Wonderworks E-Book

Angus Fletcher

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 708

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

'Fascinating. It blew my mind!' Malcolm Gladwell Wonderworks reveals that literature is among the mightiest technologies that humans have ever invented, precision-honed to give us what our brains most want and need. Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere xe2x80x93 from Homer to Shakespeare, Austen to Ferrante xe2x80x93 each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. But literaturexe2x80x99s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all. Based on Angus Fletcherxe2x80x99s own research, Wonderworks tells the story of the greatest literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day America. It draws on cutting-edge neuroscience to demonstrate that the inventions really work: they enrich our lives with joy, hope, courage and energy, and they help our brains heal from grief, loneliness and even trauma. From ancient Chinese lyrics to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, from slave narratives to contemporary TV shows, Wonderworks walks us through the evolution of literaturexe2x80x99s crucial blueprints, and offers us a new understanding of its power.

Leseprobe

Praise for Wonderworks

“I’ve been living in Wonderworks for several weeks now, dazzled by its innovations, wild surmises, gifts of insight, unlikely readings and—perhaps most of all—its inspirational force. Angus Fletcher is that rare critic who actually has something to say, who grabs us by the collar and hopes to shake sense into us. This may be one of the most important and truly useful books about literature written in the past decade. It opens a vista into reading that regards writing as a kind of continual experiment in human and societal engineering. That Wonderworks deserves a wide audience goes without saying. It’s refreshing and remarkable on so many levels.”

—Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me: An Encounter

“Aristotle’s Poetics was new and brave but was left incomplete. Angus Fletcher finishes it in Wonderworks with some help from contemporary science and an abundance of penetrating analyses. Fletcher endorses storytelling as a foundational technology but he goes beyond that to illustrate its therapeutic value and centrality to cultural invention. Wonderworks is the perfect counter to our season in hell.”

—Antonio Damasio, author of The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures; Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the

Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California

“Find one polymath. Take a profound knowledge of world literature. Add a deep knowledge of modern psychology and of neuroscience. Add a cupful of worldly wisdom. Stir in an enchanting prose style. Heat until bubbling. You have just baked a unique, marvelous treat: Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks.”

—Martin Seligman, author of The Hope Circuit andLearned Optimism, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania

“An epic, a masterpiece. Angus Fletcher has reached deep into history and far in contemporary neuroscience to give us a magisterial synthesis of why and how humans not just make literature but use it to navigate our worlds.” —Blakey Vermeule, author of Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?,

Albert Guérard Professor of Literature, Stanford University

“Drawing upon insights from neuroscience and evolutionary biology, an expert in the art of storytelling explains why literature matters by showing, through lucid examples, the myriad ways that literature’s bag of tricks works with and for our minds. Anyone who has experienced wonder in an encounter with literature will profit from this wise and clever book.”

—Lawrence Manley, William R. Kenan, Jr.

Professor of English, Yale University

“Extraordinary. . . . Angus Fletcher has not only set out a radical vision of literature as a technology that helps us, he has also provided a wonderfully varied and generously introduced reading list. . . . Wonderworks brings inspiration, and an exciting challenge, to read and to think hard about literature, and it’s a pleasure to read.”

—Raphael Lyne, Professor of Renaissance Literature, Faculty of English,

University of Cambridge; Fellow of Murray Edwards College

“Wonderworks unleashes the transport, suspense, paradox, and power of stories. All the ideas glossed—from Aristotle and Shakespeare to contemporary neurosciences—exhibit the literary invention that constitute the subject of the book, creating a tour-de-force of knowledge, fantasy, and the desire to heal.”

—Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Executive Director, Columbia Narrative

Medicine, Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons

Wonderworks

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by Simon & Schuster 2021

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2021

Copyright © Angus Fletcher 2021

The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80075-021-0

eISBN: 978-1-80075-022-7

Illustrations on pages 145, 364 and 366 by George 'Agas

Art on page 351 from Fun Home © 2006 by Alison Bechdel

For Ronan, aged nearly three:

“Are there two Ronans here?”

“No. Just me!”

Contents

Preface

A Heaven of Invention

Introduction

The Lost Technology

Chapter 1. Rally Your Courage

Homer’s Iliad and the Invention of the Almighty Heart

Chapter 2. Rekindle the Romance

Sappho’s Lyrics, the Odes of Eastern Zhou, and the Invention of the Secret Discloser

Chapter 3. Exit Anger

The Book of Job, Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, and the Invention of the Empathy Generator

Chapter 4. Float Above Hurt

Aesop’s Fables, Plato’s Meno, and the Invention of the Serenity Elevator

Chapter 5. Excite Your Curiosity

The Epic of Sundiata, the Modern Thriller, and the Invention of the Tale Told from Our Future

Chapter 6. Free Your Mind

Dante’s Inferno, Machiavelli’s Innovatori, and the Invention of the Vigilance Trigger

Chapter 7. Jettison Your Pessimism

Giovanni Straparola, the Original Cinderella, and the Invention of the Fairy-tale Twist

Chapter 8. Heal from Grief

Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Invention of the Sorrow Resolver

Chapter 9. Banish Despair

John Donne’s “Songs” and the Invention of the Mind-Eye Opener

Chapter 10. Achieve Self-Acceptance

Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, Zhuangzi’s “Tale of Wonton,” and the Invention of the Butterfly Immerser

Chapter 11. Ward Off Heartbreak

Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, and the Invention of the Valentine Armor

Chapter 12. Energize Your Life

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Modern Meta-Horror, and the Invention of the Stress Transformer

Chapter 13. Solve Every Mystery

Francis Bacon, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of the Virtual Scientist

Chapter 14. Become Your Better Self

Frederick Douglass, Saint Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Invention of the Life Evolver

Chapter 15. Bounce Back from Failure

George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the Invention of the Gratitude Multiplier

Chapter 16. Clear Your Head

“Rashōmon,” Julius Caesar, and the Invention of the Second Look

Chapter 17. Find Peace of Mind

Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and the Invention of the Riverbank of Consciousness

Chapter 18. Feed Your Creativity

Winnie-the-Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, and the Invention of the Anarchy Rhymer

Chapter 19. Unlock Salvation

To Kill a Mockingbird, Shakespeare’s Soliloquy Breakthrough, and the Invention of the Humanity Connector

Chapter 20. Renew Your Future

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and the Invention of the Revolution Rediscovery

Chapter 21. Decide Wiser

Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Thomas More’s Utopia, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the Invention of the Double Alien

Chapter 22. Believe in Yourself

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the Invention of the Choose Your Own Accomplice

Chapter 23. Unfreeze Your Heart

Alison Bechdel, Euripides, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and the Invention of the Clinical Joy

Chapter 24. Live Your Dream

Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, a Dash of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” and the Invention of the Wish Triumphant

Chapter 25. Lessen Your Lonely

Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and the Invention of the Childhood Opera

Conclusion

Inventing Tomorrow

Coda

The Secret History of This Book

Acknowledgments

Notes on Translations, Sources, and Further Reading

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HENRY V

PREFACE

A Heaven of Invention

It was barely sunrise.

