Medicinal Fiction

Medicine Between the Lines

“To try to ease him a little, I start talking again. The story is not a happy one, but something in me has to tell it. There is truth in this story that Xavier needs to hear, and maybe it is best that the hears it in sleep so that the medicine in the tale can slip into him unnoticed.”

The notion expressed above by one of the narrator’s of Three Day Road, that of medicine in the tale, adds a layer of importance to the role of fiction in our lives. It has greater value than our often fact~heavy social dialogue gives it. And conceiving of it as medicine presents a most significant refutation of its detractors.

The most common argument against fiction denies it as not true to life, not factually accurate, not scientifically meaningful. The most common counter~argument upholds fiction as true of life. The disproportionate value given to facts, statistics and scientific discourse has dulled our imagination, the very stuff with which we create fiction, and absorb it.

Fiction has evolved into such diverse media from the spoken word to the written, to radio, film, televion, comics, blogs, and other works combining media. We immerse ourselves in fictions ranging from escapist pulp to intellectual experimentation, from “Battlefield Earth” to “Finnegan’s Wake.” Each has its audience, each its value.

Arguments against the value of fiction ignore its continuous and continued enjoyment by billions of people.

Reading makes your Brain work

A recent study has determined that the Brain Simulates Actions in Stories as a Person Reads.

“Reading a book triggers an active response in a person’s brain, replicating the activity described in the story, a study by Washington University researchers in St. Louis, Mo., indicates. A brain-imaging study at Washington University tracked brain activity as participants read sections of a story.”

Regardless of whether what we read contains fiction or non~fiction, it stimulates our brain (one physical portion of our emergent mind), reproducing mental activity synonymous with the subject matter.  Reading about an activity may help our performance. That in itself holds value. This may give us a greater means of coping with potential situations we have not yet encountered.

Fiction as Medicine

Back to our Three Day Road exerpt. Fiction works as medicine in two manners, one through its creation, another through its perception. This applies to all creative works of art, whether an illustration, a danse [sic], a song or written fiction. In the creation of fiction, one has to provide a narrative order to the tale, one that strings image and meaning together into a coherent series of story-arcs. The most powerful of these remains the circle, where we end the tale where we’ve begun. Three Day Road follows a non~chronological story structure to accomplis this circle. It has shrugged off the tyranny of chronological storytelling, to weave together traditional elements of First Nations storytelling within the form of written fiction. This, in itself, indicates a means of healing the identity of First Nations’ peoples, who have had their traditions assaulted, and buried under introduced culture. By redefining the written word in their own voice, First Nations’ authors have created a new art, one that combines the ancient with the modern, in a manner that sings with more truth than all compiled histories.

Most particularly, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, Green Grass Running Water by Thomas King, Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway and Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden (the first in a Trilogy) all reflect this combination of the ancient with the modern, and the path to healing. These works and authors have encouraged the creation of this journal, in hopes that it too may find a medicinal path.

Ceremony , a work dense with meaning, demands that we create new Ceremonies, for those unchanged ones we have inherited no longer represent us. We must express the world as we experience and perceive it through our art, in order to find meaning, and to share our insights with those who would listen fully and openly. Although this story calls to the peoples of the First Nations, the American Indians and Indigenous peoples, it would do well to penetrate the stagnant churches of Christianity, who rely on stories written near 2000 years ago, which refuse to change, adapt or evolve, demanding instead that we do. This creation of a new ritual, in itself provides healing, as does the enactment of the ceremony itself.

Green Grass, Running Water, a complex story with Coyote as its muse, weaves a tricky tale of creation stories, modern perception of the First Nations, and surviving in the modern world, despite the harshness and hardships that it imposes with indifferent prejudice. This story deserves attention in all Canadian literature courses, as it expresses a very particular Canadian experience with a lightness of humour that provides an antidote to tragedy. Therein lies its healing powers. Laughter dispels emotional ill~feeling before it becomes illness.

Kiss of the Fur Queen, chronicles as it fictionalises the lives of Tomson Highway and his brother René. The course of writing this appears to have helped Tomson deal with the premature death of René from HIV/AIDS. The antidote to the residential school experience, life in modern Winnipeg, and the subsequent struggles to define themselves in the little explored wilderness between North American tradition, music and the dance, and those introduced by Europe, particularly through classical piano and ballet, seeps through the lines of the pages.

As with most art forms, popular fiction, written for the sole purpose of making money (different from literary or medicinal fiction which becomes popular and makes money), waters down the pool of stories from which we may draw significant meaning. If we put down a story, and never think about it again, never evoke its characters, scenarios, or narrative into our imagination, then what good has it done us? Does momentary distraction truly serve us at all? From what does it distract us?

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