Gustave Doré, Life-in-Death playing dice with Death
Friday – Halloween Edition
Reposted and reworked from October 31, 2013
Have you ever thought of Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a Halloween poem? Along with its gothic elements, it has at least one stanza that describes the trick-or-treating experience of timid children.
The poem is filled with spooky images. To begin with, there are the two dice players aboard the skeleton ship who are competing for the mariner. The winner, “Life in Death,” has a great Halloween get-up:
Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
And then there are all those corpses—the mariner’s former crew mates–who are reanimated to man the ship. Think of them as the living dead:
The loud wind never reached the ship, Yet now the ship moved on! Beneath the lightning and the Moon The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; Yet never a breeze up-blew; The mariners all ‘gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do; They raised their limbs like lifeless tools— We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother’s son Stood by me, knee to knee: The body and I pulled at one rope, But he said nought to me.
The mariner’s description of how the corpses creep him out is very much like how a child on Halloween imagines monsters behind every tree:
Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.
So, are you scared now? But wait a moment, I have something even more frightening. What if Coleridge’s LIFE IN DEATH is actually a metaphor for debilitating depression? What if, after such a promising opening to his voyage, Coleridge is in the grip of a mental breakdown which makes all the world around him seem dead and sterile. “The very deep did rot,” he says at point. He feels so hopeless that even praying is beyond his grasp. As he will explain it later,
Oh wedding guest, this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea: So lonely ’twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.
Luckily, for kids going out trick-or-treating, they get to return to a safe home after flirting with fright. In the poem, meanwhile, the monsters turn into something positive. Just as the sea snakes change from “slimy things” to “happy living things” that are stunningly beautiful, so the corpses are revealed to be “a troop of spirits blest” who make beautiful music and then light up the landscape as shining seraphs.
Inspect a monster closely enough and you will find a beautiful soul somewhere within.
First it was caravans, then it was wokeness, then it was Critical Race Theory, and now it’s Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Apparently, Republican candidates have one play and one play only for winning elections: scare your voters by pointing at people of color.
Morrison’s novel, which won her both a Pulitzer and a Nobel, is being used as the closing argument by Glen Youngkin, Republican candidate for Virginia governor. Apparently eight years ago the son of Republican activist Laura Murphy, then a high school senior, claimed to have had nightmares because of the book. What emerged out of his mother’s complaint was a bill that parents could exempt their sons and daughters from reading books with explicit sex scenes. While the bill was passed by the State Assembly, it was then vetoed by Governor Terry McAuliffe, who is running again this year. According to a Washington Postarticle on the controversy, the Beloved bill (as it was called) “would have made Virginia the first state in the nation to give parents that opt-out power.”
Youngkin is now using McAuliffe’s veto to turn voters against him. He is also playing on McAuliffe’s assertion that parents shouldn’t be telling teachers what to teach. Youngkin has framed this as McAuliffe wanting “to silence parents because he doesn’t believe they should have a say in their child’s education.”
In a Youngkin ad, Laura Murphy is seen saying, “When my son showed me his reading material, my heart sunk. It was some of the most explicit reading material you can imagine.” McAuliffe has replied that “Youngkin’s closing message of book banning and silencing esteemed Black authors is a racist dog whistle designed to gin up support from the most extreme elements of his party–mainly his top endorser and surrogate, Donald Trump.”
I consider Beloved to be one of America’s greatest novels—up there with The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby—but set that aside for the moment. I’ll say first that the Virginia situation is very familiar because I once found myself battling a school superintendent over another Morrison novel, Song of Solomon, in which some of the same dynamics were in play.
I write about the incident here but to sum up the highlights, a high school English teacher who was a former student of mine paired up Huckleberry Finn and Song of Solomon in an AP class, an inspired coupling given that both are coming-of-age novels involving young men grappling with race in America. (Indeed, Morrison admires and has defended Huckleberry Finn.) A student objected to three pages of explicit trash-talking between the protagonist Milkman and some country folk, who are testing his manhood. (Milkman passes the test and is accepted by the group.) The student’s mother photocopied the offending passages and took it to the county’s superintendent of schools, who decreed that St. Mary’s County school teachers could no longer teach the book in their classes.
