Lessons Learned from Literature

1 Crime and Punishment

I was on a local bus—more like a toughened mini-bus than a licensed coach—on a smog-ridden, noisy and humid afternoon in Lima. The bus, in competition with other buses to reach passengers at indeterminate stops, was racing along a choked road on a tropical cliff that looked as if it should collapse onto the empty concrete basketball courts on the beach below. The mist and sea beyond had merged like grey reflections.

The bus veered around a corner at a lovers park, which was bare of lovers but decorated with a momentous, modernist stone sculpture of a kissing couple as well as large mosaics―one was of a flaring sun, the real thing, we had been told, rarely visible in Lima any more. Gravity pressed me into the warm body of the stranger next to me. He was a young man, dressed in jeans and an old T-shirt, and he was reading a dilapidated paperback copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, translated into Spanish. I muttered my apologies and slid back onto my half of the vinyl seat, but he turned the yellowed page of his novel as if he was reading in a library.

When I got off the bus with my husband several lurching stops later, pushing my way through people clinging to bars suspended from the bus’s ceiling, I noticed others reading: an elderly woman with a red coiffure; a middle-aged man in a green corduroy jacket; and a dandily dressed older man who seemed to be affecting a cane.

Getting off the bus, my husband and I found ourselves in the suburb of Barranco outside the Sancho Panza café bar, which displayed a poster advertising ‘Literary Mondays’. Luis la Hoz, I read, conversed there every Monday evening with the most important poets, novelists and playwrights. Entry was free. We worked out that today was Tuesday. We crossed the road to a supermarket. Its delicatessen sold cow hearts and chicken blood in plastic bags of the kind in which we had once brought home goldfish.

About a year later, my husband was catching a peak-hour train back from Melbourne―a newly and prestigiously ordained City of Literature―to Geelong―where ‘Cats Fever’ was beginning to take hold again. He passed through kilometres of dry paddocks that recalled, in their colour, the late afternoons of childhood. On a previous trip, he had been moved to write a poem about nostalgia inspired by that journey. On this day, he was reading Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money, and he had on his iPod. He was sitting next to a large middle-aged man who had a bald head and a dark beard and who was wearing a bulky black-leather jacket. He was reading a motorcycle magazine. A stop away from the Geelong station, the man leant towards my husband and, sotto voce, said something. My husband removed the bud from his left ear, and the man muttered his question again: ‘Are you a teacher?’

My husband and I are academics at a university. We teach literary studies, a discipline that, over the last couple of decades, has suffered nationally decreasing enrolments. Being an academic in literary studies is an admission I tend to make reluctantly. It generally evokes mixed responses, and not just outside the academy. For instance, the last time I saw our previous dean, a respected military historian and a woman as diminutive and alert as a sparrow, my husband and I were having lunch with a newly appointed colleague―a rarity, but her predecessor had retired―at a campus restaurant that overlooked a brown but picturesque lake in which I thought I had once glimpsed the ghost-like form of a prehistoric-looking fish. The dean had entered the restaurant with a boisterous group of management staff and, upon seeing us at our little table, made a dutiful stopover. My husband introduced our new colleague. The dean, before moving to rejoin her animated group for lunch, added by way of conversation, ‘Yes, you’re very lucky in literary studies that education students still need to take your subjects.’ I smiled and nodded, feeling—not for the first time—like a freeloader, an economic criminal, in the increasingly business-oriented world of the university.

Our former dean has since moved on to a ‘Group of Eight’ university, but I want, finally, to enter my plea. I want to tell her—and the man who spoke to my husband on the train—that there is more to reading and teaching literature than improving the literacy skills of students or student teachers—although this is far from a trivial function. I want them to know about those Peruvians reading on a battered bus as it sped and jolted its way around their hazy city and how in that racing and jerking microcosm of the world there were people regenerating themselves in intimate association with other people’s words. There were people expanding the imaginative landscape of their worlds. There were people communing with what is essentially literary about themselves. I am almost halfway through a life spent being lost—and found—in books, and I want to say something about what I have learned about literature.

2 Adventures of the Wishing Chair

My favourite novel when I was a child was Enid Blyton’s Adventures of the Wishing Chair. The hard cover of the book showed a wooden chair painted fire-engine red and positioned against a backdrop of enamel sky, its blue interrupted by a solitary smudge of cloud. Dainty, angelically feathered wings had sprouted from the chair’s feet, and two children—how the Blytonesque context makes even the word roll in the mouth like some forgotten candy!—were ensconced in its seat, their hair unkempt in the invisible wind.

