Jeanette Winterson on reading books in the digital age

[tegeus-Cromis]

"Do books serve a moral function? Absolutely. And it isn’t a question of subject matter, because fiction isn’t obliged to tackle the world head-on. If we are only interested in the now, then the past is obsolete. Reading is such an odd act — solitary, introspective, outside of time (not controlled by time) and not subject to surveillance. Reading isn’t data. Books more than ever are agents of freedom from a snoopy controlling data-driven nightmare that pretends we are free when we have never been more scrutinized. So reading certainly has moral value — and is increasingly subversive. Literature is a compass — useful to get your bearings even if you want to go in a different direction. Literature is a tool kit. Books are the most practical of endeavors. They teach us about life, about motive, about our own darkness, about why we act as we do, and they give us back real live language. Anything that frees your brain from the karate-chop syntax of newsfeed and social media is in part a meditative act.

The purpose of art changes as society changes. Sometimes art has to break us up — sometimes art has to heal us up. Literature, because it is made of language, returns language to us. If we have the words, we are not silenced, although we learn, through the enforced quiet of reading, what it means to be silent."

From here: Jeanette Winterson Owns the Entire Oxford English Dictionary

 

[Extollager]

Basically I like her comments, but I don't fully endorse them because much that she says could be taken as a utilitarian case for literature, i.e. it's valuable because it helps us to live better lives in a surveillance society.

First, I'd say to that, it depends. A lot of reading matter out there probably works to make people more comfortable with our present society (including that sense of comfort that comes when people applaud themselves, unworthily, for being stalwart against the flow). My sense is that a tremendous amount of the current prestige art in places like New York is intended to seem valuable for social reasons (and is likely to be terribly predictable). I wouldn't bother with it,

Second, allowing that some reading may indeed have moral value for our lives over against "society," still this is an extraliterary benefit. Literature may be "good for us," but I like to see readers and authors reminding us too that the artistic imagination (literature, music, visual arts) has its own basic human value. Consider a small child who feels perfectly secure, healthy, and happy -- still the child loves a story. We shouldn't outgrow that.