Читать книгу C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication - Steven Beebe - Страница 24

The fourth communication principle, that effective communicators are evocative, involves getting messages out of the reader or listener, stimulating both their hearts and minds to help them discover meaning. To evoke is to elicit, awaken, arouse, induce, and stimulate. C. S. Lewis used a variety of communication techniques to evoke images and emotions from his readers and listeners. Lewis knew that people are more likely to believe “data” drawn from their personal experiences, rather than to rely on the descriptions of others. Chapter 7 discusses Lewis’s methods for evoking a response, especially an emotional response, from his readers and listeners.

How does Lewis evoke emotional meaning? He describes a situation for the reader or listener rather than tells someone how to feel. The key to evoking a response is not to tell someone what to feel, but to paint a picture with words so that the reader or listener experiences his or her own emotional reaction. Lewis once suggested that he didn’t consider himself effective at making strong, explicit emotional appeals to listeners, such as making an emotion-infused, impassioned plea to persuade others.¹³² He would not, he said, be good at using strong emotional appeals to make successful “alter calls” in a religious service.¹³³ He did, however, effectively describe emotion-evoking situations by telling stories, using illustrations, and creating visual metaphors that resulted strong emotional responses from his readers and listeners. His best-selling Narnia series is successful, in large part, because it connects emotionally with readers. Lewis called the evocation of emotional response a “surprisingness.” The story of Aslan and other characters does more than tell a tale; it creates an emotional response that we want to experience again and again as we re-read the Narnia books.

When reading a book a second time we already know what will happen in the story; we re-read to experience the emotion of the story. We re-read a book or may see a favorite movie again and again not to be surprised by what will happen, but to evoke an emotional response to the story. Lewis suggested that an author or speaker should not tell someone what to feel, but rather, set the stage and create a scene that evokes a response.