From Shakespeare to social media: are we losing the will to read?

[Music] good morning welcome to from Shakespeare to social media are we losing the will to read I'm Claire Fox I'm the director of the academy of ideas we're constantly told that in the era of Twitter and social media we've lost our ability to read critically or even to read deeply or to read with judgment that people's attention spans have dissipated that nobody's going to bother to sit down and read a book so why are we bothering to do this session you'd think especially as i have chillie blue rises we don't want to read but i want to look at those kind of questions about what we read why we read and how we develop as critical readers and this session was very much inspired by a new book by Tim parks which is here pen in hand reading rereading and the mysteries highly recommended but that's we're going to be digging deeper into it and I wanted to just read something that is the start of one of the essays in the book called reading the struggle for the conditions in which we read today are not those of fifty or even thirty years ago and the big question is how contemporary fiction will adapt these changes because in the end adapt it will no art form exists independently of the conditions in which it is enjoyed what I'm talking about is the state of constant distraction we live in and how that affects the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction for immersing oneself in it and then coming back and back to it on numerous occasions over what could be days weeks or months each time picking up the threads of the story or stories the patterning of internal reference the positioning of the work within the context of other novels and indeed the larger world when he read that you think that is the kind of requirements of reading and yet we are constantly saying we haven't got time for anything so are we squeezing reading out that is the kind of context let me introduce the two people I'm going to discuss this with Tim parks the man himself who I should obviously has to read his own words because he would have read them better than me he's a novelist and essayist a travel writer and a translator the author of 18 novels including book a shortlisted Europa the first novel I read appears which is actually set in and around at the heart of Europe and guess what where I am now so it's a very odd thing but anyway there we go um and also his other novels include destiny cleaver and more recently in extremis Tim writes regularly for the LRB and the New York Review of Books and many other things he's one of those people who never goes anywhere without causing trouble which is why we like him with a battle of ideas give him a warm welcome please and then we are joined again for another time because she's spoken last year as well I think or Elif Shafak who's the award-winning British Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey who writes in both Turkish in English and is published 17 bucks 11 of those and novels and a work has been translated into 50 languages and her latest novel is just out 10 minutes 38 seconds in the strange world in in sorry in this strange world and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and also Elif is a political activist and advocate for women's rights and LGBT rights and freedom of speech and one of the things I thought and I was reading the novel and one things will discuss is many of the political interests that Elif expresses in real life are explored through this novel can we give her a warm welcome so the format is this I've just asked both Tim and I like to just musee with the question of reading for 5 7 minutes each I've got some questions for them and then we'll open it up as a conversation so Tim I want to start by talking about a book that nobody reads and indeed that no one has ever read a book called the boy niche manuscript this was a book that was bought in an antique store in Rome in 1912 by a man called Voynich was an antique book collector and it is written in a language that nobody has ever managed to decipher ok so there was a recent case of somebody claiming they had deciphered The Voyage people every regularly every 10 years why do i why do I mention this book there it is on paper apparently possibly available but this book in a way doesn't exist because nobody has the competence to to read it ok so I want to start with this first reflection that until somebody can read it a book is really not a book ok it just doesn't exist the only experience we have a books is when they're read like we tend to talk about them as if they were an absolute object like a chair or a red carpet but actually the book only exists when there's a reader ok so then the whole question of competence becomes important ok we all know is we start - we start to read we have somebody beside us assisting us and then we bring to the first books that we can read that little family life that we have ok which is why we have books for different ages of people children's books and so on and so forth so there's the idea that the competence required for reading is also a growing and developing competence that a change in compensation you don't want to spend your whole life reading you know where the wild things are or or even Harry Potter perhaps but that's another issue that I want maybe we'll get onto later and so you need to be competent for a book and the competence will be changed by certain books which will challenge that okay you might want to keep growing a lot in competence or you might not and by competence I don't just mean your linguistic ability to recognize all the words and so on but competence is also how much you know and can bring to a book a book cannot cannot tell you things to a certain extent it can't tell you things you don't to a certain extent already know or are not able to know like no book can tell somebody who's never seen snow exactly what snow feels like it moves into the area of exotica snow exists those people up north have snow we've never seen it we can have it described we can set but it will be different when you've seen it okay so Bohr has always used to say just just name the things that people know and it and it'll be and it'll be alright so what what I just want to say to conclude these few opening remarks about about reading is that the book is what you is to a great degree will be what you bring to it and what you want how you want to perhaps change in reaction to it okay now up until fifty sixty but certainly a a hundred and when do we have film at the beginning of the twentieth century we begin to get people moving to the film of course there was always theater but but but not everybody could get to the theater so for a couple of hundred years the book was the main medium through which people could immerse themselves in different worlds and develop competencies and construct a social conversation around what they read you know something like tristram shandy becomes a huge conversation in in the UK with just everybody talking about it okay and now of course that's not the case now of course we're distracted to distraction constantly we have many other wonderful mediums we have film we have television where the conversation around narrative is generally constructed now we have computer games which people insistently tell me are very serious and and I believe them because I'm not going to investigate the issue but the question is with all this distraction and with the book no longer being the thing that constructs the social conversation usually do we actually develop the competences to read a certain kind of book but if a certain kind of book was written now would that be the competence to meet it and and so on and so forth so I close with them well every every now and then authors are asked whether books whether we believe that books can save the world rights change anything what do they mean anything what I do know is in the absence of books I think the world will be a much darker place and I also know when I look at my own life that books do make a difference in our personal journeys in our understanding of the world why do I say that because I know that books have changed me when I look at my own past very briefly I can tell you that I was I was born in France then I was brought to Turkey by my mother and from that moment onwards I was raised by two women my mother and my grandmother and the reason why I'm telling you this is because maybe from my mother I learned this love of written culture but from my grandmother the love for oral culture oral storytelling which is not necessarily found in books and yet it is so old and transferred from one