ULTIMA RATIO POETATUM – OR THE SUPREME AFFORDANCE OF LITERATURE

Firelei Báez, To see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls

I’ve been having a conversation about the future of reading books in the age of fractured attention — or, to put it alliteratively, reading in the time of TikTok.

After my last stack In Defense of an Imperiled Art, my interlocutor Robert responded:

What’s troubling me is that we, in many cases, keep using books to do the same types of things the other mediums do now, & often so much better, namely narrative storytelling…

… why not evolve lit into new forms that might meet these shifts? What might it look like for text to be as engaging & quick-hit consumable & mechanically similar to these other forms? What if instead of trying to “make it new” again by doing a new version of what novels have always done — tell stories — we broke it open & turned writing into something else, & really focused on what writing alone can do. We don’t need text to tell stories, & audiences keep choosing other mediums to get their stories, so what if we leaned hard into turning text into something else & made it legitimately new again?

There’s a lot here that I could weigh in on — I’m not as convinced, por ejemplo that reels, etc., are better at the kinds of narratives that novels often engage in — or that TikTok gives much humanity or authenticity — but as time is short I’m going to focus on what for me seems the crux of the matter — “what writing alone can do” — what I called literature’s unique affordances.

Affordances is a concept coined by psychologist James J. Gibson¹ — the affordance of something is what it offers, furnishes or provides. Wet terrain has certain affordances, dry terrain has other affordances. After Donald Norman ported affordance over to design², the concept has proliferated across many conceptual fields, both as an analytical and creative tool. The affordances of film, for example — how handily it captures movement — which is not one of the strong affordances of literature.

No question: literature and social media are both narrative media. They both tell stories, but literature’s stubborn survival in the face of trillions of corporate dollars aimed at rewiring all of us into non-limbic lizards that only consume ain’t just owed to its storytelling prowess. As any narrative scholar will attest, plenty of earlier forms told stories very well, and plenty of later forms also tell stories very well.

What really sets literature apart, what it does best of all, better than any other narrative media — its signal affordance — is interiority.

Literature allows readers to experience, to share, to inhabit the interiority of another human being.

No other media is capable of such a direct audacious transference, such a divine cohabitation. Literature alone performs telepathy, engages in we-being, crosses the mind-other barrier.

Other forms allow us to play the mimicry game — can approximate, refer, or intimate interiority, can produce immersion, but nothing does it as profoundly, as longitudinally, or as vastationally as literature.

And in allowing us to experience, to become possessed by the interiority of another human being, literature throws our own interiority, its splendid wounded yearning murky isolation, into radiant relief.

Literature allows us to reach out across the vast gulf of darkness separating us from every other person and come into contact with another life, no matter how fleetingly.

And those who have crossed that gulf never return the same person.

Kings might have had their cannons — their Ultimo Ratio Regum — but we writers have our own transcendent arsenal — our Ultimo Regio Poetatum.

Our last argument of poets.

Which if done right no can defense.

It is this very affordance that no other media can approach or simulate that explains why literature is literature — why literature is so fucking precious and unique — and why literature defies easy translation into new faster viral forms.

TikTok and its ilk are designed to do plenty of things well, but what they can’t do is interiority. At all. Neither can film, neither can plays. They can approach interiority and occasionally produce orthogonal approximations — powerful in their own right in the right hands — but they can’t deliver the real inner sublime — what writing alone can do — can never evoke what it means to be a recently enslaved woman who is coping with the trauma of enslavement and the trauma of having killed some of her children to keep them from being enslaved. Can never render the torment of Raskolnikov or the unbreaking resilience of Lilith Iyapo.

It is simply the way they’re built. TikTok and Reels and the like are Fast Media and possess all the lizard affordances of Fast Media and encourage a lizard sensibility (addictive, reactive, simplistic, unsympathetic, consuming, commodifying). But books and literature (like democracy and justice) are Slow Media and it is that very human slowness and the craft required to sustain it and the sensibility it encourages (deliberative, moderate, nuanced, sympathetic, tolerant of contradiction) that allows for the affordance of interiority.

Are all people who love reels lizards? Of course not. Same way all people who read are not always sympathetic. What a media encourages is not always what a media gets.

Are plenty of people happy with their Fast Media? Sure. Happy forever? Only time will tell, but I have my doubts.

Will someone figure out how to make literature “engaging & quick-hit consumable & mechanically similar to these other forms”? Possibly. But not, I suspect, without destroying “what writing alone can do” — the affordance of interiority.

Will books and literature continue to decline into obsolescence?

Perhaps.

But as long as people are people, trapped in the terrible solitude of what it means to be human and desperate to know we are not alone, they will have need of the only media that allows them communion with another human essence, the only truly social media we have ever devised.

1. See his 1966 book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems

2. See his 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things