In his essay “Hedonics” C. S. Lewis records being made uncommonly happy by the beauty of evening sunlight and the domestic scenes of people coming home from work. He points out that this pleasure did not force itself upon him rather it offered itself. Lewis says he accepted the invitation, but that there is a Jailer who is always forbidding such pleasures.
Like Lewis, I have read enough realistic modern fiction to know the “Jailer” he mentions. It is realism. It is what Lewis calls the “wiseacre” that points out the reality behind every vision of happiness. Realism tells us cute babies grow into smart-mouthed teenagers. It will remind us that about half of all marriages end in divorce and that half of the remaining marriages are unhappy. The guy celebrated as a hero today will be discovered to have a criminal record tomorrow. In the famous words of Holden Caulfield, “Everyone is a phony.”
This Jailer used to be my friend. I liked punching holes in the optimism of nauseating saccharine and mindlessly cheerful people. Realism would wink at me when someone naively said something stupidly optimistic. We enjoyed the inside joke. When we spoke of the American Dream it was always with irony—implying it was no dream but at best a delusion and at worse a lie. Just the mention of a “white-picket fence” was short-hand for a whole cynical view of American domestic happiness. Realism and I thought it was cool that there was a TV show called “Suburgatory”.
But like Lewis I have discovered that realism is a fraud. As Lewis points out, the common pleasures and “unreasonable happiness” we sometimes experience are also real. Lewis insists,” If we are to be realists, let us have realism all round.” Realism wrongly asserts that only the twisted is true and only the tragic real.
On fall Friday nights I can hear the high school band playing at the football game and sometimes even hear the announcer and crowd cheering when our team scores (evenings were quiet last fall). The sound of the game and coolness of the autumn night makes me happy as I remember watching my boys play football or listening to Peter play the drums in the band. Realism, or something uglier, will remind me of all the anxiety of watching your kid play and the trips to the hospital after concussions. And even worse, I will think about small town politics, bad coaching, and my boys not getting to play as much as they wanted. My nostalgic sigh can turn into a cynical sneer in a heart-beat. But the pleasure of the memory and moment is just as real as the negative stuff. Realism is our Jailer, not our friend.
Lewis proposes that we “knock the Jailer down and keep the keys henceforward in our own possession.” The ordinary pleasures and common wonders that encompass our lives are real, and they are ours. And literature that is sometimes called escapist may simply be giving us a reality our Jailer has forbidden. Here is Lewis’s solution:
He [the Jailer] accuses all myth and fantasy and romance of wishful thinking: the way to silence him is to be more realist than he—to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity which the literature that he calls realistic omits.
I now know the cynicism that empowered me to see through everything was blinding me to much that was good and real. When we protect ourselves from disillusionment by believing nothing, we are just as blind as those who see only the good. Cynicism not only numbs us to life’s pain; it robs us of its pleasures.