Yet even in the faint, rose-fingered light, there could be no doubt: the invention was a marvel. It could mend cracks in the heart and resurrect hope from the dark. It could summon up raptures and impossible days. It could chase away dullness and unlatch the sky.

The invention was literature. And to catch its marvel for ourselves, let’s return to that dawn. Let’s learn the story of why literature was invented. And all the things it was invented to do.

The Invention of Literature

Sometime around 2300 BCE, in what is now Iraq, literature’s first known inventor was born within a great mudbrick palace near the snowmelt waters of the Tigris River. There, upon a fragrant cedar cot, the newborn babe was lullabied to sleep amid white rock sculptures of armies famed for the most remarkable deeds: turning mountains to ash, pouring blood into cups, and vanquishing beasts in a chasm of thorns. But soon the dreamful infant would become even more famous. Everywhere throughout the city-states of Mesopotamia, all the way from the silver mines of Anatolia to the beaches of the Persian Gulf, her name would be sung. And her name was Enheduanna.

Enheduanna’s journey to renown began when, barely older than a girl, she was sent south to an almond-shaped city on the willowed mouth of the Euphrates. The city was Ur, and it was revered as a place of tremendous imagination. Its night-haired, moon-praying people had devised the wheel, the sailboat, and the multiplication table, and to supply their busy workshops with the raw materials to engineer more wonders still, they’d fashioned a massive walled harbor to import lumber from forest slopes in Lebanon, copper from fire-mined quarries in Magan, and jeweled blue stones from ore veins in Afghanistan. So intricate was this network of commerce that by 3000 BCE, it had spurred perhaps the most world-changing creation of all: namdub. Or as we know it now: writing. Stamped down as cuneiform characters on quick-drying clay tablets, writing tracked every cargo transaction on Ur’s sandy anchorage, allowing receipt ledgers to be kept and taxes calculated to the fraction.

Ur’s fertile innovations made it the richest city on earth, its traders adorning their courtyard homes with pearl mosaics and burying themselves in tombs of gold. And so Enheduanna was tasked by her father, King Sargon the Great, with ensuring that the bountiful wealth from Ur continued to flow, borne north by donkey caravans across the steppes to the imperial treasury at Akkad. It would be a giant task, Sargon knew, to tame Ur’s proud merchant folk. But he had the greatest confidence in his daughter. It was not simply that she was the most agile minded of his offspring. Or the most ruthless. It was that she had her mother’s tongue. A honey tongue that sweetened salt and charmed all anger from the heart.

Enheduanna began her royal mission by using that honey tongue to forge an invention: her name. For “Enheduanna” wasn’t what her father had called her when she lay in swaddle on her infant cot; it was an original title that she tinkered up for herself. And although the title sounded strange when it first echoed through the air, the cleverness of its engineering became clear when Enheduanna arrived at last in Ur. The sun had sunk hours before, leaving the shore air cool and the sky a cloudless black. Above, at heaven’s top, hung the holy moon in rounded full, illuminating Enheduanna as she glided down the city’s main canal upon a papyrus barge rowed by clerics in feathered camelback robes. Crowding the waterway on all sides were throngs of citizen sailors, scribes, and sweet-beer brewers, armed with sickle swords of bronze. And surging into view ahead, blocking starshine with its shade, loomed the Old Ziggurat of Ur.

The Ziggurat was Ur’s stronghold of the gods. Its foundation bricks had been baptized by the rainstorms of the Flood, and within its mammoth tabernacle, high platformed and ziggedly asymmetric, stretched the oblong bedchamber where the moon had lain with the Queen of the Marsh, birthing the sun’s hot rays and the ambisexual goddess of love. These heavenly beings were notoriously blood hungry, but they gave Enheduanna no pause. She docked calmly at the Ziggurat’s silhouetted jag of angles, perfumed by scents of bloom weed and the river rose. And with her eyes aglow in midnight moonlight, she bade her clerics to chant in fevered tones: “She is the high lord of the moon.” Or, as the chant went in its original syllables: “En-hedu-‘anna. En-hedu-‘anna. En-hedu-‘anna.”

This was the reason for Enheduanna’s self-made name. It claimed for her the mantle of the city’s astral overseer, crowning her as archpriest of the fifty thousand lunar worshippers now surrounding her on Ur’s canal banks. It was a might invested through a word invented.

And the name was just the beginning of Enheduanna’s inventions. Debarking her barge, she climbed a thousand pink-beige stairs until she reached the hidden shrine that capped the Ziggurat. There, upon a dais that seemed to touch the firmament, she bathed herself within a sacred pool, its sides cleverly leak proofed with bitumen caulk. And glistened bright by holy waters, she brought her congregation to its knees by lifting up her voice in incantation:

O Feeder of life,

Rising like a bull from snake shallows,

Born from a great mother,

Light above all.

As Enheduanna sang, the song answered back, glimmering the horizon with the milk fire of a thousand moons. In the heart of night, a new morn was breaking, unlike any imagined before.

Enheduanna had invented literature.

She wasn’t, of course, the first to invent it. Her verses were preceded by other ziggurat canticles, such as The Kesh Temple Hymn, dating to a handful of generations earlier. And prior to that, there were many generations more of oral literature, generations that may have stretched back before our species to the Homo erectus hunter-gatherers of the Afro-Asian Stone Ages, where perhaps upon the volcanic lakeshores of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley or among the buzzing wetlands of Shaanxi, an archaic hominid bespoke the world’s first myth or metaphor, a million years ago or more.

But Enheduanna is the first inventor whose name we know. She’s the first author we can credit for an original piece of literature.

Partly, this is because she was lucky enough to be born into an age of literacy; the same cuneiform print that diligently logged Ur’s dockyard traffic allowed Enheduanna to breathe her mind into pages of clay, passing her spark on to readers beyond. And partly, this is because her creations were so compelling that Sumerian city clerks copied them afresh for hundreds of years, long after Enheduanna’s less adroit brothers had been bludgeoned to death by the stone writing seals of palace assassins—and her father’s whole bloodline had been rolled under by mountain raiders from the east.

