Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Monday
Last month I reported on a Smithsonian article by Angus Fletcher, a “professor of story science” at Ohio State, about the different ways that literature comes to our aid. Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature is an anthropological-psychological study of narrative that breaks new ground as it explores why different literary techniques affect us as they do. Now that I’ve obtained a copy, I can talk about it more directly.
Fletcher startles us with his depiction of narrative form as an invented technology. Normally, Fletcher observes, we tend to think of technology as “gadgetries of steel and silicon.” Furthermore, we think that technology is supposed to address such physical needs as hunger, shelter, travel, communication, defense, etc. But if we see technology as first and foremost about helping solve problems, then there are uniquely human problems that, say, an airplane or a furnace cannot address. This is “the problem of being human in a nonhuman world”:
To be human is to wonder Why? As in, Why are we here? What’s the purpose of our hours? Does this life mean anything? And to be human is to have irrational desires and uncontrollable passions, and griefs that split us into pieces. Or to put it in the frank language of our scientific present: to be human is to be saddled with the problem of having a human brain. A brain capable of asking vast questions that it cannot answer.
Looking back at the very earliest instance of written literature—Queen Enheduanna of Ur—Fletcher says we can see how literature harnessed “literature’s great power of emotion” to “imbue[ ] faltering spirits with togetherness and courage.” While creations like Neolithic axes and Bronze Age plows “turned outward to grapple with the problem of surviving in our world,” he writes, “literature turned inward to grapple with the problem of surviving as ourselves.”
To get even more specific, literary technology was invented to “fix hearts and lift souls.” It was a “narrative-emotional technology that helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology. It was an invention for overcoming the doubt and the pain of just being us.”
And these tools “didn’t suddenly stop working when our ancestors departed this globe,” Fletcher adds. Literature “can still reckon with death and unshatter the psyche. It can still give us the stuff past the stars and the meaning immortal.”
Literature, furthermore, should not be seen as only one great invention but as many great inventions, each with “a unique purpose, engineered with its own intricate circuitry to click into our psyche in a different way”:
So there was one special invention for lightening sorrow, another for banishing loneliness, another for diminishing anxiety, another for treating the symptoms of trauma, another for bringing hope, another for heightening joy, another for stirring love, another for ushering in tranquility, and so on and so.
Why don’t literature departments see literature in this way? In the book I’ve just finished writing, I put some of the blame on New Criticism, which chose to cordon off literature from life. Fletcher, however, thinks the problem predates the New Critics by 25 centuries. The Greek sophists, he believes, looked at literature as a healing technology, only to run up against the philosophers (Socrates, Plato) and the rhetoricians. Because the sophists didn’t specialize in arguments, they died out. Rhetoric and philosophy, by contrast, flourished:
In our modern literature classes, from elementary school all the way through college, we concentrate primarily on two skills-building rubrics: (1) essay writing and (2) reading comprehension and analysis. In essay writing, we learn to frame arguments as thesis statements that we defend with paragraphs of supporting evidence. In reading comprehension and analysis, we learn to pinpoint what literature is saying….We’re taught, that is, to see literature as a species of argument.
The one exception to philosophy’s triumph, Fletcher acknowledges, is Aristotle, who in his writing about tragedy was interested in how literature impacts us. That’s a colossally large exception although, in Fletcher’s defense, I’ll note that much of literary criticism has focused more on what Aristotle said about form (say, the tragic hero) and less about its cathartic effect. It has been psychologists such as Freud who were more interested in catharsis, which Aristotle described as the purging of the emotions of pity and fear.
To give you a clearer sense of Fletcher’s project, I turn to what he says about tragedy’s ability to treat trauma.
Aristototle, he says, noted that Greek tragedy
didn’t just make people feel good. It also made them feel less bad. The feeling good came from enriching the brain with positive experiences such as wonder and hope, while the feeling less bad came from the inverse: emptying the brain of negative experiences like grief and anxiety. Or to use modern psychiatric parlance: the feeling good came from boosted mental well-being, that neural condition of happy thriving where our life reaches its fullest potential, while the feeling less bad came from improved mental health, that psychological foundation for mental well-being—and for normal daily functioning.
Fletcher discusses how catharsis—empathetic pity and distancing fear—works therapeutically in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, which is about Clytemnestra killing her husband when he returns from the Trojan War. In the following account, EMDR stands for eye-movement desensitizing and reprocessing, a particular trauma therapy. Fletcher says that the 2500-year-old play
gave its audience a chance to experience ancient literary versions of two modern psychiatric treatments for posttraumatic fear. Like autobiographical review, Agamemnon prompted spectators to review their posttraumatic memories in a physically safe and emotionally supportive environment. And like EMDR, the play’s chorus delivered that prompt in a dynamic performance that shifted the eyes left and right. And although we cannot travel back in time to gauge the therapeutic effectiveness of these long-ago treatments, we have been able to observe their healing action on twenty-first-century trauma survivors. Over the past decade, performances of the chorus of Agamemnon and other Greek tragedies have been staged for combat veterans by initiatives such as Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War Production and Peter Meineck’s Aquila Theatre Company (which places particular emphasis on the side-to-side movement incorporated into EMDR). And in response to these performances, veterans have self-reported a decrease in feelings of isolation, hypervigilance, and other symptoms of posttraumatic fear. Just as Aristotle describes in the Poetics, they’ve undergone an experience of catharsis.
Fletcher cautions that this doesn’t make Greek tragedy a “miracle cure” but it can help some who suffer. And then Fletcher makes a further claim: that there’s a further literary technique that can boost tragedy’s effects, what he calls the “Hurt Delay.” This is the character suffering trauma but not acknowledging it until later, a plot twist that one finds in Sophocles’s Oedipus.
It is what school kids learn as “tragic irony”—at least I did in high school—and it consists of the audience being able to see what the protagonist cannot. Fletcher contends that Hurt Delay helps trauma victims by giving them a “godlike experience of looking down.” In doing so, the play “reduces activity in our brain’s deep emotion zones, acting as a neural shock absorber against the traumatic events before us.” And this in turn increases “our belief in our ability to cope with trauma ourselves.”
This is called “self-efficacy,” and Fletcher says it has been correlated with significantly higher rates of trauma recover, explaining,
Even though we’re no more able than Oedipus to stop the inevitable, the Hurt Delay strengthens our capacity to manage when the inevitable arrives. Shifting our tragic feeling of helplessness into a psychological sensation of helpfulness, it supplies our brain with a visceral belief in our power to heal.
There’s a lot more in the book, which I’ll be exploring in future posts. For the moment I’ll just note that what Fletcher is trying to set forth systematically, readers have intuitively known forever. Often we sense the kind of book we need at different moments of our lives.
Think of it as self-medication although my own preferred analogy has been a tool kit. The advantage of being well-read, as I’ve frequently told my students, is that you’re always adding to the number of tools you have at your disposal. When a problem arises, someone who’s read a wide variety of works is more likely to have the necessary literary hammer or screwdriver.
Come to think of it, talking about literary technique as a technology doesn’t startle me as much as I thought.