I went to talk to the superintendent but was palmed off on two of her assistants. In our conversation, I noted (1) that parents should be thrilled that such a book as Song of Solomon was being taught as it is about a young man finding purpose in his life; (2) that they were sending a terrible message to the African American community by banning a work by the first African American author to win a Nobel prize; and (3) that if they banned Song of Solomon today, might they not ban Beloved tomorrow?
My visit didn’t do any good and, as far as I can tell, teachers are still forbidden from teaching Song of Solomon in St. Mary’s County schools. I haven’t heard about Beloved.
Back to the novel. Beloved is about an escaped slave who, to save herself and her children from being taken back into slavery, kills her eldest daughter and attempts to kill the others. That daughter comes back to haunt her, breaking up her family and driving her half crazy.
The novel, in other words, really is the stuff of nightmares—but then, much of literature is. Slavery was such a horrifying institution that it sometimes caused people, Blacks as well as Whites, to do dreadful things. When I wonder what traumatized Laura Murphy’s son, however, I wonder if what most oppressed him was race oppression making Whites look bad.
For although there are some good Whites in the book, there are some awful ones as well. For instance, there’s a scene where the slaveowner’s sons force Sethe, who is about to deliver, to suckle them with her breastmilk. When she informs on them to her horrified mistress, she is beaten so badly that a permanent tree pattern appears to be etched into her back. As she recounts the episode,
“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t speak for her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.”
“They used cowhide on youds?”
“And they took my milk.”
“They beat you and you was pregnant?”
“And they took my milk.
We are living in a society right now where anything racial that makes certain Whites feel uncomfortable is a cause for offense. We’ve seen videos of police being called on Black birdwatchers, on Black picnickers, on Blacks standing in their front yard and Blacks entering their apartment complexes. Ahmaud Arbery was shot for jogging, Trayvon Martin for returning from the store.
And it’s getting worse. Increasingly we’re seeing parents complain when their kids are taught Civil Rights history, while Texas history books have begun to soft pedal slavery. It seems inevitable that people would get around to Toni Morrison sooner or later.
Literature, after all, packs a wallop. And just as Edgar Allan Poe (in the words of Harold Bloom) dreamt America’s nightmares, so Morrison dreams its racial traumas. African Americans no less than Whites continue to bear the scars of slavery. One imagines Morrison quoting one of her own literary models, William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
If we were truly concerned about raising young people right in this country, English teachers would explain to parents how their children benefit from reading challenging novels like Beloved. Kids are tougher than their parents think and well able to rise to the challenge of difficult material, but to involve the entire community in the education of the young would be to avoid some of the conflicts that we are encountering.
Unfortunately, we are so polarized, and so many Whites are see mere discussions of race as threatening, that I’m becoming pessimistic that such conversations could ever happen. If that’s the case, then we’ll continue to have racial fear-mongering in our politics. And if Beloved is targeted today, other African American classics that remind us of our dark past will find themselves on banned lists tomorrow.
Added note: To make clear the slippery slope we have entered, just today a Texas lawmaker has released a list of 850 books that he wants school districts to investigate, with more to come. As NBC News reports,
A Texas Republican lawmaker has drawn up a list of 850 books on subjects ranging from racism to sexuality that could “make students feel discomfort,” and is demanding that school districts across the state report whether any are in their classrooms or libraries.
State Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, also wants to know how many copies of each book the districts have and how much money they spent on them, according to a letter he sent Monday to Lily Laux, deputy commissioner of school programs at the Texas Education Agency, and several school district superintendents.
