Wednesday
Friend and reader Valerie Hotchkiss has alerted me to a new book that is very much in the spirit of this blog. Times Literary Supplement recently reviewed Literature and Transformation, by one Thor Magnus Tangerås, which does a deep dive into the healing powers of literature. Apparently Anthem Press will be coming out with a new series on “Bibliotherapy and Well-Being.”
Reviewer Joshua Pugh says that bibliotherapy is “having a moment,” what with National Health Service’s “books on prescription” and “the novelist Ann Cleeves’s funding of ‘reading coaches’ in the northeast of England.” Pugh says that traditional literary scholarship, by contrast, is suffering through an identity crisis:
Can books change our lives? Thor Magnus Tangerås tackles this momentous question in Literature and Transformation, the first volume in Anthem Press’s new series on “Bibliotherapy and Well-Being”. The term “bibliotherapy” was coined in 1916, but the basic idea is almost as old as reading itself. The earliest known library, belonging to Pharaoh Ramses II, is said to have borne the inscription, “the house of healing for the soul”. Now there is a burgeoning field of research supporting the view that reading can heal us, and projects putting it into practice. From NHS “books on prescription” schemes to the novelist Ann Cleeves’s funding of “reading coaches” in the northeast of England, bibliotherapy is having a moment:
Many academics, myself included, agree with Tangerås that there is “something missing from, or taken for granted in” our way of reading: eager for scholarly rigour, we’ve said too little about our feelings…. The raw experience of reading – intuitive emotional reaction – is thought to belong instead to journalism.
Given that I’m in the final stages of writing a book that makes a version of this same point, I can only applaud. I’m also struck, given that I’ve just finished writing a chapter on John Stuart Mill, that literary scholarship’s crisis sounds a bit like one the utilitarian philosopher went through. He was so caught up in analysis that he lost touch with his emotions and needed the poetry of William Wordsworth to reconnect. Pugh writes,
Many academics, myself included, agree with Tangerås that there is “something missing from, or taken for granted in” our way of reading: eager for scholarly rigour, we’ve said too little about our feelings…The raw experience of reading – intuitive emotional reaction – is thought to belong instead to journalism.
Pugh says Tangerås differs from other academics because he lets readers “speak for themselves, sharing their thoughts about how books have moved them.” (I note in passing that I’ve been doing this myself for over 30 years, but not having written about it, the world doesn’t know.) The reviewer gives us a taste of what emerges:
First we meet Veronica, whose discovery of Lady Chatterley’s Lover encouraged her to break free of a failing relationship. Next up is Nina, whose rereading of her childhood favourite, Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka, inspired her to pursue her vocation and become a musician. Life-changing reading, Nina reminds us, can span a lifetime; circling back to a book decades later can be as powerful as a first encounter. Then there is Esther, for whom the Norwegian poet Inger Hagerup’s “Episode” – written while Hagerup and her husband were having difficulties – triggered new insights into her parents’ “terrible marriage”. Jane, meanwhile, was deeply moved by Doris Lessing’s Shikasta, a book which shook “the very basis of everything I thought I was”, imbuing her life with a new sense of “purpose”. Finally, for Sue, two key lines from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life” – “But hardly have we, for one little hour, / Been on our own line, have we been ourselves” – sparked newfound direction after a suicidal depression. Of these writers, Arnold and Lawrence are firmly ensconced in the English canon (itself, after all, partly Arnold’s invention), and their books have long been viewed as life-affirming and life-improving. But canons can feel like top-down prescriptions, imposed by those who know better than us which books are “good” for us. Tangerås instead paints a bottom-up picture of literary value – one in which prestige matters less than personal experience.
Then, because Tangerås is a trying to formulate a “new and precise tool for exploring the elusive experience of reading,” he comes up with special terms:
Ultimately, he distils from his interviews a new theory of “reading by heart” – a mode of reading which is “heartfelt”, or deeply internalized, and which inspires transformative “changes of heart”. His technical term for it is lexithymia, a play on a concept from psychology: where alexithymia denotes a difficulty in identifying or describing emotions, lexithymia, Tangerås claims, is a contrasting “capacity to engage the heart in contemplation”.
Both reviewer and author are careful to distance themselves from a utilitarian agenda where literature is chiefly valuable because it is therapeutically or socially useful. They’re worried that literature will be reduced to something instrumental:
Self-help, at its least helpful, is simplistically instrumental: you diagnose a problem, and then buy a book to provide a solution. The life-altering moments captured in Literature and Transformation are not about means-end efficiency. Nor are they easily assimilable to the agendas of governments or university officials who push for proof of literature’s “usefulness”. What this book touches on is more authentic, and even, as its author unabashedly states, “spiritual”. It’s about what happens when two minds meet – which is, after all, the essence of both reading and psychotherapy. Whether on the page or the couch, such encounters can change us in ways we never imagined.
If this sounds as though Pugh and Tangerås are trying to have it both ways—helpful but not bureaucratically or self-helpy helpful, therapeutic but not narrowly therapeutic—I can report from my own research that literary theorists have been dancing around the issue of usefulness since the time of Plato, who wanted only useful poetry in his Republic. And then there was the Roman poet Horace, who wanted poetry to simultaneously instruct and delight. And Sir Philip Sidney, who essentially said that a spoonful of cherry-flavored poetry helps moral instruction go down. And Percy Shelley, who said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And Matthew Arnold, who saw requiring that everyone read poetry would usher in a new Renaissance. And Brecht, who saw literature as a hammer to shape reality. And on and on.
Rather than disavowing usefulness, I find it more useful to see (with Horace and the others) instruction and delight caught up in a dynamic tension. The best literature has always been both without surrendering to either.
One other thing I get from the review: this may be the right time for my own book.