generation to the next and so there's a part of me that understands there are different ways of storytelling and I also understand that the format can change but what is essential and what is universal and hopefully what is eternal is our need for stories are almost existing sheíll needs for stories that said I do believe that novels in particular have a special place because constantly we are in the company of other people we are constantly rushing late for the next appointment and all of that affects our energy you know the surrounding energy affects the way we think I've seen this in Turkey so many times I have many readers who come from very conservative backgrounds and they have been brought up in a certain way if you ask their opinion about minorities let's say about Jews about Armenians about Greeks about Kurds I Livi's this because these are the main minorities in Turkey they will tell you lots of stereotypes because this is the only rhetoric that they have heard in the family at school in the neighborhood equally I have many readers who are very clearly homophobic or transphobic but then the same people come and they say you know I've read your book and this is the character that I associated with the most and I and I felt bad and I cried when that character was hurt and maybe the fictional character that they're talking about is Armenian or Greek or Jewish or gay or bisexual so there are times when I have to think about this issue how is it possible that people who are more judgemental in their daily lives in the public space in the company of other people when they are reading a novel when they're alone when they retreat into the inner space maybe they become a little bit more open you know maybe a little bit more ready to connect with the other how does that work I honestly think it's not a coincidence at the end of the day all totalitarian narratives ideologies needs collectivistic energy you know synchronized energy erasing individuality and I think what novels do in particular is to restore that individuality but not in a selfish way hopefully in a way that helps us to connect with the rest of humanity and helps us to understand that in fact there's no other you know the other is my brother there is my sister I am the other so that inner inward journey is something that I find very important but if I may share with you a few examples I never forget I was in high school I read a book by Yvonne Rich for the first time it was called the bridge over the Drina and that book III remember how it shook me because until then I had gone to school I had swallowed a very nationalistic interpretation of history of racial history and the official narrative said that we were a mighty empire wherever we went the Ottoman Empire we brought civilization and progress and I know these are also familiar words for for a British audience but in Turkey you don't find books that can question the official history very easily so when I was reading this novel there was a passage when two peasants in the Balkans they talked about the Janissaries as you might know the Janissaries were the core of the Ottoman military and they came from Christian families children from Balkan families were recruited but I had never thought how those families would have felt because to me history was only a matter of dates treaties peace treaties and Wars without human elements in it and then when you're reading the novel for the first time there these two peasants are talking and one of them says thanks to the Janissary system our poor boys were able to where they were given a very good education and if they were successful they would become Beziers and the other one says yeah but because of this system those boys never saw their families again they never saw their mothers again they forgot their language they forgot their religion they were assimilated so yes they had education but at the expense of what and I and I remember as a Turkish kid stopping on that page because I understood what the novelist was trying to do you know have you ever thought about the same story through the eyes of another person and that kind of cognitive flexibility is something that only literature can provide so fast-forward am i worried today I am worried because we do see a decline in literary fiction and maybe the last note I do make a distinction between information knowledge and wisdom I think we're living in an age in which we have a bombardment of information let alone misinformation but we can't process that knowledge is something else altogether it requires to slow down it requires to go inward and knowledge requires books or in-depth analysis but then wisdom is something else altogether and wisdom requires bringing the mind and the heart together so how can we change the ratio lessen the information we are subjected to increase the amount of knowledge we have and hopefully increase the wisdom that we have and for that we need literature okay I'm gonna I'll start because of what you've said Elif I'll actually start with this the wrote the social role of the novel timbi one of the essays you you write about and the social function of the novel what's in it for society you actually talk about Tess of the d'Urbervilles and how at dinner parties everyone was rowing about it it's quite a funny story cuz I was always like Britt Tess of the d'Urbervilles the brexit of its day but you know like a dinner parties everyone has got abreu months it was yeah and I just thought that was interesting because just a sort of the contrast is it's often said an Aleph is maybe point you know without novels where will we get the empathy is there a social function but then how does that how do we avoid that being as it were politicized because you yourself talk in one of the other essays that I think about some of the times when politics becomes the obvious aim of a novel that that can also be a kind of luck drying the life out of it so how do you kind of get the balance on that anything okay carry on okay let's try and talk about this I don't think everybody who reads a book in in which some figure oh they might generally see negatively gets presented buzzer to play is is necessarily going to change their behavior in relation to that other although that can possibly happen clearly a lot of novels are constructed around the idea of showing compassion to class of people or to excluded individuals from society clearly in the 19th century there was there were a number of novelists like Thomas Hardy with his country folk or Dickens with with the town who brought the suffering of not exactly the working classes because Dickens could never quite went that far but the lower middle classes to to the public and generated something called compassion which is quite you know quite a common mix in the aesthetic business of reading now what can we say about we can say what we can say well Giacomo Leopardi said about poet Italian poet in the 1820s and 30s then he said you know compassion is a wonderful emotion and we all enjoy feeling it and it increases our self-esteem to feel that we have been able to feel compassion but I don't think says leopardi the feeling compassion another will in in a novel or in a poem will actually change a behavior pattern later funny enough Muriel Spark of all people I think without ever having read Leopardi become up and maybe I'm wrong said exactly the same thing in a very aggressive essay in shortly before she died so I think there is an issue there and I think there's also an issue of opportunism this becomes that the absolute classic moment development in in the moment when it becomes sellable to present to actually as it were enjoy and aestheticized the sufferings of the poor is limb is a blur Hugo's miserable Hugo wrote the book a huge book he sold it for the highest advance that has probably ever been had in fiction he showed it to a guy who had never published a book before a banker he told the banker look this is you can sell this book by saying it's about the poor you can get that if we have his letters where he makes it perfectly clear what you have to sell it as is a book of compassion you have to don't tell anybody anything happens in the book - the day is published but put up lots of posters are very attractive but very poor people okay so it's extraordinary how this how this operation that it's a wonderful book I don't want to take anything away from the book it's an extraordinary book but it's also extraordinary how Victor Hugo had understood you know we'll publish it in ten languages at the same time don't tell anybody what's in it midnight at the book shops kind of thing some of that agenda was also and that becomes worrying like