Krause, who chairs the state’s House Committee on General Investigating, also directed the districts to identify “any other books” that could cause students “guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
Toni Morrison isn’t on the list yet but could well be included under “any other books” once the censors get started. The NBC News article mentions some of the fiction that has been included:
Along with the letter, which was first obtained by The Texas Tribune, Krause appended the book list that includes well-known titles like the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
The leaves in Tennessee’s Southern Cumberland Mountains are currently in full-change mode, sending me to a poem by my father that I’ve shared in past. Enjoy!
Yesterday, after seeing a Sewanee student production of Hamlet, I compared Claudius’s successful coup to Donald Trump’s attempted one. Today I’m thinking of the play again after having read a Washington Post article about political turmoil in a polarized Montana town. Not only are the adults fighting about today’s hot button issues but, over the past 16 months, nine of their teenagers have committed suicide, including three since the beginning of the school year. Hamlet’s own suicidal thoughts help us understand what may be going on.
To be sure, Hamlet is no teenager but a young man of about 30. That being said, he can come across as a precocious adolescent, and this was reenforced by Dakota Collins’s superb performance. Through him, Hamlet was androgynous, super sensitive, and somewhat innocent. As a result, I understood much better why he would be so affected by the machinations of those running society and could imagine those Montana school children being similarly affected. As the Post article observes,
No one knows exactly what led the teenagers to end their lives. But people here are thinking: What if the adults in the Flathead, with all their anger, have provided a terrible example for the children?
“We’re such a highly wounded community right now,” said Kyle Waterman, a gay city councilman who received training this year in making a citizen’s arrest in case he feels physically threatened. “It’s been hard to show people we’re here for our kids.”
Now put yourself in Hamlet’s situation. Thinking his father has everything in hand, despite a war with Norway, Hamlet feels free to go away to college. When he returns, however, everything has been turned upside down, with his uncle suddenly his king and stepfather. Claudius and Gertrude want him to shrug off his father’s death and adapt to the new reality but, even before he learns of the “murder most foul,” he wants to erase himself from reality. He even contemplates self-slaughter as everything seems “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable”:
Things, of course, go from bad to worse once Hamlet Sr.’s ghost reports the murder. Already fragile, Hamlet is pushed over the edge. Whatever idealism he had has been shattered, as we see in his discourse with his former friends Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern:
I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me…
As Hamlet figures out that his friends have been set up to spy on him, and as he detects Polonius setting up Ophelia to spy on him as well, he feels less and less able to trust anyone or anything. His mother’s behavior has prompted him to wonder about Ophelia (“frailty, thy name is woman”), and the visiting actors’ ability to feign tears over imaginary characters (“What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?”) only furthers his sense of unreality.
Sensing himself half mad, Hamlet once again thinks upon death in his most well-known soliloquy:
Given his active imagination, however, even death doesn’t seem a simple solution. His reasoning, fortunately, has the virtue of forestalling a suicide:
Faced with conflicting pressures, Hamlet becomes increasingly erratic and high-strung. Like a teenager, he vacillates between crippling self-doubt and precipitous action. Late in the play he reflects upon death once again as he muses upon the skull of a man who played with him as a child. Only at the end of the tragedy does everything become clear to him.
Did those Montana teenagers have a version of Hamlet’s confusion? Did reality to them seem unstable because of the way that adults were behaving? Between Trump unleashing America’s id and a world-wide pandemic affecting every aspect of life, there’s plenty to point to. When the instability of adolescence comes up against adults who are unwilling or unable to provide the necessary support systems–when grown-ups act like teenagers, in other words–tragedy seems inevitable.
I attended an impressive student production of Hamlet yesterday—the lead, played by a female student, was magnificent—and was struck early on by Claudius’s insistence that everyone move on quickly from old Hamlet’s death. It reminded me of the GOP wanting to move on quickly from the January 6 insurrection.
The motives are even roughly the same. Just as the GOP wants us to forget Donald Trump’s attempted coup, so Claudius wants Hamlet to move on from his own successful one. In his opening speech he says essentially, “Well, it’s too bad that old Hamlet is dead but, what can you do, we have get back to business.”
