As The Odyssey surges towards a worldwide box-office haul of one billion dollars – and IMAX cinemas continue to screen the movie through the night – one of Christopher Nolan’s core themes has been curiously underexplored.
In what amounts to a confession to Penelope (Anne Hathaway), Odysseus (Matt Damon), returned to Ithaca after 20 years, laments that “we lived in a world of palaces and trade and language… blind to its beauty until we broke it… Our age of bronze is collapsing.”
Later, as they sail towards the “unknown west… chasing the escaping sun”, he is even more specific. When she asks why the tales of the Trojan War and its aftermath will “only be sung”, he says: “Because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write… A new dawn will break over the darkened world… And our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”
It can be argued – just – that this focus upon the collapse of literacy maps on to the history of civilisational downfall told in (for instance) Eric H Cline’s 1177 B.C. (2021) and The End of the Bronze Age (1993) by Robert Drews. It is true that the decline of the ancient syllabic writing known as Linear B roughly coincided with the “systemic failure” of the radically “interconnected world” described by Cline.
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Yet Linear B was a bureaucratic communication system rather than a Mycenaean literary language. And it is striking that, in the combined 27,803 lines of The Iliad and The Odyssey, there is only a single reference to writing – in Book Six of the former epic, in which Glaucus tells the story of his grandfather Bellerophon, despatched by Proetus, king of Tiryns, to Iobates, ruler of Lycia, with a private message that condemns its bearer to death (“a folded tablet, which he had inscribed/ with many dangerous and deadly symbols” – tr. Emily Wilson, 2023).
In other words: Homer was not preoccupied by literature or literacy. But Nolan most definitely is. Take a look at Tom Shone’s excellent 2020 book on the director, written with his full cooperation, which reveals his sheer erudition and the extent to which he is influenced by TS Eliot, James Joyce, Wilkie Collins, Goethe, Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Graham Swift, and, above all, Jorge Luis Borges (“I’ll give [copies of his books] to people… I feel like I’ve always been reading them”).
In other words: though Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is not, as some have claimed, a treacherous departure from the source material – you try filming a 3,000-year-old epic for multiplex audiences – his decision to put the collapse of literacy at the heart of the movie’s denouement is profoundly personal and resonant with the pathologies of our own times.
Last month, the Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch wrote a long article titled “The End of Reading is Here” that went deservedly viral. Building upon an earlier piece, “The Elite College Students who Can’t Read Books”, Horowitch makes a compelling and disturbing case for her thesis: according to the National Endowment for Arts, fewer than half of all American adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.
Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social sciences support, told her that some students now consider the demand to read books as, in effect, an act of pedagogic aggression. “By asking them to read,” Rennix said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium” (my italics).
An irony: as a result of digital bombardment, Americans “are probably reading more words than ever before”. But because none of this involves sustained immersion in a long text, the capacity for discernment, comprehension, detection of nuance, the cadences of wit and critical thinking is in free fall. Horowitch’s bleak verdict: “America… isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.”
The most asinine response to this trend is to claim that Gen Z and Generation Alpha are simply getting stupider. This is insulting nonsense.
The sharp decline in attention spans associated with dramatically increased screen time, the distractions of streaming and the algorithm’s loathing of subtlety is by no means confined to the young.
According to a Censuswide survey in 2024, a third of adults in the UK said that they had given up reading. In March last year, YouGov reported that 40% of the public had not read or listened to a single book in the past year.
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The latest and perhaps greatest threat to literacy is the extent to which – principally since 2024 – hundreds of millions of people have essentially delegated the old tasks of reading and writing to artificial intelligence. As we have been dreading Skynet, AI has instead quietly colonised our inner lives, offered itself as a prosthetic alternative to a whole range of cognitive skills and established, at pace, one of the most terrifying dependency cultures in human history.
On July 21, the American tech news website 404 Media revealed that Anthropic and other AI mega-corporations were buying thousands of rare books, feeding them into high-speed scanning machines to maintain their greedy large language models and then destroying the original copies. This naturally invites comparison with the decline and destruction of the Library of Alexandria and Nazi book-burning.
Yet, in truth, it is a hypermodern form of philistine atrocity: the (so far) entirely legal and court-approved annihilation of an ancient literary culture to feed the beast of a new technology that, now smartphones and social media have captured our attention, wants our souls into the bargain, too.
