Why Read Great Literature?

No Reason. Nine Reasons.

There Is No Reason to Read Great Literature

We know why the young do not read today. It is because the image has supplanted the word, the screen the book. Many do not have the attention span even to watch feature films, even to listen to songs, let alone grapple with multi-clause sentences.¹ But, as with the artificial intelligence of the two-dimensional screen, which is just replacing the artificial intelligence of the two-dimensional mind, and as with the medical mask, which covers faces that had already lost their power of expression, and as with the cultureless nothingness in the heart of digital man, who was alienated and atomised long before the internet cut him off from the people around him, so with literacy which, although it appears to be dying now, has been effectively dead for a long time.

Literacy, for most men and women, is useless, a burden, which is why they are so ready to give it up. They can read, but they cannot discern, and so they either accept what they read uncritically, or they reject it uncritically,² without bringing any real intelligence, which is to say any real experience, to the text. Most people don’t really have experience, and so they have nothing inside to guide them in recognising or in understanding what they read. What use is being able to read in such circumstances? The only purposes literacy serves, aside from giving a handful of people a surrogate for their dead culture, are bureaucracy and indoctrination.³ Most people are no more interested in artistic truth, than they are in moral truth, which is to say they are interested, but only if it serves their purposes, if they can get something out of it, either objective power or subjective pleasure.

Artistic truth, like moral truth, is of no interest to mankind because it is neither objective nor subjective.⁴ it transcends these self-generated (i.e. selfish) conditions; it is panjective. This is why greatness stands the test of time and space, being loved by diverse people at diverse times, because ultimately it has nothing to do with either. And it is why the essence of great literature cannot be taught, unlike the objective facts and techniques demanded by machine minds. The great author acquires a prodigious quantity of facts (through study and experience), but merely knowing things cannot produce quality, any more than being imaginative can, because neither objective fact, nor subjective artifice, can make the writer, or the reader, more conscious of quality, any more than intelligence can make men and women more moral.⁵

Ultimately, the great writer refuses to give the reader subjective feelings or objective facts. Ultimately,⁶ all he is interested in is greater consciousness of facts and feelings. Ultimately, great art gives you, your self, nothing. It is (as James Joyce reminds us) neither pornographic nor didactic. It doesn’t move us, it stills us. It doesn’t make us want (juicy steaks, juicy breasts) or not want (goblins and terrorists). It stops us wanting. It doesn’t dangle pleasure that will be before the restless heart, nor does it offer knowledge of what was to the acquisitive mind. Great art is, auric. It expresses, through self-baffling metaphor and the fateful music of speech, the conscious aura, or quality, of what is.

Once upon a time all language was poetic and all of us were poets. Primal people did not make a distinction between objective, prosaic meaning and subjective, poetic sense. The ‘wind’ was both an objective, fact, and it was ‘spirit’, a subjective quality. Right up to the renaissance language was still used in this way, but the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century drained quality from the cosmos and turned what was once a metaphor—of the universe being a machine—into a literal fact, evacuating objective reality of beauty, morality and human meaning. Over the last four centuries we have lost the power to understand or express quality, because the only place it is supposed to be, in the subjective self, has no reality to it. Good and bad are either whatever you happen to want them to be, or reducible to crude forms of objective utilitarianism. The only place in our culture we can find a genuine alternative to this bind is in great literature, in language that speaks both of blood a liquid tissue that circulates in the cardiovascular system, and of blood as vital spirit, cosmic pulse, the ineffable empathy of the innermost, and so on.⁷

Such ineffable fusion of quantity and quality bypasses the modern either-or mind. There is therefore no logical, mind-graspable, self-satisfying ‘why’ you should enjoy the quality of artistic truth — as there is with superhero movies and technical manuals — any more than there is a reason ‘why’ you should enjoy nature or love your mother. The quality of consciousness that great literature offers, one with the quality of consciousness that it demands from the reader, is its own reward — or it is to those who love to be conscious. To experience the enigmatic quality that Cervantes, Shakespeare, Clare, Gogol and Proust present is to be invited into that quality yourself. Whether you accept the invitation is down to you.