But mostly, this is because Enheduanna wanted to be known as an inventor. She flagrantly identified herself within her verses:

O goddess, from my altar days,

I, Enheduanna, sang your name.

And after she’d collected an anthology of her choicest poetry, she ended it by boasting:

I, Enheduanna, created this booklet—

a thing which no one else had ever created.

So, in Enheduanna, we have our earliest glimpse of what it was to invent literature. And although it’s only a glimpse, it’s enough to see why our ancestors did the inventing.

Why Literature Was Invented

Enheduanna coined her ziggurat verses for the same purpose that she coined her moon-catching name: to grab hold of forces above. And her belief in literature’s almighty properties would endure long after, leaving its trace in the ancient world’s most holy writings. Eight centuries or so after Enheduanna, metaphoric similes danced across the Hindu Vedas as they praised the twin horse gods, Nasatya and Dasra. Another eight centuries after that, alliterations chimed through the Hebrew Torah as it told of death’s coming to the Garden of Eden. And a half century later still, poetic repetitions latticed the Greek Theogony as it revealed how Sky and Soil immortally begat the titan Cyclopes.

So it came to be that in the world’s earliest libraries, scripture and literature were joined. And indeed, so tight was the jointure that literature and scripture would be fashioned with identical root meanings: “that which is writ.” They were two ways of saying the very same thing.

What prompted this ancient reverence for literature? What great powers did Enheduanna and our other ancestors detect within its pages? The powers were many, but two in particular stood out.

The first great power was narrative, or, more colloquially, story. Story connected events. And story provided beginnings—and endings. So, story could answer the question “Where did our universe come from?” As in this Mesoamerican parable, recounted by highland Anahuac peoples who predated the Aztecs:

Amid darkness, the gods gathered together. To make light, they needed fuel, and a proud god, Tecuciztecatl, volunteered to burn himself. But at the heat of the flame, Tecuciztecatl faltered. So, before the flame could perish, Nanauatzin, a sick god and lame, jumped in, becoming the sun. Ashamed, Tecuciztecatl leapt after, becoming the moon.

And story could also answer “Where will we go when we die?” As in this Saqqâra pyramid text, fashioned around 2320 BCE in the Egyptian Old Kingdom: “The good soul will row the eastern sky-boat across the water of the Fields of Reeds.”

The second great power of literature was the stirring of emotion: love, wonder, faith. For such was the strength of these feelings that they could fend off life’s mightiest demons. Against the demon of loneliness, there was the “Love prayer to Shu-Sin,” sung three centuries after Enheduanna upon another moony tabernacle at Ur:

O man,

I ask

you freely,

Master me;

Open up your temple to my touch,

And sweet my dark night with your love.

And against the demon of fear, there was India’s Vedic Age Samhita, brushed with ash-tar ink upon a birch-bark choral sheet: “Great lightning god, fling wide the doors of strength, making us heroes.”

These heart-raising, universe-explaining texts are the heirs of Enheduanna’s belief that literature can support and guide us through the darkness: “O Feeder of life . . . Light above all.” And literature’s two powers of story and emotion aren’t all that we can learn from Enheduanna. We can also discover how to pull those powers down from heaven, becoming dawn makers ourselves.

Enheduanna’s Other Discovery

Enheduanna did more than treat literature as immortal scripture. She also treated it as an earthly invention. Which is to say: she treated it as a technology.

In our modern epoch, we tend to think of technology as gadgetries of steel and silicon. And even in Enheduanna’s age, it was perceived not so differently by most of her father’s subjects as contrivances of copper, bronze, and tin. But technology doesn’t need to be forged from metal. It can be built of any substance: clay, paper, ink, or even breath. For if we look back to the very earliest beginnings of engineering, we can see that a technology is any human-made thing that helps to solve a problem.

To help solve the problem of cold, there’s the technology of fire taming, such as the heating pits that Paleolithic humans dug out of Huang He limestone. To help solve the problem of hunger, there’s the technology of meat scavenging, such as the quartzite knives that Pleistocene hominids flaked from Tanzanian creek rock. To help solve the problem of not knowing what lies ahead, there’s the technology of signaling, such as the whistles that Paleo-Indians drilled into North American bird bone.

As Enheduanna saw, literature can also help to solve a problem. And indeed, part of what drew her to literature is that it tackles a different class of problem from the archaic technologies above. Those technologies seem wildly diverse, but beneath their branching actions lies a deeper mutual enterprise: domesticating our planet. By transforming cold nights, hungry landscapes, and uncertain futures into warmth, nourishment, and information, fire and knives and whistles bend the physical environment to our will.

This archaic task is such an omnipresent part of human existence that even today it remains the goal of our most futuristic engineerings. Our drones, our phones, our algorithms, our virtual realities, and our smart homes have all been built to shuttle around meals and data and other stuffs, turning space-time into an extension of our needs and wants. Yet if we work backward, we can see that life poses an even more basic challenge than the problem of being human in a nonhuman world. That challenge is: the problem of simply being human.

To be human is to wonder Why? As in, Why are we here? What’s the purpose of our hours? Does this life mean anything? And to be human is to have irrational desires, and uncontrollable passions, and griefs that split us into pieces. Or to put it in the frank language of our scientific present: to be human is to be saddled with the problem of having a human brain. A brain capable of asking vast questions that it cannot answer. A brain fueled by emotions that propel us forward but that also cause us to crave things that harm, and to fear things that don’t exist, and to rage against age and death and other parts of our nature that can’t be escaped.

As scientists have recently discovered, this problem isn’t unique to us humans. Our animal relatives share bits and pieces of our neural circuitry, which is why chimps suffer anxiety, elephants lament their departed, dogs get lonesome, and antelopes spook. Yet even so, the singular sophistication of the hardware in your head and mine means that the problem is particularly profound in us. We can achieve unprecedented success—and still feel that life is pointless. We can have a thousand friends—and be overwhelmed by loneliness. We can walk in daylight’s brightest gold—and see all the world as gray.

So deep, so sprawling, and so intangible is this problem that it can seem beyond the grip of any technology. But it’s the problem addressed by Enheduanna’s ziggurat verses and the world’s other original literary scriptures. By drawing on literature’s great power of story, these works answered existential doubts with narrative purpose. And by harnessing literature’s great power of emotion, these works imbued faltering spirits with togetherness and courage.