If this isn’t a five-alarm fire, I don’t know what is. As I wrote in November under TNW’s “Read Against Racism” rubric, “[p]recisely when we need the muscles of imagination, empathy and curiosity to be strong they continue to atrophy from disuse”.
The great paradox of reading is that it is an interior habit involving solitary attention to a text; but one which is essential – now more than ever – to our full participation in increasingly complex, interdependent and multi-ethnic societies. We cannot be true citizens without taking the time to withdraw from the moronic inferno and apply ourselves to sustained reading.
Ask yourself who really gains most from the lurch away from literacy. It is the populists who long for us to be distracted by dopamine hits, to be ill-informed, amnesiac, interested in history only as a source of grotesquely simplified heritage (the right) or as something to apologise for (the woke).
Their hunting ground is marked out by huge neon slogans, shallow arguments and what the late Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating cliches”. In his endless speeches, and his love of the directionless “weave”, Donald Trump is a book-hating bard for our idiot age, a pioneer of a new, fascistic oral tradition.
Liberal democracy is not a free ride; it never was. One of the reasons that progressives are still struggling with the Right’s often loathsome attacks on immigration and with the appallingly neglected challenge of integration is that so few of them now bother to put in (metaphorically and literally) the hours in the library.
Just as the threat of Christian nationalism is impossible to understand without reading (for instance) Jesus and John Wayne (2020) by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers (2020) and Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (2023), so it is absurd to opine on violent acts inspired by Islamism without at least a basic grasp of its origins.
Most left-liberals are nowhere on this issue. The last such writer to have engaged with it candidly and with deep learning is Kenan Malik, whose seminal book From Fatwa to Jihad (2009) shows that the robust pluralism of Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and John Rawls has not been completely abandoned. But it is in desperately poor shape.
In which context: I am dismayed by how few people who routinely comment on Islamism have heard of, let alone read, its founding texts: notably Muhammad Rashid Rida’s The Caliphate or Supreme Imamate (1923) and (especially) Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones (1964). Instead, the routine response by left-liberals to a jihadi attack is the politics of the bumper sticker: “diversity is our strength”, “we reject all acts of violence”, “we shall not be divided”.
Again, a paradox: if you really want to defeat bigotry, you have to hug the cactus of the problem, whole and entire. Slogans may be therapeutic to those who utter them, and can look good on Instagram, but they reveal only illiteracy (in every sense). Channelling Hannah Arendt, we refer often to the “banality of evil”. We should pay no less attention to the banality of performative compassion.
Just as there is no right side of history, no political pendulum, no preordained trajectory in human affairs, so the collapse of literacy is not inevitable. Witness Homer’s debut – finally! – in the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list (the Penguin Classics edition of The Odyssey).
It is no less heartening to see on Substack a thriving rebel alliance of reading groups and courses on selected books: Story Club with George Saunders has more than 329,000 subscribers; Read the Classics with Henry Eliot and the Athenaeum Book Club are terrific ways to discover great works of literature.
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Meanwhile, the phenomenon of BookTok – reading subcommunities on TikTok – is further evidence that the young, in spite of the digital bedlam that we bequeathed to them, often yearn for books just as much as their forebears. In 2024, according to Circana BookScan, 59 million print book sales could be tied to BookTok content.
And if you sneer at those who read “romantasy” and YA titles, then you are truly part of the problem. An authentic bibliophile, rather than a snob, understands that popular fiction and the classics are not enemies but siblings; that the most voracious young readers will turn from Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros to Jane Austen and Albert Camus; just as their parents read Lee Child and Anne Rice alongside their Fitzcarraldo and Faber titles.
As we fight to defend the ancient walls of the republic of letters – to protect the literary inheritance that is the foundation of liberal pluralism – we need mind gyms as much as we need regular gyms. Which is why I fervently hope that Andy Burnham supports public libraries with even more vigour than he did as culture secretary and mayor of Greater Manchester.
In the words of Tennyson’s Ulysses – the Roman name for Odysseus – “that which we are, we are”: our predicament is real, our shared culture seriously imperilled. But the poet’s early Victorian version of Homer’s hero also declares that it is “not too late to seek a newer world”; and so it is today.
Time is very short. Our ship is dragged towards the roaring whirlpool of a digital Charybdis, as we are beckoned by the Sirens of our screens and tempted by the narcotic AI lotus flowers of gormless plausibility. Will we make it home?
