Please Read Carefully: The Pharmacology of Fiction

Abstract

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.

1. A Painting

‘now when you read a book how is it’

Gertrude Stein, ‘Plays’

(Stein 1971, p. 63)

The painting that I want to take as the point of departure for this contribution is entitled ‘Grandfather’s Devotion’—‘Die Andacht des Grossvaters’ in the native German of the artist who made it. The work measures 63 by 92 centimetres. It hangs in the Kunstmuseum in Bern, the capital of Switzerland. Shades of brown, blue, and yellow are dominant, in the lightest possible variations that give it a warm softness that suits the depicted scene very well. The scene is fairly easy to summarise: an old man is reclined in a resting chair, propped up by pillows that support both his back and head. He looks peaceful enough, as he appears to be listening to a boy, who is sitting next to him on a regular chair. The boy is reading to the old man from a book. The title of the painting not only wants us to assume that the old man is the boy’s grandfather but also that the book which the boy clutches tightly in his hands is either the Bible (Gerber-Visser 2010, p. 60) or another text that requires the practice of devotional reading that the artist wanted his work to represent.

The painting dates from 1893; it is by Swiss painter Albert Anker (1831–1910), who was mainly active in the last decades of the 19th century. A student of Reformed Theology in Bern and Halle, Anker served as a member of the Church Council in his native Ins (Huggler 1977). As a painter, he specialised in realistic scenes of the idealist kind (Frehner 2003; Bhattacharya-Stettler et al. 2010). Clearly, this is the case here as well: the painting shows not just something that is, but something that ideally could be, that should be, possibly. Much of Anker’s work is set in a rural community that is faced by the threat of its culture’s disappearance in a slowly but steadily industrialising society. While Anker’s work is unmistakenly of its time, many commentators feel that from our present perspective, there is an all too nostalgic feeling to it. The stories that his paintings are meant to tell evoke a past that just barely lives on in the painter’s present but which the artist, like the characters that he depicts, would rather not see lost (Tobler 2020; Bütler 2023).

Anker also painted quite a few child portraits (Frehner et al. 2024), which some critics have related to contemporary pedagogical ideals (Gennari 2011; Gerber-Visser 2010) and the influence of the Swiss Protestant thinker Alexandre Vinet. In this particular work, however, the central focus is not only on the child, but also (and possibly even more so) on the elderly man with whom the boy shares the scene. The man’s folded hands are resting in his lap: they are to be taken, I assume, as a sign of the calm concentration that, based on the painting’s title, Anker expects us to attribute to him: they showcase the specific form of attention that the old man’s ‘devotion’ requires. ‘Everyone knows what attention is’, William James (1842–1910) writes in his famous definition of the phenomenon in chapter 11 of his Principles of Psychology. James’ book was published three years before Anker made his painting. The philosopher and the painter are near contemporaries—the latter is eleven years older than the former, but they share the year in which they both died. Here is James’ definition of ‘attention’: ‘It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German’ (James 2019, pp. 403–4; see also Cohen 2013, p. 1; Wu 2014, pp. 3–4).

Attention is the opposite of indifference, dejection, boredom, depression, lethargy: these are all states of mind that are marked by a lack of attention, the loss of attention even. And reading, so we keep hearing a lot lately—the sort of reading that literature in particular requires, focused reading, attentive reading—may help us in regaining that quality that in the Western part of the world we seem more and more in danger of losing. In Anker’s original conception of the painting, the reading of devotional texts served as the self-evident tool to ward off the dangers of dejection and to instil in readers the rewards of deep attention. In her contradistinction between ‘deep’ and ‘hyper’ variants of attention, N. Katherine Hayles typically associates the former with the reading of a novel or another longer work of fiction (Dickens and Austen are her prime examples), the latter with playing a video game. Deep attention, Hayles writes, requires us to ‘concentrat[e] on a single object for long periods (…), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged’, whereas hyper attention ‘is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom’ (Hayles 2007, p. 187).

At a first glance, though, the grandfather in the painting does not necessarily look as deeply attentive as the work’s title would have us believe. Indeed, if the work’s title were missing, we might as well be led to believe that the old man is lost in thoughts of his own, thoughts that prevent him from paying attention to the young boy sitting next to him. His posture might even be taken as that of someone who, for whatever reason, has lost all interest in life and on account of that has forsaken all attention. In that reading of the image, the old man might be taken as an icon of the psychoanalytical concept of ‘aphanisis’, the loss of desire. In his book Attention Seeking, Adam Phillips connects the term to the work of his fellow countrymen Ernest Jones, for whom ‘aphanisis’ was related primarily to the loss of sexual appetite (Phillips 2019, pp. 6–7). Phillips takes it in a more general sense—the loss of any interest and any form of desire, of the will to live. In such a reading of the painting, the use of the book that the young boy brings to his grandfather—whether it be for entertainment, instruction or the mere passing of time—would be of little or no value. The book would fail to be noticed, its presence absolutely worthless.

