Book Review: The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis's Nonfiction Prose

The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis's Nonfiction Prose. By Gary L. Tandy. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009. ISBN 798-0-78338-973-0. Pp. xiii + 135. $39.95. In The Rhetoric of Certitude, Gary Tandy has produced a detailed study of the nonfiction prose rhetoric of C. S. Lewis. Considered as a contribution to the growing body of Lewis scholarship, this book's success is mixed. Mr. Tandy notes that a study of the rhetoric of Lewis is challenged from the outset in multiple ways. First is the size of the corpus--dozens of titles. Second is the number and diversity of the genre of those titles: literary scholarship, theology and apologetics, novels, poetry, children's fantasy, science fiction, essays, and letters. Third, and trickiest, is the seductive tendency of Lewis' writing to draw the critic away from matters of style into the substance of his arguments. Tandy addresses the first two challenges by determining to examine only(!) Lewis' nonfiction prose, encompassing the literary scholarship, the theology and apologetics, and essays. Even though this sub-set of Lewis' work is still substantial in size and quite diverse in audience, he considers that it is critical to a comprehensive assessment of Lewis' rhetoric to look for evidence of stylistic unity across a wide array of Lewis' work. Tandy states: Because of this natural separation of Lewis's prose into these seemingly exclusive categories, many critics have failed to recognize the essential unity of Lewis's rhetoric and have failed to identify those stylistic traits common both to his literary criticism and religious apologetics. (x) Tandy addresses the third challenge by simply refusing to be seduced by the content of Lewis' writing. Philosophers such as I consider this fairly odd, but Tandy has a job to do, and he sticks to it resolutely--to a fault, but that will be discussed below. This brief but loaded book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter, '"The Stance of the Last Survivor': C. S. Lewis and the Modern World," sets Lewis as a thinker and writer in the intellectual context of the twentieth century. Tandy states that Lewis viewed himself as a holdover from an earlier era, the Christian era, which Lewis thinks ended around the early nineteenth century. The first chapter sets this crucial perspective for understanding Lewis' work. Chapter 2 describes Lewis' theory of rhetoric, gleaned from his "comments about language, communication, and style in his nonfiction prose" (xii). This chapter includes a review of the basic categories of Lewis' theology and apologetic approach, because his view of rhetoric is so deeply entwined with his overall theory of language. In chapters 3 and 4, Tandy analyzes Lewis' practice, taking the reader through a fairly comprehensive catalog of rhetorical categories. In chapter 5, Tandy ultimately argues for the "essential stylistic unity of Lewis's literary criticism and religious prose" (xii). Three earlier books aim to analyze Lewis' prose: Chad Walsh's The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, Richard Cunningham's C. S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith, and James Como's Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis. All three are very good books with their own strengths, and Como, a professor of rhetoric at City University of New York, York College, has deliberately organized his book according to rhetorical categories. As far as offering an overall understanding of the excellence of Lewis' writing, ComUs brilliant essay is certainly a far more thoughtful contribution than Tandy's. Tandy's work, however, offers an extremely detailed and comprehensive basic rhetorical analysis, sticking painstakingly to that more specific and particular task. Thus, Tandy's volume has its clear contribution to make to the scholarship on Lewis. At the basic level of scholarship--the accumulation, cataloging, and marshaling of relevant primary and secondary material on the subject--Tandy's book is a significant resource in two dimensions. …