"Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts"

Peter Bichsel’s observation posits literature in a paradoxical space between indulgence and necessity, equating its significance to that of tableware or ironed shirts, objects that, upon scrutiny, prove essential in the rituals of daily life, yet remain nonessential to bare survival. Tableware dignifies the act of eating, transforming nourishment from a mechanical process into a communal, aesthetic, or even civilized experience. Ironed shirts, similarly, transcend mere function, suggesting care, identity, and a sense of occasion beyond basic sheltering of the body. Through this analogy, literature is framed as something that embellishes, interprets, and dignifies human existence.

The phrase “unnecessarily necessarily” contains a deliberate contradiction. Bichsel points to a truth often felt but rarely articulated: that certain cultural artifacts, like stories, novels, poems, fulfill no immediate, practical need. One could, in theory, eat with hands, wear wrinkled clothes, or never read a novel. Yet, as with tableware and ironed shirts, the absence of literature would strip life of layers that make it richer and more human. Literature offers frameworks to comprehend ambiguity, solace in alienation, and connection with the breadth of human experience across time and culture.

Bichsel’s choice to compare literature to outwardly mundane objects subverts the notion of literature as esoteric or elitist. Instead, it situates literature amidst the lived, everyday rituals that confer meaning and belonging. The necessity of literature is not within physiology but rather in the psychological and social domains; its “unnecessary necessity” lies in making sense of the self and the other, in transforming survival into living. In acknowledging this, Bichsel highlights that to be human is to need not only bread, but also roses, gestures, objects, and stories that beautify, structure, and interpret the business of being alive.