Thus it was that literature’s technology distinguished itself from Neolithic axes and Bronze Age plows and other creations forged of metal, stone, and bone. While those creations turned outward to grapple with the problem of surviving in our world, literature turned inward to grapple with the problem of surviving as ourselves.

To be sure, this grand intention probably wasn’t in the mind of literature’s very first author. And, in fact, we know that in many ancient cultures, authors claimed to have no intention at all, preferring to credit their work to muses or other spirits above. But then we arrive at Enheduanna. And in her writings, we get our earliest glimpse of the technology-making discovery that authors could be innovators:

I, Enheduanna, created this booklet—

a thing which no one else had ever created.

How brazen was this boast? Was Enheduanna simply announcing herself as a partner in a creative act—“born from a great mother”—one womb passing on the vital energy of another? Or did Enheduanna believe more boldly that she and she alone was the maker of her inventions? Did she dare in moments to think that even the gods she named were fictions built to do her bidding, taming the merchants of Ur and preserving her dynasty? Did she go so far as to dream that heaven was a story that she could fashion herself?

It’s impossible to say. But either way, the authors who followed Enheduanna would learn that they could work literature’s gears and switches without the magic of supernatural assistance. They could target story to answer specific life questions. They could mold emotion to generate particular mind balms and uplifts. They could engineer new worlds—and new eternities too.

So it came to be that by the time of the first millennium BCE, about two thousand years after Enheduanna’s midnight arrival in Ur, literature had gained repute for delivering hope and hospice in shadows where no priest or medic ventured. When the Hellenistic sage Epicurus declared that the gods had bobbed away, his followers revived their greater sense of purpose with the epic poem On the Nature of It All. And when Zhou dynasty doctors confessed that they could mend bones but not sorrows, this lyric remedy was painted on bamboo by a resourceful wife upon the Yangtze marshes:

After you return from the hunt,

With red-footed geese and wild duck,

We will feast

To songs of silk,

And I will wish for life’s long years

To keep me, gray haired,

In your arms.

The medicine men may have run out of unguents and potions; the heavens may have vanished or grown cold. But still, literature could fix hearts and lift souls.

That, in brief, is why literature was invented and what it was invented to do. It was a narrative-emotional technology that helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology. It was an invention for overcoming the doubt and the pain of just being us.

And the technology didn’t suddenly stop working when our ancestors departed this globe. It can still reckon with death and unshatter the psyche. It can still give us the stuff past the stars and the meaning immortal.

Our ancestors’ blueprint can show us how.

Our Ancestors’ Blueprint for Using Literature

To get the most out of literature, our ancestors treated it as more than a great invention. They treated it as many great inventions.

Each of these inventions had a unique purpose, engineered with its own intricate circuitry to click into our psyche in a different way. So, there was one special invention for lightening sorrow, another for banishing loneliness, another for diminishing anxiety, another for treating the symptoms of trauma, another for bringing hope, another for heightening joy, another for stirring love, another for ushering in tranquility, and so on and so on.

Since these inventions were all very different in both how they were built and what they did, our ancestors initially stumbled at random into finding them. But then sometime around 500 BCE, roughly a hundred generations after Enheduanna, a breakthrough occurred: our ancestors discovered an invention-finding method. The method was straightforward enough to be explained in a few moments yet versatile enough to be applied to any piece of global literature, no matter how original its design or far-flung its creation. And with the help of the method, our ancestors began scouring the world’s libraries, gathering up a toolbox of literary inventions for improving daily mental health and happiness—when abruptly, a few short centuries after the project began, it was halted. No more inventions were added to the toolbox, while its existing inventions gradually fell into rusted neglect, until, at last, the technology of literature was lost.

If you’re curious to learn how this loss occurred—and to explore why our modern schools and universities don’t train us to use literature as an innovation for troubleshooting our humanity—you can discover the story in the coda that concludes this book. But our purpose over the following chapters won’t be to dwell on the literary toolbox’s demise; our purpose will be to undo it. We’ll start by re-exhuming the original inventions unearthed by our ancestors, dusting off their dormant flywheels and patching their corroded circuitries so we can put their health-and-happiness boosters back to work. And then we’ll go further. We’ll expand the toolbox many times over by deploying our ancestors’ old invention-finding method in a pair of fresh ways.

First, we’ll turn to the vast abundance of literature created in the centuries since our ancestors departed the earth, using the method to excavate the inventions of modernist novels and Renaissance stage plays, nursery rhymes and superhero comics, crime sagas and computer-animated movies, love songs and prime-time soaps, slave narratives and space operas, cartoon memoirs and single-cam sitcoms, pulp fiction adventures and postmodern elegies, horror flicks and detective fictions, surrealist short stories and fairy-tale anthologies, and many, many genres more.

Second, we’ll combine our ancestors’ method with a more recent revealer of secrets: twenty-first-century neuroscience. Over the past decade or so, neuroscientists have begun using pulse monitors, eye trackers, brain scanners, and other gadgets to look inside our head as we consume novels, poems, films, and comic books. This scientific project is still in its infancy and is thick with unresolved questions and scholarly disagreements. But even so, its early findings have been tremendously revealing. And when they’re combined with established areas of psychological and psychiatric research, they produce an intricate picture of how literature’s inventions can plug into different regions of our brain—the emotion centers of our amygdala, the imagination hubs of our default mode network, the spiritual nodes of our parietal lobe, the heart softeners of our empathy system, the God’s-Eye elevators of our prefrontal neurons, the pleasure injectors of our caudate nucleus, the psychedelic pathways of our visual cortex—to alleviate depression, reduce anxiety, sharpen intelligence, increase mental energy, kindle creativity, inspire confidence, and enrich our days with myriad other psychological benefits.

Remarkably, then, our ancestors were righter than they knew. Enheduanna’s moonlit engineering feat was followed by countless more, filling literature with inventions for healing our heart and enhancing our mind, refreshing our lives and making us new.

So, let’s go back to the future. Let’s discover our ancestors’ long-ago method and the modern science behind it.

Let’s turn the page and see what followed the dawn.

INTRODUCTION

The Lost Technology

Out of the evergreen wilds of northern Greece, in the morning years of the fourth century BCE, walked a young man with dark, shaggy hair.

The young man hailed from a family of curious minds. His great-grandfather had plumbed the secrets of disease by dissecting wild dogs—and perhaps even the still-beating heart of a Barbary ape. His older sister had hungrily pestered their mother for tales of enchanted huntresses who rode blonde-antlered deer, and of resurrector goddesses who washed away death’s ache with poppy blooms, and of titan queens whose boundless memory stored every song and story ever breathed. And he himself was determined to delve deeper still into the mysteries of medicine and myth, dedicating his days to a far-reaching quest that would lead him at last to a method for finding literature’s inventions.

