These are my notes from a plenary talk I gave at the Southeastern Consortium of Classical Educators in Raleigh, NC earlier this month.
In what remains of this series, I’m going to seek to do more than simply offer humane and legitimate justifications for reading literature. I will do that briefly and fairly matter-of-factly in the outset.
Then I want to try and give you adequate and meaningful language to explain why reading literature brings the literary people among us so much joy. I will, in any case, supply the language for it that satisfies me. Hopefully, it will serve you too. As a bonus, if I have time, I’ll offer an explanation for why I believe some people have never discovered the joy of literature.
To begin with, I need to provide a definition of literature. It’s too broad of a term to leave undefined. I’m taking my definition, specifically for this talk, from an amalgamation of entries on “literature” in the OED:
“The result or product of literary activity; written works considered collectively and valued for superior or lasting artistic merit including non-fictional books and writings published on a particular subject.”
With a definition of literature now tucked safely in our proverbial belts like Reepicheep’s rapier, and given this is a conference made up primarily of educators who already have the buy-in—educators who already know from training and experience that reading literature has a humanizing effect—we should lose no time articulating the humane and legitimate justification for reading literature. And, by the way, this is, in and of itself, a real source of joy.
At the conclusion of an essay titled, A Defense of Literacy, Wendell Berry writes,
Literacy—the mastery of language and the knowledge of books—is not an ornament but a necessity. It is impractical only by the standards of quick profit and easy power. Longer perspective will show that it alone can preserve in us the possibility of an accurate judgment of ourselves and possibilities of correction and renewal. Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow.
Berry’s statement captures in three sentences more than two millennia of thinking on the matter. He argues that the ability to preserve an accurate account of thoughts, ideas, actions, and struggles of our Western ancestors, and the ability to discern the symbols that communicate these preserved accounts, orients us to the collected wisdom of human history.
In short, Berry contrasts two competing attitudes, two competing philosophies, two competing worldviews about standards for being human, and he compels us to choose a side. In fact, he calls us to identify and name which way of life we are going to embrace.
The truth is, these two attitudes or perspectives have been at war since the Fall of man. The human conflict between the utilitarian activists who are after quick profit and easy power might be metaphorically represented by Cain in the 4th chapter of Genesis.
The true contemplatives, those with the “longer perspective,” as Berry calls it, might be represented by his brother Abel. The former are just as ubiquitous as smartphone notifications in our world today. Joseph Pieper has something to teach these utilitarian activists, the-cog-and-consumer pragmatists of the world: that receptive attention is not idleness; it’s in fact, the highest activity. Alas!
The latter are those who know how to use leisure, not merely for amusement or entertainment, but for recognizing the Eternal, and for developing an accurate judgment of ourselves in light of it, that we might prepare ourselves for it, and live for the good in this life by correcting our errors and renewing ourselves and our societies.
Following in the steps of Lewis, Berry is saying that to read books—especially old books, and I might add, to do so with a pipe in our teeth and a pencil in our hand—is a palliative to our inherited errors. Without the ability and desire to read old books, we have no connection to the past. Without literacy, we are at the mercy of words, words, words, decried Dorothy Sayers. We are prone to the worst kind of propaganda.
Without reading, we must depend on CNN, Fox News, and TikTok to tell us what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful. And, without our books, we’ll soon be at the mercy of large language models that are presently—as we speak—buying up rare books across the world, scanning and shredding them. If this modern implementation of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 continues, it’s possible they alone might one day be the sole stewards of collected human knowledge. If that be the case, we are looking at a nightmarish tomorrow more terrible than Huxley’s Brave New World and more terrifying than Orwell’s 1984.
Berry is correct: books and the ability to read them are a necessity and not an ornament.
Now as to the joy of literature that I was invited here to tell you about, you already know there is some kind of magic going on. The joy is there, or we wouldn’t keep buying and reading books. The pleasure exists, even if we’re unsure if it’s more like revenge or buttered toast. The real mystery is in how to explain what is going on. Let me briefly try to help with that.
I’m tempted to borrow from Tolkien’s discussion of fantasy to make that point. To do so would be more than adequate. It’s hard to improve on Tolkien. But I hesitate because his is a language most classical educators are familiar with and so there’s a tendency for his formula to feel cliché. Tolkien tells us that Fantasy—and his definitions rightly extend in many ways to general fiction—provides escape, recovery, and consolation.
By Escape, he doesn’t mean the flight of the deserter—someone neglecting his responsibilities in life—but the musings of the prisoner, someone taking a break from the mundane to contemplate the wonderful. Recovery, then, is the cleaning of our mind’s windows so we can see clearly. Recovery gives us a new backdrop for seeing and contemplating reality that we may behold its glory again. Finally, Consolation is the sudden joyous turn that breaks into the story and lets a gleam of unexpected hope come through. He calls this eucatastrophe. The good catastrophe.
While Tolkien is really good, his paradigm does help to give us adequate language for explaining what we experience when we read good imaginative literature, it’s also possible we’ve become too used to the language, so I wanted to try and approach it a bit differently.
In the first place, there is a sense in which adequate language to describe our joy in reading literature escapes us because it’s difficult to explain an innate human condition. It would be like trying to explain why you look the way you do? Why are your features one way and not another? Today, we can point to DNA, of course, but even DNA and protein mapping can only explain in cold scientific terms why your nose grew bigger than your brother’s.
There’s a sense in which scientific explanation fails to connect with the human condition. For example, if I said it was 18° C in the room, it would be a measurement that has significance in certain contexts, but not in all. And it would be less meaningful than if someone said it’s pretty chilly in here, don’t you agree?
Back to the point, there is something similarly innate in our human condition, the human need for story. A DNA kind of explanation falls flat, but it’s true nonetheless. We are not data centers; to quote Jonathan Gottschall, we are Homo Fictus, storytelling animals. The history of this element of our human nature can be traced back to 21st Century BC Mesopotamia, to Moses and the Genesis account, to the Hebrew stories of the covenant nation of Israel, to Plato and his expositions of myths and music.
More recently, Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book After Virtue, also argues that humans are essentially story-telling animals. MacIntyre claims that we can’t understand human action without looking at the narratives and traditions in which those actions take place. There’s also the notable Joseph Campbell whose concept of the “monomyth” (the Hero’s Journey), argues that humans have always and fundamentally used archetypes and mythological stories to make sense of the human condition and personal transformation.
And, just for good measure, let’s not forget the uncomely carpenter of Nazareth whose world-shaking teaching ministry consisted primarily of stories.
My second point will be quite brief, but it’s not for lack of weightiness…