What did reading ever do for us?

The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society, James Marriott, The Bodley Head, £14.99

‘Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it – oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?… And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years… we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princess de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at a happy medium.’ The speaker is Charles Swann, the most significant character in the first volume of Proust’s novel series, In Search of Lost Time. Here we are introduced to him as a guest at a dinner party given at the narrator’s childhood home in Combray. Each of those present talks about what they want to talk about (Sweden’s co-operative movement, the methods of a fashionable actor, and the private lives of certain descendants of the Bourbons). They talk past each other. The scene peaks with the narrator’s aunts’ repeated attempts to thank Swann for a gift of a case of wine. They are so refined that they don’t wish to do so directly, thinking that Swann might be embarrassed, but wink and nudge and pun. Swann is none the wiser. It is a little comedy of manners.

Swann is not seen as a man of culture at all by his hosts – they know him simply as the modest son of a stockbroker, a local friend of the family. But Swann is thoroughly cultured. He shows it by bringing back prints of famous artworks from abroad for the narrator’s education and amusement. He even jokes about the resemblances between people and canonical artworks. He moves in the highest social circles, a fact his hosts dismiss as unimportant. So Swann’s contribution is a delicate piece of social signalling. Here he is, playing up: slightly above the fray, simultaneously diffident and controlled: oh isn’t it all rather beneath us! And isn’t Pascal worth listening to – but only once in a decade…

This exchange could only have taken place in a literate society – newspapers full of social chatter, an ironic reference to a philosopher famous for his difficulty, treasured books dolled up in special bindings, and the assumption that ‘we’ read ‘every morning’. The guests dart quickly around esoteric places and personalities, knowledge that can only have been acquired second-hand. They misread each other comically, but with consequences. In Proust’s world, life can seem to slip away amid the endless chattering. It is a conversation that is imagined as having taken place in the 1880s, seen from the first decades of the 20th century. Intensely cultivated, intensely literate, these charming representatives of the European bourgeoisie were ill-prepared for the age that followed. Their class largely did not survive it.

That historical moment – running roughly to the middle of the 20th century before the invention of television – is for James Marriott the high tide of literacy in human affairs. It was an era of genuine mass democracy ruled by elites capable of making it work. Where did this society come from? Marriott’s story begins in the 18th century. In his account, the republic of letters, once the preserve of a few high-minded gentlemen, soon opened its gates to all, while print technology did the rest, carrying new ideas to whole societies. The rulers of this literate world were broadly decent and learned men. A culture of lively debate kept politicians honest, kept them within ‘rational’ limits, as Marriott puts it. They didn’t get everything right, but they could correct their mistakes. Crucially, mass literacy meant that appeals to the tribe, to mysticism and superstition, did not work well on a sceptical reading public. Working people also used the power of the written word to win rights long hoarded by the rich. In the 20th century, the culture of print and the book left residues on the way we talked to each other, how our leaders explained themselves to us, and the way we made music. Those residues are now being rubbed out and may already have vanished.

These positive developments are inconceivable, in Marriott’s account, without the widespread adoption of specific modes of attention fostered by books and ‘deep reading’. Neither the moving image nor sound achieves these effects. Only reading, he argues, amplifies human beings’ pattern-spotting abilities and expands their flexibility and scope to this dramatic extent. The book introduced a model of behaviour that was new: concentrated, immersive and personal. When it became available at scale, it changed the world for the better. The reader and the page must work together. Deep reading yields personal insights and slowly uproots sincerely held prejudices. The process is occasionally magnificent, he writes. These conclusions are hard to resist for anyone who fell in love with books as a child, has felt hooked by a story, and has marvelled at the hallucinated reality novels can communicate, and who, in adult life, continues to value the unique combination of reflection, insight and sensuous delight that books can offer.

These arguments will be familiar to readers of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, published in 2010, a work Marriott pays tribute to. In The Shallows, Carr devotes a chapter to the practice of following up hyperlinks. He worries that manoeuvring between pages in this way reduces our attention capacity. That now seems quaint – minor stuff, and the substance of a million water cooler conversations: ‘Oh I always have a thousand tabs open, too.’ Since 2010, the surfing, skimming and blogging techniques that Carr criticises have been superseded by the age of the ubiquitous smartphone, an audiovisual carnival of swiping, slop and noise.

