Literature is a joyful art

I’m not telling you to change your reading habits. Just try and see the joy in it.

Literature is a joyful art. People used to read so much more! — Everyone says this. Nobody can read anymore! — This one too. Recently, a photograph went viral, showing a lector in a 19^th century factory, reading the latest Dickens novel aloud to the workers. It was interesting, a fascinating look into a world in which literature played a fundamentally different role: mass entertainment. Of course, people jumped on this to bemoan our current illiteracy. How sad workers aren’t being read the latest Dickens novel on the factory floor anymore! Thankfully Trump will fix this. The role of literacy in society has changed. The socially conscious 19^th century novel, featuring characters who wax lyrical on the author’s preferred discourse, has been replaced by the Serious TV Show, just as the feuilletons have been replaced by the personal essayists and the twitter power-users. Now, instead of Dickens’ poor orphans tugging at Tory heartstrings, we have newscasters drilling politicians over the events of Adolescence, and a flood of commentary on the latest season of The White Lotus.

The world will not end because people aren’t reading novels. Literature won’t end either, even though the long hangover of the 19^th century novel feels like a death sentence. A mostly illiterate society, 5^th century BC Athens, produced a particularly notable literary scene. On the one hand, there was the ascendancy of Democracy, and the need to politically educate the populace through tragedy and comedy. On the other hand, there was a wealthy elite with Pericles at the helm. He was happy to spend a pretty penny attracting the leading lights of the Hellenic world to Athens. Thanks to this highly contingent set of circumstances, we have the works of Plato, Thucydides, Gorgias, Aeschylus, and Euripides. For centuries afterwards, literati ate the hair of the dog. In Hellenistic Egypt, we have a literary scene cloistered in the Great Library. Scholar-poets produced work composed of references to the literature of the Archaic and Classical periods. Their whole poetic language was a series of references to Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus. Literature did not have the same social significance, and many a Hellenistic poet surely wished they were as important (and as publicly celebrated) as Sophocles or Euripides, those popular artists from an era in which art mattered. Since we are in our own literary Hellenistic period, it is a relief that the literature of the Hellenistic is brilliant, frequently measuring up to or surpassing the works being referenced. We have the ever-popular Argonautica, the dense and overly-referential pre-postmodern poem, Lykophron’s Alexandra, and even the invention of some new, exciting forms: literary epigrams, mini-epics, and the Ancient Greek novel. And, a few centuries later, many Hellenistic innovations would go into the writing of the Aeneid.

Now, it is clear, literature has a new role again. Over the 20^th century the popular novel, and the popular literary novel, persevered. In the 21^st century, the novel is still persevering, and the literary novel is sort of persevering. Contemporary literary novelists certainly aren’t celebrities, but they are producing great works. What has changed the most, though, is our attitude towards literature. Perelmuter, in his remarked-upon essay, commented on the retreat of the modernist literary bro. In response to the paucity of anglophone literature, many have retreated towards translated European (particularly Eastern European) literature. There is a canon of hard lit, serious lit, which anglophone writers have ceased adding to. This serious lit stands in contrast to shallow, autofictional, identity-focused literature. What’s going on here is not actually to do with the literature itself, it is to do with how we engage with literature, and how the hollowed-out publishing industry chases that engagement. The culturally dominant sort of literature today is understood exists along the lines that it is written by this type of person, reflecting this sort of experience. If you want something else, there is a cottage industry of serious literature for serious people, where you can purchase clout to cash in with your grad student friends. This is an exhausting situation, which seems to be pushed by publishers, by marketing, by whatever remains of a critical apparatus in literature. But it doesn’t really come from up there. There is no ‘up there’ anymore. This is a bottom-up pop-culture phenomenon. It is mostly our fault.

Sylvia Plath, Dostoevsky, Lispector, Kafka. These are some of the key representatives of classic literature in booktok, or whatever you’d like to call the grouping of young people online who care about classic literature. Alongside some sombre Russian folk song is an image of Dostoevsky and the caption: “when she starts talking to you like she works in HR you know you’re cooked”. Kafka’s diary entries, alongside those of Kierkegaard, are placed in the sensitive depressive boy canon: “I went to this party and now I feel quite sad”, “I could build Chichén Itzá with the strength it takes me to cling to life and reason”, you know how it goes. Young women post pictures of their skinny legs, alongside cigarettes and bowls of fruit, and the centrally placed Clarice Lispector book, the one which prominently features her beautiful young face on the cover. Everyone wants to be someone through their books.

