Literature as Therapy

I post a link here to a posting on The Educated Imagination, a website devoted to studies of Northrop Frye. The author considers Frye's lecture "Literature as Therapy," which was presented at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto as part of the Samya Moranis Chris Special Lectures Series on Science and Culture, November 23, 1989. The lecture is very much a senior scholar at the end of his career and life considering the value of literature and therapy -- perhaps Frye was predicting the cognitive/scientific turn before it would reach the 'mainstream' (if it has yet even achieved this status).

I have, initially two thoughts that relate well to our study of Marcel Proust's masterpiece. The first draws on Carmelo Tropiano's argument that "[t]he cathartic effects of reading appear to segue into the purging of destructive 'imbalances' that contribute to physical illness." To Tropiano's argument, it seems we can add the "cathartic effects" of writing. Could it be that for Proust, writing itself serves as the cathartic act which helps to account for the living with physical illness? To these ends, as with all things Proustian, a necessary inversion occurs. Tropiano writes:

The artist's vision is one in which the reader participates, in such a way as to procure a deeper awareness of the world beyond one's environment; it is a practice that enables a reader to gain insights, through appropriation, that will make his own life more comprehensible.

This, of course, makes sense, but what happens when we flip or invert the artist with the reader? What if it is the reader's vision in which the author participates? Proust was as much a reader as he was a writer. Proust seems to want to understand his own phenomenological experience as he wants to write about it -- this coming to understand his own presence and present become that oceanic moment, those rare glimpses when time and being are captured by the author/reader (indeed, a neologism seems needed, one that would allow reader and author to fold into one another).

The latter thought -- connected and disconnected -- comes from Frye and, at times, seems to have something in common with Tropiano's commentary of Frye's "Literature as Therapy," Frye writes:

There's a very shrewd comment in George Eliot's Middlemarch about a doctor who had a reputation for being a sceptic, but, instead of ruining his reputation in a small Victorian town, his scepticism actually raised his stock very considerably because his patients greatly preferred to deal with somebody who thought entirely in terms of natural causes and natural cures. (463-4)

Frye does not turn to Proust often -- though he certainly does throughout his career -- however, there is something to be said for this doctor and Marcel Proust. As we know, Proust greatly admired Eliot's work and it seems interesting that here we have a medical scepticism while Proust seemed to be sceptical. Proust seems like this doctor in recognising that "the practice of medicine was full of magic" (464) and yet recognises that "it was based on the conception of natural sympathies and natural antipathies" (464). All of this is part of the Proustian inversion which in many instances is a paradoxical embrace -- as readers we are often struggling to understand these inversion which create paradoxes, but, what if instead of 'bracketing' a part of the paradox, we just allow for two contrary ideas to stand together?

A Frygian reading of Proust would likely rely upon the poetics, politics, and hermeneutics of paradox:

Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from individual works to the things they mean, or in practice to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. (Anatomy of Criticism 73)

Indeed, this is the very sort of reading that Proust demands of his reader: read internally and externally. This is precisely the challenge of deciding how one must read Proust. We must adopt a reading like that of the doctor in Middlemarch, we must recognise the limits of our approaches and rely upon the magic and scepticism intrinsic to our modes of reading practice.

This returns us to the question, I hope, of the therapeutic value of literature precisely because it becomes a question of how to read, and in turn, how to heal. One of the great traumas of our experience with Proust was the premature ending, we left in media res and were all sort of dealing with questions about the significance of three trees, the madeleines, the writer as reader writing about his readings, the problem of inversion. We were all negotiating which theoretical postures were best when reading Proust, and almost always realising that we were and continue to be without a worthy answer to this question. So now what? In a Proustian inversion, what if reading is an illness that only reading will cure? We all remember that infamous Proustian line -- there are so many! -- "If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time."

To close (though that Proust quotation felt like an ending!) -- and I fear, that I have just run around in circles and will never really close -- Tropiano writes: "[t]he healing properties in literature, thus, are those that allow us to dislocate ourselves form our surroundings" and yet with Proust, it seems as much as we are able to be captivated by the narrative, we are also able to be fugitives and flee from it. Proust heals as much as he wounds. Proust enclosed and disclosed himself in his narrative. Or, perhaps, like Frye teaching Milton, I have fallen victim to the power of tremendous lines:

Many years ago, when I found myself teaching Milton's Paradise Lost with considerable intensity, I discovered that his tremendous lines tended to detach themselves from their context and become individual beings chasing themselves around inside my head. On one occasion when I was very tired and still couldn't get to sleep, I examined the contents of my brain, so far as I could, and I found there the line from book 10 describing the building of the bridge over Chaos to Hell: "Disparted Chaos overbuilt exclaimed." I thought to myself, well, nobody can sleep with a line like that chewing away in the back of his skull, so I concentrated on the line about the planets from Book 8, "With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps", and was asleep in no time. (475-6)

As with reading Proust, perhaps the challenge is where we put our attention -- can we displace our pain, our aches, our symptoms? I have been caught by the essay/chapter on inversion and have not been quite able to overcome it and perhaps one must, if one is to receive literature as therapy, move beyond the difficulty of one or two passages and, as Proust would say: "[t]he voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." So, we ought not to give up on the difficulty of Proust, but to focus our attention on other elements and aspects -- of course, I fear that I may just enjoy the symptoms of my own illness too much and will remain stuck on the point of inversion. Virginia Woolf notes, wonderfully so, that,

Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow. In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poems by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour. (On Being Ill 21-22)

I close here with many unfinished thoughts precisely because I am not quite sure how to overcome this illness of reading Proust and now I must allow for literature to work as therapy and work through the issues that remain unresolved. And to the Captive, I return.

J.A.