Gillie Bolton

Lapidus Quarterly Spring 2006  pp25-27

What does reading literature do for us?   Why do some of us read compulsively?   And why do we want to encourage those who don’t habitually do it?  Can it make us better people?   Can it help us to do our job better as the rapidly growing field of Literature and Medicine would have us tell doctors (eg Bolton 2002), and as Mexico City police chiefs (Gurria-Quintana 2006), and Birmingham NHS clearly believe (Morley 2002)?

I think literature has been more my constant companion throughout my life than any person.   Most of my learning from it has been about human relationships I think.  The way characters spark off and affect each other, whether subtly or forcefully.   As a child and young person I could trust authors to tell me what I needed and wanted to know.  If a book has an unreliable narrator, the author manages to let even a child know.   The unreliable adults who surrounded me always untrustworthily pretended to be otherwise.

Art can’t make us better people; knowing the Nazis were keen art enthusiasts blows this one to bits.   Even John Carey, however, admits that literature stimulates imagination, reason and understanding in those who need it most, like prisoners (2005).   And reading teaches us how to write: there are no finer educators in the literary arts than our best writers.

Freud and the other great psychological writers have told us a very great deal about people and their social interactions and the impact all this has on individual behaviour, feeling, and sense of identity.   But the poets and great novelists have done it better, more clearly and graspably, and certainly more enjoyably.   JPSartre wrote his very best philosophy in novel form (Nausea for example).  War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Homer’s The Odyssey and all the plays of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus are all gripping reads.  They also all give us tremendous psychological, social, cultural and historical insight.   Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are a fabulous introduction to philosophy, and Winnie the Pooh gives us gentle and true philosophy of life.   How about this:

‘Rabbit’s clever’. Said Pooh thoughtfully.
‘Yes’, said Piglet, ‘Rabbit’s clever.’
‘And he has brain.’
‘Yes’, said Piglet, ‘Rabbit has brain.’
There was a long silence.
‘I suppose’, said Pooh, ‘that’s why he never understands anything.’
(Milne 1928, p. 274)

Why does literature grab us so enthrallingly?   Fiction and drama are generally told as narratives, and we are narrative based creatures: try and tell a child half a story and they won’t have it: ‘and then…?’ they’ll insist.   I tell friends or colleagues stories about my experience, and they tell me stories of theirs.   We constantly create stories about our lives in order to make sense of them.   We perceive an innate sense of order in beginning, middle and end.  Music is structured in much the same way.   Life-as-it-is-lived does not happen so satisfyingly, being mostly muddly middle, with beginnings and endings seemingly shoved in at random (Sartre 1938).

Narrative is a habitual human attempt to create order and security out of a chaotic world.    If our lives weren’t constantly told and retold, storying each new experience, we would have no coherent notion of who we are, where we are going, what we believe, what we want, where we belong, and how to be.   Just as my skin holds my organs and body-fluids in a form which is recognizably me (to myself as well as others), my psychosocial selfhood relies upon my grasp of my narratives of actions, relationship, chronology, and place (Bolton 2005).

We all like to hear about character development.   A classic satisfying story starts with a set of characters in a place and time, something happens to some of these people, and they are changed as a result.   Two classic plots are: they meet, they love, they quarrel and understand each other better, they marry (or die); something needs to be found, someone sets off to find it, has great adventures and learns a lot about life, returns and their spouse is still waiting (see Booker 2004).

You might think true stories would be more powerful than fiction.  But fiction creates satisfying plot structure, rounded characters, effective description; it can leap over boring bits, tackle issues head on, convey multiple viewpoints, sidestep confidentiality problems, and offer readers the complexity of ambiguity: making them reach their own conclusions.   Read In another light (Greig 2004), Honour thy father (Glaister 1990).   Truth might be more bizarre than fiction, but it never happens in tightly plotted sequence with fascinating characters in interesting places and times.

Here is Clare Connolly, a doctor: ‘Sometimes, in the midst of all the impressions which reading fiction allows, I begin to sense that what I read expresses a dilemma or difficulty I have wrestled with in my working life as a doctor.   That it expresses the nuance and complexity more accurately than can ever be detailed in a list of skills or how those skills can be learned and tested.   In Regeneration by Pat Barker, perhaps it is the layers of doubt; the exploration of unfounded psychological techniques with very distressed individuals and the essential loneliness within the intimacy of the consultation which speaks most clearly to me as a modern physician.’ (Bolton 2002)

Why does poetry work for us?   Not normally through narrative, though Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, two of the greatest poems in the English language, have narrative to see us through.  Poetry works partly due to the soothing and calming, or intensifying order of rhythm and rhyme, and partly because it is so succinct and to the point: ‘The best words in the best order’ (Coleridge).   In startlingly few words our best poets enable us to understand something about our lives, our world, our psychological and spiritual nature.   Philosophers use hundreds of big words to do just this.