Obviously, this is not the sort of reading that I want to put forward in this essay, in the remainder of which I want to acknowledge the importance of reading as a practice of care. But I do want to point out—for reasons that will become clearer in the course of what follows—that the image itself does allow for an interpretation that refuses to take for granted the self-evidence of the values of reading that, on first sight, we are tempted to take as the artist’s central message. Let us return to the painting itself. The grandfather’s eyes are focused on a spot that appears to be located somewhere above or next to his hands but which in reality is clearly further away, at a distance, a place from another world even. In the small idealised universe of the painting as Anker meant it to be seen, the old man cannot obviously be blamed for a lack of attention. Fortunately, the attention that the act of reading demands is basically never focused on the immediate reality in which we engage in that activity. It remains hard to say, though, to what, to whom, or to where the grandfather’s attention is directed. Is he really paying attention to what his grandson is saying, or are his thoughts elsewhere? The question is impossible to answer. After all, the attention of reading always lies ‘elsewhere’—by definition even. It focuses on the world that the book evokes before our mind’s eye and that on the basis of the book’s miraculous powers we make our own while reading. It is on that world that the grandfather’s attentive gaze can be said to focus. His attention is not on the book (his external eyes do not even perceive the book in the literal sense of that word), but the internal eye of his mind, in my reading of the image, is clearly focused on processing what the book from which his grandson is reading to him has to offer him.

2. ‘Good Reading’

The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk (winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature that was only awarded in 2019) has recently aptly described the miraculous process of reading in a beautiful essay in which she reflects on the history of her own reading practice: ‘Every time we open a book’, she writes, ‘between the eye and the surface of the paper a kind of miracle happens, something special. We see rows of letters, and when we glance over them, our brains turn them into images, thoughts, smells, voices’ (Tokarczuk 2023, pp. 88–89, my translation). This may be most evident in the case of the boy in Anker’s painting, but the miracle Tokarczuk talks about also occurs in the case of his grandfather, who, although he does not see the letters of the book, will have an auditory experience of them. As you know, we can also read with our ears, some of us even with our fingers.

‘Of all animal species, only man has acquired this uncanny ability’, Tokarczuk writes, ‘to read, and thereby leave his own reality—mentally and for some time’ (Tokarczuk 2023, p. 88, my translation). That thought, too, seems to apply to the old man in the painting. His thoughts are clearly elsewhere, but they do not take the form of the ‘scatter-brained’ experience that William James saw as the opposite of attention in his book. On the contrary, the grandfather’s thoughts in this scene are held together in the supreme form of concentration required by reading, which his gaze shows in concert with his hands. His reading grandson is no less attentive, but the lad’s attention is clearly focused more on the letters themselves than on what they are supposed to evoke. His gaze equally expresses supreme concentration, but at the same time the apprehension that there are words ahead that will be new to him. His hands show it too: the fingers clasping the book are more tense than strictly necessary. Of course, a reading error is easily made: could it be that the little boy is a novice reader and that the painting, in part, also pictures a pedagogical scene that highlights the importance of literacy in the development of one’s personality (Gerber-Visser 2010, p. 62)?

‘In moments of agitation and stress, we do not read’, Tokarczuk writes in the same essay from which I just quoted (Tokarczuk 2023, p. 89, my translation). For this reason, the scene that Anker painted is also a scene of absolute calm, a calm that, incidentally, does not exclude the activity that supports attentive reading; in fact, it goes perfectly with it. ‘Reading’, Tokarczuk continues, is ‘the privilege of a healthy, balanced mind’ (Tokarczuk 2023, p. 89, my translation), and if those words also apply to the painting, then ‘The grandfather’s attention’ shows a good, healthy form of reading—what Heidegger in his short 1954 essay on reading labelled ‘das eigentliche Lesen’, ‘the authentic reading’ in John Sallis’ translation (Heidegger 1993, p. 2). In its absence, Heidegger claims, we will not be able ‘to see what has us in sight nor to gaze upon any appearance or semblance.’ ‘Authentic reading’, Heidegger claims, ‘is a gatheredness (Sammlung) to that which, unbeknown to us, has already claimed our essence, regardless of whether we comply with it or withhold from it’ (Heidegger 1993, p. 2).