for me it was very worrying when that when the when the boss of the book apprised they've Chan and I'm boss is probably wrong right chairman Booker price says this is a political age and it's good to see the authors are stepping up to the political challenge so which means all the books we're going to choose are going to be of a political nature and we know which side of the political any political argument they're going to be on so what kind of invitation is that to a young author you know what was going to happen to a Jane Austen today or a Barbara PIM you know way who's who's gonna put Barbara PIM on approach yeah well on that because one of the essays is about saturon in saturon Charlie Hebdo and there is no doubt about it that when I mean I'm interested in politics and I love literature but there is a sort of assumption that we know what kind of politics will pass for political you know political fiction in there are restrictions politically depending on where you are and that was what was gonna go on and saying it as a Turkish novelist you are in exile and not depending on where you are there will be different orthodoxies about what is politically acceptable and different restrictions on freedom about what you can and cannot say so in that sense the kind of artist as political activist is quite a tricky one because it depends where you are and what's acceptable and anyway any thoughts where I draw the line is it there's a difference between asking political questions and trying to give political answers I think they're completely different things and in my opinion writer can ask difficult questions about difficult issues it is something else altogether when a writer tries to teach or preach so coming back to the earlier question can novels be politically as they can can they be partisan in my opinion they can't and they shouldn't that's a different thing but maybe we should also try to explain what we mean at least what I mean by politics I sincerely think if you happen to come from a wounded democracy such as Turkey or Nigeria or Pakistan Brazil Venezuela Philippines Russia imagine that list is so long now and it is getting longer by day you don't have the luxury as a novelist you don't have the luxury of saying I'm not going to talk about politics I'm not going to talk about what's happening outside the window I just want to write my stories you really can't do that you know if what's happening outside the window bothers your conscience you need to speak about CP speak up but that's it I am a feminist and one of the many wonderful things that I have learned from feminist movements of past generations is very simple and it's very basic in my opinion politics is not only about breakfast it's not only about Boris Johnson it's not even about right versus left I think whatever there's power there's politics so if you describe politics in this broad sense then writing about Jane Austen personal life marriage sexuality can also be a political act I think that is where I maybe differ and in that regard as well I think we writers can't be non-political but as I said at the end of the day writers drove in my opinion is to ask the questions open up a space a free space where a diversity of opinions can be heard where difficult issues can also be questioned but always leave the answer to the reader because every readers answer is going to be very different what's Jim's point there about the kind of it's time for novelist to step up and see where we live in a political age is there a danger of even making the demand the the the novel is a restriction on freedom if as it were it asked to be the person to have a social conscience maybe you want to write about some nothing to do with and I don't why don't you say right about politics nukes oh well that might be marriage and that's about feminism and power but say you want to write about dolphins I mean that will probably be the animal rights thing but I mean what I mean is shouldn't you just be able to write but that's exactly the the kind of pressure that we are going through and we have been going through for a very long time again especially because we need to talk about identity politics in the world of literature and I find it very problematic and it does affect me because just to give an example all or many women writers coming from different parts of the world a small example if you happen to be an Afghan woman writer nobody expects you to write science fiction you know they want you to write about the problems of being a woman in Afghanistan well maybe she's gonna do that in this book but maybe the next book is going to be about dolphins that is totally that what we should be defending that kind of freedom but at the same time I personally believe writers need to speak up in this age louder bolder about what is at stake because in an age when truth is endangered I think writers can't speak up louder about this issue my favorite novel of Samuel Beckett's is what called what it's one of the most bizarre and extraordinary books you ever read and and if you do read it you were occasionally struggle but it's also one of the most hilarious books you'll ever read Samuel Beckett wrote the book in at 1942-1943 he was he had been in France at the time of the Nazi invasion he had got involved in the French Resistance something about which he never spoke but he was basically he was basically the connector between the French and the English okay then he had to flee Paris when his circle of agents was cracked and spent the last years of the war in the massive Central where there was a kind of neutral free zone Beckett never spoke about the war he never spoke about war experiences he never spoke about about anything you could obviously any book that deals human relationships and human relationships inevitably turn around belonging and around power and around fear and courage and so on and so forth and good and evil obviously can be interpreted politically but back it certainly never went into that territory and never spoke out about about it except very occasionally he always signed petitions it was it was it was generally a very very solid person but there's a great artist who didn't talk about about that so I my own feeling is our freedom is not restricted by the fact that there's an enormous pressure to you know the story that you say about the Afghan woman who once who wants to write about something else because she's gone but she's told her story and now wants to move on I remember meeting a woman from Suriname in Amsterdam who had become quite successful writing about origins is Suren Amazon and difficulties a woman and then found that as soon as she write a non Surinam book you know the publishers just didn't want to go there is it a limitation on freedom well it's a limitation on freedom if you wanna earn money okay yeah for myself in a completely banal all the way if I write a novel even something like euro per or something I'm gonna get a very smaller bonds if I write a book about Italy where I've lived for 40 years of whatever kind I'll get an advance about five or six times greater than that so it does become up you know money and freedom obviously to intertwine intertwined issues I'd like to speak not men on now because I just spoke no lot but I would like to speak positively at some point about how I how I think novels do help us grow which I don't think has anything to do with political issues or compassion but you write a couple of times about also fiction but this is quite interesting so you write the novel in extremist in extremis and one of the critics said that it was too obviously about you to be assessed as a novel mm-hmm but there's also quite a discussion going on about whether you are writing about yourself I don't know whether there's identity politics but also whether in a way you can separate the are from the artist you also were in one of the essays talk about Philip Roth and you know with the kind of people are reading the novel and thinking this Philip Roth character is a bit of a you know you know what I mean whereas actually he's like no that's the character in my book but how much is one writing about oneself or is it rather that readers interpret things now through the prism of it must be about the novelist their views IIIi had a rare recently about never koves Lolita in this kind of vein of you know what I mean I mean how can you like that novel and it's not one of those because it's a great novel yeah but never call you know and all the right time you finish the conversation it's you feel in an awkward situation defending a novel or what are you defending anyway you know I'm saying so say many thoughts on that and then