“Literature is standing its ground against screens”

What can we say about the role of lit­er­at­ure dur­ing the confinement?

Before com­ing to lit­er­at­ure, let’s talk about read­ing, which did not do too badly dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. The drop in sales was mod­er­ate, even though book­stores were closed for many months and there were fears of a dis­aster for publishing.

Did this resi­li­ence of the “book eco­nomy” bene­fit lit­er­at­ure? The answer is not so simple. We observed a very strong con­cen­tra­tion of best­sellers in 2020. Hence, it is best­sellers that have benefited from the upswing. This can be explained by the fact that it has been more dif­fi­cult to browse through book­stores, and there­fore exper­i­ence the full diversity of titles. 

That is what I refer to when I say ‘read­ing’. Where­as lit­er­at­ure is more about rare books, dif­fi­cult books. How­ever, there is a nuance to be noted here because the sales of the 2020 Gon­court prize, L’An­om­alie, are very good even though the author does belong to the most access­ible cat­egory of pop­u­lar lit­er­at­ure; that of Oulipo, Queneau, Calvino or Perec. Thus, lit­er­at­ure too seems to have benefited from the confinement.

This seems all the more true since the clas­sics also sold well. There was a move­ment back to the lit­er­ary col­lec­tion: The Horse­man on the Roof, The Plague… We went to books that could speak to us about the situ­ation we were experiencing. 

So, over­all, books have not suffered too much from the situ­ation. On the con­trary, some pub­lish­ers recor­ded excep­tion­al profits in 2020, which was a sur­prise for them: the con­fine­ment did not only bene­fit Net­flix as they had feared. We are sat­ur­ated with digit­al con­tent, and the sales fig­ures for books show a nice res­ist­ance to the screen (even e‑books remain mar­gin­al in France). All in all, this is not a bad year for literature.

What is the role of lit­er­at­ure? What are the bene­fits it provides that screens cannot?

Lit­er­at­ure serves to widen our field of exper­i­ence, to open ourselves up to what we can­not know by ourselves about the world around us. It serves to free us from our pre­ju­dices. In fact, that is the same func­tion lit­er­at­ure has always served. Aris­totle already of spoke already the cath­arsis in Poet­ics; a com­plic­ated notion since we still do not know what exactly it implies, oth­er it con­sists of liv­ing things through the exper­i­ences of others.

Lit­er­at­ure edu­cates by mul­tiply­ing sen­sa­tions and exper­i­ences; through which we dis­cov­er some­thing else. It is well known that humans learn much bet­ter by example than by rule, which we know but do not apply. Christ speaks in par­ables, because allegory or fable are more instruct­ive than commandments.

There are, of course, oth­er ways to learn, espe­cially through the screen. But the writ­ten word has cer­tain priv­ileges, which are linked to the free­dom that lan­guage gives in rela­tion to images. When faced with the screen adapt­a­tion of a nov­el that we love, we often feel a sense of dis­ap­point­ment, because this was not how we ima­gined the char­ac­ters and their world. The free­dom of ima­gin­a­tion that read­ing gives is without equi­val­ent: it is the great priv­ilege of the writ­ten word, which remains com­pared to oth­er modes of narration.

This priv­ilege is also linked to time: we are less depend­ent on its lin­ear­ity when we read than when we watch a film. The “pause” but­ton on VCRs was one of the great inven­tions of the 20^th cen­tury, but it has noth­ing in com­mon with the free­dom to read a book at one’s own pace, to be able to slow down, speed up, sus­pend… So, the advant­ages of lit­er­at­ure remain.

Young adults stop read­ing at the age of trans­ition from chil­dren’s books to ‘main­stream’ literature

How­ever, young­er chil­dren have been read­ing a little less in 2020. How can we help them under­stand the import­ance of books?

The dif­fi­culty with books is in adoles­cence rather than child­hood. That’s when many give up read­ing. Young adults stop read­ing at the age of trans­ition from children’s books to “main­stream” lit­er­at­ure. This is actu­ally more true for boys than for girls.

What can we tell them? Prob­ably explain to them that lit­er­at­ure will help them in their pro­fes­sion­al careers. I have often argued that lit­er­ary cul­ture is an asset in all sorts of activ­it­ies. Proust points this out in The Search: a bet­ter law­yer (or engin­eer, or doc­tor) is a law­yer (or engin­eer, or doc­tor) who has a lit­er­ary culture.

Lit­er­ary cul­ture is always an asset for suc­cess – whatever the activ­ity – because it gives an exper­i­ence of the oth­er, and because, in all pro­fes­sion­al sec­tors, com­mu­nic­a­tion, dia­logue, inter­ac­tions with oth­ers are at stake.

Vari­ous courses have intro­duced lit­er­at­ure to human­ise their cur­ricula, which had become excess­ively tech­nic­al. This is the case, for example, in medi­cine: in many fac­ulties, lit­er­ary teach­ing has been intro­duced to human­ise the rela­tion­ship between doc­tors, med­ic­al staff, and patients. The idea is quite simply that a strictly tech­nic­al medi­cine has more dif­fi­culty in cur­ing; the dis­ease must be part of a story, told between the doc­tor and the patient. A medi­cine that has a nar­rat­ive dimen­sion is in this way a bet­ter medicine.

I have spoken about lit­er­at­ure in med­ic­al schools. There is a whole body of texts about ill­ness, death and heal­ing. We read Thomas Mann’s Magic Moun­tain or Solzhenitsyn’s The Can­cer Ward. And it is import­ant that phys­i­cians have some famili­ar­ity with the ways in which ill­ness is nar­rated. This reas­on­ing applies to all dis­cip­lines, includ­ing engineering.

Does lit­er­at­ure allow us to bet­ter under­stand the sciences?

How can we doubt it? The best math­em­aticians and phys­i­cists are also poets. They give their inven­tions the most meta­phor­ic­al names because they think like poets. Think of cata­strophe the­ory, Schrödinger­’s cat, or string the­ory. I men­tioned earli­er the con­tri­bu­tion of the nov­el to the intel­li­gence of the world, to the under­stand­ing of oth­ers. But it is the ima­gin­a­tion to which poetry has intro­duced them that makes sci­ent­ists better.

Interview by Clément Boulle and Juliette Parmentier