The role of literature in response to coping with tragedy

Sales of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame surged after the tragedy of fire broke out in the eponymous cathedral on the 15th April 2019. The question of why this happened has been asked by many. Perhaps people came across the title by chance and were influenced to buy it because they had the building on their minds. Maybe they searched ‘Notre Dame’ and became curious, or they were just trying to buy the DVD instead.

More profoundly, perhaps the hundreds of new readers were shocked and disturbed by the tragedy. As a result, before booksellers started talking about donating a portion of the sales to restoration efforts, readers did what people all over the world do when they experience a deep upset: they reached out. In this case, that involved using literature to grasp the monument and bring it, as well as the sense of national pride and perseverance it represents, into the safe haven of their mind’s eye.

Above all, people have always written about the pain of life

This is not a new process. Literature has been culturally ingrained in responses to personal and collective tragedy for centuries: the Biblical psalms respond to crises of faith and fallen circumstances (the phrase “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” from Psalm 22 comes to mind). Slave narratives grapple with the aftermath of horrific degradation and abuse. Romantics wrote of the early stages of the Anthropocene we are still a part of today, when human actions began to have an impact on the environment. The poets of the First World War dealt with the greater tragedy of armed conflict as well as their own lingering psychological wounds.

Above all, people have always written about the pain of life. If you also factor in the thousands of works of literature that have been created in response to tragedies and kept private, one thing becomes clear: literature is a key part of the psychological process of reconciling what was with what has traumatically come to be.

In more detail, what ultimately causes humans to respond to tragedy with feelings of fear, anger, helplessness, and confusion is the way the tragedy violates people’s basic assumptions in life. They are (to varying degrees) safe, events are in their control and other people can be trusted and are worth forming links with. Literature can help rebuild faith in these basic assumptions by offering a symbolic, intact representation of what has been threatened, as in the case of Notre Dame.

literature both cushions the reader from the psychological effects of tragedy and helps them to advance beyond their initial trauma response towards a more everyday, functional mental state

Literature can also put into words and elaborate on the grief experienced by the individual, at a time when the individual may be unable to organise their thoughts to express themselves. Not only would this create a sense of solidarity between the individual and the author, but properly identifying emotions is an important element in the process of resolving them. So, literature both cushions the reader from the psychological effects of tragedy and helps them to advance beyond their initial trauma response towards a more everyday, functional mental state.

Evidence for this doesn’t just lie in sales figures, but also in the frequency that poems such as Mary Elizabeth Frye’s ‘Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep’ turn up at funerals, and the amount of times the fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For The Fallen’ is used at Remembrance Day events. Both show that the uptake of purchases of The Hunchback of Notre Dame last month is not without precedence. In short, literature is now and always has been a cornerstone in individual and community responses to tragedy, and the grief it brings.