Since the creation of the Epic of Gilgamesh some
4000 years ago, human beings have had a powerful technology with which
to record, analyse, and explore their existence. I am talking about
literature, which replicates more faithfully than any other man-made
form the sense, structure, and feel of experience itself, while at the
same time affording a safe distance from which to refract that
experience. The ancient Egyptians understood this, inscribing “the
medicine chest of the soul” over the door of the great library at
Thebes.
In recent years, there has been a move towards
integrating some aspects of literature into the medical and
psychotherapeutic toolkit. Since 2001, The Reader Organisation in the UK
has been pioneering Get Into Reading (GIR), with the help of colleagues
from the Schools of English and of Medicine at the University of
Liverpool, and with several Merseyside National Health Service (NHS)
Trusts. The Reader Organisation is now training staff members and
service-users, including the Chief Executive and the Medical Director of
Mersey Care NHS Trust, to deliver weekly read-aloud reading groups,
already pioneered in over 80 community settings. GIR is a simple
intervention. Group members meet weekly for an hour or two, and just two
things happen: a facilitator or group member reads aloud; the reading
is broken up by conversation and response to the text. Our hypothesis is
that reading literature aloud with others offers something uniquely
valuable.
What does reading literature offer that reading
a newspaper, chatting, knitting, dancing, or participating in a choir
does not? As Maryanne Wolf has noted in Proust and the Squid; The Story and Science of Reading and the Brain
(2008), reading literature offers exposure to “both the commonality and
the uniqueness of our thoughts”. For someone in a depressive state to
be (as Wolf puts it) “no longer limited by the confines of his or her
own thinking” may in itself have a therapeutic value. Our belief in not
giving group members targeted self-help books is the other major
structural principle: what literature offers is the opportunity for
people to discover a relation to the book rather than the book narrowly
proposing it. Deeper, wider, and richer resources are offered within the
broadly human realm than are offered through the medicalised
“self-help” pigeonhole. The decision not to go for immediate and
obviously “relevant” connections is related, I believe, to a need to get
the brain functioning along different connections of pathways—the more
difficult, the more rich, the less immediately relevant a text the more
therapeutic it might be. If the connection with a book comes as a
surprise, an active emotional discovery, there may be a more dynamically
creative result. That is why the rule here is that the book matters in
its own right in GIR, because, paradoxically, that is what produces a
deeper effect on the reader. In GIR you can use your difficulties to
imagine, to give and find sympathy and relationship.
Here
is an example that I encountered at an NHS meeting. The speaker told
assembled medics and managers that he had had a severe breakdown while
teaching English in a desperately failing school. He was still suffering
badly and did not expect to work again. He had found that the poetry of
Gerard Manley Hopkins offered him, if not active help, then something
like serious company. He said, “when things are really bad it helps to
see that someone else has been there and hung on, it helps to see that
someone has managed to get it in order”. |
| Jean Honoré Fragonard - La liseuse (1776) |
Hopkins' poem neither changed nor expunged the experience,
nor did it distract this man from it. No one would claim the poem was a
cure, but it did offer recognition, solidarity, and perhaps a safe
harbour.
Let me add some thoughts from my own experience
as a reader. Someone reads out “O the mind, mind has mountains” and as
the reading voice is registered in my mind I am already processing and
expanding upon the content. In a split second I am checking with myself:
does the mind have mountains? An image of a sheer cliff face flashes
upon what the poet Wordsworth calls the “inward eye”; I remember being
frightened on a scree slope somewhere on Snowdon when I was about 14
years old; I think fleetingly of my friend Wil who died in a climbing
accident; I feel a vertiginous drop as I remember a time of extreme
mental distress and almost feel that distressing memory as “fall”; I'm
also registering the crying repetition of the word mind, “o the mind,
mind”. I'm slowing this down and reimagining it in order to write it
down here, but as it happens in real time I've barely registered any of
this. That is why stopping to talk, as the reading happens, becomes
important.
But such literature is a gift that it is hard
for some to receive. The man in my example was a literature graduate.
But many people have difficulties with literacy and not everyone has
easy access to the great writing, ranging from Doctor Seuss to William
Shakespeare, which we might want to call “literature”. Reading aloud can
give immediate access to complex writing that might otherwise be at
least daunting and at worst unavailable to a large section of the
population.
It is worth noting that in the history of
civilisation, the notion that reading should be silent and private,
rather than communal and out-loud, is a fairly recent development. In
his Confessions (AD 397), Augustine records with surprise
seeing Ambrose reading silently, ‘“his eyes scanned the page and his
heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue
was still.’” Voiced reading was the norm, creating a community of
listeners: we return to that tradition in GIR but from within a culture
where silent and private reading is now the norm instead. Reading aloud
now offers experiences and benefits not available elsewhere.
Literary
texts of the past 300 or so years, though obviously with an oral
component, are for the most part not meant for oral performance. That
means that reading aloud is much slower than reading done by the
solitary individual in his or her head, and it demands not only a
different sort of attention (translating from outside to in, from out
there to my personal relation), but also calls for a greater attention
to human detail unfolding in time. Reading aloud thus offers a counter
to an over-busy world of visual scanning or ephemeral print.
The
read-aloud model facilitates the creation of a series of powerful
interplays: between the written text and the aural experience; between
hearing the text from outside and processing it within; between one's
own experience and that of the author and characters; between the
privacy of personal consciousness and the public experience of group
discussion. And always there is the group. For by reading aloud in a
group it may be that readers experience what we might call
interpersonality both with the book, and its author and characters, and
with other group members. Group members have often reported a sense of
the book itself as a voiced human presence in the group and at its
emotional centre. To see oneself in others; to see others in oneself:
this is the rich experience going on within the group and with the
books.
For people who have become competent readers, and
especially for those who have become readers of literature, such as our
English teacher, reading is largely a private and solitary activity.
Those who wish to engage with others through books (members of book
clubs, colleagues meeting over the water-cooler, people taking
literature courses) usually do so by having the reading experience in
private and then talking about that experience or the ideas arising from
that experience at the meeting or class. Especially when set against
the utterly primal excitement that the reading experience can sometimes
involve, this disjunction between having the experience and sharing the
meaning makes much literary talk feel at best second-hand, and at worst,
unreal. The reading-aloud group model offers something live: the
sharing of the experience itself, the reading together, and also the
immediate discussion of that complex experience in a social community.
“The
mind does have mountains”, a group member may remark. “That's a great
description of how it feels.” “Yes, I've been there”, another member may
add—or not, if she chooses to remain silent. But the thought “Yes I've
been there” will be registered even if the expression is not yet ripe.
Seeing others grappling with difficulty, attempting expression,
overcoming silence, using personal resonances, may be another “active
ingredient”. Having the language, both verbal and syntactical, to
describe complex experience may be a key component in developing the
ability to survive mental tribulation.
Samuel Johnson wrote “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
Article by Jane Davies
from The Lancet
