Concerned that study of the humanities is not getting an adequate defence within the public sphere, including from humanities professors, who (he says) undersell their subjects, Alain de Botton sets out the case he thinks ought to be made:
My own answer to what the humanities are for is simple: They should help us to live. We should look to culture as a storehouse of useful ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues. Novels and historical narratives can impart moral instruction and edification... It should be the job of a university education to tease out the therapeutic and illuminative aspects of culture, so that we emerge from a period of study as slightly less disturbed, selfish and blinkered human beings. Such a transformation benefits not only the economy but also our friends, children and spouses.
Alain is writing of the humanities in general, but I want to focus on what he says only as it relates to the reading and study of literature. So focused the case, it seems to me, divides into two different cases. Or, at any rate, that is the suggestion I want to explore.
Alain has a fair bit more to say echoing the above passage. Thus, he quotes Mill: 'to make capable and cultivated human beings'. And he speaks of helping people 'to find meaning [and] understand themselves', of disseminating 'emotional or ethical life skills', of a 'knowledge concerned with things that are not only true but also inwardly beneficial, providing comfort in the face of life's infinite challenges, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal diagnosis'.
The division I now propose is one between, broadly speaking, utility and understanding. For both are present in the argument that Alain makes. As applied to the reading of literature, this should, on the one hand, 'help us to live', provide 'a storehouse of useful ideas', better enable us to deal with 'a tyrannical employer'; and, on the other hand, tease out 'illuminative aspects of culture', make 'cultivated human beings', and help us to find meaning and understand ourselves.
I do not for a moment deny that having a better, a deeper, understanding of things can be practically useful; it can, of course. But the reason I distinguish the utilitarian case for the reading of literature from the promotion-of-understanding one is that the former seems to me to be diminishing in a way that the latter isn't. I mean, suppose someone says that from reading Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, he or she learned something useful which they then applied to their own marriage(s), that by reading Philip Roth they were helped in thinking about the prospect of death, that after reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy they found it easier to cope with a cruelty they had suffered personally; whereas someone else professes to have had no help at all from reading assorted novels by Anne Tyler, George Eliot, William Maxwell and Anita Brookner, whether in his marriage, or in raising his children, or in coping with her employer, or with a personal misdeed done against her, or with anything. Supposing all this, or some variant of it - are we then to say that the second someone's reading has been a total waste of time? Don't evade the issue by suggesting in your turn that maybe this second someone obtained handy lessons in hill-walking or bird-watching, or in how to relate to a difficult teenager. Suppose they're just not very good in translating their reading into practical lessons; or that the spread of their reading doesn't mesh with the particular problems they face in life.
My point is that reading fiction surely has another rationale than the narrowly utilitarian one - i.e., that it will be useful in your life. I think it does have another and better rationale: namely, that it tells - or shows - you stuff about the world which you otherwise might not get. Plus: for those who enjoy it, it's enjoyable. This is enough. Even if the study of literature can be useful as well.