandings for an objective view of culture. But one cannot transcend one's own cultural paradigms in order to study scientifically the nature of cultural paradigms. Derrida insists that we consider "the structurality of structure," recognizing that there is no absolute center, no fixed vantage point which is not itself implicated in the structure.
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