What Heidegger calls ‘authentic reading’, Tokarczuk labels ‘good reading’, a form of reading that, as she puts it, ‘involves actually understanding and living through what you read’ (Tokarczuk 2023, p. 89). The title of Anker’s painting underlines the thought: we misunderstand the old man’s gaze if we see it as murky or absent. That this grandfather needs to be read to is at most the result of impaired vision, not of an unclear mind. Which book exactly the grandson is reading from, it is impossible to say, even though the title of the painting, as I said earlier, points in the direction of a religious text. However, for the sake of the argument that follows, I would like to shift the scene slightly (in a way that still fits the image itself, I believe) and imagine that what the young boy is reading is not a religious text, but a novel, a work of fiction that succeeds in keeping the grandfather’s attentive imagination awake.

‘Grandfather’s Devotion’ is not only a scene centred on good reading. It connects the activity to the other central topic of what follows: reading and care, reading as care—irrespective, actually, of whether the book that the young boy is reading from is religious or fictional. In American political scientist Joan Tronto’s widely accepted definition, four overlapping aspects of the disposition and practice of caring stand out: (1) ‘caring about, noticing the need of care in the first place’; (2) ‘taking care of, assuming responsibility for care’; (3) ‘care-giving, the actual care of work that needs to be done’; (4) ‘care-receiving, the response of that which is cared for to care’ (Tronto 2005, p. 252; see also Fisher and Tronto 1990; Tronto 1993). In other words, to care implies to care about someone, mentally assisting that person, actually giving that person care and doing so with a clear eye on the person for whom the care is intended. Care, in other words, is not a mere mental attitude: something has to be done if you want to take care of somebody. And it is certainly not a practice primarily aimed at easing one’s own conscience.

To understand the scene depicted by Anker as a scene of care is not at all far-fetched, I assume. The young boy’s reading in the presence of his grandfather can quite easily be seen an act of care in the provisional definition that Tronto gives of the phenomenon. To the four aspects of care that she distinguishes, Tronto links four characteristics that the caregiver must possess in order to provide good care—‘four ethical elements of care’, Tronto calls them (Tronto 2005, p. 252). The good caregiver must be attentive (‘attentiveness’), responsible (‘responsibility’), skilled (‘competence’), and focused on the other (‘responsiveness’). As it happens, the same thing could be said about the good reader, who, if that is indeed the aspiration, needs to pay close attention to what the text is actually saying as opposed to what the reader would want it to say. The good reader will also conceive of this attention to the text as a form of responsibility, the responsibility of not simply deciding for themselves what they think the text is saying. Third, the good reader will need to be skilled to make a distinction between what the text actually has on offer and what less good readers will think it has on offer, skills in the detection, for instance, of figurative language and formal questions related to meaningful elements in the construction of the narrative. And, finally, the good reader will exercise these skills in the conviction that this is what the text—the good text—wants them to do and what the text deserves. And good readers—as all of you good readers out there will know—will derive some satisfaction from that, reading pleasure combined with some measure of pride in a job well done.

The young boy in the painting, reading while caring for his grandfather, has the first two qualities that Tronto singles out in abundance. The boy realises that he is not only doing his grandfather a service but also doing him a great favour. He presumably knows that his grandfather loves books, that he needs (possibly now more than ever) the imaginative activity that reading is for him and that he can no longer actively perform the activity himself—due to weakened eyesight, possibly. He is thus attentive to his grandfather’s care needs and also assumes his responsibility. If we look at the painting from the perspective of Tronto’s first ethical requirement, it becomes plausible that its title can also be read differently—in its English translation at least. The meaning of ‘grandfather’s devotion’ is not necessarily limited to what I initially suggested—it may refer not only to the devotion of the grandfather as in ‘by the grandfather’ (in which we limit our attention to the old man), it may also be read as ‘the devotion to the grandfather’, in which the grandfather is the object of the genitive case rather than its subject (in this alternative reading, the focus is on the young boy who is devoted to his grandfather and attentive to the old man’s needs).

Whether the young boy possesses the necessary competence to care for his grandfather (Tronto’s third characteristic) is up for debate, as I already suggested. The question is whether his age allows him to be the most competent reader that his grandfather could wish for. Indeed, the lad seems particularly attentive to the letters in the book, which he reproduces in supreme concentration. The apron that he is wearing may be taken to signal that he takes his reading task as seriously as the other manual chores that are expected of him and that clearly left their trace on it. Still, whether his reading aloud has the intended effect on his grandfather (Tronto’s fourth characteristic) does not immediately seem to be his main concern. He may be a novice reader, as I said, and therefore not the best possible one to provide the specific form of care that reading may offer.

For us to be able to speak of good care, Tronto argues, the four elements of care practice must interact well and come together in an integrated way. However, this does not necessarily mean that all responsibility should rest on the shoulders of the caregiver: care, Tronto stresses, can never simply be reduced to a dyadic relationship between two individuals, the person giving the care and the person receiving it (Tronto 1993, p. 103). Practices of care always take place in a specific context to which caregiver and the person cared for belong, and it may involve other agents/actors that are instrumental in the procurement of care. In the specific care situation depicted in Albert Anker’s painting, care involves not only the two characters who are portrayed, but also the book that the young boy holds in his hands. As you can see, the book is in between the two characters, in the central, transitional space that brings them together and separates them at the same time (the space is also occupied by what I take to be a spoon and a cup of coffee, which in our contemporary imaginary of the reading of literature can easily be integrated in such a framework. If reading is often said to be a practice of consolation, so in my language is the drinking of coffee—in Dutch, a cup of coffee is also called a ‘cup of consolation’).

