The NEA’s News from Nowhere

Friday, July 23rd, 2004

Americans are reading less. The NEA’s News from Nowhere declares that “not so long ago, the death of reading would have been celebrated”:

While the NEA deplores what it perceives as ‘a culture at risk,’ such news must have William Morris grinning in his grave. The ‘unbooked’ world that Morris dreamed about in his 1891 utopia, News from Nowhere, approaches, at least in this one notable detail.

Morris is one of the more intriguing figures of his era. A designer of great talent, he established the Arts & Crafts movement whose furniture is now worth its weight in gold. A writer of considerable creativity (if perhaps not much of a stylist), he invented the modern fantasy genre with such works as The Wood Beyond the World. A political thinker of great energy, he mounted a lifelong cultural critique of capitalist society. He thought true art was impossible under capitalism, and he much preferred the pre-industrial world (hence his interest in fantasy and enchantment, and in traditional craftsmanship). In News from Nowhere, he posits a post-capitalist world where labor provides the gratification assigned, in his lifetime, to art. In Morris’ utopia, there’s no longer any desire to read fiction because the “bourgeois individualism” it celebrated has been discarded.

Morris, then, hated fiction-reading because it was in the way of the socialist revolution he so ardently desired. As it happens, not many of Morris’ intellectual contemporaries cared for his particular kind of utopia: H.G. Wells, for one, lampooned Morris’ vision in his 1895 novel, The Time Machine, where the decadent above-ground world of the Eloi is intended in part as a parody of Morris’ idea of paradise.

I didn’t didn’t realize Wells’ Eloi had such a clear origin. Anyway, Well’s complaint about mass literacy is surprisingly familiar:

But Wells did agree with Morris about one thing: Mass literacy was a problem. If popular literature was an ultimately sociopolitical problem for Morris, it was an intellectual issue for Wells: The demand for reading material by great hordes of the lower classes was generating a tidal wave of bad literature and marginalizing fine culture.

Mass literacy turned “literature” into network television.

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