How do poets manage to say so much in so few words?  Partly because they use image.  Metaphor is a powerful way of enabling understanding because it gets underneath and beyond slow-witted intellectual understanding in one wily move.   We think in metaphor as readily as we do narrative.  I once asked some medical students for an example of metaphor: ‘we’re scientists… .’, their horrified faces expressed.  One at last said: ‘I can’t think of one, my mind’s a blank sheet’.   Here’s another example for you: ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.   Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.’ (Hopkins 1953, p61)   Yes I’ve been at the edge of that mental cliff; I bet you have too or you wouldn’t be a member of Lapidus and reading this.    Here’s another example of metaphor:

The doctor disappears
like a goods train
that travels through the night without stopping
or caring who is born or dies.
(Selima Hill 2004, p43)

We can experience things vicariously in both poetry and fiction.  I can be with Hopkins on that cliff, have shell shock in the first world war, face death from cancer with Julia Darling (Darling & Fuller 2005), mental hospital with Selima Hill (2004), anorexia with Leanne O’Sullivan (2004), depression and a partner’s cancer with Gwyneth Lewis (2005), and the depths of depression with Jane Kenyon (2005).   The insight of these writers is given to me clearly, lightly and generously in their poetry.

I can also trust writers to take me into other lives in which moral and ethical values are very different, or even seemingly non-existent.  In reading I can do and go where I know I could not or would not go outside the pages of the book, and can therefore experiment with very different values, and ponder on them afterwards according to my own principles.   Literature offers constant ambiguity and uncertainty, like life; it does not usually offer answers or judgements, presenting instead situations which inevitably pose more searching questions.

The police chief of a rough New Mexico area provides his officers with books, requiring them to read at least one a month.  He says: ‘Risking your life to save other people’s lives and property requires deep convictions.      Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment.  We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.’ (Gurria-Quintana 2006, p22)

How does it have the power to transport the reader or writer into a space other than the one inhabited by their body?   Winnicott would have called it a playspace (1982).   Play here does not mean ease and light enjoyment.  It means a deeply creative, explorative, expressive and inventive space.   It is a strenuous exercise of the imagination, when the imagination is 'a power at once intelligent, sensitive and constructive[,] importantly related to the power of healing' (Carson, 2003).   It is not only the space into which children disappear, but also musicians when playing, and all of us when we read or write with deep attention.  And we love being in that space.  Like me, I’m sure you’ve sighed, stretched and looked at the clock in utter amazement having been deep in writing or reading.

George Herbert told us: 'A man that looks on glass, / on it may stay his eye; / or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, / and then the heav'n espy.'   Lewis Carroll's Alice does even better: she crawls right through the looking glass, leaving her stuffy Victorian rule bound world, entering a world in which everything is 'as different as possible', things are 'all alive'  (Carroll 1865 p122), where dynamic connections are made between divergent elements.   Great literature can enable us to pass through the dulled glass of daily life.   It’s certainly given me enormous education, huge support and massive enjoyment; I can’t imagine I’d survive a desert island long without pen, paper and above all books.

References

• Bolton G (2002) Literature and Medicine: Opening the Word Hoard: Literature to heal the divide.  Medical Humanities: Edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics pp97-101
• Bolton G (2005) Second Edition: Reflective Practice Writing for Professional Development.   London: Sage.
• Booker C (2004) The seven basic plots: why we tell stories.   London: Continuum
• Carey J (2005) What good are the arts?   London: Faber & Faber
• Carroll L (1865 (1954))  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass, London: Dent & Sons.
• Carson R (2003) Educating the moral imagination.   In Carson RA, Burns CR, Cole TR (eds) Practicing the Medical Humanities.   Maryland: University Publishing Group.  pp25-39
• Darling J, Fuler C (2005) The poetry cure.   Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe
• Glaister L (1990) Honour thy father.   London: Secker & Warmburg
• Greig (2004) In another light.   London: Wiedenfield & Nicholson
• Gurria-Quintana A (2006) Words on the Street.  Financial Times Magazine, 4 March p22-24
• Hill S (2004) Lou Lou. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe   £7.95    1 85224 671 5
• Hopkins GM (1953) Poems and prose Gardner WH (ed) London: Penguin
• Kenyon J (2005) Let Evening Come.   Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe   £8.95    1 85224 697 9
• Lewis G (2005) Two in a boat: a marital voyage.   London: Harper Collins.   0-00-712063-x
• AA Milne (1958 (1928)) The World of Pooh (The House at Pooh Corner) London: Methuen p274
• Morley D (ed) (2002) The Gift: new writing for the NHS.   Exeter, Devon: Stride
• O’Sullivan L (2004) Waiting for my clothes.   Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe   £7.95    1 85224 674 x
• Sartre, J. P. (1938 (1963)) Nausea. Middlesex: Penguin.
• Winnicott D (1982) Playing and Reality  London: Routledge