6 (7?) billion people. We do not know for what proportion of them reading and writing (regardless of training) can or will be a _comfortable_ activity. And for billions now it is not in fact comfortable. Are you denying them the capacity for happiness unless they learn to read and write?
Were Paleolithic humans capable of happiness or pleasure? No paintings even until 40K BP. I love to read (or did when I could: it's mostly painful now, even when read aloud to me. I can still write, & that's a pleasure, but it remains to be established that "everyone" can write. I had students who read well, who were quite brilliant conversationalists even, but who simply could not get a coherent statement down on paper. Writing for them was simply torture.
I haven't read your post carefully enough to know if this is relevant; perhaps tomorrow morning.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Dennis Claxton Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2012 4:30 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org; lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Essential Reading - Hah!
At 10:37 AM 2/4/2012, Carrol Cox wrote:
>I think there are still those possessed by the delusion of "Essential
Reading
>for the Good Life" or something like that. See Alan Bloom's bizarre book.
>Some still take it seriously.
But that's not to say that reading/writing is not essential. I just found this the other day. Carlos Fuentes talking about fiction:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/361.html
[...]
Reality is not fixed, it is mutable. We can only approach reality if we do not pretend to define it once and for all. The partial verities proposed by a novel are a bulwark against dogmatic impositions. Considered politically feeble and unimportant, why are writers then persecuted by totalitarian regimes as if they really mattered? This contradiction reveals the deeper nature of the political in literature. The reference is to the polis, the city, the evolving but constant community of citizens, not to the autoritas, the passing powers, essentially temporary but pridefully believing themselves eternal.
Kafka's fictions describe a power that makes its own fiction powerful. Power is a representation that, like the authorities in "The Castle", gain its strength from the imagination of those outside the castle. When that imagination ceases to confer power upon power, the Emperor appears naked and the impotent writer who points this out is banned to exile, the concentration camp or the bonfire, while the Emperor's tailors stitch on his new clothes.
So, if there can be political power in writing, it is exceptional. Under so-called "normal" circumstances, the writer has scarce if any political importance. He or she can, of course, become politically relevant as citizens. Yet he or she possess the ultimate political importance of offering the city, however quietly, however postponed, however indirectly, the two indispensable values that unite the personal and the collective:
Fiction then, from Rabelais and Cervantes to Grass and Goytisolo and Gordimer, is another way of questioning truth as we strive for it through the paradox of a lie. That lie can be called the imagination. It can also be seen as a parallel reality. It can be observed as a critical mirror of what passes for the truth in the world of convention. It certainly sets up a second universe of being, where Don Quixote and Heathclif and Emma Bovary have a reality greater, though no less important, than the host of hastily met and then forgotten citizens we deal with. Indeed, Don Quixote or Emma Bovary bring into light, give weight and presence to the virtues and vices --to the fugitive personalities-- of our daily acquaintance.
Perhaps, what Ahab and Pedro Paramo and Effie Briest possess is, also, the living memory of the great, glorious and mortal subjectivities of the men and women that we forget, that our fathers knew and our grand parents foresaw. In Don Quixote, Dostoevsky wrote, truth is saved by a lie. With Cervantes, the novel establishes its birthright as a lie that is the foundation of truth. For through the medium of fiction, the novelist puts reason to the proof. Fiction invents what the world lacks, what the world has forgotten, what it hopes to attain and perhaps can never reach. Fiction is thus a way of appropriating the world, giving the world the color, the taste, the sense, the dreams, the vigils, the perseverance and even the lazy repose that, to go on being, it claims.
[...]
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