Does reading do us any good?

Stripped of easy moralising, literature makes us relish the search for truth in an age when many believe truth to be dead

by Flora Champy + BIO

Photo by Jeenah Moon/Reuters

is associate professor of French at Princeton University, US. Her research focuses on 18th-century French political literature and philosophy, blending literary analysis with political theory. She is the author of one and the co-editor of two French books on the period.

Edited byMarina Benjamin

Does reading turn us into better people? Does it make us more sensitive and empathetic? Does it improve our judgment? And if it is not edifying, then what good does it do? About 120 years ago, the indecisive, dilettante offspring of a wealthy physician found these questions so important that he took up his pen to argue that, no, books are never the instruments of moral betterment. He based his argument on his own memories. Though he had always been an avid reader, books, he claimed, never gave him any sort of useful, respectable instruction. That does not mean they were meaningless – far from it; they shaped his apprehension of life by preserving indelible impressions of his surroundings. Relatives now long gone, places he hadn’t seen in years – these were nevertheless still present in his mind through memories of his readings. Books helped keep past sensations alive. Literature made time tangible: something to be grasped without being abolished.

Marcel Proust by Otto Wegener, c1895. Courtesy Wikimedia

Hindsight makes it easy to find in Marcel Proust’s essay On Reading (1905) the spark that would later flare into his multivolume novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). However, his essay was not the intuition of solitary genius. Rather, it was published as a preface to the French translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) – a cryptic title bringing together two lectures Ruskin delivered in Manchester in December 1864. Working on this text allowed Proust to realise why he deeply disagreed with an author he nevertheless admired: he resented Ruskin’s moralising defence of reading.

In his lectures, Ruskin bemoaned the general spiritual impoverishment of Victorian Britain, where every purpose has been ‘infected’ with ‘the idea that everything should “pay”’. The problem with this mindset, says Ruskin, is that it makes books superfluous – because genuine literacy is a training in disinterestedness, in generously reflecting on the meaning of chosen expressions. Provocatively, Ruskin describes his generation as illiterate – even in a time when education was expanding. He thought his contemporaries had lost any capacity for understanding each other or any important issue because they read superficially, and for the wrong reasons – chiefly, to get social recognition from a narrow group of peers. It was therefore, in his view, a matter of collective self-preservation to reverse course: to ‘organise, drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers! …’

To convince his audience, Ruskin nevertheless attempts to speak the utilitarian language of his opponents – framing his argument in terms of gains and losses. He says it is ultimately a better investment if we value education as a training in close reading rather than as a point of entry into lucrative networking circles. Using a passage from John Milton’s poem ‘Lycidas’ (1637), Ruskin demonstrates how the mind encounters words on equal terms that will never apply to meetings with influential luminaries. A powerful politician, or an influential journalist, may turn out to be small-minded, dismissive or simply in a bad mood in the few moments you’re permitted an audience with them. Instead, he argues, library shelves brim with much more secure assets. There, the most powerful and smartest minds vie for the privilege of conversing with you, putting the wisdom of all ages and countries at your disposal. Books enrich and empower their readers.

Proust vigorously opposed this very idea. He found it preposterous to recommend reading as a valuable access point to a world of wisdom – akin to thinking you could access truth through ‘recommendation letters’. In response, his own defence of reading makes no concessions to the cost/benefit mindset, and owes nothing to financial or conversational analogies. In his view, it is futile to praise reading as an encounter with great minds. What happens in reading is substantially different from what happens in social life, where speech is always subject to social constraints. By contrast, a reader enjoys the utmost freedom to find the greatest writers boring, or to appreciate them for his own purposes, which may be utterly at odds with what they intended. Books do not create a higher form of conversation but instead allow for a unique ‘fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude’. Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the ability to make sense of words, and things.

In this sense, books connect us with the richest part of ourselves. The meaning we attach to words as we read is uniquely connected to our experience – it can never be replicated. This is how reading becomes, in Proust’s view, the fullest, most concrete mediation to our sensations. And it allows us to expand our experience beyond all measure when it lets us enter into contact with the past. When we read age-old texts (Proust gives the examples of Racine and Saint-Simon), managing to make sense of them beyond the evolution in language and customs, we have access to nothing less than immortality.

Proust shared Ruskin’s veneration for the power of the written word. Yet they expected widely different benefits from reading. The difference in their position lies in the respective role they attribute to reader and writer. Proust considered reading as a form of ethical training rather than moral education. The ‘miracle’ of reading, in his view, does not even depend on exposure to good writing. Mediocre books and poor writers serve just as well – what matters is that, by experiencing contact with the ‘oeuvring self’ of the writer, a term Proust invoked in his essay ‘Against Sainte-Beuve’ (1895-1900), you open up your deepest self too, discovering new spheres of experience you would never have imagined or fathomed before.