There are two heads to this snake. There are people who read because they want to be well-read, or because they want to adopt the identity associated with a certain book, fed to them via memes and Instagram slideshows. Is it any surprise, then, that the publishing industry tries to appeal to people by marketing books along the lines of identity? You can only fight against the market for so long. And on the flipside, there is the kind of person who seeks to differentiate themselves from the former kind of person, by reading even more serious, even more real literature. Is it any surprise that for this smaller demographic, there is an inverse industry, which trades in severity and difficulty? Both kinds of person, you will notice, feed on each other. The former needs to be told what homework-books will turn them into a real person, the latter needs to feel there are people they are better than, or they’ll have no reason to go on.

There is a sad thing happening to authors like Dostoevsky, Kafka, Lispector, perhaps two things, since there seems to me to be two trends, with a strict gender demarcation, both manifesting the same central principle. For young women, literature is used to project a sort of ‘cultured feminity’ identity, which involves fruit, cannibalism-as-a-metaphor-for-love, things like that. For young men, all literature is self-help literature. You might as well create one over-arching genre, which all books, from past to present, are to be placed in: books to make you better. At some point, Aurelius’ Meditations began appearing alongside Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Coelho’s The Alchemist on the reading list of every normal young man who otherwise doesn’t read much. But this trend has ballooned. Taking on the vestiges of the /lit/ top 100 chart, and the easily memeable authorial identities of Dostoevsky and Kafka, is a sort of spiritual improvement literature. These are books that will make you better, either because they’re deep, or serious, or important. While this specific form of things is somewhat new, this trend is only the current manifestation of a long-running approach to literature, which has wormed its way into society via education: reading as homework. The roots of this run deep.

If you say you don’t like a particular book, you might be told but don’t you know we’re in a literacy crisis? Are you really encouraging people not to read when so many people aren’t reading today? Don’t you see the state of the world? Well, I don’t see it as my problem that people don’t read. It is a problem for the publishing industry, and they don’t pay me. I don’t think the world will be saved by people reading more novels. Since, after all, novels are entertainment. Yes, that includes the literary ones, they are just novels which are more entertaining than the other ones. I don’t particularly care if other people read, except in so far as I want readers for my writing, and I want people to talk about literature with. I don’t see reading as some essential moral good.

But reading as an essential moral good is the dominant cultural understanding of reading. Reading is good. Reading is healthy. Reading is exercise for your brain. These, and other vacuities, are the reasons drilled into your head for reading. The problem, it seems to me, is quite simple: people don’t like doing homework. If you insist that reading is self-betterment, that having read a few tomes off the canon is the mark of a good person, you make reading into homework. I do not want to do homework. We know, of course, that reading is good for you, that children who read end up doing better in life (one of those middle class statistics — reading a book, drinking wine, and living in a large detached house, all happen to guarantee a long, pleasant life), that it lowers the risk of dementia and stimulates your imagination, whatever. So does going for a walk in the park, looking at a painting, watching a good film, talking with your friends. We treat none of those common activities with the sort of hysterical moral necessity as reading. And we engage with this hysterical treatment of literature, while none of us are actually reading. The problem, it seems to me, is reading as homework.

This idea is planted in our heads early. First you are given a reading diary at school. Fine, reading ability has to be drilled into the heads of children, alongside exercise, alongside maths. I don’t dispute that. But the problem with reading goes deeper. Every promotion of reading as an activity aims to create an enforced subject who reads, voluntarily, to better themselves. We don’t do that for maths, we don’t even do it for physical fitness, where it’s entirely appropriate. We have implanted, quite deeply, the idea of reading as an exercise that you can get a good grade in, and thus the idea that reading is a chore. So, the idea of the gifted kid who used to read hundreds of books a year, who now does not read at all. Well, why do they not want to read anymore? Before their books were easy, and everyone told them what a little wonder they were for reading, even though they were doing it for fun. Now, the books are a bit harder, and since they have more agency, there are other sources of entertainment available. The child seeks out those alternative sources of entertainment, and they bemoan their own incapacity: I used to have such a great attention span, now I can’t get through a page. Why is this? Because you have erased the idea that reading is fun, you have crowded it out of their head. You have replaced that joy with the idea that reading makes them a good person. Now, they do not see reading as one of many sources of joy in life, but as a colossal weight on their shoulders, something they are failing at (how exactly can one fail at reading? Yet, many adults who have not read since they were children seem to see themselves as failing at reading, as if they were still being graded), and thus, while chastising themselves, they do not read, as anyone does when they put off doing their homework.

