Interpersonal communication is defined as a “distinctive, transactional form of human communication involving mutual influence, usually for the purpose of managing relationships.”73 The study of human relationships is at the heart of the interpersonal communication context. C. S. Lewis was clearly interested in the quality of interpersonal relationships. Several of his books, including The Four Loves, Till We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters, and all three of the books in his Ransom trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) include both implicit and explicit observations about the nature and importance of human relationships.
He not only wrote about interpersonal communication topics, but also loved the joy of just visiting with his friends. Lewis was known to close friends as a marvelous conversationalist with a wonderful sense of humor. His good friend Owen ←13 | 14→Barfield describes how Lewis liked to tease by playing insulting word games with his friends:
It was much more like a ‘language game,’ particularly so in the case of sarcasm. There the object of the game was to come as near as possible to formulating an insult as if it were intended, while at the same time choosing one which would be particularly telling if it were. He once carried this so far, or I was so stupid, that I thought it was meant; and, for a time after that (but this was rather in correspondence than in conversation) we would preface with a solemn rubric to the effect that “this is a joke.”74
Lewis seemed to take pleasure from the joy of conversation with his friends. Walter Hooper appreciatively recalls, “C. S. Lewis was the best listener I have ever talked with in my life. He was actually very interested in what you had to say.”75
In addition to interpersonal communication, Lewis made astute observations about small group communication, defined as “communication among a small group of people who share a common purpose, who feel a sense of belonging to the group, and who exert influence on one another.”76 The dynamics of what causes groups to form, stay together, and accomplish specific tasks through communication, are key elements of group communication study. As with applications of interpersonal communication, Lewis was ahead of his time when discussing group interaction. Although books with “group discussion” in the title were published in the 1930s, group communication textbooks that referenced social-psychological dynamics of groups emerged only after Lewis’s death.77
In noting a standard observation of contemporary group communication textbooks, Lewis knew that “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”78 For Lewis, friendship among a group of people, in contrast to friendship between only two people, adds a new dynamic to the relationships. The 1945 loss of his friend Charles Williams gave Lewis insights about the collaborative nature of friendship. As Lewis put it, “[I];f, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but ‘A’s B.”79 Lewis understood the dynamic of group interaction and the influence of individual members on the group. He adds, “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”80 The loss of his dear friend Williams (friend A) meant that he also lost observing the rich interaction between Williams and J. R. R. Tolkien (friend B). Without using the term synergy or referring to systems theory, Lewis illustrated a sophisticated understanding of group dynamics.
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His address “Membership,” given to the Society of St. Alban and St. Sergius in February 1945, is chock full of observations about the nature of groups, societies, organizations, and communities. For example, he makes a comparison between group membership and family membership with this observation:
How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense) precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable.81
Although he doesn’t use contemporary communication terminology, he goes on to describe the nature and function of roles, norms, and other classic group communication variables. Diana Pavlac Glyer’s award-winning book Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, masterfully describes how the Inklings literary group illustrates principles and practices of group communication and collaboration.82 C. S. Lewis was interested in more than speaking and writing; he was also a keen observer of communication in several contexts.
Applications of communication ideas and principles, as well as explicit observations about words, meaning, messages, and human behavior, can be found in virtually everything he wrote, especially his scholarly publications such as A Preface to Paradise Lost. His friends and colleagues, J. R. R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield, were both celebrated philologists and Lewis was a philological scholar in his own right. Lewis wrote, “This book has grown out of a practice which was at first my necessity and later my hobby; whether at last it has attained the dignity of a study others must decide.”83 This thesis sentence from Studies in Words, published in 1960 that evolved from a lecture series titled “Some Difficult Words,” offers evidence of Lewis’s life-long love of language and how words affect and reflect human nature.84 Lewis believed that through language we articulate our longing for joy and acknowledge objective truth. Therefore, a prime argument for viewing Lewis as a communication professor is both his “necessity” and “hobby” of thinking and writing about language and meaning.
Although Lewis wrote about words, meaning, and messages, he did not set out to develop a theory of communication. As noted earlier, it is unlikely that he studied contemporary communication theory—an area of study that has more fully blossomed in academia since his death in 1963. Lewis was known for applying principles rather than proposing new theories. Rhetorical scholar James Como suggests that when studying rhetoric, “[Lewis] had no grand theories and ←15 | 16→did not follow schools or invent intricate methodologies.”85 In fact, Como argues that Lewis “did not lend himself to rhetorical theory with the same characteristic thoroughness that marked his other reading.”86 Rhetorical scholar Greg Anderson chronicles Lewis’s rhetorical roots and reaches this conclusion: “The extant evidence shows that Lewis did take rhetoric seriously as a student but even more so as a young don.”87 Anderson additionally notes, “His focus was not so much on classical as on medieval and even modern rhetoricians.”88