Doris Lessing was too frail to travel to Stockholm to accept this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, but she nevertheless delivered a powerful acceptance speech this evening, read on her behalf by her editor. Lessing opened her address by recalling a trip to Zimbabwe, the land of her childhood. She visits a crumbling schoolhouse where a friend of hers is a teacher:
The pupils range from six to 26, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can’t study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off for school and when they get back.
As I sit with my friend in his room, people shyly drop in, and everyone begs for books. “Please send us books when you get back to London,” one man says. “They taught us to read but we have no books.” Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.
After returning to England from her trip to Africa, Lessing is invited to speak to the students of a prosperous British school: “Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. ‘You know how it is,’ one of the teachers says. ‘A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.'”
She continues:
Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging et cetera?”
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.
We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it.
The Guardian has published the entire speech.
“Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education …”
Yes, but very recently (relatively), only very few people were even mildly educated. So romantic as her speech can be – and of course, it’s playing to the audience – it’s not exactly as insightful as it might sound.
Those who walk uphill both ways to get to a rural school obviously have a different attitude towards learning than those who are at a top University to make social connections among their part of the ruling class. In fact, these groups are so different it’s arguably misleading to put them in the same category at all.
And remember, one could just as well have said at one time:
“How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the book, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in reading romance novels et cetera.”
Greetings Seth and I hope all is well with you. I was taken as a small child to East Africa and spent several years there until the Mau Mau Tribe chased the colonialists out. The dust and open jeep smell returns once in a while yet it’s been some 50 years, so I might have an easier time relating to her speech than you did and I must admit to a very similar biography in some ways.
I thought the context she used to be purposeful and it genuinely reflects the passion that has driven her life’s work.
My teenage daughters attend a very good inner city public school yet they rarely pick up a book out of there own free will and their knowledge of literature and geography is shockingly inadequate. I do not see much difference in their peer group.
I do believe that contemporary electronic media has left a generation of children with atrophied imaginative powers. When I started teaching a class of children might be easily spellbound by a good story, breathless, riveted and lost in it. With the advent of blockbusters and special effects the visual senses have been bombarded and it has become much harder to create that magic inner space for them.
Too be clear I am referring to the damage from excessive media upon young children.
Alan
Doris Lessing is a very persuasive romantic, but I am not convinced by her words.
As McLuhan noted, when we adopted print technology, our civilization morphed into a bureaucratic culture, with all its benefits and flaws. He also argued that the new electric media are returning us to a global village, where the oral becomes more important.
Lessing also fails to see that young people in the west are using printed words more than ever, except they are texting and emailing and building social media sites. She should be rejoicing that all the great works of literature – and their ideas – are now available for the reading without having to go to an institution – a publishing house, a bookstore or library. And today, with print on demand, more and more people are writing and publishing. We’re drowning in books.
So what Lessing is really doing is lamenting the eclipse of an institution and its culture.
Norm,
I think you’re completely wrong. First, McLuhan’s idea that electric media would return us to tribal oral traditions was itself a romantic notion (or at least it became a romantic notion in the minds of his more superficial readers).
Second, fucking around with “text” all day has absolutely nothing to do with reading serious, challenging books. Lessing is not talking about “text.”
Third, greater availability does not mean greater use, and it’s use that matters.
Fourth, she’s certainly not talking about the quantity of books being produced (read her comments about publishing toward the end of her talk). She’s talking about the desire to read good books as a manifestation of the desire to expand one’s knowledge and understanding of one’s world. Studies clearly show that young people’s reading of literature is in a sharp, long-term decline. That decline began before the arrival of the Web, but the arrival of the Web is not reversing the trend; it’s accelerating it.
Seth,
Of course you’re right to say “Yes, but very recently (relatively), only very few people were even mildly educated,” and it’s an important point to make, but it’s beside Lessing’s point. What Lessing is talking about is the desire for learning, the hunger for books and knowledge. It’s the fading of that desire, whether in the educated or uneducated, that she laments.
Nick, I think you’re taking an unfounded jump here with sentences such as, “What Lessing is talking about is the desire for learning, the hunger for books and knowledge.” You are taking for granted that the hunger for books is the same as the hunger for knowledge.
I think it is fine to be saddened by a declining interest in literature, and I may be suspicious that it is tied to a declining interest in education, but that suspicion is unfounded! Look at what books ended up being among the most popular before the wide-spread adoption of the internet: pulp fiction and romance novels. Today, we associate reading with learning and education, but the fact of the matter is that people have, for years, turned to reading for entertainment, arguably because it was their best option. They didn’t have to make up their own stories, or rely on a family member or neighbor to make up a story. No, they could let their own imaginations atrophy as they enjoyed the imaginings of an author with whom they would never have any personal contact.
I submit that the substitution of blogs for romance novels is not nearly as disconcerting of a thought as that proposed by Lessing and yourself, here. But, entertainment aside, I do not think you can say that a declining interest in books is the same as a declining interest in education when books were the primary delivery mechanism for education, but are becoming less so every day.
