Don’t fear the Reaper
A fitting coda to the media’s handwringing this year over all things literary is Caleb Crain’s piece in The New Yorker, ominously titled “Twilight of the Books,” which looks at how declining literacy is affecting not just the publishing industry – it’s changing the very structure of the human mind, most likely for the worse.
The article begins by corralling a long list of facts that describes the slow decline of literacy in the U.S. Here are a couple of zingers, excerpted from the text:
In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002.
The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005.
According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient – capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials” – declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.
Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation – even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.
And on and on. Crain then offers a lengthy primer on the neurological basis of literacy skills and concludes that reading, as opposed to watching TV, provides a better “cognitive workout.” The bad news, of course, is that in the “antagonism between words and moving images” the latter is winning hands down.
Given the decline of books, it’s not surprising that the Guardian is reporting on the death of book criticism. John Crace’s article profiles English academic Ronan McDonald, whose new book (titled The Death of the Critic) contains some very old-school ideas. (The central argument boils down to this: “It’s tough being a serious critic in these relativist times.”) The author even invokes the ghost of F.R. Leavis, the admittedly “rebarbative and prescriptive”critic of a bygone era.
Ironically, the very existence of Crain’s lengthy piece and McDonald’s lively polemic point to the health of both literacy and criticism. Here’s hoping that coverage of both topics becomes a little less morbid in the new year.
This post needs more cowbell.
What amuses me is that people who don’t read books write books or, at least, have them written for them. Isn’t that right Brian, Jean? And then you have some know-it-all writer who thinks he’s making an important point by sending the current PM books to read. Martel is poised to become the William Gass of Canlit politics. A bigger bombast than Mulroney himself. Hectoring the rabble from the commanding heights. Read you sorry sods, your souls depend on it. Jann we see you up there and we are truly humbled. If we only knew Homer like you knew Homer we’d truly know why we are vindictive, greedy, conniving bastards and make true art out of these qualities. No wonder reading is down. Our literary lites are truly that. Play the man Jann but some of us play it as it lays. Controlled folly baby, anyone who has lived beyond the age of six months doesn’t need to read a book to figure that one out. You can make poetry or tragedy out of it if you like and some small corner of the world will give you a Booker Prize but I know riff raff on the corner of Queen & Church Streets or Bay & Adelaide who do it just as well and they don’t need any book to give their life form. One day Jann you’re crying on a bed in India and the next day you’re trying to tell the PM how to think. Isn’t life grandiose? Let the reaper come. He’s coming anyway and he doesn’t give a shit about my IQ or reading list. So reading is down. As a business that’s bad news fpr the publishing industry. But as a sign of the decline of man I’ll leave that to Jann Martel and William Gass to determine. Cause, in truth, despite the companship of the great books in my life, or because of them, I’ve learned that even the well read build defective cars and curse their children. But as we’re talking books and the power of authors, I’ll close with a sweet reprise from Kurt Vonnegut: So it goes.
I would argue that the “existence of Crain’s lengthy piece and McDonald’s lively polemic” merely points to the inescapable fact that declining rates of literacy matter only to the literate.