Business, in this case, is marrying Hamlet Sr.’s queen and taking over the throne. Or as he puts it, when discretion (practicality) fights with nature (mourning the dead), go with discretion. Claudio gets squirrelly in his language since he knows that it looks bad marrying Gertrude two months after her husband’s death. He therefore advocates balancing “wise sorrow” with “remembrance of ourselves” (as if he ever stopped remembering himself). This new dispensation therefore finds “mirth in funeral” and “dirge in marriage”:
Gertrude enables the situation. Unlike the GOP, she is genuinely unaware of Claudius’s coup—Republicans can’t claim her innocence, having been in the Capitol when Trump stirred up a mob to pressure Mike Pence—but she sounds a lot like them. To a despondent Hamlet who is shocked at the turn of events, she claims that these things just naturally happen and must be accepted:
In other words, stop thinking about the past and look forward—which is to say, look forward to me as king.
The GOP wants us to stop looking at the past insurrection so that they can plan for a future coup, one complete with voter suppression measures and Republican takeover of state election boards.
There’s one significant difference between Claudius and the GOP: he at least feels remorse for what has been done. Try to imagine Trump giving a speech like this, with murdering the Constitution substituted for murdering his brother:
In other words, there’s no shuffling when God is looking on. The GOP, by contrast, apparently believes it can, with impunity, shove by justice to seize “the wicked prize itself,” buying out the law in the process.
There’s one other political parallel I noted in the play. Just as Trump finds easily manipulable people to do his dirty work (including storming the Capitol), so Claudius finds Laertes. Stoking the young man’s rage, Claudius gets him to partake in a rigged sword fight, complete with a poisoned blade and poisoned refreshment. The ploy works but it also backfires so that, by the end of the play, all the principles are dead, and a foreign power stands ready to take over.
Message to Republicans: Trumpism make get you what you want in the short run, but in the end you will take down American democracy. Various foreign adversaries will applaud.
Thomas Matthews Rooke, from triptych of The Story of Ruth (1876-7)
Spiritual Sunday
I had a health scare Friday night and, while it turned out to be a false alarm (!!), thoughts fond and wayward went through my head as I lay in a morphine haze in Sewanee’s hospital emergency room. For reasons I’ll explain, the story of Ruth and Naomi also came to mind..
Some background first. Five years ago, when I was visiting my dying friend Rachel Kranz in a Bronx hospital, I picked up an infection that went to my heart, giving me a case of pericarditis and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart sack and heart muscle). Thinking that I had just pulled a muscle playing tennis—why else would one feel a weight on one’s chest and upper back?—I waited until the following morning so that I could visit my primary care physician.
Three hours after she referred me to the local hospital for an EKG (hers being broken), I was on board a medical helicopter because they thought I was having a full-blown heart attack. (You can read my blog post from my hospital bed here.) Fortunately, all I needed was anti-inflammatory medication. If Julia had been with me rather than down in Tennessee with my mother, she would have insisted I go to the emergency room right away.
Which in fact I did three weeks later when the infection returned. I wasn’t about to get scolded again for my casual concern for my health, and it was fortunate that I made the trip. I can report that my heart has suffered no damage and has been good ever since.
Until, I feared, Friday night, when I awoke in the middle of the night with pressure to my upper back and stabbing pains in my upper quadrant. Fearing a recurrence of pericarditis, we rushed to the emergency room, where I underwent multiple tests. The doctors are still not sure what’s up but think it may be a muscular or skeletal problem associated with my tennis and/or computer use. I need to be careful with both.
While I was in the emergency room, however, I thought of my mortality, which is why Wordsworth’s final stanza in “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” surfaced:
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a Lover’s head! “O mercy!” to myself I cried, “If Lucy should be dead!”