Ms. Lessing’s thesis seems best encapsulated by her own words:
I read this argument as the model of abject conservativism. She claims that to merely question what was certain a few decades is a sign of a “fragmenting culture”. My own view is that questioning what is “certain” is the hallmark of a healthy, adaptive culture. Is this not the basis for all artistic, scientific, and human advancement, to fearlessly question what is considered beyond reproach?
Her sweeping claim that young men and women commonly “know nothing of the world” and “have read nothing” appeals to the cynic within. But there are two critically important responses: is this claim consistent with the truth, and (dare I even ask), are “knowledge of the world” and being “well-read” as valuable today as in generations past? Ms. Lessing’s statement poses as both unquestionable fact and unquestionable judgement. I propose we discuss, rather than disdain, our world and culture.
Thank you, Nick, for the pointer. The whole speech is a lot more than the parts we’re talking about here and I really enjoyed reading it.
I think Lessings criticisms are objectively true (I’ll explain why). I see some saving graces that she might not, though (and I’ll explain those).
Let’s forget “books” for a moment — they are not important to her point about “the west”. Rather, she is saying that all of today’s young people are dullards and that, when they compete among themselves to improve themselves, the competition aims at becoming a very specialized dullard rather than on becoming the most erudite person.
It’s illustrative that, in trying to argue against Lessing, some here point to the increased accessibility of things like books. Access is not consumption. Whereas consumption can create erudition, merely ubiquitous access — the freedom to look up a quick quote when you need to make a point — is a simulacrum, a substitute for erudition. A cheap, untrustworthy, dangerous substitute.
I think it’s pretty obviously objectively true that the habits and goals of erudition both elude most young people these days (to a notably greater extent, percentage wise, than even a little while ago) and are palpably not conveyed by our supposed institutions of learning with any kind of reliable success. And yet, remarkably, in cultures struggling to be literate at all those habits and values come naturally.
The bright side is that I think, to a small hopeful extent at least, that Lessing is partly just looking in the wrong places. The younger generations are not, in fact, all dullards and some of them do, in fact, compete among themselves to see who can become the most learned.
The weird thing that I observe, that might account for Lessing’s perception given her social standing, is that so many of today’s young scholars are autodidacts not, primarily, living by a trade that rewards their scholarship. Scholarship is, for them, a hobby and a way to cling to sanity in a materially challenging environment. Lessing reports seeing similar cases in Africa….
-t
Interestingly enough the medium we are using to attempt to convey our thoughts with is woefully inadequate to the task, unless we would be willing to read many-paged responses. Where we face to face most of this discourse would either not arise or fall to the ground with a thud!
So what is it that is missing? When we have that answer, both this post and the most recent, Slutbot aces Turing Test, would be self-evident.
Tom the comment “the habits and goals of erudition both elude most young people these days and are palpably not conveyed by our supposed institutions of learning with any kind of reliable success” is a huge part of the general problem we are dealing with here.
Alan
Perhaps Doris Lessing is right, but here is an alternative theory: In any culture there is a minority of people who read books for fun. Not necessarily difficult, serious books, but books that reflect curiosity in the reader. Exploring the worlds of fiction and non-fiction is to them an end in itself. Then there’s a larger group of people who will read only as a means to something else: a good job, social status, etc. And then there’s a small group who actively avoid reading at all. It’s the difference between walking up a mountain because you enjoy it, doing it because you want to get to the other side, and not even trying.
The first group will always be hungry for books, the third will always hate them, but the second group will adapt to their circumstances. In a poor country, education can be the difference between death and wealth, in a rich welfare state the consequences are much smaller. You need less general knowledge to succeed – there are more specialized jobs available, and there’s not as far to fall if you fail. You won’t starve, and you won’t even be bored (at least on your spare time). Also, the knowledge requirements that do exist can often be passed using Google and Wikipedia. Those tools won’t make you knowledgeable, but they will give you a passing grade. So you may not need to open a book to achieve your goals of job or status. It’s like someone laid roads and tunnels through the mountain – you miss out on the experience of climbing it, but it’s one you never cared about in the first place. And now the book-haters can get to the other side as well.
I’m not saying this is how it is, or that the proportion between these groups is fixed, but if it is: Is it a bad thing that some of us live in a world where the second group doesn’t have to read so many books any more? And where books are so common that you have to be a genuine booklover (group 1) to be thirsty for them? Shouldn’t the question be what happens to the first group? If they keep on reading as before, then I’m not concerned. I don’t know if they are, (hard facts, anyone?), but that’s what I think would be important.
Thanks for the link — I just read her speech. It is so rich with ideas.
Some bloggers feel attacked by her speech. Her piece actually expresses great hope and encouragement, not snobbish finger-wagging:
Elsewhere, she shows that she isn’t simply a bookophile:
That’s about as expansive as I dare in a comment. On a blog post. About a brilliant speech.