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In the second half of the 20th century, Proust’s view seemed to have largely won against Ruskin’s. The discourses that dominated critical analyses scrutinised literature for its inner qualities, setting depth or complexity of form above any direct application of the text to the reader’s experience – think of structuralists like Roland Barthes, as well as deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida, or Stanley Fish. New Criticism, then New Historicism, differed on crucial points, but agreed on the fundamental assumption that literary appreciation was not a matter of cultivating a sense of right and wrong. The idea that reading should bring any sort of moral benefit was classed as the relic of simple-minded, well-meaning Leftism (Ruskin was a major inspiration for English socialism, despite being a staunch conservative in other respects).

John Ruskin by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, 1879. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London

Yet the endeavour to evangelise blue-collars by giving them access to high culture had been quite successful in its time, as Jonathan Rose has shown in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001). In the postwar era, while fashion dictated that academic literary criticism took a distinctly anti-utilitarian approach to reading, the idea that great books positively contribute to moral education remained a driving force in public education, fulfilling a promise of social ascension for many low-middle-class families: think of the British grammar school system, or of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who owed his spectacular academic career and influence to the republican meritocracy he later denounced as elitist. This clash between the role assigned to literature in the general public and the way it was read and taught in higher education may explain the public success of advocates of the moral education to be found in great books: the two Blooms – Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994) and Allan Bloom’s last book, Love and Friendship (1993) – enjoyed huge popular influence, but they also appeared as exceptions to a seemingly irresistible academic and intellectual trend.

These takes ultimately consider books as some sort of processed foods for thought

It may, then, not be that surprising to see moralising return in full force in the 21st century – offering Ruskin numerous, sometimes unexpected heirs. This can in part be explained by the digital revolution: we are much more likely to spend our leisure time with screens than with books, and online formats make it easier to focus commentary on morals rather than style. The resulting alarm over decreasing literacy has led to no shortage of zealous defences of reading, which, like most matters of opinion today, fall rather neatly along political divides. In short, conservatives praise ‘great books’ for teaching good morals and a sense of beauty, while progressives criticise the canon for its lack of representativeness, championing reading mostly as a training in empathy for underrepresented groups. In the former camp, Emily Finley, writing in The Wall Street Journal, recommends that children read ‘old’ books (pre-1940) to build up adequate protection against dangerous impulses, such as imagining that happiness can be found outside of religious and conjugal duties. On the other side, Patricia Matthew in The Atlantic advocates revisiting our definitions of what makes a ‘great’ writer – targeting Jane Austen for the conventionality of her writing as well as her ties to the transatlantic slave trade.

These takes ultimately consider books as some sort of processed foods for thought, telling us in advance what we are supposed to glean from what we read. Yet if you expect to find stories of domestic bliss in Greek myths, it’s likely that Medea and Clytemnestra will disappoint you. And is Madame Bovary (1856-7) such an obvious warning against escapism? Could we not rather read Gustave Flaubert’s novel, as Elena Ferrante suggested in The New Yorker in 2016, as picturing the impossible and alienating double bind that weighs on women corralled into traditional marriage and motherhood? As for the lack of representativity of the canon, it is by no means a new issue: literary history could be told as an unending series of rewritings to include a wider cast of characters. The response to flawed creation is to be more creative – as evidenced recently by Kamel Daoud’s novel The Meursault Investigation (2013) – a retelling of Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942) from the perspective of its murdered ‘Arab’ – or Percival Everett’s James (2024), which retells Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in the words of the fugitive slave Jim.

Yet its inner contradictions do not attenuate the obdurate vitality of the moralising view of literature. Ruskin, it seems, has never been more popular – and this cannot be explained only by the role of social media in building literary reputations. I would argue that the moralising view of literature is so strong because it has deep historical roots – which we need to examine, if we want to understand what literature really is for.

Our understanding of literature does not come out of a historical vacuum. Like it or not, we remain indebted to the Romantics’ idea that writers have social duties. As the critic and literary historian Paul Bénichou demonstrated in his classic study The Consecration of the Writer (1996), the brutal rupture with tradition occasioned by the French Revolution led counterrevolutionaries and new Romantics alike to take up the idea that writers could very well replace priests as spiritual leaders. In the modern age, poets and writers were the true seers, who could see through social appearances and predict the future awaiting the polity. The writer’s claim to authority was considered more legitimate than the old prophets’ because the writer was accountable to the public only, and not to an organised church. The writer’s mission, as outlined in Victor Hugo’s poem ‘The Poet’s Function’ (1840), was to explain difficult truths.