3. Proust on Reading

That books can be more than just another inert instrument of care, an in itself passive technology designed to alleviate and/or make more efficient the task of the caregiver, has been argued for since the Renaissance, the Italian literary scholar Lina Bolzoni writes in a recently translated book on the art of reading in early modern Europe. Already at the time of the great humanists, books were supposed, as Bolzoni writes, ‘[to] have a profound impact on the individual using them (or being used by them), to the extent that they transform expectations, abilities, and emotions and consequently affect the brain itself’ (Bolzoni 2023, p. 2). Authors such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Montaigne and Tasso borrow this idea from the classics, for whom dealing with prominent texts was a practice of care anyway, a practice of what the Romans called the ‘cura animarum’, care of the soul. The early humanists adapted this classical framework to the religious convictions underlying their Christian worldview, as Kathy Eden and numerous other scholars of the period have shown (Eden 2001). Among early modern humanists, this book-fuelled soul-care became the subject of a dialogue they felt they could have with the absent, classical authors of the texts they read. Such a dialogue with someone else who is not really there but is nevertheless made present in the reading Bolzoni labels in the title of her book A Marvelous Solitude. The wonder lies in the fact that while the reader appears to be alone, this is not really the case. In the solitary activity of reading, the reader allows another voice inside himself that offers a new perspective. The reader addresses himself, as it were, with words that come from elsewhere, from the book he has read. He is alone with his book, but without really being alone. I also see the grandfather in Anker’s painting in light of this ‘wonderful solitude’: while we have the impression that he is deeply absorbed in his own thoughts, the painting, in my interpretation, invites us to think beyond his apparent isolation. The thoughts the grandfather has are not just his own; they come to him from the book his grandson reads to him, and they lead him to new thoughts, thoughts he then makes his own.

As we read books, Bolzoni suggests, the books read us. There is something reciprocal about the transactional process taking place in the ‘marvelous solitude’ of reading, Bolzoni stresses in her book, which she concludes with an epilogue on Marcel Proust’s famous reflection on reading in his essay ‘Sur la lecture’. Originally, that text was intended as an introduction to Proust’s translation of two lectures delivered by British cultural historian John Ruskin on the importance of reading classical texts in 1864 (Hilton 2002, pp. 373–76). In the early years of what would later become his impressive writing career, Proust was obsessed with Ruskin, whose work he got to know in 1897 (Compagnon in Proust 1987; Kasell 1980, pp. 19–31). For Ruskin, the importance of reading was that it fed the cultural and social capital of people who had no easy access to books. The power of reading had to do with the lessons that readers could draw from the authors of the classical writings that they had left behind. Those authors, Ruskin believed, continued to speak to us and we as readers had simply to listen, meekly and in the right sort of awe, in utter devotion.

As he was translating Ruskin in the first years of the twentieth century, Proust began to find out that he saw things differently. Good reading, in his view, was not just the passive reception of predetermined messages coming from elsewhere. Reading was a creative practice, an activity that presupposes more than the mere acquisition of meaning. The essay anticipates Proust’s later reflections on the importance of reading in the Recherche, a topic which has been extensively studied (see, for instance, Hill 1980; Ellison 1984; Watt 2009). In a central passage in his introduction to Ruskin’s lectures on the value of canonical writings, Proust describes reading as ‘the mind’s full, fruitful work on itself’ (Proust 1971, p. 31; see also Proust 2022). Reading, in other words, is not similar to having a conversation with another person who is present with you during that encounter, Proust stresses, but what he repeatedly calls in his text ‘communication in the midst of solitude’ (Proust 1971, p. 31). When we are reading, we are never really alone, the American scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks concurs: ‘When we encounter a book for the first time, perhaps devouring it in solitude, we participate in silent exchange with the book’s author, whose efforts to shape our responses we encourage or resist or permit’ (Meyer Spacks 2011, p. 243). This ‘silent exchange’ is precisely what Proust means by ‘communication in the midst of solitude’. The reader is in conversation, within himself, with another self that the text awakens in his consciousness and that the reader, being alone, has to make his own (the fact that in Anker’s painting the grandfather’s hands are folded in his lap resonates beautifully with the image that Proust will develop in his text on reading 13 years later—at least it does so in the Dutch translation of ‘Sur la lecture’, where Proust’s ‘communication in the midst of solitude’ is translated as ‘in the lap of solitude’).