you're asking me to speak about this like this is a kind of thing that I could speak for an era wrong I know I know it was a few thought obviously don't nobody you know it's interesting that particular criticism which fortunately many people rejected of an extremist one could one could level it David Copperfield or one could level at the portrait of an artist as a young man perhaps much more than than my book so let's say this and an artist begins to work because that there's a sense of something that needs to be explored okay it could be in reaction to what's happening out there it could be in in in terms of family dynamics it could be in terms of discomfort but writers generally don't sit there comfortably and saying oh it wouldn't be a bad idea to be a writer let me see what I want to write about okay it's coming out of something and if you recently like Philip Roth you'll see that again and again in a million different ways he reframes the issue how independent can you be in the modern world can I really have what I want and be a good person okay if you look at Beckett Beckett frames again and again the question how can I avoid any contact with the world but still continue to to live and be looked after that that question is framed and reframed in Beckett a million times so you begin to sense it's not as if you could say Beckett later said you know as a wonderful moment when Beckett when when Beckett's character Malone when he Malone dies says this is about myself shall I never be able to lie about a different subject okay so lying about yourself is probably what a lot of books are about and finding different ways to reframe issues that are important for you so I booked that might not appear to be in any way about yourself is is like for example when it the one at the end of Little Dorrit Dickens manages by incredibly complicated narrative machinery to get a lawyer to marry a boatman's daughter which was obviously an impossible marriage in Victorian society and then to arrange a dinner party where everybody discusses isn't it disgraceful that so-and-so is married a boatman's daughter you know my god this can't happen and one character at the dinner settled in a party sort of defends the dignity of this person as a person yep Dickens had been trapped in a relationship for 10 years that he was terrified of making public his relationship with with Ellen I think she was called caught remember now it's quite obviously not about himself but but he's framing it round this is the world he needs to explore and in fact if you want to see the authenticity of a novelist look at three or four of their novels and see if there's a core that even though novels are novelists are great when they reframe it differently but there's a core of material that is urgent for them in one way or another so if you've a lot of your novel very different anyway you couldn't say that it's like the same story or sometimes and this your latest novel which is the 10 minutes and 38 seconds and is after someone has died and it allows each anyway you could explain actually you find a way of somebody who's died telling their story which is kind of interesting just in terms of what we're talking about telling one story but but do you get accused of being the center of the novel you know you get held to account for the novelist views or anyway just explore that yeah it's something I'm also familiar with just to give you a few examples when I wrote the bastard of Istanbul which tells the story of a Turkish family and then Armenian American family there were articles in Turkey saying I was she must be a secret Armenian and then when I wrote another novel they said she's a secret Kurd because we have this conspiracy theories like you have to be secret something but but the underlying idea which which is of course very problematic is what they're trying to say is if it's not your story why would you even care you know so this must be your identity and I think this is precisely why we need literature to swim again that currents to swim against the the tides of identity politics as well that said I I do know that different authors can be motivated by different journeys I respect that diversity we can't dictate just one formula it wouldn't work but personally when I look at my my own journey it wasn't necessarily autobiographical I think it's just the opposite that motivated me because I thought I started writing at very young age I was like 8 years old 9 years old not because I wanted to become a novelist I didn't know such a thing was possible there were no novelists around me but because I thought life was very boring and life was very repetitive so the reason why I love literature so much is because it gave me another world another existence that's what I'm most interested in not being myself the ability to be someone else and then someone else those endless journeys so we can have different starting points but I think we definitely need to leave it open that possibility I just want to add one more thing there's a gender dimension here that maybe we need to talk about when for instance a male novelist writes about sexuality and his fantasies and all of that people say oh he's got a great imagination when a women novelist writes about similar subjects people think oh this must be how life is this what happened to you so it becomes everything becomes more personal more intimate you feel like you have to defend your privacy more so I've always observed East always wherever we go I think there's difference depending on the gender of the novelist the perception is different although III actually think that there's a danger particularly in an era of me to the male novelists can be accused particularly in the areas around sexuality of inhabiting what I wanted it to be unacceptable sexist views of some of their characters so you that that can it works it works in different ways it might be gendered but it works in different ways it's not necessarily that the men get away with it that's what I'm trying to say no and they should be encouraged to write about anything and everything as long as we feel it that's why we should refuse to be reduced to you know get those and tribes and identities well I've always been accused that it was me you know always they always think it's me when it's not me and they don't think it's me when it is me you know it's but but but that's fine let let people let people explore that and think about I'm not worried about I wrote one book in first person as a woman one of the very early books through in fact written two novels in first person as a woman complete with but with sexual material in it and I remember one reviewer those were very early days when I wasn't known saying this is clearly a pseudonym for a woman what was clearly written by was a big compliment but of course men spend a lot of time with woman women and I probably know I probably spent far more time discussing those kinds of things with women than with though in there and so you know when I think you're perfectly right we should all we should all be allowed to do what we want but I will insist that the question of autobiographical is not a question of whether the book tells a story that is your story it's a question of whether the kind of the kind of problems that are problems for you or that you see as problematic tend to be formulated in books so for example if we read let's take an author who I deeply admire which will allow me also to tackle to tackle another she's a guy called Paita stam who's a swiss author he's written seven or eight novel is very highly regarded he writes in a very simple German which so if you have rudimentary German you can just about read read it in German in all of his books we we get formulated certain circumstance for example a guy who smokes heavily a teacher in a school goes to the hospital for for an x-ray on his lungs gets called back to the hospital urgently a few days later arrives at the door to the hospital and decides not to go in right and then he begins a kind of adventure with various women etc so the book the book in many ways is very strange and very often you can't and I couldn't understand his behavior you know like you think why is this guy behaving like this and so on do people really behave like this and you begin to write this guy moves in a different world of feeling from the world of feeling I do people in his books you look at all of his books do things that I would never have my characters do okay just like Dickens would never have his characters do what the insurance says his characters do invite and vice versa that is you begin to see that the way the characters are operating is help