Spiritual Sunday
I have been reporting on my responses to Thor Magnus Tangeras’s important new study Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences (Anthem, 2020) and today note a startling turn his argument takes. In the process of analyzing five readers who had life-changing encounters with books, at one point he shifts to religious language, describing their experience as “an evolving and deepening devotional transaction.”
The language doesn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier, Tangeras has turned to American psychologist William James’s study of religious conversion to understand how transformation happens. For James, the key concept is surrender. Just as book lovers surrender to the world of the book, so do religious devotees surrender themselves to God:
When surveying the history of the different narratives of Christianity, [James] finds a gradual circling in of one particular experience: the crisis of self-surrender and the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness. ‘The crisis of self-surrender is the turning-point in two different senses: The critical point around which James’s investigation turns, and the point where the life of the individual is transformed from egocentricity to allocentricity, from forlornness to redemption: ‘In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life.” Crisis-surrender-redemption is at the heart of James’s phenomenology of transformation and constitutes his narrative of narratives.
There are a number of thinkers who talk about surrendering to a work of literature. One of my favorites is phenomenologist Georges Poulet, who dramatically describes absorption or immersion in a book as follows:
As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. I say farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in what is not. I surround myself with fictitious beings; I become the prey of language. There is no escaping this takeover. Language surrounds me with its unreality.
Tolstoy too weighs in on the phenomenon, noting that we are “infected” with an author’s ideas and emotions and declaring, “The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art.”
We see Tangeras also looking to frame reading as a quasi-religious experience when, in reflecting upon one of his readers, he compares what she is doing to the Medieval practice of Lectio Divina, where religious figures would see themselves tasting and digesting the Scriptures to inscribe them on their hearts. Speaking of his subjects, Tangeras says that
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. When this happens, the expanded affect-consciousness allows for an altered sense of self in which the crisis can be resolved.
Tangeras’s thoughts here arise in part from his analysis of a reader reporting on how Matthew Arnold’s “Buried Life” pulled her out of a severe depression. Here’s an excerpt from the poem:
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ‘t is not true!
And then we will no more be rack’d
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Only—but this is rare—
When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.
And here’s some the conversation that Tangeras had with his subject about the poem’s impact:
Thor: ‘And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.’ So that line there is to me what the authentic self would be, wouldn’t it?
Sue: Yes. ‘A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast.’ Bolt. Shot. Back – I’ve never really understood what a bolt shot back means, but it sounds so … right. I think it’s like, I imagine it to be a shock, a shocking awakening. Like a sort of an aha moment, a sitting up moment. Or a … it was like a bolt was shot back somewhere in my breast,
Thor: It seems you have a clear felt sense of what that means.Sue: Yeah, I think I’ve got a felt sense of it, but I would find it a bit hard to describe as well. ‘And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again’, that’s that awakening of the deepest part of yourself, the bit of you that just … if things aren’t used, or noticed, they can just sort of fade away, can’t they? So a lost pulse is like something that’s there, but it’s getting weaker and weaker because it’s not ever attended to. Hmmm, so it’s not putting something new into him, it’s not putting within, he’s reawakening something that is there already, it’s always there.
And elsewhere:
Sue: …but something about just that very first bit of this poem, it felt like it changed everything really.
Thor: It changed everything?
Sue: Well, it felt like it just changed everything, that suddenly I was awake to this possibility of what poetry might do. I mean it did feel that big actually, yeah… [Since then] I’ve grown tremendously, and I can’t imagine my life without poetry now, you know. I don’t even want to think about my life without poetry now. So yeah, I just think it was the most magical, amazing stuff.
And finally:
Sue: I keep on using the work impact, it’s had a really significant impact, definitely. Has it changed my life? It has really, because it’s opened me up to the power of the written word, so in that respect it has really. I don’t know if it’s saved my life, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, I mean, I think my life was already on a sort of upward trajectory by the time I read it….But the poem has really helped me. I love it, because – I mean I love it for itself and I think it’s a great poem – but it also has a special resonance for me in that it opened something up in me. Something that I will always carry with me. So I don’t think of it so much as saving my life, I think of it more as, I don’t know, reminding me of something important, getting back to sort of excavating something ‘from the soul’s subterranean depth’.
When we become immersed or absorbed in a great poem or story, soul work is going on, which is why “devotional transaction” seems right. Arnold, interestingly enough, thought that poetry would one day replace religion as the mauor way values were instilled in the population. While reading literature may not be a religious act, it it is definitely a spiritual one.