Is this reader good enough for me?

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There Are Nine Reasons to Read Great Literature

1. Literature provides a bounded cultural form. The book doesn’t spiral away into an infinity of arbitrary menus, wilful choices, endless seasons and cynical reboots. Literature may be colonised by the cultural industry and endlessly regurgitated in degraded forms — T-shirts, video games, toys, manga, teevee — but the novel, the play and the poem are inherently contained totalities which thereby express a wholeness of conception unknown and unknowable in a postmodern unreality of blasted boundaries, where there is no limit, no totality, no distinction, no end and no beginning. The great novel, in its integrity, represents a form of protection against this nightmarish pastiche of liberation.

2. Through the bounded culture-in-miniature that the author presents, the reader finds his or her tradition. Here in England, to take an example close to my heart, we have a tradition of ironic humour and elegiac, narrative realism that reaches back a thousand years. Beyond that, there is a restrained, individualistic Northern European tradition, beyond that a wider Christian tradition of self-critical humanism (which, regardless of belief, all native Europeans are part of), and then there is the world library, that everyone draws inspiration from. We Westerners are, for better or worse, a highly literate people, and so are dependent on books for our culture in a way that societies richer in orality are not. The lore and ethos of all people is primarily encoded in orality, which runs under print culture like lava flows beneath the crust of the earth. If our extinguished culture is ever reignited, the fuel and flame of it certainly won’t come from books; but they represent a combustible material and, particularly in these dark times, the solitary spirit can light his way with candles which still burn in the temple.⁸

3. Beyond these limited virtues, great literature — and here I am speaking specifically of the great novel — represents a totality of conception that no other art form or cultural experience can provide. This panjective totality is presented in novels as it is in a dream, by splitting singularity of consciousness into conflicting living forms — or characters — that resolve themselves, over time,⁹ not into a literal meaning, but into an ineffable totality which unites its disparate elements. To take the pre-eminent example in world literature, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov asks the eternal question, ‘why does evil exist?’ in a parable (the famous ‘Grand Inquisitor’ section) that cannot, literally speaking, be answered, but which is solved, not in the unsatisfying ‘Russian Monk’ section which follows, but in the entire story, of all four brothers, over the course of the novel.

4. The great novel, above all, is a story, or myth, and without myth man is unable to understand or express — and therefore collectively partake in — his own existence. We live today in a post-narrative world,¹⁰ which has, through hyper-individualism, hyper-stimulation and hyper-boredom, poisoned the root of story, leading to loss of meaning and, consequently a manic fever to consume transient experience, to substitute pleasure for purpose and to turn away from communal spirit, which is founded on narration. It goes without saying that reading a few stories cannot cure us of these ills, but an inability to mythologise life drains it of significance, which our greatest stories, encoded in literature, provide. Without this significance we are not just confused, bereft and deaf to story; in short, sick, but unable to heal. It is through framing chaos and suffering with story, and by listening to story, that reconciliation with fate can begin.

5. Singularity of intent means an encounter with uniqueness. The degree to which I am really saying something, is the degree to which my me, my self, is unlike any other self in the universe. This is one reason why we don’t feel like we are ever really speaking with the artificial text generators we call ‘AI’ or with the artificial text generators we call ‘human-beings’. Both AI and the artificial minds that long predated it are formed from the opinions, beliefs, influences and tastes of others. They are not original, because they are incapable of experiencing, and therefore expressing, their individuality. Not so the greatest artists. To read Hugo, Chekhov, Lawrence and Sōseki is to bathe in an individuality that, despite being shaped and coloured by their respective cultures, is ultimately free of it. This uniqueness seeps into the heart of the reader and, if that heart is still beating, inspires it to seek its own individuality, to live in its own way, to find its own truth.