is getting you to know Peter stam actually in a funny way and when I met Peter Stan there is that immediate recognition of you know there he is smoking heavily and slightly phobic but very elegant and certainly one for the women so what are the things that's interesting in books is you know those experiences where you suddenly realize I don't know where this person is coming from you start a relationship with someone you know everything's going hunky-dory and then all of a sudden some issue comes up my mother-in-law or brexit or anything and suddenly they're coming from a completely different place from you and then you rise oh you know maybe this relationship isn't gonna work or maybe and then maybe make either you'll get over there oh oh you Wow and and with a lot of books it's like it's like that and the good thing about the book is that you don't actually have to live with the person so you know the points that you were making about empathy we're really interesting earlier is he's a similar point although differently made but but but the one that Tim made but one of the and I've been trying to avoid brexit I'm not going to write so there's a there's a there's an essay intense book about a brexit but it's one of the things that I've had a lot of arguments with people in the arts about and I don't mean about brexit I mean the boast that 97% of the arts community was remain is often said to me as though this is a boast and I've wanted you know I've suggested that maybe it might be interesting if some people in the arts community a few more of them had actually thought about another side of the argument or whether they can empathize with those people who had a different view and one of the things I was going to say was that some sometimes you anyway that the point being I've had arguments with novelists and one of the novelist who's speaking here yesterday who is a novelist who's had arguments with her fellow novelists she says as a lever most novelist she knows are so appalled that she's was a lever as a novelist that they kind of cut her out of polite society and what I thought what she said was well they're not going to get away with writing successful contemporary fiction if they don't understand why somebody might have been in the majority in a referendum so I'm mentioning that because Tim writes about it and I and I know you and I don't agree on that but just in terms of empathy it doesn't have to be quite broad ranging I think I know I understand and I'm a remainer I I'm sad this entire breaks it's our guys is does worry me when I when I moved to the UK about eleven years ago I used to think British people are so calm when they talk about politics I no longer feel that way you know so one of the things that worries me is the loss of that calmness there's more anger more frustration on both sides but coming back to what you say 90% of the I'm not sure about those numbers a grain of salt but let's say the overwhelming majority of the article salomina that doesn't mean I'm a Romina that doesn't mean that I have no ability to empathize with someone who votes differently than I am in all my life I have fought for this how do we understand each other where we each are coming from because at the end of the day I think the core of the novel the art of storytelling is to accept this had I been born in a different family had I been born in a different part of this country of all the world I would have thought about the world in a different way just just that cognitive flexibility so you can't be rigid about anything to me I do use the word populism and it is something that does worry me populist nationalist simple authoritarianism I do think that history can go backwards countries can go backwards and if that happens women should be more concerned minorities should be more concerned because we will be the first ones to lose our rights but the reason why I'm mentioning this is because I think populism is the fake answer to some very real problems the problems are real the problems are there so whether I will remain or leave doesn't matter do I understand the problems the real problems do I connect with the problems and do I try to find solutions that's a completely separate thing okay I'm going to the audience I kind of I like the idea of a writer's kind of rising to the political movement but it what same time I kind of thought I wish that kind of an awful lot of our kind of britain's novelist elite would probably shut up because often three years after the kind of brexit vote it's actually sort of seen the kind of shame kind of shameful reaction and I think of a lot of the kind of arts kind of community to even just kind of naked Lee advertising their lack of desire to even try to understand or kind of empathize Jonathan Cole Ali Smith Ian McEwan Robert house they're just actually when you just look at what this is they're not providing they're not doing the job or you have novelists and actually which is trying to get under the skin of understanding what's happening that they're just you know projecting or from their own contempt and kind of assumptions onto it because it seems to me that what you know what great fiction does it's not just some empathizes with people it's actually what that really does it gives people agency characters come off the page they become real complicated figures not just ciphers for whatever arguments you want to make Dickens it is much more than when he's depicting the kind of the poor kind of masses and it is greatest when he's depicting those who have agency and kind of character to them so that's a kind of yeah I kind of real sort of issue that I have that I think we've been really kind of failed I think at the moment I sort of understand why you I used to go around to try and encourage people to read more often and I kind of sort of think in the last three years I kind of go I can understand why awful lot people would never touch a book because why would you spend time in the company of people who seem to have nothing but contempt for you but just tell you to rattle that off with a question is it on that kind of notion of kind of empathy and tried to get into the kind of skin of a character do you yourselves have any feelings that there are some people you could you wouldn't dare try to get into the skin off to kind of wear the hats off to kind of give voice to so you said the kind of you know the example of the Afghan any woman right in my Runner about dolphins but would either of you feel confident writing about an Afghani dolphin fan and try to give voice to her okay so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a few different points do you think the obsession with diversity is suffocating I know it suffocates me so I work in a university and then I go in to the University in the morning there's a there's a monument to diversity and a neat I must bend down and kiss its feet while Human Resources whip me with a stake and then I get home and I watch British television which is meant to be the top British television program and you can see they've ticked all the diversity boxes then it comes on the news that the Booker Prize is going to be worn and you just you look at the list and you can say oh yeah I haven't read the booth but I know who's gonna win it based on their diversity storyline their background and so on it seems completely suffocating now I watched three billboards again a couple of weeks ago the film great film and absolutely brilliant and what I love about is one of the characters who's a kind of racist you think he's a racist ends up being a really quite sympathetic character and it's it's that's refreshing and I remember watching a Newsnight discussion about the Philip Roth book I think it was every man Mark Kermode was on who was an Asian woman and an American blonde woman and Mark Kermode and the Asian woman were seeing Philip Roth's just a misogynist he talks about anal sex all the time in this people she says what an old and the blond American woman was trying to see you know I think it's a bit more complex and I just found that depressing and I tend not to try and read British novel on novelists because I just assume they will be suffocated by an obsession with having the right views in their novels so my very simple question but it's a sort of row over from yesterday's session on what makes a great teacher is can young people love reading so sorry to bring something from yesterday but I thought it was relevant to today because we had a very strange discussion we're actually three of the panel were kind of saying that they couldn't love reading you they could love specific books and it's been niggling me all evening and right