Marriott clearly relishes the contrasts between the relatively sober culture of print and text and the plethora of video and imagery that seems to have replaced it. To use social media for any significant length of time is to be practically bombarded by bizarre and mostly ephemeral stimulation, an amped-up version of the old ITV programme You’ve Been Framed, which featured wedding videos gone wrong and pratfall stunts captured on handheld cameras. The churn embraces every conceivable human endeavour: politics, sport, culture, cinema, TV, music. The text-dominated internet passed quickly. The new world of the smartphone is altogether stranger. It is hard not to feel his arguments well vindicated by experience. I’ve spent many journeys on public transport trapped next to someone, volume on, cycling through video after video after video. The effects on young people of consuming information via a constant stream of short videos, however amusing and diverting in the moment, are surely miserable in the long term.

The difficulty of writing about a new technology, whose long-term consequences are still in play, is that human beings may simply adapt. Marriott got rid of his smartphone a few years ago and has little practical wisdom to offer about managing smartphone use. As he points out, well-paid Silicon Valley engineers have designed smartphones to win an ever-increasing portion of our attention; and they are very good at their jobs. It is simply impossible to resist these devices’ addictive charms, he writes. But he is wrong to argue that there is nothing we smartphone users can do. In the years since, and this should cheer the author, solutions have been found. My smartphone is a Balance Phone, produced by a Spanish company which reverse-engineers Android systems to make it impossible to download ‘entertaining’ apps such as YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. I still have WhatsApp and email and can read the news on my phone. Demand is growing. The product now sells worldwide – and 50 per cent of its sales are accounted for by the UK market. I also have a lock box at home with an inbuilt timer. If I want to mark out a couple of hours for ‘deep’ reading, or more often just mooching around, I pop my phone and computer in the box, set the timer and off I go. If my capacity for attention is compromised, I am not aware of it.

The effects of the smartphone might be experienced here, in the developed West, by deep readers as irritating, even compromising, but not so elsewhere. The journeys of the men and women who walk across deserts and sail the high seas to arrive on the shores of Europe are inconceivable without the smartphone. The smartphone revolution is global. Even a text designed to be a polemic could have benefited from a discussion of the effects it may have on societies less penetrated by technology. But Marriott certainly captures something alarming about the societies where families can afford three or four smartphones each. He marshals a convincing range of international measures that show that the smartphone generation struggles with cognitive tests – IQ, practical intelligence, pattern-spotting – precisely the qualities cultivated by reading. Something has been lost if this bright, spangly rectangular object is to be cradled in billions of hands for so many hours of the waking day. But what?

In accounting for the origins of mass literacy, Marriott pays significant attention to the 18th century – this was the era, he argues, when brave people, including men of letters such as Voltaire, challenged the old sources of authority, religious and political: when those who ‘dared to know’ first got a proper hearing in a burgeoning world of newspapers and books. Hence the ‘rational’ world was born from the womb of obscurantism. The history of France figures heavily in this account, perhaps justifiably, given that it was the nonpareil society of its day, the largest and most powerful state in Europe, its contradictions and glories pondered over in thousands of essays at home and abroad. The flaw is that the story is told partially and with two significant omissions: the Wars of Religion that lay far back in the country’s past and the Terror that was still to come. Recognising them could have produced a far less reassuring, although potentially more interesting, history of literacy.

The Renaissance philosopher Montaigne, who observed the religious wars of his century, is enlisted as an early harbinger of the literacy revolution – a lone sceptical voice who ‘dared to know’ before the market for ideas had taken off. Marriott glosses him as a man for whom ‘nothing could be taken for granted any more’. In this sense, Marriott’s view of Montaigne is close to the way the Enlightenment philosophes saw him: he was one of their own, a prophet for the prescriptions they applied to their own time. It is not a view we have to accept. In the Essais, he does talk about certain religious practices with a wry, even urbane, sense of humour. But this conservative man of the 16th century went to Mass and was a practising Catholic all his life. He simply accepted the religion of his forefathers, because it was there, because it was time-honoured, because it had been handed down. In matters of deepest conscience, Montaigne remained silent. Amid vicious accusations of heresy and counter-heresy, it was a wise course of action.

