When, as a young man, I applied to be an English teacher, I recall being asked during interviews why it was so vital to interest my (hypothetical) charges in literature. I felt obliged to respond with what I intuited were the expected answers: “To teach them human empathy via the medium of prose,” or some such pablum.
But did I really believe this? Personally, the only reason I have ever read books is because I enjoy reading books. De gustibus non disputandum est; matters of taste are beyond dispute (I read that in a book once).
But from looking around, I get the sense this is a minority opinion. Reading, society tells us, must provide utility. Moby Dick or Crime and Punishment are less valuable as aesthetic experiences and more as step-by-step guides to whale hunting and axe murdering, respectively.
Yet in truth, the supposed “life lessons” to be drawn from many works of literature are tenuous indeed. The Invisible Man? Don’t make an invisibility serum. The Time Machine? Don’t build a time machine. Dracula? Don’t befriend Transylvanians. I wasn’t planning on doing any of those things anyway.
The latest work of literature to get this treatment is, ironically, one of the earliest: Homer’s Odyssey, which has been given a new lease on life by Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film.
The Odyssey Mindset: 7 Timeless Lessons for Living, by Oxford classicist turned clinical psychologist Dr. Sam Akbar, purports to “translate the ancient wisdom of Homer’s timeless epic into a reassuring and helpful toolkit for modern life.” Helpful how? In case one day you, too, are embroiled within a long, bitter, and drawn-out war over a convoluted misunderstanding with some Anatolian goddesses about a golden apple?
“Wherever you are on your journey, The Odyssey Mindset will help you navigate the obstacles that life presents,” says the blurb, steering you self-actualizingly between the Scylla of burnout and the Charybdis of chronic back pain, or something.
As the author of earlier works like Stressilient: How To Beat Stress and Build Resilience (based upon The Epic of Gilgamesh) Dr. Akbar is able to divine, like Joseph Campbell crossed with Oprah Winfrey, that The Odyssey is really one gigantic bronze-age metaphor for one’s own inner journey, the ultimate destination of which will be a personal Ithaca. Says Dr. Akbar:
I used to worry that I had taken too long on my Odyssey to find my thing! Now I see how helpful it has been to have a winding path, because it has given me so many different experiences and learning. Every ‘island’ I visited taught me something about what was important to me … I think it’s about assimilating all those different parts of yourself, and knowing that it takes time to get there, just like getting back to Ithaca. I would also add that nothing is really a straight line because that would presuppose you are in control of every outcome. Diversions happen to you whether you like it or not so learn what they tell you about yourself and what is important to you, and try to steer in that direction.
Sounds like driving back home drunk from a holiday with the GPS turned off.
But Dr. Akbar is not alone in her effort to wring modern utility out of this ancient text.
Elsewhere in Britain, Lord Sewell, our race-relations tsar, drew a strained comparison between Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, who had to wait 20 long years for his father to return from his wanderings, and the young boys of our urban dystopias, whose fathers are also frequently absent for long stretches. (Though Odysseus wasn’t doing a 20-year sentence in Belmarsh for armed robbery.)
There are 1.25 million boys in the United Kingdom of Ithaca growing up without a father right now, and one of them, journalist Zack Asgard, leapt at the chance to sell a column to The Times, bemoaning how, raised with an absent father himself, he too was a modern-day Telemachus. With a surname like Asgard, you’d expect his dad to be Thor or Loki, but as the next Marvel film isn’t due out until next summer, he had to go for an Odyssey tie-in.
How precisely was Zack’s old man like Odysseus, then? The 21st century Telemachus explains:
Visiting Sundays were much of a muchness. He would arrive at 11.30am and whistle to announce his arrival. Then we would climb into his car and hit the South Circular [highway] at speed, stopping off at the Tesco [supermarket] near his house to buy a pack of Chesterfield Blue Superking [cigarettes]. Back at his place I would sit on a pillow in front of the TV and watch a pirated DVD. It was usually Men in Black or Men in Black II – sometimes both. We didn’t speak … He would stand by the corner of the room smoking a thousand cigarettes … On warmer days, we’d walk down the high street. He would point at the gadgets in the shop windows and ask ‘Would you like that?’ I would nod. ‘Great,’ he would say. ‘Get your mother to buy it.’ That was our routine.”