While reading is definitely a solitary act for Proust, it is certainly not a narcissistic one. In his essay on reading, Proust even calls reading ‘a sort of curative discipline’, which in his view shows its effect most clearly in those moments of ‘spiritual depression’ when what he calls the ‘lazy mind’ is no longer able to escape from lethargy by itself (Proust 1971, p. 39). ‘[I]n certain diseases of the nervous system’, Proust writes in his essay, ‘the patient, without any one of his organs being affected, is engulfed in a kind of impossibility of willing, as if he were in a deep rut out of which he cannot pull himself on his own, and in which he would finally waste away if a powerful and helpful hand were not extended to him’ (Proust 1971, p. 39). At such moments, books can come to the rescue, as Proust knew from his own depressive experiences, lending the helpful hand to those in need, assuming what he sees as ‘a role similar to that of psychotherapists for certain neurasthenics’ (Proust 1971, p. 39). The role in question is that of restoring in those in need ‘to think for themselves and to create’ (Proust 1971, p. 41), that is, to use their mental capacities creatively. ‘[I]t is clear’, Proust writes in a passage that resumes the image of the act of reading as one undertaken ‘in the midst of solitude’, ‘that this impulse which the slothful mind cannot find within itself and which must come to it from others must be received in the midst of solitude, outside of which, as we have seen, that creative activity which has to be revived in it cannot be produced’ (Proust 1971, p. 41). We need to be alone, Proust writes, not among friends or others who want to be of help: ‘the loftiest conversation, the most pressing advice, would be absolutely no use to [the mind], since they cannot produce this original activity’ (Proust 1971, p. 41). Proust refers to original in the sense that it originates in the mind itself. ‘What is necessary, then, is an intervention which, while coming from another, takes place in our innermost selves, which is indeed the impetus of another mind, but received in the midst of solitude’ (Proust 1971, p. 41). While reading, we are exposed to the thoughts of another, and it is this ‘[t]hrough exposure’, as brain-scholar Maryanne Wolf contends in a reflection that starts from the opening sentences of Proust’s essay, that ‘we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts—that we are individuals, but not alone.’ (Wolf 2008, p. 8). When reading, you need to be alone, but at the same time you never are, Proust believes, even if there is no other living being around. This is the paradox that the image of ‘communication in the midst of solitude’ seeks to evoke: the reader stages within the contours of their own mind an exchange of thoughts that come from elsewhere and that, because they are on offer in the book being read, we can make our own (for this reason, reading does not enforce our loneliness, Alain de Botton also concludes in How Proust Can Change Your Life, it just cures us of it or teaches us to live with it in a more healthy way (De Botton 1997, p. 27)).

4. In the Company of the Text

In the tradition of the ‘cura animarum’ that authors like Petrarch, Montaigne and Ariosto revived in the Renaissance, the book can only be an instrument of care in that it calls for a mode of reading that is to a large extent a practice of self-care. The book can only function successfully as an instrument of care if the reader enables it to function as such. The ‘cura animarum’, in other words, requires a specific form of reading, an active form of reading that requires that the person doing the reading not simply act as one who is at the receiving end of the process of care-giving but becomes a caregiver him- or herself. This is also the case for Proust. Good reading, as he shows in ‘Sur la lecture’, requires the wilful activity of the person doing the reading, the reader’s desire to read and to develop the creative potential that the act of reading embodies. As he puts it in his essay: ‘reading acts only in the manner of a stimulus which can never be substituted for our personal activity; it contents itself with giving us the use of itself, as, in the nervous ailments to which we alluded a while ago, the psychotherapist does not do anything but to restore to the patient the will to use his stomach, his legs, his brains, which have remained undamaged’ (Proust 1971, pp. 41–43). Reading, in other words, has the power to restore our health or to enable us to continue our healthy living—provided, of course, that we read with care.

Sure enough, the reading scene that lies at the basis of Proust’s essay is very different from the one that Anker paints. The reader in ‘Sur la lecture’ is a solitary individual, engrossed in the book that is his sole companion, tracing the letters with avid eyes that fuel the imagination to such an extent that nothing that might otherwise be seen or heard in the immediate surroundings will be noticed. Proust’s reading is literally a leisure activity, associated with the spare time of the holidays that the author fondly remembers from his childhood years. The young boy in Anker’s painting is reading in very different circumstances: his reading is clearly a social activity, possibly one that he feels is expected from him. Maybe he doesn’t like reading at all; maybe he just wants to please his grandpa.

