One of my colleagues has just retired and among the many books of his extensive library that he has given away (for that’s what happens with the books we store in our offices) I have rescued John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? (Faber & Faber, 2005). I have very fond memories of reading Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992), one of the key books, together with Ken Gelder’s Popular Fiction The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (2004), in my postgraduate and even postdoctoral education. They were astonishing eye-openers.
What Good Are the Arts? is the published version of the Northcliffe Lectures which Professor Carey offered at University College London and that might be the reason why the tone is more reader-friendly than in our current extra-dry academic prose. I wonder if Faber & Faber (today Faber), the house for which T.S. Eliot was editor, is still in the business of publishing major academics. Unlike most academic presses, they don’t welcome proposals and I don’t recognize among the many authors any big academic names. Now we write highly specialized texts for other specialists and we no longer have intellectuals like Carey in our midst. Merve Emre rightly wondered last year “Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?”, subtitling her article for The New Yorker “Literature departments seem to provide a haven for studying books, but they may have painted themselves into a corner.” The Yale Review has gone this Summer down the same lane in a special issue (indeed Merve Emre is one of the contributors) wondering whether in the age of GoodReads we still need cultural criticism. My point is not so much whether we need professional academic criticism (of course we do) or whether this has painted itself into a corner (of course it has) but whether we have any academics left capable of crossing the divide and addressing a general audience as humanists. Carey, currently 90, might be among the last. Noam Chomsky (95) also comes to mind.
Prof. Carey uses the first part of his volume to debunk all the attempts offered up to the early 21st century to justify why we need to be in contact with the arts. His main target is the rather absurd idea that experiencing art makes you a moral person, a Kantian boutade that Hitler, an art-lover and frustrated artist, thoroughly disproved. Yet, Prof. Carey still wants his readers to believe that contact with arts is positive and that literature is the most complete art, so he uses the second part of his volume to build his argumentation in support of this view. Here’s his thesis statement:
“I am not suggesting that reading literature makes you more moral. It may do, but such evidence as I have come across suggests that it would be unwise to depend on this. (…) My claim is different. It is that literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning.” (208)
I’ll complement the quotation with the final words of the volume: “Literature does not make you a better person, though it may help you to criticize what you are. But it enlarges your mind, and it gives you thoughts, words and rhythms that will last you for life” (260). Prof. Carey, as usual, is confusing reading with reading literature. Reading other types of books, newspapers, magazines, journals, blogs, websites and even tweets may “may help you to criticize what you are”, or, as we are seeing these days with the rise of the far right (again!) turn you into a much worse version of yourself. Literature does not have a monopoly on raising self-awareness though, of course, as a Literature teacher I know that the inner life of the persons who refuse to expand their limited lifespan by refusing to read about other people’s experiences in fine writing cannot be very rich.
I was recently at a family dinner and I was dismayed by the following. Firstly: my mother, who used to be more demanding as a reader, is now following recommendations from our local library and by other persons in the family that incline her towards much lighter fiction; she’s currently reading Colleen Hoover. Secondly, a family member who used to be a regular reader (of that lighter fiction, but fine, ok) suddenly has ‘no time to read’ because she’s now watching series. Thirdly: another family member told me he never reads and he is ‘fine’ (though fast veering towards the extreme right-wing, if he’s not already there). Fourth: a younger family member, who is a very good student otherwise, adamantly refuses to read fiction (typically she loves series) because, guess what?, it’s boring. Nobody respects my opinions as a reader, or cares about what I write, and that is the plain truth. I wonder what they think I do professionally, or if they think that I am reading Shakespeare all the time. I don’t ask them because I will convince no one that reading literature makes you a mentally richer person, and far more critical. And I can’t even convince my family, how can I convince my students, or my readers?
By literature I don’t just mean the canonical names that most interest Prof. Carey, but any text in which you can appreciate that the author has put a lot of effort, talent, and intelligence in their writing. I mean the kind of text that keeps you engaged and that makes you feel a) ‘my God, this is so well written’, b) ‘my God, this author is so talented and has worked so hard’, and c) ‘my God, I can feel my mind expanding as I read’. You can get this multiple impression our of a variety of authors (not necessarily out of the canonical authors), but, of course, you can also read for entertainment less illuminating texts of any type. The point, as Prof. Carey insists, is that reading literature improves your critical thinking skills, and this is why persons who never read are not ‘fine’. I’ll use an analogy with sports. Whenever my doctor tells me that I should exercise, I don’t reply ‘I’m fine, look at me’; I’m honest and I reply that I’m lazy and I don’t like sports. These days watching the Olympic Games, I wallow in my laziness as I marvel at what other people do with their bodies, but I would never have the cheek to tell an Olympian that my body is as well developed as theirs. I marvel, then, that people who don’t exercise their brain pretend that they’re ‘fine’ and tell me so to my face, being as I am a professional brain athlete. Maybe the problem is that we don’t have intellectual Olympic Games, though I can’t imagine what they would be like.
To understand what reading good books (of any genre) does for one person, I just need to think of my life without books. What a wasteland! I agree with Prof. Carey that only literature can fully awaken your intellectual capacities in ways that no other art can do. The little I understand about life does not come from cinema (as much as I love movies), theatre, painting, sculpture, photography or other arts I may also enjoy as an observer, including fashion, home decoration, knitting, or embroidery. It comes from reading fiction and non-fiction (I’m not a good reader of poetry or plays). Reading, in fact, has helped me to understand and appreciate the other arts, though I thank from the bottom of my heart the arts teacher who sent us to see Henry Moore’s exhibition at the Fundació Miró in 1982 (I was 16), without telling is anything about what we would see. I fell in love with the sensuality of Moore’s paradoxically soft stone figures and that is the purest art experience I’ve had in my life. There have been many other moments like that, but they were bolstered by lots of previous reading to be better informed about what I was seeing and feeling.
I am well aware that book readers are a minority and that we, the demanding book readers, are an even smaller minority. In fact, I am aware that within the number of book readers the space occupied by the more demanding readers is fast shrinking. This has to do with your classic four-front perfect storm: a) the literature children are taught in school often obeys principle of nationalist glorification rather than reader training; b) social media have destroyed the authority of the professional reviewer and passed it onto far less experienced readers; c) the canon battles of the 1990s foregrounded many neglected texts but often at the expense of critical judgement; d) the post-modern breaking of barriers between low and high culture has convinced too many readers that anything goes. And there is even a fifth front: we have all become niche academics, even when our fields are as big as post-colonial fiction or the 18th century. By this I mean that our critical conversation cannot be general because everyone is reading different texts. No, the solution is not going back to the narrow canon dominated by dead, white, cis, straight, European males writing in major languages, but the current fragmentation is not helping, either. One may be ashamed of not having read Dickens or Tolstoy, but there is no shame in not having read any post-WWII authors. There are so many even the best reader is bound to miss many major names.
So, if reading literature does not make you a moral person and people refuse the invitation to have their minds expanded and their critical skills sharpened, should we, the demanding readers, still insist that reading is indispensable? I insist because I am a professional paid to read and to teach others to read, but I tire of being also a nagging witch (or bitch). Right now, perhaps the only hope for literature is, as I have hinted, that it is compared to exercising and reading presented as the best possible way to keep your brain healthy for many decades. Sadly, just as athletes may die of heart attacks in their youth, great readers still suffer from Alzheimer’s, but I still have hopes that one day people will understand the need of keeping mentally fit by reading the literature that best feeds your brain. Start training…