Yes, but did he ever kill a Cyclops?
I wish I could say this craze was restricted to Homer. But our own national bard comes in for it too.
There has been a recent debate in Great Britain about the purpose of schooling: should it emphasize academic or vocational pursuits? One retired English teacher wrote in to The Times expressing skepticism that all the hours she spent teaching Shakespeare to catatonic schoolgirls who only ever wished to leave school and become florists, hairdressers or mothers, had been anything other than wasted.
Repelled by such sentiments, another reader wrote back, educating Times readers that, in fact, Shakespeare’s works held “valuable insights into each of their career choices”, as “his plays include more than 100 botanical references” for florists, and several “powerful depictions of motherhood, including that of Lady Macbeth” (who isn’t a mother during the play, and who famously fantasizes about bashing any hypothetical baby’s brains out). As for hairdressers, the correspondent explains, Bottom at one points utters the line “methinks I am marvelous hairy about the face” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How’s that going to help someone wield a pair of fringe-scissors?
Still, I thought, at least he isn’t recommending trainee doctors read Shakespeare to learn how to perform surgery. Then I read his letter’s signature: “Dr David Jeffrey, Author, How Shakespeare Inspires Empathy in Clinical Care.”
Looking him up, I find Dr. Jeffrey has crafted an entire sideline in penning academic treatises urgently urging that modules in reading Shakespeare be added to UK medical degree courses. Why? Because he can “teach them empathy”, supposedly, the same clichéd stock answer fib I parroted when asked why I wanted to teach kids literature several decades ago. Specifically, Dr. Jeffrey indicates Shakespeare touched upon various palliative care matters during his plays. Here, for instance, he discusses voluntary euthanasia in King Lear:
When King Lear dies, Edgar steps forward to revive him, but Kent stops him, ‘Vex not his ghost; O, let him pass. He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer’.
“Doctors need ‘narrative competency’ to allow them to interact with the patient in a joint process of making sense of their stories of suffering,” says Dr. Jeffrey, to justify all this. I’d rather my own doctor had spent his days reading Grey’s Anatomy than Gray’s Elegy, personally. Otherwise I might end up lying forgotten far from the madding crowd buried in a churchyard too.
I remember one amiably empty-headed girl I taught, who only wanted to leave school to become a cake-decoratrix. She loved doodling pictures and words onto bits of sponge with icing, was actually good at it (apart from the spelling), and had a job lined up waiting for her when she finally turned 16, doing just this, with a family friend.
But, in the meantime, she had to endure two more years of her life with me, reading The Tempest. By Dr. Jeffrey’s logic, I could surely have transformed her cosmic levels of boredom and incomprehension at this task into raptures of purest intrigue, simply by pointing out that, as one fascinating website all about The Bard and Buns details:
Touchstone in As You Like It and the Clown in All’s Well talk about pancakes, Doll Tearsheet tells us that Pistol lives on ‘mouldy stew’d prunes and dried cakes’, Pistol mentions ‘wafer-cakes’, and Dromio of Ephesus talks about cakes in The Comedy of Errors. Hugh Otecake and Alice Shortcake are mentioned by comic characters in Much Ado About Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor respectively.
At which point, the little girl would have baked me and Dr. Jeffrey a very special cake, iced over on top with a short two-word phrase, distinctly less than Shakespearean in its diction, which cannot be reproduced here.
It’s pointless trying to persuade or trick people who just don’t enjoy books into reading them by glibly lying how there are loads of cakes in Shakespeare/cats in The Great Gatsby/donuts in Buddenbrooks/quad bikes in Middlemarch/Ewoks in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, or by saying that memorizing The Iliad will somehow teach them how to overcome their childhood stutter or repair their broken vacuum-cleaner.
People who like to read, should. People who don’t like to read, shouldn’t.
The End.
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