'The Hallmark of What Is Truly Priceless'

“. . . what literature is really about: our very survival as human beings.” 

A bit melodramatic, no? Grandiose? Perhaps expressed by a writer worried about sales or a reader boosting his self-esteem? Could be. But there’s something to it. Maybe it amounts to more than virtue-signaling after all, and it’s one of the reasons we go on reading in a post-literate age.

 

The late Belgian-born Simon Leys, né Pierre Ryckmans, was not a frivolous man. He was serious but seldom solemn, and understood how to prudently lend an ironic edge to his words. Above he is speaking in one of his 1996 Boyer Lectures, later published as The View from the Bridge. He asks, “Are books essentially useless?” and answers, “I suggest that we indeed subscribe to such a conclusion. But so long as we remain aware that uselessness is also the hallmark of what is truly priceless.” A paradox worthy of Chesterton, one of his admirations. (“He wrote with a reckless generosity of genius.”) Leys goes on to quote the wife of an Australian Outback farmer – and Nabokov:  “Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody’s wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.”

 

Books are not the curriculum of a vocational school. A popular sentiment boosted by many of late has been the therapeutic worth of literature. Reading makes us better people, a statement revealing a childish naïveté about both books and human beings. Serious readers read for non-utilitarian reasons. Books are consolation. Leys cites a Chinese scholar who read Shakespeare and Du Fu while in one of Mao’s camps, and Primo Levi who consoled himself and another prisoner in Auschwitz with lines from Dante. Levi described this experience in If This is a Man. I would add the unexpected fondness inmates of Soviet prisons and labor camps had for Proust, as recounted by Aleksander Wat, Józef Czapski and Varlam Shalamov.

 

No, books are not food, water or warm clothing. In fact, for many in camps and elsewhere they might serve as kindling. In the title essay of Leys’ The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books, 2013), he writes: “After all, this sort of ‘uselessness’ is the very ground on which rest all the essential values of our common humanity.”