6/9/24 — SOCIETY | ESSAY

How many books do you read in a day? Not in a month or a year — in a day. Seriously, how many?

What a presumptuous thing to ask?

I agree. In fact, it is the first thing that comes to mind as two strangers I meet in a university cafeteria attempt to gauge my intellect via the question. I, reluctantly, did not respond in essay format when initially prompted, and it is very well a useless exercise now (as we are long dissociated from one another). Still, I find the provoke lingering in my mind as, so blatantly, evidence of a haughty intellectualism’s perpetuating standard that I can’t help but to endeavor anyway.

I should make it clear that the point of this essay is not to deride the people who share the mental schema I am about to outline, but instead, to deconstruct and persuade it to a different end — which leads us to the first…

1) WHY DOES LITERATURE CARRY WITH IT THE PRESUMPTION OF INTELLECT?

To deconstruct the question,

“How many books do you read in a day?”

is first to understand its utility. I assume that people curious to this end presume literature carries with it some type of intellectual hallmark… why?

What is so distinctly intellectual about literature that other communicative formats succumb to? Why not ask,

“How many movies do you watch in a day?”

“How many podcasts do you listen to?”

And why aren’t these formats considered literature, or on a more prevalent basis, literary?

Of course, there is a pragmatic utility in the word’s linguistic distinction whose definition helps us distinguish between the written, spoken, and visual arts. The issue I take with that pragmatism is not the linguistic utility but its connotation to the literary and the literary’s connotation to a rigid and exclusive intellect.

2) WHAT IS LITERATURE ANYWAY?

The second presumption you are obliged to consider before addressing the inquiry subject to this writing is the idea that literature takes place on a page (excepting maybe the audiobook). Is literature really something only voracious readers enjoy? In this I think we continue to allow personhood to separate us from the reality of how human literature really is.

What is literature then? Well, I can tell you what I think it’s not…

I do not think literature is a hallmark of the page: I don’t think it requires a press; I don’t think literature is reserved to what’s on your reading list for AP English; I don’t think literature is written by the critically acclaimed; I don’t think literature lives exclusively in libraries.

Instead, I think literature is experience and thought — existing in our mouths and ears too. Cultural mythology and word of mouth are literature. I remember that the first poetry originated in oral tradition — that people were writing long before dictionaries ever existed. It seems silly, then, that we deem the people who fail to write their stories down, or who can’t read written words, as illiterate — that the definition of the word colloquialism is “a word or phrase that is not literary”.

The Oxford English Dictionary was entirely cited in written literatures¹, meaning not only that literature creates language and not the vice versa (cue Shakespeare), but also that because we understand the existence of literature as far surpassing the “literate”, our dictionaries lack an accurate representation of our language². What if Shakespeare had been (not unlikely for his time) illiterate? Would we have deemed his stories non-literary? (Virginia Woolf considered this thought experiment first. In her long form essay A Room of One’s Own, she explores the scenario in which a “woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius³” as I have no doubt many did) How many Shakespeares do I think exist/existed as either illiterate, not critically acclaimed, or just plain unpublished? Many. I think they are Shakespeares still. How many people do I think engage with some kind of “non-literature?” Everyone. In this case, they are (the whole of humanity is) literary, and so literate, still.

Before I get ahead of my self, I do think literacy is a important. I think reading is a crucial exercise for those who intend to access mainstream intellects across eras, but I do not think a person’s thoughts and experiences are inexpressible or lacking a literary “esque” before that person writes them down.

I also don’t pretend to be unaware of the fact that literacy has been waged as a weapon, rather than a gift, to both suppress and promote human potential: to divide classes. I’m not ignorant of the fact that humans once existed for centuries as illiterate — some tribal cultures still, and I believe the peoples of prehistory have/had no less literature than us (if not more). On the level of personhood (which is a more practical level for any kind of social analysis because we operate in societies of fellow humans and not sundry species, but that is a different essay, and I don’t find it too detrimental to my point), I can admit that literacy is a cultural, sometimes socioeconomic, and era relevant dependent⁴. But from the perspective of humanhood, on the level of species, I think there is actually only one criteria for being literate: being human.

Why?

Because the one trend I observe across all things deemed “literary”, is the expression of human experience in a uniquely personal way. Every popular literary work then, is proof that the patterns of our humanity intuitively prevail against the patterns of personhood. Of course, human experience has the ability to transcend forms of human expression — even language itself so that individual, silent, and unexpressed sensory experience is the original literary unit.

3) WHAT KINDS OF READING ARE INHERENTLY WORTHWHILE?

The final presumption which requires consideration before one can attempt to answer the question which prompted this writing is the idea that any kind of reading is an inherently worthwhile activity. I reject this notion for the following reason:

You can cross many books off a TBR list without having gained much from the exercise. If the point of reading is quantity (or to gain the practical skills of literacy as promoted in schools), you will have achieved your goal, otherwise you will have wasted your time. I, personally, see reading as a means to an end, not an actualizing activity. Learning, on the other hand, the consuming of communicative or entertainment products which enrich my human experience are. My (embellished) response to the students who asked me the, by now, notorious question (while perhaps not complete) was (and I admit this was amongst excuses for not being a very active reader): “I’m more focused on learning than I am reading, so that, if a documentary is more time efficient and qualitative to that end, I will pick it over the book. Even more, I’m prone to re-reading, because I would much rather enrich my understanding of one piece of literature than to have a shallow understanding of multiple. What I walk away with is more important to me than the nuances of how I chose to ascertain it.”

The rigidness created around the concept of literature impedes our ability to identify its prevalence all around us. Rigidness, of course, isn’t focused on highlighting the wonderful prevalence of literature exclusive to our humanity and not a personhood/a page. Moreover, I am not convinced that the proliferation of mainstream contemporary literature (a genre I notice as increasingly popular amongst people who tend to have the longest reading logs (please forgive my opinion here)), is focused on creating a worthwhile literature when compared to its less mainstream counterparts.

You may ask, well what good is an old oral tradition lost to history: I can’t read it… You would be correct in that, but the point is not to discourage your literary endeavors. It is to encourage you to expand your understanding of the literary concept itself: in quality more than quantity, in unique forms, in yourself.

The first authorship I ever embarked on occurred well before I could read or write. In fact, if you were to ask me how long I’ve been writing, I’d say: “forever”. Not so as to seem prolific, but because it is true: to deny it would be to deny my humanity. My family, typing for me first, made earnest effort not to revise my prose so that its language maintained a profoundly naive air: which is the most literary thing — as humans are literary long before they can properly contort themselves into rigid literary spaces.

Summer Arukwer-Strother

Footnotes

1. OED’S HISTORY OF THE OED ↩︎
2. A commentary made by the above OED historian(s). ↩︎
3. VIRGINIA WOOLF’S A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN ↩︎
4. Something I also probably learned from my historical research. But an author, I cannot remember ↩︎

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