In my case, it was “if I should be dead.” I then thought of Julia, which conjured up Keats’s line where he imagines his famous nightingale singing to a widowed Ruth:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn…
That in turn got me thinking of Ruth’s relationship with her mother-in-law Naomi. Famously, the Moabite Ruth chooses to stay with the Jewish Naomi after both have been widowed, even though such a life will be uncertain. As Ruth famously replies after Naomi suggests she return to her parents’ family (Ruth 1:6 KJV) “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God…”
I thought of how Julia loves and cares for my mother and would not leave her even if I died. I am deeply grateful for that relationship, which deepens even further my strong love for my wife. And that reminded me of a Marge Piercy poem I have written about in the past.
Such fond and wayward thoughts can show up when the prospect of heart surgery looms.
The Book of Ruth and Naomi By Marge Piercy
When you pick up the Tanakh and read the Book of Ruth, it is a shock how little it resembles memory. It’s concerned with inheritance, lands, men’s names, how women must wiggle and wobble to live.
Yet women have kept it dear for the beloved elder who cherished Ruth, more friend than daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth brought even the baby she made with Boaz home as a gift.
Where you go, I will go too, your people shall be my people, I will be a Jew for you, for what is yours I will love as I love you, oh Naomi my mother, my sister, my heart.
Show me a woman who does not dream a double, heart’s twin, a sister of the mind in whose ear she can whisper, whose hair she can braid as her life twists its pleasure and pain and shame. Show me a woman who does not hide in the locket of bone that deep eye beam of fiercely gentle love she had once from mother, daughter, sister; once like a warm moon that radiance aligned the tides of her blood into potent order.
At the season of first fruits, we recall two travelers, co-conspirators, scavengers making do with leftovers and mill ends, whose friendship was stronger than fear, stronger than hunger, who walked together, the road of shards, hands joined.
I’ve been struck by how Trumpism, an authoritarian movement that attempted to overthrow the 2020 election and may well be planning to override the voters’ will in future contests, insists on personal freedom when it comes to vaccine mandates. As many have noted, Trumpists support freedom for themselves but not for others, as is clear by their voter suppression efforts and Texas’s abortion bounty laws. My father Scott Bates notes this seeming paradox in a fable he wrote back in the 1970s.
In “The Recalcitrant Piece of Mimeograph Paper,” a sheet of paper defiantly resists attempts to impose text upon it, using arguments reminiscent of many who refuse to get Covid vaccine shots. For all his advocacy of individual rights, however, the sheet has succumbed to cultish groupthink by the end of the poem. While my father was targeting leftwing groups when he wrote it, authoritarians are pretty much the same, whether right or left. Instead of spouting The Communist Manifesto, as the mimeograph sheet does, today’s anti-vaxxers quote QAnon, Fox News, and stuff circulated on Facebook.
A note on the vaccine mandates before I share the poem: all advanced nations require various public health measures to protect their populations. Without them, our society would be ravaged by numerous lethal diseases and other ills. Only because children are required to receive multiple vaccines are they able to attend school safely, with the few families who resist vaccines parasitically rely on everyone around them to protect them.
As far as the poem’s imagery is concerned, those of you who grew up in the photocopy and digital ages should feel lucky that you never had to grapple with mimeograph machines, which were messy and a real pain. To update the poem, imagine “the recalcitrant piece of mimeograph paper” as a sheet in your printer that refuses to respond to your “print” command.
The Recalcitrant Piece of Mimeograph Paper By Scott Bates
A Sheet of Mimeograph Paper refused to go through the machine No no it cried Set me apart Must I serve as fodder for a Mimeograph Moloch Reduced To the docile conformity and blank imbecility of my sheeplike compatriots My purity sullied My innocence destroyed
Will you track up my candor with your muddy feet No no I protest I refuse Let me be crumpled into cabbage
Peeled into carrot strips Abandoned with the used kleenices holey hermit sacks outcast chewing gum wrappers and all the other paper pariahs of your so-called civilization Before you tattoo my backside with the decadent artifacts of a worn-out bureaucracy
They fed it through the machine It came out blank They fed it through again Inexorably
At last it spoke Dear Sirs it said Pursuant to your request of long standing And in full cognizance of the numerous difficulties involved I am authorized to inform you at this time You have nothing to lose but your chains
Further thought: Another way to read the poem is that the sheet has been driven to communist rebellion because of society’s failure to recognize personal characteristics that are integral to a sense of self. When my father wrote this poem, I remember some leftwing protestors carrying signs that said, “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate,” a reference to computer cards and to an IBM society that they feared was destroying all individuality (“the man in the gray flannel suit”). In that case, the state would bear some of the blame for what happens to the sheet.
