Surprised by Joy and the Menippean Solution

Abstract

The boarding school chapters of C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy have been criticized for their questionable veracity, uneven quality, and disturbing strangeness – not what readers of Lewis normally expect. Identifying Surprised by Joy as a Menippean satire responds to these criticisms and clarifies its message. Its digressions and disjointedness; its encyclopaedic, opaque, densely academic passages; and Lewis’s ambivalent responses to otherwise shocking, carnivalistic events contribute to a deeply unsettling narrative. These would be out of place in milder genres, but combined, they constitute many of the features that give Menippean satire its peculiar identity. On the surface, Surprised by Joy tells the story of Lewis’s reconversion to Christianity. Beneath the surface, Surprised by Joy is a critique of a constellation of ideas and values that Lewis considered threats to truth and intellectual freedom, as witnessed in boarding-school and adult life. The strangeness and harshness of Menippean satire provides an appropriate genre to communicate Lewis’s serious critique about what he believed to be a seriously problematic ideology.