One paradox of literary culture is that, although speech precedes literacy, and the mother tongue the alphabet, it is usually the written, not the spoken, word that attracts the most attention. So, for at least 1,000 years, English literature lived on the lips and in the memory of Everyman, handed down in folk culture. Then along came Caxton and his Westminster printing press. We have been eating paper and drinking printer's ink ever since.
The spoken word, however, retains its ancient magic. The market for the audiobook has defied the recession. Poets draw full houses. Last week, in Norwich, I heard JM Coetzee give a memorable reading to a sold-out audience in the Playhouse as part of a lively and popular literary programme. Coetzee's dry, understated performance, mirroring his prose, was a vivid reminder that the spoken word rarely fails to entertain or console.
None of this would have surprised the Greeks. Apollo was God of poetry and healing. Literature does not have to be private and meditative, though that's what is often celebrated about the book. As a communal and collaborative experience, reading can be therapeutic. Increasingly, teachers and health professionals are coming round to the view, expressed by DH Lawrence, that "one sheds one's sickness in books".
The Reader Organisation, a national charity launched in 1997, has promoted its "reading revolution" to firefighters, psychiatrists and schoolteachers, in prisons, rehab centres, hospitals and schools. It's a mission that began in Liverpool after a reading by Doris Lessing. Today, the organisation champions the curative power of reading aloud. According to its director, Jane Davis, research has begun to uncover what most writers would willingly concede: the extraordinary connection between writing, reading and good health.
Davis describes how one of her colleagues had been holding weekly meetings with "Barbara", who was barely literate, and oppressed by a long-term relationship with a "difficult" partner. After each session, Barbara would profess indifference to reading until, one day, she chanced to read WE Henley's celebration of heroic Victorian individualism, "Invictus", ending with the stanza:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
This time, Barbara repeated this passage to herself, unprompted. When asked why she had done this, she confessed that "It makes me feel happy." She is hardly the first. "Invictus", of course, is the poem that sustained Nelson Mandela during his long incarceration on Robben Island, and the title of the recent film, starring Morgan Freeman, about how it inspired him to unite South Africa. Lighter moments in this "reading cure" include an old lady, in a group reading Othello, who asked to take the part of Iago, because "I was married to that bastard for 30 years".
Listening to the spoken word is one of the most profound sources of comfort. The sense of being looked after, nourished and replenished, is like being fed. The listener can relax and place their trust in the reader. The experience is quite unlike reading to oneself. Part of this, claims Davis, comes from "the slowness of the human voice". When we are engaged at the pace of ordinary speech, we don't skip on, we engage with the many levels of meaning in the story. It grows deeper and more real. From this, people start to talk freely about what a text has meant to them – and become liberated in their personal lives.
To promote this programme, the Reader Organisation is about to launch an anthology of prose and poetry, A Little, Aloud, for reading out in one of the hundreds of "read aloud" groups that have been springing up across the UK. It's an eclectic volume, with well-chosen gobbets from Tennyson, Dickens, Saki and Yeats as well as Elizabeth Jennings, Anna Sewell, the Brontes, Louisa M Alcott and Joanne Harris.
"Bibliotherapy" is not yet in the dictionary, but if this campaign takes wing, it might turn out to be a really important breakthrough in the practice of mental health. Words becoming deeds: it's a winning formula.