This young man from Macedon was Aristotle. Driven by his teenage ambition to learn, he quit the provincial ravines of his boyhood years, hiking east through forests of lynx, then three hundred miles south down the turquoise-watered Aegean Coast, to make his way to a vast circuit of white-marble walls—built from toppled temple arches and smashed-up statues of forgotten heroes—that guarded the city of Athens. Just outside the walls lay the ancient Mediterranean’s most famous school, the Academy of Plato, where, amid a sloping olive grove, all the fabled wisdom of Babylon, Egypt, and Atlantis was studied—and superseded. So, Aristotle enrolled, and, making good on his lofty self-improvement scheme, he became a pupil of extraordinary renown; the only one, it was said in later times, who could comprehend Plato’s abstruse theories of immortal beauty and arithmetic afterlives. Until sometime around 347 BCE, the now middle-aged man from Macedon broke away from the academy, heading off to think in his own way.

It’s not exactly clear why Aristotle decided to break away. At the time, it was whispered that he was just being a provocateur. That, after all, was the way of ambitious students: they came up with outrageous new ideas to make a name for themselves. And certainly Aristotle was fond of being the center of attention. He enjoyed expensive clothes, covered his fingers with glittering rings, and liked to announce in public places that he had a theory of everything.

Or perhaps Aristotle broke away from the academy because he was a born outsider. Unlike Plato, Aristotle wasn’t a high-blooded Athenian aristocrat. He was a resident alien; a foreign son. So, he might have thought that it was simply in his pedigree to trouble the status quo.

Or perhaps Aristotle broke away because he was more practically minded than his great teacher. He was a man of the world, and not just because he took pleasure in clothing and rings. He also had an interest in the way things worked, and he delved into nature with a scientist’s eye, searching for clues to how acorns sprouted and tongues tasted and heavens rotated.

But whatever the reason for Aristotle’s departure, he most definitely went rogue. Renouncing the academy’s commitment to reason and reason alone, he ambled off to chat with beekeepers, vivisect bird eggs, catalogue mortal emotions, classify wildflowers, and chronicle stage shows, laying the empirical foundations of zoology, physiology, psychology, botany, and dramaturgy. And somewhere in the course of these investigations into the nuts and bolts of life, he discovered the method for finding all of literature’s inventions.

Aristotle wasn’t the first to discover the method. In fact, he almost certainly learned it from a mysterious group of peripatetic instructors known as the literary Sophists, whose own history is sketched in the coda that concludes this book. But the writings of the literary Sophists and all their students except for Aristotle have since been scattered by the winds of passing years. So, without Aristotle’s eager thirst to learn how literature worked, the method would have evaporated forever, like Atlantis and its misty genius, into the stuff of legend.

Aristotle’s account of the invention-finding method appears in a cragged paragraph that falls about one-third of the way into a treatise known as the Poetics. The Poetics, we now think, may not have been physically composed by Aristotle. In fact, there’s a strong possibility that it was handwritten by one of his students. The student may have been a trained amanuensis who employed a cryptic intellectual shorthand. Or the student may have struggled to follow every detail of Aristotle’s fast-paced lecturings, forcing him to hastily jot down all the words he could in the hope that he’d unpuzzle their full brilliance later. Or the student may have felt fuzzy headed from the hyacinth wine sloshed out at last night’s symposium, leading his mind and his note-taking to meander erratically. But however it was that the Poetics came to be writ, it doesn’t make for an easy read. It gallops through intricacies and delivers revolutionary ideas with stilted matter-of-factness. For long stretches, it feels pedantically boring. And then it shifts into being exasperatingly enigmatic.

Yet as knotty as the prose paragraphs of the Poetics can be, they manage to preserve the invention-finding method with enough clarity for us to recover its essential action. That action consists of two linked steps: first, identify what literature does, and second, work backward to uncover how literature does it. The what is the specific psychological effect of a literary work; an effect that’s typically linked to emotion. The how is the unique literary invention that drives the effect; an invention that’s usually engineered from one of the core elements of narrative: plot, character, storyworld, and narrator.

In theory, this two-step process of reverse engineering literature is simple. In practice, it’s a bit more difficult. But the more we practice, the easier it gets. So, to slip in a little practice, let’s follow along with the Poetics as Aristotle unearths one hidden literary invention.

And then another, more hidden still.

The First Invention Unearthed by the Poetics

The first invention is what the Greeks saw as a soul lifter.

Prior to Aristotle, his teacher Plato had sagely concluded that there existed only one soul lifter: reason. But when Aristotle visited the theater, he noticed audiences of Greek tragedy experiencing a nonrational—indeed, emotional—up. That up was thaumazein, or as we might translate it today, wonder. Wonder is life through the eyes of a child. It’s the first glimpse of a flower, or the discovery of oceans, or the parting of clouds at the high touch of heaven.

So, what’s the literary source of this uplifting feeling? What invention did the Greek playwrights devise to impart wonder’s joyous sense of greater possibility? The answer provided by the Poetics is: the plot twist. Sounds straightforward. But, of course, there’s some twist to it.

The first part of the twist is this: the plot twist isn’t a twist. It’s the final link of a chain of untwisted events, where each link connects smoothly with the one before, carrying the story forward without bends or breaks. Yet even though the chain of the story is arrow straight, its final link is so stunning that it feels like a swerve. It overthrows all precedent, delivering us to a destination unexpected.

Here is Aristotle’s favorite example:

Once upon a time, a prince of Thebes was born with a hideous prophecy: he was fated to sleep with his mother. Determined to prevent that prophecy from coming true, the prince’s mother took immediate action. She ordered a shepherd to get rid of the boy, and the shepherd stole the boy far away, to another land.

In that other land, the prince was raised up by a different mother. Until one day, the prince got curious about his future and visited an oracle. There, the prince heard a hideous prophecy: he was fated to sleep with his mother. Determined to prevent that prophecy from coming true, the prince took immediate action. Fleeing the home of the only mother he’d known, he journeyed far away to another land, until he came to a city known as Thebes, where he met a lovely widowed queen. . . .

That’s the story of Oedipus. You can clearly see its unbroken chain. Step by step, a mother and son act entirely logically, hearing a prophecy and doing the sensible thing to thwart it. And then, surprise! Their sensible plots cancel out, and the mother and son end up together.

