Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Who Needs Literature?" Los Angeles Review of Books, November 11, 2019 [Original Yiddish text, first published in Forverts on October 20, 1963; tr. David Stromberg]:
- The crisis of literature: I sometimes fear that all of humankind may sooner or later come to my conclusion: that reading fiction is a waste of time. But why should I be afraid? Just because I would personally be one of the victims?
No, it’s not just that. Even though we can now land on Mount Everest
in a helicopter, it would be a pity if we no longer attempted climbing
to the top. The value of literary fiction is not only its capacity to
both entertain readers and teach them something, but also as a sport —
an intellectual challenge. Even if we could invent a machine that would
report to us precisely all of the experiences of a Raskolnikov, a Madame
Bovary, or an Anna Karenina, it would still be interesting to know if
this could be done with pen and paper. [...]
Put this way, literature would still seem to survive as an intellectual
sport. But it would be a sport in which only people playing the sport,
as well as a few amateurs, would be interested. A man who walked on foot
to California might summon our admiration, but his walking would not be
taken seriously as a medium of communication. For this reason, I fear
the day when literary fiction becomes a sport. It often seems to me that
we are already at this point. It has actually already happened with
poetry, including in our own Yiddish language. The poetic word is now
read almost exclusively by poets. In such a great and wealthy land as
the United States, works of poetry are often published in 500 copies and
a good part of these is distributed by authors among their friends.
Drama has not yet reached the sad state of poetry, but it’s going in
that the same direction.
As for literary prose, we often feel like it’s doing well. Books of
prose are still bought in hundreds of thousands of copies. But when we
look a little deeper into the matter, we see that what we nowadays call
“literary fiction” is often far from literary fiction. Works are often
sold under the label “novel” that are in fact three-fourths or a 100
percent journalism.
- The forgotten rules of the game: It often seems to me that modern critics suffer from amnesia. They’ve forgotten the elementary rules of the game called literature. It’s no feat to score grand victories in a chess game if, right from the start, one player gets more pieces than another, or if the rules of the game change with each round [...] Instead of admitting that there’s a crisis in literature and that journalism must step in on behalf of literature, literary critics, publishers, and often writers themselves have, consciously and more often unconsciously, changed the concept, they’ve ostensibly expanded it, but in reality simply confused and forgotten it. It’s as if people playing a sport had suddenly decided that a participant in a footrace can ride a bicycle. It’s a revolution that, instead of enriching the field, impoverishes and liquidates it.
- Artistic purity–the way out: For those genuinely interested in literature and its achievements, such works are a sign of a tragic downturn, a sickness that people try to cover up with bragging, false cures, harmful injections, and drugs. We have so expanded the definitions and so deformed the rules that everyone can play and everyone can win. Anyone who understands how rarely a true talent is born and how extremely difficult it is to be original — to discover something of one’s own in the art of writing — can clearly see that we are not dealing with progress but regress, a sort of literary anarchy that’s good only for the big publishers and their printing presses, for television and Hollywood. [...] Precisely because people today are surrounded by a sea of information related to all kinds of fields, genuine modern artists have to deliver more and more artistic purity, more substance, a greater focus on the portrayal of character and individuality. But for this one has to have exceptional gifts. It is, simply put, harder than ever to be original and creative in new ways.
from Rowan Williams, "Why Poetry Matters" (A Review of John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century), New Statesman, October 23, 2019:
Burnside is a consistent champion of difficulty in poetry, the quality that liberates the reader (and writer) from a “prefabricated world” in which nothing is ever new and disorienting. On this basis he has some pretty sharp things to say about how poetry is often taught in schools – as illustrative of subject matter rather than as something that has to be wrestled with first and foremost as speech. Pupils, he says, are likely to go away thinking more about this subject matter than about what has been happening in the words they hear or read. Pushing students into prematurely writing their own poems on the subject further shrinks the challenge of staying with the difficulty and valuing it in its own terms. Yet he also has astringent things to say about “lazy” difficulty. Verbose, self-indulgent poetry, drawing attention to its own ingenuity, labours for surface effect rather than transparency to what the poem directs us to – which is not themes or ideas but the “music” of the givenness of a moment, or a juxtaposition of words, or a collision of sensations.
[...]
Burnside mischievously suggests that our passion to “understand” poetry may derive from “a middle-school confusion of literature and theology”, rooted in the abiding problem of making sense of an opaque scriptural text. But if there is a proper overlap between the two it is surely here, in the way poetry affirms the material, finite world but is always conscious of an unimaginable backdrop, never trying to occupy or contain that elusive perspective.
