Reading for Life

Reading for Life is in part an account of the work conducted by your research unit, the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), at the University of Liverpool. Could you tell us a little about the research that you do there, and what your aims are?

I am now partly retired—the kindlier Latin in the university sector is ‘emeritus professor’—but though the members of CRILS are dispersed, we plan to get back together for specific projects, and I will continue to write and do research.

My main interest has always been the investigation of what goes on inside people when they read powerful literature. This is a complex, multi-dimensional experience, so we use multi-disciplinary methods to match it. That means quantitative and as well as qualitative research, scientific as well as humanistic approaches.

In terms of quantitative measurement, we’ve used self-reporting measures (questionnaires), as well as analysis of the words people use after each session. There are also physiological measures: brain-imaging, eye-tracking, heart rate and galvanic skin response… some of these in only initial experimental stages. All show readers moving away from stuck routines and automatic habits, beyond the straightforward left-hemisphere process of reading, say, a simple manual.

The brain in reading literature has to activate areas of itself that work harder to recognise meaning that is not simply literal—even co-opting the feeling of autobiographical memories from the right hemisphere. Reading literature is a total experience, bringing together an inter-related mix of physical and mental and personal responses.

Our qualitative work includes filming and recording reading-groups, analysing the transcriptions, and discussing excerpts with the participants at interview, to get their sense of what was going on inside them. We are not only interested in literature, but in how literature works to reveal what is deeply human in those who read it: not art for art’s sake but reading for life’s sake.

In the book, we get to know a dozen or so deep readers—their reading, their lives, the relation  between the two. Some are, in some sense, professional—a novelist, a doctor; but many of them are ‘ordinary readers’, often troubled people, who have found something importantly moving to them. And these people will help you, I hope, to read the books and poems they love: my book is partly also an anthology.

In the book, you examine the impact of literature on mental health and wellbeing. Should we consider this a study of ‘bibliotherapy’? Or something different?

Names are tricky things. One reason I prefer the literary way is that it is not stuck on simple names and nouns and fixed categories or diagnoses. Indeed, our research suggests that reading literature is more therapeutic for not being a programmed therapy.

I am not against whatever helps people, but Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), for example, works top-down—by trying to get people to stop repeating their bad habits, their unhappy patterns. But where CBT controls, reading literature frees. Reading works from the bottom up. You don’t know what is coming; the books are not on prescription to solve particular ‘cases’; the books find you if they work, by ringing bells, often unexpectedly. (For example, in a Croydon reading group, a 45 year-old man originally from Jamaica, said he identified with 10-year old Jane Eyre finding herself a misfit in the house of her unkind aunt.)

Doctors and psychologists often feel helpless in the face of what cannot be cured. But as Salley Vickers, one of the novelists I talk to in my book, has a psychiatrist say in a novel: ‘There is no cure for being alive.’ Literature often deals with what cannot be cured. The ill-fitting, the uncomfortable, the unhygienic. That is why I don’t like the term ‘bibliotherapy’ much. The effects of literature are subtler.

Here is something by Fulke Greville from the beginning of the seventeenth century:

O wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.

Nothing easy or straightforward there in the human condition—and this is spoken by ‘Chorus Sacerdotum’—a group of priests, of believers who even so do not know what to think, or how to be! I find myself sometimes repeating lines like these, though I am not myself religious, as somehow helpful. Literature has to do for me instead in the space between faith and therapy.

In the CRILS manifesto, you make a distinction between types of reading: reading a newspaper being less beneficial than the “implicit psychotherapy” of literary reading. But literary reading is much more rarified, as an activity. I know many adults who have not read for pleasure (as opposed to from necessity, to gain information) for many years. How do you think this sort of reading might be encouraged beyond an educational setting?

The research project I would most like to set up is a comparative study of reading literary texts compared to reading non-literary texts (for example, newspapers or self-help books). One group would spend, say, six to eight weeks reading literature and then turn to the other material; a second group would spend six to eight weeks reading non-literary work and then switch. Then we might be better able to support the idea that it matters what you read, just as it matters what you eat or drink.

It also matters that we read not only the most recent, ‘relevant’ novels, but works from centuries ago too. Our brain-imaging studies show that powerful and surprising language works better in activating that shift in the reader than more straightforward fare.

