Attention dilemmas focus on the dramatic loss of the ability to concentrate. A post-literate society does not erase literacy; it replaces extended, legible text with short-form video as the default medium of everyday life. General literacy remains historically high. Attention – especially the kind needed to interpret inky marks on a page and turn them into meaning – has become central to debates about the character of a literate public and what might be lost if that character disappears. One way to counter this sense of loss is to consider the costs of literacy to personality and the behavioural patterns that excessive literacy can amplify.

Highly literate individuals routinely attempt to translate experience into readable form. Paradoxically, post-literate societies may obscure literacy’s costs, costs visible only to the hyper-literate, who alone perceive what literacy gives and takes away. In post-literacy, reading is often treated as an unalloyed good, precisely because awareness of what is lost substitutes for reading itself.

The spy George Smiley, one of the great characters of postwar 20th-century fiction, a high point for reading as a mass leisure pursuit, suffers from the many maladies of the hyper-literate person. For Smiley, espionage provides ‘what he had once loved best in life: academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions’. Smiley remains true to this philosophy throughout the seven novels by John le Carré in which he appears. He operates at a distance, simply making ‘excursions’ into the human world. When the situation demands it, Smiley is ruthless in pursuing the ‘practical’ conclusions ‘of his own deductions’. In Smiley’s People, he brings down the legendary Karla, his opposite number in the KGB, with a sophisticated and morally dubious blackmail involving the Russian spymaster’s own daughter.

Smiley is self-consciously literary, thoroughly devoted to his German poetry and philosophy, and he operates in a literary style – there is a certain otherworldliness to his peculiar brand of heroism. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for much of the timeframe in which the novel operates, Smiley is lost in paper trails, in archives. Piece by piece, he builds up the architecture of the double cross: ‘it would be beautiful in another context’, he muses.

Many of the most sophisticated plots in le Carré’s work, especially the dance of deception he handles in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, must be set out within the fiction itself, subjected to the mechanical demands it makes on the unformed word. Weighting, pace, drive and narrative do not have their place in the real world – but are potentially approximated eerily closely by the world of the spy. The spy must impose control on human behaviour, make the hurly burly clean and comprehensible. Unwanted material must be cut away; untidy threads pulled into place. Smiley’s search for creative solutions to human dilemmas involves an enmeshment with words and labyrinthine systems. This mirrors the highly developed literate mind’s relationship to the world: reality must be seen from a distance to be converted into judgement.

Smiley, servant of the elegant plot, is as emotionally compromised as he is good with patterns. His closest associates, Peter Guillam, his right-hand man from the next generation of MI6, Control, the elderly head of MI6 from a generation older than Smiley, and Connie Sachs, the wonderful and inimitable archivist for the secret service, are something more than colleagues, and something less than friends. He is a cuckold – his wife pursues endless dalliances, for which Smiley forgives her, repeatedly, until finally he draws the business to its end. Ultimately, Smiley’s ‘academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour’ are all he can manage. Real life and the people closest to him remain a mystery.

In espionage, as in fiction, the method is the morality, however grubby. If the execution works, if it is exquisite, the reader forgives much – both the novelist’s treatment of characters, and even the novelist’s own moral failings. The very mechanisms Smiley uses to manipulate the secret world also generate a fundamental estrangement in his personality. Spies make a job of calculated distortion, and a lifetime spent in this way has certain costs.

Many modernist novelists sought to impose discipline on the sprawling realism of the Victorian novel. They were intensely aware of the potential risks in doing so. In EM Forster’s A Room with a View, George describes Lucy Cavendish’s fiancé Cecil as ‘the sort who are all right so long as they keep to things – books, pictures – but kill when they come to people’. The drama of the novel turns on precisely this fault line. Aesthetic refinement can lead to moral weakness if precision and discernment are used to avoid the messiness of real human encounters. Robert Louis Stevenson, a consummate stylist who nevertheless experienced a persistent sense of inadequacy even after achieving worldwide commercial success, found himself wanting against his forebears – men who had built the first lighthouses along the Scottish coastline: ‘Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life,’ he wrote.

In a post-literate world, literary references may become more profuse, and more frequently drawn on, because they have been freed of the weight they once had. Imprecise references are more easily tolerated. A reduction in cultural literacy, a sixth sense for where and how artworks fit together, erodes the internal discipline needed to judge whether a reference truly belongs in an argument. Large Language Models accelerate this trend, providing ready-made glosses that can be inserted directly into arguments. This process is already deep at work, even in magazines that run frequent editorials bemoaning the onset of the post-literate world and staffed by journalists who style themselves as ‘literary’. To be genuinely literate is also to know that the well-rounded person of culture must be equally at home in the musical and the visual arts, through which the word is reformulated and occasionally perfected. Words are powerful – but they lose force if not harnessed with skill by writers with the imagination to see beyond them.