Last month Nobel Prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer passed through New York for the PEN Festival of Literature, where she gave talks on the theme of home and away to packed audiences.
The turnouts, while encouraging, belied a larger issue at work in America, though—the decline of book culture. Reading levels are down; newspaper book pages are being cut back; more and more books are sold at big-box superstores, which are crowding out smaller bookstores with more eclectic selections.
In America, readership levels are going down—both of books and of newspapers. Are you having similar problems in South Africa?
I’m very troubled by what’s happening to the book; that’s why this event here, the PEN festival—seeing large audiences turning up to hear writers—is very heartening and encouraging. Because the image is gravely threatening the word. And the most obvious example and really important one is this: When you were a child, I’m sure somebody read to you a bedtime story. And from that comes your interest in words and wanting to read. You begin to associate the word that is read to you with what is there on the page. In other words, you are beginning to read before you can read. Nowadays, the child is put in front of the television: That is the bedtime story. But it’s not the same as being read to, and that is why when children go to school they have problems. I know you have these problems in your own universities—people go to college, and they have problems. And this is now becoming universal. In my country, in England, they are now having big problems.
The other aspect of this is the newspaper sections which cover books—and bring that discussion to a wide and democratic audience—are also shrinking.
Oh, yes, and the amount of journals where young people can see their first efforts, their first story or their first poem, are disappearing. All of us started that way—we saw our first efforts published. Looking at it printed there, removed from yourself, you look at it objectively as a reader. It’s your own work, but you look at it as a reader. And you see your shortcomings, and you see where you didn’t quite convey what you wanted to. But now that chance is really gone. I was talking to somebody last night, he was saying the same thing about the literary reviews. Almost every college or university used to have a journal. Now there are few left. Virginia Quarterly Review is one of the few left. Atlantic has stopped publishing fiction ...
Once a year they have an issue ...
Once a year! Atlantic was a wonderful place for our stories. Harper’s still publishes. And who else?
Where were your very early stories published?
Outside South Africa. In Kenyon Review and Virginia Quarterly Review, and very soon in the New Yorker. And the New Yorker now—one story. And very short. And more and more toward what they call personal history, which is autobiographical. The story is in trouble, and if the short story is in trouble, then so is the novel.
What can be done?
In my country, the universities don’t help, they say they are running out of money—because the money has to be put into “formal education.” The idea that literature is not education is staggering.We are in a weird climate, aren’t we? Where belief in the idea that literature improves your life, or at least enriches it, makes you sound old-fashioned.
But the fact is it helps you develop your mysterious capacities as human beings—of thinking, doubting, making decisions, understanding your own emotions and those of others. There isn’t any other form that can do this.