Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin offers a surprising viewpoint in an article for Harper's about books and the decline in reading.
Boiled down, it is this: So what?
Shrugging at our modern-day drop in literacy? That's heresy among the scholars, schoolteachers and newspaper people.
Why, America's reigning place in the world rests on our ability to read. That and skill with those pesky numbers, of course, which prove over and over again that a priori knowledge is as true as what we see, hear and touch. But I'm straying already. Math as prophecy is fodder for a whole 'nother column.
Le Guin, among the heavyweights in the fantasy genre, works with words and ideas the way physicists explore existence with their formulas. It's hard to tell sometimes which is the more weird or less real.
The audience for these disciplines is pretty small. Not many of us puzzle through Einstein or learn the language of "Earthsea." But her article isn't about a polar extreme. It's about books and reading itself. Fundamental stuff.
Or is it?
Le Guin recognizes the peak of reading as 1850 to 1950 in the United States " the century of the book, she calls it. That also was the golden age of newspapers. Public education and public libraries came into being and flourished. Many towns had at least two papers. That great corrupter, television, had not arrived yet.
People not only read books, but they discussed them like we talk about rock bands and sitcoms. General readers could recognize and enjoy subtle references to Shakespeare or Tennyson, Le Guin says.
Her point isn't to bemoan declines in general reading, though. Not that she celebrates it. Reading requires skill and focus, and it trains the mind in ways I do think we're losing possibly to our peril. Good thing for the world, if not the United States, that millions of people in places like India and China have picked up the ambition and rigor to their studies that we've let slip in our comfort here.
But Le Guin observes that through nearly all of history, literacy belonged to an elite. The notion that everyone must be well read is new.
A slight dip since 1950 is not the same as when only the local priest knew how to read, a little. If only half of us read a book in the past year, so what, really?
Books are still here to stay, for those just bright enough to tackle them. She asks: "The hedonists who read because they want to; were such people ever in the majority?"
Besides, even in decline, there are more and better books than ever before. Of course, thanks to self-publishing and corporate publishers chasing dollars ahead of literature, there's a lot more crap, too.
She excoriates today's book publishers and their pursuit of profit, while vowing they'll never entirely kill writing as art.
I see a lot of parallels in her piece on books with my occupation. Smarter, more community-conscious, wealthier, older people have self-selected themselves as heavier newspaper readers since the 1950s, and probably before that, too.
Like the book world, mine has consolidated and compressed into ever more corporate models. Today there's a coldness in the big papers that I'll blame on objective professionalism. The little guys still have some quirkiness, some personality, and haven't gone quite so tone deaf to the communities they presume to cover.
We still have plenty of publishers who believe in profit as the means, not the end. They may not work for Gannett, mind you. But there remain family-owned operations among the sea of public entities, and I sense that's where the art will dwell and eventually prevail.
I don't work for an Inc. I know the owners not by a stock moniker but as people " Jan and Marilyn " who value community and believe in the paper's proper place supporting it.
They need their papers to succeed as businesses, just as you need your enterprise to succeed. But they long ago would have taken the easier path to sell out, as many families have, if the ledger were the most important thing they read.
I'm a lot less comfortable than Le Guin with today's low state of literacy. But I get her drift that what matters most is the right people will still pick up a book, or paper.
- Don Rogers, publisher of The Record-Courier, can be reached at 782-5121, ext. 208, or drogers@recordcourier.com