How is this linked to ‘difficult books’ and the cult of classic authors like Kafka and Dostoevsky? Because reading such books is, for some people, equivalent to locking in at a subject they have long neglected. It is the same as a skinnyfat guy hitting the gym. I am failing at reading, I am failing at being a good person. It is time to read books that make me better. It is time to read a few pieces from the canon that are appropriately spiritual, and some books that tell me to be disciplined and to make a lot of money. For other people the idea is more general: reading is a ‘good person’ stamp on my identity. I want to have the ‘good person’ stamp, I want to know people with the ‘good person’ stamp. My problem with this isn’t what books people are reading, or that they are reading in the first place. It is simply sad the attitude with which people read. People have reading goals, not as a joyful exercise, but because they view reading as exercise. I suppose you can read for whatever reason you want, it’s really fine, but a trick is being missed: that reading is a joyful art, that all the best art is joyful, not serious.

The most common reason why many fail to engage with modern art, or classical music, or literature, or whatever other form of serious art, is because it is serious. It is serious, it is difficult, it is homework, which should be put off or shunned altogether. If you introduce many to the idea behind Finnegan’s Wake, their reaction is: that’s fucking stupid, what a waste of time, I think that Joyce was a charlatan, he was trolling, he was tricking us. This is the reaction a student has towards a subject they don’t want to study: I’m being made a rube, why didn’t James Joyce write a novel teaching me how to do my taxes? They miss the fact that it’s fun. Do you not see how inventing a language from scratch to write one story is fun? It’s not a trick, no one is trying to scam you. People see things as so serious, that if they don’t directly improve their productivity, the whole thing is a scam. But the point isn’t to be productive, it is joy. People say: this painting is pointless, I could do it. Why do you think that’s a bad thing? Why don’t you do it? Painting is joyful, no one is stopping you. It is as if people want these things to be forbidding and abstruse.

Literature will probably not, in our lifetimes, return to being mass entertainment. It is natural, then, that we have entered a literary Hellenistic era, full of formal innovation and tributes to the classics of old. It is natural that literacy is increasingly becoming a sort of status symbol, that it has been sucked into the eternal quest for self-definition, self-promotion, and exhibitionism that pervades literally everything nowadays. It is natural that many turn their heads at this, they desperately want something real that can’t be boiled down to just another trend. What isn’t natural is how miserable it all is. Why does good literature have to be serious? Why does the literature we define ourselves by have to be depressive? Why is difficulty the sole aspect through which we engage with experimental literature, as if puzzles are only difficult, never fun? Why do we want to find misery where there’s joy? Kafka is actually an incredibly funny writer. You wouldn’t notice that if you only knew him from TikTok. I’ve been teaching Kafka to an IB class lately, and I’ve caught myself chuckling to myself and laughing over and over. Gregor is turned into a bug, but he’s still used to being human. When he runs after his boss, who came to visit him, he tries to get up on his hind legs, like a human, but he keeps falling over, because he’s a bug. When K., trapped in his morose legal battle, is asking the painter Titorelli for advice, he suddenly finds himself sickened by the air in the unventilated studio. He tries to get up to leave, but Titorelli first asks that K. has a look at his paintings, in case there’s any he likes. Titorelli shows K. a painting of two trees in a field. K. goes fine, I’ll take it. Titorelli shows K. an identical painting of two trees in a field. K. goes fine, I’ll take it. Titorelli shows K. a third identical painting of two trees in a field. K. goes fine, I’ll take it, and he is finally able to escape the studio, by climbing right over Titorelli’s bed towards the door, paintings in hand.

It's kind of hard to get my students to grasp that Kafka is funny. Some know him as that depressed guy. Others don’t know him at all, but they know they are meant to be looking for themes, since this is Literature class. If you ask them to give you a detail from the book, they are almost chronically unable to do it. What they are able to do is tell you that it’s about alienation, it’s about capitalism, it’s about being a Jew, it’s about disability. That’s all true, to an extent, but what about the joy of observation, what about the humour of the whole situation? What about Kafka’s whole conceit, of genuinely, seriously imagining this whole situation is totally real? I think the rot with literature goes down to the bottom. We teach literature as self-betterment, as spiritual homework performed for the sake of applause from the Other. We do not teach the idea that literature is joyful, that it is capable of a tone other than seriousness. So, people find it hard to tell when a book is joking, and they find it hard to recognise the joy in literature. Art is for the sake of something, literature makes you better. God, it’s really fine. You are fine the way you are. You don’t need to seem a certain way. Most good things are light and easy. Improving your soul so desperately won’t work. The world was never saved by taking it so seriously. You can read the exact same books as before: I’m not telling you to change your reading habits. Just try and see the joy in it.

The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger