Where does your next book come from? You’ve been going along with a set of ideas about your chosen field, ideas that you learned in graduate school, ones that pretty much conform to your understanding and experience of your discipline. You’ve written papers and articles in accordance with those ideas, and structured your classes to reflect them. You are a well-trained, high-functioning academic.
Then one day, your students say something so off-the-wall that your jaw just drops. When you come to this juncture, you have two choices. You can retreat to the faculty club and talk about how kids today just don’t get it, or you can plunge into the weirdness your students put in front of you and see where it takes you.
I started teaching English 13 years ago. I begin almost every course the same way: I ask my students to introduce themselves by talking about a book they read and enjoyed over the summer. The range of titles people mention creates a literary map on which we can then situate the works we’ll read in the coming term. The way students explain what motivated them to choose a certain book, and what excited them about reading it, puts in place a critical vocabulary that we can refine and develop over the semester.
A few years ago I began to notice a pattern in my students’ summer reading. A surprising number of plots (particularly, but not exclusively, in the novels chosen by female students) centered on family trauma and tragedy and the protagonist’s struggle to overcome it. I chalked this up to the persistent appeal of 19th-century sentimentalism, which was just then experiencing a glossy renaissance at the hands of Oprah’s Book Club. At the same time, what seemed to motivate and please my students most in their reading was a protagonist they could “identify” with -- one whose struggles were narrated in such a way that they could find themselves in her story, and learn from what she learned. If they couldn’t “relate,” they weren’t interested.
Neither those plots nor that mode of reading matches my own taste in summer reading (I prefer graphic novels and cooking magazines), but there are worse places from which to begin trying to motivate students to think about literature. At least they had read books and liked them. Summer suns rose and set over the nation’s beaches, but my students’ critical rubric -- not only their criteria for what made a book “good,” but also their notions of how to read a “good” book -- remained fairly constant.
Then one fall day came the moment of epiphany. My “Introduction to Fiction” class was discussing Wuthering Heights, specifically the scene in which Heathcliff tells Nelly Dean he has removed the side plank of Cathy’s casket, so that he might “sleep the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers.” With great solemnity (and not the slightest awareness of punning) one student announced that this symbolized Heathcliff’s “boundary issues.”
The can of therapeutic jargon opened, and all manner of well-meaning concern poured out. Heathcliff and Cathy were a “dysfunctional” couple who “victimized” one another. Their dysfunction was not surprising, though, because as children they had both been “abused” by Mr. Earnshaw, and “survivors” of such a “toxic family” frequently form “codependent” relationships. Couples therapy, a support group, and perhaps Prozac would have helped the benighted lovers recover from their early traumas and learn to form “healthy” relationships; it was a shame, the class concluded, that they didn’t have those remedies available to them in their premodern world.
That casual interpretive stance revealed by my casual summer-reading survey did not register at the artless default setting. It was, in fact, a full-blown hermeneutic, an interpretive practice underwritten by a complete worldview and replete with its own jargon. Only, what I was hearing was not literary-critical jargon -- not the aesthetic vocabulary of the New Criticism, nor the materialist terminology of cultural studies, nor even the rarefied language of psychoanalytic interpretation. It was the language of pop psychology, specifically of the 12-step-recovery movement.
How had the late-20th-century discourse of addiction and codependency become so powerful that its strictures could determine the meaning of an early 19th-century novel? What attraction did that language hold for a classroom full of fresh-faced adolescents? And did it have the same appeal for the American reading public as a whole?
Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935; Al-anon, the first codependency support group, came into being in 1951 to meet the needs of the wives of alcoholics in A.A. (it is now open to all “family and friends of alcoholics”). Both groups are built on the 12 steps devised by A.A. founder Bill Wilson. These include admitting that alcoholism is a disease over which the alcoholic is powerless, and subsequently turning one’s life over to the guidance of a higher power.
During the 1970’s, groups like Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, and Codependents Anonymous (to name just a few) adopted the 12 steps, substituting various addictive substances and relationships for the alcohol at the center of the original model.
In the 1980’s, the expansion of what some saw as the recovery movement’s “victim mentality” was so rapid and pervasive that the movement drew scornful fire from leftand right-wing critics alike. Despite those critiques, the number of people involved in 12-step programs has continued to grow. Although the groups’ policies of anonymity and nonprofessionalism make it impossible to gauge precisely how many people today are active 12-steppers, A.A. counts almost two million members and 99,000 meetings worldwide, while the established codependency programs mentioned above collectively estimate they have 31,000 groups meeting today.
As the media critic Elayne Rapping points out in The Culture of Recovery, however, more important than the raw membership statistics of 12-step programs is the extent to which recovery has flowed into American cultural -- especially literary -- life. The 12-step narrative of trauma, struggle, and finally “acceptance” and “forgiveness” has come to structure the plots of literary, filmic, and televisual narratives at every level of sophistication. David Foster Wallace’s postmodern behemoth Infinite Jest explores the complexities of A.A. along with film theory, competitive tennis, and calculus. Two Pulitzer Prize winners in the last decade -- Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News -- as well as countless memoirs and lesser fictions feature protagonists reckoning with childhood sexual abuse. And even the most desultory hour of channel-surfing will reveal, with mind-numbing definitiveness, that stories of compulsion, abuse, addiction -- and triumphant recovery from same -- are the bread and butter of quality dramas and “reality-based programming” on network and cable TV alike. I had assumed that it was a quirk of late-adolescent taste or, occasionally, personal experience, that drew my students to tales of survival and recovery; in actuality, it seems they have just been reading what the market has to offer.
It’s not surprising to find that popular culture is providing writers with ideas for plots. But as my class on Wuthering Heights so unambiguously demonstrated, the recovery movement is also teaching nascent readers how to be audiences. Like classrooms or churches, both of which they resemble, 12-step programs lay out protocols for interpretation -- some subtle, some explicit. The anonymity at the heart of the recovery movement means that, like a good New Critic, we take a story as we find it, without digging around for biographical, material, or historical context. In addition, we must listen to the anonymous story without judging, since the spiritual basis for recovery is predicated on the idea that no one really knows what’s right for anyone else -- or for himself or herself, for that matter. Only a higher power knows.
Individually, those tenets seem profoundly alienating; on what grounds can people actually come to know one another? The key to connection lies in the phrase familiar to every English teacher: “I can relate to that.” Through gut-level identification, you can see yourself in someone else’s story, and vice versa, because of a felt spiritual or psychological kinship that transcends life specifics or the lack of them. This noncritical identification provides the basis for the unconditional love that 12-step fellowships offer their members. The same identification is the point of departure for most modern reading.
Obviously, the recovery plot and interpretive principles are present in their purest forms in the formal meetings of 12-step groups, but both seem to have passed relatively -- shockingly -- undiluted into the culture at large. And it’s not merely well-intentioned young students who follow this hermeneutic bent. Somewhat like an addict myself (or at least like a good old-fashioned paranoiac), once I began to look for the 12-step sensibility, I saw it everywhere.
My students are merely the tip of an iceberg of enthusiastic, nonprofessional readers. Watch an episode of Oprah’s Book Club, or look at the fan bulletin board for the best-selling Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, for example, and you see the same interpretive habits and desires at work. The solemn diagnostic reading of Wuthering Heights that spilled out into my class is only one example of a therapeutic sensibility that currently governs literary interpretation and, increasingly, literary production.
Here’s where your next book comes from. First your jaw drops at something in class, then you decide to figure it out: how it happened, what it means, and why -- or whether -- it’s important. The 12-step recovery narrative has moved into the culture at large because it has been adopted by two powerful professions: psychology and publishing. Cultural and medical historians have a great story to tell us about how an explicitly religious ideology with its roots in 19th-century mysticism became comfortably ensconced within the modern medical establishment (see Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky’s The Truth About Addiction and Recovery, Peele’s The Diseasing of America, and Stephanie Brown’s Treating the Alcoholic: A Developmental Model of Recovery). But how that same doctrine came to be a part of contemporary book culture is a riddle for literary historians to solve.
Part of the answer lies in what I’ve sketched out here -- the compelling narrative and interpretive rubrics that recovery culture offers. But those formal elements are intertwined with the precarious economics of late-20th-century publishing. Since the late 60’s, changing business practices have made profitable self-help books a more important -- and legitimate -- piece of the literary scene than ever before. Recovery literature lends itself easily to lucrative spinoff merchandise: the workbooks, calendars, audiotapes, journals, videos, and so on that increasingly drive synergistic marketing strategies. And in a saturated book market, in which getting the product’s name before the consumer’s eye means everything, recovery-related titles have a distinct advantage. Because they speak to social issues -- obesity, drug addiction, child abuse, domestic relationships -- they can make their way out of the book-review section, into so-called news, and from there to the bestseller list.
So we can see that recovery thought has moved into literary culture, but what does that fact mean? It means that our national literary culture is responsive to social and cultural change. Recovery-inflected literature is a new incarnation of the culture commonly known as “middlebrow,” which appeared at the end of the 19th century with the growth of an economy based on knowledge work and conspicuous consumption.
Back then, middle-class anxiety resulted from the altitude sickness brought on by quick upward movement: Can I pass as a part of the culture into which I have ascended? Middlebrow culture assuaged that fear. Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf of Books, the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the like distilled “culture” into manageable sizes and shapes. Anxious members of the new middle class consumed them eagerly, and learned from them how to appear culturally competent before a judgmental world.
