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his literary attack against Tillyard by means of what he calls the shared imagination. “It is his business, starting from his own consciousness; whatever that may happen to be, to find that arrangement of public experiences, embodied in words, which will admit him (and incidentally us) to a new mode of consciousness.”⁵⁵ Sound rhetorical theory is audience-centered; it seeks to describe reality in a way that one’s audience comes to see and to be persuaded by the author’s argument. To do this well the author should know something of the hearer’s point of view. He or she appeals to experiences and values that are shared between them and draws on these to make a point. “The common world with its nights, its oaks, and its stars, which we have all seen, and which mean at least something the same to all of us, is the bank on which he [the author] draws his checks.”⁵⁶ An appeal is made by means of these common experiences. Then the author, utilizing these shared experiences, seeks to go beyond what was previously known by author or reader. This could hardly be an expression solely of the state of the author’s own mind.

       5. THE AUTHOR’S ROLE AS A WINDOW

      Lewis suggests that the author’s role is a window through which the reader sees the world depicted in the story.⁵⁷ “A poet does what no one else can do: what, perhaps, no other poet can do; but he does not express his personality. His own personality is his starting point, and his limitation: it is analogous to the position of a window” and, as Lewis reminds his readers, “windows are not put there that you may study windows; rather that you might forget windows. And if you find that you are forced to attend to the glass rather than the landscape, then either the window or your eye is faulty.”⁵⁸ One looks through the window to see beyond it into the garden. Similarly, one looks through the author’s eyes to see the story depicted. It is the story to which the reader ought to attend, not to the author.

       6. THE PROBLEM OF EMBELLISHMENTS

      Here’s another objection Lewis has to Tillyard’s position. An author often “proceeds … partly by following the tradition of his predecessors, but very largely by the method of trial and error; and the result, when it comes, is for him, no less than for us, an acquisition, a voyage beyond the limits of his personal point of view, an annihilation of the brute fact of his own particular psychology rather than its assertion.”⁵⁹

      For Lewis, literary embellishments occur when an author builds his story on stories that came before. How should one distinguish between an author’s voice and the voices of those from which the author has drawn? For example, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, how would one distinguish between Shakespeare and Homer’s Odyssey from which Shakespeare borrowed? Or Virgil’s, when he wrote the Aeneid? Or Boccaccio’s when he wrote The Decameron? This point is made over and over in Lewis’s work on the nature of embellishments—see The Discarded Image,⁶⁰ “The Genesis of a Medieval Book” and “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” both in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature;⁶¹ and in “What Chaucer Really did with Il Filostrato” from Selected Literary Essays.⁶²

       Conclusion of Lewis’s First Objection to Tillyard

      Lewis acknowledges that both Gnostic and materialist approaches to literature are destined to be faulty. The Gnostic (or hyper-spiritual) approach to literature seeks a meaning that is most likely a projection; the author paints a “Thus saith the Lord” across his or her opinions, making the projection equal to the word of God. Who could ever argue against someone who is convinced his ideas are equivalent to the word of God?

      Also, Lewis believed, that “the typical modern critic is usually a half-hearted materialist.” The materialist “thinks that everything except the buzzing electrons is subjective fancy … because outside the poet’s head there is nothing but the interplay of blind forces. But he forgets that if materialism is true, there is nothing else inside the poet’s head either … there is no foothold left for the personal heresy.”⁶³ He adds, “You cannot have it both ways. If the universe is meaningless, then so are we; if we mean something, we do not mean alone. Embrace either alternative, and you are free of the personal heresy.”⁶⁴

       Tillyard’s Response

      In any argument, to define one’s terms is wise. It removes ambiguity and the risk of equivocation. In responding to Lewis, Tillyard does this very thing. He defines his use of words such as “personal” and “personality” to add clarity to his side of the debate.⁶⁵ Then Tillyard says that “Mr. Lewis implies that ‘personal’ as a critical term includes every accident however trivial connected with the author. No one can complain that he does so, but I should guess that not a few supporters of the ‘personal heresy’ would simply ignore such trivialities in their conception of personality. They would attach them to the sphere of literary gossip, not to that of criticism.”⁶⁶

      Here Tillyard does not represent Lewis fairly. He presents a straw man argument, trivializes Lewis’s point, and then dismisses it. Certainly, it is not always easy to accurately represent an opponent in a debate. As Lewis’s friend and fellow Inkling Charles Williams observed, “Not one mind in a thousand can be trusted to state accurately what its opponent says, much less what he thinks.”⁶⁷ Tillyard continues, “Of course Mr. Lewis does not confine ‘personal’ to the trivial or accidental sense. He grants that it is possible through poetry to come into contact with a poet’s temperament in the most intimate way. The reader shares the poet’s consciousness.”⁶⁸ Tillyard turns Lewis’s words around, suggesting that Lewis grants Tillyard’s point when this has not been the case at all.

      Concerned that terms such as personal and personality ought to be properly defined, Tillyard then introduces the term “normal personality” and suggests a definition that can only be construed as ambiguous. He writes that “by personality or normal personality I do not mean practical or everyday personality, I mean rather some mental pattern which makes Keats Keats and not Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones.” What Tillyard means by practical everyday personality is not made clear so as to distinguish it either from “normal” or that “which makes Keats Keats.” He further muddies the waters by saying of Keats that his is “a remarkable personality.” And in a failed attempt to clarify further he adds that Keats is “someone whose personality impresses us.” By what standard does Tillyard judge that a personality is remarkable or impressive, or distinguishable from “normal”? Tillyard seeks to press his defense. He argues that an author’s style points to “the function of personality in poetry” and argues that “‘style’ readily suggests the mental pattern of the author, the personality realized in words.”⁶⁹

      Here it appears a point is scored for Tillyard’s side—until he presses the point too far and the argument unravels. He seeks to apply this as a defense against what Lewis wrote about translations, where multiple authors, styles, and personalities may be represented in the text. Tillyard compares translators to artists whose paintings or sculptures are attempts to “translate” some original to canvas or marble. He suggests something of the author’s personality is not merely preserved, but is the only thing worth critical analysis. At this point, the reader begins to think Tillyard would be better served if he yielded rather than continued to defend what looks to be indefensible. Literary style does distinguish one author or artist from another. This is a fact in evidence when comparing texts or works of art with others. Tillyard’s case is not made because the work of art is not merely reflective of the personality of the artist. Tillyard seeks to make a definitive statement—the text is the expression of the writer’s personality—rather than an indefinite one, i.e., that a

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