Even the most literate man of his day accepted that knowledge was only useful if it was used well, or deliberately circumscribed. It is an insight worth keeping in mind in the next chapter of French history to figure: the vibrant culture of criticism and debate that flourished in the dying days of the Ancien Régime. In Marriott’s view, print meant that the court of Versailles could be lampooned as never before, criticised and ridiculed. No longer could princes and kings control what their subjects saw of them in grand acts of public ritual. It just wouldn’t do when print could show what lay behind the magical displays, possibly extravagance, corruption and decay. It is true that it is virtually impossible to understand the mentality of the revolution, its profound energy, without accounting for the spread of literacy. But his story does not continue beyond 1789. Literacy underpinned the less savoury side of the Revolution and Enlightenment, too – the sincere ambition of their brave apostles to classify, to order, to build. The mentality of those who conducted the Terror, with their obsession for restructuring the patterns of daily life, carries the mark of highly literate minds. Tragically, human beings often got in the way of these powerful, high-minded men. When the Revolution wanted to win support beyond Paris, the effects were spectacular, and horrific. The revolutionaries wanted to build, but they had to churn through a lot of human material in their systematic attempts to complete the good work. The populations who did not fit into this society of reasonable men were mere cement for the Republic. Saint-Just and Robespierre have as good and as sincere a claim to represent the Enlightenment as the, to modern eyes, more palatable Voltaire.

That the Revolution could be represented as the triumph of ‘rationalism’ over ‘irrationalism’ would have brought little succour to the people of the Vendée, butchered, man, woman and child, for widespread loyalty to the Ancien Régime. The cult of reason, formulated by men who thought they were reasonable, prepared the way for the mass movements of the 20th century, Fascism and Communism, both similarly incomprehensible without the literate mentality. The will to impose ideological schemata upon great swathes of space, over entire peoples, was brought to perfection in some of the most literate societies in history. Their victims are legion beyond thought. In Marriott’s account, the disasters that took place in the age of literacy, the high tide of man’s association with books, are attributed to a range of factors such as economic collapse or military humiliation. But this was principally, and irreducibly, a time of great movements, and these were explicitly movements of ideas. It was within this deeply literate mentality that many of their excesses took root. The age of literacy had its great achievements, not least the European novel. But it is too easy to separate the excesses from the achievements. Both were products of literacy.

Marriott concludes by raising the stakes significantly: books, reading and especially reading novels, ‘can be in the vanguard of a new and radical way of looking at the world’. Novels are special: ‘No actor on earth can show with his or her face what Jane Austen can show us about the human heart in half a paragraph.’ Cinema, by contrast, is an art form ‘hopelessly trapped in the exterior world of surfaces’. Provocation can be part of the work of criticism, but erecting a general standard on a foundation of personal taste is risky. There are films that are all surface, sometimes consciously so. But some films have left me with insights that have not faded: recently, films directed by Tarkovsky, Rohmer, and Powell and Pressburger. Shakespeare is much better on stage, or on screen, than on the page. Certain bars in Schubert’s late piano sonatas make me see so far within I can hardly stand it, moments of pure, bracing light, simply demanding to be wondered at and felt. Music can trigger strange, marvellous hallucinations. The rest of the world, like immersion in the best novel, can feel very remote by comparison.

The New Dark Ages is a reckoning with one half of Charles Swann’s elegant dinner party paradox: what if, every time we opened our phone, we were confronted by a passage from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? And what if, in the quiet of our book-lined studies, we were to open a beautiful Everyman edition of a classic only to find one of MrBeast’s shimmering entertainments inside? Marriott is right to raise the alarm about the future of a culture that begins to hallow the latter, while treating the former like pub quiz trivia. The other half of the conundrum is left unanswered – have we ever found a happy medium between what we read and how we live?