How great literature can change your life

Tuesday

As I continue to work my way through Thor Magnus Tangeras’s Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Experiences, I am getting a clearer sense of my own book project. Tangeras makes intense reading experiences the foundation for his study, interviewing subjects who have had such experiences and then seeking to map out the psychological processes involved. I too put significant literary encounters at the core of my book, although in my case I turn to what leading thinkers throughout the ages have said about what these encounters mean and what they accomplish.

I’m also interested in more than literature’s psychological effects. Assessing literature’s impact on history involves other tools that analyzing sit-down interviews.

At the center of Literature and Transformation are five extended interviews with readers whom Tangeras either encountered haphazardly or found through sending out a call. In this course of the book we encounter

–Veronica, who used Lady Chatterley’s Love to break free from a dead-end relationship;
–Nina, who used Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka to break through mental barriers and become a successful musician;
–Esther, who used Norwegian poet Inger Hagerup’s “Episode” to understand and thereby come to terms with her parents’ dysfunctional marriage;
–Jane, who used Doris Lessing’s novel Shikasta to escape a debilitating depression and embark on a new career; and
–Sue, who used Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life” to, again, escape depression.

Because psychology, as a social science, likes to nail things down, Tangeras wants to spell out every step in the change process. His operating principle appears to be that, when readers have a powerful encounter with a work of literature, they integrate it into their self-narrative. Or as Tangeras puts it,

the expanded affect-consciousness allows for an altered sense of self in which the crisis can be resolved. Thus, in being moved new movement is created: that which was stuck is loosened, that which was frozen melts, that which was in the dark is brought into light and so on. Such transformations of the subject’s sense of self does not mean that life becomes easier or free from suffering, but rather that, as the muddled, restrictive, unclear or shallow self-experience is given greater depth, clarity, connectedness and openness, a renewed vitality and sense of direction becomes available to the subject.

Not everyone integrates literature in the same way, however. Therefore, Tangeras tries to categorize (1) the different ways that different readers engage with a work, (2) the different ways that readers perceive themselves being moved by a work, and (3) the different shapes the reader’s crisis may take, whether it involves “stuckness, restriction, despair, confusion or isolation.” In the reader stories featured in the book, different readers have different breakthroughs depending on the multiple factors involved.

While Tangeras is thought-provoking, I find myself often preferring the explanations his subjects give for the significance of their reading experiences over his intricate psychological analysis. In other words, I prefer a humanities approach to a scientific one. For instance, when Veronica reads the following passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I like how clear she it about how it starts her on her road to splitting with her husband. Connie is Lady Chatterley:

Connie really sometimes felt she would die at this time. She felt she was being crushed to death by weird lies, and by the amazing cruelty of idiocy.

Veronica says that Connie’s subsequent twists and turns allowed her to recognize her own back and forth, where she broke off the relationship, then went back, and then broke it off for good. In the novel, Connie has her own back and forth after she meets the gamekeeper Mellors. As Veronica explains,

So in the book [her marriage] goes from that being enough, to her then meeting Mellors. And the way that he almost changes something inside her, the way that her feelings then sit. Her emotions sit differently within her stomach and she reacts to things differently. There’s a part where she’s almost become a bit of a zombie, everyone’s quite worried about her and it looks like she’s quite ill and her sister comes along to intervene, to take her away. And again, that was something that I could connect with. With all the other emotions that were happening, I fell into a depression, so I had that sort of fuzziness around me where I was just getting through and could do my day-to-day stuff, but just felt quite numb, to the outside world.

And further on:

I think it was when I finished the book, and was just digesting it. And then the feeling arose: OK, I know what I need to do now. This is something different, I feel differently now.

Even though Veronica wouldn’t spit up with her partner for another six months, she said the novel got the ball rolling:

I remember there being a real kind of crystallising moment for me, thinking if I can want this [freedom] for a fictional character, then surely I can want it for myself. And that it shouldn’t just be, pardon me, a fantasy or like a ‘maybe one day’, or ‘I’ll get there in the end’. I realised that if I was going to make any changes, then it would have to be by my own hands, by my own doing. There wasn’t going to be a wonderful man to whisk me off and make me feel differently about myself, it had to come from me and from within. And it helped me find that, I’m not saying straightaway, but it certainly gave me the spark to make me to want to go and find it for myself and see what that would look like. It wasn’t for a few months afterwards that I decided to terminate the relationship, but the decision for me internally had been made, that this wasn’t good enough and that I had to do something. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was at that point, but my willingness to tolerate the status quo sort of evaporated, and something solidified in me about wanting to make a change.

One thing I appreciate about Tangeras is his distinction between literature as self-help and literature as exploration. The transformative experiences he describes are of the latter sort:

It is not a case of self-help reading, in which the reader has identified a problem, and then looks for an apt source that will provide a solution. Instead, what transpires is that, over and beyond the initial motivation for picking up the book – whether it was by obligation or serendipity, through titillation, after recommendation or by association with a pleasurable state – at some point it turns into an I–-Thou encounter; at some point these readers unreservedly give themselves over to, and surrender to, the experience, and become fully involved, body, heart and mind. Furthermore, in this evolving and deepening devotional transaction, these readers are deeply moved. The experience of a panoply of feelings that traditionally have straddled aesthetic and religious domains – such as wonder, awe, tenderness, jubilation and faith – come into full awareness.

Elsewhere he mentions the role of serendipity—one just happens across the book that one most needs. I’ve sometimes described this as the book seeming to find you, almost jumping off a shelf into your hands. Literature is often most powerful when it catches you by surprise–“surprised by joy,” as it were–and having a book prescribed detracts from that experience. It’s a problem that both Tangeras and I have with bibliotherapy. But that’s a subject for a future post.