I would be shocked if anything close to 0.31 percent of Britain, or any other population in the world (perhaps excepting Russia--I'd be very curious to know if anyone has any information on this), really began and finished that book with any meaningful level of attentiveness.
If one goes by that logic that means that there are at least a hundred people who lie about having read War and Peace for every person who actually has read War and Peace.
Now, War and Peace is an exceptional case given the book's particular fame, reputation and, if not "difficulty" in the sense of difficulty of technique in the way we have become familiar with from the Modernists forward, then at least difficulty due to the demands the book makes on the attention and patience of the reader by virtue of its great length and structure (its looseness, crowdedness, digressiveness, etc.). But it is a reminder that in reality (as opposed to bad TV and movies where intellectual super-people are the norm) literary classics comprise a very limited part of the limited and declining amount of discretionary long-form fiction reading the public does.
Indeed, as previously remarked, the consumption of classics is small enough that it is conceivable that, where actual reading is concerned, few but students of Literature are doing very much of it. With the number of such students apparently in collapse at the college level I suspect this will translate to a significant contraction in such consumption--which in turn will have negative effects on the readiness of publishers to keep such work in print, and the prospects of such books coming to the attention of the general public.
Does that seem plausible to you?
No comments:
Post a Comment