According to Apuleius, Pleasure is the daughter of Cupid and Psyche - of Love and the Soul, that is, a sufficiently elevated pedigree, one would have thought. Yet the British still put up a strong resistance to the idea that pleasurability might be a valid criterion in the response to literature, just as we remain dubious about the value of the 'decorative' in the visual arts. When Graham Greene made 'entertainments' a separate category from the hard stuff in his production, he rammed home the point: the difference was a moral one, a difference between reading to pass the time pleasurably - that is, trivially - and reading to some purpose.

LRB 1 June 1989 | PDF Download