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Friday
I have been working my way through Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature and, as promised, share some more of what he has to say. I’ll note first, however, that this scholarly book sometimes sounds like a self-help manual. Check out the following:
Some of these inventions target what modern psychiatrists have identified as common forms of mental distress: grief, grudges, pessimism, shame, heartbreak, rumination, reactive thoughts, self-doubt, numbness, loneliness. Some impart what modern psychologists have identified as well-being boosters: courage, love, curiosity, belief, energy, imagination. And some indirectly support our mental health and well-being by nurturing practical life skills: freethinking, problem solving, de-biasing, counterfactual speculating, cognitive flexing, relearning, introspecting.
Like any responsible self-help manual, Wonderworks then issues a caution:
These benefits are by no means replacements for modern psychiatry. They’re supplements, just as a healthy diet and regular exercise are supplements for doctor visits and blood pressure medications.
Fletcher adds that one can be thoroughly pragmatic in how one uses his book. “If you’re seeking a particular benefit from literature,” he suggests, “you can jump to reading that chapter now.” He himself, while drawing on scientific findings, strives to be as colloquial as possible “with a view to assisting you in using the invention more effectively.”
I obviously don’t have problems with using literature as self-help although I’ve sometimes shied away from being quite as programmatic as Fletcher. As I’ve noted numerous times, sometimes literature’s magic lies in how it catches the reader unawares: you don’t think it has any personal application and then it does. In fact, some part of me resists books that are prescribed for my improvement, as though someone else wants to determine my reading experience for me. But that being acknowledged, there’s a lot in what Fletcher has to say, so here goes.
In chapters on Homer and Sappho, Fletcher looks at the literary inventions of omniscient heroic narratives and first-person love lyrics. Fletcher notes that narrative broke important ground thousands of years ago when it realized it could speak in a “God Voice.” (“Let there be light” in Genesis is an example, and one also finds the God Voice, used to instill wonder and fear, in the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.) Homer then took the God Voice to a new level, using it to enter into recognizable human emotions. When Homer opens the Iliad with, “Sing, goddess of the anger of Achilles,” Fletcher observes that the God Voice, while huge, is also human:
It’s not a divinity aloof. It’s a vaster version of ourselves, an “Almighty Heart” that echoes our emotional response to the spectacle of war and death.
What Homer has done, Fletcher says, is “hybridize[ ] the two species of voice, blending mortal sentiment and cosmic scope into an anthropomorphic far-sightedness.” The effect is to engender courage in listeners and readers. Moving into a chemical description, Fletcher explains,
When that feeling of vaster humanity is combined with the neurochemicals stimulated by our primary fear response, the result is a threefold chest heat: the blood-pumping warmth of adrenaline, the pain-dulling warmth of our native opioids, and the social-bonding warmth of oxytocin. This neurochemical elixir makes us feel energized, impervious to harm, and willing to sacrifice ourselves. It’s the heart flame that we hail as courage.
I’ll note in passing that Plato feared that The Odyssey would make young men cowardly, not brave—at least the journey to the underworld episode—but in this he has been in the minority. Homer has often been used to engender courage in schoolboys, both in ancient Athens and in 18th and 19th century Britain.
In the chapter on Sappho, Fletcher contrasts the Homeric omniscient voice with the private first-person voice. Love, he asserts, is a mix of awe and self-disclosure, both of which appear in the following lyric about lesbian love:
He seems to me a god
that man
listening to you
chat sweetly
and laugh like music,
scattering my heart.
When I look at you,
I can’t speak.
My tongue breaks
and my skin is on fire.
Writing that this is “genuine self-disclosure,” Fletcher adds,
Sappho doesn’t just expose her private secrets. She mixes in wonder. She stretches her inner feelings into simple but awe-summoning metaphors of heart scatter and skin fire.
And then, Fletcher notes, Sappho innovates even further: one can make intimate disclosures about others as well as oneself. Take “Fragment 16,” for instance, in which (as Fletcher puts it) Sappho rewrites the Iliad:
Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what-
ever you love best.And it’s easy to make this understood by
everyone, for she who surpassed all human
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
husband–that best ofmen–went sailing off to the shores of Troy and
never spent a thought on her child or loving
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
left her to wander,she forgot them all, she could not remember
anything but longing, and lightly straying
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
now: Anactória,she’s not here, and I’d rather see her lovely
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
glittering armor.
If literature could make self-disclosures on behalf of Helen, Fletcher notes, it “could take any story and make it a love story.”
And because he always wants to anchor literature’s effects in the brain, Fletcher writes,
We can keep on exchanging wonder-enriched self-disclosures with our wooer, creating a reciprocal cycle of dopamine prime and release that makes us feel increasingly happy together and encourages us to disclose more personal details to each other until we’ve built an intimate emotional bond.
Although ideally we want to experience love with another person, Fletcher adds that we can get all the love we need from literature. He turns to a Darcy-Elizabeth passage—proposal made and accepted—to make his point.