Why read? In 1990, the philosopher Alain Etchegoyen published Capital letters (Éditions François Bourin). He explained that literary studies could become an asset in an increasingly complex world, including in scientific professions. Thirty-four years later, Antoine Compagnon takes up the torch in an essay with a provocative title: Literature pays! Not for the authors, of course, when we know that only 15% of them earn more than €9,000 per year. No, the happy beneficiaries of literature are the readers.
The academician and honorary professor at the Collège de France questions this notion of literary profitability which is difficult to quantify. He points out that it takes as much time today as in Antiquity to learn to read, to write a book and to read it. The gain is therefore not to be sought in speed. He also emphasizes that“a writer is essentially a reader” and that“a book is made of books and readings”. Perhaps the hidden fruit of literature is that it feeds on itself and that one day’s reader may become tomorrow’s writer.
One thing is certain: the “busy people who stop reading” lose their clairvoyance, empathy and understanding. Literature acts as prevention but also as therapy and it is not necessary to read it to see its effects. The recitation of the “song of Ulysses” by The Divine Comedy of Dante by Primo Levi and Jean, the “Pikolo” of Auschwitz, reported in If it’s a manallows us to reconnect with the notions of virtue and knowledge. The strength of literature is there, beyond the medium, engraved in the memory.
The story has not lost its power in the era when reading has shifted somewhat from paper to screen. The Montaigne specialist brings together all the subjects that revolve around the book: the predominance of “industrial literature” already denounced by Sainte-Beuve in 1839, the emergence of word processing and now of artificial intelligence that generates content. For all these themes, he remains optimistic and his book will reassure writers, publishers, booksellers and readers.
In his defense of literature in a modern world, he also appeals to the serendipity of reading, which makes you find what you were not looking for, what you did not even know you needed and which you can no longer do without. It is in this sense that we must understand Baudelaire’s phrase: “Poetry is one of the most profitable arts.” Literature is not the whole of life, but without it there would be a dimension missing, like a flavor in gastronomy. In the 1970s, Pierre Dumayet proposed a program that would probably struggle to convince a producer today. For example, he asked Norman peasant women to read Flaubert with a pencil in their hand and to underline the strong passages in Madame Bovary. He called it “Reading is living.”
Antoine Compagnon
Literature pays!
Ecuadorian Editions
Print run: 5,000 copies.
Price: €18; 192 p.
ISBN: 9782382847510
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