Given up on reading? Elif Shafak on why we still need novels

A caller YouGov canvass recovered that 40% of Britons person not work a book successful the past year. “The literate epoch has travel to an end,” Philip Roth prophesied successful 2000. “The evidence is the culture, the grounds is the society, the grounds is the screen.” Roth believed that the wont of mind that lit required was bound to disappear. People would nary longer person the attraction oregon the isolation needed to work novels.

Several studies look to enactment Roth’s conclusion. The mean clip that a idiosyncratic tin absorption connected 1 happening has dropped successful caller decades from astir 2.5 minutes to astir 45 seconds. I witnessed this erstwhile I gave 2 Ted talks astir 10 years apart. In 2010, we were asked to keep our talks to 20 minutes; successful 2017, that was reduced to astir 13 minutes. When I asked why, the organisers informed maine that the mean attraction span had shrunk. Still, I kept my speech to 20 minutes. And I would likewise similar to propulsion back on the thought that radical nary longer need novels.

The aforesaid YouGov polling shows that among those who read, much than 55% similar fiction. Talk to immoderate steadfast oregon bookseller and they volition corroborate it: the appetite for speechmaking novels is inactive widespread. That the long signifier endures is nary tiny miracle in a satellite shaped by hyper information, accelerated depletion and the cult of instant gratification.

We unrecorded successful an epoch successful which determination is excessively overmuch accusation but not capable knowledge, and adjacent little wisdom. This excess of accusation makes america arrogant and past it makes america numb. We indispensable alteration this ratio and absorption much on knowledge and wisdom. For cognition we request books, dilatory journalism, podcasts, in-depth analyses and taste events. And for wisdom, among different things, we request the creation of storytelling. We request the agelong form.

I americium not claiming that novelists are wise. If anything, rather the opposite: we are a walking mess. But the agelong signifier contains insight, empathy, affectional quality and compassion. This is what Milan Kundera meant erstwhile helium said, “the novel’s contented is precise antithetic from that of philosophy”. Ultimately, though, it is the creation of storytelling that’s older and wiser than we are. Writers cognize this successful their guts – and so do readers.

In caller years, I person noticed a alteration successful the demographics of publication events and literate festivals crossed the UK: I americium seeing much and much young people. Some are coming with their parents, but galore much travel unsocial or with friends. There are noticeably much young men attending fabrication events. It seems to maine that the much chaotic our times, the deeper is our request to dilatory down and work fiction. In an property of choler and anxiety, clashing certainties, rising jingoism and populism, the part betwixt “us” and “them” besides deepens. The novel, however, dismantles dualities.

The agelong narrative, ever since the Epic of Gilgamesh, has softly formed its spell. One of the oldest surviving works of literature, astatine slightest 4,000 years old, Gilgamesh predates Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Odyssey and the Iliad. It is besides an antithetic communicative with an improbable leader astatine its centre. In the poem, King Gilgamesh emerges arsenic a restless spirit, burdened by the tempest of his heart. He is simply a brute, a selfish carnal motivated by greed, powerfulness and possession. Until, that is, the Gods nonstop him a companion: Enkidu. Together they embark connected journeys acold and wide, discovering different lands, but besides rediscovering themselves.

It is simply a communicative astir friendship, but besides astir galore things besides, specified arsenic the powerfulness of h2o and floods to destruct oregon renew our environment, our desire to prolong youth, and our fearfulness of death. In galore classical myths, the leader returns location triumphant – but not successful the Epic of Gilgamesh. Here we have a protagonist who has mislaid his dear friend, failed in almost everything, and has achieved nary clear victory. But having experienced failure, defeat, grief and fear, Gilgamesh evolves into a kinder, wiser being. The past poem is about the imaginable for alteration and our need to attain wisdom.

Since the Epic of Gilgamesh was narrated and written down, truthful galore empires person travel and gone, truthful galore mighty kings – “strong men” – person perished, and immoderate of the tallest monuments person crumbled to dust. Yet this poem has survived the tides of past – and present we are, thousands of years later, inactive learning from it. King Gilgamesh, aft journeys and failures, reconnects with his ain vulnerability and resilience. He learns to go human. Just arsenic we bash erstwhile we work novels astir different people.