into the morning and I reread where I'm reading from from Tim parks on the wane on the tube who's got a very particular sort of family upbringing with his brother and his sister all reading different kinds of books and that seems to have really made an impact on you in terms of how you judge books and what you think you should be saying about books but I'd love the panel to come back on that can young people love reading almost in the abstract as opposed to loving specific books you stole my question but as a as a mother of two highly intelligent brilliant young women 14 and 16 wandering a level English they don't read and you know I'm so completely committed to the idea of literature being you know the way to see the other as the brother and the sister and I okay so we're at where else are they going to get that from if they're not getting it from literature and I just wonder whether the panel feels they've got anything to contribute on to say on that and you know whether they're concerned about that possibility that that connection is going to get lost by the lack of reading among young people you've brought up knowledge earlier I was just thinking that quite often a lot but there's nonfiction that's very heavily based in academia is quite unaccessible to people who don't study in that or sometimes even on accessible to people who study that I mean imagine bored you can treat him at all no idea what you're saying so quite often people try to get knowledge from fiction but then sometimes fictional writers I know for my own studies people in Peru who write in Spanish right about the Incas Tamachi and they romanticize it so much that it's completely incorrect to what archaeology or history has taught us or maybe when I was trying to be pick up my Mandarin in China the books I got recommended to read I don't know why were or gay fiction and I have no idea what and reading it because I have quite a lot of LGBT friends I know it's absolutely nowhere near the actual kind of relationships that normal LGBT people have but quite often that I know in those countries because people can't access the academia those are the readings they have because it's more accessible it's more or they enjoy but then there's no knowledge or even accurate information in that so how do you solve that problem so on to these two points that's something that I'm very passionate about I work with students I'm a lecturer in literature and the amount of students that I deal with now who who return attend lectures and they haven't read the text they haven't even begun to engage with the literature before they can decide whether or not it's allowed them to kind of identify with or consider the other so this question of can we get young people to enjoy reading I think it's inherently bound up in identity politics the fact that students now even when they have read it if they identify with which to them often means they don't agree with they close it straightaway and then and they use that as a reason for not wanting to study it so you know and this is why techs are now being removed from syllabuses or they're being shortened so instead of asking students to read the entire novel we were asking them to read chapters of the novel instead so they're not getting you know the full experience of the book um and I think the big thing that the big challenge the main challenge I think of education in our time is exactly this question getting students getting young people getting children from a really early age to be excited about the possibility of being curious and of changing and that is my little spiel there's a question that I ask myself often how is it possible that so many knowledgeable people people who are experts in their own fields got so many things wrong imagine over the years whether it's the euro crisis the financial meltdown breaks that happened trump happened or go back to Arab Spring lots of those predictions were wrong right how is that possible not because these people don't know their fields actually they do know their fields well but what is missing I think one of the things that is missing is that everybody's so atomized everybody's so isolated we live in our own epistemological tribes in our own mental ghettos and we don't have enough conversations across disciplines across cultures I'm a big believer in the need for interdisciplinary conversations and readings so to me it's much more interesting of course I'm a novelist and I do read novels all the time but I also can be interested in something where I have no knowledge of right like neuroscience to meets much more interesting when a novelist becomes curious about neuroscience or when a neuroscientist starts to read poetry or when a poet becomes interested in political science or when a political scientist starts a big becomes interested in film theory those are the conversations that are going to challenge us really both intellectually but almost spiritually because that kind knowledge that comes from outside of our field outside of our culture and outside of our worldview that matters that shakes us so I think it's very important that we do keep reading and you might be a lever but you can read a novel by someone by a novelist who you know maybe is Pro remain I don't see a problem in that at all we need those conversations actually our problem is the lack of those conversations and exchanges I just want to show you one single thing I do read the memoirs of survivors a lot and some of these are writers novice poets that have gone through the darkest chapters of human history including the Holocaust genocide civil wars and almost all of them are asking us one very simple question how is it possible that such horrific things happen in human history is it because people are bad evil by nature and they are saying actually there are some evil people but their numbers are small relatively but nonetheless atrocities can happen on a larger scale people can become angry at each other on a larger scale how does that happen so the survivors are saying maybe the opposite of goodness is not necessarily evil the opposite of kindness is not necessarily wickedness maybe the opposite of goodness is numbness is the moment we become numb desensitized indifferent disconnected because we are angry at each other I think that's a very dangerous threshold yeah so I am worried when people talk about brakes it fatigue and they say 45% of the population say you know I don't want to hear anything related to brakes and I just switch off the TV when I hear someone who thinks differently that kind of disconnection I do believe is dangerous and one thing that happens then is moderates moderates on both sides take a step back they become disconnected or maybe a little bit desensitized a little bit numb a little bit tired fatigued and then the hardliners begin to occupy that public space because they have much more passion than the moderates that is something that worries me just one final thought about diversity I come from a country where we have lost our diversity well and we have never appreciated diversity and I sincerely believe by losing this we have lost a lot and I'm not talking about an economic loss I'm not talking about political loss only but even in something in our conscience was gone I don't think diversity is our problem our problem is inequality our problem is these endless rifts fractures that keep us apart whether it's economic social political but it's it's not because we come from different backgrounds where what we can share together is much more important than that and what keeps us apart all those inequalities all those barriers is in my opinion is what we should be focusing on Thanks I'm Tim I think these these questions are linked I mean I think there's a link between between the question of young people reading identity politics and then they're completely understandable sense of dismay that there is a sort of sort of group of celebrity novelists who can be guaranteed to take a certain political position on a certain issue and whose work will be I believe opportunistically political you know I would I would say that that's simply evident not knowing what to do next they will go there because that is where the arts community will be happy with them so let's start with it with the young people it is clear that our age as I guessed is absolutely hostile to the process of the quiet formation of a reading ability around established texts we've questioned all our established texts they all have some slight unpolitical II correct issue we've started rewriting a lot of them there is a huge multiplication of texts which means that even children reading books don't find they