6. An encounter with uniqueness means expansion of awareness. One reaches beyond one’s society, into cultural forms, styles of perception and moral truths that are alien to one’s own, expanding one’s capacity to think and to feel. To make the effort to rise to a profound understanding of great literature, does not just give the reader a ‘deep thought’ (no thought is deep), or make the reader more ‘tolerant’, but actually changes him, if he’ll let it. This rarely happens, as most readers look for confirmation in literature of a pitifully crude conception of life, made up of simplistic ideas, roughly on the level of a news item, and moral judgements, divided into Elves goodies who can do no wrong, and Orcs baddies who can do no right. They refuse to accept subtle ideas or morally complex characters because they cannot descend, as Marcel Proust put it, ‘into [their] own heart, passing through and leaving far behind us those clouds of ephemeral thought through which [they] are ordinarily content to view things.’ This activity, which requires some courage, strengthens the spirit of those willing to rise above themselves. Just as playing with an athlete strengthens one’s body through unusual and painful efforts, so playing with a great mind, following its powerful movements, makes the mind, and the heart, more supple.¹¹

7. Expansion of awareness also means a greater depth of attention. Great writers are, if nothing else, great noticers. Tolstoy is a (perhaps even the) master of this kind of observation¹² (he often writes ‘and as often happens…’), but all great authors have this gift, which they generously share with their readers, a power of perception that reveals to conceptual awareness what had hitherto been but dimly intuited. This is why when you read great work you say to yourself, ‘yes, this is my truth, I knew this, but now I realise I know it’ and why the more you read, the more you realise you know, not just through reading, but through living. This makes you more interesting — as those who can speak the language of themselves always are — and more conscious. Not because you read more, but because you notice more. And because you are what you notice, you become more you. With pornography (adverts, spectator sports, video games, superhero movies, nationalist hymns, self-help, reportage, cute cat videos and so on) one wants to get something or become someone else, one wants to be ‘a better person’, more knowledgeable, more self-controlled, cooler; which diminishes the spirit. With great art, one stops seeking, and one’s own being is revealed.¹³

8. One learns to notice, through literature, by being noticed. Great books are not just read — they read you. Although a distant author cannot see precisely how you lie to yourself, or who or what you are neglecting, he can almost inevitably see deeper into your heart than the people around you can. Nothing, in its way, is quite as penetrating, as the impulse from a great mind, sent into the soul of one’s solitary consciousness. Unless you are miraculously fortunate, nobody you are ever likely to meet has the power to penetrate into your secret soul like a literary genius.¹⁴ Not that reading gives us access to the lessons of the greatest teacher, life, for reading stands forever at one vast remove from actuality (which is why the illiterate can be far wiser than the book-learned), but literacy can prepare the soul for that life, knock down intellectual impediments to freely entering into it, and, perhaps deepest of all, make the heart ache for the love and mystery the author gives voice to, which, after closing the book, we now turn towards, and seek to find, not in another world of the spirit, in yogic devotion or baptismal fire, but in the situation that we are in, here. This is why great literature, while often superbly entertaining, is not diverting. If the reader looks for the same kind of fun that easy, relaxing, stimulation provides he or she will soon get discouraged and will be unlikely to choose the best books of all, those that confront, challenge, bring pain.¹⁵

9. Finally, we come to language. Great literature, like the free speech it is born from, wrestles meaning back from those who would imprison words in official definitions, from the code of priests, the jargon of professionals and the degraded argot of the mass. Great literature gives those of us imprisoned by modernity something other than food, family, sport and the news to talk about. Great literature gives new life to words worn away by unconscious overuse and turned into technical concerns by academic thought. Great literature tears down dead scripture and raises up living speech, which is why those who serve death come for writers and speakers first. Great literature gives the world new metaphors by which to recognise and speak of the qualities which surround us. Great literature forces us not merely to read it instrumentally, as one reads a newspaper article or the ingredients on a bottle of ketchup, but to discern the meaning, or quality, behind the words and, beyond those, behind the events of the world. Literature, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, does not give us information, but withholds it, and in the space we discover what has been taken from us by information, the unspoken quality of our own lives. For finally, great literature, like great music, leads back to silence, the forgotten stillness that, beneath mere information, I am.

