“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