We have a partnership with The Reader, a third sector charity that takes serious literature out of the academy into a range of hard-to-reach (or, easy-to-ignore) communities: care homes for the elderly, facilities for looked-after children, prisons, drug and rehab centres, facilities for people living with psychosis, or people living with chronic pain, GP drop-in centres, schools and libraries. The founder and director is my wife, Jane Davis.

You can’t just offer a reading list or bring in the books and leave it at that. People generally won’t pick them up, or know how to get the best from them. You need to help make it happen, and ‘shared reading’ is one way to do that. The group-leader—usually a trained volunteer—brings in a poem or story, reads aloud, stops for talk, re-reading, analysis. The readers have the text in front of them, and read aloud themselves if they want to. They can stay silent or join in. It is live, the poem is alive in the room, and it is in every sense free. That is the en-couraging thing—giving courage to read and think in these emotional areas when literature can seem too soft, or too difficult, or too elitist.

I dislike it when educated individuals condescend to others by suggesting that certain works would be too hard to be accessible to ordinary people, or are too old-fashioned to be politically or socially relevant. A drug and rehab group in Liverpool got more out of Shakespeare’s sonnet 29, written in 1609, than they might have from a mere directive, though none of them had read Shakespeare before. Here’s an excerpt from the session:

At one moment they are concentrated on the second line of the sonnet, ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state’, when a participant we will call Barry says: ‘So it were done in 1609, yeah? These days it would be ‘Cry my friggin’ eyes out, man…’ The group-leader doesn’t flinch at the word ‘frigging’ that Barry chooses for the poetry. What she says to us afterwards is how pleased she was, ‘because straightaway it is becoming real for people’. What Barry says felt gutsy. It is what the group leader praises as rough translation, hitting home.

I am moved by relatively inexperienced readers —with hard and struggling lives, compared to the easily articulate educated classes—and think that sometimes those who have less give more.

This is what my colleague, a psychologist, Rhiannon Corcoran calls ‘literature in performance, psychology in action’: the two things happening together, live.
Both The Reader and CRILS believe that literature is a tool for helping humans survive and live. The Reader currently offers over 500 shared reading groups across this country every week. Interested readers should please go to the website (thereader.org.uk) and see how to become a volunteer.

Could you also tell us something about the Literary Agenda series that you worked on? 

It was another idealistic attempt to get what is of value inside the universities and the literary world—inside the minds of literary critics and writers and poets and theologians and philosophers—out into the wider world. To try to let a few more people see what literature can mean and do in the personal voice and life of the person writing the book in a way that was not reductive, but not arcane and theoretical, either. It was bold of Oxford University Press to trust us and support us in this outreach endeavour—using the power of academe for the sake of something more: namely the use of literature in and for the world.

We are continuing the series, still with the idea that the literary agenda is different, because it does not restrict itself to a set agenda—to fixed political opinions or religious dogmas. It is more disruptively risky and imaginatively venturesome and excited and wildly anomalous than all that belongs with some established party line.

Here is an example of that great creative mess: one of the favourite novels for one reader in Reading for Life is Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed (2010): in it, a man involuntarily walks out of his family for no reason, without anywhere to go, just walks and walks and walks, almost to death, for no easy-to-detect reason. It is significantly not like Bunyan’s seventeenth-century Pilgrim’s Progress: there is no end, no great destination in a heavenly city, and the walker misses that. ‘The Unnamed’ is a great title for all literature.

We are now also creating a new series from OUP called ‘My Reading’—on individual books and writers that have had a personal effect. I also edit a series for Anthem Press which has the title ‘Bibliotherapy’, but again only as a way of thinking about that word and what it can or cannot do.

I myself do not believe that reading is the most important thing you can do in life, or that people who do read are somehow superior to those who do not. Nor do I believe reading literature is a cure for mental ill-health or that it makes people morally better, or that it can save us as if by magic. But I do think it can make people ‘more’: more of themselves, more able to use their troubles and experience, as writers do, to offer a holding-ground in which to be able to think about life with feeling. Not to have that possibility is a mental disaster.

Philip Davis