This twist produces horror in Oedipus and his mother. But in us, the viewing audience, it produces thaumazein, lifting our mind with awe at the farseeing powers above.

And this isn’t the only wonder that we can take from the plot twist. Because the twist contains a further twist: an invention for making wonder without any plot at all.

The Deeper Invention for Making Wonder

Buried within the plot twist is a more basic literary invention: the stretch.

The stretch is the taking of a regular pattern of plot or character or storyworld or narrative style or any other core component of story—and extending the pattern further. So, taking a great battle—and making it greater. Taking a bold girl—and making her bolder. Taking a blue lake—and making it bluer. Taking a star—and making it everywhere.

The stretch is the invention at the root of all literary wonder: the marvel that comes from stretching regular objects into metaphors, the dazzle that comes from stretching regular rhythms of speech into poetic meters, and the awe that comes from stretching regular humans into heroes.

And the stretch is also the invention at the root of the plot twist. The plot twist takes a story chain and stretches it one link further, as when Oedipus Tyrannus takes the old plot of a person who tries to outwit a prophecy and elaborates it into the mind bender of two people trying to outwit the same prophecy—and so double-negatively fulfilling it.

The stretch is a simple device, but its effects on our brain can be profound. It’s been linked in modern psychology labs to a shift of neural attention that flings our focus outward, decreasing activity in our parietal lobe—a brain region associated with mental representations of our self. The result is that we quite literally feel the borders of our self dissolving, even to the point of “self-annihilation.”

This neural feeling is why we can “lose ourselves” in a book or a film, forgetting our personal limits in horizons beyond. And although such forgetfulness has been dismissed by many an outside observer as idle escapism, it ushers our brain into what twenty-first-century psychologists term a self-transcendent experience, or what the early-twentieth-century founder of modern psychology, William James, described more vividly as a “spiritual” experience. These experiences are the mystic mental states that sages from days immemorial have preached as the highest good of human life. And in the case of literature, at least, the good really exists. The stretch has been connected by modern neuroscientists to significant increases in both our generosity and our sense of personal well-being. Which is to say: fictional plot twists, metaphors, and heroic characters dispense a pair of factual benefits. By immersing our neural circuitry in the feeling of things bigger, they elevate our charity and our happiness, spiriting us closer to a scientific Shangri-la.

The literary blueprint for this mind-lifting experience is an extraordinary thing. It might even have made you feel a little burst of wonder yourself. But it’s only half of the extraordinary contained in the Poetics. Because as Aristotle was staking out the theater, studying audiences, he realized that Greek tragedy contained another great invention. And that invention worked very differently from the stretch.

Its function was less spiritual. And more medical.

The Medical Function of Greek Tragedy

When Aristotle went to the theater, he saw that Greek tragedy didn’t just make people feel good. It also made them feel less bad. The feeling good came from enriching the brain with positive experiences such as wonder and hope, while the feeling less bad came from the inverse: emptying the brain of negative experiences like grief and anxiety. Or to use modern psychiatric parlance: the feeling good came from boosted mental well-being, that neural condition of happy thriving where our life reaches its fullest potential, while the feeling less bad came from improved mental health, that psychological foundation for mental well-being—and for normal daily functioning.

Literature can improve our mental health in all sorts of ways, but in the particular case of Greek tragedy, Aristotle emphasized a therapeutic process that he called catharsis. Catharsis is an old doctorly term for purging something unhealthy. And as Aristotle recorded in the Poetics, one something purged by Greek tragedy is fear.

Fear isn’t always bad. In fact, it can be very healthy, steering us away from cliff drops and crocodiles and other perils. But Aristotle noticed that unhealthy fear can build up in our brain when we suffer trauma. That posttraumatic fear, as it’s now termed by modern psychiatrists, is meant to be a form of emotional self-protection; a way of maintaining our distance from the world so that we don’t get harmed again. But its frequent effect is to increase our suffering. It can disrupt our lives with pervasive feelings of helplessness, isolation, and hypervigilance. And it’s often associated with generalized anxiety, anger, and depression. Traumatic fear will be experienced by about 90 percent of us over our lives, and its posttraumatic residue will linger in roughly 10 percent of cases. There’s no universally effective treatment for the residue; different therapies are more or less effective in different individual situations. But over the past two decades, psychiatric studies involving thousands of patients have yielded a pair of unexpected findings.

The first finding is that it can be therapeutic to revisit our memories of the trauma. This psychiatric process, known as autobiographical review, seems counterintuitive and doesn’t always work; some of us find more relief, particularly at first, by instead focusing on forward-looking stress management. But in general, if we imaginatively play back our experience of trauma within a safe and supportive environment, then the “flashbulb” intensity of our remembrance will gradually decrease. This isn’t the same thing as erasing our memory: the trauma will always remain part of our lived experience, kept within the long-term storage of our neural cortex. But autobiographical review can make the memory less emotionally raw and intrusive, receding the trauma into the background of our consciousness, and decreasing our symptoms of helplessness, isolation, and hypervigilance.

The second finding is that it helps to sweep our eyes from side to side while we mentally review the trauma. This curious fact was stumbled upon by the California psychologist Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s, and, at the time, it appeared so random, even magical, that it was regarded warily as a drift into pseudoscience. But recent studies on mice have suggested that side-to-side eye movement may stimulate a small region of our brain, the superior colliculus–mediodorsal thalamus circuit, which is involved in fear attenuation. And eye movement has proved effective enough in clinical trials to produce its own trauma therapy—eye movement desensitizing and reprocessing (EMDR) —that has been formally recommended by the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

As surprising as these findings have been for many modern psychiatrists, versions of both autobiographical review and EMDR were incorporated into ancient Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy encourages us to revisit our past experiences of trauma by staging suicides, murders, and assaults that are interspersed with choral chants such as the ones found in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon:

The law of our world is pain,

the scar that teaches

the hardness of days

and leaves its mark

in every heart.

This chant was first performed in 458 BCE within the Dionysus Eleuthereus, an open-air theater hewn into the south cliff face of Athens’s Acropolis. That rock enclosure turned its back on the city’s marketplaces and legal forums, casting the eyes instead across the honeyed ridges of the Hymettos Mountains and the dolphin wavelets of the Saronic Gulf. So, as the audience sat upon long, curving pinewood benches, surrounded by thousands of neighbors and extended family members, they were prompted to recall their own past hardships—“The law of our world is pain . . . the hardness of days . . . every heart”—in a venue that removed them from life’s daily pressures to enfold them in a greater community of care.