can have a conversation with other children reading books about the same thing the question of who creates the conversation when the kids get into class whether it's TV or whether it's books you know we know perfectly well who who it is and then most children will probably have a mobile phone I presume I don't know what the age is now but probably 1012 they'll Devlin they have one so ones only hope is reading to kids when they're little and and and then just showing by one's own behavior because one teaches by example the most dangerous thing is to constantly urge a child to read which is a mistake I of course paid with my children I don't think there's any solution to this and I think that to be over anxious at the end about something beyond the point in which one could seek to control to encourage is a mistake I think it's actually wrong to believe like we were before we heard you know that novels are essential and so on I don't agree with that you know novel reading didn't really get going until the mid late 17th century there were a few before from the 1500s onwards reading itself a printing came in in the late 15th century we had 15 centuries of 15 after Christ then of course another another 3,000 before if we want to start looking at it by even more so we don't have to feel that the novel is absolutely essential for somebody to have a happy life you know on the other hand we can show by example that we feel it's a wonderful experience it's certainly a way of developing a certain kind of selfhood by immersing oneself immersing oneself in others but the point the point I want to try to make about this is the multiplication of cultures from which we receive books is obviously in a one side positive we want to be open to other things but not to the point that there's no community at home around which we develop an identity in positions in relation to each other think of the relation of a novel by Dickens to the community in which is writing Dickens writes a book everybody knows this is Britain everybody say no Britain is not like this or Britain is like this you no I agree with that that's I recognize that I don't recognize that we read a book about a woman more or less tortured in Korea because she wants to be a vegetarian we can feel enormous amount of compassion for we don't know anything about Korea and as somebody said wrong information about about cultures is all too frequent you know I mean I might not recognize certain descriptions of of Italy that I live improved from other people so I do think this whole problem with the fragmentation of how many how many books are published each year in the world I think it's 2 million in Britain we've got 160,000 books 180,000 of which 60,000 our electronic titles about 10% of those titles and novels how can you know which is a wonderful thing but you're never going to construct a conversation take a few more people yeah I've written a novel and the thing that's fascinated me is the fact talking to readers every reader has read a different book and I think that's something we forget when we talk about writers and what rights are doing what the writers should be doing that actually isn't relevant because as Tim said your books only exist when they're red that's that's when they become in come into existence and I'll actually on to be very positive about this because when a person reads a book any book it's a cumulative business it's added it's compared to every other book they've ever read it's a cumulative experience from the Hungry Caterpillar onwards through ridiculously high offer and so on and actually children read vast amounts they read all sorts of things they read comics they read magazines they read stuff on the Internet their reading experience is actually huge it's always been a struggle to get them to read literary texts in schools yeah that's always been the case it's so different now and I although I accept the bit about a shared conversation protects them Harry Potter there's huge areas of shared conversation so I actually think the situation's much much more positive than is often painted or currently perhaps being painted in the room so I actually want to kind of elaborate on what the person behind me said and put my view in as a young person and at high school age I don't think that in education the books that we are given in English lessons exercise the actual beauty of reading and literature and they don't exercise your imagination or the love of falling into another world the books that I mean Jacqueline hi the inspect cause of my Sandman they're all great pieces of literature but are they talking points for children no I you know I enjoy Jacqueline Hyde but I didn't want to talk about it with my friends in fact it kind of made me resent English until I started reading books that I enjoyed more modern-day books people at high school age who do enjoy reading enjoy reading a fan fictions Harry Potter especially and The Hunger Games things like that these are exercising their imagination and their creativity and I think that the government needs to maybe change out the books that they're giving to children to exercise that and love for reading more and get more children reading and I wondered what your ideas on that was okay I'm a chat by you teaching this I'm gonna Hansen and say I'm afraid as an English teacher my view is that you should read the books that you don't want to read and if the English teacher says Oh fanfiction you like it they're just basically crawling to you and actually patronizing you you will read the books that you love fine the role of an English teacher is to say you don't know that you will love this book and you might not love this book but I'm going to introduce you to some books that I think you should read and you will resent me and I don't care person of that yeah given the current tightening attention economy with more and more people like having paying less attention to things that aren't shocking as an aspiring writer I feel that there's this some strong demand for like things that are more violent so books and content that's more graphic because people tend to pick that up more the feels them to be more likely to pick that out so do you think that that will how will you think that that will change the future of literature into maybe things are less censored and they're more like more and more gory for example do you think that that's something that literature literature should head towards in the current moment as a I'm an English teacher of a level and GCSE students I would just like to ask whether our education system is set up for students to read entire novels I was thinking about any some point the difference between information and knowledge I constantly find students want answers they want to be told this is the information that will get you the grade a at the end of the day they are not that interested in reading and getting the knowledge themselves they just want the information because our education system is set up for them to be heading to those top grades all the time and it we've lost the sense of Education for Education sense sake I feel and we're just in the exam economy okay so we're just thank you I think the demise of reading perhaps has been overstated so there's a there's a resurgence of books has probably many be aware about about surgeons doctors you can name it they kind of everyday people are doing everyday things I guess in these sort of darker times so as far as I understand book reading is going up reading of podcasts so reading all the things on Kindle is going up so maybe we're overstating the fact that things are um struggling and suffering and also self-help I think that's that's through a mammoth industry and I suppose maybe that's a competition that fiction has now but it didn't have 20 years ago the other point I wanted to make was as somebody in his some four however I do think there's a bit of an issue here I have friends who male and female their forties who just wouldn't entertain the idea of picking up a book nowadays you know they can't think of anything less and relatable than picking up books I think there is a cycle lost generation as you get older that if you're not connecting perhaps with with academia or we're not connecting with friends who read books and voraciously then your appetite to want to read and falls by the wayside I think through these two gentlemen who talked about not once to read certain books by certain authors because they have a pre-election towards a certain way of writing about politics I would say in fact you could be the ones who so take a stand you could be the ones who actually seek to understand the other way of thinking