Doris Lessing, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, delivered her acceptance speech last week. It's a powerful plea for reading and for education and for joining in the "great tradition" of books, but Lessing wonders why poor students in southern Africa have a stronger desire for books than do the wealthy students of England. Her answer: TV and the Internet.
Lessing is an old woman now (b. 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia) and wasn't able to deliver the speech in person, but that didn't stop her from crafting a fiery speech about the power of books.
She grew up in Persia (now Iran) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and she is largely self-educated. The Nobel committee calls her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."
Lessing's Nobel diploma
She's also no fan of blogging. Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn't believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. "And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc." It is now common, she says, for "young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers."
She contrasts this attitude with the hunger for books shown by students she has visited in Zimbabwe and other African countries, but also with the workingmen's clubs and lending libraries that characterized Victorian England. Her attack on TV, computers, and the Internet, though brief, is crucial to the piece: it is her single reason for the perceived decline in the desire to read.
One could respond to this in many ways, but perhaps the most fruitful would be to simply accept Lessing's premise. TV and computers and the Internet have changed the ways that people spend their time, and those changes have not always been critically examined by those parents who now allow their average US child to watch four hours of television a day. There is much that could be condemned here, from obesity to short attention spans to the singing of Barney songs.
And yet, perhaps book lovers will need to accept that the "great tradition" of literary art is moving into a new medium. It's not the first time. Print did the same thing to an oral culture, and recorded pop music has largely replaced poetry for most in the modern world. But television, films, and web sites can all offer powerful stories. And print, far from dying out, is being consumed in massive quantities online. The issue, as it has always been, is pointing readers and viewers to the sort of material worth their time and attention, material that tells true stories about the world or enlarges our sense of what it means to be human or offers real entertainment. What needs to be avoided is the content, online and off, that is little more than pabulum spoonfed to those who want fare just rich enough to keep them from boredom.
Books are also a great offender in this regard, as anyone who has perused the racks of paperback novels at a supermarket can attest. Bashing those who "blog and blug" (that is, read and write) seems to be missing the point; so too does the glorification of paper copies of Anna Karenina. Text is in no danger of dying out (see Amazon's Kindle); in fact, neither is print. Critics have been wondering for years whether too many books are currently being published.
Lessing tells an anecdote about a visit to a posh London school. She goes to the library. She is told, "You know how it is. A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used." If true, it does seem a sad story, but the answer simply cannot be a fetishization of books. We need instead to encourage the consumption (and thoughtful digestion) of artful fiction and nonfiction on whatever page or screen it appears.
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