Conclusion: Why Not to Read Great Literature

The professional management class love to recommend reading, because it’s a low-stakes way of appearing to Make The World a Better Place, without actually doing anything. When you read, you are passive, you do nothing, you change nothing, you make nothing — not even a book.

Reading may offer spiritual solace, practical guidance, thrilling ideas and a route into your own culture, but except in extraordinary, cases it cannot change a reader’s beliefs. In this respect novels are more penetrating — and far more truthful — than so-called non-fiction.

Beliefs are, for the most part, and despite what we like to tell ourselves, irrational, unreasoned and public, while the arguments we find in non-fiction are rational, reasoned and private. Novels can sidestep the reasonable illusions we live with, and touch a deeper reality.

But although books can change the world (we more or less live in a world written for us five hundred years ago), they cannot radically change the human heart. If one is ready, they can open the door, but they cannot push the reader through. Only love can do this. And pain.

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And now…

1. Professional-class ‘writers’ like Gaby Hinsliff (author of ‘Half a Wife’) are terribly upset that people no longer read. Not because literacy benefits ordinary folk — if it did, it would be made illegal — but because it is, like education, health, law and democracy, primarily a means by which the professional class can exert control over society.

2. The undiscerning man is, and can only be, either a committed believer or a committed unbeliever. This manifests either as blind belief in official narratives, no matter how absurd, or as an equally blind rejection of them. Politically the believer uncritically accepts the news, religiously he blindly (and often literally) accepts the sacred text, interpersonally he takes everyone he meets at face-value; while the unbeliever sees nothing but false flags and globalist plots in history and politics, nothing but priestly fictions and clever hoaxes in art and religion, and nothing but cynical self-interest behind every smile and offer of help.

3. Indoctrination is not through what one reads (or sees on the screen), but in that one is being fed a constant diet of contextless things to think about; the issue of the day, the big story, the scandal or shock attack. Propaganda, in other words, is not getting you to believe one thing or another, but to focus on one thing after another. You can’t fight propaganda with facts, only with lack of interest, which is why those most interested in the facts (usually the cleverest of men), are the most heavily indoctrinated. They do not have sufficient consciousness to tie together the facts they guzzle down, to set them in a meaningful context or to step beyond fact altogether into the deeper rivers of truth.

4. If it were the former, AI could produce masterpieces and a Brave New Management could make better people. If it were the latter, there would be no difference between Banksy and Rembrandt, and child abuse would be groovy. See Self and Unself.

5. One often hears people describe those they consider immoral as ‘stupid’ or ‘dumb’, as if acting selfishly, or violently, or even insanely is down to a lack of education!

6. ‘Ultimately’ I say. Relatively, or secondarily, the pleasure of great writing emerges from a mass of interesting facts and pleasurable feelings, but primarily these things are not the source of greatness.

As has often been pointed out, words meanings in them fade with the repeated use that they undergo with the lapse of time. Many philologists, for instance, have drawn attention to the fact that, if we look into their history, most words present the appearance of "fossilized metaphors". That is one of the reasons why poetry is needed as well as prose. The languages of all civilized peoples, it has been pointed out, have undergone a process of "sedimentation". It is not so much meaning that they present us with now as the husks of meaning. There is, however, a means by which the faded words, the fossilized metaphors, can be revivified, so that meaning again shines through them, so that language once again begins to reveal something behind or beyond its merely sensuous references. And that something is, precisely, the act of using language and the faculty of apprehending it as a tissue of symbols. In the case of religion, it is in much the same way and, indeed, it is in close association with that very process of sedimentation - that what began as revelation fades into tradition. And here again the only known remedy for sedimentation appears to be the way of symbol. For tradition to re-acquire the pristine energy, so to speak, of revelation, it needs to be apprehended not only as historical record but also as a symbol.

