Plato said that writing is a bad idea.
“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory,” the Greek philosopher said through Socrates’s character. “So it is with the written word: you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.”
Plato wrote at a time when a story was alive; one person took it down from another, forgot details, added their own dramas and murders and endings. The Homer whose name we read on a copy of “The Odyssey” is a bald-faced lie. Poets only wrote versions of his story centuries after he had died; no one knows exactly what he had in mind when he plotted out the most iconic moments.
There is a lot going for this kind of story. The fish always gets longer when one’s grandpa talks about his crowning catch, jokes are told and retold from one friend on. It’s a cultural telephone. We give so many of our hours to these mutations, and become so sharp in our give-and-take over them, that I don’t blame Plato for fearing the fallout of a technology that could replace all that.
It is at that very point, though — that stories on paper are dead as soon as they’re written — where he rings out of tune. The story is just half of it, if that. Readers’ brains are wild and capacious. A story is made and remade within a breath, a sentence. Most of the fun of “Macbeth” is arguing with yourself or your friends or the PhD who wrote the introduction about where Lady Macbeth went insane or whether the witches could actually prophesy or whether Banquo’s ghost was there to scare or to embolden Macbeth himself.
Look at the best-selling books of the last few years, and see that barely one of them is literary. It’s a list of titles like “Fourth Wing,” “It Ends With Us,” “Sunrise on the Reaping” et cetera. Some of those books are alright, I’ll admit, and a few may even be well-written, but they don’t have the character-driven, language-mastering x-factor that makes a book literary. We have decided, it seems, to live on amusing ourselves with good books rather than challenging ourselves with great ones.
I don’t have any right to care if someone reads a trashy detective novel sometimes. Life is hard. Do what you have to do. But the best stories make life easier. Rather than distracting us with explosive plots and dramas, they walk us quietly through the places in our worlds and minds that we don’t like to confront, they help us understand them, they make us put in the work to feel better. “Escapist fiction” is sometimes the moniker for the pulp I just described, and in moderation, it is fine. But literary fiction helps us to confront, and to grow. The reason why people get so annoying and self-righteous about their favorite tome is that books like those make their readers not want to go back.
The only popular literary book today is Percival Everett’s “James,” in which he retells Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the eyes of the slave, Jim, who helps Huck down the Mississippi River to escape his abusive dad.
But “James” doesn’t prove some revival of high-brow novels. It paid its way via a festival of social justice rhetoric that put it in the tote bags of every white book club attendee on this side of the Mason-Dixon line. And I don’t mind it; I love “James.” But when it, “Demon Copperhead,” and other obviously progressive novels are the only difficult books we read, we quickly get a culture that cannot have complex thoughts outside of the political sphere. And that’s worrisome.
Here’s what I mean: people sometimes say that “literary fiction” is “classic fiction”; they just don’t write books like they used to. That’s a lie. New fiction can be great and old fiction can suck. If we think any other way, we’re missing out on so much gobstopping genius (Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Bachtyar Ali, Salman Rushdie and so on) that we can’t forgive ourselves. We just need to approach contemporary novels like classics. Take some time to learn the context, the politics. Then drill, hard, into the story. A compelling thesis about race, without anything towards metaphor or character, shouldn’t pass for criticism of “James.”
The elephant in the room has gotten so big that it’s threatening to rupture: all of this is rich, but most people just don’t read anymore. 48% of Americans read one or more books last year, and among young people, the numbers are worse. How are you to get back into reading? Articles are everywhere. The more common question, at least among college students, is why to read at all.
I don’t fully know the answer to this, other than that, eventually, people stopped reading because people stopped reading. Books got beat, magazines got slimmer, local newspapers are carcasses of their old selves. It fell out of the culture. I can’t totally say why. But we can find one answer in American universities.
Frank X Walker, a former Kentucky Poet Laureate who teaches English at the University of Kentucky, went there on an electrical engineering scholarship. That didn’t work out.
“I was academically prepared, but I expected to be happier,” Walker said. “Nobody told me about choosing a major that was connected to my passion.” He changed his major, and succeeded as a writer, but that is not an institutional success story so much as a testament to one brilliant person making it work. The system doesn’t afford everyone that chance. The noxious advice that Walker got — pursue a career, study for the future, don’t be naive — is the same dreck that muddies today’s academies. And it’s a lot worse now.
“Larger institutions tend to skew in the direction of being a meat grinder,” Walker said. Every year, parents ask him how their kid can make a living with poetry. Walker recommends that the money-obsessed go to business school, but I’m unsure about that, too. People today watch the computer science degrees that they got a decade ago, confident that they’d make bank, shrivel in value before AI that can write its own code. Lawyers face a similar threat; secretaries, too. Why we all grip illusions of pragmatism in the craziest job market of anyone’s lifetime makes next to no sense. Majors should reflect what makes life worth it: creating, sharing and enjoying.
And, in the middle of all of this, universities cut their humanities programs. Students aren’t interested, they say. I doubt this. Students have plenty of interest; it’s the culture that got bored, that stopped reading, that started mocking young men for the high crime of reading good books in public places. Universities, to risk repeating myself, aren’t innocent, either.
“Right now, we have an incentive structure where you get rewarded and promoted for teaching, for publishing peer-reviewed academic research, and for participation in the governance of the institution,” Avery Kolers, the chair of the University of Louisville’s philosophy department, said.
“In the universities, most often, you don’t get intellectual production of the sort that [Jean Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir were doing in the 20th century in France.” The US had parallels: in the 1960s, the cultural center of gravity was Greenwich Village, where Beat poets were ripping holes in the zeitgeist and letting an awful lot of light through. A novel or a podcast or a newsletter from a university that tries to get the public excited about English or philosophy won’t impress a tenure board quite like a handful of research articles. A system that is by academics and for academics is, despite the good people like Kolers and Walker who inhabit it, unlikely to cradle the humanities back to life.
I’m fortunate to have discovered Adam Walker (not to be confused with Frank X Walker), an ex Harvard University English professor who left because of all the things I’ve described. They also weren’t paying him enough in his adjunct position — another huge barrier between universities and pop-culture horsepower. Now, he close reads poetry on YouTube and writes on Substack about the subject of this piece.
“I once proposed that a certain English department start a public-facing initiative — a podcast or series of public lectures. The proposal was met with confusion and disdain,” he wrote in a dazzling piece called “The Fall of the English Department.” “Meanwhile outside the tower, technological acceleration, short-form entertainment, technocratic-market logic continues to dull the faculties of the imagination and disintegrate shared meaning. It’s no wonder anti-intellectualism is on the rise,” he wrote.
“If the American English department is indicative of the whole, the humanities have lost cultural influence precisely when society most needed them.”
But students may have that influence. If we can decouple ourselves from algorithms that make us careless, if we can choose majors that we care about over the phantom idea of some more money in the future, we can put good books squarely back in the culture. I’m not naive enough to hold my breath for this change; print’s heyday is long gone. But the humanities are bigger than books or ancient musings. They grow the world and look it over and probe its weak spots. They ask, ceaselessly, for new ideas. They have a young person’s energy and an old person’s humor. Just hear the word: humanities. We act like they disrupt the center of our being; they are that center. The culture ditches them, universities let them expire. They stagger over lectures and campfires. I am not hopeless enough to think that this generation will let them breathe their last.
