The Literary Blog Hop is a blogging activity brought you back the intellectual, fierce and sassy girls of The Blue Bookcase. If you've been missing out on them, it's not too late to check them out. This week, the discussion prompt of the hop is:
Discuss Bibliotherapy. Do you believe literature can be a viable form of therapy? Is literary writing more or less therapeutic than pop lit or nonfiction?
I didn't know it had a name. To me, it's just something that is. Books ARE therapeutic. It's hard to explain this without the corny life-experience moment, so I'll try to be succinct*. True empathy is impossible. Your default settings as a human being is to think: "I am the center of the universe"**. Stop by and listen to conversations in a café sometime. Good chance it's going to sound like this.
"I did this, I have this, I know this, I'm good"
"Well, but I did this, I know that and I have more then you, I'm better"
And it goes on and on and on, into the night. If it doesn't make you feel lonely, well it should. You can't reach out to somebody without a little selflessness and if you show some, there's a good chance the only thing you'll be rewarded with is a lecture of your interlocutor, about how great (s)he is. So yeah, my experience is about alienation ***, but here's how I think a book can be therapeutic.
The only purpose of fiction is to be read. Therefore, it's never complete without a reader. Hence, you. Also, it's not successful unless it made something resonate inside the person holding the book. An author wrote it with the intention of sharing something that's been eating away at him/her for long and the reader is most likely looking for answers to something that's been eating away at him/her too. Consciously or not. Pulling yourself from society to spend time with an imaginary world is something you do when the real world doesn't quite satisfy you. So characters of fiction are, to me, a perfect intermediary in between two consciousnesses that need to talk. That's what makes literature so powerful and universal.
So, as to know if literary fiction is more therapeutic than pop lit or non-fiction, I'd be at loss to say. The best answer I can come up with is that everybody's different.To me, it definitively is. Crime fiction is very cathartic ****, but literary fiction is specifically written to deal with difficult human issues. When it's not, you cross the line of pretentiousness. A literary fiction book that deals with something purely aesthetic will become empty showboating with words. Even the greatest language acrobats like William Faulkner, discussed pressing issues such as racism, mental illness and rape. So there's no excuse not to, when you're a literary writer.
So here it is, and please, please, please, other Literary Hop participants. I am interested in your opinion on the question, but I don't want to know about literature healed you. I am not going to read or comment entries about your own life, so please forgive me for this.
* I hate when other people do it, so I'll try to lead by the example. No matter how pertinent my life seems to me.
** I know I'm borrowing this, but I'm not going to name this writer again. I'll try to trick you into thinking I'm quite the thinker. (Oh I went there).
*** Promise, I won't go any further than that in life-experience stuff.
**** And also the genre fiction I find the closest to literary, when it's well done.