When We’ve Stopped Reading

“By sheer accident, one man in this stupefied future learns how to read.”

Imagine if mankind forgot how to read. This is the premise of Walter Tevis’s superb 1980 dystopian novel Mockingbird. Centuries have passed, and the populations of the world now lead lives entirely reliant on automation. At first, machines provided basic labor, but, gradually, they became the doctors, then the police, then the teachers, then the judges, then even the government itself. This left people free to pursue individualist pleasures. Everyone lives on drugs—the person who stops taking drugs is considered mad. Memorization is considered vulgar; one should live in the present. The motto of society becomes “Forget it, Relax.” Traditional social institutions like the family are first abandoned, then stigmatized, then outlawed. Private life is championed above all else. People no longer understand the lives of others (“privacy invasion,” or asking personal questions, is made illegal). Just be yourself, they are told.

By sheer accident, one man in this stupefied future learns how to read. Paul Bentley was searching in the archives for old pornographic films as part of the “Classics” course he teaches at a university, when he accidentally comes across “ancient” educational films teaching young children basic literacy. He dedicates his time to studying them, but he must do so in secret; the teaching of reading, after all, is an illegal activity. However, no one can study a subject without wishing intensely to share the knowledge gained, and so eventually he teaches one other person, a young woman with whom he develops a secret romance (which is, alas, also a crime). He ends up being “detected” by a robot and sent to prison. He experiences profound suffering throughout the rest of the book—but also much joy. One could say that had he not learnt to read, his life would have been much more comfortable. However, Bentley clearly prefers his new life to his previous state of artificial bliss. Reading had changed him entirely, for he had discovered an internal life. He now had stories and histories and ideas, which would forever resound within him. This was a deeper comfort than drugs, television, or any other sensory pleasure.

Mockingbird, perhaps uniquely, shows us what “the end of history” might look like.

Before his arrest there is an overwhelming moment when Bentley, having before only been able to find the occasional book, comes across a room full of thousands of books:

“I stood there not knowing what to do or say. I was feeling something that was like what some of the films had made me feel—a sense that I was in the presence of great waves of feeling that had once been felt by people who were now dead and who understood things that I did not.”