This newfangled role of the writer set at the centre of society was often expressed with a generous dose of male self-aggrandising – obfuscating for a long time the fact that the most detailed account of this new idea was elaborated by the literary critic and political theorist Anne Louise Germaine de Staël long before dashing young men filled the literary scene. In her groundbreaking work Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions (1800), Madame de Staël argued that literature was now irreversibly part and parcel of political life, and was just as influential on religion, customs and laws as it was shaped by them. Staël’s account is entirely informed by her faith in what she calls ‘the perfectibility of the human species’. Fiction, she said, actively contributes to collective improvement because it works directly on shared representations – thereby contributing to national unity. She believed that politics depended on the specificity of languages, each one bearing a world of its own in itself. Within each nation, therefore, literary fiction provides a common ground that every member of the nation can relate to, whereas real situations are either too close or too remote to allow for a secure understanding. In her words: ‘Literary criticism is often a treatise in morals’ (my translation). On that point, she’s with Ruskin.

However, Staël adds another layer by emphasising the political consequences of literary appreciation. Crucially, she believed that, by sharpening the use of language, literature prepares citizens for potential participation in government – an essential feature in countries on the way to becoming more and more democratic: ‘The progress of literature, ie the perfectioning of the art of thinking and expressing our thoughts, is necessary for establishing and preserving liberty.’ In effect, Staël argued that literature sets us free by developing a non-predictable use of language, away from governmental reach.

Rousseau requires writers to ‘speak the language of the lonely’

Her optimistic argument is almost the photographic negative of a much more critical account, developed two generations earlier by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was one of the bestselling books of its century. It elicited an avalanche of letters from readers who were deeply moved by this long, sentimental epistolary novel. Of course, it was inspired by earlier novels – especially Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). However, because Rousseau was also a political theorist, he fleshed out what was at stake in the public success of his novel. The preface to Julie is written in the form of a dialogue between two characters referred to only through their initials, ‘R’ and ‘N’ – standing for the author and his publisher – in which N repeatedly teases R about the propriety of his writing, the gist being: how could someone who gained fame as an austere social critic put his name on the title page of a love story?

R’s response is unambiguous: for the usual readership – urban, educated – no reading may ever be educational. The elite will never take any book seriously – for them, reading is simply a way to assert their superiority by enjoying more sophisticated distractions than the poor. They will then simply ignore or misread the books they disagree with and commend those that confirm them in their preexisting views. On this point, Rousseau’s criticism was echoed a century later by Ruskin. Yet his response is articulated in political terms, not in moral ones. In R’s view, a writer who thinks his mission is to educate his audience must target another readership, the only one for which words may assume their full significance: provincials with ample time on their hands. In a meaningful phrase, Rousseau requires writers to ‘speak the language of the lonely’ (my translation) – that is, to work away from the witty, ever-changing expressions coined in fashionable circles. The writer thus fulfils a role in society that is different from both entertainer and priest. The writer, he says, should first and foremost see his task as a ‘citizen’: his work is not to merely preach good things, but to present a sober examination of what constitutes happiness. This task is not as simple as it seems, even among a society of good people – Julie remains famous for ending tragically even though it features no villain character.

The novel’s preface offers a cogent illustration of what the Rousseau scholar Christopher Kelly has named ‘literary citizenship’. It is a mark of modernity, argues Kelly, that as social values became increasingly defined in terms of transaction and profit, it was imperative to secure a currency that could escape both governmental and economic control, and literature was the way to achieve it. Literary writing could contribute to creating an alternative currency by urging caution against seemingly obvious representations of social duties and expectations that may cover up manoeuvres to alienate part of the people. In other words, literature contributes to citizens’ freedom.

It is then easy to see how Staël could stem from Rousseau: both considered literature as the most secure path to liberty because it freed the imagination from social conventions, and prevented language from being worn down to a series of preset transactional phrases. But where Rousseau depicts a battle against powerful dominating forces that cannot be fully checked by literature, Staël envisions a glorious future of national reconciliation.

Why does it even matter to recall this history? The paths to collective freedom imagined by Rousseau and Staël proceed to run alongside each other throughout the 19th century, in the age of great novels we still venerate today. They renewed and reinforced national imaginaries while also exposing social divides – in particular, class ones. Some of the most famous titles of this period embody this tension: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Hugo’s Les Misérables (1865), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). These realist novels epitomise the mission of the writer to predict what awaits each nation if it allows injustice to continue. Yet, by bringing together a multitude of characters, they allowed varied readers to recognise their own participation in a collective story.

