If you find yourself leafing through the August 1896 edition of The Atlantic – as I am sure you might – you will come across an essay: Present Conditions of Literary Production. As a treatise, it so haughty that I imagine it will make even the most patrician of readers bristle. (“The tyranny exercised by the taste of the common-schooled millions who have been taught to read, but have never learned to discriminate.”) It wondered whether the current “period of dullness” in the artistic realm – namely with novels and poems – was part of a permanent and linear regression or whether it was a mere blip, that good taste would come back, “it always does!” Et cetera, et cetera.
The author needn’t have been so worried. It was only 1896 – there was still WB Yeats’s best work to come. Heart of Darkness would be published after a patient wait of just six years and James Joyce was only fourteen. In fact, the anxious hand-wringing predates by a matter of a few years one of the best periods of literary production ever. There is a lesson in all of this: don’t be swept away by easy pessimistic instincts. And I will not heed it.
Fast forward to 2025 and the literary realm is in a depressing and depressive state. Now, 200,000 books are published annually in the UK alone. That is too many. Recent polling by YouGov found only 60 per cent of people there had read in the past year. That is too few. And while Irish teenagers’ technical literacy is second only to those in Singapore, there is scant evidence that this translates into them becoming high volume readers in adulthood.
Then there is the matter of quality to contend with. It is extraordinarily hard to judge in the present moment which books will earn their place in the permanent canon and which are a product of temporary vogue. But I am confident that I do not need the filtering effect of time to tell you this: the world’s bestselling author in 2024, Sarah J Maas, a pioneer of “romantasy” genre fiction, will not be up there with our Dostoevskys and Austens in 20 years time, or now, or ever. This is not to say that no one is writing good novels – of course, they are – but instead to point out that in this current deluge of slop fiction, the glittering highs will be harder to fish out and read by increasingly few. This is a mathematical inevitability.
Meanwhile, Present Conditions of Literary Production contended that Greek tragedy essentially died with Euripides, not because fourth-century Athenians “had duller poetic sensibilities than their ancestors” but because “all possible expressions and combinations of the ideals and conventions of heroic tragedy had been essayed”. I wonder if we might think the same of the genre we could call Sad Irish Girl Wanders Around Dublin. The books in this category are not bad – some are very good – but I cannot help but think the theme has been excavated for all it is worth.
I won’t begrudge anyone calling me a snob. But concern for the state of literature is important nonetheless. We all have to live in the public realm, formed by the cleanliness of our streets, the state of public art, the usefulness of public transport, the frequency of green spaces, the quality of state broadcasting and, yes, the books we read and talk about. And literature has long provided civilisation with a common vernacular.
Now, that effect is more diffuse as the “fewer readers more books” equation is seeing society lose shared reference points. We won’t know the material impacts of this phenomenon for some time but my suspicions are it is something we will come to regret.
Maybe my pessimism will look as naive in hindsight as the anxiety in Present Condition of Literary Production. In that, the author bemoaned the lagging quality of the literary realm at the end of the 19th century – and lo, the 20th century! Even better, a contrarian might argue. And that does give me cause for hope. There are geniuses writing now and there will be more lurking around the corner. Perhaps we are just a six year wait around the corner from a new Heart of Darkness too.
There is one salient difference between then and now, however. It is passé to blame everything on technology, social media, AI. But, in 2025, these are serious antagonists to literary production and the art of reading. Social media is not just distracting for those trying to gain a hinterland in the canon. Some of the more sinister actors behind AI are trying to usurp the necessity of human creativity altogether, ceding all artistic production to the Machine. I do not think they will win outright but the effect must still be a malign one.
This is not a despairing howl but, in some senses, an exercise in self-accountability. It is easy to reverse the trend of the literary realm: read good books and read more of them.
