Novel therapy

By Vithal C Nadkarni

As he scribbled away to crank up masterpieces such as La Comédie humaine, French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac consumed prodigious amounts of black coffee. The workaholic claimed to have gone on a 48-hour binge once with barely three hours of rest in the middle. Not the best of lifestyles to emulate, for, Balzac collapsed and died before his 52nd birthday. But the Master’s oeuvre lies in a therapeutic class of its own if one were to believe the prospectus of the newly-set-up The School of Life in Bloomsbury.

Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, colleagues of the writer-founder Alain de Botton, say their belief in the curative powers of the novel led them to set up aformal bibliotherapy service “for life’s ailments”.

Non-fiction is out. This ostensibly rules out therapeutic classics such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible. The bibliotherapists prescribe daily doses of fiction, instead, which is touted as “the purest and best form of bibliotherapy”. Their “Novel Cure” (pun intended) advertises an apothecary that contains “Balzacian balms, Tolstoyan tourniquets, not to forget salves of Saramago and the purges of Perec and Proust”; never mind if these novel nostrums were invented by DWMs (Dead White Males).

Like antibiotics, which supposedly work uniformly regardless of boundaries of colour, class and creed, literature as therapy is supposed to unite humanity traducing all divisions. As for “patients” who cannot access Queen’s English, patience is the prescribed virtue: anew generation of drugs in the form of translation therapy is awaited.