I read this novel over and over again, as children today repeatedly watch computer-animated DVDs. I know that the wishing chair took the two good and happy children to birthday-cake lands populated by temperamental giants and mischievous pixies, but I don’t remember any details of their adventures. What I do recall is being intrigued by the wishing chair itself. I would stare at the cover image of the enchanted chair, even then suspecting that it somehow stood for the book I held in my hands, which had the magical power to lift me outside myself.

As a child, reading was not a task I principally associated with education. Lost in an out-of-mind-and-body experience, I found the sensation of becoming virtual and identity-less infinitely fascinating and exhilarating. I had, though, learned one of my first lessons from books.

I had intuited that I was, in some profound sense, a visionary being, which made me excitingly vulnerable to experiences of magical transportation and transformation of the kind offered not only by literature but also by other imaginative media such as computer games and TV. I was capable, while reading Enid Blyton, of experiencing the secret pleasures of wandering through a charmed antiques store in an orderly English village and spying, in one tidy corner, a toylike chair. Similarly, nowadays I see boys feeling empowered by the acts of war they perform in the desolate urban battlefields of American arcade games, and I hear about girls mourning Sally’s leave-taking in Home and Away. (Even Kate Ritchie, the actor who played Sally from childhood into adulthood in this Australian TV series, confided that she misses her character as she would miss herself, like a zombie that has lost its soul.) What I had learned, through my experience of childhood reading—and what the experiences of game players and Sally’s fans likewise affirm—was something fundamental about what could be called the literary nature of identity.

In researching the experience of reading in recent years, I have found that psychoanalysts, sociologists, literary theorists and cognitive scientists are generally united in seeing humans as a ‘symbolic species,’ a phrase taken from the title of Terence Deacon’s extraordinary book on the evolution of the human brain in association with language acquisition. When we gain languages—and we can use that term to encompass all kinds of symbolic systems, including the illustrations that we are first exposed to in picture books as young children—our hungry infant brains feed on these representational systems and their radical connectivity (chair makes sense in terms of table, and so on) such that language becomes the medium of our sentient being. Language becomes the virtual field in which we become able to envision ourselves as entities beyond unruly embodiments of drives for warmth and food, and through which we become able to locate the meaning of the people and objects in our environment. Language, in other words, provides us with the space of our identity and the space through which we understand our world.

From books, films and even advertising—and from other children and adults often unconsciously acting out these miscellaneous stories in a tangled web of real-life literary simulation—we discover that a girl is pink-sugar and lipstick nice and that a Mercedes Benz gives businessmen a golden aura. We learn that kings and queens are born with royal blood and that, once a year, a genial man in a red-and-white suit flies in from the sparkling North Pole attracted by radiant trees. We discover that millions of people, as unfathomable in their number as stars, were led like so many Hansels and Gretels to gas ovens during the Second World War—because of the stories that were told about their identities —and that the world’s deepest lake broods soundlessly between jagged mountains in Siberia. That is, we come to grasp ourselves and our world through language and the imagination it affords, rather than through any direct or unmediated experience of reality.

However, as the example of Santa suggests, language is in no way beholden to the conditions of our existence. Indeed, the immateriality of language has made it possible for us to imagine flying to the moon, mobile telephones that signal to mirrored satellites, and missiles that self-propel like colossal bullets through the atmosphere—all things that in our modern world have been made material. In other words, the same virtuality of language that accounts for the unicorns, fairies and wishing chairs that fly through the spangled skies of childhood also underlies the technological innovations we take for granted in the ‘real’ world.

Language, which haunts us like the soul we have long suspected inhabits our core, gives us this capacity to escape or transcend ourselves and our world—a message that literature, which embraces the imaginative force of language, delivers to our innermost selves. We are not, literature teaches us at the deepest level of our beings, bound to ourselves or to our world. While we may have first glimpsed the potential of another life through childhood reading events, we remain eternally and magically capable of an experience of language and of being that, in the aesthetic nature of its thrill, can be thought of as intrinsically literary.

3 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

The spectral plane of language, as the medium of our cognitive selves, allows us to picture ourselves and our world, but it also seems tied up with that most sought-after and life-changing of experiences, namely, love. Indeed, how many of the literary encounters we pursue are ones that offer transportation and transformation through stories of profound, traumatic love—an event that, like a book, can eradicate us and redefine us in powerful ways?

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography is one of them. It is also a novel that I have always associated with a certain erotics of reading. There is the red room, plush and made for bodies like a womb, in which the orphan-child Jane Eyre is locked with the awful ghosts of her lonely book-fed imagination and in which those visions threaten to become at once terrifyingly and seductively real. And then there are the dark labyrinths of longing in Rochester’s castle, in which Jane wanders as a governess in her sensible ankle-length dresses, a book often in her hand like a map, aching to encounter her soul mate in the cold and echoing hallways. There is Jane warming herself in a cot against the dying body of her school friend in the dormitories of the stone orphanage, and then there is Jane dousing the flames engulfing Rochester’s bed. There is Jane in her nightgown by candlelight trailing the footsteps and laughter of an unseen woman, whose voice drifts through the corridors and chambers of the gothic mansion like danger or promise.