Clearly, a writer has a great deal to live up to if they’re to fulfil the role that Rousseau or Staël expected from them. Can any writer be truly faithful to the entire nation? Isn’t there a risk that they try to please a very restricted circle who claim to represent the nation as a whole? How can you reconcile the independence of language with accountability to your supposed audience? Not long after the publication of these landmark novels of the 1860s, two emerging disciplines, Émile Durkheim’s sociology and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, stripped literature of its monopoly on explaining social dynamics and affects. Literary fiction was left to explore more subterranean psychological realms and experimental formats. As a consequence, books were also left to pick, or shape, their own audiences. Writers who claimed to speak in the name of whole nations ran a greater risk of simply subjugating their pen to ready-made ideologies.

This was Proust’s moment. Against Ruskin’s utilitarian moralising, he saw that literature finally had the chance to be acknowledged for what belongs to it only. Literary fiction does not guide readers’ minds to an unchanging heaven of well-meaning certitudes. At best, it is an education in enjoyment; as he says in the early pages of Swann’s Way (1913): ‘beautiful things teach us to seek our pleasure elsewhere than in satisfactions deriving from wellbeing and vanity’ (my translation).

Literature has a purpose distinct from both political propaganda and moralistic instruction

This encapsulates what literature can do today. In a society largely dominated by visual entertainment, communication and performance, when fewer and fewer people read for pleasure, the idea of the writer as a spiritual beacon may seem largely outmoded. Today, people seem to turn much more willingly to therapists, experts or influencers to make sense of their lives. Yet I would argue that now may be a good moment for reconsidering the role of literature as the key to personal freedom – precisely because it is no longer the most common or most prestigious medium for interpreting experience. I tend to think of written words as much more liberating than images, which have a stronger, more direct impact on our minds, leaving their recipients with a reduced margin of action for reaction, understanding, and potential disagreement or dissociation, whereas literary language has the power to apprehend nuance so we’re less likely to fall prey to abusive false presumptions. It also allows us not to outsource the work of understanding our own experience.

The point is that literature has a purpose distinct from both political propaganda and moralistic instruction. Its unique, immense utility appears with greater clarity when we stop expecting grand answers from it – or, more exactly, when it deepens our experience by making us enjoy answers that are neither grand nor easy. Among today’s writers, Elena Ferrante excels at exploring these ambiguities, as exposed in the lives of contemporary women – as shown in the dark and piercingly beautiful ending of her best novel, The Lost Daughter (2006).

This is how literature can be political today in the deepest sense. To the extent that it remains committed to complexity, literature has the capacity to shed light on social ills with greater strength and urgency than activist discourses. Consider Neige Sinno’s memoir Sad Tiger (translated by Natasha Lehrer, 2023), which has done so much to raise awareness around incest precisely because it eschews the conventions too often marketed in today’s ‘trauma culture’. Tellingly, Sinno highlights how, in her experience, fiction proved more helpful than theory – because it ‘offers only oblique, tangential responses based on stories that aren’t real.’ Literature’s obliqueness gives readers leeway to reconstruct the meaning of a story by breaking open the alienating preset narratives our current culture is eager to sell us. Sad Tiger increases our collective responsibility for recognising – and preventing – a social ill by calling our attention to our very means of comprehending it.

We are not all victims of abuse. But the currently predominant economic model that relies on the harvesting of personal data and relentless advertising makes us all targets of predation. Alienating narrative patterns common to news and social media blur the distinction between fiction and reality, ingraining in us the belief that collective decisions should be taken solely to satisfy the most strident desires of whoever is in power. In these conditions, literature can fulfil the most crucial of missions: that of rebuilding a common understanding by delighting in the complexities of today’s world. Hernan Diaz’s metafiction Trust (2022) comes very close to this mark – with its four narratives that capture the curiosity of the reader, guiding them through the impact of financial operations using a wide cast of multiple characters. Everett’s James masterfully complicates Twain’s Huckleberry Finn narrative by allowing ‘Jim’ his full name and a chance to tell his own story, leading the reader through the discrepancy between his real knowledge and the stereotypical character he has to impersonate in order to survive.

These books (among many others) offer remarkable examples of what fine literature can do. Stripped of easy moralising, literature has the power to make us relish the search for truth, in the age when it is widely believed to be dead. This is what Proust understood when he became a writer: books teach us nothing but to partially lift ‘the veil of ugliness and insignificance that leaves us incurious before the universe’. This incomplete endeavour literally means the world.

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