Please Read Carefully: The Pharmacology of Fiction

This contribution offers a close reading of a painting by Swiss artist Albert Anker (1831–1910). The painting—‘Grandfather’s Devotion’—pictures a reading scene in which a young boy (the grandson) reads aloud to an old man (the grandfather). In Anker’s original conception of the scene, the book that the young boy holds in his hands would in all likelihood have been a religious volume, the reading of which evokes the devotional practice to which the title of the work alludes. In my analysis of the painting, however, I want to shift the scene slightly and imagine that the book is a novel. In doing so, I want to reflect on the relationship between reading and care that underlies many contemporary discussions of the importance of literature to medical and health humanities. By means of a comparison of the scene that Anker pictures with that underlying Marcel Proust’s essay ‘On Reading’, I want to suggest that we see ‘Grandfather’s Devotion’ as the representation of a form of ‘vulnerable reading’ (Arthur Frank). At the same time, I want to suggest that we keep open the possibility that in this case the object of the old man’s devoted attention is a pharmakon and that, therefore, the act of reading may do harm as well as bring relief.