And the audience didn’t just hear the chant of Agamemnon. They saw it too. The chant’s words flowed from the twelve actors of the koros, or “chorus,” a word that now simply means “song,” but which was synonymous in Attic Greek with “dance.” As the Greek warrior Ajax snaps in Homer’s Iliad: “The Trojans are calling us to a fight, not a chorus dance!”

In the case of Greek tragedy, the space for that dance was an ample one. It was situated at the bottom of the Dionysus Eleuthereus in a semicircular area that spanned more than sixty-five feet in diameter. The area was known as the orkestra, or “orchestra,” which in our own age has come, like chorus, to mean a thing of sound. But it translates literally as “dancing place.” To the ancient Greeks, the orchestra was seventeen hundred square feet for choreographed movement back and forth.

When Agamemnon premiered more than twenty-five centuries ago, it therefore gave its audience a chance to experience ancient literary versions of two modern psychiatric treatments for posttraumatic fear. Like autobiographical review, Agamemnon prompted spectators to review their posttraumatic memories in a physically safe and emotionally supportive environment. And like EMDR, the play’s chorus delivered that prompt in a dynamic performance that shifted the eyes left and right. And although we cannot travel back in time to gauge the therapeutic effectiveness of these long-ago treatments, we have been able to observe their healing action on twenty-first-century trauma survivors. Over the past decade, performances of the chorus of Agamemnon and other Greek tragedies have been staged for combat veterans by initiatives such as Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War Productions and Peter Meineck’s Aquila Theatre Company (which places particular emphasis on the side-to-side movement incorporated into EMDR). And in response to these performances, veterans have self-reported a decrease in feelings of isolation, hypervigilance, and other symptoms of posttraumatic fear. Just as Aristotle describes in the Poetics, they’ve undergone an experience of catharsis.

This doesn’t make Greek tragedy a miracle cure; ancient plays such as Agamemnon don’t work automatically, in every case, to lessen post-traumatic fear. But perhaps the most remarkable feature of Greek tragedy is that its historical evolution suggests that its authors were aware of its therapeutic limits—and devised an innovation to address them.

The Innovation for Improving Greek Tragedy’s Therapeutic Effect

The innovation was revealed to modern eyes by a twenty-first-century psychiatric discovery: therapy for posttraumatic fear is more effective when we possess “self-efficacy.”

Self-efficacy is the inner conviction that we can deal successfully with posttraumatic fear, managing and eventually overcoming it. The conviction can be conscious; we might, for example, tell ourselves that unlike trauma, which is an external force that damages, posttraumatic fear is an inner shield flung up by our brain, so that instead of fighting or fleeing its psychic distress, we can calmly acknowledge it as a protective part of our own self. Or the conviction can exist as an unconscious attitude—I’m stronger than this fear—embedded deep within our gray matter, that we feel without articulating. But either way, the conviction is powerful medicine. If we possess self-efficacy, then autobiographical review and EMDR are significantly more likely to work for us. And if we don’t possess it—if we instead suspect in our bones that the pain of posttraumatic fear can harm us permanently in ways that we cannot stop—then the reverse holds true: our process of mentally revisiting trauma through autobiographical review or EMDR can be alarming and even harmful, exacerbating our symptoms instead of alleviating them.

Twenty-five centuries ago, the Greeks seem to have realized this. Because as Greek tragedy evolved, it developed a mechanism for increasing our self-efficacy—a mechanism that’s precisely identified by Aristotle in the Poetics.

Aristotle makes the identification in Poetics 1452a, where he observes that the healing effects of catharsis can be boosted by a specific kind of tragic plot: one where a character suffers trauma but doesn’t acknowledge it until later. Aristotle refers to this belated acknowledgement as anagnorisis. We can call it the “Hurt Delay.”

To illustrate the Hurt Delay, Aristotle turns to Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus. Written three decades after the Agamemnon chorus, the play reveals that Oedipus has fathered children with the lovely Theban widow who birthed him long ago. So catastrophic is this tragedy that it’s now ravaging the whole city of Thebes with plague. Yet Oedipus is completely unaware. He has no idea that he’s wedded his mother, and, in fact, angrily rebuffs a prophet who tries to alert him. It’s only in the play’s final moments that Oedipus sees at last the horror of what he’s already undergone. And with a terrible scream, he acknowledges the devastation that happened years before.

This is a highly intricate structure for a story. It requires the storyteller to construct a way for trauma to strike a character without the character realizing it; hence Sophocles’s use of prophets and prophecies that necessitate a future disaster that Oedipus cannot see. These time-bending devices have often been used in modern classrooms to draw students of Oedipus into contemplating the infinite philosophical labyrinths of fate and free will, but their storytelling purpose is entirely uncomplicated: to place us, the audience, in the position of knowing the trauma before it’s felt.

That position of foreknowledge stimulates a powerful sensation of cosmic irony in the “perspective-taking network” of our brain’s prefrontal cortex, giving us a godlike experience of looking down on Oedipus’s mortal tragedy from above. This God’s-Eye vantage reduces activity in our brain’s deep emotion zones, acting as a neural shock absorber against the traumatic events before us. And it also does something else: it primes us to increase our self-efficacy.

The increase begins at the climactic moment of the Hurt Delay, when Oedipus endures his terrible epiphany. To escape from seeing the horror of what he’s done, Oedipus slams a pair of golden broaches into his eyes, blinding himself. Yet this desperate act doesn’t accomplish its purpose. Instead, Oedipus cries out in agony that he’s been “pierced by memory.” That memory is the deep source of posttraumatic fear, and when its edge cuts Oedipus, it seems to doom him to a life of unending flashbacks. What bodily eyes can perceive no more, the mind’s eye will never forget.

But then, unexpectedly, relief arrives in the form of the chorus, which cries out to Oedipus: “We understand your pain; it’s catastrophe upon catastrophe.” To which Oedipus responds gratefully: “O friend, you are my steadfast care giver still.”

The chorus is able to provide Oedipus with this caregiving respite because its members possess a perspective on his tragedy that he does not. That perspective comes from their own posttraumatic memory, which is revealed when the chorus members first arrive in the orchestra, confessing the fear bred of their painful past. The memory then recurs throughout the play, prompting the chorus to shake as they feel flashbacks ensuing. Until at last, in Oedipus’s terrible time of need, the memory is converted unexpectedly into a source of healing, empowering the chorus to console Oedipus as a fellow trauma survivor: You are not alone.

