Thursday
I’ve just come across a fine article in the Guardian, written twelve years ago, about “the reading cure.” In an extensive discussion, Blake Morrison recounts various instances in which the classics have come to the aid of patients suffering from various mental and physical ailments.
One key figure in process is Jane Davis, who has founded an organization that sets up “shared reading groups” for different constituencies. Morrison reports (this in 2008),
Under the umbrella of Jane Davis’s “Get into Reading” scheme, there are now around 50 groups like this across Merseyside: groups in care homes, day centers, neurological rehab units, acute psychiatric wards, cottage hospitals, sheltered accommodation and libraries; groups for people with learning disabilities, Alzheimer’s, motor-neuron disease, mental health problems; groups for prisoners, excluded teenagers, looked-after children, recovering drug-addicts, nurses and carers; groups that are small – no more than 10 – so there’s a sense of intimacy.
The groups read substantive material:
The educational backgrounds vary widely but there’s no dumbing down in the choice of texts – The Mayor of Casterbridge, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Rebecca, Great Expectations, Adam Bede, Jane Eyre, Of Mice and Men, Kes, even Robert Pirsig’s The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance among them. The usual pattern is for a complete book to be read aloud, cover to cover, at weekly sessions, which for a group spending an hour a week on a Dickens novel can mean six months devoted to a single work. Nobody is pressured to read aloud, but if and when they do the boost to their confidence can be striking.
The article is filled with wonderful stories of literature alleviating suffering:
For Kate, who has suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis for 30 years, the answer is clear: “Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer seems important. No matter how ill you are, there’s a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind of conversation – with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of something – can be enormously helpful.” Others say the same: “I’ve stopped seeing the doctor since I came here and cut down on my medication”; “being in a group with other women who have what I had, breast cancer, didn’t help me, but talking about books has made a huge difference.”
And further on:
Medical staff tell stories of the remarkable successes they’ve seen: the neurological patient who sat in a group saying nothing for months, then after a reading of George Herbert’s poem “The Flower” (“Who would have thought my shrivelled heart/Could have recovered greenness?”) launched into a 10-minute monologue at the end of which he announced “I feel great”; the brain-damaged young man whose vocabulary significantly increased after he joined a book group; the husband caring for his disabled wife whose exposure to poetry has proved not just a respite but a liberation. To outsiders, the outcomes might seem small, but to the staff and patients concerned they’re huge breakthroughs.
Herbert’s poetry is noteworthy for its relentless honesty. The Anglican rector isn’t afraid to acknowledge when he feels dry and barren, when he cannot feel God’s presence, which only serves to make his own breakthrough moments both authentic and powerful.
And then there’s this:
One particularly successful initiative has been reading poetry to and with dementia patients, some of whom have lost all sense of who and where they are but can recite the words of a poem learned at school 70 years ago. As Get into Reading worker Katie Peters describes it: “One lady was shouting and swearing at anyone who approached, and when I mentioned poetry told me in no uncertain terms to go away. But as I sat and read poem after poem, she visibly relaxed, her mood changed completely and she happily chatted about the poems to other residents.
The article has given me some new slogans, like “prose not Prozac” and “literature not lithium.” And “a talking cure in the presence of Keats, Dickens or Shakespeare rather than a physician or psychiatrist.” I’ve also learned that D. H. Lawrence one said, “One sheds one’s sicknesses in books,” which reminds me of Leslie Marmon Silko’s conversation with a Laguna Pueblo elder at the beginning of her novel Ceremony:
I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren’t just for entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.
Morrison’s article has also alerted me to a Renaissance work I need to check out. Apparently, Thomas Puttenham in The Art of English Poesie argues
that the poet must “play also the physician and not only by applying a medicine to the ordinary sickness of mankind, but by making the very grief itself (in part) cure of the disease”. What Puttenham meant was that the writer should use “one dolour to expel another”, the sad cadence in a line of poetry allaying the burden of pain or depression in the reader, “one short sorrowing a remedy of a long and grievous sorrow”.
Morrison reports that there’s a study in Alabama—unfortunately he doesn’t say more—demonstrating that “depressives treated via bibliotherapy had less chance of relapse than those given medication.” He also mentions a 2004 Arts Council report indicating “the positive effect of the arts and humanities in healthcare, among them inducing positive physiological and psychological changes in clinical outcomes, reducing drug consumption, shortening length of stay in hospital … and developing health practitioners’ empathy.’”
The article concludes that the therapeutic power of literature lies partly in how it
doesn’t just echo our own experience, recognize, vindicate and validate it – it takes us places we hadn’t imagined but which, once seen, we never forget. When literature is working – the right words in the right place – it offers an orderliness which can shore up readers against the disorder, or lack of control, that afflicts them.
He contrasts this with “misery memoirs,” which he says “invite readers to be prurient rather than to identify, exaggerate where no exaggeration is necessary, and are too clamorous to grant the space to contemplate and withdraw.”
I like the idea of literature being less clamorous than other forms of writing. On the other hand, I wouldn’t go overboard in following Morrison’s literature prescriptions, jettisoning your anti-depressive medications for a good book. (Sometimes prose and Prozac, literature and lithium, would be wiser choices.) Morrison mentions the successes but not the failures. Still, literature definitely does have a role to play in healing.