The case for literature

I recently spoke with an intern on the team about education. We began by comparing the subjects we had studied, and soon found ourselves talking about literature.

When I say that I did considerably worse in English than in science and mathematics, I mean literature. At school, English meant reading novels, poems and essays, then writing about them. I found the other subjects easier because their answers seemed more definite.

I now suspect that English was the most serious subject I studied. History and philosophy might have an equal claim, but literature has a particular advantage. It presents human questions through individual lives, rather than as abstract problems. We encounter people who are proud, weak, generous, dishonest or brave, and are required to attend to them without reducing them to examples.

For a long time I thought I disliked the subject. Perhaps I had simply not lived enough to understand it. A book read at sixteen can seem remote because the reader has not yet acquired the experience that makes it intelligible. Years later, the same book may say something quite different, although the words have not changed.

This is one reason I think literature deserves more attention in the age of AI. Machines can already produce fluent prose, summarise books and explain the apparent meaning of a passage. They are less useful in deciding what is worth reading, or what a human being ought to notice in it.

Literature gives us practice in attention. It makes us dwell on language and follow a mind that is not our own. It also teaches a form of judgment that cannot be reduced to extracting the correct answer. We learn to distinguish sincerity from performance, courage from recklessness, and self-knowledge from self-deception.

My honest opinion is that we should teach more literature. As machines become better at producing language, students will have greater need to understand what language is for, and what kinds of human experience it can disclose.