7. Owen Barfied, Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion.

8. The primacy of orality, and the degrading influence of literature (which separates man from his culture), explains why it is a grave mistake to believe that literacy leads to eloquence, strength of character and an interesting mind, when the reverse is invariably the case. The abstraction of literate language, which must be recalled, and the security of academia, which suppresses the uncertainty that genuine intelligence is forged from, smother individuality and undermine the spontaneity of speech, which is how one can encounter true greatness of spirit in someone who never reads, and why some of the driest, most stultified and most tedious people on earth are the most well-read. They make much of their book-learning, but their pose of superiority is as fragile and easily torn as the page of a book. They do not really have to live, and so they do not know what life is, which means they do not have call upon genuinely creative speech to express that life. If one does live, then literacy, through the expanded and deepened language that the greatest writers give to us, amplifies one’s power of speech, but for the man of mere letters, erudition crushes what little spirit he may have had. As Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out, the knowledge that comes to us through books is like a heavy suit of armour; it makes the strong stronger, but it squashes the weak.

9. And over considerable time. Through their sheer length, novels and epic poems can express the truth of the world in a manner that plays, films and short tales cannot.

10. We no longer recount, we merely count.

Only with narration is life elevated above its sheer facticity, above its nakedness. Narrating means to make time’s passing meaningful, to give it a beginning and an end. Without narration, life is purely additive.

Byung-Hul Chan, The Crisis of Narration.

11. This is the intellectual value of difficult great literature, like Musil’s The Man Without Qualities or, the most extreme example, Joyce’s Ulysses. Although difficulty is no substitute for the far more edifying challenges that an encounter with depth of character offers, and is more often than not its betrayer, as readers of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis might understand.

We might also note here that engaging with greatness raises one’s standards of taste. This is good for both writers, who should aim above the given quality of the culture around him, and for general readers, because heightened standards in one area of life have a tendency to pull all the other areas upwards.

He staggered as he said this and then repeated the movement trying to make it seem as if it had been intentional

12. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

He emitted the loud panting breath that people exhale not when they are too hot, but when they wish to be thought too hot

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

13. The artist does not, ultimately, give us second-hand observations of consciousness, like the scientist or psychologist does, but manifests his own, first-hand, experience of being. With psychology I merely learn about what I might be, with great literature I am inspired to realise who I am.

Discovering the mind is too important and central a human concern to be left exclusively to the “psychologists,” that is, to those who have come to carry this institutionally and narrowly defined title of relatively recent origin, the professional psychologists… The lamentable tendency to relinquish psychology to the psychologists is not just the result of their presumptuous and aggressive appropriation of what is by nature an intellectual and existential concern common to all human beings. There has been complicity on the part of philosophers and writers who wanted to rid themselves of the burden of having to work at discovering the mind.

Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber.

We may, by good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound of his voice; or put a question to a man of science, and be answered good-humouredly. We may intrude ten minutes’ talk on a cabinet minister, answered probably with words worse than silence, being deceptive; or snatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of throwing a bouquet in the path of a princess, or arresting the kind glance of a queen. And yet these momentary chances we covet; and spend our years, and passions, and powers, in pursuit of little more than these; while, meantime, there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting round us all day long, kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! In those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, we make no account of that company, perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!

14. Sesame. Of Kings’ Treasuries, John Ruskin

One interesting consequence of having all these great people sitting around on our bookshelves is that they watch us age, and comment on our changing spirit. To read, a masterpiece at the age of twenty, and then to return to it at the age of fifty is to hear it tell how you have changed.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we would write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.

15. Letter to Oskar Pollak (in Letters to Family and Editors), Franz Kafka.