It took two hundred thousand years for man to develop the written word, another five thousand years to mass-produce it, and one generation to forget it.
It took two hundred thousand years for man to develop the written word, another five thousand years to mass-produce it, and one generation to forget it. Who, in the popular imagination, reads books anymore? Weirdos, academics, good students, hipsters, and the lonely—or so the narrative of definition goes. But literature, which made our civilization as much as its working and political classes did, should not continue its decline. For the last sixty years many writers have talked about “the death of literature” how they used to talk about “the death of God.” It was, for a time, the philosophical vogue. Where it was a vogue, it is now a reality. No one reads anymore, not even the people you see everyday with their faces tucked in a book, slowly picking their way across the pages. They might engage in an act of conspicuous intellectual consumption, or an act of ritual culture; but they are not reading, they are miming what they think reading looks like. To really read is to love as though it were a science.
Where literature declines, so the decline of humanism follows. The political founders of America were all literati. Indeed, even the fundamental tenets of our Constitution are literary in nature. They are “ratified,” they are “speech acts.” The Founders spoke the legal structures of our federation into authoritative being; they did not drag them up from the wilderness, fully-formed.
There was a time, in culture, when to be a man meant to be a reading man as much as a gentle man or a handy man.
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The First Amendment, which historically characterized America as the first among the formally-secular democratic-republics, is a legal paragraph, an instance of the theme of freedom, of Lockean humanism freed from the strictures of monarchical oppression. All that we have as a country, we owe to literature and its offspring. But now intellectualism is looked down upon, as hinting towards the unfamiliar, the strange, and even the mentally ill (have you read William Burroughs?). The trend has prevailed since the end of the 1970s, at least, when literary culture transformed into cinematic culture, the culture of quick-shots and 90 minute narratives a viewer is usually content to simply stare at.
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There was a time, in culture, when to be a man meant to be a reading man as much as a gentle man or a handy man. Illiteracy, especially proud illiteracy, was seen as a great taint upon the character; willful ignorance was practically a sin, whereas now it is divine. Genet, a French writer of the 20th century, wrote often of the beautiful, the sublime, and the ugly in their necessary admixture. People used to use his name as a sort of sexual Shibboleth: “if a man told you he read Genet, you fucked him,” I remember reading in Jean-Paul Sartre’s biography of Genet. Literature was a badge of honor, of intellect, which was identical with honor, virtue, even physical prowess. America’s Genet, Henry Miller, inspired a generation of adolescents with his literary understanding of the world and its conventions, its failures and aspirations towards a standardized morality, one-size-fits all. His work, like Genet’s, is little read today—as is, for that matter, most of our intellectual inheritance.
What have we replaced literature with? It was once as important as religious instruction, as necessary for human development as water and heat. We needed it to better understand each other—to automatically recognize the person serving us our food has a fully-bloomed personality, desires and despairs, an economic situation and a familial one—rather than plod along imagining each of us is merely a semi-conscious factotum. The utility of literature was not only theoretical, but practical. Literature inspired mankind in every one of its endeavors, from the scientific speculations of the Space Age (Asimov’s oeuvre) to the nationalist expansions of the 19th century (Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) to the political upheavals of the 20th century (Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution). In it, we found ourselves again. We do not, as individuals, lead very long lives in the grand scheme of events, but, at least for a time, we knew that we could continue on in our culture without having to re-invent the wheel every 70 years. We have replaced that eternal library, which was us, with a great space of nothing.
It isn’t that the internet is the culprit in literature’s disappearance from the public vocabulary. The internet is a far better library than any library ever was. It’s the cacophony in which we place ourselves every day, without cessation, that has severed our thinking from literature—we are too busy to read, to reflect, and so we leave it to the scholars, as though it were their purview alone, or to the psychologists, or to Oprah and her book club. Literature encompasses so many things it is difficult to even begin a steady definition of it, but with its passing, so too have passed all these extraordinary things from the popular consciousness: philosophy, history, formal ethics, even religion (though I myself am not unhappy to see this go).
What have we replaced literature with? It’s the cacophony in which we place ourselves every day, without cessation, that has severed our thinking from literature—we are too busy to read, to reflect, and so we leave it to “them”.
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Literature made our culture solvent. Even in an increasingly complex world, it convinced us we belonged to something worldly and human yet transcendent, made us consciously engaged with a living heritage, and made us think actively about the world we collectively had no choice in coming into. In short, literature produced from a series of individuals a whole encultured people. There is no replacement for it or the act of reading creatively. And, as a balm against the evils of the world, it proved to be a far more effective medicine than our current psychiatric regimens. When once a traveling man looked in his hotel drawer and found the Bible, a piece of literature that reminded him he belonged to a culture of people like himself, he now swallows a Xanax and calls it a night.
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Without poetry, without the novel, without the theories we used to endlessly interpret them with, we might as well be troglodytes. The desire to make reading culturally normal again is not even an elite desire—the working class used to indulge in literature as much as the upper echelons of our society, and perhaps moreso, since they needed more assurance that they too had worthwhile minds and not just bodies to be worked to the bone. It ought to be common once again. A society that does not read, once it has had the opportunity to and has nevertheless denied it, hardly deserves to be called a society at all. It deserves to be called a temporary gathering of confused animals. And, as with society, so too with man: a man who is able to but refuses to read ought to be thought of not as a man but as a permanent child, adrift in a half-formed consciousness in an outer world so beautiful it can only be interpreted through words.
Photo: dann toliver/Flickr
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