Newcastle University

Why do you read – is it primarily for pleasure?

[…] From my first degree, which was French and Spanish, you find as you get older that you return to some of these authors, because the characters grow in your mind and become more real than real people, sometimes. And as you get older I think literature becomes more of a consolation, perhaps more of an escape, but these characters become almost like friends to you. One of the projects we do here, which I lead, is we have a French literature class, which began by showing non-specialist techniques for being able to read French literature, modern French literature, in the original. We read Mauriac […] he’s one of my favourite writers, and it’s the characters with all their faults who become so very, very human, you find yourself – just like a piece of good music, you don’t listen once you just dip in anywhere, it doesn’t matter. You pick it up anywhere and you’re transported back in time and place, far away from a cold December afternoon in Newcastle to the South West of France in the 1910s, or, I’m thinking here perhaps of German literature, of the Second World War or just after […], the fate, the stories of families, following a family through all the vicissitudes that they have very often suffered in the Second World War – the bombing of Berlin, exile, the expulsion from East Prussia, for example. So if you say why am I attracted […] by literature, I think it’s because, in life, you can only have a very limited range of experiences yourself, and by definition they have to be in the twenty-first century. As soon as you open the door of literature, then you can go in time and place wherever you want to go, and you find these people become like friends. You know, there’s thousands of characters in any literature that you think of. […] We were talking upstairs about how somebody’s going to see Tartuffe tonight by Molière, and, you know, there’s so many people I’ve come across who are religious hypocrites, but it just fits perfectly – ‘ah, that’s exactly what Tartuffe does’ – which is a consolation, there’s nothing new about it. Or there’s nothing new about the miser, L’Avare, another play of Molière’s, it’s all been there before. There’s nothing new, so don’t worry too much – life is still going on despite these sort of things.