Like that original model, the new middlebrow culture offers a way to cope with status anxiety, with consumer society, with the pace and diversity of contemporary life. But it’s a different coping strategy, because here at the turn of the 21st century, we’re fatigued by those things and, if we’re sensible, more than a little frightened by the way they play out in our daily lives. The recently soaring fortunes of dot-commers notwithstanding, middle-class anxiety today has a somewhat different flavor than it did 100 years ago. Members of the postindustrial middle class are more likely to move down than up, and to suffer from what Barbara Ehrenreich has called “fear of falling.” Literary culture has absorbed 12-step philosophy in order to speak to that reality.
For addicts, whatever their devil happens to be -- alcohol, food, sex -- is a tangible poison to be overcome. For nonaddicts, however, the particular addictions live as metonyms, small, concrete images that stand for an enormous, abstract reality: the amorphous and ubiquitous, seductive and relentless world of late-capitalist consumer culture. For addict and nonaddict alike, recovery’s model of self-in-the-world makes perfect sense. It can explain a physiological addiction or simply today’s human condition, since both are structurally similar. You feel alone in a world that seems out of control; you know that your pleasures are at some level destructive; you are appalled by the fact that you cannot imagine -- much less enact -- any alternative. How can you break the pattern?
Unlike the original, this new middlebrow culture does not offer shortcuts through or end runs around the looming monster of modern life. It does not teach its middle-class adherents how to keep from falling. Instead, it suggests that they embrace their fall. Its method is not “empowerment,” but “powerlessness,” and its reward is not the ersatz glitter of success, but the cooling serenity of relief.
Although plenty of commentators noted its flaws, the original middlebrow culture had a public and deeply pragmatic purpose. It taught its arriviste adherents how to penetrate modernity and succeed within it. Its new incarnation offers just the opposite: a lesson in, and a rationalization for, an escape from the public life of scrutiny, competition, and travail. Recovery champions a retreat into the private self, and that makes it a troubling phenomenon to most progressive social critics. Its narratives ignore the possibility that there are socioeconomic causes for human unhappiness, and rely instead on organic-sounding explanations like “disease,” “dysfunction,” and “toxic family.” They depict ways to withdraw (“let it go”), and give lessons in how to ameliorate pain (“accept,” “forgive”). There can be no doubt that they respond to the social crises of the moment, and offer relief from them, but they seem to have little to say about solving them.
In that last point lies the answer to the final questions that drive your new book:
Is this phenomenon important? If so, why? If the recovery movement, with its fixation on the personal and emotional at the expense of the public and the social, has become the new middlebrow culture of the 21st century, so what? What can we possibly have to learn from its apparent narcissism, its emotionalism, its sentimental banality? Can anything useful be retrieved from a realm of culture that seems not merely anti-intellectual, but also, in the end, just downright hokey?
Yes, something can be retrieved, and yes, it is important that we retrieve it. This new middlebrow literature -- and its readers -- articulate a utopian longing for a kind of satisfaction and fulfillment that our modern world sorely lacks. Obviously, then, this literary culture is interesting as a critique of that world. But ultimately it’s the mode of the critique -- the spe-cific names it gives to the gaps and shortcomings of our culture and the concrete images it uses to depict the gaps being filled and redressed -- that is the most compelling aspect of the phenomenon. The new middlebrow culture imagines a world made whole again by love -- that’s the downright hokey part. But that very hokiness, I think, articulates a rich and strange critique of modern culture, one that differs in interesting and useful ways from those that usually resound within the walls of the ivory tower. If academics could plumb that sentiment, rather than dismissing it out of hand, we might enrich both our understanding of modernity and our ability to critique it.
Can literary scholarship reckon with the language of acceptance, forgiveness, and unconditional love? Can scholars of literature take seriously the cultural forces that have brought those terms, rather than a scholarly language of aesthetics and politics, into the foreground of readers’ critical vocabularies, and thus into the fabric of their lives?
We need to. If we begin to discern the nature of this literature, and of readers’ relationships to it, we can become better critics, and better teachers. More important, though, we might begin to break down a centuries-old divide between intellect and emotion, a binary that structures not only our scholarship, but also our valuations of male and female identity, and of public and private life.
For many years now, I’ve taken my students’ love for their summer books as a good starting place; my plan has always been to move them from an affective to an intellectual response, from loving a text to understanding it. What I didn’t consider was that loving might be a way of understanding, not merely a precursor to it. How that works, I’m still not exactly sure. When I find out, well, that’s where my next book will come from.
Trysh Travis is an assistant professor of English at Southern Methodist University. She is at work on two books, Reading Matters: Books, Book Men, and the American Century and Recovery and Reading: The New Middlebrow Culture.
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