The Hurt Delay provides us with the same empowerment. By imbuing our brain’s perspective-taking network with an ironic up-aboveness, the Hurt Delay makes us feel as if we’re floating on a higher plane from which we, like the chorus, can see Oedipus’s catastrophe as part of a larger cosmic pattern—and from which we can reach down to Oedipus and lift him up. This neural feeling of being able to support Oedipus is deeply therapeutic: when we experience our ability to assist others through their trauma, we increase our belief in our ability to cope with trauma ourselves. And, in fact, such is the boost to our self-efficacy that, in clinical group-therapy settings, it has been correlated with signifi-cantly higher rates of trauma recovery. So, even though we’re no more able than Oedipus to stop the inevitable, the Hurt Delay strengthens our capacity to manage when the inevitable arrives. Shifting our tragic feeling of helplessness into a psychological sensation of helpfulness, it supplies our brain with a visceral belief in our power to heal.

In the Poetics, Aristotle credits this therapeutic innovation for elevating Greek tragedy to a state of perfection. That’s an overstatement, at least as far as Greek tragedy’s medicinal action is concerned; no work of literature has ever become a universal cure-all. But Aristotle is nevertheless right to claim that the Hurt Delay enhanced Greek tragedy’s cathartic effect, and this fact of medical improvement is the most eye-opening of the many eye-opening details inscribed in the Poetics. It reveals the Greek stage as an experimental laboratory where new literary inventions could be developed. And it establishes Greek tragedy as a wonderwork that stretched to amplify its healing power over time.

Yet despite all this empirical research, ancient and modern, you might still be thinking: Hold on, hold on. I’ve flipped through a Greek tragedy or two. But it didn’t make me feel any better. And now that I think back, I also didn’t find my way to Shangri-la.

If you’re thinking those thoughts, don’t put down this book just yet. You can still reap all the psychic benefits of Greek tragedy. The invention-finding method can show you how.

Using the Method to Reap the Benefits of Literature

Not all our brains work the same. In fact, all our brains work a little bit differently. Some of the differences come from our DNA. Some from our culture. Some from our personal history and individual life choices.

All those differences are good for us as a species; they mean that humanity possesses an immense neural diversity that we can exploit to adapt and grow through changing times and shifting environments. But they do present a problem for our everyday consumption of literature: if we’re each a little bit different, then how can we all appreciate the same poems, novels, TV shows, and plays?

There are two broad answers to this question. The first is that our brain is flexible. Not infinitely flexible; our brain has its limits. But human gray matter has survived by being adaptable, so it’s often able to adapt itself to different kinds of literature.

The second broad answer is that literature, too, is flexible. The same basic literary invention can be deployed in richly varied styles and genres. So, if we’re not able to adapt our mind to literature, then literature is often capable of adapting itself to us.

The invention-finding method can help with both kinds of adaptation:

1.Adapting Our Mind to Literature. By providing us with the blueprints for how literary inventions are meant to operate, the method saves us from interacting with classic poems and plays in the way that we interact with alien technologies: randomly mashing at buttons to see what happens. Instead, we can work in sync with literature, clicking into its circuitry to become an active partner.

In the case of the Hurt Delay, the blueprint guides us to (1) embrace the feeling of ironic God’s-Eye triggered by our foreknowledge of Oedipus’s disaster, (2) reach out with the chorus to affirm Oedipus’s pain, and (3) feel Oedipus’s reciprocal gratitude. If we take these three steps, we can boost Greek tragedy’s cathartic effect.

2.Adapting Literature to Our Mind. By handing us the deep blueprints for literary inventions, the invention-finding method enables us to locate versions of those inventions in contemporary literature that more organically suits our taste.

In the case of the Hurt Delay, there are shelves full of modern novels, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989), to John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012), that contain the time-bending device of a trauma that happens before it’s acknowledged, providing our brain with the lightly empowering feel of cosmic irony. And Greek tragedy’s interactive experience of supporting another living soul through trauma can be found in many moments of modern drama, as when nurse Sue Monahan plays the part of the chorus at the end of Margaret Edson’s Wit (1999), or when Mama Cates makes her lonely phone call in the final moments of Marsha Norman’s ’Night, Mother (1983), or when we turn to the person in the seat next to us at the curtain drop of Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). In all these instances, we’re able to feel another person’s gratitude for our physical presence in their moment of tragedy, dosing ourselves with a neural boost of self-efficacy.

That’s the adaptive power of the method. It can deepen our appreciation for the world’s ancient classics—or direct us toward newer works that have the same psychological benefit, enriching our lives with a vast catalogue of time-tested literary inventions.

Inventions like the Hurt Delay that can improve our mental health.

Inventions like the stretch that can enhance our greater well-being.

The Plan for the Following Chapters

Aristotle was a pragmatist. He viewed literature as a multipurpose tool for making life better. So, this book will be equally pragmatic, expanding the Poetics with a catalogue of twenty-five literary inventions that you can put to work right now.

Some of these inventions target what modern psychiatrists have identified as common forms of mental distress: grief, grudges, pessimism, shame, heartbreak, rumination, reactive thoughts, self-doubt, numbness, loneliness. Some impart what modern psychologists have identified as well-being boosters: courage, love, curiosity, belief, energy, imagination. And some indirectly support our mental health and well-being by nurturing practical life skills: freethinking, problem solving, de-biasing, counterfactual speculating, cognitive flexing, relearning, introspecting.

These benefits are by no means replacements for modern psychiatry. They’re supplements, just as a healthy diet and regular exercise are supplements for doctor visits and blood pressure medications. But no less than the daily food we eat, the daily literature we consume can have significant benefits, and to convey a broad selection of those benefits, each of the following chapters delves into a different literary invention, giving you all three things you need to use it: (1) why the invention matters, (2) how the invention works, and (3) where you can find a copy of the invention for yourself.

The why comes in the form of the invention’s origin story, or in other words, the historical reason that humans developed it. This origin story, like all excursions into history, is a best guess. The invention’s earliest maker may have been lost to record, her creative genius forever hidden in the later songs and stories that we now praise for her discovery. And even when we do have a high degree of certainty about who the first inventor was, there’s inevitably a shroud of mystery around her process of engineering. Was it driven by conscious intention or subconscious intuition? Individual brilliance or cultural inheritance? Careful experiment or happy accident? Sometimes the inventor might have stumbled into one pharmacology while pursuing another; sometimes she might never have realized her invention’s psychological benefits: they may have been uncovered only by later generations. But when the issue lies in doubt, as it almost always does, this book will err on the side of generosity and credit the inventor’s volitional intelligence. By doing so, it will celebrate the undeniable fact of human literary inventiveness, which forms the deeper hero of our story.

The how