Who Needs Literature?
Who Needs Literature?
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS - November 11, 2019 • By Isaac Bashevis Singer
FROM TIME TO TIME I ask myself: Who needs literary fiction? Why invent things when nature and life supply so many strange events? Because — aside from our imagination never being able to keep up with the factual and psychological surprises of reality — not even the greatest master’s pen can be as consistent and accurate as a factual history that is told in documents or that comes to light during a trial in court. Just as heaven and earth have conspired that there is no such thing as a perfect murder, so there can never exist a perfect novel. Even Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary have their faults, familiar inconsistencies that appear in every piece of fiction. I myself have reached the point that a newspaper report or a “case history” in a book interests me more than a literary work. Why all the psychological explanations when they clarify nothing about the emotions? Why bother proving a lie when truth needs no preface?
I sometimes fear that all of humankind may sooner or later come to my conclusion: that reading fiction is a waste of time.
But why should I be afraid? Just because I would personally be one of the victims?
No, it’s not just that. Even though we can now land on Mount Everest in a helicopter, it would be a pity if we no longer attempted climbing to the top. The value of literary fiction is not only its capacity to both entertain readers and teach them something, but also as a sport — an intellectual challenge. Even if we could invent a machine that would report to us precisely all of the experiences of a Raskolnikov, a Madame Bovary, or an Anna Karenina, it would still be interesting to know if this could be done with pen and paper.
This approach to literature is not yet completely relevant for the simple fact that no such machine yet exists. But a whole array of forces is gradually assembling this machine. Modern readers know more and more about psychology, and to them a writer’s explanations often seem unnecessary, false, or old-fashioned. They reads plenty, and no theme is shocking enough to surprise them. They get the facts from newspapers, magazines, radio, television, or movies. They’re connected to all the corners of the world — and nothing invented by the mind can compare with what takes place in reality. There’s still a chance that, in our day — or yours — humankind will reach the moon, or one of the planets. All the fantasies of so-called “science fiction” will pale in comparison with footage shot on the moon or on the other planets.
Put this way, literature would still seem to survive as an intellectual sport. But it would be a sport in which only people playing the sport, as well as a few amateurs, would be interested. A man who walked on foot to California might summon our admiration, but his walking would not be taken seriously as a medium of communication. For this reason, I fear the day when literary fiction becomes a sport. It often seems to me that we are already at this point. It has actually already happened with poetry, including in our own Yiddish language. The poetic word is now read almost exclusively by poets. In such a great and wealthy land as the United States, works of poetry are often published in 500 copies and a good part of these is distributed by authors among their friends. Drama has not yet reached the sad state of poetry, but it’s going in that the same direction.
As for literary prose, we often feel like it’s doing well. Books of prose are still bought in hundreds of thousands of copies. But when we look a little deeper into the matter, we see that what we nowadays call “literary fiction” is often far from literary fiction. Works are often sold under the label “novel” that are in fact three-fourths or a 100 percent journalism.
At no other time has the boundary between journalism and literature been so thin and so blurred as in ours. It often seems to me that modern critics suffer from amnesia. They’ve forgotten the elementary rules of the game called literature. It’s no feat to score grand victories in a chess game if, right from the start, one player gets more pieces than another, or if the rules of the game change with each round.