Excerpts from his essay, Why Literature?
Literature has even served to confer upon love and desire and the sexual act itself the status of artistic creation. Without literature, eroticism would not exist. Love and pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by television’s soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts.
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I cannot accept the idea that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks neither information nor a useful and immediate communication, can integrate on a computer screen the dreams and the pleasures of words with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental concentration and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a book.
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[A]ll good literature is radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live. In all great literary texts, often without their authors’ intending it, a seditious inclination is present… [T]here is no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the reading of good literature; no better means of forming critical and independent citizens who will not be manipulated by those who govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual mobility and a vibrant imagination.
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As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which books–that is, works of literature–have become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cybernetic world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soulless–a resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who have abdicated freedom.
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“Spiritual mobility” is nice; akin, I think, to Richard Rorty’s notions of contingency and irony.
October 7th, 2010 at 10:18AM
The analogy alchemy:physics::books:computer screens is weak, strained, and tendentious. And I don’t much like the expression cybernetic world. Cyborg, maybe, would be better. Maybe it’s the translation here.
October 7th, 2010 at 10:21AM
adam: I think he was too emotional – angry at Bill Gates and his anticipation of the end of books – for that part of his essay to be particularly strong. He could have done with some calmer thinking about the issue.
October 7th, 2010 at 10:46AM
Ah, the Latin temperament. Or are we not allowed to say that any more? 🙂
October 7th, 2010 at 12:15PM
I’d say he’s a better novelist than philosopher. “The War at the End of the World” is a great book– worth reading and re-reading.
October 7th, 2010 at 12:48PM
I am going to buy a lottery ticket today. The Nobel committee picked a great novelist who has actually sold books outside of academia? Amazing.