C. S. Lewis’s Laugh at Modernism: The St(r)eam of Consciousness in “The Shoddy Lands”

Abstract

Although C. S. Lewis wrote at a time when Modernism was in bloom, he highly decried this literary movement, clearly expressing his disapproval of the entire paradigm of that age. In the article “On Juvenile Tastes”, he claims that the contemporary literary world showed little concern with the narrative art, but more with literary novelties, a category in which he includes the famous technique of “the stream of consciousness”, which he critically nicknamed “the steam of consciousness”. Even if he never actually used this technique per se, he pretended to do so in the short story “The Shoddy Lands”, which explores the mind of Peggy, a very shallow character. The result is highly amusing and thought-provoking, showing in a literary manner his opinion about Modernism. This paper will analyse some aspects of the short story mentioned above in the light of the stream of consciousness technique and reveal Lewis’s intention in apparently engaging with this modernist psychological narrative mode.