The reading in Proust’s ‘Sur la lecture’, moreover, is an activity done in utter silence. The young boy portrayed by Anker, in contrast, is clearly reading out loud, voicing the words on the page as clearly as possible so that his grandfather can hear and recognize them well enough. While there is an undeniable difference between reading by and for oneself and being read to by somebody else, I do believe that we shouldn’t see the difference in all too absolute terms. Of course, readers who read for and by themselves (and, in doing so, listen to the internal voice in their heads that gives them a feeling of the sounds of the sentences as they are being read), will be able to control the pace of the reading in ways that the person being read to will not be able to do. Inversely, the voice of the person who reads out loud to us will be more dominantly present than our own internal voice that in many cases accompanies the act of reading silently. Yet, none of these differences will overrule the fact that the act of reading in cases where we are being read to is also an active affair, not just a matter of passive receptivity to sounds uttered by someone else. As Régine Detambel puts it in her book in praise of reading out loud to oneself and to others: ‘In this vocal gift, in this shower of language that we provide as we read out loud, there is an enthusiastic moment of awakening that incites our creative imagination, our inventiveness, our emotions and sensibility’ (Detambel 2023, p. 105, my translation). In that sense, the grandfather on Anker’s painting who is being read to is also reading, reading in the form of listening, but reading nevertheless.

What the grandfather is doing in Anker’s painting, then, can be considered in the terms that Proust uses in his analysis of reading in ‘Sur la lecture’, even though in the literal sense of the word he is not alone. But while he is clearly in the presence of his grandson, he is more obviously in the presence that really seems to matter to Proust: the presence of the text, the companionship par excellence that experienced readers tend to yearn for. Whether the young boy is helping the text to do its work is open for debate, as I already suggested, but it is clear that the care work involved entails at least in part that his grandfather is allowed and indeed encouraged to do part of the caring—careful reading always implies a certain degree of self-care (apart from that, the painting also leaves room for the argument that the grandfather is himself also taking care of his grandson, in that he offers the young boy the possibility to read to him. Seen from that perspective, the scene can include possibilities of the pedagogy of care, as when the grandfather might serve as a sort of mentor for the boy).

The question remains, of course, what kind of companionship are we talking about when he see texts as companions for those who read them. While Anker’s painting, again, cannot provide us with an explicit answer to that question (the painting is suggestive, but in a very open way), we will need to make an educated interpretive guess, the kind of guess that may also help us in deciding which book, or what kind of book, the old man is reading. Again, on the basis of the painting itself, there is no way of telling. But let us make the idea that the book in the painting is indeed a novel more concrete. Let us say—in a wildly anachronistic move—that the book is Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda’s novel The Old Man Who Read Love Stories. The novel recounts the adventures of Antonio José Bolivar Proaño, an old man with a knack for stories about people who suffered greatly for love but who continued to love nevertheless. Every six months, as the narrator of Sepúlveda’s novel says, the old man reads two novels that ‘guaranteed maximum heartache’, particularly rich in ‘suffering, hopeless loves and happy endings’ (Sepúlveda 1993, pp. 22, 23). While the romances have no specific function in the fantastic plot of Sepúlveda’s novel—the old man is asked to join a hunting party to kill a female jaguar that comes dangerously close to making human victims in the neighbourhood of his village—they are clearly important in the old man’s solitary life. The novels bring him his support and they enable him to continue with his life. At the end of the narrative—the hunt for the jaguar appears to have been successful—the books are what Bolivar returns to, ‘his novels that spoke of love in such beautiful words they sometimes made him forget the barbarity of man’ (Sepúlveda 1993, p. 131).

5. Reading in Times of Vulnerability

I like to think of the novels in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories as objects that set in motion the creative, interpretive practice that in a number of his more recent publications Arthur Frank has called ‘vulnerable reading’. In Frank’s description, this is a form of reading that readers practise in an attempt to give meaning to—and in doing so to deal more productively with—their own vulnerabilities, forms of physical and mental suffering, feelings of frailty, and uncertainty, a deeply felt understanding of one’s imminent mortality. Vulnerable reading, Frank writes in one of his earlier publications on the topic, is an interpretive practice that ‘seeks help in literature’ (Frank 2019, p. 396), and that is exactly what Sepúlveda’s protagonist is doing. ‘In vulnerable reading’, Frank writes in a later reflection on the practice, ‘we seek a companion that can steady us, make our footing more firm, and then continue to be with us to turn to, confident it will offer assistance.’ (Frank 2022, p. 4) ‘Vulnerable reading’, he goes on to write, ‘is how we read when some it threatens who we are committed to believing we are; it threatens the life we want to be able to continue to live. The threat may be immediate or in the future; obvious or vaguely sensed’ (Frank 2022, p. 3). In the case of Sepúlveda’s widowed protagonist, it is quite clear that this ‘it’ boils down to a degree of existential loneliness that advances as the man grows older and the sharply felt distance from a society that prides itself on becoming modern increases. I am sure a case could be made to say something similar about the grandfather in Anker’s painting: his ‘it’ will probably also be related to his old age, to this or that ailment that accompanies it, to the fog in his head, to an increased feeling of no longer really belonging.