to enable you to be better informed about the kind of issues that other people are thinking to enable you to have those more meaningful dialogues super quick question Elif mentioned this whole brexit saga and I keep hearing the phrase this whole brexit sargon I was wondering if the panelists thought it was possible to write the brexit saga and how they might go about doing that okay so listen we're about to finish I'm so both of you just come in and give us your final reflections and we haven't really discussed but it's actually an important issue about does it matter what you read Tim made the point that you know there's lots of there's lots of think books being published maybe it doesn't matter whether young people are reading what they're reading as long as they're reading that's a kind of argument and how you judge whether a book is worth reading or not and the reason I mentioned that is one of the things that's really funny when I was reading and when I was reading Tim's book is that he has a he makes some points about Elena Ferrante right which obviously was a series of books that everybody read at the same time and discussed endlessly that is very festival in fact I mean it was kind of like an obsessive thing and of course he says it's lazy writing he says I pick up her novels and again and again I'd give up about page 50 my impression is of something wearisome Lee concocted determinedly melodramatic forever playing in the appropriate Neapolitan and stereotype and the reason why I laughed was because I i love the novels and i but i saying to people I don't know if they great novels or not I didn't know where I was meant to boast about them you kind of end up thing is it literary fiction and then people would say doesn't matter as long as everyone's reading but the reason I say that because it seems to me that one thing we have lost is we're so desperate that we think that people aren't reading that we basically just say as long as we were reading anything it doesn't matter where's one of the great joys of reading widely and being forced to read things you don't want to read is you develop a sense of critical judgment and you start to be able to say I really enjoyed that by kind of no it wasn't any good right and I know which is why I know and also there's great classical works of literature that I can't I hated reading and found difficult and struggled with but I did respect that historically everybody else had recognized it was a classic and I learned something from being forced to engage with a great work of I'm not good on Ulysses I confess history through me right but there's a literature student if I haven't read it would have been an outrage I have to be able to say I struggled with it in other things you know what it is right or anything well that's what I'm saying but it is not some guys sat down I thought Ulysses now I have friends in the office who read it for pleasure right so what I'm saying is we haven't discussed that here well there's a lot more in the box that that in Tim's book discussing these kind of things also this is the other thing is and if latest novel is not on the on the back of it what it says it's about their life I remember you telling me what you were writing it you said about the last 10 minutes after you're dead it's about a prostitute you know and you told me the premise of it and I thought oh my god right I thought why don't make this oh no that's all it's thoroughly loved it they wants to read it that's the story that's what happens right you get taken by surprise and I love that I love that sort of thing you kind of think rather resentfully I've got to read the novel because she's sneaking at the Battle of ideas luckily I loved it happy story right but though the thing about literature is that sense of surprise where something you know you're gonna hate you don't something you know you're supposed to love you like but it was worth having a go it's that dress though right Ellen give us your final I I used to go to schools a lot so to give talks and that gave me a chance maybe to get to know young readers from very different age groups and one thing remains vividly with me struck me and this is the same east or west Europe or the Middle East if you go to schools and speak to younger kids seven year old eight years old it's just fascinating to see how much chutzpah how much creativity how much confidence they have and if you ask them is there anyone in this room who would like to become a poet someday so many hands go up or novelist so many hands go up and at that age I think girls are just as confident if not even more confident than boys but then I would go to high schools to give talks and everything has changed yeah now nobody wants to become a poet anymore nobody wants to be a novelist anymore and especially in countries like Turkey or across the Middle East what I have seen is girls have become timid they have lost that confidence that they had they carried inside so this is what we do you know through years of school education in the family in the neighborhood I I have an enormous respect for teachers who try to increase and pass that pass on that love of literature and at the same time we all know that the education system is very flawed and it's based on a hierarchy that tells us maths is much more important than dance who decides you know who draws those boundaries maybe one kid for one kid it is maths for another kid it is dance in front so there's a lot we need to question that when it comes to the hierarchy of disciplines but this is precisely why we need novels this is precisely why we need literature the way I found it one which actually wasn't part of the curriculum it was despite the curriculum that told me the opposite of what a wondrous book was saying so those personal journeys are very important and we are the ones that are gonna do this I at the end of the day I just want to maybe leave with this thought I don't know a single person who doesn't need emotional intelligence whether we are bankers engineers writers bakers jewelry designers doesn't matter we all need emotional intelligence in life for that we need the art of storytelling we are living in the age of anxiety let's accept it it's not a coincidence that we're seeing an increase in cases related to mental health east and west this is the age of almost existential angst with so many uncertainties in the air fear resentment bitterness there are lots of negative emotions that we need to deal with particularly young people need to deal with and especially young people coming from disadvantaged backgrounds need to deal with so for all of that also we need emotional intelligence in this age more than ever before and that leads us to literature once again let me say that I sympathize with the teachers who find that their children the children or even students at the University has been this has been my case and not reading more than a chapter of the novel that you've given them to read this everybody knows that this is happening my my the one piece of advice that I found that really began to work with students was constantly to encourage them to read aggressively to read with a pen in their hand to write if they didn't like a sentence to write I you know I don't like this on it you know to buy the book so they're not writing a library books and to engage with them and then to go back and maybe look at their comments afterwards and say boy that was I got that wrong and so on and so forth so to read suspiciously I really buy everybody to read when when we're reading stuff this that's got a clear political bank to say well I'm up for this let's read it but but let's not be overwhelmed by it but then to really savor those moments when suddenly around page 30 or 40 this guy finally seduces us and we're suddenly really on board you know those moments and they're very few actually one reason I remember reading Thomas panhard with a certain sense oh my god this difficult Austrian stuff and then all of a sudden not Thomas Mann not is the only way to understand the world obviously that's not the case but there are wonderful moments in writing when you're seduced to a position that you ever imagined you could run with those the wonderful months and of course those the most regardless of the content where you come away with growth because you think boy you know I could engage with that and that was really not where I expected to go so I would encourage those months [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: worldwrite

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Id: -8SCatoD9mw

Length: 75min 40sec (4540 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 24 2019