Book Excerpt: Better Living Through Literature

I am pleased to announce that my blogging friend Robin Bates has a new book available: Better Living Through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History. Can books create such personal and social change, and is that in general a good thing? I think all of us here believe the answer is “yes”, but we might not have the research to back up our hunch. Robin has done that research for us, offering rabid readers a survey of views about literature’s impact from Plato to the present, incorporating practical and personal examples of how literature has changed lives, including his own.

Robin is a recently retired professor (Professor Emeritus of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland), and I’d love to have taken one of his classes. His erudition is balanced by humor, and he’s also not afraid to show deep feeling, acknowledging the emotional impact of reading even as he strives to give an objective hearing to many diverse points of view. Non-stuffy, yet grounded in years of study and teaching, his writing is highly readable and enjoyably educational.

Robin graciously gave me permission to post an excerpt from the book; here is a section from the Introduction. I hope it may inspire you to read further!

Better Living Through Literature was published by Quoir Books in 2024 and is available from Amazon. For more musings on life and literature, be sure to visit Robin’s blog, Better Living Through Beowulf.

The Power of Literary Immersion
By Robin Bates

Operating through images and stories, literature has the potential to invest us emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually in the situation put before us. For a famous literary example of the process at work, check out the scene in Hamlet where the prince encounters a troupe of actors. Hamlet marvels at how one of them can see himself in a literary character—and not only see himself but become emotionally involved. The character in this case is Hecuba, the queen of Troy, who sees the Greeks kill first her son Hector and then her husband Priam. Hamlet shakes his head in wonder at how the actor becomes Hecuba, asking, “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?”

It’s not only actors who become immersed. Hamlet intends to use the play, for which he has provided a scene, as a “mousetrap” that will “catch the conscience of a king.” If Claudius can see, enacted on the stage, someone murdering a king, he will not be able to hide from Hamlet whether he has done the same to Hamlet, Sr.

And so it works out. Claudius, already fully immersed in the play, goes on to have the most intense theatrical experience of his life. Seeing himself in a staged fiction that knows him as well as he knows himself, he freaks out and rushes from the room. The trap has snapped.

Imaginary worlds, oral and written, have been immersing audiences since families sat around campfires in prehistoric times, and people have striven to document the experience ever since. In one of the world’s great narratives, the Spanish novelist Cervantes famously shows his protagonist Don Quixote so moved by chivalric romances that he can no longer distinguish between them and reality. As a result, he ends up ludicrously attacking windmills, mistaking them for enemy giants. Quixote, of course, is an extreme example, but many works of literature, bad as well as good, have swallowed up readers.

Philosopher Georges Poulet dramatically describes the phenomenon 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.”

The great Russian novelist Tolstoy once noted that we are “infected” with an author’s ideas and emotions and opined, “The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art.”

As we will see, many thinkers have seen literary infection or literary immersion as a force for good. To give you a quick foretaste of what is to come, Romantic poet Percy Shelley contended that immersion in the works of Sophocles, Dante, and Shakespeare puts one in touch with revolutionary energies, while Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold predicted that poetry would one day replace religion as the primary motivating moral force.

Yet we must admit that not everyone has been positive. As Plato saw it, Homer-reciting rhapsodes were like demagogues, exerting a dangerous sway over audiences, which prompted him to ban them from his ideal rational Republic. We’ve already mentioned the 16th century Puritan Stephen Gosson who, disturbed by the hypnotic power that Elizabethan drama exercised over audiences, complained that poetry infects us “with many pestilent desires, with a siren’s sweetness drawing the mind to the serpent’s tail of sinful fancies.” 18th century German parents, as they watched their children adopt the clothing and mannerisms of Goethe’s protagonist young Werther, railed against Goethe’s novel out of fear that their young ones would also follow Werther’s road to suicide. And then there have been those modern parents and church leaders so worried about seeing young people disappear into the Harry Potterverse that they have attacked and, in a few instances, publicly burned J.K. Rowling’s novels.

Observing the dynamics at work in such encounters, novelist Iris Murdoch notes that “Art is close dangerous play with unconscious forces.” If we enjoy art, she says, it is because “it disturbs us in deep often incomprehensible ways; and this is one reason why it is good for us when it is good and bad for us when it is bad.” Notice that she doesn’t always say that literature is good for us: deep contact with unconscious forces can go multiple ways.

Indeed, because of the power of literary immersion, it’s important to add reflection (and, I would add, application) to the coaching process. The best literature invariably encourages such reflection whereas, as we will discuss in the chapter on pop lit, lesser literature sometimes settles for an unreflective emotional high.

To highlight literature’s power, I have focused on those genres that most take over our minds, conveying us into their worlds and, at least for a moment, persuading us to accept an alternate reality. In other words, I focus on drama, poetry, and fiction. It so happens that, throughout the centuries, these are the three genres that have gotten the most attention, with different ages choosing one of the three to stand in for literature as a whole. In ancient Athens, heroic and tragic poetry commanded the most attention, in Elizabethan England drama, in the 19th century lyric and narrative poetry, in the 20th century the novel, film, and television. In each case, thinkers sought to understand some version (to use a modern example) of the literary immersion that Harry Potter fans experienced when, after having stood in bookstore lines at midnight to purchase Goblet of Fire or Deathly Hallows, they opened the volume and lost themselves in the world of Hogwarts.

Extracted by permission from Better Living Through Literature (Quoir Books 2024).