What interests me more at this stage, though, is how Arthur Frank’s conception of vulnerable reading sees fictional texts and the work that they do for readers who find themselves in a position of vulnerability, whatever may be the cause of that position. In his vulnerable reading of Hamlet, Frank suggests that works of fiction have a three-fold function in this specific reading practice: 1. tThey work as mirrors of vulnerability, in which readers recognize aspects of their own predicament while at the same time seeing that they are not alone in it; 2. They offer what Frank calls ‘mentorship’ (Frank 2019, p. 410), as they suggest ways to overcome that which threatens us or provide us with a new form of understanding that enables us to live with it; 3. They teach us that in order to truly be ourselves, we need to be in dialogue with others (Frank 2019, p. 413).

‘Vulnerable reading most often begins by seeing how a story mirrors our own sufferings’, Frank writes in his book on Shakespeare’s King Lear (Frank 2022, p. 6). But the description comes with a warning that I want to take to heart in what follows. The experience of mirroring should in no way be seen as the endpoint or the desired outcome of this reading practice. As vulnerable readers, we should not fall in the trap of narcissism, Frank warns: ‘If we see in Shakespeare only what we bring initially to our reading, we make it all about us, and we will probably end up back where we started’ (Frank 2022, p. 7). Rather than confirm what we already know, the text at hand needs to open up a novel perspective, an interpretive space where we can develop new thoughts and where recognition shifts from an experience of sameness to one of difference—difference from the text, but also difference from the person that we thought we were. ‘Vulnerable reading’, Frank writes, ‘begins with seeing my life mirrored in the story, but if I treat the story only as a mirror, that sells us both short: it fails to let the story be the companion that it can be, and it fails to ask me to become the companion that story is entitled to. What makes a story rich, or full, or whatever adjective of praise you want, is that it and its characters become better companions the more I provisionally leave my world and enter their world, rediscovering my concerns by seeing them framed in unfamiliar terms. Reading bounces back and forth between mirroring my world and the magical effect of taking me elsewhere, out of my point of view’ (Frank 2022, p. 8).

This is the kind of reading that Sepúlveda’s protagonist practices and it is also what I like to imagine the grandfather in Anker’s painting is doing. It is in no way a merely passive form of reading, since it requires activity on behalf of the reader, what Paul Ricoeur in his analysis of the hermeneutic tradition calls ‘appropriation’ (Ricoeur 1986, pp. 170–71), a word that, incidentally, the narrator of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories uses when he describes the effect that the reading has on the novel’s old protagonist: ‘he gradually appropriated the feelings and ideas that imbued each page’ (Sepúlveda 1993, p. 26). Above all, this is a reading practice that requires attention, the kind of attention that Joan Tronto associates with care. Here is how Tronto describes how she sees the correlation between care and attention, by means of a quotation from Simone Weil. ‘Attention’, Tronto quotes Weil as saying, ‘consists in suspending thought, leaving it available, empty and ready to be entered by its object’. Careful attention, in other words, requires that we remain as open as possible to thoughts other than our own, that we suspend in as far as we can our preconceptions. ‘[T]hought must be empty’, Weil goes on to say, ‘waiting, seeking nothing, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is about to penetrate it’ (Weil quoted in Tronto 2005, p. 252). Both in Sepúlveda’s novel and on Anker’s painting, that object is the book that the two older men allow to take over and transform their imagination. In paying careful attention to the ‘naked truth’ of the books that they peruse, I like to imagine them engaging in an act of self-care that is not simply oriented to the facile comfort of being confirmed in what they already know nor to the passive reception of a message of hope that cannot but belie the difficult circumstances of old age that these readers find themselves in.

In circumstances such as theirs, the practice of reading inevitably becomes, in the felicitous phrase of Arthur Frank, a ‘wound and a blessing’ simultaneously (Frank 2022, p. 2). In numerous reflections on bibliotherapy, the very idea that we can be wounded by what we read appears to be structurally downplayed if not straightforwardly excluded. Reading simply has to be a blessing for many authors writing about the topic. The medicine of the book is more often than not taken for granted in publications that advocate for the healing power of literature. Not surprisingly, examples are rife in so-called ‘prescriptive’ varieties of bibliotherapy, where novels or poems are suggested for this or that ailment, on the assurance that they will bring to readers what they have brought to the bibliotherapist: the unmistakable blessing of a positive outcome. It is my feeling that these bibliotherapeutic practices forget the potentially disruptive force of some of the literary texts that they use and prescribe: in them, the thought that literature can have a toxic effect is minimized if not straightforwardly pushed away—literature, in prescriptive bibliotherapy is for most of the time all (and not rarely only) about feeling good.