I remember that the experience of reading Brontë’s novel felt intensely private, but it also aroused in me a painful desire for escape from the solitude that arguably emerges as the human condition in the increasing independence of teenage years. How I longed to meet my double in the passageways of my reading, in the space of language, in the matrix of connections where we can, indeed, find not only ourselves but also others.

The dual nature of my experience of Jane Eyre makes sense to me. During reading, secret things are being done to our soul, to that word-hoard at the centre of our being. In this sense, all literature—regardless of whether or not the content is concerned with romantic love—has the potential to provide an erotic charge. And, indeed, even Adventures of the Wishing Chair carried an intimate thrill for me. However, literature also provides us with an erotic experience, leaving us longing to transgress our solitude and our skin, because it makes us intensely aware of our embeddedness in a virtual world that is not just about us as individuals but also about our connectedness. Literature makes us powerfully aware of how language is a shared medium and how another can touch who we are in uncanny and ecstatic ways that leave us restless and believing in communion.

Reflecting on the connections between literature and love, Mark Roche in Why Literature Matters in the Twenty-First Century, one of a spate of recent books attempting to reinvigorate literature and literary studies in their apparent time of crisis in the Western world, describes the reader as an enraptured lover. The reader is in thrall to the literary experience of transportation and transformation in a way that resonates with the experience of being transported and transformed by love.

The space of love, like the space of reading, is the space of language. Language, which enables us to be powerfully changed or even extinguished by literature, is also what allows us to be profoundly moved or even effaced by love. It is in the realm of language that we can encounter each other. It is here that we can interpenetrate each other’s beings. It is here that we can construct a shared world.

The evolutionary scientist Ellen Dissanayake and the child psychologist D.W. Winnicott have written groundbreaking studies about the origins of aesthetic experience in the language or symbolic systems acquired with our first relationships in childhood. Both Dissanayake’s Art and Intimacy and Winnicott’s Playing and Reality focus on the world of loving mutuality originally created between mother and child to compensate for the infant’s loss―by virtue of being born―of physically immediate access to another human being. Dissanayake talks about a ‘mutual multimedia ritual performance’ that develops in the first months of infancy and motherhood, which allows the mother and child to reconnect in a symbolic space of face pulling and musical sound that is playful but nevertheless precious. Winnicott refers to the importance of ‘transitional objects’, such as blankets and toys, as ones that exist in an intermediate territory of symbolic meaning, in which mother and child renegotiate the symbiotic closeness lost through birth.

It is in this terrain of virtuality and mutuality, in this space of language and culture, that we continue to connect with each other, and it is in literature and love—which have the power to invite us to an intimate realm where we can soul-speak and where the tragic isolation of our physical being can be momentarily relieved—that these links can be most intensely felt.

4 The Shining

The experience of opening up the private space of your self to be breached, of feeling your body haunted by another as well as by yourself, which the language events of reading and love can bring, is not always one that people embrace. Indeed, it is not always a positive experience. Reading—and love—can be as upsetting as trauma and as troubling as death. Horror stories, with their parades of soulless bodies and disembodied souls, tell us something about this.

I remember as an adolescent being traumatised by Stephen King’s terrifying and cunning novel The Shining. Night-reading on the sofa alone in the lounge room, its red brick walls and ticking pendulum clock not insistent enough to hold me in that familiar space, I was stolen away by a mad man with a typewriter to an alpine hotel, surrounded by looming mountains, bristling firs and banks of dirty snow. In the corridors of the hotel, the doors lined up like wooden reflections. Twin sisters, their hair as blonde as childhood, promised me their company but showed me only the spectacle of blood. In the bedrooms, there was a woman—a mother, a lover—whose bath-wet and made-up skin would not stay on. I broke away from the novel and sought out my flesh-and-blood parents in the bright lights of the kitchen, as they sat at the laminated table playing cards. They were abstracted from me, lost in their own visionary space: the machinations of hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds. I doubted that even their bodies were real.

What The Shining exposes, like so many of King’s novels, is the writer as abomination, the typewriter as his black, other-worldly weapon. The horror writer, in particular, uses that heavy machine with the ferocity of an axe, hacking his way through to where you are hiding in your corner of the labyrinth, breathlessly awaiting an obliterating union. The horror writer makes you confront your gift or your curse, your haunting by the dream of language, which allows you to see spirits and to be invaded by them. King calls it ‘the shining’. The real shock that the horror writer so maliciously reveals is that we are ghosts for the frightening and the unmaking; we are corporeal but not real.

