This chapter begins to set out the terms of a literary-critical analysis of shared reading in practice. In this sense it is an attempt to bring the background influences discussed in chapters one and two into a contemporary model of research into reading practice undertaken with ‘real readers’.134,135
It offers a literary model of thinking within a sphere of operation often characterised as health and wellbeing. As I have argued in my introduction to this part of the thesis, the move of reading-group practice into a ‘health’ sector involves an encounter with a different set of priorities, a world that operates according to a different kind of vocabulary. This thesis is not so much an attempt to replicate that health model, as to determine what in operation within it may be better understood as literary, and to indicate its relevance to problems that are often now labelled as health concerns.
Within the field of medicine the diagnosis of illness is an essential step in the process of deciding upon a method of treatment. Psychiatry has inherited this same principle, particularly under the influence of Kraepelin, who in the late nineteenth century proposed the idea that ‘psychiatric disorders fall into a finite number of types or categories’.136
Yet the lines between these categories continue to be disputed, and for some this has brought into question the very idea of categorisation in its
application to mental health. As president of the London Medical Society, James Sims had written in 1799 of the difficulty of distinguishing mental disorders which have an affinity to each other – ‘the shades of difference, as they approach, being so very minute, as almost to escape the most experienced mind. Every thing in Nature is
134 David S. Miall, ‘Empirical Approaches to Studying Literary Readers: The State of the Discipline’,
Book History, 9 (2006), 291-311 (p. 307).
135 Included in the bibliography are a number of accounts of theoretical studies of reader response.
This thesis instead offers an empirical approach.
136 Richard Bentall, Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2004),
a continued chain, without those breaks and intervals which even the accurate describer is obliged to make, in order to keep up due discrimination, and to render himself intelligible.’137
The language of literature, especially in its depiction of human trouble and human sorrow, offers just such a sense of the continued chain of nuanced experience, in implicit opposition to the language of simple separating diagnosis.
Within the medical humanities there has been a deliberate effort to find ways of addressing the experiences that lie behind or between such diagnostic categories, from within the stories or narratives of individual patients, as well as of doctors. Just as these stories are borrowed from literature as much as from the clinical gathering of case histories, so the reading of books is deployed here to educate readers in a deeper level of human understanding. The prescription of books such as The Yellow
Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman are offered in human mitigation of over- simple external diagnosis, but only in mitigation, not as offering an alternative world-view. But this emphasis on the work of empathy has to be accommodated alongside the fact that it is the scientific manuals, the DSM and the ICD, which provide the guide that still has mainly to be adhered to in practice. It is the diagnostic criteria that in a medical education produces the frame of understanding within which it is possible to treat a patient. In this study the diagnosis therefore forms a necessary part of the context within which a number of the participants are placed and labelled, even by themselves. But the object of the analyses in this chapter and more particularly in chapter four will be to enable the reader of this thesis to observe, perhaps from a different view, the person whom the act of reading makes present.
137 James Sims, ‘Pathological Remarks upon Various Kinds of Alienation of Mind’, in Memoirs of the
Robert Coles has written that as a psychiatrist he found that the most useful starting point in his interviews with patients was sometimes simply to ask him or her to ‘tell me a story or two’.138
He later writes however of the difficulty of translating such experiences into the form of a factual research report, and the struggle to find a method of saying what it is that he had wanted to be able to say. Eventually, by returning to his set of transcripted interviews, and remembering the way in which certain comments were voiced, he decided to risk writing up a selection of those moments which had felt to him to be experientially the most important, as the potentially breakthrough points to which some of the more humdrum material was leading or giving way. His method is essentially one of editing the data, like a practical novelist, in order to try to recreate what he has come to know of those people with whom he has been working through their own first-person reports to him.139
A similar approach has been taken in the analysis of the transcripts of reading groups, where the aim was to re-find, within the transcripts, moments which held a kind of excited significance for which we did not yet have a name. This thesis is the search for a way of describing such moments, the theory of a praxis. Often these are highlighted not only by what is said, but by the sub-vocal context, either remembered or recovered from the project worker’s diary or log of sessions, or by listening again to the tone preserved in the recordings. Literary-critical attention was given by the research team, including the present writer, to the kinds of language used and to the interactions taking place, in order to apply the same level of attention to these live responses to poetry as an experienced reader might give to the poem itself. The premise for this level of attentiveness is that the responses that follow after the
138 Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1989), pp. 11-12.
139
reading aloud of a literary text are not always of the same order as casual conversation. What was required was a form of literary as well as linguistic
understanding, in order to interpret what was implicit in the human responses to the literature being read:
Art is shorthand between what the artist transmits and the reader picks up. Sometimes, I believe, we should spell out that shorthand, try to say more of what large tracts of experience are tacitly released in or by a small number of words.140 Reading the transcripts feels like translating the experience of silent reading back out into a form of live, voiced response, even given the unknowable change that must result from the change of medium from private to social. Analysis begins with the stirrings of thought and the pre-verbal utterances of group members who are not articulate experts, either as professional readers or even as students of literature, but who in their almost innocently unlearned responses offer a model of what it is like to read live and fresh and strugglingly.
(It should be noted that in the following accounts, all names have been fictionalised, and names of places either changed or omitted, to preserve participants’ anonymity.
Unless otherwise indicated, the project worker is myself.)