How great literature can change your life

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Wednesday

Julia and I spent last weekend with my son’s family in Buford, Georgia, where we heard a detailed account of the very exciting book that he’s writing. Tobias Wilson-Bates is an English professor at Georgia Gwinnett College and this book on literary time machines in the 19^th century has sent him in some wild directions, including (since he himself continues to go further back in time) connections between Milton’s Paradise Lost and Isaac Newton’s invention of calculus.

Since doing a post-doctoral fellowship at Georgia Tech before his current post, Toby has moved further into various technologies, which means that he had some choice criticisms of a recent New Yorker article on how Artificial Intelligence “may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.” To which Toby responded on Bluesky,

This article is going to turn me into the Joker. Literary style is not a puzzle you solve to get a little information treat 😩😩😩

Toby was particularly exercised about what author Joshua Rothman has to say about the opening of Bleak House, which Rothman compares to swimming through molasses. To set up what Rothman regards as A.I.’s miraculous properties, here are the first three paragraphs of Dickens’s novel:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimneypots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

Rothman sets the A.I. program Claude loose on the third paragraph:

But A.I. can also simplify: if you’re struggling with the opening of Bleak House, you can ask for it to be rewritten using easier, more modern English. “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”

Toby’s tweet set off a storm of comments, including that A.I. isn’t doing anything here that various on-line reading aids are already doing—often far more sensitively—and that the idea of reading literature for information defeats the purpose of literature. As Toby noted in our conversation, while he often finds it difficult to get into a novel, somewhere along the line his brain becomes reconfigured or acculturated so that what initially feels alien becomes familiar. What happens with great lit is that an author’s challenging style takes us over, becoming an essential part of the literary experience. There are plenty of plot summaries to be found—with the internet, people don’t even have to purchase Cliff Notes anymore—but literature has never been reducible to plot. In the trade we call this the heresy of paraphrase.

My own version of the process (as I used to tell my students) is that, while entering a novel may initially feel like pushing a car uphill, eventually the center of gravity shifts as the novel takes hold. Suddenly it feels like you’re coasting downhill.

Toby made yet another point that I found even more profound. Rothman’s account of how people have traditionally read is itself fundamentally flawed. Rothman talks about “the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading,” which supposedly involves “intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts.” This, however, has never been how most people read. Rather, reading has always been an earlier version of what we’re currently seeing, which Rothman describes as follows:

These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit’s lazy river. There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.

In addition to the fact that this doesn’t have anything to do with A.I.—it’s more about our distraction culture—it’s also invokes an idealized account of reading. According to this iteration, in some private place we pick up the author’s complete version, begin at the beginning, read until we get to the end, and then stop (to quote Lewis Carroll’s King of Hearts). I can report from my own reading history, however, that I had a variety of ways of engaging with texts. Some works I initially encountered through classics comics–Moby Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, Last of the Mohicans—for which there were little stamps that one would glue onto the appropriate page. My father read aloud other books to my brothers and me until, older and impatient at the slow pace, we would finish them on our own. There were certain books in my childhood that I didn’t realize were abridged so that I was amazed years later when I discovered the originals. (I remember being shocked at the accounts of Lilliputians carting off Gulliver’s shit. And at all the sex in the unexpurgated Arabian Nights.)

Literature consumption in the past was just as varied. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey describes an early version of Pottermania, with friends reading bits of Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho and sharing them excitedly. Sometimes, in rural England, villagers would gather to hear someone read from the latest installment of the latest Dickens novel. And speaking of Dickens, David Copperfield gains some street cred in his boarding school by recounting to the other students the plots of novels he’s read.

We know, from Dickens biographers, that as a boy he himself encountered these novels in abridged form. Dickens is undoubtedly being autobiographical as he cites the books that David loves:

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favorite characters in them—as I did—and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones—which I did too. I have been Tom Jones (a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe.

I note as an aside that I wrote my dissertation on the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett, the author of Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker. And that Dickens named one of his sons Tobias Smollett Dickens. Oh, and my own son Tobias is partly named after Smollett, partly after the gentle Uncle Toby in Laurence Sterne’s 18^th century novel Tristram Shandy.

David Copperfield’s beloved novels undergo yet further distortion when he recounts them to his classmates:

It happened on one occasion, when [Steerforth] was doing me the honor of talking to me in the playground, that I hazarded the observation that something or somebody—I forget what now—was like something or somebody in Peregrine Pickle. He said nothing at the time; but when I was going to bed at night, asked me if I had got that book?

I told him no, and explained how it was that I had read it, and all those other books of which I have made mention.

‘And do you recollect them?’ Steerforth said.

‘Oh yes,’ I replied; I had a good memory, and I believed I recollected them very well.

‘Then I tell you what, young Copperfield,’ said Steerforth, ‘you shall tell ‘em to me. I can’t get to sleep very early at night, and I generally wake rather early in the morning. We’ll go over ‘em one after another. We’ll make some regular Arabian Nights of it.’

I felt extremely flattered by this arrangement, and we commenced carrying it into execution that very evening. What ravages I committed on my favorite authors in the course of my interpretation of them, I am not in a condition to say, and should be very unwilling to know; but I had a profound faith in them, and I had, to the best of my belief, a simple, earnest manner of narrating what I did narrate; and these qualities went a long way.

Even when people in previous centuries sat down to read an entire novel straight through—say, Tom Jones—different readers would handle the book differently, with some skipping the introductory chapters and others not (which Fielding anticipated).

To Rothman’s assertion that, until recently, reading has been “an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern publishing industry, in the nineteenth century,” Toby responded, “The entire field of 19th century studies is about how wrong this summation is.”

Of the many Bluesky responses to Toby’s tweet, two particularly stood out to me. One is Gareth Clarke’s observation that A.I. summations of novels are the equivalent

of going to a restaurant and bringing a blender to liquify your meal. It might be easier for you to consume as a slurry but the flavor is changed, the textures are gone, the dish lesser as a result. You go to a specific place for a specific thing done a specific way – trust the chef.

Stone Circle Review, meanwhile, shared two great quotations:

I caution against communication because once language exists only to convey information, it is dying. — Richard Hugo

Poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information; it’s an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you. — Philip Pullman

Literature teachers dream of their students experiencing the magic and undergoing change. Sure, there have always been students who found ways to avoid doing the reading assignment, and A.I., I suppose, makes this easier than ever. But those who become immersed in, say, the murky world of Bleak House and who come to identify with the dramas of Esther and Lady Dedlock and John Jarndyce and Jo have gone so far beyond A.I. as to render it irrelevant.

The best literature teachers know that there are multiple ways to hook students, and maybe some of them will even find ways to add A.I. into the pedagogical mix, along with dramatic reenactments, counterposed passages, video and audio versions, poetry slams, imaginative texting exercises, and the like. For that matter, Dickens himself looked for new ways to immerse audiences in his fictional worlds, enthralling them with theatrical readings.

All of these approaches are designed to connect students with literature’s inner core, however, not replace it.