Does some vaccine resistance stem from a similar dynamic? Perhaps. But the stakes are too high to mess around in this case. Resisters put everyone around them at risk, not only themselves. Their vaunted individuality in this case begins to resemble narcissistic self-absorption, or a toddler saying no to a parent who knows better. Furthermore, many do not realize they are being shaped by rightwing talking points. True individuality involves critical thinking, not reactive stances. In short, whatever society’s sins, the sheet of mimeograph paper cannot be excused for going full-out authoritarian.
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.
Everyone knows that an essay needs a good thesis to be good. The same is true of a book, and although I have a complete manuscript of my book Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate, I keep tinkering with my rationale for writing it. Here is my latest effort, which gets closer to the matter than anything I’ve written previously. The passage follows several memorable reading stories that I have included to demonstrate that literature matters:
Striking though these stories are, they are not unusual. Indeed, people have been having life-changing encounters with literature, oral and written, since families sat around campfires in prehistoric times. If STEM enthusiasts think they can sideline literature now, it’s partly because those responsible for sharing it with the public downplay or overlook its transformative potential. Think how differently literature would appear to people if they saw it helping us reconfigure damaged relationships, articulate life goals, deal with suffering, counteract oppression, and much, much more. In fact, what if they thought of literature as a personal improvement plan, designed by some of the world’s greatest minds and specially customized to their specific needs. At the cost of no more than a few hours of focused attention, you can receive a special program that knows you better than you know yourself—that intuits what you most desire and points the way towards a rich and fulfilling life. Book lovers already sense that literature can provide these services, but what if our educational and cultural institutions spread the word to everyone?
Instead, too many contemporary scholars treat literature as a specialized discourse, cut off from the rest of life. As this serves to marginalize literature, it’s easy for others to marginalize it as well. This is not how great thinkers of the past have seen it, however. Plato, Aristotle, and many who have followed have seen literature as a powerful change agent—usually for good although occasionally not—and they did so because they themselves felt transformed by literary encounters. Plato theorized about poetry’s life effects because he was shaken to the core by The Odyssey, and the same was true of Aristotle with Oedipus, Sir Philip Sidney with The Aeneid, Samuel Johnson with King Lear, Percy Shelley with Dante’s Divine Comedy, John Stuart Mill with Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with Balzac’s Human Comedy, and Sigmund Freud with Oedipus and Hamlet. If these works had an outsized impact on them, they figured, then literature must be a force to be reckoned with.
While their writings on literature are well-known–most of the works treated in these pages appear in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism–for the most part scholars have not focused on what these thinkers have to say about literature’s life-changing potential. My hope is that, by gathering the thinkers together and showing how each makes a compelling case for literature improving our lives, I strengthen the arguments against those who would relegate literature to the sidelines.
For those engaged in literary study, this book will serve as an overview of the debates, a fascinating subject in its own right. But for the average person and even the casual reader, the question of how literature affects us is no less important. It matters when we hear a book has been censored in our child’s school. It matters when the liberal arts come under attack, when schools are told to focus more on writing than on literature, when the classics are declared irrelevant. It matters when you yourself decide which books to read in your limited spare time, including what is lost when you settle for lesser lit. What are you depriving yourself of when you confine yourself to formulaic genre fiction or when you read no literature at all? The thinkers you encounter here have seen versions of all these situations.