6. A Pharmacology of Reading

In trying to steer clear of this approach, I have tried to be attentive in my interpretation of Anker’s painting to the potential ambivalence of his representation of the presumed effects of the reading experience—blessing? wound? both in one? or one in the guise of the other? Who can tell, after all, whether the old man in Anker’s painting is really being helped by the book that his grandson is reading from? While it may be self-evident for us to see the scene as an instance of successful vulnerable reading, we need to keep our mind open to any alternative possibility. Maybe the old man is basically frustrated by the book that his grandson reads to him because it confronts him in all too painful ways with the bleak future that lies ahead. In which case he is doing a great job in hiding his frustration, probably so as not to offend his well-wishing carer.

The reading scene that Anker’s painting shows is an example of what Garret Stewart in a fascinating book on the representation of practices of reading calls ‘reading double’ (Stewart 2006, pp. 231–37). ’One figure reads; the other listens’, Stewart writes, ‘[o]ne deciphers and transmits; the other receives’ (Stewart 2006, p. 231). Still, the question that scenes like these beg remains fundamentally unanswerable: Does the one at the receiving end really receive what is being communicated, and how? Is the second reader, to use Stewart’s phrase, ‘a body listening or not—or maybe’? (Stewart 2006, p. 231) Indeed, in scene like the one in Anker’s painting, we will have a hard time deciding once and for all whether the book read functions as medicine or as poison, to use another metaphor, one that is often used by scholars and historians of bibliotherapy (see, for instance, De Boever 2013, pp. 4–9; Campbell et al. 2025, pp. 2–3). The obvious reference in that case is to the ancient Greek notion of pharmakon, a word that can be translated either way, as medicine or as poison, its presumed counterpart. The philosophical filiation of the concept goes back to Plato’s analysis of written language in the Phaedrus, famously taken up by Jacques Derrida in his analysis of that dialogue in ‘La pharmacie de Platon’, the first chapter of La dissémination (Derrida 1972, pp. 77–213). In his essay, Derrida shows how Plato’s analysis of the toxic effects of written language inevitably evokes the medicinal powers of writing that Socrates hopes to dispel.

For scholars of bibliotherapy and other practices of care, the reference to the pharmakon takes into account Bernard Stiegler’s adaptation of the term for a way of thinking that allows or makes room for the simultaneous presence of good and bad uses of specific technologies and things (objects), in our case the technology of writing that resulted in the book we are reading. In the introduction to one of his publications in which he describes this way of thinking, translated into English as What Makes Life Worth Living. On Pharmacology (Stiegler 2013; see also Stiegler 2008, 2010), Stiegler relates the concept to both care and the attention that is required for care to work. While he starts out work as a philosopher of technology, Stiegler’s later writings move more explicitly to a philosophy of care—of care, more precisely, in the age of technology which is ours. It is in this specific context that his ideas on the ‘pharmakon’ originate—in an analysis that aims to balance the inevitable conjunction of positive and negative outcomes of technological innovations.

‘The pharmakon’, Stiegler writes in the introduction to What Makes Life Worth Living, ‘is at once what enables care to be taken and that of which care must be taken—in the sense that it is necessary to pay attention: its power is curative to the immeasurable extent [dans la mesure et la démesure] that it is also destructive’ (Stiegler 2013, p. 4, his italics). This is exactly what the painting by Anker shows: the book that is being read (by the grandfather as well as by the young boy) makes it possible for both to act with care and self-care, while encouraging them to take care of the words and thoughts that the book holds in store. But at the same time, the painting refuses to give a decisive answer to the question that Stiegler’s pharmacological thinking urges us not to consider in straightforwardly oppositional terms. For him, the point is not whether the effect of the book is either ‘curative’ or ‘destructive’, but to understand that it can be both at the same time and possibly inevitably needs to be.

The ‘pharmakon’, Stiegler writes in the introduction to What Makes Life Worth Living, ‘can always engage not only curative processes but poisonous ones, becoming, for example, the support of an addiction, the screen of melancholy, and even a drive for destruction, of murderous madness, of those dangerous states that result when the feeling that life is worth living has been lost’. So it is with reading fiction, as I believe: it can result in moments of hopeful happiness as well as in deep despair; it can shed light as well as drive us into the darkness; it can help us to get back on track as well as prepare us for a journey down the wrong road. As Montaigne already knew, ‘Books have and contain diverse pleasing qualities to those that can duly choose them. But no good without pains, no roses without prickles’ (de Montaigne 2014, p. 225). If we want to keep stressing that reading fiction can be a source of wellbeing, I think that we do well to keep in mind the ambivalent pharmacological effects of the writings that we use as instruments of care and self-care. Being devoted to these writings does not preclude being cautious about and careful with their effects.