Jeanette Winterson is an author who generally writes about love rather than terror, but in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery she addresses how literature and love are thrilling precisely because they threaten the reality to which we lay claim. As a consequence, she argues, ‘Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment.’ We watch America’s Next Top Model, CSI: Miami or the latest game of AFL, in which bodies are reduced to material parts and actions.

Winterson argues, though, that endangering ourselves via imaginative experience is important. The stories to which we expose ourselves, regardless of whether the medium is TV, games, movies or novels, add up to the sum total of who we are. If we hide from the risks of literature, we risk letting our existing body of stories, as Winterson puts it, rust into our flesh. However, if we embrace the risks of reading, we will always have before us the thrill of an afterlife, the possibility of living in what she calls ‘energetic space.’

5 A Universal History of Infamy

At the end of the holiday to South America that my husband and I took, we found ourselves in Patagonia, traversing the side of a precipitous mountain during a snow storm on squat horses called Nena and Amilidor. We were in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, where the howling gales were as spectacular as the three granite towers of the sub-Andean mountain range, the chopped glacial-milk lakes—one with icebergs so fantastically still they looked as if they were playing statues—and condors, black and theatrical, circling in the sky below the snow line. We had organised this trek to the base of the three grand Towers of Paine, accompanied by a guide and a gaucho, from our expensive ranch-style hotel.

Before arriving there, our bus had stopped at a lonely saloon just outside the national park for what was announced as our last opportunity to buy supplies at reasonable prices. My husband, who had prepared for this trip by reading Bruce Chatwin’s travelogue In Patagonia—I had read Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel Death in the Andes—said that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had been down this way. Drinking a cup of tea near the rattling windows, I spotted a kitten being blown around on the deserted road like tumbleweed and an old man walking by with a worn axe languorously in hand. When we got to our hotel, a sprawling, red-painted wooden structure that was dwarfed by the hulking backdrop of a mountain range, musak was playing: it was the theme from Twin Peaks.

During the horseback trek to the Torres del Paine, our gaucho, whom I found impossible to discern from the knife-fighting cowboy myths of the nationalist literature of Argentina, rode behind. He was as squat and brown as the horses and generally as silent as them, except for when he would appear alongside us, suddenly furrow-browed and vigorous on his whipped-up mount, to whistle at our sleep-walking horses and kiss the air at them. And, indeed, at times the rocky path was so narrow and the gravelly slope we were traversing so steep that I had to put my camera away and, like our horses, close my eyes. My fear made me think about the sublime, a category that seemed to fit any encounter with self-annihilation, whether threatened by an immense landscape or the experience of being spectral in a literary world.

Our guide, a young man with movie-star blond hair and designer trekking gear, proved cheerful and talkative. Riding in front of us, he sat turned in the saddle of his glorious, long-maned horse, called Rocinante, to tell us a local legend. It involved the khaki-coloured bushes, bunched low and sparingly over the rocky slopes and dotted with red berries, which we had been passing along the way. Against a backdrop of brutal mountains and shifting sky, he told us about how, in hard and ancient times, a group of men and women had passed through the area searching for food. An old woman was among their group. As the days passed without eating, she weakened and begged them to leave her there on the mountain side so that they might pass through this desolate landscape more quickly. One desperate morning, they finally agreed. They left her cloaked in furs and in a shelter constructed from rocks and sticks stripped from the rangy trees. Months later, two men from the group, which had eventually reached the pampas on the other side of the stony mountain range, returned for the old woman. In her place, they found a stunted bush prickled with sour berries. The fruit enabled them to survive the journey back to their new home.

Our guide asked us what we did for a living. I mumbled a response. He turned even more fully in the seat of his dashing white horse and, beaming and with his shoulder-length hair swept by the wind, asked if we had heard of any of their great writers: Pablo Neruda, who wrote such beautiful love poems; or Jorge Luis Borges, who described a library as big as the world. I replied that I had written my PhD thesis on South American magical realism. I referred to Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy, which comprises portraits of miscellaneous rascals, including a nineteenth-century Australian, the Tichborne claimant, who faked an identity. Our guide knew the one. Writers, our guide said finally, calming down, had not always been treated very well in Argentina and Chile.

Back at the hotel, at the end of our excursion, we gave our guide and our gaucho absurdly large tips without knowing it, at the time still unable to fathom this foreign South American currency.

References

Terence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, Norton, New York, 1997.

Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2000.

Mark William Roche, Why Literature Matters in the Twenty-First Century, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2004.

D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, Routledge, London, 1971.

Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996.